Interview with Kerstin Borchhardt
Kerstin Borchhardt is an Associate Professor at the Institute of History and Theory of Art at Catholic Private University Linz. She has worked as a postdoc and lecturer at several German Universities and was a cooperating partner at UNAM in Mexico City. Her research interests include hybrid creatures, posthumanism, and the relationship of art, science, […]
Titanic robots make farming more sustainable
There’s a lot riding on farmers’ ability to fight weeds, which can strangle crops and destroy yields. To protect crops, farmers have two options: They can spray herbicides that pollute the environment and harm human health, or they can hire more workers. Unfortunately, both choices are becoming less tenable. Herbicide resistance is a growing problem […]
Using mycelium to create a self-healing wearable leather-like material
A pair of biotechnologists at Newcastle University, working with a colleague from Northumbria University, all in the U.K., have developed a way to use mycelium to create a self-healing wearable material. In their paper published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, Elise Elsacker, Martyn Dade-Robertson and Meng Zhang, describe their process and how well it […]
An Edible Rechargeable Battery
Edible electronics is a growing field that aims to produce digestible devices using only food ingredients and additives, thus addressing many of the shortcomings of ingestible electronic devices. Edible electronic devices will have major implications for gastrointestinal tract monitoring, therapeutics, as well as rapid food quality monitoring. Recent research has demonstrated the feasibility of edible […]
Interview with Claudia Schnugg
Dr. Claudia Schnugg is artscience scholar and curator. She holds a PhD in social and economic sciences with an additional focus on cultural sciences and media arts. Her ongoing practice in the field of art and science is twofold: as scholar she is researching artscience collaborations, investigating effects and impact of such art-science […]
HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence
HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence is a digital book of the European Commission on the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and society from different perspectives. The eBook, edited by Freddy Paul Grunert, with Massimo Craglia, Emilia Gómez Gutierrez and Jutta Thielen-del Pozo, presents 45 texts by authors from different humanistic and scientific backgrounds. Texts’ reviewers are […]
A new concept for low-cost batteries
As the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro […]
Dialogues across the seas: the ocean that keeps us apart also joins us. Charting knowledge and practice in the Anthropocene
This publication is about two events on the impact of the climate crisis on the seas and the marine environments. The first one was entitled “From the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Dialogues across the seas”, and took place on July 27-28, 2018, in Cervia, a coastal city nearby Ravenna where the Po Valley ends […]
Interview with Gabriele Romeo
Gabriele Romeo was born in Palermo in 1983. He has a bachelor’s degree in Science and Technology of the arts at the University of Palermo and a graduate degree in History of Art (with a specialization address on contemporary art) at the University of Bologna. He followed a course of curatorship at the […]
Tiny electromagnetic robot runs fast and re-forms after being squished
A squishy robot smaller than a postage stamp can run 70 of its body lengths every second – more than three times faster than a cheetah, relative to its body size. “It is really, really fast and, to be honest, that was a little bit of a surprise,” says Martin Kaltenbrunner at Johannes Kepler University […]
CPU Made Without Silicon
Known for its core design IP that ends up in everything from IoT to smartphones to servers, Arm is now presenting that it has enabled one of its key microcontrollers in a new form factor: rather than using silicon as a base, the company has enabled a processor core in plastic. The technology has been […]
Brain-computer interface creates text on screen by decoding brain signals associated with handwriting
Scientists with the BrainGate research collaborative have, for the first time, used an implanted sensor to record the brain signals associated with handwriting and used those signals to create text on a computer in real time. In a study published in the journal Nature, a clinical trial participant with cervical spinal cord injury used the […]
Interview with Jeremy Hight
Jeremy Hight is an artist,writer,theorist and sometimes digital curator. He created the field of Locative Narrative in 2002 with the collaborative project 34 North 118 West (https://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=34-north-118-west). His collaborative digital poetics work Carrizo Parkfield Diaries is in the permanent digital collection of the Whitney museum in New York. https://artport.whitney.org/gatepages/artists/nakatani/new_index.html He is the author of […]
“Smart clothes” that can measure your movements
In recent years there have been exciting breakthroughs in wearable technologies, like smartwatches that can monitor your breathing and blood oxygen levels. But what about a wearable that can detect how you move as you do a physical activity or play a sport, and could potentially even offer feedback on how to improve your technique? […]
New wearable device turns the body into a battery
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a new, low-cost wearable device that transforms the human body into a biological battery. The device, described today in the journal Science Advances, is stretchy enough that you can wear it like a ring, a bracelet or any other accessory that touches your skin. It also […]
