Saco-Indonesia.com — Sebuah Perkembangan ilmu pengetahuan selalu menarik untuk disimak. Penemuan-penemuan baru semakin memudahkan hidup manusia di mana depan.
Saco-Indonesia.com — Sebuah Perkembangan ilmu pengetahuan selalu menarik untuk disimak. Penemuan-penemuan baru semakin memudahkan hidup manusia di mana depan. Tampaknya, hasil desain Tashia Tucker juga akan memberikan efek serupa.
Dengan menggunakan teknologi yang dibayangkan oleh Tucker, bangunan di masa depan dapat menggunakan lantai yang mengandung bakteri sintetis. Bakteri ini dapat memakan kotoran dan membersihkan kaki orang yang melintas di atasnya.
Tucker menamai teknologi yang dibayangkannya ini dengan Synthetic Biology: The Future of Adaptive Living Environments. Proyek tersebut mengeksplorasi kemungkinan penggunaan biologi sintetis yang bisa digunakan dalam bidang arsitektur. Teknologi ini bisa menciptakan permukaan "cerdas" mengandung bakteri.
"Saya pikir dalam 10 tahun ke depan, kita akan mulai melihat pengembangan permukaan yang didesain secara biologis di laboratorium. Dalam kurun waktu 15 sampai 20 tahun mendatang, tersedia bagi masyarakat," ujar Tucker.
Sebagai seorang mahasiswa jurusan desain di Universitas Drexel, Philadelphia, Amerika Serikat, Tucker menampilkan simulasi cara kerja permukaan, penutup lantai "cerdas" yang berisi bakteri hasil modifikasi. Tidak hanya mampu memakan kotoran dan membersihkan kaki penggunanya, permukaan ini juga memberikan peringatan jika ada bahan-bahan berbahaya menempel padanya.
"Proyek ini menggunakan fabrikasi digital, proses-mikro, proyeksi video, teknologi game, dan lainnya untuk menstimulasi bagaimana bakteria yang sudah di-hack ini mampu berfungsi sebagai permukaan dan material di masa depan," imbuh Tucker.
Meski masih dalam bentuk simulasi, Tucker mengajak masyarakat dunia membayangkan berbagai kemudahan yang ditawarkan oleh penemuan semacam ini. Ia mencontohkan lantai yang dapat mendeteksi kotoran dan secara otomatis membersihkan kaki penggunanya dari berbagai bahan berbahaya. Bakteri dalam permukaan hasil desain Tucker akan mengeluarkan warna tertentu dan menunjukkan jenis toksin yang menempel di kaki penggunanya.
Dia juga mencontohkan permukaan serupa yang secara khusus didesain bagi permukaan meja dapur. Untuk simulasi ini, Tucker menggunakan permukaan silikon di atas sensor tekan yang dioperasikan oleh Nintendo gaming mat dan dihubungkan dengan prosesor mikro Arduino dan sebuah proyektor.
Permukaan hasil desain Tucker ini akan mengeluarkan warna tertentu yang akan menjadi indikator bagi penggunanya. Misalnya, penggunanya alergi terhadap kacang, maka ketika ada kandungan kacang pada makanan yang diolah di atas permukaan tersebut, bakteri di dalam permukaannya akan berubah warna menjadi kuning.
"Aplikasi ini juga berpengaruh pada industri kesehatan. Rumah sakit, peralatan bedah, dan perlengkapan medis bisa secara visual memberi amaran jika lingkungan di sekitarnya aman dan bersih," ujarnya.
Tucker bahkan membuat dinding responsif dari selulosa. Karyanya ini mendemonstrasikan bagaimana bakteri dapat diprogram untuk merespons gerakan manusia dan membentuk pola tertentu.
Hasil desain Tucker ini adalah sebagian kecil dari produk The Design Futures Lab, sebuah grup penelitian trans-disiplin ilmu yang ada di Westphal College of Media Arts & Design di Drexel University. Principal Investigator, Assistant Professor Nicole Koltick merupakan direktur laboratorium tersebut. Koltick-lah yang menyediakan berbagai visi dan membimbing proyek-proyek di bawah agenda penelitian kohesif.
Jadi, mampukah material cerdas seperti ini memudahkan hidup di masa depan? Tentu saja. Namun, kita semua masih harus menunggu, menurut Tucker, setidaknya 15 sampai 20 tahun mendatang untuk mendapatkan teknologi semacam ini.
Sumber :www.dezeen.com/kompas.com
Editor : Maulana Lee
Hockey is not exactly known as a city game, but played on roller skates, it once held sway as the sport of choice in many New York neighborhoods.
