bioephemera
Posts by this author
November 11, 2008
This forensics van enthusiastically wields the scientific method against all threats. Watch out, criminals - Science will get ya!
November 9, 2008
What is this?
A. The escape response of the smallest known cephalopod
B. A recently auctioned photo series by Man Ray
C. A fungus launching its high-speed spore
D. Latex squirting from an opium poppy pod
E. A medical nanodevice deploying into the bloodstream
Answer below the fold. . .
Well, this…
November 7, 2008
One of the odder perks of living in DC is viewing the strange Metro ads purchased by various lobbying blocs. Here, a rosy-cheeked child sucks down pasta, while the ad proudly tells us the main ingredient is fertilizer. Yum, yum.
November 6, 2008
From NPR: The staff at a German aquarium trained 6-month old Otto the octopus to aim and squirt water at targets. It was all fun and games for awhile, but then the devious cephalopod turned his powers against his captors, squirting the lights in his enclosure and repeatedly shorting out the…
November 6, 2008
Onlookers filed past the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue Wednesday night, viewing approximately 80 front pages from U.S. and world newspapers - all of which paid tribute to President-elect Barack Obama.
Related:
Useful Post-Election Links
Wow.
November 5, 2008
"Each face is made of approximately 150 million tiny carbon nanotubes; that's about how many Americans voted on November 4."
Carbon nanotube/silicon sculptures by MIT mechanical engineer Anastasios John Hart. More at nanobama and nanobliss.
In late 2005, Hart started experimenting with sculpting…
November 5, 2008
"While the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, 'We are not enemies, but friends. Though passion may have strained it…
November 5, 2008
I expected that by now, last night's events would have sunk in. They haven't. So I've spent the morning cruising the intertubes.
DC's Newseum archives the front pages of major newspapers across the country - you can see their gallery of front pages here today, and can search for Nov. 5 at later…
November 4, 2008
Okay. . . my mom has been campaigning for Obama, and she sent me a great "Science for Obama" button. It morphs the features of Einstein with those of Obama.
Unfortunately, it was pointed out to me tonight that this unnatural union yields. . . Al Sharpton.
Agh!!!!!
(I took this photo myself just…
November 4, 2008
Where do you suppose this photo was taken?
A. It's a false-color representation of the surface of a meteorite.
B. It's a 100x enlargement of the surface of a shark tooth.
C. It's crystals of an anti-cancer drug.
D. It's the "teeth" on a butterfly wing.
Answer below the fold. . .
The answer is (C…
November 3, 2008
Duke's behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of "Predictably Irrational" and founder of MIT's Center for Advanced Hindsight, was in DC for a talk today. He is a damn entertaining speaker. For example, his advice on wingmen/women: "If you ever go bar-hopping, who do you want to take with you? A…
November 3, 2008
In the current New Yorker, Margaret Talbot summarizes the gaping chasm in attitudes toward teenage sex in Red and Blue America:
Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage,…
November 2, 2008
This is for all those people who wonder why I rave endlessly about Portland, Oregon.
From ahp_ibanez' flickr stream via signal vs. noise (they have some good stuff over there!).
Note: Yes, you purists, I am aware the Pound reference is Chinese. ;)
November 2, 2008
Very cool:
These rock sculptures are pure ephemera, lasting only hours or days before the surf knocks them down. But sculptor Kent Avery doesn't see it as futile - even when the nascent sculptures fall on him, or onlookers object to their "unnatural" state.
Via signal vs. noise.
October 30, 2008
I can't freehand a parallelogram to save my life, but I can bisect an angle with the best of 'em! Woohoo!
