The Cultural Force of Science Fiction.

“L’an 2000” (“The year 2000,” 1901), print on cardboard; a collection of uncut sheets for confectionery cards showing life imagined in the future (photo by the author for Hyperallergic). Click for full size.

LONDON — The 1982 film Blade Runner imagined 2019 Los Angeles as a dystopia of noirish neon and replicants, robots sent to do hard labor on off-world colonies. It’s a future in which engineered beings are so close to humans as to make the characters question the very nature of life. We’re now just a couple of years from this movie’s timeline, and although our robots are still far from mirroring humanity, our science fiction continues to envision giant leaps in technology that are often rooted in contemporary concerns of where our innovations are taking us.

Patrick Gyger, curator of Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction at the Barbican Centre, told Hyperallergic that, for him, science fiction “allows creators to look beyond the horizon of knowledge and play with concepts and situations.” The exhibition is a sprawling examination of the genre of science fiction going back to the 19th century, with over 800 works. These include film memorabilia, vintage books, original art, and even a kinetic sculpture in a lower-level space by Conrad Shawcross. “In Light of The Machine” has a huge, robotic arm twisting within a henge-like circle of perforated walls, so visitors can only glimpse its strange dance at first, before moving to the center and seeing that it holds one bright light at the end of its body.

[…]

The exhibition shows, but does not dwell on, who has been left out of a history mostly shaped by white men (there are rare exceptions on view, like the “Astro Black” video installation by Soda_Jerk that muses on Sun Ra’s theories of Afrofuturism). It would be worthwhile to spend more time on figures who broke through these barriers, such as author Octavia Butler. As discussed on a recent podcast from Imaginary Worlds, her black characters were sometimes portrayed as white on her book covers to make them more appealing to science fiction readers. The exhibition could also have a deeper context for why certain veins of science fiction are prominent in particular eras, and perhaps question why we don’t have a lot of science fiction narratives on current crises like climate change. For instance, the much smaller 2016 exhibition Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction 1780–1910 from the Smithsonian Libraries compared milestones like Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus with physician Luigi Galvani’s “animal electricity” experiments on animating dead frog legs, and highlighted how Jules Verne channeled the doomed Franklin expedition in his 1864 book The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.

Nevertheless, having an exhibition like Into the Unknown at a mainstream space like the Barbican is significant, showing the art world appreciates science fiction beyond kitsch. And science fiction continues to be one of our important portals for thinking about the ramifications of our technological choices, and where they might take us.

You can read and see much, much more at Hyperallergic. Fascinating!

History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents.

Published in 1658, more than thirty years after his death, this book brings together Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-footed Beasts (1607) and The History of Serpents (1608). Totalling more than 1000 pages, this epic treatise on zoology explores ancient and fantastic legends about existing animals, as well as those at the more mythic end of the spectrum, including the “Hydra” (with two claws, a curled serpent’s tail, and seven small mammalian heads), the “Lamia” (with a cat-like body and woman’s face and hair), and the “Mantichora” (with lion’s body and mane, a man’s face and hair, and a grotesquely smiling mouth). Topsell was not a naturalist himself (he in fact was a clergyman) and so relied heavily on the authority of others, in particular Konrad Gesner, the Swiss scholar who was also behind many of the brilliant illustrations which adorn the volume, and Thomas Moffett. On his utilising others for his work Topsell writes “I would not have the Reader,… imagine I have … related all that is ever said of these Beasts, but only so much as is said by many”. This approach leads him to repeat some wonderfully fantastic claims: elephants are said to worship the sun and the moon with their own rituals, apes are terrified of snails, and “…the horn of the unicorn … doth wonderfully help against poyson”. Although it is abound with such fanciful ideas, Topsell’s work, as John Lienhard explains “was actually an early glimmer of modern science. For all its imperfection, it represents a vast collection of would-be observational data, and it even includes a rudimentary rule for sifting truth from supposition.”

This is a grand look at early ideas of the natural world, and all the people busy trying to figure it all out. The artwork is marvelous, and retains much of that early Medieval illuminated flavour. Creatures real, and not real inhabit the pages, along with many grand, if terrifying remedies such beasties can provide for many an ill.

Gulon.

Some remedies utilising goat bits, particularly their dung.

A beautiful badger.

Cures which can be effected by use of badger bits.

Squirrels are depicted as dangerous and bloodthirsty. Appropriately, as Iris would say.

The book includes serpents and insects.

The whole book is available here, and select images here.

Via The Public Domain.

How Hummingbirds Work. WOW.

Hummingbirds often brave downpours to gather the nectar needed to avoid starvation. This Anna’s hummingbird shakes off rain as a wet dog does, with an oscillation of its head and body. According to researchers at UC Berkeley, each twist lasts four-hundredths of a second and subjects the bird’s head to 34 times the force of gravity. Even more remarkable: Hummingbirds can do this in flight as well as when perched.
SOURCES: VICTOR ORTEGA-JIMENEZ AND ROBERT DUDLEY. Photographs by Anand Varma / National Geographic.

