Are Motion Sickness Relief Bands Effective?

It seems that way. Motion sickness Relief Bands are thought to work by stimulating an acupressure point and interfering with nerve signals. Bear in mind that this is all theoretical. Presently, no one is absolutely sure why the product works or even if it works at all. So you may have to be the best judge as to whether it will work for you. The good news is that the electrical stimulation the Relief Bands provide is not unpleasant. Best of all, there are no side effects such as drowsiness, which is a common complaint from users of motion sickness relief medications.

There have not been any official studies to prove or disprove the effectiveness of motion sickness relief bands compared to regular medication, or even compared to a placebo. However, there are many people using them, and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that they work. Motion sickness relief bands do not cause any of the side effects associated with traditional medication, and are thought by many people to be an effective treatment. They can be a little expensive, but they only need to be purchased once and last a very long time, whereas with medication you need to replace it every time it runs out.

The lack of side effects, and the ability to tweak the strength setting to find the right one for the situation means that motion sickness relief bands can be effective for a variety of situations. If you are a motion sickness sufferer, and find that you cannot reduce the symptoms through other means, then a motion sickness relief band could be the solution you are looking for.

http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Darlene-Berkel-1624/motion-sickness-relief-bands-20366.php

Producing Worst Nausea

Walter Johnson examined the question of what kinds of motion would cause the worst motion sickness. "This research culminated in a new finding, an essential finding, as to how the inner ear is maximally stimulated to produce nausea," he said. "We showed that the inner ear acts like a gyroscope. If you spin it in one plane and tilt the gyro in another plane, forces are set up to produce a stronger stimulus that is very nauseating. Say you’re in boat or plane that’s pitching up and down and your turn your head sideways—that’s the worse thing you could do. It’s more effective in causing nausea than anything."

The researchers invented diabolical machines that "would produce these terrible effects on people," said Johnson, who created a device that produced vertigo by spinning test subjects around like a top. Later, another machine, called the Precision Angular Mover, was developed; it rotated test subjects around all three axes—pitch, yaw and roll.

For vertical motion (heave), oscillation at a frequency of about 0.2 hz is the most provocative. (http://www.dizziness-and-balance.com/disorders/central/motion.htm)

http://www.space.gc.ca/asc/eng/astronauts/osm_aviation.asp

Thoughts on Sound Movement and Meaning

Rudolf Laban assumes the notion of impulse, the idea that every movement is the fruit of some
preparation, and identifies the following as effects that the dancer's initial impulse might produce :
fundamental movement, of part(s) of the body
tactile effect, a part of the body touches something else
support effect, a part of the body carries weight
prehensile effect, a part of the body grasps something
ambulatory effect, successive support-effects result in progressive movement
saltatory effect, the body is propelled into the air briefly
rebounce effect, thrusting or pushing away from
swinging or pendulum effect, passive hanging down of the body from some support.

Thoughts on Sound Movement and Meaning by Roger Reynolds, Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 16, No. 2. (Spring - Summer, 1978), pp. 181-190.

Coriolis Illusion

This involves the simultaneous stimulation of two semicircular canals and is associated with a sudden tilting (forward or backwards) of the pilot's head while the aircraft is turning. This can occur when you tilt your head down (to look at an approach chart or to write a note on your knee pad), or tilt it up (to look at an overhead instrument or switch) or tilt it sideways. This produces an almost unbearable sensation that the aircraft is rolling, pitching, and yawing all at the same time, which can be compared with the sensation of rolling down on a hillside. This illusion can make the pilot quickly become disoriented and lose control of the aircraft.

