arthur ganson's moving sculpture

許久沒更新網誌，因許多瑣事纏身，抽不出空！但今早我無意偶然間看了這段影片，我覺得蠻正面地感受到一顆熱情的心與一雙堅毅的手，不急不徐地創造人類的文明，比昨晚看到電視對雲端運算前景的介紹還多些內在的震撼力，比許多潮流設計給人的感受要深刻許多。

今天是一位朋友的生日，祝你生日快樂！
今天也是一位心目中重要的人遠行的日子 對你的思念一直都在！
僅以此影片分享 傳遞我的祝福。

*有英文字幕可供選擇，請按框景下方紅色字"view subtitles"，選擇您要的字幕。

【轉貼】 染色體研究 三人共獲諾貝爾醫學獎

【聯合報╱編譯莊蕙嘉／報導】

諾貝爾醫學獎五日揭曉，三名美國科學家伊莉莎白‧布雷克本、卡蘿‧格萊德與休斯塔克，因發現染色體在細胞分裂時的複製過程與老化的關聯而膺選，這項研究可望為癌症治療和抗老化帶來曙光。

三人的研究成果說明了染色體的自我保護機制，可在細胞分裂時成功複製，且不致使基因鈍化。

瑞典卡洛林學院諾貝爾大會表示，三人的研究「解決了生物學的一個重要問題，了解染色體如何於細胞分裂時完整複製，並防止退化。這項發現為我們認識細胞增加新面向，為對抗疾病機制提供曙光，並刺激潛在新療法的發展」。

布雷克本（Elizabeth H. Blackburn）和格萊德（Carol W. Greider）發現，位於染色體頂部的端粒，乃由端粒酶形成，這種酵素正是防止細胞退化的關鍵。布雷克本和休斯塔克（Jack W. Szostak）的研究則指出，端粒酶不足將導致老化。

卡洛林學院教授韓森負責去電通知得獎者，他表示三名科學家都親自接了電話，雖然聽起來有點睏但很高興。休斯塔克還說，要辦個盛大的派對慶祝。

聽聞得獎時，格萊德正忙著送小孩上學，因此延遲發表得獎聲明。她謙虛地說，研究之始純粹出於好奇，並未想到有助於癌症治療。

這也是諾貝爾獎歷來首次有兩名女性同時獲頒醫學獎，出生於澳洲的布雷克本擁有澳洲及美國雙重國籍，她是澳洲第一位榮獲諾貝爾獎殊榮的女性。

格萊德任教於約翰霍普金斯大學醫學院，六十歲的布雷克本是舊金山加州大學的生物學家，曾任格萊德指導教授。五十六歲的休斯塔克目前在波士頓的麻州綜合醫院教授基因學，三人可平分一千萬克朗（約台幣四千五百六十萬元）獎金。

芋頭蕃薯與拓樸

日前買了一袋芋頭蕃薯當點心吃。煮法只求方便能夠止飢，所以洗靜後蒸熟食用。
不過令人充滿驚奇的並非是該食物驚為天人的美味可口。
而是袋中的芋頭蕃薯長相看似相同，但口感有著極大的不同。

芋頭蕃薯有著比較近似蕃薯的外表，但內在有著紫色的芋頭特徵。
有的咬起來仍舊像蕃薯一般，鬆鬆軟軟澱粉的口感，這到無關痛癢，因為在煮法與口感上沒有逾越心理預期。
另一類則讓我有點驚嚇，口感完全不同，像是吃蒸熟的紅蘿蔔一般，比較像根莖非澱粉的質感。

這個經驗開始讓我想到接觸的拓樸觀念：

同胚 homeomophism
拓樸學強調一種連續性，在不破壞結構的情形下，任何形狀上的變化可視為同一結構性的物。一個環狀的甜甜圈與一個杯子視為「同胚」。一方面強調同一個結構，另一方面強調一個多重性。

兩種口感相異的芋頭蕃薯我吃起來很同胚。

【轉貼】超級奈米紙 韌性比鋁強三倍

2009-09-07 中國時報 【陳文和／綜合報導】
　據南韓《朝鮮日報》報導，南韓科學家已研發出延展性更勝於金、鋁等金屬的超級奈米紙，未來可取代聚丙烯和聚乙烯等塑料材質，做為鋰電池的隔離膜，大幅降低鋰電池的生產成本。

　南韓山林科學院環境材料工程系李善榮（音）博士領導的研究團隊，研發出這種延展性最高比鋁強三倍、比金強一倍的超級紙。而且不含任何化學添加物，製造過程不會造成汙染。李善榮表示，他們已於上月對相關技術申請專利。

　延展性是指物質承受拉力時，維持塑性變形而不斷裂的受力範圍，也就是說，要想撕開該研究小組研發的紙張，所需要的力量比扯斷鋁、金所需要的力還大。

　李善榮研究團隊將奈米技術運用於傳統的造紙原料纖維素（cellulose），研磨出粒徑廿至四十奈米（一奈米為十億分之一公尺）的奈米纖維素微粒，用以製造超級紙。

　李善榮指出，超級紙應用領域廣泛，例如可用來生產鋰電池的隔離膜。鋰電池的正極與負極之間必須以隔離膜阻隔，以避免發生短路，現有的隔離膜一般採用聚丙烯（PP）、聚乙烯（PE）單層微孔膜，以及由PP和PE復合的多層微孔膜，價格高昂，往往占鋰電池成本的二○％到三○％。超級紙隔離膜的價格將較塑料隔離膜低廉。

　此外，超級紙還可作為重要的建築材料。因它能夠阻擋水分子，又能讓空氣分子通過，可運用於實現既防潮又通風的高科技建築工藝。

related reference:
Smart cellulose could mean flying magic paper

原型 prototype II

前幾天乙醬先生回應了原型的看法，大意是原型牽涉一連串的修改。我覺得乙醬先生補充得很好。上次提到原型的意義，今天補充一下原型的特性，原型會不斷修正調適與週遭的關係，今天報紙上H1N1的報導，是個好例子。

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H1N1天熱照發威 患者暴增三成
2009-09-07 新聞速報 【中廣新聞／陶泰山】
流感病毒喜好存活於寒冷潮濕環境，台灣過去在每年秋冬才是流感流行季，但今年秋冬未到，夏日炎炎，新流感病毒已經肆虐，專家表示，這與病毒變異、型態與適應性的改變有關；即使是大熱天，近來就醫類流感患者數仍倍增，快篩陽性的比例也高，臨床觀察，一個診次，甚至從過去約20名類流感患者，暴增三倍左右達50~60名，患者數驚人。

流感病毒可在寒冷低溼度的環境中存活數小時，台灣的流感流行季，是發生在每年秋冬，特別是到農曆年節達到最高峰，不過，今年新興的新流感病毒，卻威力驚人，頂著大熱天，散播速度不減，在台灣持續疫情升溫中，依照疾病管制局資料，一天推估超過三千人因為新流感就醫。

類流感患者人數之多，連醫師都感受到壓力，台中榮總小兒感染科主任陳伯彥舉出，往年同期夏天一般感冒病例相當少，執醫多年，頭一次在大熱天裡，看到這麼多的類流感患者，通常在年底才會見到的流感流行，現在卻就醫人數倍增，快篩陽性比例也高，他表示，新流感病毒不怕天熱，夏天也活躍的原因，與病毒變異、型態與適應性的改變有關。

他舉出，過去同期，平均一個門診差不多約20幾個類流感病人，但現在一個診次，卻有高達50、60名類流感患者都要看醫生，增加達至少三倍之多。

衛生署疾管局與醫界專家都強調，目前新流感疫情還未達高峰，隨著天氣轉變，時序入秋冬，民眾有「雙流感」要對抗，包括季節流感以及新流感，呼籲要多注意個人衛生防範。

原型 prototype

多年前當「原型」還是新鮮的辭彙時，學校裡無論老師學生都會將原型掛嘴邊。不過大家對其中意義的詮釋，往往一知半解，造成許多似是而非的觀念。有的人將原型望文生義，例如是原始最初的型態、基本的類別等，有的學生因為看到原型總是要將研究A的，換到B用，所以說原型一定要換來換去。

即便現在，原型還是很重要的觀念。我的說法是原型是演變歷史的歧路，是樹的分支，是水的沸點。原型將脈絡扭轉通向新的方向，一個新的開始。而之前所有一知半解或只有片斷描述的原型，必須收納在這樣的觀念下才比較完整。

下面從口腔萃取的幹細胞轉變成眼睛的治癒方式，就是原型。

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【轉載】眼球灼傷 口腔黏膜幹細胞改善視力

〔中央社〕眼睛被強酸、強鹼潑灑，重則失明，輕則灼傷眼球表層及角膜，視力受損。林口長庚醫院以臨床實驗證實，自體口腔黏膜幹細胞能修復眼球上皮細胞，可改善患者視力。

林口長庚醫院眼角膜科主任馬惠康表示，眼部被強酸、強鹼潑灑導致的化學性灼傷，常會造成眼球表層上皮細胞及輪部上皮幹細胞嚴重損毀，使角膜上皮細胞無法自行修復，眼球表皮就容易出現反覆性潰爛，致角膜混濁、感染、穿孔、新生血管增生等嚴重後遺症，致視力退化或永久喪失。

若只有一眼被灼傷，傳統上醫界都會自另一眼取健康的輪部上皮幹細胞移殖到傷眼，但若雙眼都被灼傷，患者以往多只能自求多福。

不過，2004年日本東北大學西田幸二教授及京都府立大學木下茂教授發表以自體口腔黏膜幹細胞在體外培養後，再移入患者眼部，成功取代輪部上皮幹細胞，這項新技術命名為「COMET」，成為眼部重度灼傷患者拯救視力的新希望。

馬惠康表示，林口長庚醫院眼科團隊看到西田、木下的研究後，獲衛生署的人體實驗許可，自2006年起開始用COMET技術為5名眼部重度灼傷患者治療，證實這項技術有效，其中3人之後接受角膜移殖、1人接受輪部移殖手術，檢驗因手術被切下的眼球上皮組織後發現，組織內並沒有只存在於眼部細胞的第8型角蛋白，證實口腔黏膜細胞能健康存活在眼球表層。

馬惠康說，研究發現，運用COMET技術，在急性期可迅速降低眼角膜發炎並促進眼球表皮傷口癒合；在慢性期則有助於眼表層重建，對恢復患者視力有很大幫助，雖然患者還是可能因角膜混濁等因素仍需移植角膜，但可避免眼球傷口反覆潰爛情形出現。

除了運用COMET技術於修復眼球表層細胞，馬惠康說，不排除COMET技術未來可運用於口腔癌等口腔黏膜受損嚴重患者。

馬惠康率領的眼科團隊運用COMET技術的3篇臨床實驗論文已先後發表於「視網膜與眼之研究進展」、「眼」及「眼表層」等國際期刊上。除了已發表論文的5例病例外，馬惠康團隊運用COMET技術治療的患者已達到18名，並持續進行研究中。


日本用口腔黏膜細胞再造眼角膜
2001-05-22 10:31
　　新華網紐約５月２１日專電（記者張化）日本名古屋大學醫學部最近研究出一種用口腔黏膜細胞再生眼角膜的新技術，為需要眼角移植的人帶來曙光。
　　這項新技術所用的方法是將面頰內側的黏膜切開數毫米，再從深０．２毫米－０．５毫米的缺口取出黏膜幹細胞，加以培養，待２周－３周之後將它製成透明狀薄膜，然後貼在隱形眼鏡的內側，蓋在切除了受損角膜的眼球上，這樣培養薄膜的內側就會再生出角膜來。
　　據悉，這是由於培養膜釋放出來的化學物質，刺激了眼內的角膜幹細胞而促 進了角膜的再生過程，但如果損傷到角膜的深層部位，角膜再生就困難了。這項技術的優點是避免了角膜移植，因而不會發生排斥反應，而且採取培養口腔黏膜的幹細胞也很容易，當然，如何避免取出優質的口腔黏膜細胞給患者帶來痛苦，這是今後研究的課題。（完）
資料來源：新華網