I am just filled with awe after watching this:

Space may be the final frontier, but scientists have found plenty of head-scratchers right here on one of Earth’s zippiest creatures, the humble hummingbird. The July issue of National Geographic Magazine includes stunning photography by Anand Varma of ornithologist Christopher Clark’s experiments studying how the Anna’s hummingbird sees, moves, and eats.

Clark recreated studies from UC Berkeley and the University of British Colombia that use smoke, optical illusions, and specially-created tools in conjunction with high-speed cameras to reveal hummingbirds’ strange body parts. For example, the reason they can hover is because their unique bone structure allows them to create lift on the upswing, as well as the downswing of their wings.

You can see and read more about this at The Creators Project. I might have to put that video on a loop.

Tour The International Space Station.

Float in space w/ new @Google Street View of @Space_Station! See Where crew exercise, conduct @ISS_Research + more: bit.ly/2uMmTif

Very cool!

Via Raw Story.

Conservation Lab: Glass Flowers.

Scott Fulton working on a model of an Emperor Alexander apple affected by apple scab disease: Malus pumila (Model 813).

Luffa cylindrica (Model 272), Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, 1892. The Archives of Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka and The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, Harvard University © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

You can read all about this fascinating restoration at The Creators Project.

The Birth of Milk Bones.

Spratt’s ad, c. 1876 Public Domain.

The first dog biscuits did not resemble the bone-shaped delights of today. Developed by James Spratt in 1860, these so-called Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes were woefully square.

Spratt, an American electrician, came up with the idea for a dog biscuit after he witnessed sailors dropping hardtack—an unleavened bread—for the local dogs. He decided he could do the same—and monetize it. His flagship company, Spratt’s, was founded soon after. Their lead product, the Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes, were developed from a combination of wheat, beetroot, vegetables, and prairie meat. (The particular kind of meat in Spratt’s formula was apparently highly confidential; until his death, Spratt “kept in his hands the contract for his meat supplier.”)

At the time, the concept of a food specifically for dogs was alien. According to Katherine C. Grier, author of Pets in America, “until well into the 20th century, most household dogs lived off scraps from the kitchen, often cooked with a starch into something that people called ‘dog stew.’” But by the late 1800s, Spratt’s had shuttled dog biscuits into the mainstream—especially for dog show contestants. In 1895, the New York Times labeled Spratt’s a “principal food” of dog shows.

Spratt’s success soon spawned competition.

Over a decade later, in 1907, organic chemist Carleton Ellis received an urgent request. The owner of a local slaughterhouse was having problems with all of his excess “waste milk,” and he wanted Ellis to help him find a use for it. Ellis would eventually accrue over 753 inventions to his name and would serve as the force behind the creation of margarine, polyester, paint and varnish remover, and anti-knock gasoline. If he found the milk request odd, he did not show it. He agreed to help.

Likely inspired by Spratt’s, Ellis decided to turn the waste into food for his dog. After some experimentation, Ellis mixed the excess milk with malt, grain, and other products to form a dog biscuit—baked into what he assumed would be an appealing, rounded shape.

But when he tested the biscuits, his dog refused to eat them.

Ellis was frustrated. Clearly, the biscuit should have tasted great to a dog. He was a MIT graduate; he knew perhaps more than anyone at the time about the compounds in petroleums, oils, and varnishes. He had authored such dense, technical manuals as Hydrogenation of Oils Catalyze and The Chemical Action of Ultraviolet Rays for biscuit’s sake! Developing a treat that a dog would eat should not have provided this much of a challenge.

So he decided to do something strange: he changed the design of the biscuit rather than the ingredients. “I had some more biscuits baked from the same stock, but in the shape of a bone,” he told Popular Science in 1937, “and I found that my dog manifested a tremendous interest in the bone-shaped biscuit.”

You can read more about the origin of milk bones here. Oddly enough, I’ve always ended up with dogs who have never been terribly interested in Milk Bones.

Relics of A Cold War Satellite Program.

Julie Anand and Damon Sauer, “Calibration Mark AD48 with Satellites,” from Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks (courtesy the artists).

Strange colossal shapes dot the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, x-shaped relics of a once top-secret Cold War spying project. Known as the Corona program, the surveillance initiative by the CIA and US Air Force involved using satellites to take aerial photographs of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The cameras on these satellites were calibrated with concrete crosses 60 feet in diameter. Their exposed 70mm film was later jettisoned in space, the parachuting capsules caught in mid-air by plane. The calibration markers helped assure that the film was in focus, and that there was a landscape measure to accurately assess the size of pictured objects.

Approximately 256 of these markers were placed on a 16-square-mile grid in Arizona, spaced a mile apart. Long after Corona’s end and its declassification in 1995, around 100 remain. Phoenix-based artists Julie Anand and Damon Sauer have spent three years tracking them down for a project called Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks.

