Truth and Beauty

The Cochlea in Art: Richard Kirk

retrospectacle — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:37:37 +0000

The Cochlea in Art: Richard Kirk

Although I don't care much about money, I do regret that having none means that buying beautiful works of art is something that I cannot do. I occasionally post here about interesting science/naturalism-inspired art, and a new artist I wanted to highlight is Richard Kirk. A friend of mine showed me his work because one of his pieces is entitled "Cochlea" (below). I was floored at the intricacy of his work, as well as the juxtaposition of precise medical realism (like the cochlea + vestibular system in the lower right corner) and absurd surrealism (the pulleys as joints, branches for limbs).

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Be sure to check out Kirk's gallery here, another one of my favorites of his is Conflagration.
Hat tip darkman.

retrospectacle Sun, 01/13/2008 - 10:37

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Extraordinary! Thanks for posting this. You have an outstanding science blog by the way
cheers

Thank you! Glad you like it! ^_^

That's a really cool piece. I like how the right arm's fingers are just short of batlike, while the left is more of a tree. Interesting that he named it "Cochlea" since the cochlea is so removed from the rest of it. Neat. Thanks for posting it.

Very dark and detail oriented. I like it!

Amazing talent. I wish I could buy it for you Shelley, but I too am financially-challenged. :)

Nice and weird, the way I like 'em.

Very well done.

Hi Shelley - thanks for paying me such a lovely compliment. I really enjoyed reading your blog post.

Cochlea came out of my experience of losing hearing in one ear as a kid and subsequent tinnitus. I wanted to deal with that in a visual way - hence the creature embedded in the head. I also loved the way the anatomical structure suggested a mollusk of some sort. I find these kind of strange echoes all over in nature.

The original of this work is owned by Jonathan Davis, the frontman for the band Korn. It was this piece that introduced Jonathan to my work and eventually led to me doing the cover for the latest Korn album.

Again, thanks for the nod and I will be sure to follow your fascinating blog. Cheers, Richard.

Confocal Image of Cochlea Wins Art Prize

retrospectacle — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:54:46 +0000

Confocal Image of Cochlea Wins Art Prize

By Dr. Sonja Pyott
Department of Biology and Marine Biology
University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Wilmington, NC, USA
Specimen: Cochlea and Hair Cells
Technique: Confocal

This confocal microscopy image of the organ of Corti is just stunning. Judges at the Olympus Bioscapes Digital Imaging Competition thought so too, and awarded Dr. Sonja Pyott 4th prize in the contest. For an even larger, more hi-res version, go here. Winners receive Olympus microscopes and other prizes! Guess who the 1st place winner is? Yeah, its the Brainbow mouse, which I discussed in a previous post.

The image above is of the normal mammalian organ of Corti, which is the epithelium which contains the sensory cells of the ear. Those cells are hair cells, which are stained green here with (I'm guessing) fluorescent phalloidin, which tags actin in the hair cells. The inner hair cells are in the lower left, and the three rows of outer hair cells are to the upper right. Nuclei of the inner hair cells are blue, which I'm guessing is DAPI. The spindly red things are the neurons, which are synapsing on the inner hair cells' surface. The spiky things shooting out of the top of the inner hair cells are the stereocilia (which are made of actin, so green) which project into the fluid filled space above the organ of Corti. When sound waves are picked up by the ear canal and focused into the cochlea, the basilar membrane vibrates, causing the stereocilia to bend, which depolarizes the hair cells.

retrospectacle Wed, 11/14/2007 - 11:54

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Hi Shelly,

amazing picture!!!

I wonder if you have obtained the basal membrane from the organ of Corti, or you just sectioned the whole ear and stained and photographied. Thanks!

I am also working on this with confocal microscopy now. But obviously, your image is outstanding! Give you my thumb again!
Jin

hello XD

What is the magnification of this image?

Hi Shelly,

Wow this is a stunning image.
It might be nice to compare this with a false color electron microscope image?

Mechanical Jewels, Clockwork Insects

retrospectacle — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:35:28 +0000

Mechanical Jewels, Clockwork Insects

I'm a huge fan of artistic expressions which gets inspiration from the natural world, which is why I was absolutely floored by these beautiful clockwork insects created at Insect Lab by Mike Libby. These clocks are made from actual dead bugs; tiny clockwork gears and spings are worked around the shiny carapaces of beetles, the furry exoskeletons of tarantulae, and the delicate wings of butterflies.

The inspiration for creating these tiny frankenbugs came when Mike found a dead intact beetle one day. After locating an old wristwatch, and thinking about the simplistic, precise movements of both clock and beetle, he decided to combine the two.

After some time dissecting the beetle and outfitting it with watch parts and gears, I had a convincing little cybernetic sculpture. I soon made many more with other found insects and have been exploring and developing the theme ever since.

