Yikes!
bioephemera | January 6, 2011Unfortunately, the shift to digital music sales has largely eliminated the art of traditional album design - framing the music in cleverly designed sleeves and cases. The new Shidlas cd, "Saliami Postmodern," is a meaty exception. Yum:
Via Fubiz (the weirdest thing about the fubiz post is when they show the cd in a Discman. Who still has those?)
Design by Mother Eleganza.
bioephemera | January 4, 2011NYC scientist and filmmaker Alexis Gambis is building a body of science-themed short films. His documentary A Fruit Fly In New York juxtaposes lab equipment with the infrastructure of New York City; between grad students and postdocs relating the (somewhat deadpan) joys of fruit fly research, befuddled New Yorkers puzzle over a vial of Drosophila ("that's something I don't want on my body"). I was surprised and tickled to see that one of my friends, a former fly researcher, makes an appearance. The scientific community is so small!
The clip I enjoyed most, though, is the one I've embedded for…
bioephemera | December 30, 2010
No. "If we could gather all the electric eels from all around the world," they would free their imprisoned brother from his Yuletide servitude and bio-tase the crap out of you, bro.
Just sayin'.
bioephemera | December 27, 2010
The ultimate bioephemera: art you eat! This cephalopod by specialty cake artist Karen Portoleo is definitely NOT a cake wreck (although if there were a little cake(ship)wreck under those tentacles, it might not be a bad addition). Karen previously made a "gingerbread" house with an octopus icing and tiling the roof. For serious.
Thanks to Patricia for the link! (Check out Patricia's art blog, too).
bioephemera | December 22, 2010
Raise your fingers if this video by Cyriak kinda creeps you out.
Via Street Anatomy.
bioephemera | December 21, 2010
As children sleep, dreaming their materialistic dreams of the privileged classes, Santa - less impressive than his Falstaffian reputation would suggest - twists the narrator's grasp of reality beyond all recognition.
A hilarious tale of Christmas horror by Ryan Iverson, inspired by Warner Herzog. Via iO9.
bioephemera | December 17, 2010Euw! Ed Yong has a gross-yet-cool post about parasitic nematodes that infect and kill caterpillars - and bring along luminous bacteria whose red glow is unpalatable to birds. If a bird eats the caterpillar host, the parasitic worms die. But the bacterial warning glow protects the worms' immobilized corpse home until they mature and burst out of the dead caterpillar - as grossly as possible, of course. (See photo on Ed's blog).
Natural, uber-gross bioephemera! Thanks, Ed. :)
bioephemera | December 13, 2010This is un freaking real.
My friend John O at Armed With Science has dug up a classic animated film produced for the National Naval Medical Center in 1973. It starts with an awards ceremony for the "Communicable Disease of the Year," hosted by the Grim Reaper (who turns out to know a lot about medical history.)
The top prize is won by the Dracula-esque Count Spirochete (AKA syphilis), over the vociferous objections of a shortlist of other diseases, including smallpox ("I've scarred and disfigured millions of people!") and gonorrhea (who resembles a lavender Tribble with a pitchfork). The…
bioephemera | December 2, 2010Okay, you've probably heard the buzz about the "arsenic organism" supposedly discovered in Mono Lake, and how NASA's 2pm press conference today will reveal more. I'll be honest, I wasn't that excited about it - extremophile bacteria metabolize some freaky stuff, and it seemed pretty clear the announcement wasn't about extraterrestrial life. But Gizmodo is now claiming the critter has arsenic based DNA.
Did April Fools Day relocate to December? I'll believe this story when I hear it from the researcher herself, but that would be SO COOL. I'm getting my wide-eyed-awestruck-biologist hat out of…
bioephemera | November 30, 2010APOD got some attention yesterday with this stunning photo of a supercell thunderstorm several kilometers wide, brooding over a Montana field:
Mothership
Sean Heavey, 2010
I'm not sure it's possible for a work of art or photography to more effectively convey the grandeur of nature and the awesome power of physics. The image is simply unreal (which is why the title "Mothership" works so well). But Montana photographer Sean Heavey has a whole gallery of these stunning storm photos.
