FiveWordsForTheFuture

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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A transformable material with a cellular structure

kinetiX is a transformable material featuring a design that resembles a cellular structure. It consists of rigid plates or rods and elastic hinges. These modular elements can be combined in a wide variety of ways and assembled into multifarious forms.…
A New Kind of Microscale 3D Printing

For 15 years, Patrice Baldeck and Michel Bouriau led intense research and development at the Université Grenoble Alpes. They were working on a two-photon polymerization 3D printing process that would become the basis of Microlight3D, founded in 2016. The process…
Interview with Luz María Sánchez

Luz María Sánchez is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and academic. She holds a Doctorate in Art from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and is an Art Member of the National System of Art Creators (2015-2018) and a Member of the…
A paralyzed man makes great strides with spinal stimulation and rehab

With the help of a spine stimulator and intensive training, a formerly paralyzed man can command his legs to step again. This achievement, described online September 24 in Nature Medicine, inches researchers closer to restoring movement to paraplegic people. The…
New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers

Today Iron Ox is opening its first production facility in San Carlos, near San Francisco. The 8,000-square-foot indoor hydroponic facility—which is attached to the startup’s offices—will be producing leafy greens at a rate of roughly 26,000 heads a year. That’s…
Interview with Danielle Siembieda

Danielle Siembieda is the Managing Director of Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST). Siembieda brings over 15-years of experience in community development and strategic communications. As an active leader in the art, science, and technology…
Ageing in human cells successfully reversed in the lab

The ability to reverse ageing is something many people would hope to see in their lifetime. This is still a long way from reality, but in our latest experiment, we have reversed the ageing of human cells, which could provide…
Ford thinks exoskeletons are ready for prime time in its factories

People still build cars. While videos of giant robots welding vehicles are exciting to watch (sparks!), humans are an important part of the assembly of vehicles. However, as you would expect, doing the same thing over and over often leads…
Lithium-oxygen batteries are getting an energy boost

A new type of lithium-oxygen battery could pack more energy and last longer than its predecessors. Lithium-oxygen batteries, which are more energy-dense and made of more sustainable materials than typical lithium-ion cells, are promising candidates for the next generation of…
Dal Mediterraneo al Pacifico. Dialoghi attraverso i mari / From the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Dialogues across the seas

Italiano [English below] art*science (https://artscience.online) è una serie di eventi sulle relazioni tra forme espressive, discipline scientifiche e tecnologie volti a riflettere sulla contemporaneità e a produrre idee per immaginare il futuro. Giunto alla seconda edizione, art*science inizia un programma…
Interview with Freddy Paul Grunert

Freddy Paul Grunert is an artist and associate curator at ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, a research centre and museum that specialises in the study of information technology and its social and cultural repercussions, where he curated among other things,…
Scentee Machina AI suggests your favorite scent

“Scentee Machina” is the first and smartest room diffuser in the globe, the next generation diffuser equipped with AI technology. So far the diffuser was fragrant weak, cumbersome to manage, only things that bothers busy business people for maintenance. However,…
From Seaweed to Fiber, Is Biology The Future Of Fashion?

Is biology the future of fashion? Well, Algiknit seems to think so. The biomaterials company has been developing biomaterials that can play a key role in the future of sustainable manufacturing. Addressing the ecological damage caused by the fashion industry,…
fivewordsforthefuture @ art + b = love (?)

[ITA] fivewordsforthefuture è ospitato al festival “art + b = love (?)”, Ancona, 4-8 Aprile 2018. “Gli studenti del Contamination Lab di Ancona, coordinati da Giuseppe De Maso Gentile, s’interrogano sul futuro intervistando gli artisti e gli speaker del…
The New and History – art*science 2017/Leonardo 50 Proceedings

The book, published by Noema Media & Publishing, collects the proceedings of art*science 2017/Leonardo 50 conference, that took place in Bologna, July 3-5 2017. fivewordsforthefuture has been a media partner of the event.
Streetlights could be replaced by luminescent trees

Roads of the future could be lit by glowing trees instead of streetlamps, thanks to a breakthrough in creating bioluminescent plants. Experts injected specialised nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, which caused it to give off a dim…
Seeing the Beautiful Intelligence of Microbes

Intelligence is not a quality to attribute lightly to microbes. There is no reason to think that bacteria, slime molds and similar single-cell forms of life have awareness, understanding or other capacities implicit in real intellect. But particularly when these…
New textile weathers temperature shift

Weather changes, but thanks to a new high-tech textile, someday you may not have to switch out your outfit. Materials scientists and engineers at Stanford University have developed a multilayered textile that traps body heat on one side and passively…
Interview with Bruno D’Amore

Italiano [English below] Bruno D’Amore è stato professore ordinario di didattica della matematica per oltre 40 anni presso l’università di Bologna, attualmente insegna e dirige tesi nel dottorato di ricerca in didattica della matematica di un’università a Bogotà (Colombia), dove…
Jeans that charge your phone? The future of wearable batteries

Our clothing could soon store all the power we need to recharge our phones thanks to a new type of fabric that can hold electricity just like a battery, developed by Deakin scientists. The fabric, called MXene (pronounced ‘Maxine’), is…
Is the future in the countryside?

By Rem Koolhaas The modern world is preoccupied with cities. More than half of mankind is now urban, which has been the pretext for an almost exclusive focus on the city. They are seen as the engines of economy, of…
Interview with Elif Ayiter

Elif Ayiter, aka. Alpha Auer. I was trained as a graphic designer, and worked for many years in the graphic design industry as an art director; after which I switched to academia. Nowadays, I teach full time at Sabancı University,…
Bringing Portraits to Life

Abstract We present a technique to automatically animate a still portrait, making it possible for the subject in the photo to come to life and express various emotions. We use a driving video (of a different subject) and develop means…
Predicting the Future and Exponential Growth

“How many times would I have to fold a sheet of paper for the height of the folded paper to reach the moon?” Human beings have terrible intuition for exponential growth. If I asked you how many times you would…
Interview with Luis Miguel Girão

Luis Miguel Girão founder of Artshare, the NATO Art Expert, is a researcher generating support for EU and Transatlantic policy making in the field of the crossings of art, science and technology. He is a transdisciplinary artist developing applications…
e-Residency

Estonia is the first country in the world to offer an ‘e-Residency‘ to people of any nationality. If you become an e-resident, you get a governmentally issued digital identity like other Estonians, that you can use to set up your…
A Biodegradable Car

A concept car in the Netherlands is constructed almost entirely of materials the grow in the soil. Called “Lina,” the biodegradable car is the work of students at Eindhoven University of Technology and is composed mainly of sugar beet resin and…
Recensione di art*science 2017/Leonardo 50 / Review of art*science 2017/Leonardo 50

[ITA] E’ uscita una bella recensione di art*science 2017/Leonardo 50 di Elena Giulia Rossi su Il Sole 24 Ore del 6 Agosto, che proponiamo di seguito. fivewordsforthefuture era media partner dell’evento. [ENG] Here enclosed a beautiful review of art*science 2017/Leonardo 50 by…
Interview with Roberta Buiani

Roberta Buiani is an interdisciplinary artist, media scholar and curator based in Toronto. She is the co-founder of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto) and a co-organizer of LASER Toronto. Her work explores…
Living Light – plants become an energy system

We create a world in which plants become part of our energy system and where technology and nature will merge. ‘Living Light’, a lamp which harvests its energy by the electrons released through bacteria in the soil during the photosynthetic…