dance
dr. dolittle | July 10, 2014Have you had a chance to see this video from Discovery News showing the flashy 'disco clam'? A graduate student at UC Berkeley, Lindsey Dougherty, unraveled the mystery of this party-like effect. The clams actually have tiny silica spheres (340 nanometers in diameter) on the inside of their lips that reflect light whereas the outside of their lips is devoid of nanospheres. This is a rather unique method to put on a flashy show in the ocean as other creatures of the deep use bioluminescence whereas these clams just unfurl their lips to reflect the ambient light in the ocean around two times…
dr. dolittle | May 13, 2014Scientists in the jungles of southern India have discovered 14 new species of "dancing frogs" many of which are unfortunately already endangered. DNA analyses have shown that these new species are members of an ancient genus that has been around since the time of the dinosaurs, Micrixalus. There are now 24 known species of dancing frogs. Considering that males outnumber females 100 to 1, these acrobatics are important to attract mates. The tiny frogs are only about the size of a walnut.
vlicata | November 21, 2013It's time again for John Bohannon's annual "Dance Your Ph.D." contest. This year, in my opinion, there are even more high quality entries than in previous years! (I was one of the judges who did the first round of choices...the "winners" were then chosen by a panel that includes several professional dancers (for several years it has been members of Pilobulus)). And they are all now posted online ("winners" at the link above - all the videos are posted here - because really they are ALL winners in my opinion.
And if you can come up with more difficult ways to try to explain science - we could…
jtoney | April 23, 2013It was an unexpected journey, from the George W. Bush Shake, the Barack Obama Hug to the Harlem Shake.
Appreciation from the President of the United States is one of the highest honors any American can receive. No, it wasn't me, but the best part is that it was one of our students.
I have been very fortunate in my own education having learned from two mentors awarded the National Medal of Science (Prof. Tobin J. Marks and Prof. Stephen J. Lippard.) Each received a hearty handshake from President George W. Bush. Perhaps some of my work in their labs helped get them there, along with a…
esiegel | March 31, 2013"I'm not anybody's judge; I don't know what motivates people to do what they do. But I have a lot of admiration for anybody who can start with absolutely nothing and make a little something out of it." -Wilford Brimley
I've got a lot of respect for the creativity that goes on over the internet, ever since the original Winnie-the-Pooh and Spirit of Christmas videos I saw way back in the 1990s. But unlike the corporatized Harlem Shake, there's a classic from more than seven years ago that keeps spawning new videos: Wilford Brimley's commercials!
Image credit: Liberty Medical.
As I've told…
jtoney | July 16, 2012
Actor Jeremy Jordan signs my daughter's program, as I stand crushed amongst hundreds of Newsies fans standing on tip toe begging for his attention (author's photograph.)
Don't judge me, ok? My daughter and I shared Father's day this year taking in the buoyant raucous joy of Newsies on Broadway. Real men don't love Newsies, right?
Broadway productions, to me, had brought to mind sanguine, syrupy sweet expressions of heart-felt stories spun with punctuations bursting in song and dance in a filigreed fairy land. Such performances are for the romantic, the Pollyanna, hearts all a flutter,…
esiegel | May 27, 2012"Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." -Kyle Reese, the Terminator
Sure, they may look innocent now. Maybe you think they'll even live peacefully with us and create nothing but beauty, as Florence + the Machine might have you believe with their song,
Cosmic Love.
But the apocalypse will soon be upon us. And I think that this cute fella may be just the thing that ushers it in.
NAO robot, courtesy of Aldebaran Robotics,…
jtoney | January 19, 2012
A dung beetle performing a dance on top of its dung ball. The little jig apparently helps the pea-brained beetles navigate.
CREDIT: Emily Baird; Baird E, Byrne MJ, Smolka J, Warrant EJ, Dacke M / PLoS ONE
Do you have a favorite animal? Chemist Sir Harold Kroto does. It is the dung beetle. Why?
Because it is:
an insect that has evolved to eat animal excrement. "If there were no dung beetles, we'd be 80 feet deep in elephant crap!"
The dung beetle plays an essential role in recycling organic matter for a "greener" sustainable environment. Dung beetles, it turns out, also do some dirty…
vlicata | September 4, 2011The "Dance Your Ph.D." contest is on again for 2011. This unusual and highly interesting experiment in science outreach continues to be shepherded by John Bohannon, and continues to attract new sponsors -- this years sponsor is TEDx Brussels.
So what is this? Basically: you create an interpretive dance that "explains" your Ph.D. research and videotape it. Sounds easy, eh? No words, no powerpoint, just dancing. And you want the audience to walk away with a reasonable understanding of what you did or are currently doing your Ph.D. on. Send in a video and John will collect them all on his…
jtoney | June 23, 2011This is a guest post by Prof. Robin Landa, Distinguished Professor, Robert Busch School of Design at Kean University and author of "Advertising by Design: Generating and Designing Creative Ideas Across Media."
