I'm not going to comment too much on this, but this is hilariously wrong. I learned from this EFF post that the maker of the oft-parodied Hitler film The Downfall sent a bunch of takedown notices (or something similar using filtration technology) to YouTube, prompting removal of a swath of Hitler meltdown scene parodies. Not only are many of these parodies clear cases of fair use, the parodies even included one by EFF's Brad Templeton, "which depicted Hitler as a producer at Constantin Films. He hears about all the videos and orders DMCA takedowns. His lawyers (generals) have to explain…

Yes, they can! At least Tim Knowles thinks so: he attaches pens to the ends of branches and lets them doodle in the wind, like botanical spirographs. Knowles says, "Like signatures each drawing reveals the different qualities and characteristics of each tree." It sounds cheesy, but it's true - the drawings really are distinct, and do capture something of the fluidity of a tree in the breeze. Knowles' body of work is all about distinctive vectors and paths: he also did a series of "Vehicle Motion Drawings", and his "Postal Project" traces, seismograph-like, the movements of a package in…

That's what I said - you can print skin. Not print on skin, print the skin itself, cell layer by layer. Bioprinting custom skin grafts means you can customize a graft's depth to treat severe burns - using the patient's own cells to avoid rejection. Kudos to whomever came up with this idea. Seriously: this is bio-DIY to the max. Wow! Via Armed With Science. Update: Jason at the Thoughtful Animal just sent me a 2008 minireview on this process by Henmi et al, "New approaches for tissue engineering: three dimensional cell patterning using inkjet technology." It appears to have been sponsored…

In the munch-inducing lull between election cycles, fivethirtyeight's Nate Silver turns his attention to the KFC Double Down: I've created an index based on the amount of fat, sodium and cholesterol that the Double Down and a variety of comparable sandwiches contain as a portion of the USDA daily allowance. (In the fat category, saturated fats are counted double and trans-fats are counted triple.) The index is scaled such that the Original Recipe version of the sandwich receives a score of 1.00, a measure of gluttony that will hereafter be known as The Double Down (DD).** (source) Based on…

Wellcome's renowned London Centre for the History of Medicine will be closed. No one quite knows why, but Thomas has been posting about this at Medical Museion and will keep us updated. There is also a news update in BMJ for those with subscription access. Note that nothing I've seen suggests that the snazzy new Wellcome Collection, also in London, is in any danger.

One of the DC bands I like, Honor By August, has a new cd out- and the cover (the e-cover at least, I haven't seen a hard copy) plays with biomedical imagery. Sweet - love the little bird! I'd totally take that on a T-shirt and wear it.

New Scibling Alex over at Myrmecos has a fun post on how to turn your iPhone into a close-focus insect camera. If you, too, have been frustrated with the quality of the iPhone's camera, you might want to check this out!

I have no idea of the source on this one - anybody know who made it? This artist has created a similar model, but the inside's padded as seating, so it probably wouldn't work as well as a human hamster wheel. Via

WTF! My boyfriend, an astrophysicist, says the Sun "does this all the time." I am going to hide under my bed now until I die.

Up There is a short documentary about the sign painters who still work in cities like New York, hand-applying mural-style ads to brick walls. In this short preview clip, you see an accelerated version of a series of murals painted over three weeks to advertise Stella Artois. Each image is drawn cartoon-style onto paper, holes are burned through the cartoon, and charcoal is applied to pattern the brick wall. Then the painters fill in the mural, mixing their paint as they go. It's truly humbling to see such skilled painters, able to fill a wall with a proportional, almost photorealistic mural…

A recommendation from reader Calle: a time-lapse view of a Rocky Mountains park over a year, accompanied by sound bytes from the news. Occasionally pretty eerie. News, Weather & Sports - a year long time-lapse documents the seasonal changes and the recreational activities of visitors to a public park. This is a preview clip of a looping video art project by Dan Hudson (www.danhudson.ca). Location: Canmore, Alberta, Canada. Music: Chris Jennings. Support: Canada Council for the Arts.

