Events
bioephemera | March 17, 2011
I guess it's not surprising, my dopamine is rising
And my glutamate receptors are all shot
I'd surely be bemoaning all the extra serotonin
But my judgement is impaired and my confidence is not
Allosteric modulation
No Long Term Potentiation
Hastens my inebriation
Give me a beer. . .
Physiology professors, I trust you know what to do with this holiday treasure by cadamole. Nothing makes neurobiology seem relevant like a beer.
bioephemera | March 15, 2011
When I was about eleven years old, I loved to draw intricate ornamental initials with sea serpents twining all over them and castles sprouting out of them, etc. Sometimes my friends would have me draw ink letter "tattoos" on them, but really, the only way I could get satisfactory resolution on my letters was to use a fine tip pen on a full sheet of paper. One letter = math class. (No wonder I don't know calculus).
That's why this new group show at San Francisco's Gallery Hijinks has me smiling with nostalgia - it's a full alphabet (plus) of letter-themed artworks. The organic,…
bioephemera | March 11, 2011
David Clarke, president of the DC chapter of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (a great group that I considered joining once, long ago and several careers away), just passed along an invitation to an event next week. The artists who created the work in the Smithsonian's NMNH Hall of Human Origins will be talking about their process, the science behind it, the equipment they use and the working of their studios. While this is the DC GNSI meeting, they are graciously opening it to the public, so if you are in the DC area, consider attending.
More info about the event below the fold.…
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.…
cevans | February 8, 2011
To prepare for a "Book Sprint" I'm participating in at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie-Mellon University next week, I've been doing lots of research about notable historical interactions between art, science, and technology. In suit, Universe fringe benefits!
First, I'd like to tell you about "9 Evenings," organized in 1966 by a very interesting engineer named Billy Klüver with the help of the great American artist, Robert Rauschenberg.
Klüver is a fascinating character, a brilliant engineer who saw the potential in the integration of art and technology, and noticed an absence…
bioephemera | January 23, 2011
From NextNature, an intriguing post about the Institute for Digital Biology:
During the exhibition, visitors were able to feed a colony of microscopical pop-up creatures, save Chinese websites from a pageview-shortage, preserve an Amazone tribe from extinction by subscribing to its homepage and view a short documentary on how the living internet established itself.
Artist Walewijn den Boer also created a peculiar, twelve-minute faux-documentary, which uses animation to bring his digital biology concepts into meatspace (check it out below the fold).
Update 1:
I think the clunkiness of the…
bioephemera | January 17, 2011Observatory is hosting another great event tonight:
From Heumann Heilmittel, "Eine Reise durch den menschlichen Körper" (1941)
Body Voyaging: an illustrated lecture with Kristen Ann Ehrenberger
Date: TONIGHT, Monday, January 17th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
We human beings have a seemingly insatiable desire to experience the bodies underneath our skins. While many scholars have treated the subject of looking into or through bodies via medical imaging, one perhaps understudied trope is that of "body voyaging." A few writers and artists have imagined what it…
bioephemera | December 30, 2010
This series of sciart wallpapers by Dan Funderburgh were inspired by the Time-Life Science Library, a series of educational books published in the 1960s. For those of us old enough to remember them, Time-Life's series are objects of nostalgia in themselves. Coupling the vintage design and palettes of those books with vintage sci-art symbolism yields a sharply contemporary set of prints.
Funderburgh describes his work as "a repudiation of the fabricated schism between art and decoration;" you could also describe it as a repudiation of the fabricated gulf between science and design. (Fun…
bioephemera | December 5, 2010FYI:
Science Art-Nature and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) present the "Science Without Borders" online art exhibition in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., February 17 - 21, 2011.This on-line art exhibition, was conceived to display and promote the best contemporary Science Art and to encourage discourse between the scientific and artistic communities. Designed as a companion to the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, each selected piece of…
bioephemera | December 4, 2010"Although science is seemingly the logical, rational, ordered antithesis of artistic creativity, artists and scientists still share a common drive to innovate, explore, dissect and reveal. They have a unified love and awe for the world around and within them."
