#we made cyborg fungi

[biocheminpics]

Decay exists as an extant form of life. And we just gave it legs.

"This robot is part fungus, part machine" and it's so happy to see you.

[aion-rsa]

Top New Science Fiction Books in September 2021

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Go beyond the blockbusters to today’s smartest, most exciting science fiction novels and novellas. Here are our top picks for September 2021:

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Vol 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Type: Anthology Publisher: Gallery/Saga Press Release date: Sept. 28

Den of Geek says: It’s exactly what it says on the tin. Today’s top authors keep you on the pulse of the conversation (and provide inventive, moving stories) in this anthology that could serve as a cutting-edge collectible or an introduction to new worlds.

Publisher’s summary: With short works from some of the most lauded science fiction authors, as well as rising stars, this science fiction collection displays the top talent and cutting-edge cultural moments that affect our lives, dreams, and stories. These brilliant authors examine the way we live now, our hopes, and struggles, all through the lens of the future.

An assemblage of future classics, this star-studded anthology is a must-read for anyone who enjoys the vast and exciting world of science fiction.

Buy The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Vol 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

Type: Novel Publisher: Erewhon Release date: Sept. 7

Den of Geek says: Khaw is a buzzy name lately, and this science fiction novel has garnered strong praise from the likes of Kameron Hurley and Seanan McGuire. Besides, we’re always interested in cyborgs around here.

Publisher’s summary: Maya has died and been resurrected into countless cyborg bodies through the years of a long, dangerous career with the infamous Dirty Dozen, the most storied crew of criminals in the galaxy, at least before their untimely and gruesome demise. Decades later, she and her diverse team of broken, diminished outlaws must get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade . . . but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir. 

The highly evolved AI of the galaxy have their own agenda and will do whatever it takes to keep humanity from ever regaining control. As Maya and her comrades spiral closer to uncovering the AIs’ vast conspiracy, this band of violent women—half-clone and half-machine—must battle their own traumas and a universe of sapient ageships who want them dead, in order to settle their affairs once and for all. 

Buy The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw.

The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel 

Type: Novel Publisher: Orbit Release date: Sept 21

Den of Geek says: Both The All-Consuming World and The Body Scout seem to promise some pretty gnarly experiments on the limits of modifying the human body. This one goes more of a noir route with its focus on the world of far-future sports. Publisher’s summary: In the future you can have any body you want—as long as you can afford it. But in a New York ravaged by climate change and repeat pandemics, Kobo is barely scraping by. He scouts the latest in gene-edited talent for Big Pharma-owned baseball teams, but his own cybernetics are a decade out of date and twin sister loan sharks are banging down his door. Things couldn’t get much worse.

Then his brother—Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz—is murdered at home plate.

Determined to find the killer, Kobo plunges into a world of genetically modified CEOs, philosophical Neanderthals, and back-alley body modification, only to quickly find he’s in a game far bigger and more corrupt than he imagined. To keep himself together while the world is falling apart, he’ll have to navigate a time where both body and soul are sold to the highest bidder. 

Buy The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel.

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The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

Type: Novella Publisher: ECW Press Release date: Sept. 28 Den of Geek says: Mohamed’s interest in the natural world pervading her dark but cheerful writing style has made her one of my favorite authors of the modern day. This one seems to fit the bill perfectly: parasitic fungus, but make it hopeful. Publisher’s summary: A novella set in post–climate disaster Alberta; a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her community The world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away ― to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society ― but she can’t bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her. When she’s offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can’t even trust her own mind? With keen insight and biting prose, Premee Mohamed delivers a deeply personal tale in this post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella that reflects on the meaning of community and asks what we owe to those who have lifted us up.

Buy The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed.

The post Top New Science Fiction Books in September 2021 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[murderfinearts]

Where is my plastic bag?

Science-art project for the processing and resourcing of plastic waste, in order to achieve a closed cycle of production - consumption.

What ideas come to your mind when you hear the word "future"?  Do you imagine your very own and private future or fantasize about something global, where all humanity will participate? Today we have already crossed the line of "consumer society" and turned into creators of huge mountains of waste and consumers of an incredible amount of energy. Project “Where is my plastic bag?” is the study of plastic waste by the artists and the understanding of personal responsibility in the context of a common future.

