July 25, 2016 • 10 mins
An artist proposes making human-leather fashion grown from Alexander McQueen’s DNA, raising genetic ownership questions. Drones might dismantle land mines quickly and safely. Plus, engineers designed interlocking blocks that change and encode sound.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, this is Julie Douglas from the podcast The Stuff
of Life here to tell you that super producer Noel
Brown and I are cooking up season two for an
August release. So if you haven't already checked out season
one of the Stuff of Life, there's a big bowl
of ten episodes ready for you to dig into on
iTunes or wherever you get your delicious podcast take out from.
(00:21):
In the meantime, apply sunscreened liberally, and we'll see you
in August. Welcome to House to Works Now. I'm your host,
Lauren Vogelbaum, a researcher and writer. Here at House to Works.
Every week, I'm bringing you three stories from our team
(00:42):
about the weird and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology,
and culture. This week, a crowdfunded project is designing drones
to dismantle landmines and super unrelated, an artist has plans
to use deceased fashion designer Alexander McQueen's DNA to grow
human skin in the lab and then make it into
(01:03):
leather goods. The leather goods plus of political statement, Really
but First. Senior writer Jonathan Strickland explains how a team
of engineers have built the acoustic equivalent of Lego blocks.
These small interlocking pieces can physically change sound and even
in code information in it. The engineers come from M I. T.
(01:24):
Columbia University and Disney Research. They designed interconnecting three D
printed blocks that can dramatically change sounds. The small cubes
have connectors on each of the six faces. Those connectors
can be open to other cubes or closed off, depending
upon what you want to do. You connect a bunch
of these blocks together and fit them inside an arbitrarily
(01:45):
shaped three D printed instrument. With a particular configuration of blocks,
you can damp and sounds you don't like, or with
a different combination, you can emphasize sounds in a range
of frequencies. Or you can even build your own hippo
bugle and play the Imperial March from Star Wars on it.
I know because they did that thing and it was awesome.
(02:13):
In late July, the team will present their findings at
SIAGRAPH two thousand sixteen, a conference for digital graphics and
interactive design. Their paper has the zingy title of Acoustic
Voxels Computational Optimization of Modular Acoustic filters. The boxes are
the modular acoustic filters a k a. Vauxels. So how
(02:34):
does it work well. Sound is vibration that moves through matter.
By making changes to the medium through which the sound travels,
you can change the nature of that sound. Take a
guitar string, for example, pressing down on a string between
frets changes the length of the string, which changes the
strings number of vibrations per second, also known as its frequency.
(02:55):
We perceive sounds with a higher frequency as having a
higher pitch. The interconnection of Vauxell's changes sound in a
similar way as it passes through the system. Some filters
can muffle certain frequencies, while some boost others. There are
no moving parts and no need for electricity. It's a
purely physical phenomenon. With this technology, you could also create
(03:17):
a type of acoustic tagging for products, kind of like
a sound based QR code. The engineers demonstrated this with
three D printed octopuses. I love these guys. Each octopus
had a slightly different configuration of voxels inside it, and
app on a smartphone generated a specific noise. Holding the
phone speaker against one of the octopus is. The noise
(03:38):
traveled through the boxes inside and came out with a
different tone. The phones might picked up the new sound
and the app identified the octopus. The app could identify
different cephalopods by their unique sounds. Ultimately, I think the
simple technology's most important use will be to allow for
an entire hippo orchestra to play the music of John
(03:59):
Williams Dream of That Day, A dream of It a lot.
Next up, Holly Fry, co host of Our Stuff He
Missed in History Class podcast, brings us the story of
life saving drones. The technology has a little bit of
a bad rap because of the public's understandable concerns about
privacy and air safety, but a team is hoping to
(04:21):
use it to eradicate land mines all over the world
within the next ten years. A group working out of
the Netherlands is developing a landmine sweeping drone. Despite ongoing
global efforts to ban anti personnel land mines, they're still
used in a lot of countries. They've been a common
(04:41):
part of warfare since the nineteen thirties, but when wars
and conflicts end, it's not as though those explosive devices
just evaporate. They remain underground and unmarked, ready to detonate.
