SciencePunk
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Leave nothing to the imagination
Posted by Frank Swain on March 21, 2013 
Last month I visited Amsterdam to take part in Sonic Acts, an art festival with a keen love of the scientific. Amid music woven out of the electromagnetic ether and artists painting geomagnetic storms, I took part in a panel convened by Arc editor Simon Ings to discuss the ‘futures of science and science fiction’.…
“Dizzying but invisible depth” Jean-Baptiste Quéru’s wonderful essay on the computers around us
Posted by Frank Swain on March 20, 2013 Written over a year ago, but only just coming to my attention, is Google engineer Jean-Baptiste Quéru‘s wonderful essay describing how no single person alive understands entirely what’s going on in the machines we use daily. You just pressed a key on your keyboard. Simple, isn’t it? What just actually happened? Well, when you know about…
Tiny, useless parks built to drive out sexual offenders
Posted by Frank Swain on March 19, 2013 From the annals of dystopian architecture: the New York Times reports on a trend in US communities to build nominal parks to drive out sex offenders. The parks are often too small to be of any use to local children – instead, they exist to force out nearby paroled sex offenders, who are required to…
Futurecrime: jailbreaking your credit card
Posted by Frank Swain on March 18, 2013 This is an adaptation of my shortlisted entry to the 2013 Future of Money Design Award. The brief was to design a crime that would exist in a cashless economy. The judging took place at the Consult Hyperion Tomorrow’s Transaction conference. I didn’t win, but I enjoyed working on the idea and it was nice…
Why “De-Extinction” is a stupid idea
Posted by Frank Swain on March 13, 2013 A while back I chanced across a post by Carla Sinclair at BoingBoing, recounting a recent TED talk that proposed reviving extinct species: Stewart Brand began his TED talk today with the statement, “Biotechnology is about to liberate conservation.” Before I had a chance to process what that meant, he went on to list a…
Festival fan art of Brian Cox
Posted by Frank Swain on March 11, 2013 So last summer I ran a quiz at the Secret Garden Party festival in Cambridgeshire. For the picture round, teams had to submit their best drawing of hearthrob scientist Professor Brian Cox. Here are some of the entries.
Silent alarm: a battery-powered bell which has rung inaudibly for 173 years
Posted by Frank Swain on March 11, 2013 A whimsical thing: the Oxford Electric Bell, pictured here, is a battery-powered device that has been running (almost!) continuously since it was built in 1840. A clapper on a pendulum rocks from side to side between two metal spheres, driven by electrostatic forces. The bell is powered by a pair of mysterious batteries, the composition of…
Skull by Tim Biskup
Posted by Frank Swain on March 1, 2013 I’m rather taken by Tim Biskup’s work, especially his skulls. I think this design appeared on a limited edition Poketo wallet (the only type I buy) some years back, but I missed out on getting one. For shame. For more of his latest work, see the Design Collector blog.
Delineating journalism
Posted by Frank Swain on February 26, 2013 
During the First World War, an enterprising British field medic named Sgt James Shearer unveiled a machine that promised to revolutionise medicine. Shearer’s “Delineator” was a small wooden box that had an aperture at one end and a crank on the side. Clicking the shutter and winding the arm produced a small drawing of a…
Implanted bionic eye allows the blind to see again
Posted by Frank Swain on February 20, 2013 
Researchers at the Institute for Ophthalmic Research at the University of Tübingen have restored vision in blind patients using tiny retinal implants embedded in the eye. Nine patients were chosen because they had all suffered hereditary diseases where the retina had degenerated to the point of blindness, but left the remainder of the visual pathway intact.…