Category Archives: Society

Society

Artist of the animatronic

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3Q: Giles Walker

The Last Supper, Giles Walker's art installation at the London Science Museum's Robots show (multimedia).

The Last Supper, Giles Walker’s art installation at the London Science Museum’s Robots show (multimedia).{credit}Giles Walker © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum{/credit}

Not all roboticists are scientists or engineers. Giles Walker, an artist in Brixton, south London, specialises in turning scrap metal into animatronic sculptures — ‘art robots’ that do not involve AI. Walker uses low-tech, unashamedly cheap technologies to animate artbots: car windscreen wiper motors for big clumsy movements, radio-control servos for delicate ones, coordinated via a communications protocol used in theatre lighting. His replica of the 1928 talking tin man Eric is a star of the London Science Museum’s Robots exhibition (reviewed here). Another of Walker’s works on display there, The Last Supper, enters darker territory. This animatronic ‘ensemble piece’ involves 12 mechanical figures sitting around a table. The figures — many with faces that are humanoid, yet smoothly featureless — talk about sin and forgiveness. A doll-like sculpture of a naked child backed by a cross stands on the table. It’s a bizarre scene, packed with a sense of foreboding. Here, Walker explains what’s important when building a robot for art’s sake — and what makes it all worthwhile.

What sets animatronic figures apart?

Everyone immediately likes mechanical or kinetic art. People are drawn to moving things. If they see them as a robot, they are even more drawn. Robots appeal because they have such cult status already: old ones, because you see a relatively naive picture of the future held by people of the past; new ones, because they offer a glimpse into the future that may be just as naive. And I think attempts at replicating humans, whether in Frankenstein or a robot, have always fascinated people.

Detail, The Last Supper.

Detail, The Last Supper.{credit}Giles Walker © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum{/credit}

What are your criteria for your mechanical figures?

You see these robots coming out of Japan. Mine, by comparison, are very low budget. You can only afford a certain number of motions, so you think about movements that say the most about the character you are trying to portray. They don’t look human, but they behave in a human way. It could be through just a telephone or handbag — I give them a human trait that is instantly recognisable. The characters I create always tend to have fallen through the safety net of society. I built a ‘homeless’ character (Outside the Box) a few weeks ago to make a point. Few pay attention to a homeless person; the irony is that everyone pays attention to a homeless robot. I crafted it so that when people walked past, it told its stories. I didn’t fashion it like a Hollywood cliché.

Giles Walker.

Giles Walker.

There is an idea of robots as utopian, but that is not quite true. Funding for robotic development mainly comes from the arms trade or medical science, either to make us kill each other more efficiently — drones, Big Dog — or to help make us live longer, using nanotechnology, robot-assisted da Vinci surgery or exoskeletons. Such advances make you wonder whether have we really developed as a species or are just cancelling ourselves out. My machines are not positive icons of the future. They will not improve our lives by being a more efficient workforce, freeing up more leisure time for the working man. They are lost ‘souls’, redundant, the technological remnants society has discarded on its accelerating trajectory. Most of my sculptures, including those in  The Last Supper, smoke. Robots aren’t supposed to smoke. The juxtaposition of having a mechanical figure show, perhaps, a human weakness creates an opportunity to hold a mirror up to our own species and play with its eccentricities.

Are there surprises when your creations ‘come to life’?

It’s the best moment. You build them to formula – one elbow move tends to be the same as any other. But when you first see all the joints moving at the same time, that’s the peak. If you make it do a certain move, it encapsulates everything that you have been trying to say with that character. That’s the buzz, that’s what you do it for. You fire it up for the first time, and it will have this nervous tic in its neck, and it’s like, yes! Then you can start fine-tuning it.

Interview by Celeste Biever, Nature’s chief news and features editor. She tweets at @celestebiever. Robots runs at London’s Science Museum until 3 September. The Last Supper shows there until 29 May. (View the installation in action here.)

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Science fiction: journey to the East

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Cixin Liu

Cixin Liu.{credit}Li Yibo{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Iulia Georgescu

Last week’s Chinese Sci-Fi event at the London Literature festival was irresistible: I love science fiction and have a keen interest in the Far East. The star here was Cixin Liu, whose 2008 Hugo-awarded novel The Three-Body Problem is a huge best-seller in China and, since its English translation (Head of Zeus, 2015), beyond. (See Nature’s interview with its translator, sci-fi writer Ken Liu, here.) Liu’s fellow panellist was Xiaolu Guo, the award-winning, genre-defying Chinese novelist and filmmaker now living in Britain, whose works include the 2014 I Am China and 2012 UFO In Her Eyes.

