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Speaker 1: Hey, this is Julie Douglas from the podcast The Stuff

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Speaker 1: of Life here to tell you that super producer Noel

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Speaker 1: Brown and I are cooking up season two for an

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Speaker 1: August release. So if you haven't already checked out season

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Speaker 1: one of the Stuff of Life, there's a big bowl

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Speaker 1: of ten episodes ready for you to dig into on

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Speaker 1: iTunes or wherever you get your delicious podcast take out from.

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Speaker 1: In the meantime, apply sunscreened liberally, and we'll see you

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Speaker 1: in August. Welcome to House to Works Now. I'm your host,

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Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum, a researcher and writer. Here at House to Works.

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Speaker 1: Every week, I'm bringing you three stories from our team

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Speaker 1: about the weird and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology,

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Speaker 1: and culture. This week, a crowdfunded project is designing drones

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Speaker 1: to dismantle landmines and super unrelated, an artist has plans

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Speaker 1: to use deceased fashion designer Alexander McQueen's DNA to grow

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Speaker 1: human skin in the lab and then make it into

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Speaker 1: leather goods. The leather goods plus of political statement, Really

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Speaker 1: but First. Senior writer Jonathan Strickland explains how a team

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Speaker 1: of engineers have built the acoustic equivalent of Lego blocks.

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Speaker 1: These small interlocking pieces can physically change sound and even

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Speaker 1: in code information in it. The engineers come from M I. T.

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Speaker 1: Columbia University and Disney Research. They designed interconnecting three D

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Speaker 1: printed blocks that can dramatically change sounds. The small cubes

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Speaker 1: have connectors on each of the six faces. Those connectors

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Speaker 1: can be open to other cubes or closed off, depending

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Speaker 1: upon what you want to do. You connect a bunch

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Speaker 1: of these blocks together and fit them inside an arbitrarily

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Speaker 1: shaped three D printed instrument. With a particular configuration of blocks,

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Speaker 1: you can damp and sounds you don't like, or with

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Speaker 1: a different combination, you can emphasize sounds in a range

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Speaker 1: of frequencies. Or you can even build your own hippo

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Speaker 1: bugle and play the Imperial March from Star Wars on it.

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Speaker 1: I know because they did that thing and it was awesome.

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Speaker 1: In late July, the team will present their findings at

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Speaker 1: SIAGRAPH two thousand sixteen, a conference for digital graphics and

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Speaker 1: interactive design. Their paper has the zingy title of Acoustic

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Speaker 1: Voxels Computational Optimization of Modular Acoustic filters. The boxes are

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Speaker 1: the modular acoustic filters a k a. Vauxels. So how

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Speaker 1: does it work well. Sound is vibration that moves through matter.

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Speaker 1: By making changes to the medium through which the sound travels,

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Speaker 1: you can change the nature of that sound. Take a

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Speaker 1: guitar string, for example, pressing down on a string between

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Speaker 1: frets changes the length of the string, which changes the

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Speaker 1: strings number of vibrations per second, also known as its frequency.

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Speaker 1: We perceive sounds with a higher frequency as having a

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Speaker 1: higher pitch. The interconnection of Vauxell's changes sound in a

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Speaker 1: similar way as it passes through the system. Some filters

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Speaker 1: can muffle certain frequencies, while some boost others. There are

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Speaker 1: no moving parts and no need for electricity. It's a

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Speaker 1: purely physical phenomenon. With this technology, you could also create

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Speaker 1: a type of acoustic tagging for products, kind of like

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Speaker 1: a sound based QR code. The engineers demonstrated this with

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Speaker 1: three D printed octopuses. I love these guys. Each octopus

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Speaker 1: had a slightly different configuration of voxels inside it, and

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Speaker 1: app on a smartphone generated a specific noise. Holding the

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Speaker 1: phone speaker against one of the octopus is. The noise

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Speaker 1: traveled through the boxes inside and came out with a

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Speaker 1: different tone. The phones might picked up the new sound

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Speaker 1: and the app identified the octopus. The app could identify

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Speaker 1: different cephalopods by their unique sounds. Ultimately, I think the

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Speaker 1: simple technology's most important use will be to allow for

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Speaker 1: an entire hippo orchestra to play the music of John

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Speaker 1: Williams Dream of That Day, A dream of It a lot.

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Speaker 1: Next up, Holly Fry, co host of Our Stuff He

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Speaker 1: Missed in History Class podcast, brings us the story of

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Speaker 1: life saving drones. The technology has a little bit of

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Speaker 1: a bad rap because of the public's understandable concerns about

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Speaker 1: privacy and air safety, but a team is hoping to

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Speaker 1: use it to eradicate land mines all over the world

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Speaker 1: within the next ten years. A group working out of

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Speaker 1: the Netherlands is developing a landmine sweeping drone. Despite ongoing

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Speaker 1: global efforts to ban anti personnel land mines, they're still

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Speaker 1: used in a lot of countries. They've been a common

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Speaker 1: part of warfare since the nineteen thirties, but when wars

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Speaker 1: and conflicts end, it's not as though those explosive devices

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Speaker 1: just evaporate. They remain underground and unmarked, ready to detonate.

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Speaker 1: There were a total of three thousand, six hundred and

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Speaker 1: seventy eight recorded landmine detonation, and those are just the

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Speaker 1: ones we know about. Nearly eight percent of those who

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Speaker 1: were injured or killed in those blasts were civilians, and

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Speaker 1: nearly of those civilians or children. In recent news, even

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Speaker 1: the wildly popular Pokemon Go game has been affected. Players

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Speaker 1: in Bosnia have been warned about minds that were left

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Speaker 1: over from conflicts in the nineteen nineties. Getting rid of

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Speaker 1: all that ordinance is no small task, and it's dangerous.

