the hyper-realistic illustrations are rendered in fine detail, taking up to 250 hours each to create.
The post alessandro paglia pens photorealistic drawings of design icons appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
Photographer Emily Dryden and sculptor/actor Zahydé Pietri combine theatricality and organic produce to compose the photographs for their series Fresh Faces. The portraits are made from a wide range of fruit and vegetables and aim to highlight humanity's diversity Pietri is from Puerto Rico and Dryden is from New York. Each face has its own name and identity: “We have stories for them, which you can see in the expressions,” says Dryden, “but we decided to keep them to ourselves. We didn't want to spoil that.” For Pietri, who composes the images, the eyes are key. “If I found the eyes, then it would work from there on. These grapes are the eyes, OK… so I can use this corn as the mouth, for example.”
Roberto Fernández Ibáñez
Scary Parallel Feb 2012 - Feb 2014, 2014
Silver gelatin print
17 ½ x 19 inches
Artist:
Jeremy Geddes
“Miserere 2″
Oil on Board
18″ x 18″
2012
"There are far-reaching implications for this discovery," said Tiago Campante, from the University of Birmingham's School of Physics and Astronomy, who led the research. "We now know that Earth-sized planets have formed throughout most of the Universe's 13.8 billion year history, which could provide scope for the existence of ancient life in the Galaxy. By the time the Earth formed, the planets in this system were already older than our planet is today.
In January of 2015, astronomers discovered a solar system with five Earth-sized planets dating back to the dawn of the Galaxy. Thanks to the NASA Kepler mission, the scientists observed a pale-yellow Sun-like star (Kepler-444) hosting five planets with sizes between Mercury and Venus that was formed 11.2 billion years ago, when the Universe was less than 20 per cent its current age. This is the oldest known system of terrestrial-sized planets in our Galaxy - two and a half times older than the Earth.
The team carried out the research using asteroseismology - listening to the natural resonances of the host star which are caused by sound trapped within it. These oscillations lead to miniscule changes or pulses in its brightness which allow the researchers to measure its diameter, mass and age. The planets were then detected from the dimming that occurs when the planets transited, or passed across, the stellar disc. This fractional fading in the intensity of the light received from the star enables scientists to accurately measure the size of the planets relative to the size of the star.
"The first discoveries of exoplanets around other Sun-like stars in our Galaxy have fueled efforts to find other worlds like Earth and other terrestrial planets outside our Solar System," said Bill Chaplin, from the University of Birmingham's School of Physics and Astronomy, who has been leading the team studying solar-type stars using astroseismology for the Kepler Mission. "We are now getting first glimpses of the variety of Galactic environments conducive to the formation of these small worlds. As a result, the path towards a more complete understanding of early planet formation in the Galaxy is now unfolding before us."
Today's Most Popular
The Daily Galaxy via University of Birmingham
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Solar material repeatedly bursts from the sun in this close-up captured on July 9-10, 2016, by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO. The sun is composed of plasma, a gas in which the negative electrons move freely around the positive ions, forming a powerful mix of charged particles. Each burst of plasma licks out from the surface only to withdraw back into the active region a dance commanded by complex magnetic forces above the sun. SDO captured this video in wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light, which are typically invisible to our eyes. The imagery is colorized here in red for easy viewing.
Credit: NASA/SDO/Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng
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Inverse | Can 3D-Printed Fingers Help Police Solve A Murder? InformationWeek Michigan police are working with university researchers to re-create a dead man's fingers. The goal is to use the digits to unlock his smartphone and uncover information which may help catch his killer. Robotics Gone Wild: 8 Animal-Inspired Machines. Police seek to unlock murder victim's phone using 3D replica of fingertipsThe Guardian Cops Asked This 3-D Print Lab to Re-Create a Dead Guy's Fingers to Help Solve His MurderInc.com Police want to use 3D fingerprint replicas to access murder victim's iPhoneBGR Telegraph.co.uk -International Business Times UK -Daily Mail -The Mac Observer (blog) all 57 news articles » |
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For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. - Hebrews 4v15
Day-to-day interactions between humans and machines may well become commonplace in hospitals within a decade
Long waiting times, staff shortages, exorbitant agency fees, doctors' working hours: it's no secret that the NHS is facing a labour crisis. Post-Brexit it could very well get worse, with the NHS Confederation now warning of a reluctance by EU doctors and nurses to come and work in the UK.
