MAKING A BIT OF ME
Feb 18th 2010, The Economist


A machine that prints organs is coming to market

THE great hope of transplant surgeons is that they will, one day, be
able to order replacement body parts on demand. At the moment, a
patient may wait months, sometimes years, for an organ from a suitable
donor. During that time his condition may worsen. He may even die. The
ability to make organs as they are needed would not only relieve
suffering but also save lives. And that possibility may be closer with
the arrival of the first commercial 3D bio-printer for manufacturing
human tissue and organs.

The new machine, which costs around $200,000, has been developed by
Organovo, a company in San Diego that specialises in regenerative
medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in
Melbourne, Australia. One of Organovo's founders, Gabor Forgacs of the
University of Missouri, developed the prototype on which the new 3D
bio-printer is based. The first production models will soon be
delivered to research groups which, like Dr Forgacs's, are studying
ways to produce tissue and organs for repair and replacement. At
present much of this work is done by hand or by adapting existing
instruments and devices.

To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short
stretches of blood vessels, will be made, says Keith Murphy, Organovo's
chief executive, and these will be for research purposes. Mr Murphy
says, however, that the company expects that within five years, once
clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels
for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be
possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the
machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could,
for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to
sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts.

PRINTING HISTORY
Organovo's 3D bio-printer works in a similar way to some
rapid-prototyping machines used in industry to make parts and
mechanically functioning models. These work like inkjet printers, but
with a third dimension. Such printers deposit droplets of polymer which
fuse together to form a structure. With each pass of the printing
heads, the base on which the object is being made moves down a notch.
In this way, little by little, the object takes shape. Voids in the
structure and complex shapes are supported by printing a "scaffold" of
water-soluble material. Once the object is complete, the scaffold is
washed away.

Researchers have found that something similar can be done with
biological materials. When small clusters of cells are placed next to
each other they flow together, fuse and organise themselves. Various
techniques are being explored to condition the cells to mature into
functioning body parts--for example, "exercising" incipient muscles
using small machines.

Though printing organs is new, growing them from scratch on scaffolds
has already been done successfully. In 2006 Anthony Atala and his
colleagues at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in
North Carolina made new bladders for seven patients. These are still
working.

Dr Atala's process starts by taking a tiny sample of tissue from the
patient's own bladder (so that the organ that is grown from it will not
be rejected by his immune system). From this he extracts precursor
cells that can go on to form the muscle on the outside of the bladder
and the specialised cells within it. When more of these cells have been
cultured in the laboratory, they are painted onto a biodegradable
bladder-shaped scaffold which is warmed to body temperature. The cells
then mature and multiply. Six to eight weeks later, the bladder is
ready to be put into the patient.

The advantage of using a bioprinter is that it eliminates the need for
a scaffold, so Dr Atala, too, is experimenting with inkjet technology.
The Organovo machine uses stem cells extracted from adult bone marrow
and fat as the precursors. These cells can be coaxed into
differentiating into many other types of cells by the application of
appropriate growth factors. The cells are formed into droplets 100-500
microns in diameter and containing 10,000-30,000 cells each. The
droplets retain their shape well and pass easily through the inkjet
printing process.

A second printing head is used to deposit scaffolding--a sugar-based
hydrogel. This does not interfere with the cells or stick to them. Once
the printing is complete, the structure is left for a day or two, to
allow the droplets to fuse together. For tubular structures, such as
blood vessels, the hydrogel is printed in the centre and around the
outside of the ring of each cross-section before the cells are added.
When the part has matured, the hydrogel is peeled away from the outside
and pulled from the centre like a piece of string.

The bio-printers are also capable of using other types of cells and
support materials. They could be employed, Mr Murphy suggests, to place
liver cells on a pre-built, liver-shaped scaffold or to form layers of
lining and connective tissue that would grow into a tooth. The printer
fits inside a standard laboratory biosafety cabinet, for sterile
operation. Invetech has developed a laser-based calibration system to
ensure that both print heads deposit their materials accurately, and a
computer-graphics system allows cross-sections of body parts to be
designed.