You can read all about this, and see more at Hyperallergic.

Religious Shroomin’ and Snorting Chocolate.

Photograph: Fredrik Skold/Alamy.

Researchers are once again feeding shrooms of the magic kind to religious leaders, well, some of them anyway. I noticed a glaring absence of a representative of the Religious Reich. I have no idea why this is being done, it’s already been done, back in the psychedelic ’60s. Pretty much the same response of anyone who has their first experience with shrooms: “Cool, man, cool.” Of course, it if persuades any of the religious to mellow the fuck out, it’s all good. Shrooms have always had a mild effect on me, but it’s one of the sweetest rushes on the planet. We’d all probably be happier naked apes more likely to put energies into play rather than war, if we were all allowed a pocketful of shrooms. I wouldn’t mind a pocketful of shrooms.

The Guardian has the full story.

On the naked apes behaving stupidly department, we have a new thing, snorting cacao.

Now meet Coco Loko, a “snortable” chocolate powder being marketed as a drug-free way to get a buzz. The product, created by Orlando-based company Legal Lean, includes cacao powder, as well as gingko biloba, taurine and guarana, which are commonly found in energy drinks.

Nick Anderson, the 29-year-old founder of Legal Lean, says he heard about a “chocolate-snorting trend” in Europe a few months ago. He ordered a sample and gave it a try.

“At first, I was like, ‘Is this a hoax?,’” he recalled. “And then I tried it and it was like, okay, this is the future right here.”

Yeah, okay, whatever. All I thought when I first saw this was “fuck, that sounds messy.” Might give brown nose a whole new meaning. My second thought was “I wonder how many people are gonna die.” True chocolate allergies are rare, and most all of them involve raw cacao. Those allergies are most often anaphylactic in nature, also. I think everyone would be better off with a light menu of shrooms.

The Washington Post has the story.

The Lady of Cao.

A replica of The Lady of Cao face, a female mummy found at the archaeological site Huaca El Brujo, a grand pyramid of the ancient Moche pre-hispanic culture, is seen at the Ministry of Culture in Lima, Peru July 4, 2017. REUTERS/Guadalupe Pardo.

The discovery of the Lady of Cao’s mummified remains in 2005 shattered the belief that the ancient Moche society, which occupied the Chicama Valley from about 100 to 700 A.D., was patriarchal. Several Moche female mummies have been found since in graves with objects denoting a high political and religious standing.

Archaeologists believe the Lady of Cao died due to complications of childbirth but otherwise lived a healthy life.

Her arms and legs were covered with tattoos of snakes, spiders and other supernatural motifs. Discovered near her funerary bundle was a strangled adolescent, who might have been a sacrifice to guide her into the afterlife, according to the museum at the El Brujo archaeological site where she was found.

The Lady of Cao is a reminder of the complex societies that thrived in what is now Peru long before the Inca empire dominated the Andes or Europeans arrived in the Americas.

The Moche built irrigation canals to grow crops in the desert and were known for their ceramics and goldwork that have been looted from their gravesites.

The replica of the Lady of Cao, a collaboration that included archaeologists, the Wiese Foundation and global imaging company FARO Technologies Inc, will be displayed in Peru’s culture ministry in the capital Lima through July 16. It will later be shown at the museum at El Brujo.

There’s more to read and see at Reuters.

Wild Horses Return to the Steppes.

A Przewalski’s horse leaves its container after being released in Takhin Tal National Park, part of the Gobi B Strictly Protected Area, in south-west Mongolia, June 20, 2017. REUTERS/David W Cerny.

A quarter-century-old project to repopulate the steppes of Mongolia with wild horses was kept alive as four animals made the long trip back to their ancestral home from Prague Zoo.

Driven to extinction in their homeland in the 1960s, the Przewalski’s horses survived in captivity before efforts began to re-introduce them to the arid desert and mountains along Mongolia’s border with China.

Zoos organized the first transport to Mongolia of the strong, stocky beasts in 1992.

For the past decade, Prague Zoo has been the only one continuing that tradition and it holds the studbook of a species whose ancestors – unlike other free-roaming horses such as the wild mustangs of the United States – were never domesticated.

The zoo completed its seventh transport last week, releasing four mares born in captivity in the Czech Republic, Germany and Denmark in the Gobi desert. They will spend the next year in an enclosed area to acclimatize before being freed.

“All the mares are looking very well, they are not hobbling, they are calm, eating hay and trying to test the taste of the new grass,” Prague Zoo veterinarian Roman Vodicka said after making observations a few days after the release.

Prague has released 27 horses in total and officials estimate around 190 are now back in the wild in the Gobi B park, where the most recent arrivals were sent.

What a wonderful project, one that fills my heart with happiness. There are many more photos at Reuters.