Beyond Science Fiction

The future of the city from Science to Science Fiction and back (and beyond)

There are many ways of imagining the future of the city. We can start with the growth of urbanisation, which envisages that in 2050 more than two-thirds of the world population will live in cities. And from there calculate the increase in the ecological footprint that urban life will determine, the increase in consumption of the land, and the possible rise in inequality and segregation. Or refl...

Fiction informed by science.

Science Fiction and Macdonald's Polynomials

This work studies the remarkable relationships that hold among certain m-tuples of the Garsia-Haiman modules M and corresponding elements of the Macdonald basis. We recall that in 10], M is deened for a partition`n, as the linear span of derivatives of a certain bihomogeneouspolynomial (x; y) in the variables x 1 ; x 2 conjecturedin 6], 10] that M has n! dimensionsand that its bigraded Frobeniu...

Organ printing: fiction or science.

Aggregates of living cells (i.e. model tissue fragments) under appropriate conditions fuse like liquid drops. According to Steinberg's differential adhesion hypothesis (DAH), this may be understood by assuming that cells are motile and tissues made of such cells possess an effective surface tension. Here we show that based on these properties three-dimensional cellular structures of prescribed ...

Science Fiction Prototyping at Work

C O M P U T E R 0 0 1 8 9 1 6 2 / 1 6 / $ 3 3 . 0 0 © 2 0 1 6 I E E E P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E I E E E C O M P U T E R S O C I E T Y A U G U S T 2 0 1 6 109 Autodesk is best known for making design software such as AutoCAD. So when people discover that we’re creating tools for molecular design and human–robot collaboration, their rst question is why. The answer usually involves a scienti c e...