Xiaolu Guo.

Xiaolu Guo.{credit}provided by Xiaolu Guo{/credit}

Both Cixin Liu and Guo had much to say. They agreed that sci-fi is a Western concept imported into China in the late 1970s and 80s. Post-Cultural Revolution China had the perfect climate for nurturing the genre, they said. First, there was a void in fantastic and speculative literature: much of Chinese literature in the twentieth century was focused on realism. Secondly, as science education was very poor at that time, sci-fi was a means of educating about science. The public fell upon it, eager to learn more about the latest discoveries.

Although Liu was heavily influenced by Western sci-fi writers, Chinese sci-fi has unique features. The difference, he seemed to think, lies in the Christian tradition imprinted on Western fiction. For instance, there is much discussion of whether the ethical implications of human cloning are perceived differently in China (see this Nature article). Liu averred that more than that, the idea of a doomsday, so dominant in Western thought, is less so in Chinese culture, which enshrines the concept of time flowing continuously and eternally.

imagesThat said, Liu’s The Three-Body Problem is about the end of the world — which is perhaps one of the reasons for its international popularity. (Japanese sci-fi is rich in apocalyptic scenarios too, for example in classics such as Kobo Abe’s Inter Ice Age 4, Sakyo Komatsu’s Japan Sinks, or the Neon Genesis Evangelion media franchise.)

Liu and Guo agreed that for them, the appeal of sci-fi lies in its departure from realism. Guo suggested that sci-fi is perhaps the only way for writers living in China to talk about political and social issues, as with Jingfang Hao‘s Hugo-winning novelette Folding Beijing (set in a future where three social classes inhabit Beijing in different spatial dimensions that only occasionally overlap). For Liu, sci-fi allows him to explore a bigger picture – humanity as a whole and its place in the Universe, as in the last book of his Three-Body trilogy, set in the very distant future.

The event made me realize anew how little of contemporary Asian literature has been translated into English. I hope that Liu’s popularity prompts publishers to more translations: I already have a long wish list.

Iulia Georgescu is senior editor, Nature Physics.

 

Access Nature’s science fiction special here; and Nature’s science-fiction column Futures (and Future Conditional blog) here. For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

The rise and fall of the UFO

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Posted on behalf of Daniel Cressey

ARC028 - UFO - CoverIt seems amazing that anyone ever believed in them. In the mid-twentieth-century heyday of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), grainy pictures of flying saucers hovering in the sky were a staple even in  respectable magazines such as Time and Life. Volumes were written earnestly detailing the visits of aliens. This novel form of cold war paranoia seemed to seep into the collective psyche on both sides of the Atlantic.

For believe they did. A sizeable section of the public ate up cheap books on saucers and devoured tales of visitors from beyond our planet, whether their intent was good or ill. Fortunately for anyone enamoured of American subcultures in all their garish glory, the speculative-fiction writer Jack Womack has amassed a huge collection of these books, from sex-obsessed adult novels to earnest pseudo-academic treatises. He reproduces many of these gems in his lavishly illustrated menagerie of the tracts, Flying Saucers Are Real.

ARC028 - UFO - MIichael, C - Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer

A 1955 title.

They range from what Womack calls the “finest science fiction cover to ever appear on a non-science fiction book” (The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe) to the mundane (Richard S. Shaver’s 1948 I Remember Lemuria).

While Womack is deeply invested in these books, he doesn’t spare them. UFO Photographs Around the World Vols 1 and 2, he notes, “offers the most complete compilation of lens flares, camera smudges, film imperfections, blurs and jiggled shots ever published”. Womack points out that British linguist Gavin Gibbons (author of The Coming of the Space Ships (1956) and They Rode In Space Ships (1957)), and others from the UK brought “a wide-eyed if not overly creative spirit to the field”. Gibbons rewrote other people’s UFO encounters, “managing to make their accounts far less interesting”.

This is no attempt to deconstruct the reasons behind the rise and fall of the UFO. Instead, Womack seems to be attempting to understand a bizarre lost cult by collecting the artefacts they left.