Interview with Jatun Risba
Jatun Risba (‘ki’) is an artist of self, linguist of kinship and joker exploring beyond human paradigms. By approaching Art, Science, Technology in terms of ritual mysticism, ki recovers poetry and magic in contemporary societies. Since 2014 Risba has been developing the practice of ‘interesse’ (Dance of Life) which consists of liminal somatic & […]
Surgical device inspired by parasitic wasps
A surgical device inspired by parasitic wasps could make it easier and less painful to remove certain tumours and blood clots. Parasitic wasps inject their eggs through a long, thin, tubular organ called an ovipositor into living hosts, such as spiders and caterpillars. The organ’s blade-like valves, which run the full length of the tube, […]
Interview with Giada Totaro
Giada Totaro is a new media artist and innovative didactic expert. Between 2002 and 2015 she graduated in “Theatre Direction” and “Cinema, TV and Multimedia Production” at the University of Roma Tre, the first level master “Digital Environment Design” at NABA in Milan, and the second level Diploma at the School of New Technologies […]
Plug-and-play brain–computer interface
Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) offer the potential for people with severe motor disabilities to control external assistive devices with their mind. Current BCI systems are limited, however, by the need for daily recalibration of the decoder that converts neural activity into control signals. Researchers at the UC San Francisco Weill Institute for Neurosciences have now employed machine […]
Pavegen
Pavegen is a people powered, kinetic tech floor tile that creates clean electricity and captivates the imagination of anyone that steps on it. WHO WE ARE Let’s create cities that work for citizens, not machines. Technology alone won’t make cities perform more efficiently. It’s about changing behaviours. Pavegen is a smart, innovative platform that also […]
Interview with Marta de Menezes
Marta de Menezes is a Portuguese artist (b. Lisbon, 1975) with a degree in Fine Arts by the University in Lisbon, a MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture by the University of Oxford, and a PhD candidate at the University of Leiden. She has been exploring the intersection between Art and Biology, […]
A chip made with carbon nanotubes marks a computing milestone
Because carbon nanotubes are almost atomically thin and ferry electricity so well, they make better semiconductors than silicon. In principle, carbon nanotube processors could run three times faster while consuming about one-third of the energy of their silicon predecessors.
Brain-machine interface set to improve life for amputees
A newly designed brain-machine interface dramatically improves performance and reduces mental and physical stress for people with a leg amputated above the knee.
Interview with Dalila Honorato
Dalila Honorato, Ph.D, is a facilitator of safe spaces for hosting the interaction of ideas around liminal issues in the frame of Art&Sci. Her research focus is on embodiment, monstrosity, the uncanny and the acrobatic balance between phobia and paraphilia. She is Tenured Assistant Professor in Aesthetics and Visual Semiotics at the Ionian University, Greece, guest faculty at Alma Mater Europaea, Slovenia, collaborator at the Center of Philosophy of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal.
Iota Biosciences raises $15M to produce in-body sensors smaller than a grain of rice
Fitness trackers and heart-rate monitors are all well and good, but if you want to track activity inside the body, the solutions aren’t nearly as convenient. Iota Biosciences wants to change that with millimeter-wide sensors that can live more or less permanently in your body and transmit wirelessly what they detect, and a $15 million […]
Toyota untethers its T-HR3 humanoid robot thanks to 5G
Toyota just brought your dreams of an Avatar-like proxy one step closer to reality. Teaming with NTT Docomo, it remotely controlled its T-HR3 humanoid robot over a 5G network from a distance of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). So far the bot, first unveiled a year ago, has only been controlled over a direct wired connection. […]
Kia to demonstrate Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving
Kia’s new Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving (READ) technology will be demonstrated at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Co-developed with the Affective Computing Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, the Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving system utilises a “world-first emotional AI-based optimized and interactive in-cabin space centred on human senses.” […]
Interview with Adam Zaretsky
Adam Zaretsky is a Wet-Lab Art Practitioner mixing Ecology, Biotechnology, Non-human Relations, Body Performance and Gastronomy. Zaretsky stages lively, hands-on bioart production labs based on topics such as: foreign species invasion (pure/impure), radical food science (edible/inedible), jazz bioinformatics (code/flesh), tissue culture (undead/semi-alive), transgenic design issues (traits/desires), interactive ethology (person/machine/non-human) and physiology (performance/stress).
The first tendril-like soft robot able to climb
Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia created the first soft robot mimicking plant tendrils. It is able to curl and climb using the same physical principles determining water transport in plants. In the future, this tendril-like soft robot could inspire the development of wearable devices such as soft braces that actively morph their shape.
