Read about Buckminster Fuller – architect, inventor, innovator, designer, futurist.

Evolution at work Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab.

User Designer has been very quiet because I was on holidays and attending the Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 conference, where I presented Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences. Yet again AVI was an enjoyable conference with lots of friendly faces. Unfortunately its only on every two years.

While in Italy I headed to Pompeii and unexpectedly stumbled upon a 2000 year old bistable optical illusion mosaic in The House of the Faun. Wow. I hadn’t realised the Romans and Greeks used optical illusions in their art. Below is a photo of the mosaic:

Scientists have created an entire synthetic genome. Another important step towards making biological nanobot “machines”, which would be extremely useful as smart malleable materials.

Very very blog relevant and interesting Call For Papers: Imagining Domestic Interiors. This is one CFP I’ll definitely be working towards! Robots are set to play an increasing role in our everyday lives, particularly in our domestic interiors. Already, they have found their way into vacuum cleaners, sweepers, mops, and other automated service machines for the home. Looking beyond these largely predictable developments, advances in self-configurable and adaptive robots promise some radically new possibilities. Our furniture, for example, may be host to interconnected assemblies of robotic modules that can re-configure themselves to suit different purposes, events, or even moods. An adaptive home interior might also physically age with its occupants, conforming to their changing needs and operating to support their states of development and health. (rest…)

What Kind of Genius Are You? Slow burn or short fast bright bright bright.

This post is dedicated to Molly “Isn’t it only natural”.

We can simulate you. Out Of The Blue is an engaging article about whether a supercomputer can be used to simulate a biologically accurate brain. Sounds like they’re getting real results.

Nanoscale pretty.

We can model you and you and you and everyone. Use Geosimulation to model urban panic. Pruned (a neat blog) has a good writeup on Paul Torrens related research.

Florian Kräutli has designed and created malleable magnetic curtains that retain their shape. Clunky elegance.

Embodied Cognition “is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes.” Learn more about this increasingly important area from this website. (via MindHacks)

Gimme gimme one of the Emotiv Brain-Computer Interface headsets. No contact gel required. Of course you could always build your own based on designs from the OpenEEG project.

Neat video of a time fountain optical illusion. Looks like water is running backward defying gravity and hanging in mid-air.

Pod-a-licious: Talking Robots: The Podcast on Robotics and A.I. has lots of very interesting audio interviews with researchers who are deeply into flying insect robots, robot brains & emotions, bionic design, robot & human teams, etc, etc.

Some good introductory tutorials on building Graphical User Interfaces in Matlab.

Go on – learn how to dance properly with Zefrank.

For when you’re in a dancing mood and craving some eye candy: lots and lots of music videos “that overlap the music video format with architecture, landscape and/or urbanism”.

Get lost in a world of great Human-Computer Interaction, Usability and Interaction Design resources with the excellent HCI Bibliography.

Of course, not forgetting a big welcome to all the new blog subscribers. There’s a load of you! I’m all ears for your interesting links and suggestions.