bioephemera

As I mentioned last week, I spent yesterday on a panel/in a workshop at Harvard's Kennedy School, "Unruly Democracy: Science Blogs and the Public Sphere." It was an excellent day - I met many interesting people and had some great conversations. Plus, I got to meet Dr. Isis in the flesh! Woohoo!…

[U]nlike artists or musicians, we do have competitors. Only van Gogh can paint like van Gogh and the uniqueness of Beethoven's music is immediately recognizable. Their contributions are irreplaceable. But individual scientists are not irreplaceable. There are many, many examples of important…

Over at scientificblogging.com, Mark Changizi has a post about "unconstrained scientific craziness": I criticized avant-garde artists for their craziness, all the while explicitly aiming for craziness as a scientist! In effect, I was teaching my students to be avant-garde scientists, and trying…

These are images of cells from GE's IN Cell Analyzer Competition 2010: every year we invite IN Cell Analyzer users to submit their images to the IN Cell Image Competition. This year we have received over 70 fabulous images from researchers' worldwide, working in areas such as toxicology, malaria,…

An urban art installation proposal by Nick Rodrigues would install sculpted pigeons in Cambridge, MA, each equipped with a "pico projector" that would project a live Tweet stream. According to the Artsake blog, "Gossiping Birds" is a proposal by Nick Rodrigues (MCC Sculpture/Installation Fellow '…

I wanted to let you all know that I've put two framed original watercolor paintings up for sale on etsy: "Bee and Echinacea" (sold) and "The Cicada" (still available). These are likely to be the only original paintings I'll have for sale for some time to come, so if you want a BioE original this…

Yesterday was a great day for space images. First, celebrating Hubble's 20th anniversary (via Wired): This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" or a Dr. Seuss book, depending on your imagination. The NASA Hubble…

FYI: I'll be appearing next Friday on a panel as part of the "Unruly Democracy: Science Blogs and the Public Sphere" workshop sponsored by the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Knight Science…

The Anachronism (Full Film) from Anachronism Pictures on Vimeo. The full length version of The Anachronism, a short film by Matthew Gordon Long, has been released online. The only thing wrong with it is that it isn't longer. Give yourself a treat this weekend, enjoy the steampunk, and, if you're…

Artist Balint Zsako does remarkable things with collage and biological/anatomical imagery. By embellishing his classically posed subjects with a plethora of arms, swaddlings of restrictive clothing, or provocatively opened fruit, he plays with our expectations: portraits become faceless, the…

I'm not going to comment too much on this, but this is hilariously wrong. I learned from this EFF post that the maker of the oft-parodied Hitler film The Downfall sent a bunch of takedown notices (or something similar using filtration technology) to YouTube, prompting removal of a swath of Hitler…

Yes, they can! At least Tim Knowles thinks so: he attaches pens to the ends of branches and lets them doodle in the wind, like botanical spirographs. Knowles says, "Like signatures each drawing reveals the different qualities and characteristics of each tree." It sounds cheesy, but it's true…

That's what I said - you can print skin. Not print on skin, print the skin itself, cell layer by layer. Bioprinting custom skin grafts means you can customize a graft's depth to treat severe burns - using the patient's own cells to avoid rejection. Kudos to whomever came up with this idea.…

In the munch-inducing lull between election cycles, fivethirtyeight's Nate Silver turns his attention to the KFC Double Down: I've created an index based on the amount of fat, sodium and cholesterol that the Double Down and a variety of comparable sandwiches contain as a portion of the USDA daily…

Wellcome's renowned London Centre for the History of Medicine will be closed. No one quite knows why, but Thomas has been posting about this at Medical Museion and will keep us updated. There is also a news update in BMJ for those with subscription access. Note that nothing I've seen suggests that…

One of the DC bands I like, Honor By August, has a new cd out- and the cover (the e-cover at least, I haven't seen a hard copy) plays with biomedical imagery. Sweet - love the little bird! I'd totally take that on a T-shirt and wear it.

New Scibling Alex over at Myrmecos has a fun post on how to turn your iPhone into a close-focus insect camera. If you, too, have been frustrated with the quality of the iPhone's camera, you might want to check this out!

I have no idea of the source on this one - anybody know who made it? This artist has created a similar model, but the inside's padded as seating, so it probably wouldn't work as well as a human hamster wheel. Via

WTF! My boyfriend, an astrophysicist, says the Sun "does this all the time." I am going to hide under my bed now until I die.

Up There is a short documentary about the sign painters who still work in cities like New York, hand-applying mural-style ads to brick walls. In this short preview clip, you see an accelerated version of a series of murals painted over three weeks to advertise Stella Artois. Each image is drawn…

A recommendation from reader Calle: a time-lapse view of a Rocky Mountains park over a year, accompanied by sound bytes from the news. Occasionally pretty eerie. News, Weather & Sports - a year long time-lapse documents the seasonal changes and the recreational activities of visitors to a…

Via talking points memo, an amazing photo gallery of the Icelandic volcano causing so much disruption in Europe's airspace. photo credit: Newscom/Zuma Update: More amazing photos here.

For the past two months, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has been showing films . . . to potted plants. Specifically, the flora will be seeing travel documentaries showing off glorious European skies. Will the green cinematic scheme backfire when the plants are too entertained to foresee their…

Memento 2.9, 2009 Alan Bur Johnson makes delicate clustered sculptures that consist of transparencies in silver frames mounted on dissection pins: "The installations resemble haiku in their enchanting, simple grammar - and, like precise syllables come to luminous life as each framed, wing-like…

This is. . . . A. A ghost. B. The computer reconstruction of the structure of mammoth globulin. C. The moon reflected on a river in England. D. A new iPad app that lets you blow virtual smoke rings. E. A newly discovered deep-sea jellyfish. It's actually C, a ghostly photo of the moon taken by Tim…

In this TED clip, Natalie Merchant sings haunting arrangements of old poetry from her new album, Leave Your Sleep (2CD). If you have limited time, skip ahead to about 8:00 for the beautiful ee cummings poem "maggie and milly and molly and may", followed by the gently rebellious "if no one ever…

Anthropologie's new From the Deep collection features cobalt blue tentacles reaching over the edge of a dinner plate while an octopus broods on the salad plate. There are even suckers on the teacup handles! You can Life Aquatic it up quirky-collage-style with the coordinating dishes featuring…

Reader Jake alerts me that Wired has just put up a gallery of robot spiders (and spider-like critters). If you've always wanted to be creeped out by a 40-foot robot Shelob, be my guest!

Wednesday night, Radiolab's "science cabaret" program, Awe-mageddon, kicks off at 7pm with its first live video webcast, hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich: "AWE-MAGEDDON" will feature Radiolab's trademark mash-up of world-class scientists, artists, philosophers and generally interesting…

from "Visualizing biological data--now and in the future" Seán I O'Donoghue, Anne-Claude Gavin, Nils Gehlenborg, David S Goodsell, Jean-Karim Hériché, Cydney B Nielsen, Chris North, Arthur J Olson, James B Procter, David W Shattuck, Thomas Walter & Bang Wong Nature Methods Supplement 7, S2…