Valentina Karga

redesign the recipe

Apart from recipe design which is what we used to know so far, here comes recipe re-design, which is what you get when you visualize standart recipes in a more creative, graphical way. Why didn’t we do that earlier? GOOD followed this upcoming trend and organized a competition about this topic. Results are in and you can vote for your favorite one here. Click more to see a comic-like udon, an ikea-like pho bo, a data visualization-like lasagna and more.

reposted from Parfois

a merry christmas and a

moon life handbook

Demo#2 architecture

“Greenwashing manual” and “Greenwasher” will be displayed in an exhibition organized by Dynamo project space in Thessaloniki, Greece. From 17/12 to 23/12.

pidgin

one-point perspectival constructions, anamorphosis and camouflage

Sinta Werner

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can (non-biological) life be created de novo?

The “essence of life” has fascinated people through all times. What is life, how did it arise or where did it come from? Scientifically, much research and speculation has been devoted to the question of the origin of life on Earth, whereas less attention has been focussing on the prerequisites for life and the possibilities of creating “artificial life” in the laboratory.  In two ambitious, newly started, “intercontinental” projects, a European-US consortium is exploring routes that may eventually lead to non-biological artificial life.

Although we all believe that “we know what life is”, and are able to determine if an object is alive or not, a strict and rigorous scientific definition of “life” is far less straightforward. However, most scientists will agree that life must posses several key properties such as the ability to replicate, i.e. make copies of it self, and thereby multiply, as well as the ability to evolve, such that the progeny is not an exact (genetic) copy of the parent. In order to replicate and evolve an ordered structure and free energy are required. Therefore, to produce an ordered progeny from unordered components of the environment, free energy, and a flow of resource materials, are needed (in thermodynamic terms: as the entropy of the living entity is decreasing, the entropy of the environment increases and the free energy is “consumed” by the living entity).

Thus if we limit ourselves to chemical systems, as opposed to purely electronic systems (life within a computer [1]), life must consist of a genetic information bearing material and a metabolic system and these must be physically confined, e.g., in a container. Furthermore, the genetic system must be coupled to the metabolic system and/or the container, in order to establish what in contemporary life constitutes the genotype-phenotype coupling.

One of the most fundamental questions to ask is of course what are the minimum chemical and physical requirements for life. This would help us understand how life could have originated on Earth and also provide a much better basis for predicting the possibilities of discovering life elsewhere in the Universe. Furthermore, if it can be demonstrated that new life forms can be based on “non-biological” chemistry, i.e., life forms which are orthogonal to the biological life we know from Earth, this would profoundly change our view of Life biologically as well as philosophically.

Chemists have within recent years attempted to develop self-replicating “living” systems based on liposome contained catalytic RNA [2], as a model for the origin of the RNA world. Such a system would not be conceptually or chemically different from contemporary life, and could be seen as a predecessor of this. However, self-replicating chemical systems has been demonstrated based on small oligonucleotides [3], or peptides [4] or even simple non-biological organic compounds [5]. Such systems could in principle lay the foundation for “non-biological life”.

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found in the web

found here