There were a total of three thousand, six hundred and
seventy eight recorded landmine detonation, and those are just the
ones we know about. Nearly eight percent of those who
(05:04):
were injured or killed in those blasts were civilians, and
nearly of those civilians or children. In recent news, even
the wildly popular Pokemon Go game has been affected. Players
in Bosnia have been warned about minds that were left
over from conflicts in the nineteen nineties. Getting rid of
all that ordinance is no small task, and it's dangerous.
(05:28):
Current methods of removal involved sniffer animals, human d miners
with metal detectors, or large detonation vehicles, and those methods
can be slow and costly, and they come with a
high risk. Enter the mind Sweeping drone. Now this isn't
the first time project founder Massoud Hassani and his team
have built a robot to get rid of land mines.
(05:50):
In they created a device called mine Cafone. It's sort
of like a robotic tumbleweed. It rolls through mine fields
and when it finds a mine, it blows up both
itself and the mine. Now, the mind Caphone team has
developed a drone based mine eradicator that will further reduce
both the cost and the risk of demining. It uses
(06:11):
a series of modular robotic attachments that can be interchanged.
So first, the Mincaphone drone uses a mapping system attachment
to make a three D map of the entire designated area,
and then a metal detector is attached to it and
it uses that plus GPS to locate and identify mine locations.
(06:31):
And then in the final step, that metal detector is
swapped out for a robotic gripping arm which carefully places
detonators on the identified mines. The mines are then triggered
and eliminated, and the drone can move on to its
next location. Right now, the mine Caphone Foundation is running
a Kickstarter so they can finish development and start testing
(06:52):
the technology in the field. The project is incredibly ambitious.
Hasani has a goal to eradicate all of the minds
on the planet in the space of just ten years.
But according to the kickstarter pitch, this method is twenty
times faster at ferreting out and detonating minds and at
a cost two hundred times cheaper than existing technologies. Finally,
(07:20):
this week, senior writer Robert Lamb finally found a story
that grossed me out. An artist by the name of
Tina Gorjank has proposed growing human leather from the sample
of Alexander McQueen's DNA. She wants to make it into
bags and leatherware, and more importantly, raise awareness about the
potential for lab grown leather and raise questions about genetic
ownership rights. Goor Jenk's project at London Central St Martin's
(07:45):
Fashion School revolves around the creation of a very special
sort of leather. Instead of harvesting it from a cow
or other non human animal, she plans to grow the
skin of deceased fashion designer Alexander McQueen and make it
into handbags and jackets, flesh colored items that will feature
McQueen's distinguishing marks and tattoos. The starting point for this
(08:06):
grizzly glam fashion venture is a sample of McQueen's own
hair used in his silk coat titled Jack the Rippers
Stalks his victims see he probably would have dug the project.
The DNA will be manipulated and grown out into skin, tanned,
and finally processed into human leather. The technology here emerges
from the room of Synthetic Biology, an exciting area of
(08:27):
biotechnology that has already led to the creation of lab
grown skin, grass and synthetic organs. The ultimate possibilities are
truly transhumanist in nature, entailing everything from engineer disease immunity
to enhance longevity. But cutting edge science sometimes outpaces our
ability to understand all the ramifications, and that's where art
enters the picture. Gorgen copes to push the notion of
(08:49):
sustainable slaughter free lab grown leather, but the project is
also about the lack of rights concerning our own genetic information.
See the project here is unapproved by either McQueen family
or fashion brand. She snagged the DNA from a hair
sample and has already filed a patent for the resulting
leather material based on its singular source and creation process
(09:10):
is bioephesis. Glenn Cohen pointed out on the website. Courts
the UK and United States afford little or no ownership
protection to abandon tissues. A wizard can come along stuff
of voodoo doll full of your hair clippings, and there's
nothing you can do about it. The same potentially goes
for real world cloning and synthetic tissue growth. We're drifting
into largely uncharted legal waters here, at least as far
(09:32):
as luxury items made from dead celebrities go. So while
the fun question here is, Hey, which Oscar winner would
you wear as a pair of slacks, the more pressing
issue is who owns your genetic information? And how much
privacy can you expect concerning all the scraps of discarded
hair and skin you leave in your weight each day?
(09:54):
And that's our show for this week. Thank you so
much for tuning in. Subscribe now for more of the late,
best and strangest science news, and send us links to
anything you'd like to hear us cover, plus whatever cute
animal video you're digging on today, I could use it.
