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This 1,400-Foot Desert Citadel Would Be A Self-Sustaining City Of Tomorrow — By John Brownlee | Fast Company

It may look like Immortan Joe’s Citadel from Mad Max: Fury Road, but this abstract desert obelisk isn’t a citadel of the post-apocalypse. It’s a self-contained city—also called an arcology—that French firms Nicholas Laisné Associés and OXO Architects propose to build in the Saharan desert.

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2015 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium | July 26–31, 2015 | Milan, Italy

Hosted by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium 2015 (IGARSS 2015) will be held from Sunday July 26th through Friday July 31th, 2015 at the Convention Center in Milan, Italy. This is the same town of the EXPO 2015 exhibition, whose topic is “Feeding the planet: energy for life”.

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OS Fermentation Salon Series — By EcoArtTech

“OS FERMENTATION events have included installations, workshops, prints, and tastings. The installation includes digital prints created by custom electronics and software that allow microbes to take their own “selfies” and add image manipulation effects to their images based on the shifting pH levels, oxygen, and color values of the fermentation process.”

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New Book: An Irreverent Singularity Funcyclopedia, by Mondo 2000’s R.U. Sirius.

Quoted: “Legendary cyberculture icon (and iconoclast) R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have written a delicious funcyclopedia of the Singularity, transhumanism, and radical futurism, just published on January 1.” And: “The book, “Transcendence – The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity,” is a collection of alphabetically-ordered short chapters about artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, space exploration, synthetic biology, robotics, and virtual worlds. Entries range from Cloning and Cyborg Feminism to Designer Babies and Memory-Editing Drugs.” And: “If you are young and don’t remember the 1980s you should know that, before Wired magazine, the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 edited by R.U. Sirius covered dangerous hacking, new media and cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs, with an anarchic and subversive slant. As it often happens the more sedate Wired, a watered-down later version of Mondo 2000, was much more successful and went mainstream.”

Read the article here >https://hacked.com/irreverent-singularity-funcyclopedia-mondo-2000s-r-u-sirius/

Chopsticks Of The Future Will Count Your Calorie Intake For You

By — Huffington Post

While normally just a vehicle to get food from plate to mouth, chopsticks have been capable of some pretty incredible feats — like creating a larger-than-life portrait of Jackie Chan. And in the very near future, they’re being programed to do a whole lot more.

Chinese search engine Baidu is working on a technology for chopsticks, called Kuaisou, that’ll enable them to test PH levels, the temperature of food and track nutritional information. They’ll also be able to detect the freshness of oils, helping to prevent the use of contaminated foods like gutter oil. (Gutter oil is something that should never — EVER — exist, but does in Chinese and Taiwanese street food.)

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Pa. department backs seed library protocol as reaction grows

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture sees its new protocol for seed libraries as an opportunity to safely regulate them while saving an organization or person from liability.

Proponents of seed libraries, however, see the department’s efforts as a way to effectively shut down movement to grow and maintain local seed varieties.

The issue at hand stems back to April 26, when the Joseph T. Simpson Public Library opened a seed library, in which it would allow residents to “borrow” seeds and then offer seeds back to the library to start the process over again. It’s the second part of that process that caught the attention of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, which then contacted the Cumberland County Library System to rectify what it saw as a violation of the Pennsylvania Seed Act of 2004.

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Big Corporations Have An OVERWHELMING Amount Of Power Over Our Food Supply

By Michael Snyder — Washington’s Blog

From our fields to our forks, huge corporations have an overwhelming amount of power over our food supply every step of the way. Right now there are more than 313 million people living in the United States, and the job of feeding all of those people is almost entirely in the hands of just a few dozen monolithic companies. If you do not like how our food is produced or you don’t believe that it is healthy enough, it isn’t very hard to figure out who is to blame. These mammoth corporations are not in business to look out for the best interests of the American people. Rather, the purpose of these corporations is to maximize wealth for their shareholders. So the American people end up eating billions of pounds of extremely unhealthy food that is loaded with chemicals and additives each year, and we just keep getting sicker and sicker as a society. But these big corporations are raking in big profits, so they don’t really care.

If we did actually have a capitalist system in this country, we would have a high level of competition in the food industry. But instead, the U.S. food industry has become increasingly concentrated with each passing year. Just consider the following numbers about the U.S. agricultural sector…

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