JeffreyGong_DESMA9

Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey Taken from Wikipedia    As an aspiring sci-fi writer, space is of course a topic that is very near and dear to my heart.The imagination of the writers who first imagined space travel long before the days of the space race and Yuri Gagarin is astonishing. The fact that Jules Verne could imagine a journey from the earth to the moon, a century before Apollo 11 and prior to the Wright Brothers' birth, and describe weightlessness and roughly predict the general design of the spacecraft, is astonishing. It's also fascinating how many concepts for inventions that became reality, or are being actively pursued, were first popularized by writers, like Arthur C. Clarke's ideas of satellite communication and the space elevator. It's hard to think of sci-fi nowadays without thinking of spaceships and rockets-- though most of the time, space ends up being treated as a fancy ocean, works like one of my personal favorites, the Expanse, really op...

     The word "nanotech" , much like the words "nuclear", "positron", and "quantum", has long been the favorite of the writer wishing to apply a scientific veneer to their completely nonsensical plot devices. As a result, when we hear the word "nano," we think of world-consuming swarms of tiny, uncontrollably replicating machines, or more benign swarms capable of repairing and building anything in the universe. Either way, nanotechnology feels like something from far in the future, and so it's surprising when we learn that nanotechnology is already shaping our lives and the products around us, albeit in less immediately potentially catastrophic ways-- antibacterial particles in sports wear, quantum dots that produce colors, self-cleaning materials...                                                       A typi...

 As a budding neuroscience major, I was quite interested to learn how the science of the brain contributes to art this week. To me, the human brain is the most fascinating construct in the universe, not just for the practical utilities of understanding the organ of understanding, but also for the philosophical implications for abstract concepts like identity and consciousness.  A Brainbow Image Taken From Cell Press Of the art we discussed this week, the most visually striking and meaningful is certainly the Brainbow-- which is rather interesting as one could argue the Brainbow is not art as all, as it was created for the purpose of neuroscience. I was intrigued by most of the work discussed in the article "Neuroculture" by Giovanni Frazzetto and Suzanne Anker, but most of all the artist Jonathon Keats, who sold his brain and thoughts in order to achieve immortality. I particularly liked his description of his brain as a sculpture created by thinking. Though true immortality ...

Taken from imdb      For my second event, I attended the watch party for the movie Gattaca. As a major in the life sciences, genetics has always been an area of particular interest for me, and so Gattaca has always been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it in my high school biology class. Though I'd already watched the movie, seeing people's first reactions to it was fun. The fact that what's in the movie, and more, is already potentially achievable with our current technology,as demonstrated by the Chinese scientist who used CRISPR to modify human embryos, and the current practice of allowing IVF users to choose the gender of their baby, is disturbing(though we still have a way to go before we understand the genetics of something as abstract as intelligence).  He Jiankui, scientist responsible for controversial CRISPR experiments with human embryos Taken from NPR Human Embryo Taken from Scientific American      Of course, people should be c...

 This week, we looked at how biotechnology has been used for new and increasingly fantastic kinds of art. On a purely emotional level, I was most amused by the concept of the Blood Wars, where an artist pit the white blood cells of different people against each other in a massive/tiny tournament.  Blood Cells Taken from Wikipedia  But bioart is also intellectually fascinating to me because of how it forces us to rethink our outdated definitions of many concepts that might have initially seemed unambiguous. As Ellen K. Levy wrote in her article on the subject, biotechnological art forces us to ask what can be considered life and brings up difficult questions regarding the ethics of creating and modifying life and whether individuals should be able to own the life they modify. I was intrigued by her description of the attempts to simulate evolution, and the difficulty of doing so without imposing the prescriptions of the designers on the method to determine fitness, but my...