Some researchers think machines like this may one day be capable of
printing tissues and organs directly into the body. Indeed, Dr Atala is
working on one that would scan the contours of the part of a body where
a skin graft was needed and then print skin onto it. As for bigger body
parts, Dr Forgacs thinks they may take many different forms, at least
initially. A man-made biological substitute for a kidney, for instance,
need not look like a real one or contain all its features in order to
clean waste products from the bloodstream. Those waiting for
transplants are unlikely to worry too much about what replacement body
parts look like, so long as they work and make them better.

FLAT PACK
Mar 4th 2010, The Economist


Transport: A collapsible shipping container could help reduce the
environmental impact of transporting goods

OVERHAULING an industry of which you know little is not easy, but
neither is it impossible. In 1956 Malcolm McLean, a trucker from North
Carolina, launched the first "intermodal" shipping container, which
could be transferred easily between lorries, trains and ships. It
revolutionised the transport of goods by abolishing the traditional
(and back-breaking) system of "break bulk" loading, and thus helped oil
the wheels of globalisation. Now another outsider to the shipping
industry is trying to get a similar change under way.

Rene Giesbers, a heating-systems engineer from the Netherlands, has
invented a collapsible plastic shipping container which, he hopes, will
replace McLean's steel design. Because it is made of a fibreglass
composite, it weighs only three-quarters as much as a standard
container but--more importantly-- when empty, it can be folded down to
a quarter of its size. The composite is more resistant to corrosion
than the steel it replaces, is easier to clean and floats. It is also
greener to manufacture. Making one of the new containers produces 25%
of the carbon dioxide that would be generated by the manufacture of its
steel counterpart.

A collapsible shipping container would be useful for several reasons.
Patterns of trade mean that more goods travel from China to America,
for example, than the other way around, so ships, trains and lorries
inevitably carry some empty containers. If these were folded, there
would be more room for full containers and some vessels would be
liberated to ply different routes. If collapsed containers were bundled
together in groups of four, ships could be loaded more quickly, cutting
the time spent in ports. They would also take up less space on land,
allowing depots to operate more efficiently.

Mr Giesbers is not the first to invent a collapsible container. Several
models were experimented with in the early 1990s but failed to catch
on, mainly because of the extra work involved in folding and unfolding
them. There were also concerns about their strength. Mr Giesbers says
the Cargoshell, as he has dubbed his version, can be collapsed or
opened in 30 seconds by a single person using a forklift truck. It is
now undergoing tests to see if it is strong enough to meet
international standards.

There are currently about 26m containers in the world, and the volume
of goods they carry has risen from 13.5m "twenty-foot equivalent units"
in 1980 to almost 140m today. It is expected to reach 180m by 2015. Mr
Giesbers aims to have 1m Cargoshells plying the seas, rails and roads
by 2020, equivalent to 4% of the market.

Bart Kuipers, a harbour economist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam,
thinks that is a little ambitious, but he reckons the crate could win
2-3% of the market. He thinks it is the container's lower weight,
rather than its collapsibility, that makes it attractive. It will
appeal to firms worried about their carbon footprints--and if oil
prices rise, that appeal will widen.

Ultimately, the main obstacle to the introduction of the Cargoshell may
be institutional rather than technical. As Edgar Blanco, a logistics
expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out,
"Everyone is vested in the current system. Introducing a disruptive
technology requires a major player to take a huge risk in adopting it.
So the question will always boil down to: who pays for the extra cost,
and takes the initial risk?"

hard to choose a categorie for this post.
we need a wishlist, a meeting, a decision, a plan to finance, an isolated etoy.TANK as garage.

Alexander Klose's new book looks suuuper interesting and i wonder when i get a few days off to study the 320 pages in detail!