The insects come from all over the world, from dead bug dealers, as well as personally collected by the artist. He also accepts commissions where people give him their own found bugs. The clockwork parts come from antique pocketwatches and wristwatches, and he also uses electrical components from olf circuitboards. All comes from outdated or "dead" technology. Take note that these are pieces of art and not everyday watches; they are meant to be displayed in cases. They are suprisingly cheap considering the time and attention to detail required to create them.

Check out more pictures of his work under the fold....

Hat tip darkman.

retrospectacle Sat, 10/27/2007 - 08:35

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Wow those are amazing and beautiful. I wonder how my wife would like one for Christmas? Probably not so much!
One of the other sci-bloggers, I forget which now, posted a few weeks ago about dragonflies that may or may not be robotic spies created by the CIA. Seems more plausible now!

So, if you find one of these in a field one day, what are you supposed to think about the Blind Watchmaker? That He likes to mix simple mechanical gears with the complex organic structures?

I have a friend who is quite the beetle enthusiast, and I was thinking what a great gift this would be, but balked at the prices; some upwards of a thousand bucks!

very nice, but, ouch!

Hmm, the ones I saw were more like $250 range, so there are some cheaper ones. Not that that is *cheap,* but considering the time it must take to fix and glue all those little gears....

I have a book to recommend. It's sort of a coffee-table book, so it can be just flipped through:

The Museum at Purgatory, by Nick Bantock

Same guy who wrote Griffin & Sabine.

In my undergraduate-ish semi-professional fine artist's opinion, I will say that these pieces are a post-modern derivative relating to, but not intentionally referencing the social consciousness space pregnant with FRICKIN' AWESOME.

Fibonacci Numbers, the Cochlea, and Poetry

retrospectacle — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:44:56 +0000

Fibonacci Numbers, the Cochlea, and Poetry

The Fibonacci numbers form a sequence defined by this relation (don't be scared!):

What this means, in English, is that it is a sequence of numbers whose relationship is this: after the first two numbers, each proceeding number is the sum of the previous two numbers. For example 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233.....and so on. Quite simple, really.

Fibonacci numbers have an interesting property. When you divide one number in the sequence by the number preceding it, you are left with a number very close to 1.618. This number is called the "golden ratio," and rectangle whose sides is equal to the golden ratio is known as a "golden rectangle."

Fibonacci numbers are not purely artifact, they are also found in nature in an uncurling fern, the branching of trees, and leaflets of the pineapple. The Fibonacci sequence also describes the "golden spiral," which is when a "golden rectangle" is subdivided in smaller and smaller golden rectangles (example below)--the result being a predictable spiral.

One example of a biological structure in the mammalian body which is very close to a "golden spiral" is the cochlea. It is not a perfect golden spiral, and there is individual variation between and within species.

Another close example is the shell of a mollusk, or a nautilus shell (below).

The Fibonacci sequence has been used to structure poetry, ie the syllables per line follow the Fibonacci sequence. As a former student of poetry, I couldn't help but try my hand.

These poems are based on the Fibonacci sequence and have been published in the Science Creative Quarterly, when I wrote them about 6 months ago.

---

Shyness

Fish
dive
deeply,
mouths agape,
fins proud and ragged,
filtering the oceans apart
until shimmer-hooked and then flopping in boat bottoms,
when gills heave, gasp, drowning in air; eyes glaze like dropped
marbles, clouded and cracked, but holding.

---

Ego

She
will
nod as
you pass her
and you both will know
you are young and raw, half-bitten,
spitten in disgust like fruit picked before its season.

-----

Heaven

Dead
leaves
jump back
on the trees,
a reverse whirlwind
and an impossible sunset
seeking their origins, the life from whence they came.

retrospectacle Fri, 10/12/2007 - 02:44

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The soul does not see it's own image in another, due to the distortions of physicality and psychology. I am exponetially shocked and exited.I didn't expect to see a cute, intellectual women writing this. Anyway,I was contemplating the effects of fibonacci series as one of the many intelligent geometrics and mathematics existing in nature,such as cymatics. I got off the subject and was considering the quantum mechanics aspects of math and vibrations, and thought some how of hearing vibrations, and thought about the spiral choclea. I concluded that there might a golden spiral that might be indicative of fib sequence. Interesting to ponder, and it's shocking to see someone like myself who realizes the interconectedness of all the arts,philosophy,mathematics,science,art,religion(spirituality)history, politics,etc.. and to see the way they are all intelligently intertwined. The fibonacci numbers are everywhere, I trade stocks for a living, and there are fib numbers in all markets.. I use them all the time to find support and resistand retracement prices. I saw the movie pi years ago... it's just like that... it's something that, in studying these topics will take over your life if your not careful,but if it does it is exponentially worth it, that's the beauty of it . It's funny you mentioned that old black and white pi movie... wish I could of seen it at Sundance. If you ever want to discuss the arts in depth, it would be of my utmost pleasure. Keep up the gift.