【轉貼】冰層消覓食難北極熊軀體縮小

Environmental stresses could be causing physical changes in the bears
Polar bears are one of the most polluted mammals on the globe
The team used skulls from the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen
The maximum sea ice extent is declining by about 2.7% per decade

2009-08-27 中國時報 【潘勛／綜合廿五日外電報導】

丹麥科學家比對百餘年來的北極熊顱骨變化後推斷，因為環境惡化，現存北極熊的軀體相較於一百多年前的熊祖先，已經縮小。

　研究團隊比對「哥本哈根動物博物館」收藏的近三百具北極熊顱骨，發現過去一百廿年間，顱骨尺寸縮減的幅度在二％至九％之間。

　研究報告主撰人「奧胡斯大學」生物學教授裴托迪表示，丹麥團隊研究那批顱骨、顱骨形狀及尺寸變化，可以判斷北極熊軀體大小改變。研究成果發表於《動物學期刊》（Jounal of Zoology）。

　裴托迪表示，北極熊軀體縮小，按推斷原因在環境惡化，造成「生理壓力」。首先，全球暖化，北極海冰層因消融而縮小，北極熊耗費在覓食的力氣增加，因此沒有額外精力讓身軀長大。

　再來，人類製造的化學汙染物存留在北極熊體內，也造成北極熊生育率減少。由於生育率降低，導致交配對象減少，北極熊近親繁殖現象增加，連帶改變了北極熊顱骨的形狀。

　裴托迪表示，北極熊受化學汙染影響特別重，原因是牠們位居食物鏈頂端；食物鏈較低層生物，如魚及海豹等凡沾染汙染物者，都匯聚到北極熊脂肪內。


'Stress' is shrinking polar bears

By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News

Polar bears have shrunk over the last century, according to research.

Scientists compared bear skulls from the early 20th Century with those from the latter half of the century.

Their study, in the Journal of Zoology, describes changes in size and shape that could be linked an increase in pollution and the reduction in sea ice.

Physical "stress" caused by pollutants in the bears' bodies, and the increased effort needed to find food, could limit the animals' growth, the team said.

The researchers used the skulls as indicators of body size. The skulls from the later period were between two and 9% smaller.

"Because the ice is melting, the bears have to use much more energy to hunt their prey," explained Cino Pertoldi, professor of biology from Aarhus University and the Polish Academy of Science, and lead scientist in this study.

"Imagine you have two twins - one is well fed during its growth and one is starving. (The starving) one will be much smaller, because it will not have enough energy to allocate to growth."

The team, which included colleagues from Aarhus University's Department of Arctic Environment, also found shape differences between the skulls from the different periods.

This development was slightly more mysterious, said Dr Pertoldi.

He explained that it was not possible to determine the cause, but that the changes could be linked to the environment - more specifically to pollutants that have built up in the Arctic, and in the polar bears' bodies.

The aim of the study was to compare two groups of animals that lived during periods when sea ice extent and pollution levels were very different.

The pollutants that the scientists focused on were compounds containing carbon and halogens - fluorine, chlorine, bromine or iodine.

Some of these compounds have already been phased out, but many still have important uses in industry. These include solvents, pesticides, refrigerants, adhesives and coatings.

Genetic brink

The changes, the team says, could also be related to a reduction in the genetic diversity of the species.

Hunting over the last century, said Dr Pertoldi, could have depleted the gene pool, leaving polar bears to suffer the effects of inbreeding.

"We also know from previous studies that some chlorinated chemical pollutants have affected the fertility of the females," he continued.

Rune Dietz from Aarhus University was another member of the research team.

He explained that he and his colleagues had already determined a link between man-made "persistent organic pollutants" and reduced bone mineral density in polar bears - which could leave the animals vulnerable to injury and to the bone disease osteoporosis.

Skull collection

The collection of almost 300 polar bear skulls was provided by the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Christian Sonne, a veterinary scientist from Aarhus University who worked with the team, said that this provided a unique and "fantastic sample", providing a window into the bears' development over a whole century.

During that time, he said, concentrations of many man-made pollutants in the Arctic have significantly increased.

He said: "Polar bears are one of the most polluted mammals on the globe."

【轉載】DNA電腦晶片 更小更強更省電

中國時報 2009-08-18 【潘勛／綜合十七日外電報導】

　美國電腦研究專家表示，他們已找到利用去氧核醣核酸（ＤＮＡ）分子技術製造下一代微晶片的方法，而以ＤＮＡ分子取代傳統的矽元素來造出微電路，可讓晶片變得更小，功能更強，也更省電。但專家也表示，這種晶片要進入商業量產，至少還要好幾年。

　美國ＩＢＭ公司與加州理工學院專家羅斯蒙德合作；羅斯蒙德幾年前便判定，ＤＮＡ分子可以「自我組合」成微小形狀，如三角形、正方形及星形。借用ＤＮＡ的天然能力，可以吸收大量的複雜資訊，轉而運用在其他類型的活動。

　ＩＢＭ公司研究許多方法，讓ＤＮＡ在晶片表面自組成圖案，然後充當某種「支架」，再用數百萬奈米碳管及奈米粒子沉積上去。ＩＢＭ科學家表示，如此奈米碳管及奈米粒子形成的新網絡，可以充當未來電腦晶片的線路及電晶體。

　具體而言，科學家先以傳統晶片技術蝕刻所需的電路圖形，再將ＤＮＡ溶液倒在矽晶表面，此時ＤＮＡ會依蝕刻的電路圖形自我組合成微小的三角形、正方形，這種能力，科學家稱之為「ＤＮＡ的摺紙技術」（DNA origami）。如能將這些微小的ＤＮＡ摺紙技術放置在晶圓表面，那麼科學家便能利用ＤＮＡ的特性，製作出奈米電路板。

　這篇論文發表在最新《自然奈米科技》期刊。過去數十年，矽晶技術不斷微縮，將更小的線路蝕刻在晶片表面，以增進速度表現，同時減少電力消耗。目前最先進的電腦晶片是用四十五奈米製程製造，但再過幾年，要降到廿二奈米以下便瀕臨矽晶材料的物理極限，將變得更為困難、昂貴。


延伸閱讀：
Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns
Design of DNA origami
Six-Helix Bundles Designed from DNA

Flâneur

"Flâneur"在法文原指流浪漢、街道晃蕩之意。波特萊爾Charles Baudelaire開發其意為“在街頭行走以觀察體驗都市生活”的意思。其背景是在19世紀工業革命下，新式蒸氣發動機、紡織機、火車等各式工具以及金融革命推波助瀾下，從而襲捲而來創造的新型大都會、新型生活型態所引發的思考。這也引發其後許多關於都市的研究與想法：日常生活、由下而上等等。

Golan Levin's artwork

interstitial fragment processor



scrapple installation



TED lecture



在TED上看到Golan Levin的作品，覺得相當有趣。他的互動作品具備了收集即時資訊、處理、表現，同時也帶著幽默。

robot cooking noodles

機械人煮拉麵！雖然是噱頭，複製汽車工業的機械人。但是刺激力道還是呱呱叫！

【轉載TED】Bonnie Bassler: how bacteria talk

TED這個網站每星期都有簡短演講在網上流通，題材廣泛包括各種新知、特別的經驗、智慧結晶等等，相當受用。這則是有關細菌如何藉化學分子溝通，達到群體社會行為，也影響人類對於疾病治寮的觀點。

原始網站：http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html
有中英字幕可選擇！

responsive form

近來讀greg lynn的animate form，裡面提到一些探討動態形狀的先進，Hans Jenny是其中一位。他利用震動與磁性，置放鐵屑或水泥粉末在盤子上製造形狀的紋理。形狀在場域的力量交互作用下成形。



下面是另一個相關的影片，利用聲波製造米粒的紋理。



another model generated by sounds:

【轉貼】葉綠素電池發功 尿布救生衣遇溼主動求救

上學其指導一位銘傳畢業生做有關綠藻發電的研究，這篇報導有關葉綠素的環保利用，參考參考。


2009-07-13 中國時報 【中央社】

失智老人尿溼、意外落水，尿布、救生衣只能提供最低限度功能，不過，搭配遇溼就發電的葉綠素電池模組，功能大大提升，不但會主動求救，而且每個模組花費只要新台幣10元以下。 老人、嬰兒尿溼了，照顧者一忙很容易忘了查看；意外落水，就算穿著救生衣，在黑夜、大海中，也只能延長存活時間。研發出「葉綠素電池」的國立虎尾科技大學光電所教授廖重賓表示，利用葉綠素電池遇溼發電的特性，結合會發出音樂的IC晶片及發亮射程更遠的LED 燈泡，尿布、救生衣變得更聰明。 廖重賓指出，葉綠素電池結合IC晶片可以做成扁平化模組，放進尿布的不織布層中，葉綠素電池被尿淋溼就會發電，使模組主動發出音樂聲響，提醒照顧者，而大量生產化後，單一造價只要1元。

　同樣的原理，結合LED燈泡模組化後放進救生衣，落水後燈泡可持續點亮達72小時，增加落水者獲救機會，「單一造價只要10元左右」，未來結合GPS全球定位儀，效果會更好。

　廖重賓說，葉綠素電池模組尿布、救生衣都已取得發明專利，且都有廠商開始洽談商業化合作，前景相當可觀。

　廖重賓及研發團隊下午在教育部「2009技專校院技術研發成果聯合發表記者會」發表成果。另外，私立亞東技術學院工商業設計系講師高繼徽研發的「向量式人體工學辦公椅」，利用U型椅腿、T型滾輪等力學結構，使辦公椅可隨人體移動微調，減緩不適感及久坐的傷害，有量產價值，也受到注意。

　其他，國立高雄海洋科技大學研發的無水微生物廁所，利用微生物技術，讓人類排泄物不再只是廢棄物，反而成為再生能源的一環，同樣吸引參觀展覽者的目光。980713

活潑建築大陸版─新仿生建築

日前接到大陸出版社通知，「活潑建築」一書已在大陸出版問世。接到這個好消息，除了令人振奮之外，真的只能說好品質有內容的書還是有一絲機會與世人見面，也必須感謝許多人的幫忙，沒有他們的幫助，肯定沒機會的。首先感謝老季引薦中國工業出版社，上海清華大學建築系徐衛國教授為文作序，出版社唐旭先生不辭辛勞與我溝通所有細節，好友張碩修的翻譯內容等等。

書名換成「新仿生建築」，顯然「活潑建築」一辭其實真的很沒市場，不太上相。在台灣出版時，偶而會被譏笑書名沒有氣質，殊不知絕大部分的譏笑者其實只幻想著一個絢麗的名稱，搭配一個可有可無的內容罷了，跟此書硬底子扎實的內容對照起來，確實處在天南地北的光譜兩端。我當初叫活潑建築時，心裡不太有任何市場概念，只想著契合內容。不過這一次，我想出版專業的考量也必須加以尊重，是故除了反應內容之外，必須要一個能震攝住讀者的名號，想必與過往行走江湖的術士一般，給人印象深刻些。我採用仿生建築這個主軸，以新的思潮、工具引領出新的仿生契機為目標，包裹這本原本強調活生生反應活性的建築新趨勢，活潑易變的性質成為新仿生的課題，希望仿生一辭能讓大陸讀者有更親近的面容。

