Uppers & Downers

December 1, 2010 By arne hendriks Off

Hormones play a key role in growth as the chemical mediators with which the growth process is stimulated, or slowed down. Most hormones are controlled by a negative feedback inhibition loop. If we are to shrink the human species manipulation of this loop may represent one…

Sixty Calories

November 23, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

Smaller people require less nutrients, water and energy to live under the same conditions and life style of taller people. The energy requirements of a 50 centimeter person might be approximately 60 calories per day. That’s the number of calories in a small apple, and…

Missing Molars & Microdontia

November 19, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

In a 2008 discovery of the remains of small humans (130 – 140 cm) on the Micronesian island of Palau it was observed that the teeth seemed unusually large in comparison to the jaw bone. Discoverer Lee Berger speculates that this is the result of…

Killer Hail

November 16, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Some things just won’t shrink. Like the weather. Rain drops, snow flakes and hail stones will not change with us. If we decide to shink to 50 centimeters, talking about the weather becomes more than the casual social exchange around the coffee machine. With hail…

Outgrowing Eames

November 5, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

The Lounge Chair (670) and accompanying ottoman (671) by Charles and Ray Eames, is one of the most iconic furniture designs of the 20th century. The Lounge Chair, like many important modern classics, is a piece of furniture that comes from the past but fits into…

Micro Liver

November 1, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Researchers at Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine have grown a miniature liver using human cells. It’s only an inch in diameter which is not big enough to work for a regular sized human being but would be more then sufficient if we were…

Disproportionate Restaurant

October 30, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

One of the more exciting prospects of shrinking mankind is the drastic change in food consumption. To investigate this aspect more elaborately The Incredible Shrinking Man intends to build a fully functional restaurant catering to customers that are 50 centimeters tall.  The restaurant will also…

The 9 Lives of Shrinking Man

October 28, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

The final velocity of a falling body is the product of its acceleration and the time the body is accelerating. The smaller the person the smaller the risk of getting seriously hurt. Kinetic energy increases as length raised to the fifth power. If a child…

The Tiny Frontier

October 27, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

In a response to our ambition to create a 50 cm research doll, Australian designer Guy Keulemans points out that “the idea of a 50cm puppet exploring tiny urban space is interesting, simply because we are running out of regular sized spaces to explore. The great age…

Mexican Dwarf Bullfighters

October 26, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Difference in body-size has intrigued people throughout the centuries. Dwarfs were amongst the most popular gladiators in Rome and famous little people like General Tom Thumb, Sebastiano Biavati and He Pingping still capture the imagination. Another example is documented in the book The Enanitos Toreros…

Preformationism & the Homunculus

October 21, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

In 1694 Nicolaas Hartsoeker, in his Essai de Dioptrique produced an image of a tiny human form curled up inside a sperm cell, He referred to it as petit l’infant, the small infant. This image, depicting what historians now refer to as the homunculus, has become iconic of the…

Children’s Shrinklit.

October 19, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

There is a lot of of children’s literature involving little or shrunken characters. These stories sparked our imagination as a child and in many cases continue to do so, consciously and subconsciously. In the Netherlands we have Pinkeltje and Wiplala, in Sweden it’s Simon Small,…

Megalophobia

October 15, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Quite often the  primary response to The Incredible Shrinking Man’s ambition to downsize the human body is the fear of being exposed to animals. As we’ll shrink, our environment and everything in it will appear a lot larger. The fear of large animals and objects…

The Research Puppet

October 11, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

This is a photo of my mother in the mid 80’s holding a self-marionette, more or less the size of our projected future people. The Incredible Shrinking Man is developing tools to investigate what it would be like to be 50 centimeters. One of these tools…

The Methuselah Gene

September 28, 2010 By arne hendriks 3

The strong correlation between size and the aging process has been discussed here before. However the connection between the two is a very complex puzzle of different ingredients, all playing a role in the aging/growing process. A type of gene mutation long known to extend…

Gravitational Time Dilation

September 25, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Einstein’s theory, that short people grow old slower then tall people, has finally been proven scientifically. In an experiment using the most accurate atomic clocks ever invented, researchers of the National Institute of Standards and Technology showed that clocks run faster if they are raised…

The Shrinking Iguana

September 20, 2010 By arne hendriks 4

Much to his surprise, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University has found that in times of famine, marine iguanas in the Galápagos Islands shrink in length and then regrow when food is plentiful again. “For vertebrates, it’s sort of a dogma that they don’t shrink,”…

Koro Syndrome

September 16, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

The Incredible Shrinking Man is interested in mapping shrink desires that already exist in society. But we shouldn’t close our eyes to the opposite: shrink fears. One of the more curious manifestations of this fear is the Koro Syndrome, the pathological fear that the genitals…

Degrowth: Small is Happy

September 15, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

In the influential collection of essays “Small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered” first published in 1973, the economic thinker Fritz Schumacher proposes the idea of “smallness within bigness”. For a large organization to work it must behave like a related…

An Act of Rebellion

September 14, 2010 By arne hendriks 2

In The Tin Drum, one of the great postwar literary classics, the protagonist Oskar Matzerath decides to stop growing at age 3. He explains to the reader that since he was born with a fully developed consciousness he could observe adults, and their ways. Since he…