bioephemera | October 27, 2008Amazingly, 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 dance like a monkey.
Honestly, I'd dance like a monkey too, but none of you wants to see that, I promise you. I have no rhythm whatsoever.
So here it is, readers: I'm going to do something to persuade you to donate, too. I'm going to give away a painting. A new, original, watercolor painting that I am…
bioephemera | October 27, 2008
Tentacles with Synthetic Flowers
Liz 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 eat candy again.
Thanks to Rhett for this one!
bioephemera | October 27, 2008Robert 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 absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recalls some well-known scientific phrase."
More here.
Via 3 quarks daily.
bioephemera | 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 wrong - the silver disc behind the beetle is a pin head. The beetle is seen here at 40x magnification - pinning it down with a conventional pin would obliterate it.
The first place winner this year was Michael Stringer, who used polarized light, darkfield, and image manipulation to portray the graceful…
bioephemera | 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 up lizards and snakes, although less surgically than this. Many years ago, when I was working the night shift at a produce freezing plant, we had to pick bits of reptile, insect, and amphibian out of the frozen vegetables. Fun job, that.
Anyway, the strangest thing (besides the idea that this…
bioephemera | October 24, 2008Today 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 caused about 10% more weight loss in obese patients compared with placebo and diet. The finding indicates that the treatment, manufactured by Danish firm NeuroSearch, is twice as effective as existing obesity pills, which provide about 5% of weight loss.
Okay, how much weight loss does tesofensine…
bioephemera | 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 and the human body. A representation of the antibody molecule, in a style developed by the artist, is surrounded by a ring evocative of Leonardo's Renaissance icon Vitruvian Man (1490). Where man's arms reach up to touch the circle with his hands, the molecule's flexible 'arms' ending in highly…
bioephemera | 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 typical scenario involving faceless government scientists (in this case, "Project Armadillo") and their vats of inconvenient toxic waste. Come on! I mean, unscrupulous government researchers can hardly be to blame for EVERY fictitious race of carnivorous angiosperms. Cut 'em some slack, and blame…
bioephemera | 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, Kirsten Anderson of Roq la Rue interviews the artist at his Amsterdam studio (below the fold).
His patience is amazing. I just wish the video were higher-res!
Related: No, it's not digital. Really.
bioephemera | 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 disaster, but had no idea what to do about it.
I jogged right up to the buck, yelled at him, and made as if to slap him on the rump. He looked at me dumbfounded, as did the walkers. Then he ambled back into the bushes. Easy enough. But I think the concerned walkers expected the buck to gore me, or…
bioephemera | October 21, 2008This receipt from CVS was over three feet long!
I purchased exactly one item. How is this monstrous scroll of paper remotely necessary to document it? It's no wonder the world has conservation problems. . .
bioephemera | October 19, 2008
Beast
Chris Berens, 2007
Via the excellent art blog Erratic Phenomena, I discovered the work of Dutch painter Chris Berens. Actually, "discovered" is the wrong word; I'd glimpsed his work before, but never had a chance to discover the artist behind these warped-yet-graceful paintings, which appear so deceptively close to digital art - but aren't digital at all.
Heaven on Their Minds
Chris Berens, 2007
I find it hard to wrap my head around this without seeing his work in person (Roq la Rue, here I come!) but Berens doesn't work digitally. He uses layers of ink, bistre and varnish to create…
bioephemera | October 19, 2008On Friday, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a "report card" on media practices and scientific speech in federal agencies. According to UCS,
Both good policy and good practice in the communication of scientific results to the media are achievable goals for federal agencies. Yet there is no consistency among agency policies, and the ability of government scientists to speak freely about their research depends on the agency that employs them.
Here are the "grades" UCS gave each agency:
But what does this actually represent?
Honestly, what bothers me about this "report card" is that it…
bioephemera | October 17, 2008
"Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking, and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa."
Brian Stewart and Giulia Saltini-Semerari
Science
If you couldn't stop twitching your pipetman to the crazy Euro-molecule party a couple posts back, or that anthropomorphic Orangina ad, or the Eppendorf boy band, you may have what it takes to win AAAS' Science Dance Contest.
The 2008 contest was a small-scale affair in Vienna, a prelude to a performance by the scientist-DJs Molecular Code. You can watch winner Brian Stewart & the other…
bioephemera | October 15, 2008Okay - it's halfway through the DonorsChoose challenge, and we need to do better. We still have several great projects left to fund. Luckily, our SEED overlords have decided to reward you for giving - not that helping kids learn isn't reward enough, but an iPod would be nice, wouldn't it?
So, Seed will be giving away Seed mag subscriptions and an assortment of mugs, laptop covers and USB drives each Friday from now until the end of October. In addition, there will be one 'grand prize' at the end of the drive: an iPod Touch!
All you have to do to enter is:
1) give to one of our DonorsChoose…
bioephemera | October 15, 2008In the interest of supplying an educational, scientific alternative to the third presidential debate, I give you this:
This video is the creation of those kooky Europeans at Marie Curie Actions, who also gave us this disturbingly throbbing website. It all has something to do with science education and careers, but I can't look away from the video long enough to tell exactly what.
If this is what an EU research career is like, I may have left science too early.
bioephemera | October 15, 2008
If you had to persuade a medieval peasant that the world was round, how would you do it? Why do you believe the world is round? And what does the American public in general think?
One of the hardest tasks I encountered as a professor was getting my students to recognize that all of their convictions - even assumptions as basic as "the world is round" or "the sun will come up tomorrow" - are built on a lifetime of accumulated experience. Sometimes the experience is direct: we've all seen the sun come up. But sometimes it's not. We often underestimate how little direct evidence we have for our…
bioephemera | October 13, 2008
The National Library of Medicine just opened a new exhibition, "Harry Potter's World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine."
"Harry Potter's World" explores the plants, animals, and magic featured in the Harry Potter book series and their roots in Renaissance traditions that played an important role in the development of Western science. The exhibition incorporates the works of several 15- and 16th-century thinkers mentioned in Harry Potter and looks at topics such as alchemy, astrology, and natural philosophy, as well as the ethical issues faced by both the fictitious characters from…
bioephemera | October 10, 2008
I'm off to a wedding this weekend, so no posts for a few days. But I wanted to give you a heads up that six computers will be competing in a Turing test on Sunday.
The competitors, named Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal, must converse for five minutes and fool their human questioners into thinking that they're also human - or at least make the questioners uncertain whether they're human or machine. This imitation game, devised by Alan Turing in 1950, is rightly or wrongly considered the definitive test for successful artificial intelligence:
If any…
bioephemera | October 8, 2008
Fixed (fawn)
Lisa Black
Lisa Black's hybrid clockwork animals are heartbreaking - especially the fawn and duckling. The title of her series, "Fixed," strikes just the right note of ambiguity. Is the fawn's state a travesty, or better than the alternative? Who did the fixing, and why?
Via Brass Goggles
PS - speaking of Goggles, have you seen Google's new Mail Goggles? It's an add-on for Gmail which is supposed to prevent you from sending drunk email messages late at night, by requiring you to do math before allowing you to send. The only problem is, the math looks too easy - I'm terrible at…