--Mark de Novellis, curator of "Picturing Science," a sciart exhibition opening today at the UK's Riverside Gallery.
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 26, 2010Okay, so is this the perfect job for me or what?
Massachusetts College of Art and Design seeks a full time, tenure track interdisciplinary position in the Liberal Arts Department at the assistant or associate professor level to teach biology and environmental science and related science courses, including arts-oriented science courses, beginning in September 2011. The Liberal Arts department provides the general education component of Massachusetts College of Art's BFA degree program. Successful candidates will help build an academic program in collaboration with colleagues from non-…
bioephemera | October 23, 2010Just in: the 2010 Imagine Science Films Festival's Nature Scientific Merit award, given to "a short film that exemplifies science in narrative filmmaking in a compelling, credible and inspiring manner," is An Eyeful of Sound, a short film about audio-visual synaesthesia by Samantha Moore.
Here's the trailer:

An Eyeful of Sound - trailer from Samantha Moore on Vimeo.
It's a little hard from that clip to get a sense of what the film is like. But it's great that an organization is finally calling attention to science-themed short films. Bravo, ISFF.
Related: The Eyeful of Sound…
bioephemera | October 21, 2010A couple of days ago, the New York Times reported on an undergraduate class at Harvard that teaches the science of cooking. It's called "Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science," and it's popular: if you're a Harvard undergrad, you have about a 43% chance of winning a seat at the lab bench (still, as one of the instructors points out, better odds than most people have of getting reservations at one of the participating guest chefs' exclusive restaurants).
The class also seems to be changing the way some students think about science:
For Mr. Jean-Baptiste, a junior…
bioephemera | October 12, 2010What do you get when you ask Harvard physicist Lisa Randall to curate an art show? A Los Angeles gallery found out, and Wired has the story. My favorite quote:
I asked Mays whether the artists gained an appreciation for physics. "Oh god, yes!" he said. "I've seen them carrying books around about different scientific theories."
No! Not artists with books of scientific theories! The world is upside-down!
Coverage of the Measure for Measure exhibition is here - it sadly closed last weekend, but there are photos online, and I tracked down a few of the sciart contributors, Meeson Pae Yang (with an…
cevans | August 10, 2010
Greetings from the People of Earth from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
I made the above video, Greetings from the People of Earth, to open the World Science Festival 2010 panel "The Search for Life in the Universe," which featured personal hero Jill Tarter, David Charbonneau, and Steven Squyres.
In 1977, taking advantage of a fortuitous alignment of planets, NASA dispatched two spacecraft named Voyager into space. These probes, now the farthest human-made objects from Earth, carry with them a unique recording, the Voyager Golden Record. Compiled by a team under Dr. Carl Sagan, the Golden…
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 16, 2010A German home improvement company turns an old apartment building into a modern wonder cabinet, as part of an ad campaign: first they covered the facade with a flock of shoes (Dr. Isis must have been their muse) and then they installed concept art throughout the whole thing (some of it nuts, and some of it pretty remarkable). They won a 2009 Mobius Award for their work. Check it out:
I think we'd all like to have the room with the giant air mattress/bubble in it. Mmmmmmm, sleeping on a giant bubble.
bioephemera | April 23, 2010
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 Journalism program at MIT. I'll be appearing with Chris Mooney of the Intersection/Discover on a panel called "Science and the Web."
Now, if you've read the blog for a while, you'll know I'm not a new media cheerleader. I do love new media, but I also have many concerns about its evolving mores. So in…
bioephemera | April 15, 2010
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 component flickers independently in the wake of an exhalation or current of air passing through the room." (source).
Much of the fragmented imagery Bur Johnson uses in his transparencies (honeycomb, dragonfly wing venation, segmented legs) is insectoid, and the pieces are correspondingly loose, organic…