六月份最後一天，以此勉勵自己與在各地的中英文讀者，一起加油！

基因屏障與新種

星期四東海正評，邀請到兩位生科系的助教來客評幫忙，提供有關發育生物學及生物演化的意見，也試圖讓建築生命的實驗方向，有跨領域的激盪，這也是一直以來我所熱衷的方向。

會中討論到新種的形成，有幾種可能性。一種是地理上的屏障。比如海峽、高山等自然的地理因素，讓原本同種的生物隔絕，經過長期的時間分隔在不同的環境下各自獨立交配繁殖，自然會形成不同種的生物。另一種或許是行為模式，如果繁殖時程一直搭不上一致，長期下來即便生活在同一環境中，也可能長期不交配而形成不同種。總而言之，形成屏障隔絕便有可能形成不同種類。有趣的生物知識。

今天看到新聞，提到台灣畫眉因商人大量進口大陸畫眉，因為各種因素造成彼此混種，逐漸讓台灣畫眉快要絕種。對於台灣畫眉快要絕種的情形，我不是很清楚是否該很憂心而需要趕快防範，我沒有任何立場，而讓我比較關心的是屏障的出現與否造成物種之間的消退卻是一個活生生的例子。而物種與環境的關係才正要開始因而改變呢！

**********************************************************

基因汙染兩成 台灣畫眉恐滅種
2009-06-26 中國時報 【沈揮勝／南投報導】
　台灣畫眉在兩年前獲承認為獨立種，不過因早期國人引進大陸畫眉，導致基因受汙染。農委會特生中心與師大生命科學系合作調查發現，受汙染比例已逾兩成，如不及時控制，台灣畫眉恐將滅種。

　台灣畫眉基因滲漏現象，已引起國際重視。特生中心及師大生命科學系的研究論文，日前獲刊全球排名第一的Journal of Avian Biology鳥類學術期刊，其後續影響與衝擊，農委會正密切關切中，將於這兩天正式發表。

　藍胸、白眉或裸皮眼圈，是大陸畫眉特徵。基因遭汙染的二代台灣畫眉外觀多元且不完整，常具備部分陸眉特徵，且每一個體不太相同。由於民間飼養的大陸畫眉及雜交種數量龐大，如不徹底解決，以後野外看到所謂的台灣畫眉，將與現在看到的長相不同。

　因雜交畫眉四處流竄，農委會見事態嚴重，於九十二年將大陸畫眉亦列為保育，期能夠杜絕民眾豢養。不過此舉反成了繁殖業者的護身符。雜交種無法列入保育，豢養繁殖剛好避過野保法，讓情況更為惡化。

　台灣原生野鳥遭外來基因汙染或領域排擠最嚴重者，非八哥莫屬，南洋白尾八哥縱橫全島，台灣原生八哥在混群中剩下不到○二％。台灣畫眉因具領域性，受汙染族群呈塊狀分布，要控制其繼續擴散，專家認為技術不是問題，但工程浩大複雜。

【轉貼】5個脾 肝錯置 英女孩內臟如拼圖

【聯合報╱編譯陳世欽／報導】 2009.05.23 03:46 am

光看外表，英國6歲女孩貝塔妮‧喬登（Bethany Jordan ）與其他活蹦亂跳的小女孩沒兩樣，包括天真無邪的笑容。但是體內，她的五臟六腑卻有與眾不同的排列組合。

貝塔妮出生時就有5個脾臟，心臟有一個破洞，肝臟前後倒置，右肺形成時有如左肺，胃的位置也不對。

倫敦每日郵報22日以「拼圖女孩」（Jigsaw Kid）報導貝塔妮的故事，醫師曾預告她可能很快就會夭折。貝塔妮至今還好端端活著。

貝塔妮與父母住在西密德蘭史托爾橋，罹患的是艾維馬克綜合症（Ivemark Syndrome）。這是一種罕見的臟器先天錯置症狀，特點是心血管系統發育不良，部分臟器位置錯誤。這意味，她無法像正常小孩那樣的承受正常程度的體力消耗。如果貝塔妮運動過度，旁人可自她的背後看到心臟跳動。

這種病例出現的機率約僅15萬分之一，每一個個案都有不同的特點，以致醫學界對它所知甚少。專家認為，原因可能與遺傳有關。貝塔妮的母親麗莎表示：「她的部分臟器前後錯置。我們必須加倍小心，因為她很容易累。」

貝塔妮的5個脾臟比正常脾臟小很多，而且無法有效過濾血液，使她很容易受到感染。

麗莎表示：「這意味，如果她生病，復原的時間會比較久，因為她的免疫系統很薄弱。」

伯明罕婦女醫院的醫師在麗莎接受產檢時，即已發現貝塔妮的問題。他們找不到脾臟，並向她的父母表示，她可能罹患唐氏症。醫師當時並研判，貝塔妮的腦部可能受損，這使她的父母面臨是否終止懷孕的痛苦選擇。稍後的檢測顯示，她的腦部正常；麗莎最後還是決定生下她。

主治醫師表示貝塔妮最終需要肝臟移植，但目前情況良好，每年只需回診兩次。


The'Jigsaw Kid' who has five spleens, a back-to-front liver and two left lungs

By David Wilkes
Last updated at 11:07 AM on 22nd May 2009

On the outside, Bethany Jordan looks like any healthy little girl - cheeky grin included.
But on the inside, she has been pieced together differently from everyone else.
Dubbed the 'Jigsaw Kid', Bethany was born with five spleens, a hole in the heart, a diseased and back-tofront liver, a right lung formed as if it was a left one, and her stomach on the wrong side.

Doctors warned her parents Lisa and Robert there was little chance she would survive birth.
But she did, and six years later is still defying the odds.
Bethany, of Stourbridge, West Midlands, suffers from Ivemark Syndrome, a very rare disorder characterised by a poorly-formed cardiovascular system and having organs in the wrong place.

It means she cannot stand up to some of the normal rigours and strains of an average child. When she exercises too much, Bethany's heart can be seen beating through her back.
There are so few sufferers - one in 150,000 - and each case is so different, that very little is known about the condition. The cause is thought to be genetic.
Yesterday her mother said: 'Underneath her skin everything is back to front and jumbled up.
'We have to really watch her because she gets tired very quickly because of her condition.'
Her five spleens - each much smaller than a healthy one - do not work effectively at filtering her blood, leaving her at risk of harmful infections.
'It means that if she gets ill it takes a lot longer for her to get over it because she has a very low immune system,' said Mrs Jordan.
Doctors at Birmingham's Women's Hospital discovered Bethany's condition before she was born during routine pregnancy scans.
They were not able to find a spleen and warned her parents she could also be suffering from Down's Syndrome.
Doctors also thought Bethany could be brain-damaged, leaving her family with the agonising decision of whether to terminate the pregnancy. Later tests showed her brain was normal and Mrs Jordan chose to go ahead with the birth.
Bethany was born at nearby Wordsley Hospital, weighing 4lb 15oz. She spent ten days in an incubator before being allowed home.
A month later she was taken back to hospital after her heart failed and in the ensuing months had operations on her liver, a collapsed lung and on the hole in her heart, before rejoining her parents and brothers Drew, 19, Joshua, 17, and Reece, 13, at home again.
Dr Patrick McKiernan, Bethany's liver consultant at Birmingham Children's Hospital, said: 'No two children who have this condition would be alike, but treatment for Bethany's syndrome is getting better and better.

'We only need to see her twice a year now, which is great news for her and her family. She will eventually-need a liver transplant but at the moment we are just waiting to see when that will be.
'She is doing very well despite all of her problems, I think she's a very tough little girl.'
Ivemark Syndrome sufferers are slightly smaller than other children their age because of the calories they burn off by their hearts having to work harder.

【轉載】克魯曼:靠出口？除非銷外星球

2009-05-15【林上祚／台北報導】

諾貝爾經濟學獎得主克魯曼，昨日不改專欄作家快言快語作風，自稱是個「短期樂觀主義、中期悲觀主義、長期樂觀主義」的經濟學家。他說全球經濟狀況，比日本的「失落十年」還糟糕，日本當年還能靠出口復甦，全球要靠出口復甦，「除非和另外一顆星球貿易」。
全球經濟 面臨保護主義威脅

由經濟日報、台灣金控、中華經濟研究院合辦的「國際經濟金融論壇」，昨日邀請經濟學大師保羅．克魯曼針對「全球經濟金融展望兼論貿易保護主義」進行專題演說。

克魯曼表示，貿易保護主義與結構性失衡等五項威脅，讓未來十年全球經濟的前景相對黯淡。貿易保護主義不僅在新興市場國家歷史悠久，即使在美國，也有國會議員主張將「買國貨條款」納入擴大內需方案預算。

「全球貿易花了三個世代才走到這個地步，現在走保護主義回頭路，以後要花很長時間才能回頭。」克魯曼表示，貿易保護主義心態雖然值得同情，過度的保護主義卻是全球經濟的一大威脅。



前景黯淡 更甚「失落的十年」

克魯曼形容自己是個短期的樂觀主義者、中期的悲觀主義者與長期的樂觀主義者。他相信短期內政府一定會透過貨幣與財政政策拯救經濟，對於美國透過公開市場操作注資，印鈔票發債救通縮，克魯曼認為，美國負債比目前不算太高，未來只要經濟恢復成長，美國聯準會一定有能力把錢從公開市場抽回，「畢竟，美國又不是辛巴威。」

但從中期角度，克魯曼認為貨幣與財政政策效果有其極限，「有限的財政支出，只能創早有限的繁榮」，和日本經濟九○年代「失落的十年」相比，全球經濟目前情況似乎更為黯淡。

克魯曼說，二戰後的馬歇爾計畫，起碼有一個強而有力的美國作為財力後盾，「現在舉世根本找不到一個需求強而有力的國家。」

「日本當初靠出口恢復成長，現在，除非能夠找到另外一個星球，世界各國無法靠出口恢復成長。」克魯曼表示，一九二九年經濟大蕭條發生時，各國政府的舉債水準並沒有現在這麼高，世界各國在這一波經濟衰退能夠施展的財政空間相對有限。



危機當前 推動改革最好時機

儘管如此，克魯曼認為，如果把歷史拉長二、三十年，人類一定能夠找到新的替代科技，解決目前二氧化碳排放所造成的溫室效應與環境污染問題，新的科技創造更多就業機會。他也相信，各國之間屆時一定能夠找出解決全球金融體系失衡的方案，「但我擔心的是未來十年。」

除了科技創新帶來希望，二、三十年後，大幅跌價的金融資產也會漲回來。

「全球目前正處於改變的關頭。」克魯曼相信，接下來的環保節能議題，會在經濟政策上扮演重要關鍵，世界各國在危機的當下，是推動改革最好的時機。同樣是失業現象，歐洲因為有完善的失業救濟，失業者在德國的痛苦感受自然比美國小很多，美國政府應該趁這個機會，強化社會安全網。



「除非政治阻礙」 克魯曼：沒理由不搞好兩岸經貿

【林上祚、黃馨儀／台北報導】

諾貝爾經濟學獎得主克魯曼十四日表示，中國與美國之間不是「零和關係」，中國在他有生之年，一定會超越美國成為世界最大經濟體；中國做為台灣的鄰國，除非有政治因素阻礙，否則，台灣沒有理由不與這個大國改善貿易關係。

