bioephemera
Posts by this author
November 8, 2009
Louis Menand has a must-read article on what's wrong with graduate education in the Harvard Magazine:
Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and…
November 6, 2009
Townephemera? The hamlet of Argleton, UK apparently exists only on Google Maps. The Telegraph reports that Roy Bayfield actually went there to check:
"A colleague of mine spotted the anomaly on Google Maps, and I thought 'I've got to go there'," he said."I started to weave this amazing fantasy…
November 5, 2009
In case you didn't see it, the latest xkcd is a visual shout-out to data visualization guru Edward Tufte's favorite map, this 1861 depiction of Napoleon's march on Moscow, by Charles Joseph Minard. Yay!
Movie Narrative Charts
Charles Minard's 1869 chart showing the losses in men, their movements…
November 5, 2009
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Last week, at the imagine science film festival in New York, Magnetic Movie won the Nature Scientific Merit Award:
In 2009, the Nature Scientific Merit Award went to the film judged to be not only the most deserving but also the most scientifically…
November 4, 2009
Since I posted last night, DrugMonkey, Dr. Free-Ride, and the Intersection have also checked in with their POVs on this issue. I particularly liked this comment from Dr. Free-Ride:
We get to foot the bill for the effects of other people's "moral failings" here as it is. Why, then, should it be so…
November 3, 2009
My mom, like millions of others in the U.S., has been a smoker for decades. She's tried to quit a few times, but it's been hard for her. The thing that's helped the most so far? The nicotine patch.
While the patch is not a universal cure - see the Mayo Clinic's analysis here - physicians back them…
November 2, 2009
The very epitome of bioephemera, from Microbial Art:
Artist JoWOnder presents a pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia created with bacteria. The demise of the painting is filmed using time-lapse photography, showing a story of death and creation of new life. The colors and animation for '6 Days…
November 1, 2009
*That's the Amazon rainforest - not Amazon.com!
Check out this interview from MAKE with Google's Rebecca Moore, who helped an Amazon chief use Google Earth to fight illegal logging.
Lots more here.
October 30, 2009
One of the coolest, weirdest, worlds-colliding Day of the Dead artworks I've ever seen is this sculpture of a skeletal Teddy Kennedy. He's at a podium, open-jawed (no doubt haranguing other late Senators), accompanied by a skeletal dog.
The paper in his hand says "Health Care: The Cause of My Life…
October 29, 2009
From the wonderful blog Letters of Note: in 1957, schoolboy Denis Cox generously shared his rocket blueprints with "A Top Scientist" at Australia's Woomera Weapons Research Establishment.
The important stuff (Rolls Royce jet engines, "Air Torpeados") is all there, although Denis explicitly gave…
October 27, 2009
Heartbreaking photos of albatross chicks, by photographer Chris Jordan:
These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents,…
October 26, 2009
From an essay by AS Byatt:
As I grow older, the fact of the existence of the world's huge compendium of changing and unchangeable tales seems to me more, not less, mysterious. How can they so steadily resemble each other, wherever they come from? How can they be so abstract and so concrete?
October 25, 2009
OK: I'm female AND a biologist, and looking at this one freaks ME out!
I'm all in favor of appreciating the beauty of female anatomy and miracle of childbirth and all, but this pasty, long-limbed newborn doll with a detatchable umbilical is nothing compared with its laboring parent, who, in this…
October 25, 2009
"Mechanical heart"
Bill McConkey
Collage of a digitally enhanced pencil drawing of the human heart and photographs of different brass instruments. Digital artwork. From the Wellcome Image Awards 2009 - see the other winners here.
Last week was Open Access Week, which meant I got to hear a great…
October 23, 2009
Has your week been like this, too? I'm just checking. . .
"Fish in a squirrel suit" by Slightly Curious.
Via Regretsy.