We learn of George Adamski, born in Poland in 1891, who ended up founding the “Royal Order of Tibet” in California (and co-writing the 1953 Flying Saucers Have Landed) before setting up an eatery. Adamski’s ‘close encounters’ include a man who claimed to be from Venus — evidenced by the fact that his “trousers were not like mine”. In Britain, Leonard G. Cramp’s 1966 UFOs and Anti-Gravity purported to lay bare the engineering of the flying saucer, complete with detailed blueprints, which he apparently thought revealed an anti-gravity system “similar to one of his own devising”.

Womack describes another book, Flying Saucer from Mars (1954), as written by “Cedric Allingham” — a hoax said to have been perpetrated by a now-deceased British astronomer and his friend. This friend apparently admitted pretending to be Allingham to give a talk to a flying saucer club, during which he wore a false moustache.

Harold T. Wilkins's 1954 text.

Harold T. Wilkins’s 1954 text.

Womack’s book can be as confusing to follow as the arguments of his UFO proponents. The typefaces switch to signal passages from source materials, and covers, photos and drawings abound. Following the huge numbers of authors mentioned and whether they are believers, hoaxers or fictional becomes something of a task. There is no clear logic to this collection of what science-fiction luminary William Gibson calls “testimonials to certain human needs” in the introduction.

Some of the notes accompanying the awesome images are brief and baffling. We read on page 10: “When John C. Sherwood was seventeen, Gray Barker published his book, Flying Saucers are Watching You (1967), a dry account of events during the 1966 Michigan Flap. Barker’s congratulation, post-publication, ‘Evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp.’” Who Sherwood and Barker are, and what the “Michigan Flap” was, we can only guess.

Womack’s collection is heading to Georgetown University Library in Washington DC, to be preserved among its special collections. It may stand as a monument to collective lunacy, a testament to how easily people can be led down the garden path, or simply a collection of egregious publishing mistakes. Whichever it is, Womack has preserved a record of something that felt very real to a great many people. These books began emerging, after all, around a decade after the filmmaker and theatre impresario Orson Welles inadvertently frightened an estimated 1.2 million US listeners during his famous 1938 radio broadcast of an adaption of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

Today, the ubiquitous advanced cameras mean the lack of convincing photographs is more and more of a problem for believers. The evidence collected here is as ‘real’ as flying saucers will ever get.

Daniel Cressey is a senior reporter for Nature in London. He tweets at @dpcressey. Flying Saucers Are Real is the first book release of New York City publisher Anthology Editions, a partnership between Boo-Hooray Gallery and Anthology Recordings.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Star Trek puts its stamp on the future

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hi res 2

{credit}© USPS 2016{/credit}

As Star Trek boldly sails into its second half-century, you might wonder what other impacts on science and culture this astonishing franchise could have. ‘Live long and prosper’, for instance — could the show hold clues to hyper-longevity? (Certainly ‘Bones’ McCoy managed to survive an incurable terminal illness, xenopolycythemia, during heated skirmishes on the asteroid-ship Yonada in an early series). Might the weird paradoxes the series harnessed to explain time travel ever transpire?

We can only wait. But in the meantime, on 2 September the US Postal Service issued a stunning set of Star Trek ‘Forever’ stamps — a time-bending product useable for posting a first-class, 1-ounce letter into perpetuity “regardless of star date”, they assure us.

hi res 6

{credit}© USPS 2016{/credit}

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{credit}© USPS 2016{/credit}

Launched in June at a ceremony featuring a talk by Walter Koenig (the original series’ inimitable navigator Pavel Chekhov), the stamps’ designs feature motifs of the USS Enterprise, Starfleet insignia and a crew member in mid-transport. The stamp featuring the Enterprise inside the silhouette of a Vulcan salute is frankly awesome, and sure to fulfil (as Spock might say) “the needs of the many”.

They don’t promise delivery at warp speed, but these stamps are a beautiful reminder, if we needed another one, of our deep, enduring affinity with Gene Roddenberry’s brainchild.

Sidney Perkowitz’s essay on Star Trek’s 50-year impact is just part of Nature’s packed science-fiction special, a cornucopia of offerings including Shamini Bundell’s podcast segment on how the franchise is used to teach ethics in engineering and beyond.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Breaking barriers: the US space programme’s black women mathematicians

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Posted on behalf of Alexandra Witze

Mathematician Katherine Johnson at NASA's Langley Research Center, where she worked as a "computer" from 1953 to 1986.

