All hail genetic engineering! Scientists at Genomatica, Inc., located in San Diego, have announced that they have successfuly manipulated the bacteria Escherichia coli to produce butanediol (BDO), a main component of plastic; or a recreational drug if Wikipedia is to be believed.
“We have engineered the organism such that it has to secrete that product in order for it to grow,” says bioengineer Christophe Schilling, president and co-founder of the company, launched in 2000 to develop such chemical-producing microbes. “The interests of the organism are aligned with our interests: It grows faster when it produces more.”
The company hopes to lower the rising price of BDO, which has jumped $.22 recently to $1.22 a pound with the rising cost of oil, although they are still unsure as to just how much E. coli produced BDO would cost. Regardless, I look forward to a future where the toys our children play with and the illicit substances we use to forget our problems are made from bacterial excrement.
When I first saw one of these things my immediate reaction was, “Sweet! Space-toilets!” It took about 2.5 seconds for me to realize that these would not be the space-toilets that years of sci-fi TV had indoctrinated me to expect. There would be no automatic doors, no spongy material carpeting everything in sight, no toilet to thank me in calm tones for unleashing the wrath of the space-burrito into its glistening, chromed orifice before misting the air with rose perfume.
But I had to look anyway. I mean, come on, how many chances do you get to look inside a space-toilet? And it had just been installed that very day. The varied and vibrant street-life of Seattle couldn’t have caked the insides of the thing with their full palette of horror in less than 12 hours could they?
Oh how I loathe conceptual designs. The near constant reminder of a future that lies just out of reach. Well god damn it like Veruca Salt before me I Want It Now. It is highly unacceptable that I (and you as well I suppose) can’t reach within my vest pocket to pull out an ornately scrolled “pocket-watch” to respond to the aspersions cast on my mother in a text message from Brownlee.
With Parliament defending their recent vote allowing for the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for scientific study, the future takes one step closer to the noisome, unsettling din we all eagerly anticipate. It won’t be long before that kind of strange bio-tech has wriggled its way into (semi) polite society the same way all far-out tech has trickled down into common usage.
First thing in the morning you’ll slap your wall-screen to life so that the beast-women of the world can preach the gospel of a new, better, psuedo-you. All followed by an advertising parade for genetic remapping agents so gratuitous and glossy in its hustle it would make the advertising execs of today weep. If you’re lucky maybe some seizure-inducing cartoons right after.
Art Center College of Design student Jake Loniak designed this motorcycle concept, which he dubbed the Deus Ex Machina. His concept is an electric vertically parking motorcycle controlled by 36 pneumatic muscles with 2 linear actuators. It can reach 60mph in three seconds and has a top speed of 75mph. The exo-skeleton has seven artificial vertebrae and a pneumatically attached helmet. One thing is for certain, it’s a much more interesting “future of transportation” idea than the Segway.
Staring wistfully into the distance, intrepid chrononaut Chesh Morgan remembers the day he unveiled his plans to span the great oceans of time like some chronological Magellan. As a smug smile tugs at the corners of a mouth obscured by the last vestiges of his origins, the brave explorer recalls the painful taunts of his peers prior to his expedition.
If only he had accounted for the potential desire to return to his time armed to the teeth and ripped to the gills on the finest chemical cocktails the future has to offer. While delightful in their own right, Threadless tees and Star Trek simply can’t compare with putting long-dead skeptics in their place with a good, old-fashioned blood-soaked hallucination courtesy of the 21st Century.
As much as we enjoy conjecture and extravagant speculation regarding the future and the treasures it holds it’s a shock when something from the pages of the professional speculators, aka sci-fi authors, worms its way into our disappointingly nonfictional reality. Though in all fairness, less so when it comes from Japan.
Yet the newest way in which the metropolitan Japanese surprise and confound we less progressive western dullards is a bit surprising even with the knowledge of its origins. Frenetic salarymen dissatisfied with the pink-cheeked rush the pharmaceutical melange of energy drinks has to offer can now pop in to Tenteki10 for a vein full of “vitamins and other nutritional supplements”.