Difficult times call for radical measures. So, with an estimated staff shortfall of 50,000 for the NHS in England, is it time to start thinking seriously about the mass adoption of robotics and other automated technologies in the health service?
Continue reading...Climate change and mass extinctions suggest that we have been telling the wrong stories. Writers need to reconnect with the natural world
We had climbed, slowly, to a high mountain ridge. We were two young Englishmen who were not supposed to be here journalism was forbidden and four local guides, members of the Lani tribe. Our guides were moving us around the highlands of West Papua, taking us to meet people who could tell us about their suffering at the hands of the occupying Indonesian army.
The mountain ridge was covered in deep, old rainforest, as was the rest of the area we had walked through. This forest, to the Lani, was home. In the forest they hunted, gathered food, built their homes, lived. It was not a recreation or a resource: there was nothing romantic about it, nothing to debate. It was just life.
The forests fall, the ice melts and the extinctions roll on; but we keep writing love letters to ourselves, oblivious
Once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born … it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in science, philosophy and industry, and brought ruin upon himself and his family.
We must uncentre our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
Maybe it is impossible for any of us to 'unhumanise our views'. Maybe we can only ever speak to, and of, ourselves.
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A juvenile Green Woodpecker in short grass
The Verge | Why did SoftBank buy ARM? To prepare for our robot overlords, of course The Verge SoftBank has its own robot, Pepper, that will use AI to try and form an emotional attachment with its human owners. And both Apple and Google made AI a central theme in the launch of their latest mobile software, and ARM's chips will be used to power ... and more » |
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KQED | Finally! NASA's Mars 2020 Rover Will Look for Life on the Red Planet KQED NASA's next robot to crawl across the surface of Mars — the Mars 2020 rover — recently crossed a major milestone when it received approval to launch in the summer of 2020, for a February 2021 landing. Like its predecessor Curiosity, which is ... AI: NASA's Curiosity rover can now choose its own laser targets on MarsLos Angeles Times New software allows rover to pick which rocks it wants to targetPittsburgh Post-Gazette Soon, the Curiosity Rover will rule Mars with its automatic lasersThe Pasadena Star-News Daily Mail -TechCrunch -Fox News -PerfScience all 60 news articles » |
For only $269,000, you can buy a full-scale model of the Sputnik-1 satellite, made by the USSR to test the very first satellite humans launched into space. It's still operational, with live transmitters, 59 years later. On the catalog of the Bonhams auction house in midtown Manhattan, where the Space History Sale took place on Wednesday, the estimated price is $10,000 to $15,000. But in no time, the price is flying higher than Sputnik did.
“13. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19!” shouts auctioneer Tim McNab. He looks like the bouncer of a high-end nightclub in Miami Beach: suntanned, in a blue suit and sunglasses with orange-tinted lenses, even though we're in an underground room. “Still bidding. On the books!”
The matte-black circuit board that holds Tristan Perich's Noise Patterns has a few things in common with your average smartphone. It's small and sleek enough to fit into your pocket, and it comes with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack that gives you direct access to the music within. That's just about where the similarities end. It won't let you access Spotify or Apple Music's immense libraries, and it won't let you pull up YouTube videos. (You can forget about checking your email, too.) Noise Patterns contains six tracks, and you can't rewind, skip, or pause them. The music also has more in common with the noises your microwave makes than the songs you can hear on the radio.
Noise Patterns is Perich's latest experiment with 1-bit music,...
