Events
bioephemera | April 12, 2010Wednesday night, Radiolab's "science cabaret" program, Awe-mageddon, kicks off at 7pm with its first live video webcast, hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich:
"AWE-MAGEDDON" will feature Radiolab's trademark mash-up of world-class scientists, artists, philosophers and generally interesting people sitting down with Jad and Robert to explore the interdisciplinary nature of big ideas. For the first time ever, a Radiolab event can be experienced by audiences around the globe via live video webcast, available at www.wnyc.org/thegreenespace.
Their guests will be Iain Couzin, assistant…
bioephemera | April 11, 2010Something I ran across by accident, while perusing our latest copy of Issues in Science and Technology: currently, the National Academies are sponsoring a Visual Culture and Evolution Online Symposium. It runs through Wednesday. What that means, apparently, is their panelists discuss the intersection of design, art, and culture with evolutionary biology concepts (sexual selection, genetics, adaptation, etc.) at a blog set up for the purpose.
The blog is basic (generic template), and a bit confusing. What seems to be happening is that panelists' ongoing contributions are folded into the posts…
bioephemera | April 6, 2010
This week at Coney Island, the first ever "Congress for Curious People" brings together historians of science, artists, taxidermists, musicologists, and all manner of. . . curious people. It's part of the larger "Congress of Curious Peoples":
Every spring Coney Island USA convenes The Congress of Curious Peoples, a 10-day gathering of unique individuals at Sideshows by the Seashore and the Coney Island Museum, celebrating Coney Island's subversive and exciting power and exploring its political, artistic, and spectacular possibilities through performances, exhibitions, and films by important…
bioephemera | April 5, 2010This is kind of cool:
For the second year in a row, AAAS [the American Association for the Advancement of Science] will be arranging hands-on science activities for children attending the White House Easter Egg Roll.AAAS was invited by the Office of Science and Technology Policy to help infuse science into the event on Monday 5 April. In partnership with AAAS, the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley, also will be participating in the event.With the theme "The Science of Spring," AAAS staffers have arranged activities, such as bean dissection and viewing of seeds…
bioephemera | March 28, 2010Doesn't that title sound weird - like an experimental film? It may help to know that House of Sweden is Sweden's embassy in Washington, DC - a lovely glass building on the Potomac. If you're in the DC area, you should get on their mailing list, because they host interesting science-related panel discussions and receptions. Yesterday, they opened a new exhibit - the Virtual Autopsy Table. It's a touch-screen tabletop that lets you slice into, rotate, and magnify an MRI-based 3D representation of the human body, all with a brush of a hand:
The Virtual Autopsy Table from Norrkö…
bioephemera | March 14, 2010
Only National Geographic would dare cross The Amazing Race with the mystery of conception to get. . . The Great Sperm Race:
Each of us was the grand prize in an ultimate reality competition, the amazing race a sperm makes on the road to fertilization. Millions of sperm compete while overcoming armies of antibodies, treacherous terrain and impossible odds to reach their single-minded goal. To illustrate the full weight of the challenge, Sizing Up Sperm uses real people to represent 250 million sperm on their marathon quest to be first to reach a single egg.
Obviously there aren't 250 million…
bioephemera | March 2, 2010This may appeal to some of you:
The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16-18 September, 2010. This year's conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology.The image of medicine that emerges from most museum galleries and exhibitions is still dominated by pre-modern and modern understandings of an anatomical and physiological body, and by the diagnostic and therapeutical methods and instruments used to…
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 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…
rskloot | January 26, 2010After ten long years, the serious countdown has begun for the publication of my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which will be on sale nationwide exactly SEVEN DAYS from today. I've been posting about my impending book tour, and all the great coverage the book has been getting, on Twitter and Facebook, but thought I'd also post a bit of a press round up here, and an update, for those who (gasp) don't spend all of their time in those places.
If you don't know what my book is about: it tells the story of a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells -- taken without her knowledge…
bioephemera | January 17, 2010
A short (~4 minute) sweet overview of the political power of data visualization, by Tufte disciple Alex Lundry. He says so-called "dataviz" exists (you guessed it) "at the intersection of art and science." Quite right, sir!