Yes that’s right; if you’ve got $20 (2,000 Yen) and 10 minutes you can have a doctor stuff your veins with the mysterious “vitamins and nutritional supplements” for what they describe as a “pick-me-up”. While I’m intimately familiar with the potentially less than pleasant effects of a botched intravening (to say nothing of potential “supplement” overdoses) I can’t help but wonder when we’ll have similar set ups in the States.
Even now you can swing by your local plastic surgeon’s office for a speedy syringe full of botulism for all your muscle paralysis needs. How long until Starbucks trades baristas for nurses? And further, how long until our “supplements” are supplemented with the wares of illicit chemists and old-fashioned coffeehouse snobbery is supplanted by a caste system of stat-boost aficionados?
My hope is not long; my daily ritual of chasing down a handful of No-Doze with three or four Viente Quad-Americanos has long since stopped clearing away the borderline somnambulance of the morning.
In 1963, General Dynamics Astronautics asked politicians, scientists, and military commanders to speculate on the potential state of the world in 2063, recording all these speculations in the book you see above, and sealing it in a time capsule that was interred in the depths of the General Dynamics Astronautics building. Only 200 copies of the book are thought to have been made, and the copy included in the time capsule was lost during the demolition of the General Dynamics Astronautics building.
Thankfully, the entirety of the book is available as a download thanks to the fine folks at Paleo-Future, who have also made it available in print if the reading of a speculative future via devices that would make your forebear’s heads spin doesn’t whet your appetite for irony.
I grew up in a small town in southern Delaware called Milton. The town now boasts a population of 1,657, which was lower when I lived there years ago. There were a ton of antique stores crammed with all manner of dusty, random junk that I absolutely loved. We had a farmer friendly grocery store and a number of small, family-run shops for whatever else you might need. When news of a corporate chain moving into a lot of vacant land began to surface, there was an incredible uproar from community members. At the time I couldn’t understand it, anything new that came to town meant something to distract from my “boring” days of hanging out on my favorite felled tree by a peaceful, quiet lake in my tiny, picturesque Victorian town.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Trent Reznor would have a hard time of it after The Downward Spiral, having been almost universally praised as both a commercial and critical success. The Fragile was certainly his most musically mature and complex work but the lyrics, already a favorite target of detractors, were doing his cause no favors. After another meandering journey through substance abuse he presented With Teeth, an album so transparent as an effort to fulfill a contractual obligation while trying to expand an audience that most critics and fans treated it thusly, though certainly there are many who pointed to it as a sign that Reznor had finally lost it, or at least shown himself to be the untalented sample man that they always thought him to be.
The 5th Element, in spite of being a fairly bad movie, is still one of my favorite films, if for no other reason than the entire thing is absolutely gorgeous. It is a future in which the soft, rounded corners of plastic-everything that we all expect to be permanently spotless and milky white are in actuality smudged with the dirt and grime of a population that built its way out of the polluted, earthen pit they created for themselves.
Everything in the movie is immediately obvious as “futuristic” without looking outlandish or ridiculous (save Ruby Rod, who gets a pass for having a special place in my heart); a problem to which many films set in the future fall prey.
The above grand piano, designed as a collaboration between Schimmel and Luigi Colani, would have fit perfectly in the film. As such, it is awarded my highest praise. Redesigning an instrument that many have a near religious reverence for is a tricky task, rife with perilous design flaws that could very easily ruin the whole shebang resulting in packs of pianists screaming for blood; but Colani and Schimmel have pulled off their design coup with a singular aplomb.
Had I the measly $110,000 that is being asked for this masterpiece it would be snatched up greedily with a haste I’ve likely never before displayed; and thus I would be able to count myself among the lucky 14 that stroke the keys of a piano sent back through time.
Y’know, I always thought that once time travel had been invented I’d use it to go back and give advice to my adolescent self, not to parade around the streets of Paris in what is apparently the natural evolution of my already questionable fashion choices, though when I think about it the idea makes sense. Apparently even in my advanced years I am a force of fashion with which to be reckoned.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
