Saturday, July 23, 2011

Caren Alpert’s Microscopic Photography


Life Saver, 17X Magnification
via a friend
Read Caren Alpert’s artistic statement here, and visit her gallery here.

Chicago Brewery Goes for Zero Waste


via utne reader
“A growing number of beer makers are incorporating green practices in their brewing operations, but a couple of brothers setting up a brewery in Chicago are setting their sights even higher, reports the Chicago Reader: They’re aiming for a zero-waste facility. The key is that the New Chicago Brewing Company is not a freestanding operation but part of The Plant, a former meatpacking facility that is being renovated to house a bunch of symbiotic businesses under one roof. One makes pickles, one makes kombucha tea, and one is an aquaponics operation that will produce tilapia, greens, mushrooms, and herbs…”
Read more here and here.

Our food varieties are dwindling. So why should you care?

via writesforfood
“…Most of us in the well-fed world give little thought to where our food comes from or how it’s grown. We steer our shopping carts down supermarket aisles without realizing that the apparent bounty is a shiny stage set held up by increasingly shaky scaffolding. We’ve been hearing for some time about the loss of flora and fauna in our rain forests. Very little, by contrast, is being said or done about the parallel erosion in the genetic diversity of the foods we eat. Food varieties extinction is happening all over the world—and it’s happening fast. In the United States an estimated 90 percent of our historic fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. Of the 7,000 apple varieties that were grown in the 1800s, fewer than a hundred remain. In the Philippines thousands of varieties of rice once thrived; now only up to a hundred are grown there. In China 90 percent of the wheat varieties cultivated just a century ago have disappeared. Experts estimate that we have lost more than half of the world’s food varieties over the past century. As for the 8,000 known livestock breeds, 1,600 are endangered or already extinct…”
Read the rest here.

Graphic Nothing’s Mona Lisa Remix


via retronaut
“Leonardo da Vinci's The Mona Lisa reduced and remixed down into 140 exact circles of colour. Makes no sense close up. Makes every sense from the other side of the room.”
More about it here. Print from your own hi-res quality from files here. Be sure to look through the Galleries section for some interesting discoveries, like Abbey Road Remix.


Tinnitus: When The Ringing Won’t Stop, Clear Your Mind

via npr
Two recent stories on NPR, Rethinking Tinnitus: When The Ringing Won’t Stop, Clear Your Mind and Tinnitus: Why Won’t My Ears Stop Ringing?