Dieses Buch ist überfällig und notwendig. Es entziffert unsere Kultur des 21. Jahrhunderts, eine Container- Kultur , deren Prinzipien unser alltägliches Schicksal bestimmen. (Joseph Vogl)

the book is based on Klose's dissertation. in 2005 fabio gramazio represented etoy in a conference organized by klose and volksbuehne berlin because i could not attend (still regret that so much).

get the book here for 20 euro

an english translation hopefully follows

Having failed at "Sein und Zeit" before, repeatedly and miserably, I'm most grateful to Dreyfus and Spinosa's essay on Heidegger, Borgmann and technology. Everyday life and our understanding of being embedded in a specific context allows us to make sense of our environment and act sensibly. In the authors' terminology, practices focus around things that exude their own ways of dealing with them, or with the situation, and remind us that we assume a specific behavior and sense a particular connection to the situation (a local identity) instead of all other options that we have in life. Our mortality reminds us that we could do things differently because time is scarce and we choose.

When he speaks of death, he does not mean demise or a medically defined death. He means an attribute of the way human practices work that causes mortals (later Heidegger's word for people who are inside a focal practice) to understand that they have no fixed identity and so must be ready to relinquish their current identity in order to assume the identity that their practices next call them into attunement with.

To understand oneself as mortal means to understand one's identity and world as fragile and temporary and requiring one's active engagement. In the case of the highway bridge, it means that, even while getting in tune with being a flexible resource, one does not understand oneself as being a resource all the time and everywhere. One does not always feel pressured, for instance, to optimize one's vacation possibilities by refusing to get stuck on back roads and sticking to the interstates. Rather, as one speeds along the overpass, one senses one's mortality, namely that one has other skills for bringing out other sorts of things, and therefore one is never wholly a resource. Hence, because one has in readiness other skills for dealing with other styles of things thinging, one can relate to the highway bridge not just as a transparent device but in its specificity as a way of bringing the technological ordering out in its ownmost. But that is to say that the highway bridge can be affirmed as a possible kind of focal thing that calls to us as mortals, only if there are other focal things around that preserve other styles in which things can thing.

Freeing us from having a total fixed identity so that we may experience ourselves as multiple identities disclosing multiple worlds is what Heidegger calls technology's saving power. (Dreyfus and Spinosa, 2003)

The disclosing activity is the essential entrepreneurial activity and it takes a "thorough contextual sensibility" (Steyaert, 2007: 462) to change practices that we experience. In other words, only if we experience a specific context can we be motivated to contribute to it in disclosing ways that carry the practice forward, create better quality, venture into new markets, challenge the rules, or abandon the practice altogether.

In the context of MISSION ETERNITY, this essay reminds us of two things: that to remember an individual requires capturing an extremely transient identity that only appears in time and in connection with a (local) practice. etoy's method of SCRAMBLING goes a long way towards capturing a moment and inscribing it into the global memory, indelibly and as an expression and disclosure of a mortal being at one particular moment in time.

Second, embracing technology is a valid and necessary strategy to characterize today's life and practices. Our dissolving and morphing identities that face the stand-by possibilities of access to infinite information make it ever more challenging to capture anything of our daily cyber-identities at all. Maybe, subversively, MISSION ETERNITY will end up bowing to the visionary and honest gesture of age-old burial cultures that reduce the memory of an individual to a time stamp simply because there is nothing more substantial of an identity that lasts.

War der Grabstein der Weisheit letzter Schluss?

As in many years previously, on April 1st, a new RFC has been published: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5514.txt

Obviously, it's a hoax. "IPv6 over Facebook" is not something anyone is gonna actually believe in, or even implement. But wait: the idea behind this joke is actually quite a good one: define an ipv6 prefix and assign another computed value to the rest of the address. What the hoax doesn't provide is working routability and compatibility with the existing ipv4 internet.

If you think the idea is ridiculous, consider this:

“Some men see things as they are and say, ‘why?’ I dream of things the way they never were and say, ‘why not?’"
- Robert F. Kennedy, after George Bernard Shaw

The concept of computing new, dynamic ipv6 addresses is actually available in practice through the Teredo standard. There are different implementations out in the wild, one of which is free: Miredo. Teredo provides both global addressability and routability! And it is compatibe to the existing ipv4 internet infrastructure.

