NewsBytes

Genpets -- Adam Brandejs, from London, Ontario, is the father of this piece of weirdness. Genpets purports to be genetically engineered pets that are in a state of hibernation until taken home, then they come alive to be your pet for 1 or maybe 3 years. What is it really? It's Brandejs overactive imagination as an art student at the OCAD. Quite cool, and not bad at all.

Shovel Head -- Yasuhito Udagawa is one cool artist. He works on mechanical sculptures, and was recently featured in Wired for creating two sculptures out of bicycle parts for cycle manufacturer SRAM. Way cool!

Death Wishes -- A bit of afterlife weirdness I picked up from the latest issue of Wired as well. Seems like there a few non-traditional ways to keep on going after your Energizer has been drained.

1. Promessa Organic intends to send you on your way ecologically. There's a huge ecological cost for a typical burial or cremation -- everything from the land taken up for burial, to the fuel needed to transform you to ashes. Promessa does away with the whole traditional process by freezing what was you -- then dunking your body in liquid nitrogen. Your body is then blasted with sound waves that reduces it to organic powder, which is then transferred to a vacuum chamber where water is evaporated from the powder. From there, you're filtered, and all surgical spare parts and mercury is removed. When you, and only you is left, your powder is placed in a corn starch coffin, and you're buried. In 6 months to a year, you're compost, and something can be planted above you. You've completed the circle of life.
2. Biopresence promises something different: "Living Memorials or Transgenic Tombstones." They use a process to transcode and entwine the human DNA to a tree's DNA. They do this not by modifying the tree's DNA, but by storing your DNA on naturally occurring silent mutations of base triplets. I don't understand what any of that means, nor do I have the patience to research it right now -- suffice it to say -- you and tree will not become one. Your DNA will simply be hitching a ride on something alive, even after you've gone. Your body, if you so wished, could also be reduced down to compost to feed the young plant that is now carrying the last living remains of you.
3. LifeGem takes a different tact than the previous two -- they don't aim to complete any circle of life or make a living memory out of you. What they promise is to is take the ashes from your cremation, and extract the carbon from it. From there, the carbon is purified by baking it at extreme high temperatures, converting all carbon to graphite. Heat and pressure is then applied to the graphite to transform it into diamonds. The diamond will then be cut and laser etched to your specifications. While you may not last forever, a diamond certainly will.