Plastic waste directly affects the planet's ecosystem and climate warming. As a result, humanity will have to start implementing new programs, which will be the exact opposite of today's norms. After all, life today determines our future, which is unknown. Plastic has already got into our body. Many people carry implants of high quality plastic. The biological nature of human fuses with technology. A large percentage of living organisms are dying out, but this does not preclude the development of new organisms. Cells that can begin to develop under a layer of plastic will also be able to eat this plastic. Or you and me. It is strange to assume that humanity is the end point in evolution.

The question remains - what innovations will save the environment and launch us into the next era? After all, it took billions of years and several energy eras to create people breathing oxygen, devouring the flesh, owning fire, electricity, technology, oil, plastic, which can be learned to turn into a resource.

Li-Mi-Yan and Sadovsky outlined the five main parts of their project, carried out in collaboration with scientists, engineers and technologists. The project includes various media:

 1. The activist part is the collection of plastic waste in art institutions in Moscow. 2. Processing of plastic and the creation of sculptures from the recycled (processed) material. 3. Creation of video art work in collaboration with the “Plarus” plastic processing plant (Moscow) 4. Collaboration with the scientist. Development and creation of biodegradable hydrogel from potato starch. 5. Collaboration with the Russian engineers and technologists from the QDLab innovation laboratory (Moscow) on 3D printing from recycled plastic.

 Description

1. The first, the activist part, included collecting plastic waste in museums and art institutions of Moscow, where we installed containers with the sign "Plastic for art".  We wanted to go through all the stages –

from collection to processing and production from new, recycled material. We have contacted museums and some universities to install plastic waste collection containers. Why these places? Because this is the territory where the artists live and work, and where they must show personal responsibility.Our project was supported by Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Moscow, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Skolkovo business school, Moscow Architectural Institute, Rodchenko Art School, Skoltech (Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology).

"Where is my plastic bag?" is a collective work on a project where not only artists and museums participate, but also visitors. Everyone who threw a plastic bottle into our container becomes a co-author of the project. Together we were working on our sculptures. This huge pile of plastic could decompose somewhere in the landfill outside Moscow for hundreds of years, but our joint efforts turned it into works of art.

We also announced on our Facebook pages that we accept sorted plastic in our  studio. We have involved hundreds of people! We were amazed that so many people think about this problem as well and that they responded to our call.

It was important not only to collect the waste, but also to attract people to a new, yet unusual action. After all, we consider the history of mankind not as a summary of isolated regions where everyone acts only for themselves, but as a living network of developing species that constantly affect each other.

 2. The second part of the project is the processing of the collected plastic and the creation of sculptures from the recycled material. It is important for us to consider plastic not as a problem, but as a resource, which becomes, after processing, a new material for production. As part of our project, we began to cooperate with the Plarus plastic processing plant (Moscow). This is the only plant in Russia using the unique bottle-to-bottle PET processing technology.

This means that the company produces "Clear PET" granulate from used PET bottles, from which new PET bottles are made again. The main feature of this technology is the complete identity of the quality characteristics of the resulting products (restored PET or RePET brand "Clear PET") with the primary PET raw materials for food use. "Clear PET" is certified by the Moscow Region Hygiene and Epidemiology Center for use in the production of food packaging. The development of the "bottle-to-bottle" technology opens up prospects for waste-free processing of PET packaging.

 Since there is no technology for casting from recycled plastic in Russia, we worked with the engineers of the Plarus plant on various possibilities for producing sculptures, made a lot of tests and realized that the only available technology was injection molding into metal molds. We were not satisfied with this technology, because it is old, existed 70 years ago, and the production of a single mold was very expensive. We needed more innovative and cheaper production, such as 3d printing, which we will return to later. We left the tests in the form of sculptures for the project, they are very beautiful and look great in a museum. But we are not interested only in the aesthetic side. We want the production and aesthetics of our work to be utilitarian. So that this type of production successfully works for society, producing useful things from waste.

 3. The third part is the creation of a three-channel video art together with the Plarus factory. On three screens you can watch slow industrial images from different plastic processing plants. Suddenly, among the powerful machines, a fragile human body appears with strange plastic objects that look like cells, like new organs formed outside, not inside.

We have some cyborgs with implants that move and breathe with them. Macro shooting of factory processes resembles natural phenomena, such as volcanic eruptions, geyser explosions, the rapid flow of a mountain river, and on top of all this is a human, perhaps already a post-human. All this is very anthropocentric. Today human is the most important at the geophysical level, and global warming is our handiwork. The burning of various types of energy in a huge amount (oil, gas, the production of petroleum products, plastics). Can we stop that?