I would like a chart of how the harmonics line up in the cochlear canal. I theorize the octave-apart tones, might well form a perfect golden spiral, even if it curves in the opposite direction. In fact, I'd expect that. The hairs give extra stimulation to the nerves, where "resonance" occurs for any particular tone. The tone is determined by position of stimulus, and not by frequency. I'd like to "map" the human cochlear the best way, for experimental sensory substitution tactile array delivery systems, for the deaf and some types of hearing loss. I have a 2D array already, with octave apart tones aligned vertically. However, I am now leaning toward an actual spiral of electrodes as a possible better alternative.

Um, "you are left with a number very close to 1.618, and this number is fixed after the 13th number in the series." I'm not sure what you're trying to say --- the Golden Ratio, phi, is the limit of F(n)/F(n-1) and n goes to infinity, and it's transcendental, so you get new digits every time you pick a bigger n. There's nothing obviously magical about F(13)/F(12).

I've been thinking about phi quite a bit recently ... I'm convinced its not an accident that it shows up so often in biological stuff, but deeply necessary. I haven't figured out how to make this into a clear argument rather than an intuition, though.

Charlie, have you seen the movie 'Pi' by Aronofsky? If not, you should, as it is a very interesting treatment of what you just mentioned. Fictional of course, but cool.

The golden ratio (and the 'magic' is just a name and of course not supposed to be magical) to which i was referring is not pi (3.14...). Its described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

Wonderful connection between the numerical, and the organic. I have never seen a poem using these fundementaly natural princables. Gaston Julia (designer of the "Julia set") would have had a lot to say about your mesh of the two as he was both a mathematician and a poet.

I have a kind of pavlovian twitch whenever someone mentions the Fibonacci series. In my defence I can lay claim to having studied computer science at university, and there everytime since, whenever I learnt a new programming language guess what one of the first things I had to write a program to calculate!

I am glad to say I no longer bother much with that programming stuff, these days being a database person.

Hi Shelly,

I still speculate about why there is such a close connection or even intimate relation of the cochlea to the semicircular canals?

Some of the African cats seem to capture birds capable of flight better by sound than sight.

Hi, Shelly,

Dropping by from Kim Klein's blog, where I saw your lovely comment. You must be a very kind, classy (as well as brilliant) young woman.

Best wishes to you, and good luck in the scholarship contest.

my two favorite examples of fibonacci in nature is patterning of seeds on the face of sunflowers and human form as visualized by the da vinci picture 'vitruvian man' - which i think is phi-related. if i'm not mistaken there's a lot of fibonacci/golden-ratio plant patterning (like placement of leaves on flower stalks and veins on leaves).

and just to clarify, phi and pi are different, phi being the greek letter used to denote the golden ratio, and pi for the relationship between radius and circumference of a circle (charlie was in fact talking about the same thing as you, you just might have missed the 'h', an easy mistake). Charlie's also right about the value of phi as 'n' reaches its limit at infinity. the value for phi does change after n=13, just by such a small amount is isn't going to be noticeable using regular scientific calculators (which crop after a certain number of digits post decimal point).

nice poetry by the way. i find this post funny only because maybe two posts below this one (lions skull) you claim having no artistic skills whatsoever... writing ain't drawing, but it is still art.

Got it darkman! Sorry for misunderstanding you Charlie. You know how us blondes can be. ;)

Spontaneous formation of Fibonacci spiral in elastically mismatched bilayer.
http://www.physorg.com/news97227410.html

The Peruvian calendar is also based on Fibonacci numbers and the last possible date on their calendar is 12/31/2012....interesting!

Beautiful! Very nice Shelley, thanks for sharing those poems. I totally agree with Darkman. There's more artistic talent there than many of the pieces I saw during Nuit Blanche.

Great post. I discovered the Fibonacci sequence through xkcd:

http://xkcd.com/289/

hi shelly, i discovered your blog in the finalists blogging scholarship 2007. i'm running a german blog on linguistics and poetics and had to carry the great idea of fibonacci-poem from here around the globe. thanks and much luck for the competition from germany.

Hi Shelley,

Got sent here after hearing you are up for a scholarship. I'm going to nitpick because I'm a mathematician, but the ratio of consecutive Fibonacci numbers is not exactly constant, not even after the 13th. It may be identical up to however many digits you are looking at, but it isn't really constant.

The golden ratio is a very interesting number, appearing, as you point out, all over the place in nature.

Does anyone else notice the similarity between the design of the cochlea and the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
http://www.venganza.org/

There's also this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralus_%28song%29

Thanks for posting your poems, and the explanation of Fibonacci numbers. There is a good rythm to the poems.

Sweetness, I'm a mathematician, remember?

I'll spank you next time you come through Denver.