Shoot us an email at now podcast at how stuff
works dot com, and to access thousands of other stories
(10:14):
like these, check out our home planet Now dot how
stuff works dot com
Hey, this is Julie Douglas from the podcast The Stuff
of Life here to tell you that super producer Noel
Brown and I are cooking up season two for an
August release. So if you haven't already checked out season
one of the Stuff of Life, there's a big bowl
of ten episodes ready for you to dig into on
iTunes or wherever you get your delicious podcast take out from.
(00:21):
In the meantime, apply sunscreened liberally, and we'll see you
in August. Welcome to House to Works Now. I'm your host,
Lauren Vogelbaum, a researcher and writer. Here at House to Works.
Every week, I'm bringing you three stories from our team
(00:42):
about the weird and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology,
and culture. This week, a crowdfunded project is designing drones
to dismantle landmines and super unrelated, an artist has plans
to use deceased fashion designer Alexander McQueen's DNA to grow
human skin in the lab and then make it into
(01:03):
leather goods. The leather goods plus of political statement, Really
but First. Senior writer Jonathan Strickland explains how a team
of engineers have built the acoustic equivalent of Lego blocks.
These small interlocking pieces can physically change sound and even
in code information in it. The engineers come from M I. T.
(01:24):
Columbia University and Disney Research. They designed interconnecting three D
printed blocks that can dramatically change sounds. The small cubes
have connectors on each of the six faces. Those connectors
can be open to other cubes or closed off, depending
upon what you want to do. You connect a bunch
of these blocks together and fit them inside an arbitrarily
(01:45):
shaped three D printed instrument. With a particular configuration of blocks,
you can damp and sounds you don't like, or with
a different combination, you can emphasize sounds in a range
of frequencies. Or you can even build your own hippo
bugle and play the Imperial March from Star Wars on it.
I know because they did that thing and it was awesome.
(02:13):
In late July, the team will present their findings at
SIAGRAPH two thousand sixteen, a conference for digital graphics and
interactive design. Their paper has the zingy title of Acoustic
Voxels Computational Optimization of Modular Acoustic filters. The boxes are
the modular acoustic filters a k a. Vauxels. So how
(02:34):
does it work well. Sound is vibration that moves through matter.
By making changes to the medium through which the sound travels,
you can change the nature of that sound. Take a
guitar string, for example, pressing down on a string between
frets changes the length of the string, which changes the
strings number of vibrations per second, also known as its frequency.
(02:55):
We perceive sounds with a higher frequency as having a
higher pitch. The interconnection of Vauxell's changes sound in a
similar way as it passes through the system. Some filters
can muffle certain frequencies, while some boost others. There are
no moving parts and no need for electricity. It's a
purely physical phenomenon. With this technology, you could also create
(03:17):
a type of acoustic tagging for products, kind of like
a sound based QR code. The engineers demonstrated this with
three D printed octopuses. I love these guys. Each octopus
had a slightly different configuration of voxels inside it, and
app on a smartphone generated a specific noise. Holding the
phone speaker against one of the octopus is. The noise
(03:38):
traveled through the boxes inside and came out with a
different tone. The phones might picked up the new sound
and the app identified the octopus. The app could identify
different cephalopods by their unique sounds. Ultimately, I think the
simple technology's most important use will be to allow for
an entire hippo orchestra to play the music of John
(03:59):
Williams Dream of That Day, A dream of It a lot.
Next up, Holly Fry, co host of Our Stuff He
Missed in History Class podcast, brings us the story of
life saving drones. The technology has a little bit of
a bad rap because of the public's understandable concerns about
privacy and air safety, but a team is hoping to
(04:21):
use it to eradicate land mines all over the world
within the next ten years. A group working out of
the Netherlands is developing a landmine sweeping drone. Despite ongoing
global efforts to ban anti personnel land mines, they're still
used in a lot of countries. They've been a common
(04:41):
part of warfare since the nineteen thirties, but when wars
and conflicts end, it's not as though those explosive devices
just evaporate. They remain underground and unmarked, ready to detonate.
There were a total of three thousand, six hundred and
seventy eight recorded landmine detonation, and those are just the
ones we know about. Nearly eight percent of those who
(05:04):
were injured or killed in those blasts were civilians, and
nearly of those civilians or children. In recent news, even
the wildly popular Pokemon Go game has been affected. Players
in Bosnia have been warned about minds that were left
over from conflicts in the nineteen nineties. Getting rid of
all that ordinance is no small task, and it's dangerous.
