bioephemera

Weirdest lede ever? A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Go DARPA! Article (MIT Technology Review) here. Video here.

For Christmas, my friend Vanessa got me this wonderful Equal Measure measuring cup by Fred. One side gives measures in cups and ounces, along with the equivalent quantity of various granular substances (five thousand drops of water, as many grains of flour as people on the planet). The other side…

Sadly, Hershey has announced the immediate closing of the small Berkeley factory that, since 2001, has been the flagship of Scharffen Berger chocolate. Scharffen Berger's dark chocolates were a favorite among Bay Area residents years before it was sold to Hershey in 2005; the cozy Berkeley factory…

I know FoxNews does this all the time, but sometimes I accidentally click through to their site and am shocked anew by this sort of thing: Still worried that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that will destroy the Earth when it's finally switched on this summer?Um, well, you may…

To follow up on my earlier post about Semiconductor's short film "Magnetic Movie," I want to share my favorite Semiconductor film: "Brilliant Noise." It gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. In daily life, we avoid looking at the sun, but I challenge you to rip your eyes away from this film…

While I was at work, Sciencepunk beat me to posting that Damien Hirst (of dead-shark fame) has created an original artwork for the anniversary reissue of Darwin's On the Origin of Species: Human skull in space (oil on canvas) Damien Hirst Hirst says: As in a lot of my work, there's a nod to the…

My favorite Academy Award nomination: Oktopodi. By Emud Mokhberi and Thierry Marchand. Read an interview with Mokhberi - chock full of storyboard images, video, and other goodies - here.

photo from TruShu's streamHirotoshi ItohKeiko Gallery The author and title have long slipped my mind, but I once saw a poem lamenting how arbitrary we can be in calling certain things alive, and others not. Though many of them contain remnants of life, biologically speaking, stones are not alive.…

This is a picture of. . . A) the hair cells of the bat inner ear B) a metals-polymer nanowire array C) a previously unknown species of sea anemone D) the cilia of the common goldfish parasite Trichodina Answer below the fold! If you answered polymer nanowires, you were right! This SEM by Rawiwan…

Photographer David Bergman created this gigapixel panorama of the Inauguration, which enables you to play "Where's Waldo" with folks like Al Gore and Newt Gingrich, count the snipers deployed around the Capitol, mercilessly mock folks who fell asleep during the ceremony, and generally goggle at the…

Speaking of the unpredictable evolution of language, the NYT shares this map of many formerly innocuous placenames in Britain which, over time, have become inadvertently profane. Apparently there are so many embarrassing locale that they've become the topic of two books: Mr. Bailey, who grew up on…

During President Obama's Inauguration, the staffer said to me, "the President-elect looks nervous." I said, "Why should he be nervous? All he has to do now is get through the Oath without screwing it up!" Which, of course, he immediately did. It wasn't Obama's fault, though - Chief Justice John…

Story from North America from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo. "Story from North America" Garrett Davis and Kristen Lepore Thanks to reader Claire for finding this strangely poignant yet bizarre short film. I'm not sure what to think of this one.

Satellite Image by GeoEye: [1] detail showing the Capitol; [2] detail of area around the Washington Monument I'm compensating for the shock of having to return to actual work today by looking at the GeoEye satellite images of President Obama's Inauguration. This high-res image is just fascinating…

Okay, kids - I know you loved those robot photos from SFO's science fiction in popular culture exhibit. So before my flight out of SFO after New Year's, I snagged a few more snapshots! First up: Spaceman Air Freshener. Umm, that doesn't exactly instill confidence - I think the space station…

This morning we and thousands of others watched the Inauguration on a Jumbotron from the lawn in front of the Lincoln Memorial. We didn't have tickets to get into the area in front of the Capitol, but that worked out fairly well, as we didn't have to wait in long security lines in the freezing…

Sardine eggs Richard Kirby/BNPS Over the last few weeks, I've received many interesting link ideas from readers. I've gotten behind on sharing them, so I'm going to try to catch up. Thanks to Laura for this gallery of beautiful plankton photos by Richard Kirby. Read more here. Ludia sarsii…

Magnetic Movie Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt) Last fall I stopped by the Hirshhorn Museum's Black Box theatre to watch a short film by Semiconductor (the artistic team of Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt). Magnetic Movie is a color-drenched, imaginative tour of Berkeley's Space…

A biology-driven ad for the Oslo Gay Festival, via Sociological Images. Demerits for promulgating the tenacious myth of the sentient sperm, but kudos for production values - those are really nice flagella.

Even after several readings, there's an exchange I completely fail to understand in Seed's interview with outgoing presidential science adviser John Marburger: Seed: Did you see President Bush ever change his mind based on the scientific evidence that you presented him? John Marburger: As far as I…

Look, it's Ken's "Buddy" Allan! ("All of Ken's clothes fit him!") This is my all-time favorite example of unintended scandal in advertising. I assume that this tagline somehow sounded okay in the 60s, but come on - those quotation marks are provocative regardless of the decade, because they're…

I hate Battlefield Earth not because it's a bad movie - bad movies can be fun! - but because it's so unrelentingly bad, by the end I was just plain depressed that it existed. The same goes for this truly ghastly ad for Microsoft Songsmith. At first I thought it had to be a spoof. But. . . I'm…

Whether you love or hate modern art, you should find this amusing. Via Eva Amsen at Expression Patterns, I discovered this hilarious TED performance by Ursus Wehrli, author of the rather scarce book Tidying Up Art and its sequel. A deadpan Wehrli rescues modern art masterpieces by Vincent Van Gogh…

ScienceOnline09 kicks off tonight. Formerly known as the Duke Blogging Conference, it's a weekend of interactive sessions on science blogging with lots of Sciblings and others representing the science blogging collective. Follow along on the conference wiki or Scibling Bora's blog for all the…

Definitely bio. Definitely ephemera. Definitely NSFW...

I'm hooked on the website tiltshiftmaker.com - it lets you run a quick-and-dirty tilt-shift filter on your snapshots, making them look like miniature models. Here are some snapshots I took on Book Hill Park in Georgetown: are they not adorable? I'm waiting for the miniature train to run through…

Larry Young has written a rather ambitious essay for Nature that skims over the prairie vole/AVPR1A research, breasts as erotic objects, and evidence of dopamine-based mother love on its way to a "view of love as an emergent property of a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides and neurotransmitters."…

I went to a party the other day wearing the shirt above. I'd seen it online, expressed covetousness, and the staffer actually tracked it down and bought it for me (thus scoring major points for A) an early Christmas present, B) listening to my incessant stream-of-consciousness babble, and C)…

Something I wanted to blog this weekend during the downtime: Chris Myers Asch's pitch for a public service academy to turn out well-prepared government employees. Asch doesn't have Barack Obama's support yet, but Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, and Joe Biden are onboard, according to the NYT. A…

Thanks to user B-Baily at Livejournal, we caught a glimpse of this little-known book of dubious etiquette, illustrated by the immortal Edward Gorey. But the book got a little too much attention, and the post was deleted from Livejournal. Fortunately, Joey deVilla snagged the whole thing at his…