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Paula Kahumbu: The conviction and sentencing of Feisal Mohammed Ali sends a message to poachers and traffickers that the net is closing around them
Yesterday, a Mombasa law court sentenced Feisal Mohammed Ali to 20 years in jail after finding him guilty of ivory illegal possession of ivory worth 44 million shillings (US $440,000). The court also imposed a fine of 20 million shillings.
This landmark ruling by the Kenyan court is the end of a long story that began with the seizure of 2 tonnes of ivory at Fuji Motors car yard in Mombasa in June 2014.
The guilty verdict is a strong message to all networks of poaching gangs, ivory smugglers, financiers, middlemen and shippers that Kenya will not watch as its elephant population is decimated or its territory used as a conduit for traffickers.
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London Bridge Sunset reflection image on a passing EMU
Few people can demand what kind of electricity they get. But Microsoft and Facebook, which operate huge, power-hungry data centers, are trying to green up the electricity grid with their buying power.
A lot of computing pioneers were women. For decades, the number of women in computer science was growing. But in 1984, something changed.
After years of lagging behind other ethnic groups when it comes to accessing the Internet, the "digital divide" between Latinos and whites is now at its narrowest point since 2009.
The social media company's high-altitude, unmanned, solar-powered drone is designed to provide wireless Internet coverage to the ground below.
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RT | Hold the phone: FCC pressures phone companies to end robocalls RT Few things are more irritating than receiving a call from an unknown number belonging to a robot telemarketer. But the FCC hopes to put an end to robocalls by pressuring CEOs of major communication companies to finally do something about it. On Friday ... US asks phone companies to provide 'robocall' blocking technologyDaily Mail Satellite sector mulls how to live with FCC's 5G decisionSpaceNews FCC To Phone Companies: Offer Free Robocall Blockers To CustomersThe Consumerist Rick Kupchella's BringMeTheNews -PR Web (press release) -TV Technology -On the Wire (blog) all 8 news articles » |
This article originally appeared in Vulture.
When Mr. Robot aired its season-one finale last September, USA Network execs were understandably happy about the show's solid ratings, amazing buzz, and clear brand-changing potential. The launch was nothing short of a triumph, particularly in an era when grabbing viewers' attention sometimes seems next to impossible. Until recently, USA might have been content to simply bask in that success for a few months, shifting its focus to other series until the time came to begin hyping last week's season-two premiere. But that's not how it works in the age of on-demand viewership: With audiences trained to consume shows however (and whenever) they want, networks are now promoting their biggest titles year-round, particularly when such series are in their infancy. Indeed, as soon as Robot season one ended, USA was already actively pushing audiences who'd heard the buzz about Robot to binge the show online, while figuring out ways to keep those already hooked thinking about the series up until its return. “You can never stop messaging your franchise,” says Alexandra Shapiro*, executive VP of marketing and digital for NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment Networks group. “The moment you stop is the moment the fans stop paying attention.”
Networks have different names for the new never-ending marketing. AMC talks about “Live plus 365,” playing off Nielsen's various ratings measurement windows; Shapiro and her USA colleagues call it “the always-on phenomenon.” Whatever the terminology, the consensus in the TV industry is, with apologies to David Mamet, that networks should Always Be Marketing. Rob Sharenow, general manager of Lifetime and A&E, says the evolution in how viewers watch TV is what has prompted this seismic shift in how networks manage their programming assets. “It used to be enough to just say, ‘Okay, Project Runway is coming back. Let's just throw some promos on leading up to the premiere,'” he explains. “Now, it's a more complicated, multilayered, ongoing game to keep your engagement, to keep people consuming it.” Or, as AMC/Sundance chief Charlie Collier puts it, “It's our job to keep shows alive all year long.”