克魯曼本周在上海演講，公開批評中國當局操縱人民幣匯率，引發對岸一陣譁然。克魯曼昨日再度強調，人民幣目前還沒有開放自由兌換，境內債券市場，又缺乏明顯流動性，因此在他有生之年，人民幣不會取代美元成為國際貨幣。在現階段，克魯曼也不主張人民幣開放自由兌換。
不過克魯曼強調，「除非我車禍身亡」，中國應該會在他有生之年，取代美國成為全球最大經濟體，中國與美國雖然在某些領域是貿易對手國，但中國經濟復甦產生的外溢效果，一定會嘉惠到美國，中國與美國並非零和關係。

對於中國為首的亞洲國家，能否逃過全球經濟未來可能的「失落十年」現象，克魯曼回答，在這一波全球的經濟衰退過程，亞洲國家一定會是率先反彈的地區，部分國家應該有能力逃離類似日本的「零利率」流動性陷阱。但說到亞洲經濟是否有能力與歐美「脫鉤」、獨善其身，克魯曼認為，「脫鉤」說易行難，亞洲國家過去經濟成長仰賴出口，現在如果要與歐美「脫鉤」，就要創造出龐大的內需，短期內根本不可能。

克魯曼認為，全球經濟下滑情況雖然已經減緩，但這並不代表金融風暴已經遠離，事實上，金融體系還有一些潛藏危機；事實上，美國的信用卡債與東歐政府負債問題，目前仍然沒有解決，套用醫學術語，「全球經濟病情已經穩定，但尚未脫離險境」。

克魯曼說，雖然有些指標、數據，讓某些人以為危機已經解除，因而鬆了一口氣，但「這也讓我很擔心，雖然全球經濟不至於崩潰，但不要以為復甦在望，就可以太過自信」，希望各國政府都能審慎以對。

機場還是公園？

松山機場明年中可供A330起降

2009-05-15 工商時報 【張佩芬／台北報導】
　松山機場為連結上海虹橋機場、東京羽田機場與韓國金浦機場，建立東北亞都市黃金航圈，民航局長李龍文與相關官員指出，將斥資4億元拓寬松山機場滑行道間距，預定9月底完成，再配合空橋添購與簡易貨棧設立及地勤改善等工程，明年中將可供A330客機起降，未來松山機場將定位為商務機場，以商務客與高價貨物運輸為主。

　兩周前華航A330客機曾因桃園機場側風問題改降松山機場，但是在滑行道繞經空軍油庫的保護牆時，因為間距不夠大，採取拖行方式，未來油庫圍牆將往後移約20公尺，以方便該型機起降。

　A330約可載客270人，而且機上可載貨12噸，經濟效益高很多，由於機場空間有限，將定位為商務機場，未來進出旅客將是付較高票價的商務客。

　在航空貨運部分，進出貨載將以高價的乾貨為主，設置的簡易貨棧每日容量約50噸，全年約2萬噸，無法處理生鮮冷藏貨，將透過對隔日取貨貨載收取高艙租方式，來提高貨物進出速度，增加倉儲利用率。

　機場經過擴充改善後，預計每日起降的國際航班可從目前的22個單趟班次增為44班，由於上海虹橋機場預定明年4月就會完工，我方預定今年夏天就與對岸協商松山、虹橋對飛事宜，如果商訂明年4月對飛，將先以757為最大型起降飛機，預計6月可放寬供A330飛幾起降，與羽田機場對飛時間則排在明年10月，與韓國金浦機場對飛問題預定年底前協商。

　將台北、上海、東京、首爾這四個東北亞大城市連結成雙黃金航圈，是總統馬英九競選時的政見，松山機場是亞洲最靠近市中心的機場，6月份捷運即將行經松山機場，到台北火車站僅需14分鐘車程，方便性無與倫比。李龍文指出，未來包括北京等亞洲主要機場，都會考慮列為對方的航點。

　目前松山機場已經排定的城市對飛航班，包括羽田每天8班（16個單趟）、上海每天6班，班次由雙方航空公司對分，目前台北─上海航線是飛浦東機場，等與虹橋機場對飛後，是否仍與浦東對飛有待協商。

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連續二次競選台北市長時，國民黨與民進黨的候選人對於松山機場的未來，有著極不相同的見解。國民黨希望讓松山機場成為兩岸重要的開口，民進黨希望將它改為公園。

現在松山機場要定位為較有錢人的商務機場，替較少數的人服務。雖然所有的事件不可能一分為二，替有錢人服務的機場，也不見得不會替較貧窮的人帶來好處。但還是完全不同的出發點，決然不同的都市脈絡會呈顯出來。
前幾天在北美館看到龐畢度收藏的二幅畫作，畫作主題表現關於勞工階級的假日休閒活動，是左派的思想。我雖沒有深入研究其背景，但隱約之間，了解到他們的意識形態，強調社會的健康以及如何提升勞工階級的生活型態，他們如同機械般工作，在假日裡享受他們的生活樂趣。藝術家藉此追逐美的定義。

試問為政的官員，你們做的都市規劃，心裡在想甚麼呢？

【轉貼】日本已淪為「貧窮大國」

【聯合晚報╱國際新聞組/綜合報導】 2009.05.12 03:03 pm


最新一期日本「經濟學人」周刊發表專文，要日本人承認日本雖是經濟大國，卻也已是貧窮大國的事實。報導說，日本上上下下向來不承認日本有貧窮，將貧窮淡化為差距，甚至根本忘記貧窮這回事，但金融危機凸顯這個問題，日本不宜再自欺欺人。

貧窮問題在上世紀90年代開始加深。在泡沫化以後的長期經濟低迷中，政府為了舒活企業，逐步放寬對解雇的限制，許多企業於是把正規雇用改變成非正規、約聘式雇用，也就是日文所謂「派遣人員」。2007年，派遣人員已達1890萬人，占日本勞動力三分之一以上。同時，國家財政重建的論調高唱入雲，社會安全保障的經濟漸被削奪，本來已經不健全的社會安全網由此益趨脆弱。

越來越多擔當家庭支柱的男性淪為派遣人員，一旦從派遣再陷入失業，下場就是街友。日本的派遣工人有事做才有工資，而且大多數沒有保險，有保險者，理賠條件極苛，只有兩成人有幸拿到。他們也住不起房子，日本很少廉租房，無屋者不露宿街頭，只有當「網咖難民」。

今年3月，日本失業率4.8%，增加速度創1967年以來新高。

失業者可以向厚生勞動省求助，但通常不獲回音。日本從1960 和70年代成為工業大國，就以沒有貧民的中產階級社會自視，一般人賤視貧民，認為貧窮全因懶惰，政府的同情更少。看出問題者，至多承認那是「差距」。

根據經濟合作開發組織 (OECD)最新的這方面資料，日本在2005年的貧窮率就以14.9%在OECD三十國裡排第二 (第一是美國，17.1%)。但一直到金融危機，日本人才漸漸不將貧窮美言為「差距」，而正視貧窮就是貧窮，承認貧窮不盡出於懶惰，而有其制度、結構成因。

貧窮不單是經濟問題，也是政治問題，日本有些律師、工會和街友在2007年成立「反貧窮網」，今年1月，五百多名失業在東京日比谷公園紮營，和厚生勞動省打對台，數千志工前往協助，促成政府為貧民搭建臨時棲身之所，總算有個微末的開始。接下來，就看政府是否回心轉意並提出配套政策。
*************************

說實在的，在近代歷史上我們有過真的豐衣足食、創造幸福公民的國家嗎？好像沒有！前前政府人權績效不彰，深怕人民有過多的權力，妨害其統治。前政府貪污惡搞，毀掉改革的契機。這些搞政治的真是濫，到底有沒有改善我們的生活？真的有夠機車.....

Frontier exploration

這學期在東海設計四年級，帶了生物機制與建築設計的結合。雖然這樣的結合，我已經斷斷續續嘗試了三、四年，這次主要擺在生物機制與「形」的關係上。藉由生物機制來驗證形的成長與驗證。以下是一些同學的作品，雖然是物質模型，但我相信這只是短暫的停留，觀念上絕對是新穎的，比一些以外貌數位形式呈現的東西還要具備實驗精神。我離開英國也堂堂邁入第七年，期待自己逐步整理出自己的建築思想，承接過去的洗禮，踏出個人的建築設計，一個個人小宇宙的誕生。

【轉貼】Tata Nano

《名家觀點》塔塔汽車如何替百萬人圓夢？

【經濟日報╱■李鍾熙】 2009.05.12 03:40 am


今年4月塔塔公司董事長Ratan Tata履行了他的承諾，該公司新推出的小型國民車「Tata Nano」正式在全印度470個門市，以每輛2,000美元近乎不可能的低價開始銷售，當然立刻吸引了無數民眾瘋狂搶購。對一般印度人來說，能擁有一輛自己的汽車真是美夢成真，塔塔公司是怎麼做到的？這只是短暫的噱頭，還是一場新的產業革命？

六年前，塔塔就展開了這項艱鉅的任務。當時他看到許多人用摩托車滿載一家大小，在風雨中險象環生地滿街跑，就下定決心要開發一輛人人有能力購買的超平價大眾汽車（people’s car）來取代摩托車。當時歐美車廠都認為那只是開玩笑罷了，沒想到他真的籌組了一個開發團隊，用全新的角度開始構想，一步步完成這令人驚艷的創新小車。

Tata Nano是一輛相當嬌小別緻的四人座四門轎小車，只有二個引擎；車輪縮小到12吋，擋風玻璃只有一支雨刷，全車操控儀表也減掉了60%；為了保持結構強度和亮麗外型，車體和外殼都使用日本優質的鋼材；各種新型設計不但使全車成本大減，重量也大幅下降到600公斤，因而能在車速、馬力和油耗方面達到高標準。

在製造方面，塔塔也企圖顛覆大型昂貴車廠的傳統思維，改為靈活便捷的分散式製程（distributed manufacturing），他們儘量運用衛星工廠生產預設的組件（nano kits），再交由許多獨立的小公司，依需求就地組裝銷售。塔塔希望未來可以將大部分製造外包，而公司本身只負責汽車研發、設計和行銷，以達到像資訊電腦產業一樣的高效率低成本。

另一項低價的因素，則是將行銷費用降到最低。

由於它針對的多是全新的低價客戶群，Tata Nano一推出就立刻風靡了全印度，以塔塔公司第一期每年45,000輛的產能，根本供不應求，目前要預訂不但得大排長龍，還要抽籤才有機會，因此不需要額外的行銷費用。

塔塔並不以這輛小車為滿足，他們的研發團隊已在積極開發輕型電動車，做為下一階段新產品。即使面臨當前的經濟不景氣，該公司仍然大力投入研發，找尋對社會有重大影響的創新，例如簡易抗菌水處理機、太陽光電建築材料等。董事長塔塔先生在最近對全公司的演講中就特別強調：即使外界環境再壞，仍然要持續勇於創新、勇於嘗試、挑戰大目標（think big）。

看到Tata Nano成功的案例，我們難免會自問像這樣重大革命性的創新在台灣能夠發生嗎？首先當然要有像塔塔先生的理想、熱情和企圖心，才能推動這麼艱難的計畫，而其中更重要的關鍵則是要有「大膽挑戰不可能任務（grand challenge）」的勇氣和決心，這種精神和氣度在台灣似乎較為少見。

我們的產業由於過去30年產量製造政策的成功，反而習於追求近利、善走捷徑，也養成了習慣跟隨、避免失敗的文化，往往不敢冒險突破，而讓平庸的目標限制了我們成就大事的潛力，Tata Nano的啟示值得我們深自警惕。