More spatial orientation illusions

The pilots' enjoyment of the spinning machines seems to come from surprises. "It's often connected to the unexpected," Bles says. Tilt the head while spinning with the eyes closed, for example, and suddenly, an intense tumbling sensation called the Coriolis illusion comes into play. "People find it fascinating," says Bles, "a very nice and unexpected sensation of movement." _Newsientist

D-BOX Quest Motion-Simulation Seat

D-BOX Seat has a 2-axis motion simulator system that's synchronized with onscreen action and sound. D-BOX actually encodes movies into their proprietary F/X motion codes that they can then download into the system. The idea is that viewers can then be physically immersed in the movie. The seating can be controlled with a Kinetron controller, or with a "Motion Controller Interface" and some PC software. There's also an Internet subscription service that allows users to access the D-BOX F/X Motion Code library, so that they can download the codes for the movie of their choice.

The Custom Motion Platform (lower picture) can be integrated in an existing (retrofit) or new home theater environments. It is typically configured with a recessed floor platform arrangement. Up to four seating combinations may be placed on a single platform.

Fastest Man on Earth

Col. John Paul Stapp, who rode a rocket sled to become the "fastest man on Earth" in 1954, died Saturday at his home in Alamogordo, New Mexico at age 89.

Stapp became an aerospace pioneer when he rode a rocket-driven sled to near-supersonic speeds to study the effects of extreme deceleration. As an aerospace physician, Stapp strove to understand the stresses jet pilots would face, including the rigors of ejecting during high-speed flight. He became his own test subject in 29 rocket-sled experiments. According to one aerospace historian, Stapp's Air Force Colleagues called him "one of the bravest men in the world."

He made his most famous ride on December 10, 1954. On that day, a rocket sled accelerated him from a standstill to a speed of 632 miles per hour in only five seconds. The sled was then brought to a stop in 1.4 seconds, subjecting Stapp to g-forces up to 40 times normal gravity. His expertise in medicine and biophysics allowed him to diagnose the effects of the punishing ride during and after the event.

Stapp's experiments were used to help design safer aircraft and ejection seats, and gave researchers an idea of the stresses that might be experienced by future space travelers.

His work also had more down-to-earth benefits. It demonstrated the efficacy of wearing a seatbelt or safety harness in a car or airplane, showing that people were more likely to survive the impact involved in vehicular crashes if they used such restraints.

Postliteral Society

A postliterate society is a society wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary. Many advanced science-fiction societies are postliterate. In the Earth society in Dan Simmons's Ilium (novel), for example, only Savi and Harman can read; Savi is a relic from an earlier age, and Harman is a contemporary of the society that has taught himself how to read.

Postliterate is markedly different from preliterate. A preliterate society has not yet discovered how to read and write; a postliterate society has moved beyond the need for reading and writing. All information is either transmitted via sound or some other, more complex means. Postliteracy is sometimes considered a sign that a society is approaching the technological singularity.

Following that, it is safe to presume that postiliterate writing will be asemic:

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content”.

Illegible, invented, or primal scripts (cave paintings, doodles, children’s drawings, etc.) are all influences upon asemic writing. But instead of being thought of as mimicry of preliterate expression, asemic writing can be considered as a postliterate style of writing that uses all forms of creativity for inspiration.

Some asemic writing has pictograms or ideograms, which suggest a meaning through their shape. Other forms are shapeless and exist as pure conception within the garden of imagination and experience.

Asemic writing has no verbal sense, though it may have clear textual sense. Through its formatting and structure, asemic writing may suggest a type of document and, thereby, suggest a meaning. The form of art is still writing, often calligraphic in form, and either depends on a reader’s sense and knowledge of writing systems for it to make sense, or can be understood through aesthetic intuition.

Asemic writing can also be seen as a relative perception, whereby unknown languages and forgotten scripts provide templates and platforms for new modes of expression.

The Brave New World

Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1932. Set in London in 2540 (or AF 632), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering, and sleep-learning that combine to change society.

The world the novel describes is a utopia, albeit an ironic one: humanity is carefree, healthy and technologically advanced. Warfare and poverty have been eliminated and everyone is permanently happy due to government-provided stimulation. The irony is that all of these things have been achieved by eliminating many things that humans consider to be central to their identity — family, culture, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy. It is also a hedonistic society, deriving pleasure from promiscuous sex and drug use, especially the use of soma, a powerful drug taken to escape pain and bad memories through hallucinatory fantasies. Additionally, stability has been achieved and is maintained via deliberately engineered and rigidly enforced social stratification.