This is interesting. Seen from a social point of view, not scientific, many people relate to environmental issues separately from humanity. It seems that the consequences, in our case, from plastic, will adversely affect nature, the planet, but not us. We seem to separate ourselves from nature. It is unlikely that now producers and processors of petroleum products will quit their activities. But they will have to adapt to the present, the future, and modify their activities.

  4. Cooperation with the young scientist-chemist Sakina Zeynalova (Master of Chemistry at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod), the development of biopolymers from potato starch. We considered it important to look at the problem of plastic not only from a production point of view, but also from a scientific point of view. Is it possible to create biodegradable polymers to replace petroleum polymers? Indeed, ready-made polymers already exist in nature - such as starch, cellulose, silk, chitosan and chitin, proteins, rubber, RNA and DNA. It is not yet possible to create a biopolymer of the same strength as plastic. After all, plastic is a very cheap and wear-resistant material. It is impossible to refuse it, because almost all items of our everyday life contain plastic. But it is possible to achieve a closed cycle of production, which we strive for.

 If we return to science, then plastic is used not only in commodities, but also in agriculture. Using the laboratory developments of Sakina, we came to the conclusion that it is possible to create biodegradable polymers from potato starch - such as flocculants for treating river water, sorbents for treating wastewater and hydrogels. We are interested in hydrogel. This material is used in agriculture - it is added to the soil, then spilled abundantly with water, it swells and gives water to the roots of plants for 7 days.

It is very convenient; you do not need to spend every day the energy of watering machines and human strength. But the problem is that now oil hydrogels are mainly used, which then stay in the soil for hundreds of years without decomposing. The question arises, how much organic vegetables do we eat? Thanks to the development of Sakina, we were able to obtain a biopolymer hydrogel that exhibits a thermal dependence and its swelling does not depend on the pH of the solution. It is capable of recycling: repeatedly absorb and return water up to 6 times (with a reduction in the degree of swelling by 20% from the previous one). This hydrogel decomposes in the soil under the action of enzymes and fungi for 20 days, after its full use. Now Sakina is trying to get a patent in Russia for this development with great difficulties.

Since Russia is an oil state, such an innovation is far from beneficial for everyone. And we want to show our work in the territory of art - in the museum. We have already created a large number of biopolymer hydrogels for exhibition in a museum or gallery. We want to implement this exhibition project in the fall of 2020 - to build a large installation where plants will be planted in a huge transparent reservoir and a hydrogel will be in the soil. We once fill it with water, after which visitors to the exhibition can observe for 20 days how it degrades in the soil.

  5. 3d printing from recycled plastic. Collaboration with engineers and technologists of the innovation laboratory QDLab (Moscow). We were lucky to meet and start a test job with a talented young team of engineers and developers. Now in Russia there is only one 3d - a printer that these guys developed. And, of course, they also had problems with a patent in Russia. Now QDLab has a patent only in the USA, and in Russia it works in test mode. They created a truly magical machine that can take production to a whole new level - a closed cycle (Production - Processing - Production). The capabilities of 3d printing break many limitations and kill old types of production, such as milling, the old injection molding method and numerous manual human labor. True innovation of the future.

 Of course, we really want to dream about those opportunities that may be available to humanity, thanks to 3d printing, when we ourselves can produce the necessary goods. They will not need to be replicated for mass sale, because such a way of production will be available to everyone. Perhaps we will only buy files with a design - clothes, shoes, and someone will create their own costume or home furniture designs. All production work will be done by machines. There will no longer be a need for mass production in Third World countries; goods will not need to be delivered to different corners of the Earth. Everything will be in place. This is our utopian vision of the future.

 Back to the printer. Also, it can print any product made of composite materials, such as plastic and metal. How does the printer look and work? This is a huge machine (somewhere 7x7 meters). Two more types of equipment are connected to it – this is a shredder for grinding, for example, plastic bottles, then the ground plastic gets into the second compartment –  there it dries to the desired state and then goes to the printer. Or you can print from ready-made granules that any processing plant sells. And if, for example, you printed an object, that doesn’t work, you can immediately process it and put this material back into print.

Now we have submitted an application for a project to create urban sculptures for St. Petersburg from recycled plastic which we want to create exclusively using a 3d printer, and no more manual labor!