Neuroscience

Future of Urban Agriculture in Rooftop Farms and Natalie Jeremijenko on Popularmechanics.com

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Natalie Jeremijenko, an aerospace engineer and environmental health professor at New York University, came up with a rooftop design to solve these common problems for urban farming. Her fixtures may be more economical than other urban farm concepts because they take up real estate that otherwise goes unused, and unlike other urban farm designs, they can pack in the plants, because everything, from the integrated systems to their bubble shape, is a slave to efficiency.

Natalie Jeremijenko (born 1966) is an artist and engineer whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. She is an active member of the net.art movement, and her work primarily explores the interface between society, the environment and technology. She is currently an Associate Professor at NYU in the Visual Art Department, and has affiliated faculty appointments in Computer Science and Environmental Studies.

Check out the full article here:

Future of Urban Agriculture in Rooftop Farms – Vertical and Rooftop Agriculture – Popularmechanics.com.

After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions and contemporary neuroscience

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After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions has just opened at the Natural History Museum. It’s a lot of fun. Based on Darwin’s book less-known tome The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals it veers into less obvious territories than some of the other Darwin200 events and exhibitions, looking at the …

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The Environmental Health Clinic

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Last month, Ian and I travelled to Houston for the Systems of Sustainability Seminar (SOS) hosted by the University of Houston’s Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and Blaffer Gallery.  

Natalie Jeremijenko, of the Environmental Health Clinic, was a notable speaker.  Natalie is an artist with a background in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering.  She directs the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic, a clinic that prescribes action instead of medicine, and approaches health from an understanding of “its dependence on external local environments; rather than on the internal biology and genetic predispositions of an individual.”  

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Take a look at projects from the Environmental Health Clinic, including NOPARK, photographed here.  www.environmentalhealthclinic.net

Neuroscience and change

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Matt Grist who writes the RSA Social Brain blog put up this post before the weekend:

Neuroscience
is expanding massively. There is much fear that this will somehow
herald a new social determinism, an anti-progressive agenda where
people are marked out as winners and losers by the kind of brains they
possess. The comparison case is genetics (although obviously
neuroscience is not separate from genetics). After the genome
was mapped, all sorts of anti-progressive implications floated around
for a while – refusing life insurance to people with ‘bad’ genetic
profiles and so on.

Does neuroscience have anti-progressive implications? I’m going to argue in as far as the facts are so far in, no, not at all – quite the opposite.

Matt is pulling together a lot of research that suggests the brain is much more than just a hard-wired piece of computing equipment. New science says it has has much more plasticisty than was assumed, firstly in the negative sense – that poor environmental conditions, in the meaning of poor well-being – restrict the creation of neural pathways, but also more positively in the sense that our brains don’t appear to simply compute decisions in our own self-interest but also act on emotional stimuli. In other words cultural factors can play a part in how our brains come to a decision on how to act. The idea beloved of those who see humanity as a race of cliff-bound lemmings, who can’t stop the urge to relentlessly over-consume because this is hard-wired in us is, perhaps, looking more dubious…

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