Shelley,
What a great post. I began to notice something oddly regular about the arrangement of scales on a pine cone when I began doing a bunch of drawings of them years and years ago, and lo, their swirls are based on the Fibonacci series. Most have 5 spirals going one way, 8 going the other, or 8 and 13, like the Monterey pine cone I picked up in Big Sur.
And I agree with whoever said that your poems are as artful as any drawing.

Sometimes getting funding means spiraling out of the realm of sanity. Yuk Yuk

Original Art of A Lion's Skull, And What's In It

retrospectacle — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 06:44:26 +0000

Original Art of A Lion's Skull, And What's In It

I have immense respect and awe for people with artistic talent. Since I have have absolutely none to speak of, the process of developing a piece of art from sketch to completion (and making it look beautiful) is something that baffles me. Artists who focus on the illustration of specimins, science, and natural history art are particularly awesome and rare.

I am lucky enough to consider as friends two talented natural history artists, Glendon Mellow and Carl Buell, who have both designed the beautiful banners which rotate on the masthead above. I have another to add though, reader John Perry Baumlin who emailed this gorgeous original watercolor (below) of a lion skull and invited me to post it.

This piece was included in Focus on Nature IX at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York during the summer of 2006. The juried exhibition featured the work of 69 artists from 12 countries. The Focus on Nature exhibition began 19 years ago and is held every two years, in conjunction with the Northeast Natural History Conference. I've always had a special fascination with bones and especially skull morphology. To me they are like natural sculpture, objects of great beauty. ~John Perry Baumlin ~

Seeing this skull piqued my curiousity as to what was once *in* it. What does a lion's brain look like, and how big is it? The BrainMuseum answered both.

This specimen was an adult male lion, which was perfused with fixative, and obtained from the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, Wisconsin. The first thing I noticed about this brain was the prominence of the olfactory bulbs (the bulb-like structures protruding from the front of the brain), which makes sense given the importance of the sense of smell to lions in tracking prey. Generally, the brain was more folded (containing many gyri and sulci) than I expected.\

UPDATE: I received an email from John Baumlin which adds a bit more information about the olfactory abilities of lions.

...while lions have pretty good olfactory abilities, as you noted from their brain anatomy, it is used mostly in communicating with others of their own kind rather than in tracking prey. All cats leave scent markings which can be read by others. Here's what George Schaller (whose study of lions in the Serengeti is one of the great works in field biology) says: "Males mark not only their trails, but also the vicinity of estrous lionesses and kill sites; they squirt after fights and during meetings with friends and, in fact, during any situation in which their claim to ownership or right to be there might be questioned. Scent marks are in effect physical extensions of the animals themselves, in that they communicate to others that a lion lives there, how recently it has passed, perhaps who it was, and, in the case of a lioness, whether or not she was in heat." They have a whole language of smells that is completely foreign to us more visually oriented creatures.

retrospectacle Thu, 10/11/2007 - 02:44

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Great website, absolutely amazing,really helped my son with his school project.

"Generally, the brain was more folded (containing many gyri and sulci) than I expected."

Shelley, what's the significance of having more folds?

More folds=more surface area=more brain.

I don't think kc explains it well enough, and I don't really know the answer exactly, but I can try. With folding you get more surface area, but that in itself is not an explanation for why you get more brain. You could get more brain by filling the furrows the folding causes with brain. The inner mass of the brain is filled with white matter, the axons that connect nerves together. The outer part is grey matter, the cell bodies of the nerves which the axons connect to. The cell bodies does all the processing, so with more surface area you can have more processing cells. This is why humans are thought of as more intelligent than some of the other animals, we got more processing cells. Shelley might not have expected so much folding on the lions because lions are not regarded as intelligent as humans and primates.

This is said without that much neuroscience knowledge, I just hope it's not too far off mark.

That's an absolutely beautiful watercolor. As for the prominent olfactory bulbs, I wonder if there'd be any difference in terms of relative size when compared to the Spotted Hyena (Crocuta crocuta). Lions and hyenas fight over kills all the time and I wonder if the olfactory bulbs of hyenas would be larger if they made use of decaying carcasses. Even after lions are done with a carcass, hyenas can make use of the scraps and the bones so I wonder if they'd have an overall better sense of smell to detect such leftovers. This isn't to say that hyenas only scavenge, though, since they actively hunt and kill just as much as lions do despite their reputation.

Tierhorn is right on. I don't know much about feline/big cat neuroscience (my knowledge is limited to human and rodents) but generally speaking, the amount of cortex folding (as well as the size of the cortical lobes) is a crude measure of a creature's intelligence. While lions are clearly no dunces, the amount of folding in their brains exceeded my expectation of their need. But on second thought, they also travel extremely long distances, migrating for food and water, which would likely require good mapping and memory skills. They also have rather complex social interactions too.