Katherine Johnson at NASA’s Langley Research Center, where she worked as a “computer” and mathematician from 1953 to 1986. Her illustrious career included calculating Apollo 11’s trajectory on its flight to the Moon. {credit}NASA{/credit}

Some of the most intriguing stories in the history of US science have emerged over the past few years. It’s about time. These books centre on something long under wraps: the centrally important roles women played starting some 70 years ago in the great technological transition that gripped the twentieth century. Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City (Touchstone, 2013) chronicled the contributions of the women who worked at the secret atomic-bomb laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Second World War. Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt (reviewed here) depicted the mathematicians or “human computers” who crunched numbers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California from the 1940s. In this catalogue, Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures is more than just another entry.

Shetterly’s book is an exploration of the groundbreaking achievements and shocking discrimination experienced by a group of talented mathematicians in all aspects of their professional and personal lives. These African-American women — Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden among them — began working from the early 1940s at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, then the nation’s premier aeronautical laboratory. That wartime breakthrough was to propel many of them into long and successful careers at the heart of the space race. (A feature film based on the book and starring Taraji P. Henson will be released in January.)

Christine Darden in the control room of Langley's Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel in 1975. Darden became an expert on sonic booms and supersonic flights.

Christine Darden in the control room of Langley’s Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel in 1975. Darden became an expert on sonic booms and supersonic flights.{credit}NASA{/credit}

These stellar scientists broke major political and social barriers. Virginia in the American South was a segregated state. Beginning after the Civil War and lasting until the civil-rights era of the 1960s, “Jim Crow” laws enforced a rigid racial hierarchy. Shops, restaurants, public transportation — all viciously discriminated against African-Americans in matters as basic as where to use the toilet.

The mathematicians whose experience Shetterly unveils came of age in this reality. Members of a thriving African-American middle class, they went to universities such as Howard in Washington DC — historically black institutions where they were taught by eminent faculty trained at universities such as Harvard, who could not secure a position there because of their race. These accomplished young women became teachers, then generally the sole career option for educated black women. (Postgraduate education was not even possible in some states; rather than admit African-American students to its state university for graduate studies, between 1936 and 1950 Virginia paid them “scholarships” to attend graduate school elsewhere.)

Top flight

But after America entered the war in 1941, new professional opportunities opened. Langley, where engineers designed and tested technological advances that permitted US planes to fly higher and faster, needed an awful lot of number-crunchers to calculate, say, the ideal air flow over an aeroplane wing. That crushing demand opened the gates to women. Female computers began working through calculations that kept Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress bomber  aloft and the North American Aviation P-51 Mustang fighter manoeuvering through the skies.

Even here, however, segregation persisted. Vaughan and her colleagues were placed in Langley’s ‘West Computing’ unit. White women computed on the east side. At the back of the Langley cafeteria, a white cardboard sign labeled COLORED COMPUTERS directed the West mathematicians to sit together at lunch rather than mingle. Eventually, “tiny firebrand” Miriam Mann stole the sign, and the table was left unlabelled.

Margot Lee Shetterly.

Margot Lee Shetterly.{credit}Aran Shetterly{/credit}

Shetterly, who grew up in Hampton, illuminates this remarkable group’s professional careers and personal travails. Simply getting housing as a black woman was fraught with difficulty in these decades. It was only by harnessing the strong social networks of the African-American middle class that these mathematicians finally got a toehold in the American dream. Shared work experiences bound the group outside Langley: Vaughan and Mann brought their families together for local activities including a phenomenal performance in Hampton by iconic African-American singer Marian Anderson.

Postwar, the future was unclear, Shetterly shows. Would women be pushed out of the workforce? The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 changed all that. In 1958, the Langley lab became part of the newly formed NASA and the centre of Project Mercury, the programme for crewed space travel. The West computers scattered to other divisions to begin work on the complex calculations of getting spacecraft into orbit.

HiddenFigures_HC HiResIn 1959 Johnson and her colleague Ted Skopinski first calculated the mathematics of firing a capsule into ballistic flight. The equations described the flight of a spacecraft, from the angle of launch, to point of re-entry, to the effect of Earth’s rotation. Their work underlay the successful 1961 suborbital flight of astronaut Alan Shepard. The following year, when John Glenn was about to make the first US orbital flight, he personally requested Johnson to double-check, by hand, the calculations of his trajectory. Johnson went on to an illustrious career in the US space programme. Her mathematics dictated the trajectory of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s descent to the surface, and their tricky rendezvous with the command module in lunar orbit in order to make it safely home. Later, she worked on the space shuttle programme. In November 2015, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama.