Designing "real" Haunted House

Press one button and there's a distinct chill in the bedroom. Press another and weird vibrations set hairs on end in the study. And over by the fireplace in the dimly lit living room, amid the flickering shadows, you catch fleeting images out of the corner of your eye. Was it a child, an old hag, or...just the light playing tricks?
Newscientist

Disaster machines: Simulating nature's fury

via Newscientist

Theme Park as the Spectacle

Can one perceive, in these Situationist texts of 1933-58 (Disneyland opened in 1955), an impulse towards a politicized Disneyland-the theme park as Situation and unitary urban field? "That which changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than what changes our way of seeing painting. . . . It is necessary to throw new forces into the battle of leisure.
...
The comforts of Disneyland and Disney World reveal a paradox of control by presenting the highest degree of user-friendliness in a human-technology interface while situating it within a
massively centralized apparatus.
...
All this occurs within the most protected, centralized, and technocratic of environments: complex spaces that raise pertinent questions for the understanding of techno-cultural formations; spaces that present both a traditionally grounded humanization of technology and the disembodying postmodern experience of a technological sublime; an installation which is the most extensive and explicit of strategic spaces, but which assimilates visitor tactics in the process of building a technological interface. Here Baudrillard's most euphoric and despairing pronouncements both find continual figuration.

There's Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience by Scott Bukatman,
October, Vol. 57. (Summer, 1991), pp. 55-78.

Denis Darzacq

INERS Passive Working Devices

The machines in Antal Lakner’s INERS Passive Working Devices series transform seemingly meaningful human activity—the individual phases of repetitional production processes—into meaningless physical exertion, leisure activity and entertainment, whilst immaterialising work itself. The idea of buying a wall-painting workout machine and turning work into sport by painting a non-existent wall, sawing, or pushing a make-believe wheelbarrow is, of course, no more absurd than being the proud owner of an indoor bike or a rowing bench. However, the question arises just what exactly we are working on (or out) when sweating away on these reality-replacing, virtual machines? Obviously ourselves. The reason why we give ourselves up to the early-1960s creation of post-modern technological civilisation, the cult of physical fitness, is to reclaim everything that our bodies—lazy and alienated by over-consumption—have lost as a result of technological development and industrialisation.
Made specially for the 49th Venice Biennial (and for hire on the exhibition grounds), the Art Mobile—Human Powered Biennale Vehicle causes culture-consumption, entertainment, and seemingly effortless meandering to become physical exertion, and as a consequence it contributes to our experiencing the art and perception rituals of the Giardini di Castello as effective and practical use of means.

Aesthetics of Vomiting?

Photos by Elspeth Diederix
















Interview with film creator Martin Creed.
Video excerpt.

Source of human empathy found in brain

They have been implicated in empathy, language acquisition and even consciousness itself. Now individual mirror neurons have been directly observed in people for the first time.
Newscientist

The Cyber Air Base

Kinesthesia is your sense of motion derived from the movement of your muscles and skeleton coupled with your sense of balance from your inner ear. Virtogo Inc. motion platforms are designed to enhance kinesthesia with a 6DOF capability constructed with the same mechanical architecture used in aerospace and military simulators. The pneumatic actuation of our motion platform creates a different kind of feel from electric and hydraulic platforms.

Do Swing

The lamp providing gravitational play.
By DROOGDESIGN

Dystopian Dating

"Disastrous tourism" in the Chernobyl nuclear plant site is compelling example demostrating amusing "trivialization" (or marginalization) of threat or disaster. Probably each disaster somehow gives birth to new types of amusement or alternative pleasures. Following the 9/11 incidet many emergency survival kits were produced, some of them are being used more as equipment for amusement rather than for survival (for instance emergency parachute, designed for bailing out of window of multistorey building, is being used by extreme parachutists; or iraqian children fishing by detonating grenades in a lake).

