My new Art Show
From the 24th February until the 12th March, your infrequent blogger has an exhibition of his more recent portraits at the Hossack Gallery, 28 Charlotte St, London. It’ll be a small show – perhaps six or so large pieces, for sale if you wish and general perusalment. An online gallery of my paintings – mainly the earlier caricatures – is viewable online at derrenbrownart.com, where prints are for sale if you are considering a gift for a least loved relative.
For those of you who are talented and attractive enough to follow me upon the Twitter, you may have seen I’ve been tweeting a work-in-progress of my father in real time as it comes together. The plan is to include this and one of my mother, as well as some of the recent ones I have posted on this here blog.
Some of you do enquire very kindly about buying originals. I sell the originals through the Hossack Gallery and I’m sure they’d be delighted to take any enquiries. They are big though (the ones above are each five feet high), so you’ve got to REALLY want one in your room.
Any enquiries about the art show, please call the gallery on +44 (0) 20 7255 2828.
Thanking you kindly.
South Carolina scientist works to grow meat in lab
CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) – In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat.
A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering “cultured” meat.
It’s a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way … on the hoof.
Growth of “in-vitro” or cultured meat is also under way in the Netherlands, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand.
The new National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, won’t fund it, the National Institutes of Health won’t fund it, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded it only briefly, Mironov said.
“It’s classic disruptive technology,” Mironov said. “Bringing any new technology on the market, average, costs $1 billion. We don’t even have $1 million.”
Director of the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Center in the Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the medical university, Mironov now primarily conducts research on tissue engineering, or growing, of human organs.
“There’s a yuck factor when people find out meat is grown in a lab. They don’t like to associate technology with food,” said Nicholas Genovese, 32, a visiting scholar in cancer cell biology working under a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals three-year grant to run Dr. Mironov’s meat-growing lab.
China Sets Record For World’s Longest Sea Bridge at 26 Miles Long
The world’s largest bridge stretches more than 26 miles long and is five miles longer than the Dover-Calais crossing and almost three miles longer than the previous record-holder, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana. This bridge is also 174 times longer than London’s Tower Bridge over the Thames River.
At the cost of $8.5 billion, the bridge is specifically designed to withstand an earthquake of 8 magnitude and tropical typhoons with winds up to 125mph. Initiated back in 2006 with two separate groups of workers building the different ends of the structure, the six-lane expressway stretches from Qingdao to Huangdao and the Pearl River Delta city of Zhuhai.
Slated to carry over 30,000 cars per day when it opens to commuters at the end of 2011, it is expected that this bridge will dramatically reduce travel distance along the route between Qingdao and Huangdao by 30km (more than 18 miles) and shave about 20 minutes off the total travel time.
Although everything went well when construction was completed in December, there were still concerns.
“The computer models and calculations are all very well but you can’t really relax until the two sides are bolted together. Even a few centimeters off would have been a disaster,” commented one engineer.
Fame however, is fleeting, and this bridge will only remain the world’s largest for a few years when it is expected that its length will be bested by still another Chinese bridge that will link southern Guangdong province with Hong Kong and Macau. This one is set for completion in 2016 and will span nearly 50 km (30 miles).
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