Vaughan, who in the 1950s had served as Langley’s first black supervisor, forged a successful career in computer programming. Jackson achieved the rank of engineer, then turned her attention to helping other women and minorities into high-level positions. Darden, one of the next generation to benefit from the barriers broken by this group, became a world expert on sonic booms and supersonic flight.

Hidden Figures is not the definitive history of women in the space programme, nor of women at Langley. It does not need to be. It lies at the intersection of the greatest scientific advances and the greatest civil-rights battles in US history.

Alexandra Witze is a correspondent for Nature based in Boulder, Colorado. Her email is witzescience@gmail.com and she tweets at @alexwitze.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Lunar balloonist

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3Q: Luke Jerram

Artist's impression of Museum of the Moon as it will look in a park setting.

Artist’s impression of Museum of the Moon as it will look on its travels.{credit}Luke Jerram{/credit}

Multi-media artist and researcher Luke Jerram experiments with sound, movement and materials in a dazzling array of installations. He has created monumental blown-glass sculptures of bacteria and viruses (Glass Microbiology), the acoustic wind pavilion Aeolus, and Retinal Memory Volume, an interactive sculpture using the mechanisms of eyesight. Here Jerram talks about his new Museum of the Moon, a vast globe that will premier at the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta in August.

How did you make Museum of the Moon and what will it involve?

It is a balloon 7 metres across, made of urethane-coated ripstop material, lit from the inside. The surface is printed with an image of the Moon’s surface taken by a NASA satellite carrying the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter Camera, and created by the US Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center. Each centimetre on the balloon represents 5 kilometres on the lunar surface. During the Bristol balloon festival it will be presented as part of their ‘night glow’, allowing the public to bathe in moonlight and listen to a Moon-inspired surround-sound composition by award-winning composer Dan Jones. The artwork will tour for several days; it will float through darkened streets and also be suspended a metre and a half above a local swimming pool, allowing people to swim out to view it close up. As it tours, astrophysicists from the University of Bristol will offer lectures. The balloon will then travel for up to 10 years around the world, collecting people’s ways of thinking about the Moon — from mythology to science — via questionnaires, online, on paper and on video. It’s likely to be interpreted differently in every country we go to; for example, in the United States people may think about the Apollo mission, while in China the Moon is very much celebrated during their Mid-Autumn Festival.

The lunar balloon under construction.

The lunar balloon under construction.{credit}Luke Jerram, with the kind support of Cameron Balloons. {/credit}

Why focus on the Moon?

Over millennia, the Moon has acted as a sort of cultural mirror, used as the basis for a calendar or for night-time navigation, and has been worshipped as a deity. Once it was the only night-time source of light. Now, many people see it surrounded by skyscrapers. Through this project I hope to restore a sense of wonder, to help people to ask questions and hopefully to reconnect with the night sky. I’m also fascinated in the latest lunar science. Recent space missions have detected water ice at the Moon’s poles, and the Moon is being considered as a staging post for a future mission to Mars. It was only in 1959 that the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 probe photographed the far side of the Moon, which looks completely different from the side we see: there are no dark patches, for instance. So the Museum of the Moon will be the first time most members of the public will see the far side. Here in Bristol we have the second highest tidal range in Europe: there is a 13-metre gap between high and low tide. So I think about the Moon’s influence every time I cycle to work over the River Severn each day.

Luke Jerram with blown-glass swine flu virus from his Glass Microbiology series.

Luke Jerram with blown-glass swine flu virus from his Glass Microbiology series.{credit}Luke Jerram{/credit}

Are there personal reasons for your choosing this project?

My colour-blindness has given me an interest in perception. There are a number of optical oddities linked to the Moon — for instance, the illusion that it seems larger when closer to the horizon. And when you see a close-up of the lunar surface, you realise it is very dark and grey, yet it can appear incredibly bright in the night sky due to the Gelb effect. I am fascinated by how things work. I nearly studied engineering, and still use maths and engineering as a part of my arts practice, to solve problems and design artworks. Both scientists and artists can ask similar questions, and interrogate, question and explore phenomena in different ways, which lead to very different sets of answers. I’m also fascinated by the communication of science, and am often asked by scientists to help them disseminate their research through art, and achieve that balance between accuracy, accessibility and inspiration.

