Jonas Salk stated that the most powerful way to improve society’s health would be to create an epidemic of health. Health would be contagious, spreading from person to person around the globe.

Today, in our open social networked world, we have created an environment in which massive, global changes can happen with startling speed from which dramatic new advances in health and wellness may now emerge. Inspired by Salk’s vision, Sputnik Observatory has undertaken a study to identify out-there possibilities that have the ability to propel health as a ‘social contagion.’

There is a paradigm shift underway: each and everyone one of us will be active participants in our health, monitoring, treating and enhancing our moods, emotions and well-being. In our increasingly interdependent world, we will reward each other for being healthy. This dramatic shift will enable society to move towards shared investment that drives lasting, behavioral change for a more healthier, brighter, sustainable future for all.

We will be collaborating with several partners to create a public program that brings greater awareness to the possibilities in which we can all participate in a more healthy and vibrant society. Updates will be posted here, but in the meantime, please join us in our mission to make health contagious.

Kindly share your thoughts below on “How we can create a society that’s addicted to health?”

Thank you.

Recommended Blog: Particle Decelerator

Particle Decelerator (www.decelerator.blogspot.com/) collects together particles of news and information about the worlds of science, art and technology, placing a special emphasis on the collision between the quantum and the cosmological. It aims to slow down particles of data in order to grasp them more coherently.

Particle Decelerator covers 22 diverse fields from art and dark matter to sound and strange.

The list is in: An official roster of 29 registered teams selected to compete for the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE, an unprecedented competition to send a robot to the Moon that travels at least 500 meters and transmit video, images, and data back to the Earth.

The global competition, the largest in history, was announced in September 2007, with a winner projected by 2015.

The winning team will need to complete its mission before December 31, 2015 to win the $20 million first prize ($15 million if the winning team is a government agency). Other prizes will be awarded for feats such as surviving the freezing lunar night or traveling five kilometers, for finding water, touching down near an Apollo landing site, and for “stimulating diversity” in space exploration.

Plans to transport the robotic vehicles to the Moon include US government-backed space agencies, private US agencies such as SpaceX, a company set up by Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, and agencies in Russia, China, and elsewhere.

The announcement of the official roster of registered teams comes at a time when this new era of lunar exploration has received great recognition and credibility. Recently, NASA, the U.S. civil space agency, announced that it will purchase data related to innovative lunar missions from six Google Lunar X PRIZE teams, with contracts worth as much as $10 million each. These purchases demonstrate how public and private space exploration alike will play an important role in making missions to the Moon financially sustainable.

via Google XPrize

Photo of artist courtesy of James Fuentes LLC

James Fuentes LLC, a New York City gallery, is featuring a solo exhibition with Alison Knowles, best known as a founding member and notably the first woman to participate in Fluxus. (Fluxus, an international art movement of artists, composers and designers in the 1960s, blended different media, disciplines and happenings, often described as ‘intermedia.’ Notable pioneers include John Cage and George Maciunas.)

Comprised of sculptural works made from paper and found materials, the exhibition represents over forty years of Alison Knowlesʼ life in New York City. The works entice an extreme interest in paper. Made of raw flax, cotton and abaca fiber, the paper becomes a sculptural element to house an assortment of found objects and the base material for wall panels.

In Knowles own words:

I collect shoe heels ….
I am not hunting usually, just rushing to get somewhere like everybody else, but suddenly,
Unexpectedly, akin to a found item, a found time opens up….
The heel I pick up. …quickly, offhandedly …gets stashed in my pocket.
There is a chemistry peculiar to the mysterious terrain I find myself in at that time….
I love to surf the street….
At home it gets cleaned, studied, it is drawn in silhouette, perhaps screen-printed with the name of an animal….
You know the worn shoe heels cannot be bought. Not for sale anywhere.
Isn’t it special to have recognized the energy expended in a shoe heel.
(Originally quoted in Julia Robinson, “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowlesʼs Bean and Variations,” College Art Association Journal, 2004.)

