Architect Craig Hodgetts designed this awesome art for a movie of Ecotopia, but he actually put tons of thought into how everything would work. (Look at the captions in the gallery for more info on each image.) It's like peering inside an alternate history, where maglev trains with beanbag seats, and wind-power generating balloons, became commonplace.

In Ecotopia, the Westernmost U.S. states secede and form their own country, with a liberal woman president. Hodgetts says if the movie had gotten off the ground, he would have scrapped much of the storyline of Callenbach's novel and focused on trying to create a kid-friendly movie, with lots and lots of marketable toys and "consumables." Ah, capitalism. It sort of warms your heart to think of it.

More pics, and interview, at the link. [A/N Blog, thanks to Designguybrown]

According to a recent report from the National Science Foundation, it's time for us to figure out exactly what might be going on with these slimy-bodied invertebrates:

In recent years, massive blooms of stinging jellyfish and jellyfish-like creatures have overrun some of the world’s most important fisheries and tourist destinations—even transforming large swaths of them into veritable jellytoriums. The result: injuries (sometimes serious) to water enthusiasts and even occasional deaths.

Jellyfish swarms have also damaged fisheries, fish farms, seabed mining operations, desalination plants and large ships. And proving that jellyfish can be political animals, knots of jellyfish have done the work of anti-nuclear activists: they have disabled nuclear power plants by clogging intake pipes.

In short, since the 1980s, worldwide jellyfish blooms have caused hundreds of millions—or perhaps even billions—of dollars in losses. Worldwide reports of massive jellyfish blooms are triggering speculation that jellyfish swarms are increasing because of human activities. But are they?

The report presents a swarm locations map, showing areas where scientists or journalists have identified sharp rises in the number of jellyfish present. That list includes Australia, the Mediterranean, Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf Coast, the Bering Sea, Hawaii, the Black Sea, the waters around Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and even the coast of Namibia. NSF claims that environmental stress is to blame for these swarms, so we can add "giant jelly armies" to the list of disasters caused by global climate change.

The important question is: How much of this happens to be our fault? In a chart of all possible stresses that might affect our gloopy sea neighbors, the report pinpoints these five: invasions of non-native jellyfish, pollution, climate change, over-harvesting of fish, and dams. Humans are to blame for at least four of these. Whoops.

To make up for the havoc we may have wreaked on the ecosystem of these jellies (and to avoid getting Irukandji syndrome from a venemous horde of Australian box jellyfish, say), humans must get a handle on the causes of and solutions to this abnormal swarm activity. This NSF report is a good start.

Special Report: Jellyfish Gone Wild [National Science Foundation]

Pacific sea nettle jellyfish image from Wikimedia Commons.

A team from UC Santa Barbara is working on this very question, and they've just published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They believe Earth is in its sixth mass extinction, which will kill off nearly 50% of all plant and animal species. Figuring out which endangered plants to save may be the key to minimizing the ecological impact of this particular extinction:

"Losing a very unique species may be worse than losing one with a close relative in the community," said [co-author Todd] Oakley. "The more evolutionary history that is represented in a plant community, the more productive it is."

[Post-doctoral fellow Marc W.] Cadotte explained that the buttercup is a very unique species, evolutionarily. Losing the buttercup, where it occurs in grasslands, would have a much bigger impact on the system than losing a daisy or a sunflower, for example. The latter species are closely related. Each could therefore help fill the niche of the other, if one were to be lost. The daisy and sunflower also have a more similar genetic make-up.

It may be a sad day for the daisy, but ensuring the survival of a genetically diverse array of plant life will help ensure a sufficient level of biomass, and could reduce the devastation a mass extinction would cause.

Image by Martin Heigan.

Current Mass Extinction Spurs Major Study of Which Plants to Save [via Science Blog]

The EDITT Tower, which represents Ecological Design in the Tropics, was designed by Malaysian architecture firm TR Hamzah & Yeang with an eye toward sustainability, adaptability, and ecological improvement. It will employ photovoltaic panels to harness solar energy as well as a plant to convert sewage into biogas and fertilizer. Like many urban areas, Singapore’s ecosystem is considered “zero culture,” an ecologically devastated site cleared of vegetation. The plant life on the EDITT Tower will improve the region’s biodiversity and bring the populace in daily contact with a variety of plant life:

Approximately half of the surface area of the EDITT Tower will be wrapped in organic local vegetation, and passive architecture will allow for natural ventilation. Publicly accessible ramps will connect upper floors to the street level lined in shops, restaurants and plant life. The building has also been designed for future adaptability, with many walls and floors that can be moved or removed. In a city known for its downpours, the building will collect rainwater and integrate a grey-water system for both plant irrigation and toilet flushing with an estimated 55% self-sufficiency.

