Smooth Pebbles : Now that's one superanimated cell

Profile

Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.

BOOKS by David Dobbs

Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.â€

The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.

The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.

Search this blog

« Tallying the Cost of War | Main | Who You Gonna Call -- W or Lucky Jack? Deliberating Decision-Making »

Now that's one superanimated cell

Category: Nota Bene
Posted on: February 2, 2007 8:20 AM, by David Dobbs

Now we know what Harvard's doing with all that money.

Here's an amazing look at the state of the art in biological illustration and animation: a sort of cell's inner life, with extremely high production values. Takes a few seconds to load on broadband; don't think I'd try it with dial-up.

But this is some serious eye candy. Wish I knew what half the stuff was.

Comments

Did you see the special, "Multiples" on, I think it was The Learning Channel, a couple weeks ago? Great stuff. I'd love to see the point in the production process where the scientific content advisor turns to the animator and says, "Hey, try to make this cell a deeper, more sky blue," and, "How about we set it to this little keyboard number I've come up with."
'The Inner Life of the Cell' clip is amazing. Equally amazing is that the state of digital animation is now so advanced that merely three people (the two scientific advisors and the one animator credited at the end of the clip) can create such a detailed and visually stunning piece of animation. I mean, granted, the clip's not the longest in the world, and they ARE from Harvard, but it wasn't too long ago that George Lucas needed 1000+ staff members and a multi million dollar budget to get a picture of a clay model to move jerkily across a star-strewn backdrop. Now Harvard's all sub-atomic and shit.
It also wasn't too long ago (five years) that I graduated from a high school where the most current set of encyclopedias on campus had a brief description of the USSR and absolutely no entry for AIDS. These Harvard boys sure got the jump on me: wish I had just stayed home and watch Discovery Channel instead of going to school.

Posted by: David | February 5, 2007 5:50 PM

This is interesting, i can't believe that Harvard is spending its money like this.

Posted by: Organic Chemistry | February 22, 2007 11:16 AM