Natural movement is a matter of survival for animals. We rely heavily on natural movement to go about our daily lives--whether it is to reach up to place a suitcase in an overhead compartment on an airplane, take a walk, run for a bus, or bend down to retrieve an object. However, few of us, other than dancers and athletes, execute our movements thoughtfully, with more than a nod to…
vlicata | March 24, 2011The chair of the Theatre Dept. here at LSU and I have begun co-producing a new "SciArt Conversation Series" here at LSU -- where we get scientists and artists on stage together at the same time for informal presentations of their work. We are trying to pick combinations that have some sort of real or semantic overlap. Our first one, which we just called "Silk", had an entomologist talking about the evolution of spiders and spider silk along with a choreographer and two dancers demonstrating and explaining dance moves on hanging silks.
This first one had a small but very vocal and…
vlicata | July 31, 2010There is one month to go to submit to the 2010 "Dance Your Ph.D" Contest! Entries are due by September 1st. My lab previously won in the Professor category, so I get to be one of the judges for the 2010 contest. This is our dance from the 2009 contest:
And what we won was: a real dance! Jenn Liang Chaboud, a real choreographer in Chicago, created a dance based on one of our lab's publications in JBC, here is the dance she created:
This is Science: Jenn Liang Chaboud from Red Velvet Swing on Vimeo.
The two muscular guys are Klenow and Klentaq DNA polymerases, the women are all DNA.
THIS…
edyong | September 8, 2009When danger threatens many lizards can detach their tails, leaving them behind as decoys in the hope that the predator will attack it rather than the lizard itself. But the tail doesn't just lie there as bait. For half an hour after they've been severed, the disembodied tails perform a complex dance, flipping, lunging and jumping up to an inch in the air. These acrobatics serve to distract the predator even further.
For the first time, Timothy Higham and Anthony Russell have studied the movements of severed gecko tails to understand how they can move in such complex ways without any input…
grrlscientist | August 31, 2009tags: dance, evolution of dance, humor, satire, fucking hilarious, streaming video
I've shown this video to you before, but I think it's worth a repeat. This video features comedian, Judson Laipply, demonstrating the evolution of dance (along with the appropriate music). If you can, watch this video full screen.
zooillogix | May 4, 2009
by Katie the Lowly Intern
Researchers at Cambridge University have debunked the long standing myth that freshwater algae can't dance. Volvox, while sounding like a herpes medication for mad scientists, is a spherical algae organism made up of only about 1,000 cells. They get their swerve from their flagella (think sperm tails) which they wag around until they create a flow of fluid. This flow of fluid causes them to stay in bound movements with each other; one movement being called a "waltz" and the other a "minuet." Scientists think that the oscillating dance moves make it easier for the…
edyong | March 31, 2009Classical ballet is one of the more conservative of art forms. Dancers express emotion and character through the same vocabulary of postures that was originally set in 1760, and often with entire choreographies that have been handed down for centuries.
But even amid this rigorous cascade of tradition, there is room for change. Over the years, successive generations of ballet dancers have subtly tinkered with positions that are ostensibly fixed and limited by the physical constraints of a dancer's body. The only changes ought to be a result of the dancers' varying abilities. But that's not…
ddobbs | February 13, 2009Oh man. This is good.
Via Kottke, who has other mixes as well.
Soviet Army dance ensemble + Run DMC = the invention of breakdancing in the mid-1900s.
zooillogix | March 13, 2008
What's different about this than people swimming with Whale Sharks? Fundamentally... probably nothing. However, I think this falls into the lighter shades of gray that the zoo and aquarium world must operate in, and ultimately I'm OK with, for the following reasons:
1. Walrus training is fairly common and does not pose a physical threat to the animal
2. Dolphin and sea lion training is enjoyed by the animals, obviously because their is a slimy fish reward involved, but also because new physical activity breaks up the monotony of life in a fish tank
3. I'm assuming that there is an…
laelaps | October 27, 2007I can't say that I'm a fan the music choice, but I have to admit, this bird can dance to the beat better than I can. This is Snowball, "a medium sulphur crested Eleanora cockatoo," who's apparently a big fan of the Backstreet Boys.
zooillogix | August 3, 2007Jumping spiders have exceptional vision and therefore, their courtship displays have a highly visual component. This nifty video shows a male jumping spider doing its equivalent of the Booty Drop. Make sure to have your volume on.
For more MTV Grind worthy jumping spider action, check out the Tree of Life Web Project.