creativity
jhalper | March 18, 2014Today’s new articles involve flow: the flow of positrons through the Universe and the flow of particles around the tiny cilia of corals. They involve beauty and mystery, as well. The particle flow, imaged in brilliant colors, won first place in the photography category of the 2013 Science/National Science Foundation International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.
And positrons – the anti-matter opposites of electrons – have been found in large numbers flowing in near-Earth space. Weizmann Institute research points to an answer to one riddle: Why did a satellite monitoring…
jhalper | January 8, 2012The actors on the stage work their magic, turning a few disparate phrases - "challenge, giving birth, infinity, chaos, visiting a new country" - into a brief but charming improvised sketch, to the delight of the audience. But the viewers, filling a large auditorium at the Weizmann Institute of Science, expect more than to be entertained. Since the improvised play is part of a lecture by Prof. Uri Alon, a Molecular Cell Biologist, they know scientific insights are bound to follow.
Indeed. Combining his two passions, science and theater, Alon has recently created a "theater lab" on the…
ddobbs | March 9, 2010
Jonah Lehrer's story on "Depression's Upside" has created quite a kerfuffle. The idea he explores â that depression creates an analytic, ruminative focus that generates useful insight â sits badly with quite a few people. It's not a brand-new idea, by any means; as Jonah notes, it goes back at least to Aristotle. But Jonah (who â disclosure department â is a friend; plus I write for the Times Magazine, where the piece was published) has stirred the pot with an update drawing from (among other things) a very long review paper published last year by psychiatric researchers Paul Andrews and…
pontiff | February 12, 2010In the New York Times today there is an interesting article about Helene Hegemann whose debut novel, "Axolotl Roadkill," drew wide praise. You know this story: turns out that the book contains plagiarized passages (plagiarism: check, sales rising: check.) What I find fascinating about the story, however, is not this rehash of a tried and true marketing tactic, but Ms. Hegemann's defense of herself, summarized in this quote:
"There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.
Why do I love this…
grrlscientist | September 18, 2009tags: Jarbas Agnelli, Paulo Pinto, birds on a wire, NPR, Public Radio, music, streaming video
This video is the result of a creative musician, Jarbas Agnelli, who noticed that a flock of birds on wires resembled musical notes. He took a photograph of these birds, by Paulo Pinto, and set them to music. The result of this interesting observation is below the jump;
Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli.
[Original story], many thanks to a reader, Robin, who sent this video link to me.
Of course, I have to ask you; can you identify the species?
awild | August 5, 2009
Here's a novel use for an ant photo. German designer Beat Hintermann induced a party of wedding guests to individually color in squares from one of my images of fighting Odontomachus. The pieces were then assembled as a gift to the happy couple. Both, I'm told, study the aggressive interactions of ants.
Love can arise in the oddest of circumstances.
bioephemera | June 23, 2009
Clocky sounds like R2D2 and looks kind of like an ATV's single-axled, pastel cub. In other words, it's really, really cute. Which is why when Clocky wakes you with its piercing warbles, crashes to your floor and rolls under your bed, you won't want to smash its little display with your fist. At least, we hope not! Click through for more details.
Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When the snooze bar is pressed, Clocky rolls off the table and finds a hiding spot, a new one every day. Clocky began as a class project. After graduating, Gauri Nanda turned Clocky…
edyong | June 10, 2009The German chemist Friedrich Kekule claimed to have intuited the chemical structure of the benzene ring after falling asleep in his chair and dreaming of an ouroboros (a serpent biting its own tail). He's certainly not the only person to have discovered a flash insight after waking from a good sleep. In science alone, many breakthroughs were apparently borne of a decent snooze, including Mendeleyev's creation of the Periodic Table and Loewi's experiments on the transmission of nervous signals through chemical messengers.
Most of us have tried sleeping on a difficult problem before and using…
bioephemera | May 7, 2009An interesting perspective from education professor John Kitchens:
President Obama, you must understand that mandating standards without equitable funding creates punitive systems of education, and current forms of high-stakes testing too often pit student against student, and eventually citizen against citizen. The struggling economy will likely renew the sense of competition and education for the sake of occupational gain, while a sober look at the number of jobs available in the near future will reveal the futility of these motivations. However entrenched these ideas about education are in…
bioephemera | April 18, 2009
In her recent TED talk, JoAnne Kuchera-Morin described UCSB's AlloSphere, a new project that enables scientists to literally stand inside a three-story projection of their data:
The AlloSphere space consists of a 3-story cube that is treated with extensive sound absorption material making it one of the largest anechoic chambers in the world. Standing inside this chamber are two 5-meter-radius hemispheres constructed of perforated aluminum that are designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent. (source)
Scientists and artists can stand on a bridge through the center of this…
edyong | February 5, 2009Having trouble with a word puzzle? Suffering from writer's block? Perhaps you're not looking at the right colour...
We encounter many of the colours in our lives under the same circumstances and as a result, we have come to associate certain colours with specific attributes. Red invokes thoughts of action, danger or mistakes because it is a common feature of warning signs and editorial ink. Blue, however, is a more soothing hue, and its presence in both sky and sea have connected it to peace and openness.
These associations aren't trivial ones - they can affect the way we think. In a clever…