Interview by Elena Bozhkova, a freelance journalist in London. She tweets at @elena_bozhkova.

The Bristol International Balloon Fiesta runs from 11 to 14 August at Ashton Court Estate, Bristol, UK. Museum of the Moon  is scheduled to tour UK festivals Lakes Alive (Kendal), the Norwich & Norfolk Festival, Brighton Festival and Greenwich+Docklands Festival, as well as Lieux Publics, Marseilles, France, and OORtredens Festival, Belgium.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Crowdfunding an online tree of life

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3Q: James Rosindell and Yan Wong

A branch on the OneZoom online tree of life.

OneZoom lets people sponsor animals and plants on an online tree of life.{credit}OneZoom{/credit}

Putting all living things, from kingdom to species level, onto a single, easy-to-explore ‘tree of life’ is an ambitious project. But a newly formed charity has just gone a long way towards that by releasing the website www.onezoom.org. To crowdfund the new ‘OneZoom’ tree, biodiversity theorist James Rosindell and evolutionary biologist Yan Wong are asking the public to sponsor their favourite animals and plants. Here Rosindell and Wong talk about OneZoom, and why graphics from it have made their way into a fully revised edition of The Ancestor’s Tale – the 2004 classic Wong co-authored with Richard Dawkins.

What is OneZoom?

The fully revised, reissued edition of the 2004 classic by Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong.

The fully revised, reissued edition of the 2004 classic by Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong.

JR: It’s a way of visualizing large evolutionary trees as a branching fractal. Mindboggling quantities of data can be accessed easily and intuitively by panning and zooming in. With this technology we’re aiming to do for the living world what online mapping software like Google Earth has done for the physical world. Just as you might zoom from a map of the globe into a town, you could navigate into vertebrates and then, say, bats on the tree of life. Think of it as a digital natural history museum, aquarium, zoo and botanical gardens rolled into one.

YW: When James first mentioned OneZoom to me, I was in the middle of revising The Ancestor’s Tale. It became clear that the visual attractiveness and potential coverage of the entire tree of life meant OneZoom trees would be a great addition to the book, which attempts to distil the evolution of all life on earth. I looked in detail at around 100 phylogenetic studies that concern the lineage leading from humans back to the origin of life. Synthesising these studies into a single tree was necessary to give rigour to the ‘pilgrimage to the dawn of life’ that we undergo in The Ancestor’s Tale, and formed the backbone for the tree currently used in OneZoom.

What are you hoping to do now with crowdfunding?

Both: thanks largely to projects like the Open Tree of Life, we’ve now got the entire tree of life with over 2.1 million species — practically all known complex lifeforms — in our database. We’ve also developed visualization methods that allow seamless navigation. What we don’t have yet is a software engine capable of dealing with all those species on a normal PC, let alone a mobile phone. So our website currently only reveals a fraction of what is on our database. Our priority is improving the software core that runs behind the tree view so that we can handle all 2.1 million species.

JR: We chose a crowdfunding model where visitors to the site can feel a sense of ownership of the OneZoom tree of life by stamping their name on a leaf of the tree. The species you choose to sponsor is quite personal and that enhances the community feeling without detracting from the underlying scientific core of the project. Some leaves are sponsored by visitors to the website, others have been engraved as gifts from users to people they know, but there are also many wonderful species still available to choose from.

How will your tree stay up-to-date with shifts in the science?

Simiiformes on OneZoom.

A branch on this section is our own family line.{credit}OneZoom{/credit}

JR: The disadvantage of human-drawn illustrations is that they can only be made for small trees and everything needs redrawing when the science is updated. Software that’s built to visualize trees tends to produce outputs more like graphs: simple to update, but lacking in visual design and only comfortable to read for an expert. The OneZoom viewer is unique because although it is easy to explore and visually appealing, it is also automatically generated.

YW: As for the topology of the tree — the order of branching and so forth — we have semi-automated pipelines in place to keep our tree up to date. They tie together several pre-existing, constantly maintained resources. For example, the Open Tree of Life release 5 came out on 7 April, and our pipeline was able to incorporate it and produce a new tree in time for our release less than a month later. However, some important areas of the tree still require hand curation: the main backbone of the tree and popular chunks. This is done as new studies are released. Another automated feature of the tree is our ‘popularity’ measure, based on visits and edits to Wikipedia pages. If there is a sustained increase in interest about a particular taxa on Wikipedia, this influences the prominence (and sponsorship price) of that leaf in the crowdfunding part of OneZoom.