(05:28):
Current methods of removal involved sniffer animals, human d miners
with metal detectors, or large detonation vehicles, and those methods
can be slow and costly, and they come with a
high risk. Enter the mind Sweeping drone. Now this isn't
the first time project founder Massoud Hassani and his team
have built a robot to get rid of land mines.
(05:50):
In they created a device called mine Cafone. It's sort
of like a robotic tumbleweed. It rolls through mine fields
and when it finds a mine, it blows up both
itself and the mine. Now, the mind Caphone team has
developed a drone based mine eradicator that will further reduce
both the cost and the risk of demining. It uses
(06:11):
a series of modular robotic attachments that can be interchanged.
So first, the Mincaphone drone uses a mapping system attachment
to make a three D map of the entire designated area,
and then a metal detector is attached to it and
it uses that plus GPS to locate and identify mine locations.
(06:31):
And then in the final step, that metal detector is
swapped out for a robotic gripping arm which carefully places
detonators on the identified mines. The mines are then triggered
and eliminated, and the drone can move on to its
next location. Right now, the mine Caphone Foundation is running
a Kickstarter so they can finish development and start testing
(06:52):
the technology in the field. The project is incredibly ambitious.
Hasani has a goal to eradicate all of the minds
on the planet in the space of just ten years.
But according to the kickstarter pitch, this method is twenty
times faster at ferreting out and detonating minds and at
a cost two hundred times cheaper than existing technologies. Finally,
(07:20):
this week, senior writer Robert Lamb finally found a story
that grossed me out. An artist by the name of
Tina Gorjank has proposed growing human leather from the sample
of Alexander McQueen's DNA. She wants to make it into
bags and leatherware, and more importantly, raise awareness about the
potential for lab grown leather and raise questions about genetic
ownership rights. Goor Jenk's project at London Central St Martin's
(07:45):
Fashion School revolves around the creation of a very special
sort of leather. Instead of harvesting it from a cow
or other non human animal, she plans to grow the
skin of deceased fashion designer Alexander McQueen and make it
into handbags and jackets, flesh colored items that will feature
McQueen's distinguishing marks and tattoos. The starting point for this
(08:06):
grizzly glam fashion venture is a sample of McQueen's own
hair used in his silk coat titled Jack the Rippers
Stalks his victims see he probably would have dug the project.
The DNA will be manipulated and grown out into skin, tanned,
and finally processed into human leather. The technology here emerges
from the room of Synthetic Biology, an exciting area of
(08:27):
biotechnology that has already led to the creation of lab
grown skin, grass and synthetic organs. The ultimate possibilities are
truly transhumanist in nature, entailing everything from engineer disease immunity
to enhance longevity. But cutting edge science sometimes outpaces our
ability to understand all the ramifications, and that's where art
enters the picture. Gorgen copes to push the notion of
(08:49):
sustainable slaughter free lab grown leather, but the project is
also about the lack of rights concerning our own genetic information.
See the project here is unapproved by either McQueen family
or fashion brand. She snagged the DNA from a hair
sample and has already filed a patent for the resulting
leather material based on its singular source and creation process
(09:10):
is bioephesis. Glenn Cohen pointed out on the website. Courts
the UK and United States afford little or no ownership
protection to abandon tissues. A wizard can come along stuff
of voodoo doll full of your hair clippings, and there's
nothing you can do about it. The same potentially goes
for real world cloning and synthetic tissue growth. We're drifting
into largely uncharted legal waters here, at least as far
(09:32):
as luxury items made from dead celebrities go. So while
the fun question here is, Hey, which Oscar winner would
you wear as a pair of slacks, the more pressing
issue is who owns your genetic information? And how much
privacy can you expect concerning all the scraps of discarded
hair and skin you leave in your weight each day?
(09:54):
And that's our show for this week. Thank you so
much for tuning in. Subscribe now for more of the late,
best and strangest science news, and send us links to
anything you'd like to hear us cover, plus whatever cute
animal video you're digging on today, I could use it.
Shoot us an email at now podcast at how stuff
works dot com, and to access thousands of other stories
(10:14):
like these, check out our home planet Now dot how
stuff works dot com
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