We love treehouses here at Inhabitat and are enamored with eco-architect Mitchell Joachim’s visionary ideas about how to grow living treehouses from ficus molded around frame structures. We’ve covered these brilliantly playful architectural ideas before on Inhabitat, but now we have a video from Mitchell Joachim explaining the details of how they work. Joachim does much better justice to his future-forward ecological designs than we are able to do in a mere post, so if you have any interest in living treehouses (and we know you do), check out this fascinating video below.
Cory Doctorow:
Quirks and Quarks, CBC’s national science radio show, aired a great program yesterday on the multfactorial causes of obesity. Of particular interest were the segments on microbial factors. It turns out that obesity can be triggered in mice by changing which microbes live in their gut. The theory is that microbes harvest nutrients from food, and an excess of some microbes leads to superior caloric extraction. That means that depending on your gut’s “microbial nation,” you might get two or three times as many calories out of your food as your best friend.
I listen to Quirks every weekend and have done since I was a little kid. It’s hands-down my favorite science radio show.
Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is also looking for factors that contribute to obesity. He’s been studying microbes that live in the gut, and has found that the types of bacteria found in the stomach vary between obese and lean mice. Not only that, but by transferring these bacteria into other mice, he can influence whether they’ll turn out skinny or fat.
In a similar vein, Dr. Nikhil Dhurandhar is also looking at microbes. But he’s studying viruses. He’s found a virus that infects chickens, and makes them gain weight. He’s tested humans and found that some obese people carry the same virus, suggesting it may be infecting us, too.
So while BLDGBLOG continues its fascination with Martian viro-invaders, Social Fiction has been expanding its microbial menagerie: godless ecologies simmering with selfish codes and data silently contesting for survival — fractal, pointillist, and mercilessly lethal.
Which is why someone should market them alongside these Gardens-in-a-Bag and the equally portable Flowers-in-a-Can. Certainly our reliably adventurous and near-future spacefaring Dubai sheiks can be convinced to invest in these instant landscapes, perhaps even finance viral hunting expeditions to new Edens, where not only new bird and frog species lay uncatalogued but also prized super-strains of Avian flu and Ebola-HIV hybrids await collection and classification by CDC-licensed landscape architects.
And if they happen to run out of test tubes, a body can just as easily be converted into a greenhouse and FedExed off to the manufacturing plant, whence every crevices are swabbed, tissues dissected, and bubbling fluids bottled. Then cultured and espaliered with nutrient agar and antibiotics. And finally shipped off along major air traffic routes to waiting WHO-certified gardeners.
(Or maybe the expedition encounters a malicious band of orchid hunters and transnational ex-CIA miner-loggers. Everyone’s sweaty, no shower in weeks, and the constant high pitched droning of the forest has made all trigger-happy and quite insane. The Hot Zone meets Adaptation meets Aguirre. Maybe BLDGBLOG can be persuaded to film this comedy.)
Simply arrange them atop your coffee table. Nothing will bring your guests to chat ironically about post-9/11 bioterrorism faster.
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