The continuous loop of hype has been particularly aggressive with shows launched in 2015 and early 2016. TBS has kept the spotlight on its Rashida Jones slapstick comedy Angie Tribeca by shortening the window between seasons. Because the network had ordered a second season six months before the show's premiere, TBS was able to have season two on the air just a few months after the weekly run of season one ended. “The awareness of the show was so much higher because season one had just finished airing,” says TBS programming chief Brett Weitz. “We didn't have to work as hard. We didn't have to start from a walk—we were starting from a nice comfortable jog.”
Lifetime leaned into critical accolades as part of its intraseason promotion of UnREAL. Awards voters and even TV journalists were targeted, with the network sending the latter group a “binge-watch survival kit” featuring the full first season of the show on DVD and assorted munchies. While networks and studios have been wooing TV Academy members for years with For Your Consideration campaigns, including journalists and critics is less common. “We were conscious of smart influencers we knew who liked the show,” Sharenow says. “In season one, no one knew what it was. In season two, we already had a lot of critical accolades, and true fans of the show, in the communities we respect. So we went deep with influencers in all the marketing.” The show's Peabody win in April allowed Lifetime to once again cast the show as a major brand departure, just as the network was gearing up its campaign for Emmy nominations. While reviews and awards might not always result in big ratings gains, Sharenow believes they've become far more important in the VOD era. “The role critics and commentators play has been very elevated,” he says. “People want stuff curated, and they want their choices validated.” (Lifetime's year-round marketing of the show has also included the network's first-ever digital spinoff series, The Faith Diaries, which launched in April and featured a key character from season one.)
AMC didn't need to do anything special to get audiences to sample Fear the Walking Dead. The Walking Dead spinoff benefited from being associated with the biggest show on TV among viewers under 50. And yet, per Collier's “Live plus 365” effort, the network made sure to keep audiences engaged with the newbie zombies in between seasons. Once Fear wrapped its shortened six-episode freshman season, AMC had a digital offshoot called Flight 462 ready to go. The roughly 20-minute short was sliced into 16 installments, with a new one airing during commercial breaks of the original's sixth season. A character from 462 then made the transition to Fear when that series returned for season two. The network has also been a leader in using fan-centric platforms such as Comic-Con to help drive year-round interest in The Walking Dead and even Breaking Bad. And while viewers haven't always loved the idea of split seasons, AMC's early decision to serve up single Dead seasons in two distinct chunks was a savvy way of keeping audiences attached to the show for longer period of time (while also allowing late adopters to catch up between half-seasons).
In the case of Mr. Robot, USA made sure (as most networks do these days) to keep the show available on the network's video on demand platform, allowing cable subscribers who'd heard echoes of last summer's drumbeat of praise for the show to catch up. But then, at the start of 2016, it did something unusual: It put together a sort of director's cut of the show for VOD platforms in which episodes ran with unbleeped profanity and unedited adult content, as well as very limited commercials. “We re-pitched the entire season (to viewers) as an almost binge-like experience,” Shapiro says. USA stepped up its marketing of this sort of Robot 1.1, and VOD plays of the show “skyrocketed” in January, she says. Another bump came after the network's aggressive campaign for the Golden Globes paid off with two wins for the show. Shapiro and her team kept the momentum going in March by investing heavily in SXSW, where the show had premiered a year earlier. “We owned the skyline there,” she says, literally speaking: USA transported the show's Coney Island ferris wheel to Austin for the convention, sparking a sizable social-media response.
For executives such as Shapiro, the job of selling TV shows was “a lot easier five, ten years ago,” when marketing efforts were almost entirely focused on driving viewers to a limited linear run—i.e., the rollout of new episodes at a scheduled time each week. While making it clear there's still a “laser focus” on getting (and keeping) linear audiences, “that's no longer our only objective,” Shapiro explains. “We're in the franchise-building business. We're trying to build [series] that are able to have success over a long period of time.”