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Speaker 1: Current methods of removal involved sniffer animals, human d miners

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Speaker 1: with metal detectors, or large detonation vehicles, and those methods

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Speaker 1: can be slow and costly, and they come with a

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Speaker 1: high risk. Enter the mind Sweeping drone. Now this isn't

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Speaker 1: the first time project founder Massoud Hassani and his team

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Speaker 1: have built a robot to get rid of land mines.

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Speaker 1: In they created a device called mine Cafone. It's sort

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Speaker 1: of like a robotic tumbleweed. It rolls through mine fields

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Speaker 1: and when it finds a mine, it blows up both

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Speaker 1: itself and the mine. Now, the mind Caphone team has

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Speaker 1: developed a drone based mine eradicator that will further reduce

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Speaker 1: both the cost and the risk of demining. It uses

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Speaker 1: a series of modular robotic attachments that can be interchanged.

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Speaker 1: So first, the Mincaphone drone uses a mapping system attachment

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Speaker 1: to make a three D map of the entire designated area,

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Speaker 1: and then a metal detector is attached to it and

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Speaker 1: it uses that plus GPS to locate and identify mine locations.

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Speaker 1: And then in the final step, that metal detector is

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Speaker 1: swapped out for a robotic gripping arm which carefully places

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Speaker 1: detonators on the identified mines. The mines are then triggered

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Speaker 1: and eliminated, and the drone can move on to its

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Speaker 1: next location. Right now, the mine Caphone Foundation is running

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Speaker 1: a Kickstarter so they can finish development and start testing

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Speaker 1: the technology in the field. The project is incredibly ambitious.

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Speaker 1: Hasani has a goal to eradicate all of the minds

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Speaker 1: on the planet in the space of just ten years.

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Speaker 1: But according to the kickstarter pitch, this method is twenty

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Speaker 1: times faster at ferreting out and detonating minds and at

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Speaker 1: a cost two hundred times cheaper than existing technologies. Finally,

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Speaker 1: this week, senior writer Robert Lamb finally found a story

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Speaker 1: that grossed me out. An artist by the name of

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Speaker 1: Tina Gorjank has proposed growing human leather from the sample

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Speaker 1: of Alexander McQueen's DNA. She wants to make it into

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Speaker 1: bags and leatherware, and more importantly, raise awareness about the

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Speaker 1: potential for lab grown leather and raise questions about genetic

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Speaker 1: ownership rights. Goor Jenk's project at London Central St Martin's

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Speaker 1: Fashion School revolves around the creation of a very special

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Speaker 1: sort of leather. Instead of harvesting it from a cow

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Speaker 1: or other non human animal, she plans to grow the

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Speaker 1: skin of deceased fashion designer Alexander McQueen and make it

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Speaker 1: into handbags and jackets, flesh colored items that will feature

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Speaker 1: McQueen's distinguishing marks and tattoos. The starting point for this

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Speaker 1: grizzly glam fashion venture is a sample of McQueen's own

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Speaker 1: hair used in his silk coat titled Jack the Rippers

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Speaker 1: Stalks his victims see he probably would have dug the project.

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Speaker 1: The DNA will be manipulated and grown out into skin, tanned,

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Speaker 1: and finally processed into human leather. The technology here emerges

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Speaker 1: from the room of Synthetic Biology, an exciting area of

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Speaker 1: biotechnology that has already led to the creation of lab

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Speaker 1: grown skin, grass and synthetic organs. The ultimate possibilities are

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Speaker 1: truly transhumanist in nature, entailing everything from engineer disease immunity

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Speaker 1: to enhance longevity. But cutting edge science sometimes outpaces our

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Speaker 1: ability to understand all the ramifications, and that's where art

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Speaker 1: enters the picture. Gorgen copes to push the notion of

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Speaker 1: sustainable slaughter free lab grown leather, but the project is

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Speaker 1: also about the lack of rights concerning our own genetic information.

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Speaker 1: See the project here is unapproved by either McQueen family

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Speaker 1: or fashion brand. She snagged the DNA from a hair

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Speaker 1: sample and has already filed a patent for the resulting

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Speaker 1: leather material based on its singular source and creation process

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Speaker 1: is bioephesis. Glenn Cohen pointed out on the website. Courts

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Speaker 1: the UK and United States afford little or no ownership

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Speaker 1: protection to abandon tissues. A wizard can come along stuff

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Speaker 1: of voodoo doll full of your hair clippings, and there's

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Speaker 1: nothing you can do about it. The same potentially goes

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Speaker 1: for real world cloning and synthetic tissue growth. We're drifting

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Speaker 1: into largely uncharted legal waters here, at least as far

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Speaker 1: as luxury items made from dead celebrities go. So while

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Speaker 1: the fun question here is, Hey, which Oscar winner would

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Speaker 1: you wear as a pair of slacks, the more pressing

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Speaker 1: issue is who owns your genetic information? And how much

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Speaker 1: privacy can you expect concerning all the scraps of discarded

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Speaker 1: hair and skin you leave in your weight each day?

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Speaker 1: And that's our show for this week. Thank you so

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Speaker 1: much for tuning in. Subscribe now for more of the late,

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Speaker 1: best and strangest science news, and send us links to

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Speaker 1: anything you'd like to hear us cover, plus whatever cute

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Speaker 1: animal video you're digging on today, I could use it.

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Speaker 1: Shoot us an email at now podcast at how stuff

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Speaker 1: works dot com, and to access thousands of other stories

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Speaker 1: like these, check out our home planet Now dot how

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