A Sharper Chimp

Our friend and fellow monkey fan, Jarrell McAlister, has threatened to purchase this for us:

"Alive" Chimpanzee So Real, It's Unreal!

• Amazing "Alive" Chimpanzee is a fully animated, life-size bust of the real animal.
• "Alive" Chimpanzee can see, hear and feel in ways that allow him to interact intelligently with you, your family, your guests...and with baffled strangers.
• Soulful eyes track movements using infrared "radar" vision; his ears have stereoscopic sound sensors; his skin reacts to contact with touch sensors all around.
• Four distinctive emotional moods include "Curious," "Happy," "Fearful" and "Feisty."
• Override his "natural" autonomous mode by using the wireless controller to communicate specific commands as far as 30 feet away.
• A Sharper Image worldwide exclusive.

Cassini Mission finds Water on Saturn's Moon

[From Andrew Zolli, Curator of Pop!Tech]

In case you haven't already seen it in the major media, there's breathtaking news this week from PopTech 2005 speaker and our newest board member Carolyn Porco.

Carolyn and the rest of the Cassini mission team report finding signs of liquid water on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, making it one of only a small handful of places in the solar system that could plausibly support life. The team's discoveries from the tiny moon are amazing -- giant plumes of water shooting into space, more heat emerging from the south polar regions than here on Earth, and signs that complex organic molecules may lie on the surface. "If we did nothing else, these findings alone would have made the Cassini mission worthwhile," says Carolyn. We couldn't agree more!

For more information and stay on top of this breaking news, check out Carolyn's web site, ciclops.org or visit nytimes.com today for the full story. And keep an eye out for Alive From PopTech appearing on public television stations nationwide starting in May and June -- it features fantastic footage from Cassini and Carolyn's own eloquent thoughts on the nature of exploration and discovery. And be sure to stop by poptech.org for your ticket to PopTech 2006 and 2007 -- tickets are disappearing fast, and we'd love to see you there.

Mark Lynas and High Tide

With global temperatures higher now than they have been in 5,000 years, and greenhouse gas levels higher than they have been in over 20 million years, Mark Lynas argues that the problem of global climate change is now impossible to ignore.

Using Google Earth, Mark takes his Pop!Tech 2005 audience on a world tour from his Oxford home to areas he visited in researching his book High Tide, highlighting the damage already evident from global warming.

As projections show a rise in temperature of between 1 and 6 degrees over the next century, Mark reflects on the "crisis of biodiversity" that accompanies such a rise, including the death of the coral reefs and committing a third of all species alive today to extinction.

Mark Lynas was born in Fiji in 1973, and grew up in Peru, Spain and the UK. After gaining a first-class honours degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh (where he also edited the university's student newspaper), he joined a web start-up called OneWorld.net - helping turn it into the world's most-accessed internet portal for human rights and sustainable development issues. He was also active in the flourishing environmental direct action scene during the late 1990s, joining road protests and helping mount 'decontamination' exercises against genetically-modified crops, as well as participating in Reclaim the Streets protests in London and Oxford.

Since leaving OneWorld in 2000 to work full-time on climate change, Mark has also been active as a broadcast commentator and journalist, writing for the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman and various other publications, as well as appearing on radio and television news and discussion programmes ranging from Newsnight to the BBC World Service. His book High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis was published by Flamingo/HarperCollins on March 1, 2004. He lives in Oxford, but has given talks and presentations on climate change and his travels for High Tide as far away as the United States and Australia.

Bill Hayward Portraits

From Paul Germain:

I think what Bill Hayward does has some similarities to what you accomplish with your work. In pushing his collaborators to pick up simple utensils and use a different side of the brain, the result is always a different and unique portrait of that person’s identity.

In your case, you seem to push participants to see themselves and their surroundings differently by abandoning all traditional methods of doing so as well. No computers, no notepads, secretaries, tape recorders or post its. Stripping things down to a viceral level, if you will.

Bill has been at this style of photography/portraiture for quite some time and the results have been really amazing. He’s also got a nice size coffee table book out which basically shows his process with a number of public personalities.

Bad Behavior is a radical new approach to portraiture. Rather than photographing his subjects posed in front of the standard, neutral paper backdrop, photographer Bill Hayward boldly invites them to collaborate in transforming the backdrop in any way they choose. Armed with paper, scissors and paint, the subjects create fascinating, often amusing, and always revealing portraits. Some subjects use the backdrop to paint portraits of critical people or figures in their lives, some create landscapes, some write words or phrases, while others create entire stories. Many choose to transform not only the backdrop, but themselves--removing their clothes and/or painting their bodies.

Hayward's subjects are luminaries in a variety of fields: painters, actors, directors, dancers, writers, musicians, and poets.

Body Worlds

This weekend we took the whole family to see Bodyworlds at Philadelphia's Franklin Museum of Science. Everyone was fascinated, from the two-year-old to grandpa and grandma. Dozens of full-sized humans stood in flayed splendor, often in combinations of filleted ingenuity that would make Hannibal Lector blush.

The displays are the brainchild and life's work of scientist Gunther von Hagens whose biography reads like a bad spy novel. After a two year imprisonment by East German authorities for political reasons, he was released after a $20,000 payment by the West German government. His pioneering invention that halts decomposition of the body after death and "preserves it for didactic eternity" through a delicate process of plastination:

A process at the interface of the medical discipline of anatomy and modern polymer chemistry, plastination makes it possible to preserve individual tissues and organs that have been removed from the body of the deceased as well as the entire body itself. Like most inventions, plastination is simple in theory: in order to make a specimen permanent, decomposition must be halted. Decomposition is a natural process triggered initially by cell enzymes released after death and later completed when the body is colonized by putrefaction bacteria and other microorganisms.

By removing water and fats from the tissue and replacing these with polymers, the plastination process deprives bacteria of what they need to survive. Bodily fluids cannot, however, be replaced directly with polymers, because the two are chemically incompatible. Gunther von Hagens found a way around this problem: In the initial fluid-exchange step, water in the tissues (which comprises approximately 70% of the human body) and fatty tissues are replaced with acetone, a solvent that readily evaporates. In the second step, the acetone is replaced with a polymer solution.

The Franklin Institute Science Museum hosts "BODY WORLDS: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies" from October 7, 2005 through April 23, 2006.

Throughout the ages, medical scholars and students have strived to understand how our bodies function through exploration of real human specimens. BODY WORLDS, one of the most highly attended touring exhibitions in the world, takes this tradition one step further by presenting a new look at the human body.

The exhibition features more than 200 authentic human specimens, including entire bodies, individual organs and transparent body slices that have been preserved through the process of "Plastination," a technique that replaces bodily fluids and fat. BODY WORLDS offers a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see and understand our own physiology and health and to gain new appreciation and respect for what it means to be human.

Visit the official BODY WORLDS website.