The photo-session conducted in the abandoned amusements park in Chernobyl, showing the harsh reality of man/woman relations in Chernobyl area.
If some girl wants to date a boy in Chernobyl park, they for sure need to wear some protective suits, but these suits isn’t a big barrier when there is passion between them.

Quates from the book "Let's Entertain"

"Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures examines this 'spectacularization' of everyday experience through the twin lenses of contemporary art practice and cultural criticism.... [and] challenge[s] us not to simply renounce entertainment per se, but to understand how its strategies can be used to tell a different kind of story. The story that unfolds is sweet, amusing, and, like a fairy tale, often cruel."

"metaphysical reflection on our collective consciousness" | "humorous and at times aesthetically subversive interventions" | "commentary on contemporary reliance on technological and consumerist promise" | "large scale spectacle of the ordinary" | "hold up a mirror to the viewers dysfunction" | "mix conceptual rigor with socio cultural investigation" | "seemingly banal readymades" | "intimations of bodily functions play an important role" | "witty use of diverse clichés" | "artistic nomadism" | "invesigate the sense of seduction in society dominated by spectacle" | "fascination with cliché" | "making the commonplace strange" | "blur lines between artifice and nature" | "use sound sculpturally to create aural landscapes" | "use pop culture as a ready made artistic vocabulary" | "cute doodles, friendly words, pointing arrows" | "disruption of games like rugby" | "involve audience in environment" | "create a sense of unease by odd juxtapositions"


Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures by Dike Blair

Orchestrated (Dis)orientation

Amusement parks tend to orchestrate visitors' spatial orientation, literal or metaphorical: physical, cultural, social, historical etc.
...
What soon becomes apparent to the uninitiated patron of AstroWorld is that the map more often impedes than facilitates one's ability to move through the park. In effect, one might con-
clude that the park encourages the patron to move in an ambient fashion through its space, to develop individual "interpretations" of the space through the act of wandering attentively yet leisurely.
...
Some coasters offer the promise of free-form movement, liberated from the spatial and temporal constraints which the patron experiences not only on the park's ground level,
but also as a rule in the structure of everyday life.
...
Another way in which roller coasters organize spatial and temporal dimensions as distinct from the context of ground-level space is by structuring the riding experience as a narrative, as a series of anticipations, climaxes, and resolutions.
...

the contemporary theme park is a "hybrid" space, one defined by the accumulation
and reconfiguration of seemingly disparate features which have attracted patrons to various versions of the amusement park since its inception at the beginning of the century. It is also a postmodern space, sampling fantasy structures and reclaiming history in a way that often challenges and disorients the patron who attempts any motivated movement through it.
...

The roller coaster, this hybrid's most distinctive attraction, offers a diverse set of unfamiliar,
exaggerated, and impractical interpretations of time and space which might be described as ultimately still more disorienting ... coaster euphoria is certainly a celebration of instantaneity; yet this celebration depends on a temporal and spatial contextualization
...
Coasters offer intricate narrative structures whose pleasures can only be derived through spatial performance, through participation in the activity of rendering spatial and temporal dimensions coherent. Ultimately, by incorporating disorientation as a crucial element in a drama of orientation, the roller-coaster phenomenon provides a means of challenging
postmodern theoretical assumptions regarding the cultural context of euphoric pleasure.

"Orchestrated (Dis)orientation: Roller Coasters, Theme Parks, and Postmodernism"
by Michael DeAngelis
Cultural Critique, No. 37. (Autumn, 1997), pp. 107-129.

"[Any] art is an expressive form of the world’s gravity”

Evolution of Gravitational Synesthesia in Music: To Color and Light!. Leonardo, Volume 36, Number 2 (April 01, 2003), pp. 129-134,

Carsen Holler's "Amusement park"

Coney Island of the mind: the rides in Carsten Höller’s “Amusement Park” at Mass MoCA can be seen and heard but not used.
Exhibit takes art fo a ride.