Via talking points memo, an amazing photo gallery of the Icelandic volcano causing so much disruption in Europe's airspace. photo credit: Newscom/Zuma Update: More amazing photos here.

For the past two months, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has been showing films . . . to potted plants. Specifically, the flora will be seeing travel documentaries showing off glorious European skies. Will the green cinematic scheme backfire when the plants are too entertained to foresee their possible extinction?"Our destruction of the environment is bad news for plants," the brain-teasing Keats, who also pens Wired's Jargon Watch feature, said in an e-mail interview with Wired.com "I think it's only fair that shrubs and trees know what's happening, that they realize that the cataclysm…

Memento 2.9, 2009 Alan Bur Johnson makes delicate clustered sculptures that consist of transparencies in silver frames mounted on dissection pins: "The installations resemble haiku in their enchanting, simple grammar - and, like precise syllables come to luminous life as each framed, wing-like component flickers independently in the wake of an exhalation or current of air passing through the room." (source). Much of the fragmented imagery Bur Johnson uses in his transparencies (honeycomb, dragonfly wing venation, segmented legs) is insectoid, and the pieces are correspondingly loose, organic…

This is. . . . A. A ghost. B. The computer reconstruction of the structure of mammoth globulin. C. The moon reflected on a river in England. D. A new iPad app that lets you blow virtual smoke rings. E. A newly discovered deep-sea jellyfish. It's actually C, a ghostly photo of the moon taken by Tim Knowles. See more of his work at his website.

In this TED clip, Natalie Merchant sings haunting arrangements of old poetry from her new album, Leave Your Sleep (2CD). If you have limited time, skip ahead to about 8:00 for the beautiful ee cummings poem "maggie and milly and molly and may", followed by the gently rebellious "if no one ever marries me" by Laurence Alma-Tadema (who never did marry), and then "Margaret" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I'd forgotten how moving Merchant's voice is. I'll definitely be ordering this one when it's released. Watch an interview with Natalie Merchant about this project at Granta.

Anthropologie's new From the Deep collection features cobalt blue tentacles reaching over the edge of a dinner plate while an octopus broods on the salad plate. There are even suckers on the teacup handles! You can Life Aquatic it up quirky-collage-style with the coordinating dishes featuring collaged fish, stripes, and disproportionately tiny ships, but I'm a purist: I WANT a set of those three tentacular pieces. If I were only getting married so this could be my pattern. . . sigh. From the Deep collection at Anthropologie.

Reader Jake alerts me that Wired has just put up a gallery of robot spiders (and spider-like critters). If you've always wanted to be creeped out by a 40-foot robot Shelob, be my guest!

Wednesday night, Radiolab's "science cabaret" program, Awe-mageddon, kicks off at 7pm with its first live video webcast, hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich: "AWE-MAGEDDON" will feature Radiolab's trademark mash-up of world-class scientists, artists, philosophers and generally interesting people sitting down with Jad and Robert to explore the interdisciplinary nature of big ideas. For the first time ever, a Radiolab event can be experienced by audiences around the globe via live video webcast, available at www.wnyc.org/thegreenespace. Their guests will be Iain Couzin, assistant…

from "Visualizing biological data--now and in the future" Seán I O'Donoghue, Anne-Claude Gavin, Nils Gehlenborg, David S Goodsell, Jean-Karim Hériché, Cydney B Nielsen, Chris North, Arthur J Olson, James B Procter, David W Shattuck, Thomas Walter & Bang WongNature Methods Supplement 7, S2 - S4 (2010) Nature Methods has a special supplement out right now on bioimaging methods, with five commissioned reviews, "Visualizing genomes: techniques and challenge," "Visualization of multiple alignments, phylogenies and gene family evolution," "Visualization of image data from cells to organisms…