I'm especially nuts about the ominous, Tesla-esque drama of "Base Reflectivity":
And for all you would-be storm-…
bioephemera | November 28, 2010Yes, that's what I said - Gunther von Hagens has a gift shop, and he's selling earrings and necklaces made of slices of equine and bovine genitalia. Don't like ostentatious, plastinatious penis jewelry? There's always a bull penis vasculature walking stick.
I had to blog these, but honestly, I didn't really want to know they existed at all.
bioephemera | November 26, 2010
All shopped out? I can pretty much guarantee that difficult person on your gift list does not have a huge, one-of-a-kind mama Emperor scorpion carrying baby scorpions made of fleece, felt and pom-poms.
At $200, this plush scorpion sculpture may sting your pocketbook, but seller weirdbuglady also offers more affordable amoebas, tardigrades, fossils and insects. Check out her etsy shop and her blog.
bioephemera | November 12, 2010With a poster titled "WE NEED YOUR BODY! For a UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY," microbiologist Steven Park and artist Anne Brodie invited attendees at the British Science Festival to
stand NAKED inside our live bioluminescent photograph booth and have your photograph taken. Enveloped by a living ethereal blue green light, the resulting faint and ghostly image will be used as part of an [art] installation. . .
The eerie results, which look a whole lot like TSA millimeter-wave scans, are appearing in an exhibition at the UK's Royal Institution through December 3. See a slideshow at the Londonist.
bioephemera | May 30, 2010
Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy has just unveiled a new website, the Secret Museum, to house her "exhibition of photographs exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world." So if you can't make it to her show in NYC (through June 6), you can browse her virtual exhibition of photos - like the eerie fetal skeleton tableau above (from Paris, circa 17th century).
bioephemera | May 28, 2010Susan Silas takes photos of fallen birds - and they're oddly touching. It's very strange how songbirds remain graceful, even when broken and half-decayed. . .
bioephemera | May 26, 2010Apparently the Republicans learned nothing from Change.gov and the White House's problematic experiments with crowdsourcing, because they've now invited web-based public input to shape their 2010 party platform. According to Dana Milbank, so far, the suggestions include such gems as "A 'teacher' told my child in class that dolphins were mammals and not fish! And the same thing about whales! We need TRADITIONAL VALUES in all areas of education. If it swims in the water, it is a FISH. Period! End of Story." Mmmmkay.
Unless the commenter uses a giveaway pseudonym, it's tough to tell if such…
bioephemera | May 18, 2010They're using DNA tests for everything now - even to catch canine vandals and their miscreant owners.
Robert Frost was right: good forensics make good neighbors.
bioephemera | May 16, 2010
Cornelia Hesse-Honegger's beautiful book Heteroptera is one of my most treasured natural illustration collections. Unfortunately, it seems to be out of print now, but Wired recently compiled a gallery of her work, and I highly recommend a visit.
The subtle and not-so-subtle asymmetries on Hesse-Honegger's specimens, like the cyst-eyed cicada above, are latently sinister: these are insects collected near Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, nuclear plants, and sites downwind of nuclear test grounds. Are the defects Hesse-Honegger catalogs a telltale sign of environmental contamination? Or is she…
bioephemera | May 14, 2010Want to see how Facebook's deafult settings have crept over time from mainly private to overwhelmingly public? Matt McKeon's got you covered with a very nice year-by-year data visualization. By 2010, the only things that aren't public are birthday and contract information. Was this what Zuckerberg had in mind years ago, when he said users were dumb ******s for sharing so much personal data with him? Hmmmm. . .
*yes, it's a pun. I do indeed sink so low, occasionally.
bioephemera | May 6, 2010Civility: wow, everybody's concerned about it now! Here's our president a couple of days ago:
The problem is that this kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise. It undermines democratic deliberation. It prevents learning -- since, after all, why should we listen to a "fascist," or a "socialist," or a "right-wing nut," or a left-wing nut"? It makes it nearly impossible for people who have legitimate but bridgeable differences to sit down at the same table and hash things out. It robs us of a rational and serious debate, the one we need…