Erik Davis on Experience Design

Erik Davis postulates that human experience and perception is not intrinsicly and merely constituted within semiotic entity, but also beyond linguistic realm.

"Obviously roller-coasters exist within a network of symbolic associations. But the act of subjectively submitting your bodymind to a rollercoaster ride, and undergoing the resulting thrills of adrenaline, fear, and gut-fluttering sensation, cannot be directly assimilated to the network of significations that constitute the meaning of rollercoasters."

Psychology of Risk

Good article on psychology of risk and thrill-seeking in Psychologytoday.com

Playland TV Ads

by RETHINK

Playland Ads 2007

more

Playland Outdoor Ads 2007

Playland Ads 2003

Probing the human vestibular system with galvanic stimulation

A comprehensive article about Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) and human balance responses to it.

Gin+Tonic Fog

Gin and Tonic Fog Party
Artificial indoor fog made of Gin and Tonic
Gat Fog party is an artificial indoor meteorological phenomenon based in weather engineering for "cultural farming" purposes.
by Marti Guixe

Marriage of Work and Amusement

Featuring slides and table tennis you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a nursery rather than a London office.

Is this architectural spectacle empowering an employee? Or is it merely employer's means of manipulation (i.e. for mollifying and holding staff)?

Similar cases

Spectacle

As Walter Benjamin states, the mode of reproduction has shifted from tactical (hand, lithography) to the optical (eye, cinema), experiencing a world through images and visual representations that leads us to a culture of enjoyment without criticism. Guy Debord points out that we live in a spectacle where false imagery rules our perception of the world and all of reality and every relationship are “mediated by images.” Debord defines spectacle as an inescapable system imposed by economy and articulates the way in which society/culture is controlled by the manipulation of representations of the global economy system. Therefore, our advanced “cool-looking” design and its creative capability is greatly governed by the market principle, rather than having its own agenda. In his sense, media design functions as a supporting tool in a spectacle, producing artificial reality, pseudo-needs and creating a fantasy world of imagined self-realization and happiness by promoting capitalist commodities.

Balance Chip Keeps You Rock Steady

An implantable chip could eventually restore a sense of balance to people who have lost theirs through accident or illness.

Remote-controlled Humans

By remotely stimulating a person's vestibular system with electrodes placed on the skin just below the ear, researchers at NTT's research laboratories in Kanagawa have found a way to turn humans into oversized radio controlled vehicles.
Other related projects.

Vestibular Sense and Movement

This suggests that the brain extracts two strands of information from the signal coming from the semicircular canals – information about head rotations in the vertical plane is used to control balance, while rotations in the horizontal plane are used to navigate.

Current Biology (vol 16, p 1509)

Powered Shoes

A pair of motorised roller skates that cancel out a person's steps could let users naturally explore virtual reality landscapes in confined spaces.

Vestibular Pleasure

Because the vestibular system has a connection to the hypothalamus, the part of the brain responsible for drives like hunger, sex and hedonistic responses, psychologist Neil Todd, an expert in music perception, believes that people might be getting a pleasurable buzz when they listen to music— which could explain why music has developed into such a cultural force. This buzz may mimic the thrills people get from swings and bungee jumping, where motion stimulates the balance centre.

Newscientist

David Moises

Innovating Thrill Rides

..."We are at the limit—I'm absolutely sure of this", says Walter Stengel, who has designed more of the world's rides than most. "We know the limits for the human body".
...
If our thrill-seeking bodies can really take no more, what's going to keep dragging us back to the funfairs? Creating something new and exciting, yet safe, is going to take some careful thought. Can designers tempt us with gentler thrills, or is it time to let unruly chaos—or even the passengers themselves—take control?