How good are you at eyeballing geometry? Test yourself with this game. It's addictive, although your eyes will tire quickly if you have an inferior monitor. And at the end, it gives you a…
October 30, 2008
stag beetle
Albrecht Durersource
... But life in nature manifests the truth of these things.... Therefore observe it diligently, go by it and do not depart from nature arbitrarily, imagining to find the better by thyself, for thou wouldst be misled. For, verily, "art" is embedded in nature; he who…
October 29, 2008
I was meme-tagged a while ago by Thomas at Medical Museion, and I never got around to responding, because I was incapacited by indecision! The meme (which originated with Arte y Pico) requires that I recommend five inspiring blogs to my readers. That's harder than it sounds - there are so many…
October 29, 2008
The Editors of SEED just officially endorsed Barack Obama:
Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method.…
October 29, 2008
De prospectiva pingendi, Book 3, figure lxivPiero della Francesca (c 1412-92)
This month's Lancet has an interesting article by G.D. Schott, linking Piero della Francesca's pioneering orthographic projections to technologies like fMRI:
In the neurosciences today, images of the brain and its…
October 27, 2008
Care to guess what this is?
A. a dragonfly wing.
B. a solar panel array.
C. winter fields in the mountains of Thailand.
D. a gecko foot.
E. the award-winning roof of a new modern art museum in Seattle.
Answer below the fold. . .
Yes, it's a dragonfly wing. (I had to smudge out the scale bar on…
October 27, 2008
Amazingly, it's already the last week of the DonorsChoose fundraising drive! SEED has generously kicked in matching funds for each blogger, which enabled me to contribute to several more projects - but we only have a total of $1,026 so far. That's much less than Chad is getting for promising to…
October 27, 2008
Tentacles with Synthetic FlowersLiz Wolfe, 2004
Liz Wolfe mixes sugar, spice, and everything nice with snakes, snails, and lots of raw meat. Her gallery is like a garden party from twisted suburbia, where cupcakes are topped with screws, cakes bleed, and floors are paved with ham. You may never…
October 27, 2008
Robert Crease observes at Physicsworld that the upcoming James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, is only one of many instances - some inaccurate or misleading - of "quantum" in our cultural discourse. To explain the ubiquity of the word, Crease invokes James Clerk Maxwell's observation that "the most…
October 26, 2008
Catching up on the announcement of the 2008 Nikon Small World contest winners, here's sixth place winner Klaus Bolte's stereomicrograph of a microleaf beetle (Chrysolina fastuosa). While you might think you've seen this kind of beetle before, pinned prettily in glass collection boxes, you'd be…
October 25, 2008
Images from a Thai ad campaign for Black & Decker lawnmowers! Yikes.
While I appreciate the sharpness of any blade that could slice such a clean, anatomically elegant cross-section through a living snake, I have to also say "eeeuw." Poor critters!
Unfortunately, industrial harvesters do chop…
October 24, 2008
Today I encountered yet another example of the misleading language I see all too frequently in coverage of science news. I was browsing a health newsletter (the "Pink Sheet") when I saw this:
NeuroSearch pill doubles weight loss, study finds A Phase II trial of tesofensine found that the drug…
October 23, 2008
Artist Julian Voss-Andrae created this metal sculpture, Angel of the West, which evokes da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. The molecule is probably instantly recognizable to many of you as an antibody:
The sculpture plays on the striking similarity of both proportion and function of the antibody molecule…
October 22, 2008
Treehugger (detail)
Alex Pardee
They're partying it up in SF tonight to celebrate the release of Alex Pardee's new "cinematic clothing" line, Night of the Treeple. Check out the preview gallery of sinister forest brethren at Juxtapoz.
Note: the mythology Pardee created for this line is yet another…
October 22, 2008
Lady of the Dawn (detail)
Chris Berens
"I'm not a real painter or an artist. I don't consider myself that. There are some images - a lot of images - I want to show. And for now painting is the way to do that." - Chris Berens
Perfectly timed to follow my post about Chris Berens' dreamy ink paintings…
October 22, 2008
"Migration"
Doug Aitken
Last year, on a brisk, cool day much like today, I was jogging near the National Zoo when I noticed a good-sized young deer ambling out of the Zoo, toward a busy road only a few carlengths away. Two passersby were frozen on the path; they could clearly foresee the pending…