（作者是工研院院長）


【轉貼】Autoblog 中文版 by Lawrence Lin
Tata Nano 薄利多銷5天賣5萬台

如果說市場上有一種需求叫作被禁錮的需求，那麼被昂貴汽車售價所壓制的需求大概就是屬於這種。5天接到5萬筆訂單的爆炸性成績，就是被這種需求所推昇出來，其中Tata所設計的預訂系統也幫了不少忙。

Tata車廠使用預訂的方式來銷售Nano，他們會在所有訂單裡隨機選出十萬筆訂筆，作為第一批可以買到Tata Nano的車主。從4月1日到6日這5天裡，他們已經收到來自包括經銷商及個人消費者總共5萬多筆的訂單，這還沒加上另外3萬筆來自Tata合作伙伴的訂單。光是訂單本身，Tata就要賣300盧比一張（約新台幣200元），NanaNano汽車本身則是賣9萬5千到14萬5千盧比（新台幣6萬到9萬5千元）。

這部車的銷售量會爆炸絕對是無庸至疑的，唯一可以討論的是Tata Nano算是四輪摩托車還是汽車，坐在Tata Nano裡安全性比摩托車，只好上那麼一點。Tata Nano的售價很驚人，但你可能對它的規格表現還不是很熟悉，來看看：

動力：有一顆33匹馬力的623 c.c.引擎，而Tata官方宣稱它的極速可以到達每小時105公里（安全極速比較重要）。參考數字，悍將125摩托車的馬力輸出約為10匹。

油耗：Tata Nano每耗1公升的汽油，可以跑上20公里。

安全性：我們遍尋不得Tata Nano撞擊測試影片，不過車廠官方說法說Tata Nano至少有一般安全性，座艙足夠堅固、足以抵擋外來侵入物的車門，車上也有安全帶（這是車廠說的，不是我們無聊當有趣）。

身材：長3.1公尺、車寬1.5公尺，而高度是1.6公尺。

笛卡兒 v.s. 萊布尼茲

【轉載】北醫今天發表動態式弧形放射線治療設備，可以360度全方位放射線，殺死形狀不規則形狀或躲在器官和組織後的癌細胞。
台北醫學大學附設醫院/提供

弧形放射線 5分鐘殺死癌細胞
【聯合晚報╱記者林進修/台北報導】 2009.05.04 03:26 pm

癌症患者又有新的治療選擇。

台北醫學大學附設醫院引進國內第一套動態式弧形放射線治療設備，360度全方位的放射線射出角度，可將不規則形狀或躲在器官或組織後面的癌細胞逐一殺死，一舉將癌症治療由「放射治療」提升到「放射手術」的層次。

台北醫學大學校長邱文達今天帶領醫療團發表這項新技術。北醫放射腫瘤科主任、癌症中心執行長邱仲峰表示，近年癌症治療突飛猛進，從可避免鼻咽癌患者治療後唾液腺遭破壞的「強度調控放射治療技術」(IMRT)，進展到可有效治療不規則形狀癌症的「影像導引放射治療技術」(IGRT)，如今，可全方位照射癌細胞的「動態式弧形放射治療技術」(VMAT)，無疑創下第三個里程碑。

邱仲峰表示，VMAT給合IMRT及IGRT的優點，能量高達1000萬伏特的光子束可360度、全方位地射入體內，再調控不同劑的放射線，把不規則形狀或躲在器官後面的癌細胞殺死，治療癌症可說是快、狠、準。

治療前一周，癌患要先到醫院做術前的全身模型，再經4D的電腦斷層攝影(4D CT)，做出癌細胞的立體定位，還把呼吸造成的身體位移也算出來。這些數據經過電腦運算，先在全身模型上測試一次，確認無誤後，再為癌患治療。

邱仲峰說，整個治療才短短5分鐘，癌患不用麻醉，也沒有特別感覺。一般說來，腦瘤或已轉移到腦部的腫瘤，因精準度的要求較高，最適合接受這種手術，肺癌、胰臟癌、膽管癌、攝護腺癌及子宮頸癌等惡性腫瘤，也可列為優先考慮對象。

台北榮民總醫院癌病中心主任顏上惠表示，VMAT可在不同時間、不同方位投射不同劑量的放射線，確實可提高癌症治療效率，但再新再好的醫療儀器，還是要仰賴專業醫療團隊。新光醫院腫瘤治療科主任季匡華則表示，不管是VMAT或是目前已在採用的螺旋刀，都提供不同照野的放射線治療，也讓癌患有不同選擇。
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最近閱讀Greg Lynn描述笛卡兒的座標系統與萊布尼茲保留時空線索在座標系統之內的差異，解釋出一個靜態的模型與動態模型的分別。這是個自上個世紀90年代以來，西方人的空間形式論述，的確很吸引人。

上個星期六日是銘傳畢業設計，大部分弧形的曲面形狀都被指責是手癢腦殘的技法(我誇張一點講，別介意)，客評老師的話我非常同意，因為這些同學的形式使用，其實沒有掌握這股思潮的重點，即便有幾分掌握其精隨，都還有不同見解的爭辯呢，更何況連一點論述都沒有！不過，也要提醒評圖老師，雖然評圖場合，100個奇形怪狀的曲面，可能有99.9個都是亂做，但還是希望勉勵其他老師與自己，保留一些奇蹟的機會，千萬別將曲面當成原罪，這樣也會太極端。

這股建築思潮流動之下，或許有人說實在太不經濟、不合成本，也的確道出其中的困境。好比伊東豐雄的台中歌劇院也沒有消息，再怎麼優秀的設計，太貴還是蓋不出，沒有適切的營運內容還是泡沫。是否曲面的東西，真的是宿命的原罪嗎？

不過這則醫療新聞，我會心一笑，聽起來像是雷射切割機或是RP機器的功能說明內容，其實是癌症的新型治療機械，這好比在曲面空間黑暗的時刻，送出一些光明的掌聲。也鼓勵對曲面空間有信心的創作者，脈洛一直在那邊，就等大家重新編織了。

流感、都市、建築思潮

picture from news BBC

都市的變化與成長，其實與病毒的演變是雷同的。甚至病毒的演化，非常直接的影響都市的運作。墨西哥政府已經禁止餐廳、咖啡店提供飲食服務，除了外帶之外。二者幾乎就是同義的相關名詞。禽、人類、豬流感的病毒基因混合，以新型姿態蔓延全球，跟次級房貸那些貪婪的銀行家所製造出來的金融風暴不也是異曲同工嗎？建築思潮也一樣，此起彼落交融又分離。「動態的世界」需要「動態的觀念」以及「動態的行動」！保守的人請讓開，請不要阻止世界運轉，好嗎？

生活小常識：
禽流感： bird flu
豬流感： swine flu


【轉載】這波疫情 衛署正名「新型流感」

【聯合報╱記者陳惠惠／台北報導】 2009.04.29 02:57 am


中央流行疫情指揮中心指揮官、衛生署長葉金川昨天表示，從墨西哥開始的這波疫情，是由豬、人、鳥流感基因重組出來的新病毒，不該稱為豬流感，應正名為「Ｈ１Ｎ１新型流感」。

衛署疾管局說，豬流感容易讓外界誤會，以為此病毒只在豬隻間流行，不會人傳染人。事實上，Ｈ１Ｎ１與豬肉一點關係都沒有，而是在人類身上流傳。

葉金川說，豬肉應煮熟再吃，吃豬肉不會得新型流感。讓他啼笑皆非的是，有媒體報導竟出現「病毒豬」的字眼，他強調，是病毒「株」不是病毒「豬」。

【轉載】保羅．克魯曼專欄－銀行家的報酬又漲回來了

2009-04-28 中國時報 【本報國際新聞中心尹德瀚摘譯】
　二○○七年七月十五日，《紐約時報》登出《富中之富：新鍍金時代的驕傲》，文中吹捧最力的「新大亨」是花旗集團董事長魏爾，他堅稱他和金融界同行是靠對社會的貢獻賺到龐大財富。

　此文登出後不久，魏爾自詡他協助建立的金融體系卻宣告崩潰，過程中造成巨大的附帶損害。就算我們有辦法避免大蕭條慘劇重演，世界經濟也需要多年才能恢復。

　這正好說明為何我們應對《紐時》周日版一篇文章感到不安。根據該文，投資銀行的待遇在去年縮水後又飆漲，已回到二○○七年水準。

　為何我們該焦慮？首先，已無任何理由相信這些華爾街術士真對社會有任何正面貢獻，遑論有正當理由拿天文數字的酬勞。

　切記二○○七年貴氣十足的華爾街並非一向如此。從一九三○年到一九八○年左右，銀行是個沈穩、相當無聊的行業，平均待遇不比其他行業高，但照樣維持經濟巨輪的轉動。

　那為何有些銀行家突然賺進龐大財富？有種說法是，那是對他們在金融創新上發揮創意的報酬。然而此刻很難想像，近年來有任何重大金融創新真的造福了社會。

　聯邦準備理事會主席柏南克試圖為金融創新辯護，他就「好的」金融創新舉出三個例子，一是信用卡（其實不算新構想），二是透支保護，三是次級房貸（我沒瞎掰）。這就是銀行家賴以賺進鉅額報酬的創新？

　有人會辯稱，我們實施的是自由市場經濟，私部門員工的身價由該行業自行決定。這正好觸及我要說的第二點：華爾街實質上已不再屬於私部門，它已經被政府收養，和領取救濟金的人一樣完全依賴政府。

　我說的「收養」不只是已根據「問題資產紓困計畫」挹注金融業的六千億美元，其他還包括聯準會提供的寬鬆資金、聯邦房屋貸款銀行提供的鉅額貸款、聯邦存款保險公司大幅增加保障額度等等。

　讀者大可據理力爭說，為了保護整體經濟必須拯救華爾街，這點其實我也同意。但金融企業受到如此鉅額納稅人的錢挹注，應要學公用事業，而非在營運和待遇方面回到二○○七年。

　讓這些投機炒作者坐領高薪不但離譜，更是危險。歸根結底，為何銀行家要冒高風險？因為成功─甚或只是暫時表面的成功─帶來豐厚報酬，就算搞垮公司，照樣領走上億美元。

　到底出了什麼狀況？為何銀行從業人員的待遇又往上飆？一種說法是只有這種待遇才能留住最好的人才，但此說站不住腳，現在金融業的就業機會劇減，這些人能去哪裡？

　金融企業再度發高薪，只是因為他們有這個能力。他們又開始賺錢，而且怎麼會不賺錢？畢竟拜聯邦政府保證之賜，他們可以低利借錢，再以高利借出。銀行樂得夜夜笙歌，因為不久後可能遭到管制。但也可能不會。從金融媒體可感受到風暴已經過去，股市上漲，經濟開始回穩，歐巴馬政府可能放這些銀行家一馬，頂多只是嚴詞譴責。錯對姑且不論，銀行家似乎相信馬上又可回到以往的好日子。

　我們只能指望領導人能證明他們錯了，並真正貫徹改革。二○○八年，報酬過高的銀行家拿別人的錢冒險，導致世界經濟趴到地上。我們最不需要的就是，再給他們一次惡整的機會。

　（克魯曼為美國普林斯頓大學教授，《紐約時報》專欄作家。）

Michael Fox

另一位有關動態建築的建築師。下面是一段訪談：


Excerpt of an interview with Brian Reynolds of Ohio State University for documentation of the "Meta Media Hyper Culture" symposium held at the Wexner Center in Columbus Ohio in February 2002.


Brian: First, could you tell me a little bit about what you do and how you became interested in this work? Also, how do you see your work and research impacting your own practice and the field in general?


