bioephemera | February 22, 2010So I flatter myself that you *might* be missing lil' ol' me during my blogcation. (Come on, throw me a bone here). But there's a new sibling who might distract you - Claire Evans, "a freelance science writer, science fiction critic, polymath, and musician," who also blogs about the intersection of science and the arts! Yay! Go say hello at Universe.
bioephemera | February 22, 2010
Feb 23rd (tomorrow) is the last day to snag advance tickets to the Seven on Seven conference in NYC:
Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new --be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine-- over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17th.
If you go, let me know how it is!
bioephemera | February 21, 2010FYI: the winners of the AAAS Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge are up! You may recognize some of them - including PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) cartoonist Jorge Cham. Check 'em out and share your opinions; I'll have more to say when I'm back from blogcation!
bioephemera | February 20, 2010
A quick follow-up to my mention of Edward Tufte last week: you should be aware that Edward Tufte's brief classic, Data Analysis for Politics and Policy, is available online as a PDF here. It's worth a skim in your spare time - and worth sharing with people who don't necessarily appreciate the limitations of statistics.
bioephemera | February 17, 2010
Last week, I braved a nasty sleety Cambridge evening to see Rebecca Skloot read from her excellent new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I'm thrilled to tell you it's finally being released on Amazon tomorrow, so if you haven't already been to your local bookstore, go snag a copy (or enter to win one from Sb, through 2/23/10!)
In case you don't know the story, Henrietta Lacks was a young African-American mother who was stricken with a particularly invasive form of cervical cancer back in the early 1950s. She died within months, but her cancer cells remain alive today - millions of…
bioephemera | February 15, 2010I have my priorities!
Do I even need to comment on how awesome this is? Via iO9.
bioephemera | February 15, 2010Hola BioE readers,
I've been blogging at Scienceblogs for two years this month, and prior to that, I blogged for another year at my own site. So it is not surprising that I am very, very tired.
Blogging uses up a big chunk of my dwindling free time, which I also need for such things as reading non-work-related books, going to the gym, writing long-delayed letters to friends, and cooking with my boyfriend. Not to mention maybe painting something for once, which was the original focus of this blog long, long ago.
So I'm going on blogcation, effective immediately. I expect I'll be back in a…
bioephemera | February 15, 2010
Astro Rocket
I got my boyfriend one of these adorable Astro Rockets from cardboard safari for Valentine's Day. The large ones are frighteningly expensive, but the smallest one is cute, remarkably well designed, and despite being cardboard, has that pleasant burnt-wood odor of a carpentry shop. Mmmm, laser-cuts.
They also have these kind of hilarious cardboard big game trophies:
Bucky
I have seen a collection of these in a gallery, and they're pretty awesomely weird.
bioephemera | February 14, 2010
From the Cold Spring Harbor Archive (click for larger image). From Micklos, The Science of Eugenics, pg 116 (1930).
bioephemera | February 13, 2010
Upcoming at Observatory in NYC: Entomologia (Feb 26-April 4), a group show of art incorporating and inspired by insects. I'm particularly intrigued by the discussion scheduled for April 3, "Transgenics, Cybernetics, and Evolution:"
Silkworms engineered to produce pharmaceuticals and hormones, cyborg dragonflies designed for high-speed missions and surveillance... In connection with her recent work, Shanna Maurizi has been delving into the nether regions of genetic engineering and transgenics, molecular biology, and military cybernetics.
Ok, sounds good to me! Plus it's curated by Curious…
bioephemera | February 11, 2010
Just in time for Valentine's Day: the "Copulating Earthworm Necklace," from heronadornment on etsy.
Also love her anatomical heart locket.
bioephemera | February 11, 2010
Year of the Tiger, 2010
Chris Jordan
Depicts 3200 toy tigers, equal to the estimated number of tigers remaining on Earth. The space in the middle would hold 40,000 of these tigers, equal to the global tiger population in 1970.
SEED has put together a slideshow of works by Chris Jordan, an artist I mentioned in last week's review of Visual Language (he did the Barbie doll breast image), and also in an October post on his photos of the tragic birds of Midway.
"I believe it is worth connecting with these issues and allowing them to matter to us personally, despite the complex mixtures of anger…
bioephemera | February 10, 2010
On Tuesday, Feb. 23, National Geographic Explorer will be devoting an episode to "Vampire Forensics." You can preview a brief clip below the fold, but I'll warn you now: it's not CSI. It's more scientific ("unfortunately this evidence is inconclusive" LOL) and less sexy (inexplicably, Emily Proctor is nowhere to be seen). Overall, the feeling I got from the clip was sort of "Wow, we're National Geographic Explorer, that's pretty great, but we really wish we were sexy, like CSI. Does this sinister music help?"
In conjunction with the Explorer episode, National Geographic is releasing a book…
bioephemera | February 9, 2010
It literally took me a good 20 seconds to figure out what was. . . off. . . about the first photo in this great post by Emily at SheChive. Sigh. ;)
Thanks to Jake for the heads-up!
bioephemera | February 8, 2010Okay, so most people don't even bother to read EULAs. But I'm glad we glanced at this one, by Ben Long for his Photoshop Action Pack:
You can use these actions for anything you like, and you can give them to your friends and co-workers (or even your enemies, if your experience of the actions leads you to believe that that's where the real worth of this software lies). However, if you give them to someone else, you must give them the whole package including the installer, documentation, sample workï¬ows, and a kiss on the cheek. You must then stand on one foot and cluck like a chicken. (Man, I…
bioephemera | February 8, 2010Well, not quite. I got an intriguing abstract in my inbox earlier today, to this new paper from BMC Neuroscience:
Here using a new conditioned suppression paradigm, we investigated whether the ability of a foot-shockpaired conditioned stimulus to suppress chocolate-seeking behavior was antagonized by previous exposure to a chronic stressful experience, thus modeling aberrant chocolate seeking in sated mice. Our findings demonstrate that while Control (non-food deprived) animals showed a profound conditioned suppression of chocolate seeking during presentation of conditioned stimulus,…
bioephemera | February 7, 2010
This is. . . .
A. The gills of a tropical fish.
B. A satellite photo of the Bahamas.
C. A blue-green fungus sometimes called Green Stain.
D. A UV photograph of the center of a miniature carnation.
E. Algae along the edge of a geyser.
F. A Cirque de Soleil costume.
It's actually B, a satellite image of the Bahamas - and kudos to you if you got it, since it's not what you'd usually expect from a satellite! See a slideshow of 24 more stunning aerial photos at NY Daily News.
photo by USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office
bioephemera | February 6, 2010
Those of you who like to play with color may be interested in the newColoRotate interface, designed to make editing color palettes more intuitive. This tool was produced by the same team that made the useful educational website Causes of Color, which I've blogged about before. It explains the differences between iridescence, interference, luminescence, etc. in simple language easy for nonscientists to understand.
There's a quick demo video of the ColoRotate Photoshop plugin below the fold.
bioephemera | February 5, 2010
An interactive flowchart/concept map from Berkeley's Understanding Science project. Click around a while, and tell me what you think of it. Accurate? Too simple? Useful?
bioephemera | February 4, 2010
Seaweed Picture No. 31
Alyson Denny
Photographer Alyson Denny's closeups of seaweed and jellyfish couldn't be less like your usual natural science documentation. Often, very little of her subject is in focus; she's more concerned with how the forms and colors blur and overlap as the field recedes. From a distance, her photographs are dazzling abstractions; the jellyfish photos are reminiscent of jewel-encrusted sets for high-end, artsy diamond ads. But when you realize what the subjects are, you also realize that her photos are just what you'd see if, like a child, you were lying on the…