bioephemera | January 29, 2009Weirdest 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.
bioephemera | January 29, 2009
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 gives metric volumes, alongside biological volumes (half a human brain; enough corn oil to fuel a biodiesel car for three miles, amount of table salt in a large human).
If I were still teaching physiology, I'd totally be using this in lab! As it is, I may have to convert a recipe or two into T. rex…
bioephemera | January 29, 2009Sadly, 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 used to be open for tours and chocolate tastings (followed by obligatory hot cocoa at the cafe next door). I have many fond memories of Scharffen Berger chocolate, so this news is depressing.
To add insult to injury, Hershey is also closing the factory of Joseph Schmidt in San Francisco - a company…
bioephemera | January 28, 2009I 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 have a point. Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world's largest particle collider, and determined that they won't simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted.
Oh noes! No less than…
bioephemera | January 27, 2009
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. In Semiconductor's hands, the sun is dynamic, unpredictable, even ominous. Quite the makeover for an object we take for granted!
More. . .
Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt
NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, California, USA. 2006
(click the four…
bioephemera | January 27, 2009While 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 scientific. The painting sits firmly in the tradition of "still life" and is made up of objects I've come to imbue with my own meanings, some of them Darwinian in origin, and that I guess are seen in other areas of my work. The painting has an X-ray-like quality to it, as if it is revealing something…
bioephemera | January 26, 2009
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.
bioephemera | January 25, 2009
photo from TruShu's stream
Hirotoshi Itoh
Keiko 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. But who has felt a smooth, ancient pebble warm against the cupped palm, without feeling some affinity - some sense of a shared heritage?
Hirotoshi Itoh's sculptures tap into the numinous sense that stones, too, live. But he's hardly all mystical and spiritual about it; in fact, he's downright…
bioephemera | January 24, 2009
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 Laocharoensuk was the ACS NanoVision winning image for June 2008.
See more nanoimages (and enter the Nanotube Video Contest) at the ACS Nanotation website.
Previously on bioephemera (scroll down slowly, so you don't ruin the surprise - I'm not sure how to link to just the teaser!):
Mystery Image #…
bioephemera | January 23, 2009Photographer 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 greatness of technology. This is a better view than you'd have had were you actually there!
(Bergman says on his blog, "I've only just started to explore the photo myself, but I found Yo-Yo Ma taking a picture with his iPhone.")
PS. A friend pointed out that users at the gigapan web site are…
bioephemera | January 23, 2009
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 Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire, and Mr. Hurst got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire.
The story isn't that surprising, but seeing this ridiculous little map in the sober Gray Lady just made me smile.
bioephemera | January 23, 2009During 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 Roberts appears to have prompted the gaffe by speaking the word "faithfully" out of turn. In a NYT editorial, famous linguist Steven Pinker hypothesizes why.
How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists…
bioephemera | January 22, 2009Story 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.
bioephemera | January 21, 2009
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!
Note that most of the people (the brown dots) are clumped around the Jumbotrons (compare with the official Jumbotron map here), but there are some interesting anomalies. I'm looking at the giant mass of people near the National Indian Museum (SE quadrant) and wondering if that is some sort of…
bioephemera | January 21, 2009
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 probably smells like a rusty latrine.
Ahhhhhh! Attack of the space Mrs. Butterworths!
Tom Corbett Space Academy. (It's just like a wild west fort - in space.)
"Mr. Hustler?" Really?
These are a few female space alien figurines. I'm not sure how powerful a blow they struck for feminism in Mr. Hustler's…
bioephemera | January 20, 2009
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 wind! The Lincoln Memorial is just over two miles from my home, there were no lines there, and it seemed like the appropriate place to watch, listen, and celebrate on this historic morning.
More photos of our journey through NW DC after the fold...
The crowds walking at 9:30 am at Pennsylvania and H,…
bioephemera | January 19, 2009
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
Richard Kirby/BNPS
bioephemera | January 18, 2009
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 Sciences Laboratory. The film is below the fold, but before you watch it, take a moment to consider your expectations when you're watching a film about "lab science". Ultimately, does this film transcend or offend those expectations? And what are your expectations for scientific art in general?…
bioephemera | January 18, 2009
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.
bioephemera | January 18, 2009Even 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 can tell, the president, as a matter of principle, doesn't think it's wise to defy nature. By the time I've arranged a presentation about something for the president, all science questions have been resolved. And he expects it. He would probably fire me if I permitted a science question to leak into…