October 21, 2009
According to reader Milde, L.A. Burdick's is a "serious chocolate experience." Little did I know she was right - this place even has coffin-shaped chocolate boxes for Halloween. And little chocolate ghosts. Adorable!
Of course, if you really want to impress a Goth girl, there's always Valerie…
October 20, 2009
To follow up on my post on Kevin Van Aelst, here's an anatomically-inspired artwork by Heather L. Johnson, whose new show, "Air and Blood", opens this month in NYC:
Using the Holland Tunnel as a point of departure, the artist investigates the way in which anatomical processes are mimicked in the…
October 18, 2009
Via Inventorspot: Hello Kitty goes anatomical, and we discover she even has bows on her guts. Yikes!
But seriously - the second, faux-ivory Hello Kitty looks a little familiar. According to Inventorspot,
you can choose from regular style or an interesting antiqued version with a finish resembling…
October 18, 2009
From the NIDA media guide
Jared Diamond and the New Yorker's parent company have denied all charges in the "Vengeance is Ours" scandal:"
The defendants' attorneys listed 34 reasons, called "affirmative defenses," why they should prevail in the lawsuit. Among them are the contentions that the…
October 17, 2009
From Inhabitat: Artist Brandon Jon Blommaert's recycled trash robots (yes, they're real sculptures) lay waste to Photoshopped landscapes. Check out his flickr page for more - and a "making of" series of photos showing how he built these steampunky robot overlords, who are destined for a Canadian…
October 17, 2009
NPS Photo/Dan Stahler
This fall, Montana opened a sport hunting season - on wolves. Yeah - the same wolves that wildlife biologists have been working so hard (and spending lots of federal money) to successfully reintroduce to restore the Yellowstone ecosystem. So what happened? It really isn't…
October 15, 2009
For all my microbiology/cell biology peeps, this could be a neat opportunity. ASCB has obtained a two-year stimulus grant from NIH to assemble an image library of the cell. According to Caroline Kane, project PI and professor emerita at UC-Berkeley (and a wonderful person/mentor),
"By visualizing…
October 15, 2009
So it's finally happened: the government is taking blogs so seriously that the FTC is cracking down on us! As you may have heard,
Bloggers who offer endorsements must disclose any payments they have received from the subjects of their reviews or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation, the…
October 14, 2009
Just saw this posting:
The Stetten Fellowship seeks to encourage postdoctoral historical research and publication about biomedical sciences and technology and medicine that has been funded by NIH since 1945. Fellowships carry a stipend in the range of $45,000 per year and include health insurance…
October 14, 2009
Kantor Set
Kevin Van Aelst
Several readers have suggested I blog about photographer Kevin Van Aelst in the past weeks. If you've missed out on his work, Kevin is the sort of artist who can portray cellular mitosis in the legendarily difficult medium of Krispy Kreme, or chromosomes in gummi worm,…
October 13, 2009
As you'll have noticed by now, I'm not doing a BioE DonorsChoose challenge this year. It was a really tough decision, but I currently have neither the time nor the spare cash to do a DonorsChoose promotion proper justice. Fortunately, I have a baker's dozen Sciblings who are going all out this year…
October 13, 2009
I don't know who commissions a steampunk wedding cake, but whoever they are, I like the way they think. Check out these whimsical steampunk cakes (including a metallic, Jules Verne-esque cephalopod) at the normally frightening Cake Wrecks. And big thanks to LindaCO for the heads up!
October 11, 2009
Dominik Paquet
Getting on this a little late, but the 35th annual Nikon Small World competition winners are out! See article and gallery from SciAm.
October 9, 2009
One of the arguments I generally make about Web 2.0 is that, if you are an organization who happens to screw up, you should apologize and move on. Don't try to cover your tracks or shut your critics up - you'll just invite mockery and even more attention than you did before.
Unfortunately, Ralph…
October 9, 2009
An awesome post from Shapely Prose - written for all the good single guys out there.
When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger's Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won't know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can't see inside your head, and I…