Yikes!
bioephemera | May 26, 2011
Amy Stewart's new book Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects takes a fairly trivial concept - a collection of historical anecdotes and icky factoids about dangerous insects - and executes it remarkably well. The book is well-written and has a non-cloying sense of humor ("she's just not that into you," begins the section relating how female praying mantids eat the males). Briony Morrow-Cribbs lends her insect illustrations (see a NYTimes slideshow of her ink illustrations here), and Anne Winslow's design plays off the concept of a vintage…
bioephemera | May 22, 2011. . . they could have. Or pretty darn close, at least - they just needed to visit one of the many European cabinets of anatomical curiosities, to see the work of anatomists like Honore Fragonard.
Fragonard's eighteenth-century ecorches were the clear precursors to Gunther von Hagens' "Body Worlds" exhibits: preserved, injected, partially dissected bodies in lifelike, dramatic poses, with ragged strips of muscle draped like primitive clothing over exposed vessels and nerves. The effect is eerie - like a Vesalius illustration sprung to (half-)life:
Man with a Mandible
Several of Fragonard's…
bioephemera | May 17, 2011. . . let the table settings do the talking (and the grossing out) for you! These Consumption Dinnerware plates by Leah Piepgras "are a map of the digestive tract, from mouth to anus:"
I'm trying to decide if these plates have a future as a diet aid.* Visualizing the eventual chyme-ish fate of a bolus of taco salad might just induce me to eat less. . . on the other hand, the dreamy blue watercolor palette makes me think of snowflakes, not chyme and gall. And I think I've done too many dissections for a medical illustration to have much of an effect.
Via the design blog CollabCubed.
*you…
bioephemera | May 13, 2011
From instructables user Copper Twist, this impressionist masterpiece of bacon is both biological and ephemeral (euw). What would Van Gogh say? Why do I feel if Van Gogh were alive today, he might be Vegan?
Via Chow Bella, via lots of people.
bioephemera | May 12, 2011
I was playing The Fracking Song last night about midnight, and my boyfriend was grooving to it. At the end he asked, "what was that about?" "Uh. . . fracking."
"Which kind of fracking?"
Yes, we are a BSG household.
Anyway, it may be an explainer, but it's actually quite a nice little piece of music too. And I'm a sucker for good typography any day.
Is your fracking attention span longer than 2:33? Then go dig around in ProPublica's fracking investigation. "The Fracking Song" is by members of Jay Rosen's NYU graduate journalism class. Nice work, guys!
bioephemera | May 11, 2011
Earth Spirit, 2010
Enrique Gomez de Molina
Reader Laura alerted me to this iO9 post I missed on taxidermy artist Enrique Gomez de Molina, whose work would be written off as bad Photoshopping - except it's real sculpture.
The artist says,
The impossibility of my creatures brings me both joy and sadness at the same time. The joy comes from seeing and experiencing the Fantasy of the work but that is coupled with the sadness of the fact that we are destroying all of these beautiful things.
See a video of a sculpture in progress - a rhino covered with peacock feathers and thousands of individual…
bioephemera | May 3, 2011Ok, what are the people at Quirk Books on?
I have to say, I love the cover of the book, and the typographical trailer is cute - but isn't this just blatant meme abuse?
Quirk explains The Meowmorphosis thus. . .
"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that he had been changed into an adorable kitten." Thus begins The Meowmorphosis--a bold, startling, and fuzzy-wuzzy new edition of Franz Kafka's classic nightmare tale, from the publishers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support…
bioephemera | April 13, 2011Oh, to be eight years old again, and oh-so-eager to suspend all disbelief. . . this video had me laughing in pure delight:
The baby T-Rex, which you can obviously tell is an actor (see the legs?) is touring Australian schools to promote the show "Walking with Dinosaurs." Don't get me wrong - the show looks as charming as a James Gurney musical - but I really love the expressions on the childrens' faces as they're alternately surprised, scared, and thrilled. I think I just saw four or five future paleontologists spring into being. . .
Via, like, everybody. It's dinoviral.
bioephemera | April 1, 2011
It's the very last installment of Zombiefest - one more book review, this time for one I heartily recommend!
Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts, prefaces his new book about zombies with an unexpected vignette - a visit to Graceland:
By the time my tour hit the Jungle Room, it was obvious that the thirty-odd people walking through Elvis Presley's mansion fell into two groups. The first contingent was thoroughly, utterly sincere in their devotion to all things Elvis. They were hardcore fans, and Graceland was their Mecca, their Jerusalem, and their Rome. . . the…
bioephemera | March 29, 2011Shambling, slowly disintegrating zombies aren't good for much - but maybe they're helpful for teaching neurobiology?