Self-growing materials that strengthen in response to force
Hokkaido University researchers have developed a strategy to fabricate materials that become stronger in response to mechanical stress – mimicking skeletal muscle growth. Their findings, published in the journal Science, could pave the way for long-lasting materials that can adapt and strengthen based on surrounding conditions.
Researchers develop ‘acoustic metamaterial’ that cancels sound
Boston University researchers, Xin Zhang, a professor at the College of Engineering, and Reza Ghaffarivardavagh, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, released a paper in Physical Review B demonstrating it’s possible to silence noise using an open, ringlike structure, created to mathematically perfect specifications, for cutting out sounds while maintaining airflow.
Interview with Jadwiga Charzyńska
Since 2004 she has been the director of Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art. Before that, she worked at the National Museum in Gdansk. She started her managerial career already as a student, organizing art projects, which subsequently allowed her to obtain an extra degree in culture management.
Biohybrid robots built from living tissue start to take shape
Researchers are increasingly looking for solutions to make robots softer or more compliant – less like rigid machines, more like animals. With traditional actuators – such as motors – this can mean using air muscles or adding springs in parallel with motors.
A ‘Magic’ Material Is Now the Big Thing in Physics
The practical goals are obvious: to illuminate a path to higher-temperature superconductivity, to inspire new types of devices that might revolutionize electronics, or perhaps even to hasten the arrival of quantum computers. But more subtly, and perhaps more important, the discovery has given scientists a relatively simple platform for exploring exotic quantum effects.
Living Building Blocks: A New Vision for Future Homes
The project works toward this visionary and high-risk technology using a unique mixture of biotechnology, computing and architectural design. The innovative building blocks consist of a bioreactor able to convert chemical energy produced by a pool of metabolising microorganisms into electricity, known as microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology.
Interview with Delma Rodriguez
Who’s Delma? A woman does many things That was the dialogue between two engineers, more than ten years ago to explain Delma’s role as someone who interacts and creates projects and activities on interinstitutional modalities through art, science, technology and society fields. Specifically, the anecdote refers to InfoArt project, created and coordinated by her, as […]
Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise
Innovation is one of the driving forces in our world. The constant creation of new ideas and their transformation into technologies and products forms a powerful cornerstone for 21st century society. Indeed, many universities and institutes, along with regions such as Silicon Valley, cultivate this process. And yet the process of innovation is something of […]
Robot waiters controlled by people with paralysis
Whether it’s autonomous delivery bots dropping off pizza, robo-bartenders, or automated waiters, it’s clear that robots have a growing place in the food industry. But a new Japanese pop-up cafe located in Tokyo offers a far more uncommon — and potentially transformative — spin on this premise. Called Dawn ver.β, the temporary eatery is staffed […]
Interview with Olga Kisseleva
Olga Kisseleva was born in Saint Petersburg in 1965. She is Professor the Sorbonne University in Paris and Head of Art&Science International Institute. Her art works hover between science and art and consistently challenges the viewer to rethink accepted notions about the world around us. Graduated from the Vera Mukhina Institute of Industrial Art […]
An electric plane with no moving parts
Your typical jet plane is full of fast-moving blades. We need the spinning of turbines and propellers to create thrust and let us take to the skies. Or do we? In a paper out today in Nature, MIT researchers report that they have created and flown the first plane that doesn’t require any moving parts. […]
Rome Reborn
Did you ever wish you could travel back in time to see ancient Rome at the peak of its glory? Now you can thanks to Rome Reborn®, a series of products for personal computers and VR headsets that make it possible to visit the now-vanished ancient city. Computer reconstructions of the buildings and monuments explained […]
Interview with Anna Dumitriu
Anna Dumitriu is a British artist whose work fuses craft, technology and bioscience to weave complex narratives around our relationship to infectious disease and its cultural and personal implications. She works hands-on with the tools and techniques of microbiology and synthetic biology to create intricate artworks that reveal strange histories and emerging futures. Her obsessions […]
Il Progetto
FiveWordsForTheFuture nasce per aiutare a riconoscere e capire l'innovazione, a immaginare il futuro nel senso di pensarsi in un tempo possibile, prossimo e concreto.
The Project
FiveWordsForTheFuture has been realized to help people in identifying and understanding innovation. Its aim is to imagine Our Future, through an inquiry into its concrete possibilities and by looking forward to those next, near realities that are going to come.-
A project by
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