mycelia
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Imogen Heap is using digital currency tech to change music
Imogen Heap is no stranger to using bleeding-edge technology to perform music, but she's now using it to change how you buy music. Her Mycelia project not only lets artists sell music directly to fans, but uses blockchains (the same technology behind digital currencies like Bitcoin) to get the kind of data that would normally require the help of a label. It'd include credits and usage rights, and could track things such as where and when people play a given tune -- if a song is really popular with Australians, you'll know it without asking anyone else.
'Mutarium' prototype is the perfect farm for edible plastic-eating fungi
Biodegradable plastics exist because traditional ones take between 20 and 1,000 years to break down in the wild, often blocking waterways and killing animals as that all happens. That's why two industrial designers and a group of microbiologists have designed a way to break down plastic -- and create edible mushrooms in the process. To be precise, the team (the designers are from Vienna, Austria, while the microbiologists are from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands) created something called the Fungi Mutarium: a glass dome that houses hollow egg-like pods containing bits of plastic in their cavities. These "pods" serve as food to nourish the fungi, as they're made of agar, sugar and starch, similar to those agar plates used to culture organisms in labs.