Michael: In a nutshell, the idea is to create spaces and objects that can physically re-configure themselves to meet changing needs. The central issues in making these types of systems are human and environmental interaction (the changes) embedded computational infrastructures (intelligence) and the physical control mechanisms (kinetics). In retrospect I came about these ideas in somewhat of an opposite way than one might expect today. I first became interested in kinetic solutions in architecture with a focus on looking at how such systems can facilitate adaptability. The kinetics then are generally either transformable objects that can dynamically occupy predefined physical space or moving physical objects that can share a common physical space to create adaptable spatial configurations. After exploring numerous kinetic projects with this focus on adaptability it became an obvious next step that such spaces and object should be coupled with some sort of brain that can allow them to reconfigure themselves.

I say I came about this topic in a roundabout way because today there is a great interest in academia, and even the corporate and commercial sectors in intelligent environments. Everywhere we turn there is a smart house or smart office etc. etc. and so the obvious route would be to say that we have this space that is really smart, that understands the environment inside and outside and understands various data about the users including behavioral patterns but what is it doing? This is where I think the kinetics become important; to really extend the notion of enhancing everyday activities to creating spaces and objects that can extend everyday activities and do things that we cannot do or that are very difficult or inconvenient to do. In other words I like to think of the building as a body with bones and muscles and a brain that can control their behaviors, an intelligent environment without the kinetics is like a brain with a body that is incapable of moving and without the brain we can have of course the kinetics but no behaviors. When they are combined to what I call “intelligent kinetic systems” (IKS) they begin to have implications on the profession that are not negligible especially in terms of things like safety, security, spatial efficiency and energy efficiency (such as when coupled with traditional passive sustainable solutions).


Brian: Full scale kinetic architecture is one that embeds computational subsystems into a system capable of transformation through motion. This requires the architect to be fully engaged in the methods of fabrication as well as the programming of the computational subsystems. Does kinetic architecture suggest that architects respond with an equally kinetic process? Does this change the traditional role of the
architect?



Michael: Also I think it is good to point out that nothing I am saying is really new to the field of architecture on a theoretical level but we are really at a point in the profession where such systems are possible and even feasible from an economic standpoint. Architects really need to take a more active role in directing the development of this area of design. To do this we need to have at least a superficial knowledge base of both the engineering in terms of mechanics and fabrication and also the computational substructures. It is typical for architectural students to take courses on structures and HVAC systems etc. that provide the superficial knowledge necessary for design. In professional practice specialists take on these roles. Architects then should also be taking courses on simple mechanics and computation in order to develop the skills necessary to explore, think about, and design intelligently responsive kinetic structures and systems. As architects we are not doing structural calculations on a building and we should not be programming so, in short, no the traditional role of the architect will not change, but we will have new roles of engineering and consultancy.


Brian: Many architects are finding that the increased access to CNC fabrication technologies is allowing them to realize their designs with increased efficiency as well as permitting them to realize designs that would otherwise be impossible or certainly too difficult to construct using traditional methods of construction. How do these technologies, which could be seen as forms of kinetic architecture themselves, influence your process of design?


Michael: I think that the importance of CNC relative to kinetic designs lies more in the design process rather than in terms of fabrication processes. Basically I think that what you are talking about is more referential to form-making. Ironically, CNC was invented in engineering to increase design and manufacturing process performance and was adopted by architects as being useful for presentation models and was considered inappropriate for early stages of design. Only later did architects come to understand that processes such as rapid prototyping could be useful in the design process. This is where I think CNC does have an influence in particular with the design of complex three-dimensional parts and parts that will be set to motion. I think that what CNC has recently afforded architects in terms of realizing (design-to-fabrication) forms is rather profound. Again this was basically adopted from other fields of design (both product and aerospace I believe). Mechanical design also is extremely well developed both in terms of design and fabrication, and it is up to architects to adopt the processes.


Brian: CNC fabrication processes provide dimensional tolerances in material manipulation which are unattainable or at the very least unreasonable to be consistently expected by more traditional methods of fabrication. Does the nature of kinetic architecture require this increased precision?


Michael: This is really a continuation of the above question but I want to point out that it is important to see such systems in kinetic architecture as subsystems. A very smart building should mechanically adopt the paradigm of ubiquitous computing. The autonomous mechanics will prove important for making things that are robust in terms of failure. In getting to your question though, the idea of discrete mechanics has an effect on the dimensional tolerances. In other words the individual parts do have to be precise but not necessarily the larger building as a whole. Think of examples that already exist such as rotating sensor activated doors and escalators etc. These do need to be quite precise in their own operational way but not in terms of their tolerance with the larger architectural whole.


Brian: There is currently reluctance on the part of the automotive industry and the general public to accept “drive by wire” technologies which replace the direct mechanical link between the driver and vehicle with sophisticated sensor systems and a computational subsystem which processes input from the driver. The concern being that if a malfunction, either hardware or software, disrupts the flow of information, the result could be life-threatening. Traveling in a car at 90 mph and a kinetic architecture that responds to conditions of its surrounding environment do not have the same safety concerns, but it does suggest that systems that rely on embedded computational subsystems are only as good as the programs that are processing the information they receive. Could you discuss some of the challenges that face kinetic architecture from a reliability and dependability standpoint?


Michael: Well this is a very important question especially in terms of acceptance. The safety issues are really not comparable however and already have precedent in things like automatic garage doors etc that can be tackled with simple IR shields that detect obstacles in the path of motion. I think however the question of robustness is more important than that of safety. I have story of being in a car in Boston during a snowstorm with power windows that would not roll up. I was furious that there were no manual handles to roll up the windows. There should always be a manual means of controlling the motion or in cases of the objects being too large or heavy to manually move then there must be a means of egress considered such as in elevators. Also related to the notion of robustness is again that the intelligent kinetic systems should be considered discretely. If a rotating wall with a bed on it will not fold up for some reason, it will not prohibit other systems such as partition walls from sliding or rotating etc. In terms of large buildings an automated adaptive kinetic system could be very valuable in terms of energy efficiency as for instance coupled with HVAC systems. Where not only are rooms specifically heated or cooled that are being occupied but the doors and venting systems are physically controlled to manage the inefficiencies. If they are automated discretely, if one door does not close then they system of doors is still operational. In automotive terms, if the windshield wipers do not operate, you will still have headlights. Also I think that the automotive, aerospace and even maritime industries are far more developed in terms of being both intelligent and mechanical than that of architecture. Architecture is really in it’s infancy from an application standpoint and there are many lessons to be learned. The point is we spend most of our lives in buildings and only use cars and airplanes to get from one building to another. I think the second most likely candidate for failure lies not in the computational subsystem (software) but rather in the sensing subsystem (from a hardware standpoint). If a system performs not as expected, it is more likely the result of clouded data input: something is blocking the sensor or providing conflicting data input. When I used to work late at night I would always notice the lights coming on and off in a neighboring office although no one was inside the office. The problem was that the professor had piles of loose papers that were constantly blowing around as a result of the automated ventilation system and the motion of the papers moving would turn on the lights. The remedy was to redirect the motion sensor to only look at the door but I think it is another good lesson.


Brian: From E.J. Marey’s chronophotographic studies to the motion and efficiency studies of the Gilbreth’s and numerous examples in modern art such as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, there has been and continues to be a history of exploration into how to describe and capture motion. In your elevator studies for the Porsche collector there is a cinematic nature to the motion of the doors that reminds one
of the opening sequences of a James Bond film or to the aperture of a camera’s lens. The responsive awning project traces the flows of passersby in a fluid wave-like description. Could you comment on the inspirations or ambitions of these seemingly different types of motion description? What are the differences in the computational subsystems of these two projects?


Michael: I suppose that the conceptual link lies in the fact that they are both relative to motion in the part of a third party. In both of these cases it is the spatial conceptualizer (if we get academic). The point is that the motion in architecture is prescribed by a responsive and adaptive behavior. A layer on top of this might be a building shade that tracks the sunlight and also supplies shade relative to the spatial conceptualizer. The door studies were intentionally cinematic to be choreographed when the person drives in and exits. The studies were getting at a complexity that could be inherent in a very simple system. I am a bit disappointed with the end result of the elevator in the sense that it is too straightforward without the complexity/simplicity but it is a real project with a real client and that is a great thing. The saving grace is the layering of the wire mesh that still provides the illusion of complexity with the simplicity of four choreographed doors. The complexity then is really more visual than mechanical is the point. With the façade, I had already designed several responsive awnings prior to this project each dealing with many discrete parts that followed the motion of the pedestrians as they walked along the sidewalk below. This project was conceptualized with my partner Ran Oron when he had the idea of a sand dune on a particular building on 47th and Lexington in New York. The idea of many discrete parts then was translated to a scale where the individual parts become pixilated to the extent of having negligible entities. Upon prototyping and understanding how it would actually be constructed we came to the idea of individual points being articulated enough to be recognizable but still recognizable as a whole. With the help of Axel Killian we began studies in Java to find a motion that would be simple enough to make overall patterns with discrete elements and not loose the essence of the whole. In this project then the actual mechanics played a much more important role in the conceptual development. The computational subsystem is actually quite simple as a means to imbed certain robustness into the façade as a whole. The bars are in vertical strips of 10 both mechanically and computationally. Each vertical strip moves as a whole and only understands what it has sensed and the motion of its neighbor and it’s neighbor’s neighbor on each side. In this sense if any one vertical strip malfunctions the system as a whole will still function and the vertical strip of 10 bars can be removed and repaired.


Brian: What are some of the goals of your kinetic architecture? Is there the potential that kinetic architecture can increase efficiency? Do the methods by which these kinetic systems and computational subsystems are produced lend themselves to mass production or do they remain unique responses to unique situations?


Michael: Most of this I have answered in the first additional question, but I will answer in response to mass production vs. unique situational use. Probably the most innovative designs will always arise from unique situational use, and a driving force lies in the changing patterns of human interaction with the built environment. The ability to not only monitor but also physically control remote environments may have consequentially important implications. I think there is a great potential for applications that arise from understanding what an architectural space or object is currently doing and how it can do it better:

How can issues of privacy and public be dynamically responded to? How can thermal, visual, and acoustic conditions be dynamically responded to? How can spatial sharing be optimized, and natural daylight articulated? And how can architecture extend the notion of enhancing our everyday activities by doing things that are impossible or very difficult for us to do. We should really ask not what architecture is, but what can it do.

Friedman, Yona

整理一些動態建築的資料，發現這位前輩，轉載一些他的資料。雖然他的可動性，是針對使用者出發，強調使用者可自主性地改變自身的空間，但或多或少也影響了後面的可動式(kinetic)建築。

original webpage:
http://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A8109&page_number=1&template_id=6&sort_order=1

Source: Oxford University Press
French architect of Hungarian birth. He studied architecture at the Technical University, Budapest (1943), but he left Hungary in 1945, completed his training at the Technion, Haifa (Dip. Arch., 1948) and subsequently taught. In 1956 he attended CIAM X in Dubrovnik, which confirmed his belief that requirements generated by technological progress and demographic growth were too great to be solved by traditional social, urban and architectural values and structures. In 1957 he settled in Paris and founded the Groupe d’Etude d’Architecture Mobile (GEAM) with Paul Maymont, Frei Otto, Eckard Schultze-Fielitz, Werner Runhau and D. G. Emmerich. The group’s manifesto was Friedman’s L’Architecture mobile (1958), in which he rejected the idea of a static city. In contrast he developed the principle of ‘infrastructure’, a skeletal metal ‘space-frame grid’ of several levels, on which mobile lightweight ‘space-defining elements’ would be placed. He proposed to adapt these ideas for large cities by superimposing this grid on the existing fabric of London, Tunis and New York, or by allowing commercial facilities to be built over the network of high speed roads in Los Angeles.

