Hvad vejer vækst?

Theories with emphasis on issues of proportionality have played a dominant role in the history of art and architecture and have thus contributed to our difficulty in recognising the consequences of growth: Leon Battista Alberti argued it was essential that a large and a small shape be proportioned identically and saw it as an advantage that actual size has no significance for proportions. Alberti’s considerations about what characterises a beautiful – well-proportioned – form can thus be linked to contemporary computer-generated architecture that effortlessly can be scaled up and down at a turn of the zoom button. In the computer, everything is scalable. But that is not the case in reality, where everything changes with size and a cube that on each side is 10 times larger than a smaller one is not 10, but 1,000 times heavier. The article embarks on the discussion of what it means to see the importance of size – and thus scale – in the world we inhabit and which seems to suffer because we ignore many heavy consequences of growth

Call for Papers: Creation of New Knowledge Dialogues inside and between Disciplines

NAAR/NAAF Symposium 2+2

Loss-of-activity-mutation in the cardiac chloride-bicarbonate exchanger AE3 causes short QT syndrome

Mutations in potassium and calcium channel genes have been associated with cardiac arrhythmias. Here, Jensen et al. show that an anion transporter chloride-bicarbonate exchanger AE3 is also responsible for the genetically-induced mechanism of cardiac arrhythmia, suggesting new therapeutic targets for this diseas

Rare and low-frequency coding variants alter human adult height

Height is a highly heritable, classic polygenic trait with ~700 common associated variants identified so far through genome - wide association studies . Here , we report 83 height - associated coding variants with lower minor allele frequenc ies ( range of 0.1 - 4.8% ) and effects of up to 2 16 cm /allele ( e.g. in IHH , STC2 , AR and CRISPLD2 ) , >10 times the average effect of common variants . In functional follow - up studies, rare height - increasing alleles of STC2 (+1 - 2 cm/allele) compromise d proteolytic inhibition of PAPP - A and increased cleavage of IGFBP - 4 in vitro , resulting in higher bioavailability of insulin - like growth factors . The se 83 height - associated variants overlap genes mutated in monogenic growth disorders and highlight new biological candidates ( e.g. ADAMTS3, IL11RA, NOX4 ) and pathways ( e.g . proteoglycan/ glycosaminoglycan synthesis ) involved in growth . Our results demonstrate that sufficiently large sample sizes can uncover rare and low - frequency variants of moderate to large effect associated with polygenic human phenotypes , and that these variants implicate relevant genes and pathways

Space in process: Thoughts on our architectural intuition

Vi kan ikke skabe arkitektur uden repræsentationer. Den arkitektur, vi opfører, kan beskrives som repræsentation af et forudgående arbejde med blandt andet tegninger. Arkitekturhistorien er siden renæssancen præget af forestillingen om, at det via tegninger er både muligt og ønskeligt at skabe en sand harmoni, som ikke siden skal ændres. I dag udfordres dén forestilling af en forståelse for, at det, vi skaber, vedvarende skal tilpasses en verden i forandring.The architecture we create can be considered as a representation of prior work with, among other things, drawings. How we understand these drawings is therefore crucial. In the Renaissance, drawings–and geometry–were considered by Alberti as the possibility of making architecture articulate a harmony that should be so perfect that later changes would be undesirable. Today that view is challenged by the growing understanding that the architecture we create must continually adapt to a changing world. As such, architecture is never finished. This article presents the worldview behind Alberti’s ideas which today – due to the computer’s involvement in the creation of architecture – still seems to be prevalent. It is claimed that we can find resources for a different dialogue with the drawing than the one presented by Alberti, both before and after the Renaissance: By analyzing architecture that does not fit the Renaissance template, we can find inspiration for working differently with our spatial imagination