Informatics @prototypebydesign - Tumblr Blog

"I think there needs to be a solution as soon as possible… Because these companies, they’re preying on the aquifer. And when the aquifer dries up, our future will be uncertain!"

-Dominga Rosario, who owns a patch of land in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Ica.

From The World, January 2012: Peru has become the world’s number one exporter of asparagus to places including Europe and the US. The boom there has pumped a lot of money into the economy, but it’s also pumped out a lot of water.

Peru’s Asparagus Boom Threatening Local Water Table

discoverynews

Intelligent Robots Will Overtake Humans by 2100

Are you ready for the robocalypse? Nah, I’m sure it’ll be peaceful.

npr

This reblog seemed fitting after the last post. — tanya b.

lookhigh

To Make Mice Smarter, Add A Few Human Brain Cells

Scientists have injected some human glial cells into the brains of newborn mice. When the mice grew up, they were faster learners. A study, published Thursday in Cell Stem Cell, not only introduces a new tool to study the mechanisms of the human brain, it supports the hypothesis that glial cells — and not just neurons — play an important role in learning.

The researchers say these mice are measurably smarter. In classic maze tests, they learn faster. “They make many fewer errors, and it takes them less time to come to the appropriate answer,” says Steve Goldman, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester who has studied brain cells for decades.

It might take a normal mouse four or five attempts to learn the correct route, for example. But a mouse with human brain cells could get it on the second try. Glial cells — those boring glial cells — somehow enhance learning. (NPR)

laughingsquid

Urbee 2, A 1,200-Pound 3D-Printed Car

billy-on-a-walk

tomemrich

Looks like solar, wind and the usual suspects aren’t the only alternative renewable energy sources we have as options in our near future.

According to Design Boom, french biochemist Pierre Calleja has developed a CO2-absorbing, self-powered lamp for use as street lighting, currently in prototype testing in France.

via fancyadance:

Source

youngandreary

Emily Whitehead the girl whose cancer was ‘cured’ by HIV virus.

seven-year-old girl has become the first child leukaemia patient to be successfully treated by doctors using a disabled form of the virus that causes Aids to reprogramme the immune system.

When chemotherapy failed to work for Emily Whitehead, diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, she underwent a new experimental treatment at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

It involved tricking her immune system into fighting the cancer cells.

Dr Stephan Grupp, Director of the Centre for Childhood Cancer Research at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told CBS: “We’ve treated the first couple of patients and we’ve been blown away by the results”.

They’ve been very exciting.

“We collect cells of the immune system from a patient, so we use the patient’s own cells. We put in a new gene in those cells that makes the cells go after cancer cells and then we put those cells back in the patient.”

kqedscience

The FanWing is arguably the first entirely new aircraft design developed within the past century. Instead of jet engines or rotors, it uses huge rotating fans embedded in its wings for both lift and propulsion. Scale models have been flying for years, and we’ve just learned that a manned ultralight prototype should be airborne in early 2013.

sosuperawesome

inspirestrikesback

This amazing house was build in 2006 by Arquitectura Orgánica. A young couple with two children from Mexico City who after living in a conventional home wanted to change to one integrated to nature. The goal of this project was to make it feel like an internal inhabitant of a snail, like a mollusk moving from one chamber to another, like a symbiotic dweller of a huge fossil maternal cloister.

uh can i live here