Friedman’s ambition was ‘to help the inhabitant to become master of his own design’, the sub-title of L’Architecture mobile, and to encourage architects to become less self-important and to gain an awareness of how they could be useful to their client. Applications of his participatory concepts were used in an unexecuted project for the CDC headquarters in Ivry-sur-Seine (1976) and the Lycée David d’Angers, Angers (1978–80). His ideas, conveyed by simple diagrams and cartoons, gained a significant popular appeal. His exhibition Une Utopie réalisée drew a record attendance at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1975 and it later toured Latin America, sponsored by the French government.

A gifted self-promoter, Friedman wrote and lectured extensively, and in the early 1960s his ideas began to be discussed worldwide, especially in Japan where they were adopted by Kenzo Tange and exponents of ‘metabolist’ architecture. Many urban planners, architects and critics found his concepts too simplistic and objected that occupants would never accept the state of being disconnected from ground level. In Pour une architecture scientifique (1970), Friedman attempted to prove that his visions were based on careful reasoning. After 1976 he enlarged the scope of his activities, adapting his theories to the needs of developing countries. In 1981 he began work with Eda Schaur (b 1945) on a museum where techniques and methods for self-reliance would be demonstrated to disadvantaged people, resulting in the Museum of Basic Technology, Madras, India.

Isabelle Gournay
From Grove Art Online

© 2009 Oxford University Press

robotic architecture

深夜兩點，以前學生傳來這個影片，很棒！

Biomimetics: Design by Nature

What has fins like a whale, skin like a lizard, and eyes like a moth? The future of engineering.

By Tom Mueller
Photograph by Robert Clark

One cloudless midsummer day in February, Andrew Parker, an evolutionary biologist, knelt in the baking red sand of the Australian outback just south of Alice Springs and eased the right hind leg of a thorny devil into a dish of water. The maneuver was not as risky as it sounds: Though covered with sharp spines, the lizard stood only about an inch high at the shoulder, and it looked up at Parker apprehensively, like a baby dinosaur that had lost its mother. It seemed too cute for its harsh surroundings, home to an alarmingly high percentage of the world's most venomous snakes, including the inland taipan, which can kill a hundred people with an ounce of its venom, and the desert death adder, whose name pretty well says it all. Fierce too is the landscape itself, where the wind hissing through the mulga trees feels like a blow dryer on max, and the sun seems three times its size in temperate climes. Constant reminders that here, in the driest part of the world's driest inhabited continent, you'd better have a good plan for where your next drink is coming from.

This the thorny devil knows, with an elegance and certainty that fascinated Parker beyond all thought of snakebite or sunstroke. "Look, look!" he exclaimed. "Its back is completely drenched!" Sure enough, after 30 seconds, water from the dish had wicked up the lizard's leg and was glistening all over its prickly hide. In a few seconds more the water reached its mouth, and the lizard began to smack its jaws with evident satisfaction. It was, in essence, drinking through its foot. Given more time, the thorny devil can perform this same conjuring trick on a patch of damp sand—a vital competitive advantage in the desert. Parker had come here to discover precisely how it does this, not from purely biological interest, but with a concrete purpose in mind: to make a thorny-devil-inspired device that will help people collect lifesaving water in the desert.

A slender English academic with wavy, honey-blond hair beneath a wide-brimmed sun hat, Parker busied himself with eyedroppers, misters, and various colored powders, the better to understand the thorny devil's water-collecting alchemy. Now and then he made soft, bell-like, English-academic sounds of surprise and delight. "The water's spreading out incredibly fast!" he said, as drops from his eyedropper fell onto the lizard's back and vanished, like magic. "Its skin is far more hydrophobic than I thought. There may well be hidden capillaries, channeling the water into the mouth." After completing his last experiment, we gathered up his equipment and walked back to our Land Cruiser. The lizard watched us leave with a faint look of bereavement. "Seeing the devil in its natural environment was crucial to understanding the nature of its adaptations—the texture of the sand, the amount of shade, the quality of the light," Parker said as we drove back to camp. "We've done the macro work. Now I'm ready to look at the microstructure of its skin."

A research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Sydney, Parker is a leading proponent of biomimetics—applying designs from nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields. He has investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective coatings in moth eyes—studies that have led to brighter screens for cellular phones and an anticounterfeiting technique so secret he can't say which company is behind it. He is working with Procter & Gamble and Yves Saint Laurent to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen of diatoms, and with the British Ministry of Defense to emulate their water-repellent properties. He even draws inspiration from nature's past: On the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber he saw in a museum in Warsaw, Poland, he noticed microscopic corrugations that reduced light reflection. They are now being built into solar panels.

Parker's work is only a small part of an increasingly vigorous, global biomimetics movement. Engineers in Bath, England, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, are pondering the bumps on the leading edges of humpback whale flukes to learn how to make airplane wings for more agile flight. In Berlin, Germany, the fingerlike primary feathers of raptors are inspiring engineers to develop wings that change shape aloft to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Architects in Zimbabwe are studying how termites regulate temperature, humidity, and airflow in their mounds in order to build more comfortable buildings, while Japanese medical researchers are reducing the pain of an injection by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like those on a mosquito's proboscis, minimizing nerve stimulation.

"Biomimetics brings in a whole different set of tools and ideas you wouldn't otherwise have," says materials scientist Michael Rubner of MIT, where biomimetics has entered the curriculum. "It's now built into our group culture."

Shortly after our trip to the Australian desert, I met up with Andrew Parker again, in London, to watch the next phase of his research into the thorny devil. Walking from the Natural History Museum's entrance to his laboratory on the sixth floor, we traversed warehouse-size halls filled with preserved organisms of the most exuberant variety. In one room were waist-high alcohol jars of grimacing sea otters, pythons, spiny echidnas, and wallabies, and one 65-foot-long case containing a giant squid. Other rooms held displays of gaudy hummingbirds, over-the-top toucans and majestic bowerbirds, and shelf after shelf filled with beetles as bright as gemstones: emerald-green scarabs, sapphire-blue Cyphogastras, and opalescent weevils.

To Parker this was not a mere collection of specimens, but "a treasure-trove of brilliant design." Every species, even those that have gone extinct, is a success story, optimized by millions of years of natural selection. Why not learn from what evolution has wrought? As we walked, Parker explained how the metallic sheen and dazzling colors of tropical birds and beetles derive not from pigments, but from optical features: neatly spaced microstructures that reflect specific wavelengths of light. Such structural color, fade-proof and more brilliant than pigment, is of great interest to people who manufacture paint, cosmetics, and those little holograms on credit cards. Toucan bills are a model of lightweight strength (they can crack nuts, yet are light enough not to seriously impede the bird's flight), while hedgehog spines and porcupine quills are marvels of structural economy and resilience. Spider silk is five times stronger by weight and vastly more ductile than high-grade steel. Insects offer an embarrassment of design riches. Glowworms produce a cool light with almost zero energy loss (a normal incandescent bulb wastes 98 percent of its energy as heat), and bombardier beetles have a high-efficiency combustion chamber in their posterior that shoots boiling-hot chemicals at would-be predators. The Melanophila beetle, which lays its eggs in freshly burned wood, has evolved a structure that can detect the precise infrared radiation produced by a forest fire, allowing it to sense a blaze a hundred kilometers away. This talent is currently being explored by the United States Air Force.

"I could look through here and find 50 biomimetics projects in half an hour," Parker said. "I try not to walk here in the evening, because I end up getting carried away and working until midnight."

In one such late-night creative burst eight years ago, Parker decided to investigate the water-gathering skills of a desert beetle by building an enormous sand dune in his laboratory. This tenebrionid beetle flourishes in the Namib Desert in southwestern Africa, one of the world's hottest, driest environments. The beetle drinks by harvesting morning fogs, facing into the wind and hoisting its behind, where hydrophilic bumps capture the fog and cause it to coalesce into larger droplets, which then roll down the waxy, hydrophobic troughs between the bumps, reaching the beetle's mouth. Parker imported several dozen beetles from Namibia, which promptly scampered all over the lab when he opened the box, but eventually settled contentedly on the dune. There, using a hair dryer and various misters and spray bottles, Parker simulated the conditions in the Namib Desert well enough to understand the beetle's mechanism. He then replicated it on a microscope slide, using tiny glass beads for the bumps and wax for the troughs.

For all nature's sophistication, many of its clever devices are made from simple materials like keratin, calcium carbonate, and silica, which nature manipulates into structures of fantastic complexity, strength, and toughness. The abalone, for example, makes its shell out of calcium carbonate, the same stuff as soft chalk. Yet by coaxing this material into walls of staggered, nanoscale bricks through a subtle play of proteins, it creates an armor as tough as Kevlar —3,000 times harder than chalk. Understanding the microscale and nanoscale structures responsible for a living material's exceptional properties is critical to re-creating it synthetically. So today Andrew Parker had arranged to view the skin of a thorny devil museum specimen under a scanning electron microscope, hoping to find the hidden structures that allow it to absorb and channel water so effectively.

With a microscopist at the helm, we soared over the surface of the thorny devil's skin like a deep-space probe orbiting a distant planet, dipping down now and then at Parker's request to explore some curious feature of the terrain. There seemed to be little of interest in the Matterhornlike macrostructure of an individual thorn, though Parker speculated that it might wick away heat from the lizard's body or perhaps help capture the morning dew. Halfway down the thorn, however, he noticed a series of nodules set in rows, which seemed to grade down to a larger water-collection structure. Finally we dove into a crevasse at the base of the thorn and encountered a honeycomb-like field of indentations, each 25 microns across.

"Ah-ha!" Parker exclaimed, like Sherlock Holmes alighting upon a clue. "This is clearly a superhydrophobic surface for channeling water between the scales." A subsequent examination of the thorny devil's skin with an instrument called a micro-CT scanner confirmed his theory, revealing tiny capillaries between the scales evidently designed to guide water toward the lizard's mouth. "I think we've pretty well cracked the thorny devil structure," he said. "We're ready to make a prototype."

Enter the engineers. As the next phase in his quest to create a water-collection device inspired by the lizard, Parker sent his observations and experimental results to Michael Rubner and his MIT colleague Robert Cohen, a chemical engineer with whom he has worked on several biomimetics projects in the past. Rubner and Cohen are neatly groomed gentlemen who speak in clipped phrases and look frequently at their watches. While Parker likes to explain his work via a stroll through a botanic garden or by pulling out drawerfuls of bright beetles in a museum, they are more likely to draw a tidy graph of force over time, or flip through a PowerPoint presentation on their laptop. But a pooling of biological insight and engineering pragmatism is vital to success in biomimetics, and in the case of Parker, Cohen, and Rubner, it has led to several promising applications inspired by the Namib beetle and other insects. Using a robotic arm that, in a predetermined sequence, dips slides into a series of nanoparticle suspensions and other exotic ingredients, they have assembled materials layer by layer that have the same special properties as the organisms. Soon they hope to apply the method to create a synthetic surface inspired by thorny devil skin.

Though impressed by biological structures, Cohen and Rubner consider nature merely a starting point for innovation. "You don't have to reproduce a lizard skin to make a watercollection device, or a moth eye to make an antireflective coating," Cohen says. "The natural structure provides a clue to what is useful in a mechanism. But maybe you can do it better." Lessons from the thorny devil may enhance the water-collection technology they have developed based on the microstructure of the Namib beetle, which they're working to make into water-harvesting materials, graffiti-proof paints, and self-decontaminating surfaces for kitchens and hospitals. Or the work may take them in entirely new directions. Ultimately they consider a biomimetics project a success only if it has the potential to make a useful tool for people. "Looking at pretty structures in nature is not sufficient," says Cohen. "What I want to know is, Can we actually transform these structures into an embodiment with true utility in the real world?"

