Mondolithic Studios

Series of screen grabs from an animated segment worked on by Chris Wren here at Mondo. He produced the storyboard and matte paintings used in this clip for the History Channels insanely popular ‘Ancient Aliens’ Television Series in collaboration with GVFX Studios. Click on the image to view a higher resolution version.

1 of a series of illustrations done for Focus Italy on future technologies that are beginning to filter into our everyday lives. This particular illustration depicts a ‘Virtually Augmented’ City environment. In order to address ‘visual pollution’ created by signs and advertising, the interface would receive signals from the respective businesses and create virtual signage within the viewers glasses. The possibilities for this application are enormous.

Presentation comp/illustration and proposed cover story for The Smithsonian’s ‘Air & Space Magazine’ cover story ‘The Return of The Golden Age of Air Travel’.

An unused illustration that was done for an article on the retirement of the worlds aging nuclear arsenal. Scientific American Magazine.

Illustration for the cover of Focus Magazine Italy on the design and development of a true ‘Artificial Womb’ – Also used as a 2 page spread opener for the interior of the magazine.

The most famous depiction was by Aldous Huxley in his 1932 novel, Brave New World. In Huxley’s dystopian future, children are “decanted” (manufactured) in massive factories.  A similar scenario was also used for Logan’s Run, where embryos are extracted from impregnated women to be grown in meccano-breeders by a computer-controlled life-support system.  Philip K. Dick also discusses synthetic wombs in his novel The Divine Invasion.

Primary research into the engineering of an artificial uterus was conducted at the Cornell University Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility,^[1] under Dr. Hung-Ching Liu.^[2] In the year 2002 Dr. Liu announced that she and her team had grown tissue samples from cultured endometrial cells removed from a human donor. The tissue sample was then engineered to form the shape of a natural uterus, and human embryos were then implanted into the tissue. The researchers found that the embryos correctly implanted into the artificial uterus’ lining and started to grow. Dr. Liu’s experiments were halted after six days, to stay within the permitted legal limits of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) legislation in the United States.

Another form of artificial uterus is one in which tanks are filled with amniotic fluid which is maintained at body temperature, and the embryonic umbilical cords are attached to external pumps which regulate nutrient intake and waste outflow. A potential advantage of such a system is that it would allow the fetus to develop in an environment that is not influenced by the presence of disease, environmental pollutants, alcohol, or drugs which the mother may have in her circulatory system. However, it would also not benefit from the protection of the mother’s immune system. Alternatively, it would also reduce the chances of miscarriage and premature births by allowing the embryo to develop full term outside the mother’s uterus, transferred after the initial 17 weeks of implantation. Such research was being conducted by Dr. Yoshinori Kuwabara (d: 2000) at Juntendo University in Tokyo.

Repost –  Morning sketch – a little Abstract SciFi  action before taking the Camille and Whitey to the beach.

Repost of a Thursday afternoon sketch titled Cat-ika. A kind of transhuman – SciFi – alien cat. Not sure how to label it.

Mondo cover illustration for the latest issue of Scientific American. ‘A New Unified Physics – New Efforts to Unite Quantum Mechanics with Einstein’s Relativity’.

Loops, Trees and the Search for New Physics; May 2012; by Zvi Bern, Lance J. Dixon and David A. Kosower.

‘The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, the premier discovery machine of our age, smashes together protons traveling at nearly the speed of light to study the debris from their collisions. Building the collider and its detectors pushed technology to its limits. Interpreting what the detectors see is an equally great, if less visible, challenge. At first glance, that seems rather strange. The Standard Model of elementary particles is well established, and theorists routinely apply it to predict the outcomes of experiments. To do so, we rely on a calculational technique developed more than 60 years ago by the renowned physicist Richard Feynman. Every particle physicist learns Feynman’s technique in graduate school. Every book and magazine article about particle physics for the public is based on Feynman’s concepts.’

Read the latest issue here at http://www.scientificamerican.com

A wonderful rework of Chris’ earlier illustration ‘Cydonian Staircase’, to be used as the cover art for an upcoming Novella ‘Buried’.

Images from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter have revealed seven possible cave entrances on the flanks of the Arsia Mons volcano. The caves, named after loved ones of their discoverers, are collectively known as the “seven sisters.” Cave entrances measure from 100 m to 252 m wide and they are believed to be at least 73 m to 96 m deep. Because light does not reach the floor of most of the caves, it is likely that they extend much deeper than these lower estimates and widen below the surface. “Dena” is the only exception; its floor is visible and was measured to be 130 m deep. The interiors of these caverns may be protected from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet’s surface.

http://www.google.com/mars/

Repost: Final cover illustration for Jamil Moledina‘s 2011 Science Fiction Novel ‘Tearing the Sky’.