You'll note Lundry makes use of the classic pirates-global warming relationship, Tufte's "pie charts suck" message, and so on. It's one of several good videos from a great event I really want to get to - igniteDC. I'd also like to mention that I'll be reviewing Connie Malamed's new book, Visual Language, which appears near the end of the video, in about a week or so, so…
bioephemera | January 11, 2010
A Cruel and Beautiful Far Away Place
Christopher Reiger
Vision Quest, "A Group Show of Neo-Shamanic Art," is opening at the Observatory in NYC this Saturday, January 16, at 7pm:
While the role of the shaman has traditionally been fulfilled by experienced elders in indigenous groups spanning culture and time, VISION QUEST posits that our artists fit the bill as well. Today, with more of us living in an urban jungle rather than a real one, it has become all the more important to figure out ways to internalize the lessons of nature: its growth, its brilliant bloom, its death. And in an age of…
bioephemera | January 9, 2010
Wonderful! Artist Chris Berens has a new show in NYC at the Sloan Gallery. Visit their website for much eerie eye candy. The show runs through Jan. 23.
scientificactivist | January 8, 2010If you get the Smithsonian Channel on your TV, then tune in at 8 pm this Sunday (January 10th) to watch the program Zoo Vets: Claws, Paws, and Fins. Not only does this look like a pretty neat program (from my admittedly very biased perspective), but it features--among others--my girlfriend, Meredith Clancy, and her long-time mentor, Kathryn Gamble, the head veterinarian at the Lincoln Park Zoo. The program, which follows vets at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, Brookfield Zoo, and Shedd Aquarium, was filmed in fall 2008, when Meredith was completing an external rotation at Lincoln Park as part of…
bioephemera | January 5, 2010Call to artists: ALCHEMY: Art and Science
Call to Artists at the Schiltkamp Gallery, Traina Center for the Arts, Clark University. This show will explore the intersections of art and science; art that is inspired by science or scientific images/models that are transcendent. The concept of "science" is open and may include new technology as well as the traditional sciences.
Application Instructions: 10-20 images in slides or as jpegs on a CD (no power point or slide shows). List of art work or other materials submitted, including titles, date, media, dimensions. C.V. or bio and a brief (one…
bioephemera | January 4, 2010
Beggar
Joao Ruas
Starting January 8, Thinkspace in Los Angeles is hosting a group exhibition to benefit wildlife conservation efforts:
Though we live in the city, animals exist all around us - they sleep in our beds, creep past our windows at night and visit us in our dreams. Symbolizing all that is free, unspoiled and elemental in the world, they also comfort us with guileless affection, amuse us with their playful abandon, and represent us metaphorically in a million works of art and literature. In every niche of the new contemporary scene, artists have employed animals to envisage…
bioephemera | December 24, 2009
The recent blizzard turned our decorative holiday planter into a suspiciously Cthulhulian holiday effigy. A cephaloconiferopod? A gymnosquid? An everoctogreen? I have no idea what to call it, but it obviously says "Merry Christmas, BioE readers!"
bioephemera | December 4, 2009
Voss-Andreae is therefore either brave or foolhardy to try to represent quantum phenomena tangibly. Perhaps his greatest asset as a former physicist is that he realizes how much we don't know. In some of his works, the inverted commas of analogy are explicit to the knowing eye. Quantum Corral (pictured) materializes something that could hardly be less material: the wave-like properties of electrons, first reported in Nature in 1927. Here, they are represented in a block of wood that has been milled to the contours of electron density seen in 1993 around a ring of iron atoms on the surface…
bioephemera | December 4, 2009
An intriguing new exhibition featuring work by herbert pfostl at the Observatory (next to Proteus Gowanus gallery in NYC):
Small paintings as parables of plants and animals and old stories of black robbers and white stags. Fragments on death like mirrors from a black sleep in the forests of fairy tales. All stories from the dust of the dead in fragments and footnotes like melodies of heartbreak and north and night and exploration-breakdowns. About saints with no promise of heaven and lost sailors forgotten and the terribly lonely bears. The unknown, the ugly - and the odd. Collected grand…
bioephemera | December 3, 2009Ever wonder what the pilot for "Gray's Anatomy:Uncanny Valley" would be like? Well, you're in luck!
If It Weren't For You (I'd Be Sued) from Justine Cooper on Vimeo.
Yes, that was a . . .
music video in which an unseen clinician serenades the mannequins used in medical simulation with an infectious rock ballad. Emoting on the depth of their relationship, the doctor or nurse apologizes to the mannequins for what they go through in the name of patient safety and the improvement of clinical skills, crooning the chorus "If it weren't for you, I'd be sued."
It turns out the video is just part of…