Certainly a radical rethink is necessary. Some engineers, including Willem Bles, a consultant for Vekoma, a Dutch company that designs fairground rides, say they're frightened by what's allowed. For Bles, the problem with rides is apparent every time he visits a park. "Look at people's faces," he says, "they're not having fun." He believes that true innovation has been lacking for a while—that the new rides simply increase the horrors that people have to endure. "The rides are more about survival," he says.
...
Roller coasters now include ever more loops, corkscrews and inversions. You can ride sitting down, standing up or upside down, you can copy aerobatic pilots' manoeuvres—but there's still only so many ways you can turn a car when it's on a track. Take the car off the track, however, and you can create a whole new set of sensations. (X roller coaster is one of "4d rides" examples which as well as playing with the three directions of linear motion—up and down, left to right, and front to back—they can now send you spinning head over heels.)

...

The next step in designing rides, however, could throw predictability out the window.
It's based on the first law of having fun: lose control. And when spinning is involved, losing control is easy. This step has already been taken in the newest waltzers—tea cup rides—and it could easily be applied to the next generation of roller coasters.

...

The latest waltzer cars now spin freely, driven only by the passengers' weight and the centrifugal forces created by the car's spin. It's all governed by chaos theory: perhaps not the most comforting thought when climbing aboard a ride. But they are very popular attractions. "People seem to like these chaotic rides," Stengel says.

Chaos means that the position and weight of everyone on the ride can influence just how good—or bad—your experience is. So you'll never have exactly the same ride twice. In fact, it is so sensitive that even the state of its bearings can influence the ride.

...

Stengel feels that flinging people around in ever more chaotic machines is no longer the way forward. Bles agrees enthusiastically—and has a radical solution in mind. In amusement parks of the future, he'll be thrilling you gently.

...

The pilots' enjoyment of the spinning machines seems to come from surprises. "It's often connected to the unexpected," Bles says. Tilt the head while spinning with the eyes closed, for example, and suddenly, an intense tumbling sensation called the Coriolis illusion comes into play. "People find it fascinating," says Bles, "a very nice and unexpected sensation of movement.

...

Stengel believes the sequence of accelerations, not their size, is what makes a good ride. "Changing a small acceleration is more interesting than always being on the limit that a passenger can take," he says. A roll that includes a change of acceleration from small negative g—a feeling of weightlessness—to a small positive g—a slight crushing sensation—has an extraordinary effect on people, for instance. "They have no idea where they are or what direction they're moving in," he says.

Newscientist From issue 2288 of New Scientist magazine, 28 April 2001, page 32

SaveYourSelf

You start by using a digital camera to take a self-portrait and then loading to a compact display floating in a bowl of water. Now, all you have to do is put on a set of headphones with a built-in electrode, pick up the bowl of water, and the action gets underway. The motion of the water is transmitted directly to your body.

The compact display features an integrated acceleration sensor that measures shifts of the water surface and sends the data to the electrode in the headphones. It emits a low-voltage current that stimulates the portion of the inner ear that regulates the sense of balance.

A novel sensory interface based on galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) was developed for “SaveYourSelf!!!” Similar procedures are employed in medical tests investigating how well a person’s sense of balance functions. Even a very weak electric current (less than ~1.5mA) can disturb the feeling of equilibrium.

Rocking Power

A prenatal reaction to rock or sway is undoubtedly related to when a fetus is being carried in the womb and is subject to a gentle rocking motion that the mother is unaware of. Subconsciously, in times of high anxiety, it is possible for one to revert back to or rather mimic the sensation of being carried in the womb.

Rocking is therefore a universal soothing technique that spans across every culture. From being rocked as a baby and child, humans seem to never loose their sensitivity to rocking motion. Whether by the gentle lapping of waves on a boat, a swing in a playground, or hammock in the garden most people would be able to find relaxation and comfort.

The motion of rocking makes blood pressure fall and respiration slow. the physical act taps into a pleasure centre located in the brain that produces endorphins and thus creating a therapeutic affect. It is a self comforting system in which smooth, rhythmic changes in linear motion act as a natural stimulant to the central nervous system.