Singapore’s Ecological EDITT Tower [inhabitat]

The New York Times' Dot Earth blog asked one of the researchers, Simon Carn, to interpret the satellite photos. Carn said:

The images clearly show the high SO2 emissions from sources in northeast China. China is the world’s largest SO2 emitter, mostly due to the burning of high-sulfur coal in its many coal-fired power plants, which lack the technology used in many other countries to remove sulfur from smoke stack emissions. The eastern Europe image shows a few SO2 ‘hot spots’ in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey - these are probably also power plants or metal smelters. The hot spot in Sicily is the active volcano Mt Etna - volcanoes are probably the second largest source of SO2 after anthropogenic emissions.

The main region of elevated SO2 in the USA image is the Ohio Valley and SW Pennsylvania, where there is a high concentration of coal-fired power plants (shown as diamond symbols on the image).

The significance of SO2 (apart from as a component of acid rain) is that it is a precursor of sulfate aerosol (sulfuric acid droplets), which is the main ingredient of the haze often seen in polluted regions. Sulfate aerosol is a health hazard, limits visibility, degrades buildings, reflects solar radiation (cooling the climate) and also impacts cloud properties (increasing their lifetime and reducing rainfall).

No word on how the Chinese cloud-seeding techniques to prevent rain during the Olympics are affecting any of this.

What Will Cure China's Sulfurous Skies? [Dot Earth]

As a biologist who studies whole organisms and populations, I find that more and more of biology (in terms of funding, positions and emphasis) is going to the sub-organismal level. We now have lots of cell biologists, geneticists, neurologists, biochemists, biomechanics, bioengineers and so on, but not a lot of behaviorists, population ecologists, biodemographers and others who study the emergent properties that arise at the higher levels of organization. What role, if any, do you foresee for understanding of these higher level biological phenomena in the future sci-fi-ish stuff?

As far as emerging biotechnology goes, science fiction grapples more frequently (if not always very seriously) with issues of organismal or ecological impact than the scientific establishment. There are good reasons for this. Ecological ruminations are a tradition for the authors, and the scientists have - until quite recently - been limited by technical considerations. As a scientist, I hope the title Planetary Ecologist will go on someone's tax return someday.

A Sandworm of Arrakis, from Frank Herbert's Dune.

Some would say that Frank Herbert's Dune was the beginning of ecological science fiction, but its roots go much deeper than that. Every time an author has imagined an alien world and then tried to fill it with beings capable of surviving on it, that author is grappling with issues of ecology, and every time an author has decided how those aliens would act, they were engaging in a bit of recreational behaviorism. Herbert elevated the tone and raised the bar, no doubt, but there is a long-standing tradition of biological and behavioral what-if in SF. The rise of environmentalism coupled with another favorite SF theme - dystopianism - brought us the environmental disaster subgenre, from the ridiculous The Day After Tomorrow to more thoughtful treatments like David Brin's Earth or the works of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Mars (with a little terraforming and a lot of luck).

While there are (of course) ecologists in the scientific community, there are very few thus far that bridge the gap between research at the molecular level and ecologies larger than a tissue culture dish. This is not to imply that ecologists are ignorant of molecular biology; the field has generated far too many useful tools for that. The bioengineers and cell biologists who are designing new organisms at the molecular level, on the other hand, are not always well versed in the basics of ecology and evolution. They are necessarily focused on what one scientist has called the molecular sociology of the cell.

Up until quite recently it would have been ludicrous to expect a molecular biologist to consider the higher-level environmental interactions of, for example, a particular gene, because he or she was still trying to figure out (at a molecular level) what the damn gene did to the cell itself. Take a peek at the inner life of a cell (if you haven't seen if before). A single cell is a giant bag of confusion. Trying to sort out web of interactions between the thousands of molecules present in hundreds of compartments using the technology at hand has been compared to figuring out the rules for a game of football using only pictures of the field (that only show certain players) at various times. This is why many researchers like to work with single cells instead of a cell in its natural environment, whatever that is - the cell alone is complicated enough. Experimental limitations or therapeutic concerns often require an intimate knowledge of a single organism's physiology, effectively tying a researcher to a single animal. Heinlein said, "Specialization is for insects". I would add grad students to the list.