Which, of course, is the tricky bit. Potentially one of the most useful embodiments of natural design is the bio-inspired robot, which could be deployed in places where people would be too conspicuous, bored to tears, or killed. But such robots are notoriously difficult to build. Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has taken on one of the biggest challenges of all: to create a miniature robotic fly that is swift, small, and maneuverable enough for use in surveillance or search-and-rescue operations.

If a blowfly had buzzed into Fearing's office when we first sat down on a warm March afternoon, the windows flung wide to the garden-like Berkeley campus, I would have swatted it away without a second thought. By the time Fearing finished explaining why he had chosen it as the model for his miniature aircraft, I would have fallen on bended knee in admiration. With wings beating 150 times per second, it hovers, soars, and dives with uncanny agility. From straight-line flight it can turn 90 degrees in under 50 milliseconds —a maneuver that would rip the Stealth fighter to shreds.

The key to making his micromechanical flying insect (MFI) work, Fearing said, isn't to attempt to copy the fly, but to isolate the structures crucial to its feats of flying, while keeping a sharp eye out for simpler—and perhaps better—ways to perform its highly complex operations. "The fly's wing is driven by 20 muscles, some of which only fire every fifth wing beat, and all you can do is wonder, What on Earth just happened there?" says Fearing. "Some things are just too mysterious and complicated to be able to replicate."

After CalTech neurobiologist Michael Dickinson used foot-long plastic wings flapping in two tons of mineral oil to demonstrate how the fly's U-shaped beat kept it aloft, Fearing whittled the complexity of the wing joint down to something he could manufacture. What he came up with resembles a tiny automobile differential; though lacking the fly's mystical 20-muscle poetry, it can still bang out U-shaped beats at high speed. To drive the wing, he needed piezoelectric actuators, which at high frequencies can generate more power than fly muscle can. Yet when he asked machinists to manufacture a ten-milligram actuator, he got blank stares. "People told me, 'Holy cow! I can do a ten-gram actuator,' which was bigger than our whole fly."

So Fearing made his own, one of which he held up with tweezers for me to see, a gossamer wand some 11 millimeters long and not much thicker than a cat's whisker. Fearing has been forced to manufacture many of the other minute components of his fly in the same way, using a micromachining laser and a rapid prototyping system that allows him to design his minuscule parts in a computer, automatically cut and cure them overnight, and assemble them by hand the next day under a microscope.

With the microlaser he cuts the fly's wings out of a two-micron polyester sheet so delicate that it crumples if you breathe on it and must be reinforced with carbon-fiber spars. The wings on his current model flap at 275 times per second—faster than the insect's own wings—and make the blowfly's signature buzz. "Carbon fiber outperforms fly chitin," he said, with a trace of self-satisfaction. He pointed out a protective plastic box on the lab bench, which contained the fly-bot itself, a delicate, origami-like framework of black carbon-fiber struts and hairlike wires that, not surprisingly, looks nothing like a real fly. A month later it achieved liftoff in a controlled flight on a boom. Fearing expects the fly-bot to hover in two or three years, and eventually to bank and dive with flylike virtuosity.

To find a biomimetic bot already up and running—or at least ambling—one need only cross the bay to Palo Alto. Ever since the fifth century B.C., when Aristotle marveled at how a gecko "can run up and down a tree in any way, even with the head downward," people have wondered how the lizard manages its gravity-defying locomotion. Two years ago Stanford University roboticist Mark Cutkosky set out to solve this age-old conundrum, with a gecko-inspired climber that he christened Stickybot.

In reality, gecko feet aren't sticky—they're dry and smooth to the touch—and owe their remarkable adhesion to some two billion spatula-tipped filaments per square centimeter on their toe pads, each filament only a hundred nanometers thick. These filaments are so small, in fact, that they interact at the molecular level with the surface on which the gecko walks, tapping into the low-level van der Waals forces generated by molecules' fleeting positive and negative charges, which pull any two adjacent objects together. To make the toe pads for Stickybot, Cutkosky and doctoral student Sangbae Kim, the robot's lead designer, produced a urethane fabric with tiny bristles that end in 30-micrometer points. Though not as flexible or adherent as the gecko itself, they hold the 500-gram robot on a vertical surface.

But adhesion, Cutkosky found, is only part of the gecko's game. In order to move swiftly—and geckos can scamper up a vertical surface at one meter per second—its feet must also unstick effortlessly and instantly. To understand how the lizard does this, Cutkosky sought the aid of biologists Bob Full, an expert in animal locomotion, and Kellar Autumn, probably the world's foremost authority on gecko adhesion. Through painstaking anatomical studies, force tests on individual gecko hairlets, and slow-motion analysis of lizards running on vertical treadmills, Full and Autumn discovered that gecko adhesion is highly directional: Its toes stick only when dragged downward, and they release when the direction of pull is reversed.

With this in mind, Cutkosky endowed his robot with seven-segmented toes that drag and release just like the lizard's, and a gecko-like stride that snugs it to the wall. He also crafted Stickybot's legs and feet with a process he calls shape deposition manufacturing (SDM), which combines a range of metals, polymers, and fabrics to create the same smooth gradation from stiff to flexible that is present in the lizard's limbs and absent in most man-made materials. SDM also allows him to embed actuators, sensors, and other specialized structures that make Stickybot climb better. Then he noticed in a paper on gecko anatomy that the lizard had branching tendons to distribute its weight evenly across the entire surface of its toes. Eureka. "When I saw that, I thought, Wow, that's great!" He subsequently embedded a branching polyester cloth "tendon" in his robot's limbs to distribute its load in the same way.

Stickybot now walks up vertical surfaces of glass, plastic, and glazed ceramic tile, though it will be some time before it can keep up with a gecko. For the moment it can walk only on smooth surfaces, at a mere four centimeters per second, a fraction of the speed of its biological role model. The dry adhesive on Stickybot's toes isn't self-cleaning like the lizard's either, so it rapidly clogs with dirt. "There are a lot of things about the gecko that we simply had to ignore," Cutkosky says. Still, a number of real-world applications are in the offing. The Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funds the project, has it in mind for surveillance: an automaton that could slink up a building and perch there for hours or days, monitoring the terrain below. Cutkosky hypothesizes a range of civilian uses. "I'm trying to get robots to go places where they've never gone before," he told me. "I would like to see Stickybot have a real-world function, whether it's a toy or another application. Sure, it would be great if it eventually has a lifesaving or humanitarian role.…"

His voice trailed off, in a wistful, almost apologetic tone I had heard undercutting the optimism of several other biomimeticists. For all their differences in background, temperament, and ultimate aims, most practitioners conclude their enthusiastic discourses on their bio-inspired invention with a few halfhearted theories on how it may someday make its way into the real world. Often it sounds like wishful thinking.

For all the power of the biomimetics paradigm, and the brilliant people who practice it, bio-inspiration has led to surprisingly few mass-produced products and arguably only one household word—Velcro, which was invented in 1948 by Swiss chemist George de Mestral, by copying the way cockleburs clung to his dog's coat. In addition to Cutkosky's lab, five other high-powered research teams are currently trying to mimic gecko adhesion, and so far none has come close to matching the lizard's strong, directional, self-cleaning grip. Likewise, scientists have yet to meaningfully re-create the abalone nanostructure that accounts for the strength of its shell, and several well-funded biotech companies have gone bankrupt trying to make artificial spider silk. Why?

Some biomimeticists blame industry, whose short-term expectations about how soon a project should be completed and become profitable clash with the time-consuming nature of biomimetics research. Others lament the difficulty in coordinating joint work among diverse academic and industrial disciplines, which is required to understand natural structures and mimic what they do. But the main reason biomimetics hasn't yet come of age is that from an engineering standpoint, nature is famously, fabulously, wantonly complex. Evolution doesn't "design" a fly's wing or a lizard's foot by working toward a final goal, as an engineer would—it blindly cobbles together myriad random experiments over thousands of generations, resulting in wonderfully inelegant organisms whose goal is to stay alive long enough to produce the next generation and launch the next round of random experiments. To make the abalone's shell so hard, 15 different proteins perform a carefully choreographed dance that several teams of top scientists have yet to comprehend. The power of spider silk lies not just in the cocktail of proteins that it is composed of, but in the mysteries of the creature's spinnerets, where 600 spinning nozzles weave seven different kinds of silk into highly resilient configurations.

The multilayered character of much natural engineering makes it particularly difficult to penetrate and pluck apart. The gecko's feet work so well not just because of their billions of tiny nanohairs, but also because those hairs grow on larger hairs, which in turn grow on toe ridges that are part of bigger toe pads, and so on up to the centimeter scale, creating a seven-part hierarchy that maximizes the lizard's cling to all climbing surfaces. For the present, people cannot hope to reproduce such intricate nanopuzzles. Nature, however, assembles them effortlessly, molecule by molecule, following the recipe for complexity encoded in DNA. As engineer Mark Cutkosky says, "The price that we pay for complexity at small scales is vastly higher than the price nature pays."

Nonetheless the gap with nature is gradually closing. Researchers are using electron- and atomic-force microscopes, microtomography, and high-speed computers to peer ever deeper into nature's microscale and nanoscale secrets, and a growing array of advanced materials to mimic them more accurately than ever before. And even before biomimetics matures into a commercial industry, it has itself developed into a powerful new tool for understanding life. Berkeley animal locomotion expert Bob Full uses what he learns to build running, climbing, and crawling robots—and they in turn have taught him certain fundamental rules of animal movement. He has discovered, for example, that every land animal, from centipedes to kangaroos to humans, has precisely the same springiness in its legs and generates the same relative energy when it runs. Kellar Autumn, the gecko-adhesion specialist and a former student of Full's, regularly borrows bits of Cutkosky's Stickybot to compare them with the animal's natural structures and to test central assumptions about gecko biology that cannot be learned from the geckos themselves.

"It's no problem to apply a 0.2 Newton preload to a patch of gecko adhesive and drag it in a distal direction at one micron per second," Autumn says. "But try asking a gecko to do the same thing with its foot. It'll probably just bite you."

amphibious amphicoach tourist bus

網上看到水陸兩用的遊覽車，想到跨界的設計，設計原型的意義。曾經聽到有人說，原型是根本、本質、不可在減少的性質之類的說法，應該是基本型的意思。我對於原型，不是抱持這樣的想法。相反地，原型不是事物基本的性質，而是打破事物既有性質的方式，藉此重夠事物的秩序。而這輛車是一個小小的示範，如何重構我們對事物的認知。

i browsed the internet and found this interesting amphibious tourist bus which reminds me the meaning of a "prototype", a crossing boundary design. i heard some people defined a prototype as an essensial, unreduceable object which means "Being basic!". as for me, i disagree this aspect. In the opposite, a prototype is a way by which we break the existing organizational structure and redefine its texture order. this amiphicoach is an example which shows how we re-construct our definition towards a "tourist bus" or the boundary between land and water.

Rotating Tower in Dubai

可動的建築在我當學生的時候，是不太會做設計的把戲。「建築是永恆的！」會動是褻瀆建築的神聖性。奇怪的是時間總是拿真理開玩笑，嘻！在我後來的設計中，也把可動的特質納入設計的思考。不過在建築教育的環境裡，會動仍被視為是低階的設計手法。相信kinetic, transformable, adaptive, interactive, 你們的光榮的日子快到了！再撐一下喔！

不過杜拜這個大樓倒是有點邪惡！只有動感，權勢，不太有「可變式」的精神。