The Zombie Autopsies with Steven Schlozman, MD from GCP authors on Vimeo.
It is all about braaaaiiiiiinnns, after all. . . .
Read all about Zombie Autopsies here, or head to Amazon.
bioephemera | March 29, 2011
The week of Zombiefest continues, with the photography of Danielle Tunstall, who calls them "life and death working together hand in hand." "Fragile," above, is available as a print.
via Haute Macabre.
bioephemera | March 28, 2011In addition to all the obvious reasons, tech blogger Jillian York recently noted that some web filters use comments, and links in comments, to categorize sites as pornography. This means even a blogger who diligently refrains from any, er, PhysioProfisms, can be classed as offensive and filtered based on comments alone. York explains how recently her blog was blocked by Websense:
My assumption was that their automated system was based on keywords, and that my blogging about Helmi Noman's paper ("Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft Bing in the 'Arabian Countries'") had caused…
bioephemera | March 28, 2011And I do mean Dreadful.
In honor of Zombiefest, which is a totally random blogholiday I made up, and all my awesome readers, the first person to email me their US mailing address gets a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After. Wow - that took longer than I expected. :)
bioephemera | March 7, 2011
O designer-readers who like to work and play with Photoshop, this contest may be up your alley: Quirk Books, the outfit behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has joined with Bridgeman Art Library to invite submissions for its "Art of the Mash-Up" competition. Basically, they want you to prove you can do better than the Regency unmentionable pictured above:
The iconic "Zombie Lady" on the cover of the New York Times Best Seller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies captured the imagination of readers around the world and has become one of the most recognizable book jackets in recent history.…
bioephemera | February 20, 2011It's strangely artistic, like a Dutch still life: this disturbing short film by Sam-Taylor Wood defies our expectations of decomposition, as a rabbit churns with decay while a peach sitting nearby remains fresh. (Video below the fold, so as not to gross anyone out by surprise).
Via wouldn't you like to see something strange - there's a second video over there, though not as creepy as this one.
bioephemera | February 14, 2011A classic tale of love and sacrifice, illustrated by Sean Bieri:
While Bieri's artistry technically depicts a Christmas story, it also nicely captures the undying-even-while-decaying-putrefying-and-hemorrhaging-IQ-points nature of true love. What more could you want for Valentine's Day? (And let's face it, we've all had Valentine's Days that would arguably have been improved by a Zombocalypse.)
Speaking of which, I'm working on my review of Daniel Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies. Short version: it's hilarious.
bioephemera | February 10, 2011Okay, I knew that planets are big, intellectually, but a well-done graphic is worth a thousand words, and a pretty HD video is even better. Brad Goodspeed made this video to suggest what other planets would look like, if they orbited Earth at the same distance as the Moon does. I've embedded it, but you should seriously watch it in HD, full-screen for maximum effect.
Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.
I have nightmares like that. Seriously. But is the video accurate?
In addition to being full-on creepy, Brad's video produced a fascinating discussion in the comments and on various sites…
bioephemera | February 4, 2011
PMS Quilt, 2008
hand embroidered and crocheted pantyliners
Laurel Roth
Yes, that is just what it says it is: a collection of pantyliners embroidered with profanity.
One thing is clear about artist Laurel Roth: she is not afraid to make viewers uncomfortable. Her series "Hope Chest" is constructed of hygenic accessories embroidered with "off-kilter reflections on biology, fertility, and the ever-changing roles of women" - like the f-word. Embellished with beads, rose thorns, and crochet, the embroideries are twee, kitschy decor - or they would be, if not for their bluntly worded messages.…
bioephemera | February 1, 2011
Pinkies
from Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators and Prey by Catherine Chalmers
Photographer Catherine Chalmers (who may be best known in biology circles for her portraits of genetically modified mice) goes beyond brutal accuracy in her animal photography. Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators and Prey is a book of photos depicting predatory insects, frogs, and snakes devouring their living meals - including naked, squirming baby mice (above). It's no more than honest about what animals do and eat (yes, "cute" frogs will eat baby mice). But Chalmers' ordering and…
bioephemera | January 13, 2011Isis the Laboratory Goddess sent me a Buzzfeed link featuring this incredible anatomical gown:
The artist/seamstress deserves credit for what appears to be an incredibly elaborate embroidered stiff satin gown that, on different panels, depicts circulatory, skeletal, muscular and pulmonary systems. Wow. I can't figure out who made it, so if you know the original source, please email me the link so I can update the post with the creator's information Mystery solved! The photo is by miyake juin, from a Fashion Week event at Shih Chien University. The gown's designer is Chinese; I direct you to…