The exhibition “Clear Skies All Week” is open February 23 – April 3, 2011
There will be a reception with the artist Alison Knowles on Wednesday, March 9, 6 – 8 PM.
James Fuentes LLC, 55 Delancey Street, New York, NY

Image by Raúl Rojas/Freie Universität Berlin

Imagine you could drive your car using only your thoughts. Raúl Rojas a professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Freie Universität Berlin and his team have demonstrated how a driver can use a brain interface to steer a vehicle. Dubbed the ‘BrainDriver’ project, it is part of a larger research project into autonomous driving, which they call “MadeInGermany.”

To record brain activity, the researchers use an Emotiv “neuroheadset,” an electroencephalography, or EEG, sensor by San Francisco-based company Emotiv, which design it for gaming. After a few rounds of “mental training,” the driver learns to move virtual objects only by thinking. Each action corresponds to a different brain activity pattern, and the BrainDriver software associates the patterns to specific commands—turn left, turn right, accelerate, etc. The researchers then feed these commands to the drive-by-wire system of the vehicle, a modified Volkswagen Passat Variant 3c. Now the driver’s thoughts can control the engine, brakes, and steering.

The researchers caution that the BrainDriver application is still a demonstration and is not ready for the road. But they say that future human-machine interfaces like this have huge potential to improve driving, especially in combination with autonomous vehicles. As an example, they mention an autonomous cab ride, where the passenger could decide, only by thinking, which route to take when more than one possibility exist.

This type of non-invasive brain interface could also allow disabled and paralyzed people to gain more mobility in the future, similarly to what is already happening in applications such as robotic exoskeletons and mind-controlled prosthetics.

Watch the researchers road test of the brain-controlled car on YouTube.

Via IEEE Spectrum

Photo via cymascope.com

In an important breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language, researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water.

The key to this technique is the CymaScope, a new instrument that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially. Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water. The resulting “CymaGlyphs,” as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin ‘picture word.’

Certain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean (dolphins, whales and porpoises) sounds only as graphs of frequency and amplitude. The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin’s natural environment—water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.

Within the field of cetacean research, theory states that dolphins have evolved the ability to translate dimensional information from their echolocation sonic beam. The CymaScope has the ability to visualize dimensional structure within sound. CymaGlyph patterns may resemble what the creatures perceive from their own returning sound beams and from the sound beams of other dolphins.

The team has recognized that sound does not travel in waves, as is popularly believed, but in expanding holographic bubbles and beams. The holographic aspect stems from the physics theory that even a single molecule of air or water carries all the information that describes the qualities and intensity of a given sound. At frequencies audible to humans (20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz) the sound-bubble form dominates; above 20,000 Hertz the shape of sound becomes increasingly beam shaped, similar to a lighthouse beam in appearance.

Reid explained their novel sound imaging technique: “Whenever sound bubbles or beams interact with a membrane, the sound vibrations imprint onto its surface and form a CymaGlyph, a repeatable pattern of energy. The CymaScope employs the surface tension of water as a membrane because water reacts quickly and is able to reveal intricate architectures within the sound form. These fine details can be captured on camera.”

The study of wave phenomena and vibration is called Cymatics, a scientific methodology that demonstrates the vibratory nature of matter and the transformational nature of sound, made popular by Hans Jenny, a medical doctor, scientist and researcher who captured cymatic images.

via Cymascope

Biologist Brian Goodwin explains to SPTNK how health cannot be measured by a thermometer, health is a quality of feeling.

Listen here: Brian Goodwin – Coherence

Biologist Don Ingber tells SPTNK how cells work collectively with other cells and develop very robust behaviors in very noisy and variable environments through interconnection.

Listen here: Don Ingber – Frequency

Space Entrepreneur Robert Bigelow tells SPTNK in a short time there will be no comparison between the technologies of those with robust, large facilities in microgravity and those that are terrestrial bound.

Listen here: Robert Bigelow – Periodic Table

Associate Professor, Yale School of Architecture, Michelle Addington asks SPTNK to “imagine if a thin piece of glass can behave like a thick wall”

Listen here: Michelle Addington – Thermal Boundary