“Scientists need to work outside their own areas of expertise to make new technologies that are pertinent to the 21st century and to collaborate, both with other scientific disciplines and the arts and humanities.”
“Metabolic materials” - is what TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong researches - construction materials that possess some of the properties of living systems, and can be manipulated to “grow” architecture.
Rachel thinks of this as we think about awesome parks or gardens because “metabolic materials” are made from terrestrial chemistry…
A few weeks ago, we talked about the future of food and what you can do about it. With the rise of genetic modification and its threat to biodiversity, saving seeds is more important now than it has ever been. Not only do we need plants for food, we rely on them for everything from clothing to medicines to the air we breathe. We couldn’t live without plants, and the Kew Milennium Seed Bank is working to archive 10% of the world’s most threatened flora by 2010.
A few weeks ago, we talked about 