Interestingly rocking also helps stimulate our ability of balance, by activating the system within our inner ear. This also goes some way to help us be alert and attentive.

Spiritual Rocking
Most of the time we think of prayer as a static activity. Some orthodox jews use a rocking motion called ‘shukkeling’ when praying on the ha'shem. There are mixed explanations of this tradition; some believe that at the beginning of the production of scriptures there were few books for everyone to read so the rocking motion reflects an old custom of taking it in turns to look at the pages. Others might say that the motion of shukkeling is a way of enhancing concentration or that the words are igniting the soul like the lighting of a wick and so the body moves like a flame.

In some cases rocking is a proportional physical and spiritual response to prayer. Just as we might nod our head or tap our feet in time with a piece of music, some find that the saying of prayers stimulates a physical rocking motion.

The spiritual society of the ‘shakers’ has the most impressive rocking tradition. Rockers are part of all life stages - a craddle for the new born; a rocking horse toy; a rocking stool for work in the
household of the community; a rocking chair for leisure time, social meeting and reading of spiritual texts;an adult-size craddle for ill, weak or aged invalids. The gentle rocking movement helps to calm their spirit and prevent from bedsores. The rocking motion closes the circle of life,
from birth to death!

Designboom

Sensesweb
Vestibular Rehabilitation Therapy
Hair Cells in Balance

ZOO of "modified" Animals

Above: The mouse with a human ear growing on its back proved just how far science could, or would, go. The experiment saw a biodegradable, synthetic frame planted on the mouse; human cells were added to the frame and nourished by the mouse to produce, in effect, a real ear. With an ear-to-body ratio of about eighty percent, he's probably a very good listener.

Below: Scientists managed to implant a few of the little rodents with human brain cells amounting to about one percent of their total grey matter. The same group has plans to produce mice with one hundred percent human brain cells, which they have permission to do unless the mice start exhibiting human traits. What, like banding together to escape?

Other candidates for mutants' ZOO.

Brian Walker, alias Rocket Guy, is a part-time toy invertor with no university education. He aims to become the first human being to blast himself into space in a homemade rocket Walker want to take the mystery out of space travel, and and aerospace engineer has already said that his simple rocket design, named the Earthstar 1, just may work.

Robotic Zoo - Robotarium X

If you put 45 different animals in the same cage, you might expect the larger critters to attack the smaller ones.

In that sense at least, the inhabitants of a new zoo in Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal, are no exception. However, the Robotarium X is the first zoo dedicated to artificial life. Inside, legged, wheeled and slithering autonomous robots crawl around a 4-metre-high cage made of steel and glass.

Nine larger robots interact with visitors by following their movements, making defensive actions or opening their "petals" in response to crowds. The more aggressive robots cut the tails off their smaller cousins (watch a video of Robotarium X). "We must start looking at robots as a novel species that is being born to share with us the planet and human society," says artist Leonel Moura, who designed the zoo.

Review of Roller Coasters #2

On May 21, 2005 Six Flags Great Adventure introduced Kingda Ka, the tallest, fastest roller coaster on the planet to the public. This $25-million Swiss designed "rocket coaster" uses hydraulic motors to launch the trains along a horizontal section of track from zero to 128 mph in an impressive 3.5 seconds. The trains then begins a vertical ascent up a steel tower that peaks at 456 feet or 45 stories. Crossing over the apex the train enters a vertical descent plunging through a 270-degree spiral twist again reaching speeds in excess of 100 mph. One final surprise comes before the brake run, a 129-foot tall camelback hill, that offers plenty of negative G's also known fondly as "airtime".

Review of Roller Coasters #1

It's been dubbed the "most anticipated new ride of the decade" and the world's first "Xtreme Coaster". X's prototype vehicles are designed to spin independently 360-degress forwards and backwards on a separate axis. The movement is controlled by a gearbox that is attached to two additional rails added to the outside of the steel track.