“City kids had no rinks, no ice, but they would do anything to play hockey,” said Edward Moffett, former director of the Long Island City Y.M.C.A. Roller Hockey League, in Queens, whose games were played in city playgrounds going back to the 1940s.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, the league had more than 60 teams, he said. Players included the Mullen brothers of Hell’s Kitchen and Dan Dorion of Astoria, Queens, who would later play on ice for the National Hockey League.
One street legend from the heyday of New York roller hockey was Craig Allen, who lived in the Woodside Houses projects and became one of the city’s hardest hitters and top scorers.
“Craig was a warrior, one of the best roller hockey players in the city in the ’70s,” said Dave Garmendia, 60, a retired New York police officer who grew up playing with Mr. Allen. “His teammates loved him and his opponents feared him.”
Young Craig took up hockey on the streets of Queens in the 1960s, playing pickup games between sewer covers, wearing steel-wheeled skates clamped onto school shoes and using a roll of electrical tape as the puck.
His skill and ferocity drew attention, Mr. Garmendia said, but so did his skin color. He was black, in a sport made up almost entirely by white players.
“Roller hockey was a white kid’s game, plain and simple, but Craig broke the color barrier,” Mr. Garmendia said. “We used to say Craig did more for race relations than the N.A.A.C.P.”
Mr. Allen went on to coach and referee roller hockey in New York before moving several years ago to South Carolina. But he continued to organize an annual alumni game at Dutch Kills Playground in Long Island City, the same site that held the local championship games.
The reunion this year was on Saturday, but Mr. Allen never made it. On April 26, just before boarding the bus to New York, he died of an asthma attack at age 61.
Word of his death spread rapidly among hundreds of his old hockey colleagues who resolved to continue with the event, now renamed the Craig Allen Memorial Roller Hockey Reunion.
The turnout on Saturday was the largest ever, with players pulling on their old equipment, choosing sides and taking once again to the rink of cracked blacktop with faded lines and circles. They wore no helmets, although one player wore a fedora.
Another, Vinnie Juliano, 77, of Long Island City, wore his hearing aids, along with his 50-year-old taped-up quads, or four-wheeled skates with a leather boot. Many players here never converted to in-line skates, and neither did Mr. Allen, whose photograph appeared on a poster hanging behind the players’ bench.
“I’m seeing people walking by wondering why all these rusty, grizzly old guys are here playing hockey,” one player, Tommy Dominguez, said. “We’re here for Craig, and let me tell you, these old guys still play hard.”
Everyone seemed to have a Craig Allen story, from his earliest teams at Public School 151 to the Bryant Rangers, the Woodside Wings, the Woodside Blues and more.
Mr. Allen, who became a yellow-cab driver, was always recruiting new talent. He gained the nickname Cabby for his habit of stopping at playgrounds all over the city to scout players.
Teams were organized around neighborhoods and churches, and often sponsored by local bars. Mr. Allen, for one, played for bars, including Garry Owen’s and on the Fiddler’s Green Jokers team in Inwood, Manhattan.
Play was tough and fights were frequent.
“We were basically street gangs on skates,” said Steve Rogg, 56, a mail clerk who grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and who on Saturday wore his Riedell Classic quads from 1972. “If another team caught up with you the night before a game, they tossed you a beating so you couldn’t play the next day.”
Mr. Garmendia said Mr. Allen’s skin color provoked many fights.
“When we’d go to some ignorant neighborhoods, a lot of players would use slurs,” Mr. Garmendia said, recalling a game in Ozone Park, Queens, where local fans parked motorcycles in a lineup next to the blacktop and taunted Mr. Allen. Mr. Garmendia said he checked a player into the motorcycles, “and the bikes went down like dominoes, which started a serious brawl.”
A group of fans at a game in Brooklyn once stuck a pole through the rink fence as Mr. Allen skated by and broke his jaw, Mr. Garmendia said, adding that carloads of reinforcements soon arrived to defend Mr. Allen.
And at another racially incited brawl, the police responded with six patrol cars and a helicopter.
Before play began on Saturday, the players gathered at center rink to honor Mr. Allen. Billy Barnwell, 59, of Woodside, recalled once how an all-white, all-star squad snubbed Mr. Allen by playing him third string. He scored seven goals in the first game and made first string immediately.
“He’d always hear racial stuff before the game, and I’d ask him, ‘How do you put up with that?’” Mr. Barnwell recalled. “Craig would say, ‘We’ll take care of it,’ and by the end of the game, he’d win guys over. They’d say, ‘This guy’s good.’”