bioephemera | November 26, 2010Okay, so is this the perfect job for me or what?
Massachusetts College of Art and Design seeks a full time, tenure track interdisciplinary position in the Liberal Arts Department at the assistant or associate professor level to teach biology and environmental science and related science courses, including arts-oriented science courses, beginning in September 2011. The Liberal Arts department provides the general education component of Massachusetts College of Art's BFA degree program. Successful candidates will help build an academic program in collaboration with colleagues from non-…
bioephemera | November 24, 2010
David HochbaumGenisis
NYC artist David Hochbaum, the creator of beguiling ephemera-inspired art, is a long-time favorite of BioE (and our friends at Phantasmaphile). Check out his Open Call portfolio, and if you will, take a moment to rate it five stars - you could help him win an artists' residency!
(psst, cephalopodphiles: this is the artist behind Mother, a piece I blogged about way back in 2007.)
bioephemera | November 21, 2010Today's Guardian has a very interesting (though long) article by Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder, about the unsung women of science. In the Guardian piece, Holmes shares some of his research for his forthcoming book, The Lost Women of Victorian Science:
[M]y re-examination of the Royal Society archives during this 350th birthday year has thrown new and unexpected light on the lost women of science. I have tracked down a series of letters, documents and rare publications that begin to fit together to suggest a very different network of support and understanding between the sexes.…
bioephemera | November 19, 2010This year's winner of the BioScapes digital imaging competition, Igor Siwanowicz, triumphed with a somewhat unusual portrait. To most biologists, it should be clear what anatomical structures are shown here - but what species could this be?
Igor Siwanowicz, Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology, Munich, Germany.
First Prize, 2010 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®.
click through for the answer, and for my picks of the other winners. . .
That's Dr. Siwanowicz' frontal section of Daddy Longlegs (Phalangium opilio) eyes, showing lenses (two large ovals), retinas and optic nerves…
bioephemera | November 18, 2010Hannah Waters at Culturing Science has written a lovely little post on the day-to-day benefits of having a scientific worldview:
I grew up immersed in science. Any facts that exist that I couldn't reconcile with experience, I just chalked up to the limitations of my senses or even my brain's ability to conceptualize (the latter usually reserved for when I'm dealing with astrophysics). But if you aren't well-versed in how science works and perhaps the basics, this stuff sounds completely insane!
Read more here. While I'm not quite as optimistic that the power of awesome, or science…
bioephemera | November 17, 2010
The New York Times decided earlier this week that biological animation warrants its own article. About time! :)
Seriously, for those of you who haven't discovered BioVisions' amazing animations, you should check them out and/or use them in class - with the caveat that they're not "pure" data:
While acknowledging the potential to help refine a hypothesis, for example, some scientists say that visualizations can quickly veer into fiction. "Some animations are clearly more Hollywood than useful display," says Peter Walter, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of…
bioephemera | November 13, 2010In less than a month (December 2nd), Christie's will auction off Edward Tufte's library - an idiosyncratic collection of first edition books, plates, prints, and ephemera that the dataviz guru calls his "Museum of Cognitive Art," and I call "Jessica's Christmas List."
I'm not going to sample low-rez images of the lots here, because there's a stunning slideshow, complete with curation, at the Christie's website. If you've got ten minutes, this is virtual antiquarian dataviz windowshopping at its best.
There appear to be 160 lots; Tufte's website describes it as "200 rare books, including major…
bioephemera | November 13, 2010IBM has a new commercial depicting the constant streams of medical biodata that can be gathered from a human body, and hopefully improve healthcare. In a shameless play to elicit warm fuzzies, they made it about very young babies:
Awwwww. With all the glowing data, it's sort of like a baby TRON. And what's with the virtual-data-baby-mobile? Is it made of giant diatoms, or what?
Wait. . . I know what this reminds me of. . . it's a PLANKTON PARTY!
BTW, there's also a "behind the scenes" clip of the IBM commercial, with the apparent sole purpose of giving the babies extra cute camera time.…
bioephemera | November 12, 2010With a poster titled "WE NEED YOUR BODY! For a UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY," microbiologist Steven Park and artist Anne Brodie invited attendees at the British Science Festival to
stand NAKED inside our live bioluminescent photograph booth and have your photograph taken. Enveloped by a living ethereal blue green light, the resulting faint and ghostly image will be used as part of an [art] installation. . .