Lure of Rollercoaster

As Meredith Neil explains, the roller coaster has attained an iconic and emblematic status in our cultural consciousness ; for over a century, it has become immediately recognizable as a sign of risk, danger, and pleasure. Unlike the merry-go-round and the ferris wheel, the roller coaster offers the illusion of a liberation from spatial constraints, since it is capable of manipulating both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Neil's suggestion that "the curvilinear has symbolized relaxation and pleasure, while straight lines have sober and business-like overtones" is supported by other theorists who argue that in its nineteenth-century form, the roller coaster provided a sense of free-form movement, an impractical spatial in terpretation of the commuter railroad.
Robert Cartmell notes that engineers experimented with looping coasters as early as the 1920s; because of technological limitations, however, these coasters relied solely on the properties of centrifugal force, and although they were extensively tested, riders never fully embraced these new experiences in spatial disorientation because they remained unconvinced that the coasters were safe . In recent decades, however, rapidly evolving technologies have exponentially increased the possibilities of manipulating space by defying physical forces such as gravity, to create ever more distinctively terrifying roller coaster experiences which pose no actual threat to the safety of riders. Indeed, Russel Nye has described the public appeal of the contemporary roller coaster as a "riskless risk, a place where one may take chances that are not really chances". What is emphasized in the new, high-technology coaster, then, is a regulation of the tenuous relationship between a perceived danger and the assurance of safety-in effect, a successful portrayal of a participatory simulation of danger.
...There are other, more visceral ways in which the experience of individual coasters function in a contextual relationship with ground-level space. Some coasters offer the promise of free-form movement, liberated from the spatial and temporal constraints which the patron experiences not only on the park's ground level, but also as a rule in the structure of everyday life. In the more technologically advanced thrill coasters, this liberation is often
highly exaggerated in its intensity. It is, moreover, quite brief: no coaster ride in AstroWorld exceeds four minutes in duration, and the periods within the ride which comprise the most intense forms of euphoria are much shorter. The most exhilarating portion of the shortest coaster ride, the Skyscreamer, consists of a period of only several seconds, in which individual cars, raised to a landing by elevator, are perpendicularly "dropped" from a height of sev-
eral stories, after which the track abruptly turns 90 degrees from the vertical to the horizontal, at ground level. End of ride.

Orchestrated (Dis)orientation: Roller Coasters, Theme Parks, and Postmodernism
Michael DeAngelis, Cultural Critique, No. 37. (Autumn, 1997), pp. 107-129

Exorcist Bed & Levitator Option

Our Exorcist Bed thrashes on a solid steel 360° simulator chassis. Your Actors can ride it or you may choose to add the Levitator option which safely and comfortably floats an Actor to a height of 5’0” up and down over the bed as it thrashes around.
Unit includes solid steel chassis & bed frame, walnut stained four poster bed, pneumatic package, Levitator option includes padded steel cradle, pneumatic package & grip switch.

Illusion of Out-of-body Experience

In August 2007 Henrik Ehrsson from the University College of London Institute of Neurology published research in Science demonstrating the first experimental method that, according to the scientist's claims in the publication, induced an out-of-body experience in healthy participants.[1] The experiment was conducted in the following way:

The study participant sits in a chair wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras placed beside each other two metres behind the participant’s head. The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees these as one ‘stereoscopic’ (3D) image, so they see their own back displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them. The researcher then stands just beside the participant (in their view) and uses two plastic rods to simultaneously touch the participant’s actual chest out-of-view and the chest of the illusory body, moving this second rod towards where the illusory chest would be located, just below the camera’s view. The participants confirmed that they had experienced sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that location.[2]

1. ^ Ehrsson, H.H. 2007. The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences. Science 317:1048 DOI: 10.1126/science.1142175
2. ^ First out-of-body experience induced in laboratory setting, August 23 2007, EurekAlert!

Carsten Holler's Test Site at TATE