Take E. coli as an example. We've had its genome sequenced for over a decade. Type its name into Google Scholar and you'll find over 1.5 million hits. Yet programming this bacteria - synthetic biology - is still a difficult and time-consuming process. When The University of Texas at Austin's entered their light-sensitive pigment-producing bacteria biofilm in the intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) contest, they realized that their achievement barely scratched the surface - that the "program" they'd written into the bacteria was relatively simple compared to the programming it already used to survive. In recognition of this fact, they produced perhaps my favorite "Hello world" program ever.

10 GOTO e. coli 20 Hack it genetically to turn it into a light-sensitive film

It's also important to note that almost all of the engineered cells and organisms made today are never meant to be released in the environment (and wouldn't be likely to survive in it if they did). Those that aren't created purely for research purposes are typically meant to live in small, artificial, and easily replaceable ecologies, like bioreactors in a pharmaceutical company or fermenters in a winery.

Either the bacteria are doing what they've been programmed to or we have a serious Cthulhu problem.

Genetically modified foods are a special case, but as a special case they've already received the most attention by ecologists. GM organisms that are designed to move outside of the lab enter the purview of the ecologists.

While disciplines like bioinformatics combine computational and molecular biology with evolutionary studies, increasingly complicated bioengineered organisms designed for the wild will require the ability to effectively model the ecologies they were designed for. In brief, once we're good enough at figuring out how to make a cell jump or play dead, the next frontier of design will be figuring out when we want a cell to jump or play dead, considering its surroundings. Top image via Electro-Plankton.

Do you have questions you've always wanted to ask a biogeek? You can email me at tdj@io9.com.

The vault will hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds for the world's main food crops, allowing humanity to re-establish agriculture if our main food plants disappear due to a catastrophe. Already, "gene vaults" from Iraq and Afghanistan were destroyed due to the wars in those countries. Images by AP.

[AFP]

Robots are getting down all over the place in Japan. The i-Sobot and the Asimo are both dancing maniacs. Robots are shredding the violin strings and tossing old people like dolls.

The 2007 Robot Of The Year awards featured a Japanese surgical bot that can operate while the patient is inside an MRI. Photo by Junko Yagami, Getty Images.

Architecture is so much more radical in places like the United Arab Emirates, which is developing the next generation of sleek towers. Look at the mixed-use Tameer Towers, which uses locally cast light concrete and natural shade. The UAE recently came up with the idea of a "Cool City," which would use 60 percent less energy than other cities using renewable power and efficient waste management. Then there's that giant sail-shaped building. And The Pad, featured up top, just won Best International Apartment for 2007.

Maglev trains now link Shanghai's subway with its airport, and Mumbai is considering spending $7.56 billion to build 16 to 30 miles of high-speed maglev tracks linking the city with its suburbs. A maglev train uses magnetism to lift the train a small distance above its elevated track, and they featured prominently in the 1950s scifi comic Magnus Robot Fighter. Nowadays, when Mumbai imagines becoming a futuristic city, it looks with envy towards Shanghai. And so does Paris Hilton.

Maglev train outside Shanghai.

European fashion is coming up with designs that can keep you safer as well as looking studly. Just check out this solar-powered ski suit, which uses a special thin film technology to power "Golden Dragon" LEDs that light up at night. It should reduce collisions as well as making you look like a raver on ice.

And then there's stem cells. While the U.S. government continues to try to baptize the little fellers, leading researcher Alan Colman just announced he'll divide his time between cutting-edge stem cell facilities in London and Singapore. Colman, of course, is the man who cloned Dolly the Sheep.

So the U.S. really needs to step up its game. We should be putting people on Mars, creating robot break-dancers and pioneering new green cities linked by high-speed rail. Otherwise, we're collectively going to turn into that old guy who wears his pants under his armpits and shakes his head at all this new fancy whiz-buggery. And nobody wants that, except a handful of armpit-pants fetishists.