So how to use this technology for a social network, wherein every user/participant will receive a globally unique, dynamic and routable ip address? Simple, just make miredo part of the peer-to-peer software and make sure to enable ipv6 in the operating system.

This is what etoy.CORPORATION has implemented in the ANGEL APPLICATION. The ANGEL APPLICATION NETWORK, an arcane network of computers, is loosely connected via the internet, safeguarding and sharing digital fragments of MISSION ETERNITY PILOTS. The individual ANGELS are technically routed over the existing internet via virtual ipv6 addresses, just as the RFC hoax suggests. This is loosely documented in the ANGEL WIKI.

This april fools hoax is very interesting in the sense that ideas, be it for jokes, can turn out to be real world concepts/products that help us find new ways for experiencing culture, emotions, rituals, belief, life and death.

Timothy Leary's last words are reported to have been: "Why? Why not? WHY NOT? Why not? Why not? Why not?" and later, "Beautiful."

etoy in collaboration with Simon Grand contributed material for an interesting book that is now coming from the printing press.

Lancement du livre
en présence des auteurs

Les entreprises critiques
Critical companies

sous la direction de Yann Toma
avec la collaboration de Rose Marie Barrientos
le mardi 2 Décembre 2008 à 19h

à la librairie du Palais de Tokyo
13 av. du Président Wilson 75016 Paris

coédition CERAP  / Cité du design


--
http://www.art-flux.org

ART&FLUX

La ligne de recherche Art & Flux a pour vocation de rendre compte, sous un regard critique et scientifique, des actions et réflexions portant sur ce qui lie l'art et l'économie. La relation entre les artistes et les entreprises est centrale dans l'activité de ses membres.

Art & Flux interroge les processus liant art et économie manifestes dans les démarches artistiques incarnées par les « entreprises critiques », ainsi que dans d'autres expressions de l'art comportant une dimension économique. Plutôt que de s'intéresser à des oeuvres matérielles, Art & Flux investie le territoire de l'immatérialité et de la migration énergétique entre objet et idée, entre société et art. Elle convoque les notions d'autonomie de l'art et de distanciation esthétique. Elle distingue l'idée d'esthétique relationnelle et communicationnelle des véritables objectifs esthétiques et politiques de partage et de sociabilité.

Art & Flux initie des projets et s'entoure de partenariats d'entreprises ou d'institutions nationales et internationales. Elle s'offre comme plateforme d'un réseau de réflexion sur les problèmes qui intéressent les « entreprises critiques ». La ligne de recherche se compose avant tout de chercheurs engagés dans des problématiques en relation avec la critique artiste. La plupart des membres d'Art & Flux sont impliqués professionnellement dans le monde de l'art.

Art & Flux est intégrée au CERAP, Centre d'Étude et de Recherche en Arts Plastiques de l'Université de Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.

hi, here's how it got there: Matthias Stürmer who works in our team at ETH booked an office tank (etoy.CONTAINER) for their hackontest end of September and announced it on /.
... He misplaced the link to the SARCOPHAGUS instead of a regular etoy tank. Google is one of their sponsors.
So this confusion created the PR frenzy without giving us the opportunity to really benefit, except for the traffic...

On Apr 22, 2008, at 12:22 PM, etoy.POL wrote:

I find it rather disturbing to get to know about such huge public involvement of etoy in the hacker community through /.

especially since it could involve finding dedicated contributors for the angel-app.

Wo genau ist die Verbindung zwischen einem Google-Projekt und etoy?

cheers,
-p

silvan.zurbruegg wrote:

Moin,
Die ganze story hier beschert uns seit gestern massiv traffic:
http://technocrat.net/d/2008/4/20/39812
etoy.com /missioneternity.org war gestern zeitweise nicht
erreichbar. Es beginnt zu bessern heute ...
g,s