The eerie results, which look a whole lot like TSA millimeter-wave scans, are appearing in an exhibition at the UK's Royal Institution through December 3. See a slideshow at the Londonist.
bioephemera | November 10, 2010
For health organizations, federal agencies and nonprofits alike, it's a challenge to get anyone to pay attention long enough to hear your prevention messages, much less to actually change their behavior as a result. It's even harder with kids. It's not that they don't care about science; quite the contrary, they love it - especially if it's gross. It's more that they don't want to hear an authority figure talking down to them about the parade of terribles that will befall them if they binge drink, have unprotected sex, etc. Be honest: can you think back to your high school health classes…
bioephemera | November 5, 2010
Knight Fellow Geoff McGhee created this polished video documentary series about how data visualization is infiltrating and transforming journalism. Interviews with Many Eyes creators Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, Amanda Cox of the New York Times, and other dataviz luminaries are coupled with bios and links to further information, some history of visualization techniques, industry context (is dataviz profitable? who's doing it?) and lots of lovely examples. The last section of the video, "First Steps," is a mini-tour of useful DIY sites like Swivel and Wordle (which is ridiculously…
bioephemera | November 4, 2010
Hippocampus: Broad Overview
Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman, and Joshua Sanes, 2005
from Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century by Carl Schoonover
The first time I created a transgenic neuron, it was in a worm, C. elegans -- a tiny, transparent cousin of the earthworm. I injected DNA into the embryonic worm, let it grow up, and voila: there was one eerie green blotch like a little Pac-Man ghost, its long green axon a lime racing stripe running along the worm's transparent body. The worm wiggled, but I was the one hooked: science is beautiful.
You…
bioephemera | November 3, 2010
Poor, outnumbered moderates. . .
I decided to wait until the election mayhem abated before reviewing Carl Schoonover's EXTREMELY outstanding new book Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. If you're tired of looking at red and blue Rorschach tests, drop by tomorrow for my review.
bioephemera | October 26, 2010
Wildlife of Vietnam, by Brendan Wenzel
This bundle of exotic animals by Brendan Wenzel is whimsical, yet unsettling. On the one hand, it would be perfect for a children's book; I imagine a tale in which the animals overcome their natural animosities, cooperate to free themselves, dump a hapless and ineptly nonthreatening poacher in the river, and return safely to their various homes, in the happiest of ecological endings. But we all know that's not how the story really goes.
Wenzel, a New York illustrator who until recently lived in Vietnam, says his work was inspired by the worsening…
bioephemera | October 24, 2010
Have e-books killed tree-books? I hope not - I love hefting a brand-new book in my hand and letting the pages fan open. It's sensual and anticipation-laden, like opening a bottle of good wine. But perhaps science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer is hedging his bets on the future of paper books: he's released his latest collection, Brain Cuttings, exclusively for Kindle, iPad, and other mobile devices. I clicked over to read an excerpt, and this was the first passage I saw:
Let's say you transfer your mind into a computer--not all at once but gradually, having electrodes inserted into your…
bioephemera | October 23, 2010Just in: the 2010 Imagine Science Films Festival's Nature Scientific Merit award, given to "a short film that exemplifies science in narrative filmmaking in a compelling, credible and inspiring manner," is An Eyeful of Sound, a short film about audio-visual synaesthesia by Samantha Moore.
Here's the trailer:

An Eyeful of Sound - trailer from Samantha Moore on Vimeo.
It's a little hard from that clip to get a sense of what the film is like. But it's great that an organization is finally calling attention to science-themed short films. Bravo, ISFF.
Related: The Eyeful of Sound…
bioephemera | October 22, 2010
detail of "Williamsburg Bridge Plaza," Brooklyn, NY, circa 1906
Source: Shorpy
I'm just saying, I don't think that's a speck on the negative. But maybe I'm too cynical.
bioephemera | October 21, 2010A couple of days ago, the New York Times reported on an undergraduate class at Harvard that teaches the science of cooking. It's called "Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science," and it's popular: if you're a Harvard undergrad, you have about a 43% chance of winning a seat at the lab bench (still, as one of the instructors points out, better odds than most people have of getting reservations at one of the participating guest chefs' exclusive restaurants).
The class also seems to be changing the way some students think about science:
For Mr. Jean-Baptiste, a junior…
bioephemera | October 20, 2010And now for a completely different type of glass art: this time from sculptor Luke Jerram. His deceptively beautiful glass malaria parasite (see video below) will be auctioned off to benefit Malaria No More.
Via Medical Museion. The "malaria parasite" is also known as Plasmodium falciparum. Read more about Jerram's sculpture here - no, I don't know when the auction will be, but I imagine he'll update his website with the news.