fun
awild | February 8, 2010What's this charming creature?
Ten points for the first person to get the family name right, too.
awild | February 7, 2010In honor of the big game, here's one of my favorite Super Bowl commercials from years past:
stoat | February 3, 2010A rush of controversial comments has pushed the burn rate up, and we're over the 10k barrier. You can all stop now :-).
And I'm pleased to say that I have a worthy winner, with no need for me to fudge it (not that I would have done so, oh no indeed): Hank Roberts, with "Your willingness to identify yourself publicly is likely to depend on personal experience..." from von S getting tired of the ranters?. Eli misses by 1 - soooooo close, better luck for 20k.
Now all we have to do is decide on the prize. Which should, I think, either be a guest post or a post by me on a subject of Hank's choice.
cagapakis | February 3, 2010I'm auditing a really cool class at MIT this semester called "Documenting Science Through Video and New Media." In the first class, we watched some of the earliest science films ever made, microscopic vaudeville performances by cheese mites and flies, made into a little meta-documentary by New Scientist a couple years ago. The videos are really fun, combining a sense of wonder at the beauty and complexity of the natural world with a sense of the excitement and spectacle of moving pictures. Science and nature documentaries like these became a hugely popular hit, and still are today with series…
cagapakis | February 2, 2010I've had some great suggestions for "Official" State Microbes in comments and via twitter. I'm filling in the map as they come:
So far we have:
Alaska -- Alcanivorax borkumensis for its oil consumption
California -- Ralstonia metallidurans for its gold precipitating qualities (and CA-MRSA as a terrifying runner up)
Illinois -- Penicillium roqueforti for its blue cheese making
Maryland -- Chlamydia trachomatis for UMD research on the bug
Massachusetts -- Escherichia coli for its importance to biotech
New York -- Pseudomonas putida, the first organism to be the subject of a patent case, which…
awild | February 2, 2010Given that the current crop of video games is not nearly science-nerdy enough, my friend Rob Mitchell made this graphic as a helpful suggestion to anyone looking to design a new one. I'm just passing it along...
cagapakis | February 1, 2010Wisconsin lawmakers just passed a bill to name Lactobacillus lactis, the bacteria that turns milk into cheese, into its official state microbe! What microbe do you think best represents your state? I think Massachusetts' state microbe should be E. coli, not for the gross make you sick part of course, but because of the importance of the biotech industry to Massachusetts and the importance of the lowly E. coli to biotech. Add your vote for your state microbe in the comments!
awild | January 31, 2010You may know Michel Gondry as the director of off-beat films like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". Gondry has also made a great number of music videos, including this mesmerizing time lapse of a cross-country drive:
music is "Behind" by Lacquer
cagapakis | January 29, 2010The music from the Darwin Electro-Opera I mentioned a while back is now available for free, streaming on Pitchfork!
(via Nick)
clock | January 29, 2010These are totally cool!
See the Stephaniegeology etsy store for more. What she did is get some actual fossils from Doug Grove (husband of Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove), make molds out of these fossils and then make jewelry from those molds. Fascinating!
awild | January 27, 2010Mark this on your calendar: February 27 is the 27th annual Insect Fear Film Festival. Hosted by the entomology graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the festival showcases two (usually terrible) arthropod movies. This year's delectable offerings are The Black Scorpion (1957) and Ice Crawlers (2003).
If bad movies aren't your thing, the festival also has an insect art competition, live insect displays, face painting, and other buggy entertainment. As way of a preview, Jo-anne posted her pics of last years event here. I've put the full announcement below:…
cagapakis | January 27, 2010I sort of love the "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" posters that have become the darling of interior decorating bloggers and graphic design jokesters alike in the past few years. I even have one of the posters hanging in my apartment. Then I saw Merlin's version.
At first I LOLed, and then I was like "huh." How did we get here? How did this meme evolve from stoic World War II propaganda to hilarious Richard Dawkins jokes?
And thus, the phylogenetic tree of "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" posters was born:
High res here.
cagapakis | January 25, 2010Check out these cute hand-embroidered oscilloscope merit badges! Available on Etsy.
cagapakis | January 25, 2010There's a funny article over at H+ magazine called "Get Naked: It's Good for Your Brain," telling us exactly that:
Clothing is crushing us! Trapped in tomb-like textiles, we exile our flesh from experiencing the environment. We atrophy the majority of our epidermis. If you put a plaster cast on a broken arm, the skin starves for Vitamin D; muscles weaken due to strangled range of motion; nerve synapses depress to a whimper of their former joy. Twenty-first century hominids shroud the entire skin palette, obliterating symbiosis with the planet except via face, neck and hands. (Burqa-clad…
cagapakis | January 24, 2010Things are gearing up for iGEM 2010, and in looking through some of the incredible work of the 2009 teams, I remembered the University of Washington Software team, who made an awesome lego robot that can move small volumes of liquid around in 96-well plates, a crucial and typically very expensive task in high-throughput biology. What makes the team especially remarkable is that the only member is an 11 year old kid, Gabriel See, who designed and built the robot on his own. Gabriel had the flu during the jamboree, so he unfortunately couldn't fly to MIT to share his work, but he did get his…
stoat | January 24, 2010
Sometimes I have to admit I'm completely outclassed, and people who can find this kind of stuff win hands down.
awild | January 21, 2010...than matching ant shirts?
Courtesy of these guys. Thanks!
(and yes, that's what we here at Myrmecos international headquarters look like).