Interview by Daniel Cressey, a reporter for Nature in London. He tweets at @DPCressey.

The fully revised edition of The Ancestor’s Tale was published on 28 April 2016. For further information about it, see www.ancestorstale.net. For more on OneZoom, see www.onezoom.org.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Share the repair

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Posted on behalf of Martin Charter

Farnham cafe fin 2

The Farnham Repair Cafe in Surrey, UK – one of over 1,000 community repair and recycling initiatives in the global Repair Cafe movement.{credit}Farnham Repair Cafe{/credit}

A few decades ago, a broken radio, fan or kettle generally triggered a trip to the repair shop. Now, it often means a journey to the dump. In Britain alone each year, over 2 million tonnes of waste electrical and electronic equipment are discarded; in Europe and the United States, repair services have been in decline for some decades. This ‘take, make and dispose’ approach sits uncomfortably with shifts towards closed-loop thinking and policy, such as the European Commission (EC) package on the circular economy, which emphasises repair, recycling and reuse.

For the past six years, a quiet repair revolution has been unfolding globally. Keen to drive local-level sustainability, Dutch journalist Martine Postma launched the Repair Café movement in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2009. The next year, fired by its success, she set up the non-profit Repair Café Foundation to provide guidelines.

There are now 1,003 centres worldwide, with hundreds in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands and 18 in Britain. Each is a community hub where local residents can bring in broken items and get them repaired for free, as well as network, learn skills, socialise and help others. Local expertise, tools, repair manuals and materials are all on hand. Melding education, social inclusivity, ‘sharing economy’ practices and sustainable action, the cafés have become nodes in the circular economy, teaching its principles from the bottom up.

In early 2014, The Centre for Sustainable Design ® (CfSD), which I head at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in Farnham, Surrey, completed the first survey into the circular economy aspects of Repair Cafés and Hackerspaces — places where the global community movements for repairing and ‘hacking’ (modifying) products come together to share knowledge and skills. The research results prompted CfSD to launch the Farnham Repair Café (FRC), a local non-profit organisation involving Transition Town Farnham (TTF), in February 2015. (This collaboration fuses CfSD’s experience in developing a range of innovative sustainability projects over two decades, and TTF’s local networks related to food and cycling. The Farnham Hoppers, for instance, cultivate hop plants for local brewers, while the largely volunteer-run Farnham Local Food project grows pesticide-free vegetables for sale to the community.)

The FRC offers a monthly ‘place and space’ for locals to “share in the repair”. To date, more than 500 people have participated, and over 120 items — vacuum cleaners, headphones, lamps, baby strollers and bicycles — have been repaired. That represents a diversion from landfill of near 450 kilograms of stuff, with an average repair rate within the 2.5-hour sessions of nearly 60%.

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{credit}The Centre for Sustainable Design ®, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey. Graph from Scott Keiller and Martin Charter (2015) Repair Cafés: Implications for Product Developers and Designers.{/credit}

At FRC we have also established a “creative zone” for upcycling – re-assembling product parts for a new intended purpose or for an improved function. Much of this channels into Farnham’s longheld identity as a locus for design and crafts: it was a pottery centre from the sixteenth century, and an art school (now subsumed into UCA) was established there in 1880. The café offers a chance to practise the haptic (hand-to-head) skills that are essential to craft — as well as to much science. FRC also aims to create a ‘sharing economy’, cooperating with local repair businesses by advertising their work, and encouraging them to get involved directly as volunteers.

I am observing the emergence of a grassroots movement of makers, modifiers and fixers empowered by a new can-do attitude, social networking, massive access to online information and instructional videos. Beyond repair, recycling and upcycling, this sustainable community experiment shows the real ‘Big Society’ at work – people with technological skills wanting to give back to the community, and a technologically proficient, sharing community emerging.

Martin Charter is director of The Centre for Sustainable Design ®, UCA Farnham, and cofounder of the Farnham Repair Café, Surrey, UK.

Listen in to a podcast with Martin Charter and Product-Life Institute founder and director Walter Stahel here, and see a video on the Farnham Repair Café here. Nature‘s circular-economy special can be accessed here. For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.