The move to maintain marketing momentum year-round is being driven mostly by necessity. Huge swaths of the audience are abandoning both live viewing and even DVRs in favor of on-demand platforms, pushing down Nielsen ratings—and thus ad revenue—for both cable and broadcast series. Ongoing marketing serves two purposes: It helps shore up linear ratings by making sure existing fans of a show remain engaged while at the same time allowing networks to woo new audiences more inclined to watch via on-demand platforms. Those digital viewers might not represent as much potential profit as those who still watch on TV, but they're growing in number. And while USA doesn't get paid more in the short-term if Robot gets a ton of streams on Amazon, the network stands to benefit over time as it negotiates future deals for streaming rights.
All of this is a shift from just a few years ago. Some industry insiders draw parallels to the feature film business, where movie studios market tentpole franchises—think Star Wars or any of the Marvel movies—as relentlessly as McDonald's pushes Big Macs. “Television networks … need to become more like studios, reducing their reliance on first-window revenues and reorganizing around longer monetization periods,” AMC/Sundance's Collier wrote earlier this year in an essay posted at Redef.com “This will likely make networks far more platform-agnostic over time and more focused on the duration and sustainability of intellectual property versus the immediate gratification of overnights (or even live+3 or live+7 ratings).”
We're already seeing networks adopt this philosophy of patience in other ways: AMC's Halt and Catch Fire and FX's The Americans are both examples of networks sticking by shows despite multiple seasons of meh ratings. And we're now seeing a similar dynamic play out with aforementioned newbies such as Mr. Robot, UnREAL, and Angie Tribeca. All three have experienced a bit of growth in their second seasons this summer, but nothing dramatic. Just a few years ago, there'd probably be palpable disappointment at USA, Lifetime, and TBS right now that months of aggressive marketing and, in the case of Robot and UnREAL, amazing critical response didn't immediately translate into big Nielsen gains. “You used to judge success of a show based on the first 15 minutes of a premiere,” Shapiro admits. But she insists that's no longer true. “Do we want to see growth in linear? Sure. But no one [platform] defines success.” Indeed, Shapiro notes that while Mr. Robot has never attracted more than a couple million viewers as measured by traditional ratings, internal USA Network research indicates a much broader audience has sampled the series. “To date, we've had over 30 million people and counting consume this franchise. That's a staggering number,” Shapiro says. “That's not a linear Nielsen number. That's a total audience number, when we look at all the legal places people see it. That number is how we keep ourselves motivated. We're in this for the long haul.”
See also: John Malkovich Made a Movie You Won't See, Unless You Live Until 2115 and Then Remember to Watch It
The paradoxical occurrence of heightened, lucid awareness and logical thought processes during a period of impaired cerebral perfusion raises particularly perplexing questions for our current understanding of consciousness and its relation to brain function. As prior researchers have concluded, a clear sensorium and complex perceptual processes during a period of apparent clinical death challenge the concept that consciousness is localized exclusively in the brain.
NDEs seem instead to provide direct evidence for a type of mental functioning that varies "inversely, rather than directly, with the observable activity of the nervous system." Such evidence, we believe, fundamentally conflicts with the conventional doctrine that brain processes produce consciousness, and supports the alternative view that brain activity normally serves as a kind of filter, which somehow constrains the material that emerges into waking consciousness.
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The use of solar energy is expanding worldwide but the efficiency of silicon solar cells has made very little progress in the last few decades. Could perovskite solar cell be the answer to high-efficiency solar power?
Reported timeline of solar cell energy conversion efficiencies since 1976 from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
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The new Baltimore Tower at Crossharbour. I don't think it is quite finished.
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Slate Magazine (blog) | The Emmys Have a Knack for Being Both Stodgy and Trailblazing at Once Slate Magazine (blog) Joining The Americans as a first time Best Drama contender is the incisive Mr. Robot, whose star Rami Malek adds some fizz to the Best Actor in a Drama category. ... I'm sure these groups have overlapping taste, but this dynamic would explain both the ... and more » |
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Balham, South London