Film, Video & Music
bioephemera | January 5, 2011What if Ke$ha joined Science Cheerleader? Yes, it would be awesome/disturbing/disorienting. No, it hasn't happened - yet. But this parody may induce a double-take:
Now, NASA should clearly have just used THAT at their press conference.
In case you're not into the auto-tuney-teeny-bop scene, the video is a parody of Ke$ha's "We r who we r" . And this is a parody of "Take it off" about meteors, asteroids, and comets.
From Jank.
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 | January 1, 2011Hans Rosling's Joy of Stats is now available in its entirety (one hour) from YouTube! Thanks to flowingdata for the heads up.
bioephemera | December 30, 2010Fabrication de bonbons à Berlin from philmotion productions on Vimeo.
Via NOTCOT.
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 28, 2010
Tatiana Plakhova's "Music is Maths": what cathedrals should look like on the TRON Grid.
Via fubiz.
bioephemera | December 22, 2010
Raise your fingers if this video by Cyriak kinda creeps you out.
Via Street Anatomy.
bioephemera | December 21, 2010Water + physics = beautiful work by Shinichi Maruyama.
Via Neatorama - thanks to Rhett for the tip.
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 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 8, 2010This video from the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment is like a conservationist's version of the "Right Here, Right Now" video about social media (although the music isn't as good). It has crisp design, good infographics, and makes a very important point: that nature has massive, unappreciated economic value.
I'm not saying that money should be the main reason for environmental protection; I value nature for purely aesthetic and scientific reasons, over and above economics (although aesthetics and science both have economic value - realized through tourism and R&D).…
bioephemera | December 7, 2010Whether you're studying, working, or just trying to stay warm this week, take a moment to appreciate this view of the inner workings of this positively Yeatsian music box:
Mechanical Bird Music Box
I admit it: I burst out laughing at the unexpected closure of the box. Poor little bird! (Yet he rose again, phoenix-like, to sing once more.)
From the collection of the Musical Instrument Museum. Thanks to my friend mdvlst for the link.
bioephemera | November 30, 2010
The BBC is screening a new documentary, "The Joy of Statistics," hosted by Hans Rosling of Gapminder. This is a short clip; you'll probably recognize the data and presentation from a couple of years back, but the Minority Report-style, virtual full-body interface is new. Granted, it starts off a little reminiscent of a local news meteorologist gesturing stiffly at a greenscreen. But within the first minute it starts to seem more natural, and the data (comparative life expectancy, wealth, and population in the developed and developing continents) is always eye-opening. The BBC seems to be…
bioephemera | November 17, 2010
The New York Times decided earlier this week that biological animation warrants its own article. About time! :)
Seriously, for those of you who haven't discovered BioVisions' amazing animations, you should check them out and/or use them in class - with the caveat that they're not "pure" data:
While acknowledging the potential to help refine a hypothesis, for example, some scientists say that visualizations can quickly veer into fiction. "Some animations are clearly more Hollywood than useful display," says Peter Walter, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of…
bioephemera | November 13, 2010IBM has a new commercial depicting the constant streams of medical biodata that can be gathered from a human body, and hopefully improve healthcare. In a shameless play to elicit warm fuzzies, they made it about very young babies:
Awwwww. With all the glowing data, it's sort of like a baby TRON. And what's with the virtual-data-baby-mobile? Is it made of giant diatoms, or what?
Wait. . . I know what this reminds me of. . . it's a PLANKTON PARTY!
BTW, there's also a "behind the scenes" clip of the IBM commercial, with the apparent sole purpose of giving the babies extra cute camera time.…
bioephemera | November 5, 2010
Knight Fellow Geoff McGhee created this polished video documentary series about how data visualization is infiltrating and transforming journalism. Interviews with Many Eyes creators Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, Amanda Cox of the New York Times, and other dataviz luminaries are coupled with bios and links to further information, some history of visualization techniques, industry context (is dataviz profitable? who's doing it?) and lots of lovely examples. The last section of the video, "First Steps," is a mini-tour of useful DIY sites like Swivel and Wordle (which is ridiculously…
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 20, 2010And now for a completely different type of glass art: this time from sculptor Luke Jerram. His deceptively beautiful glass malaria parasite (see video below) will be auctioned off to benefit Malaria No More.
Via Medical Museion. The "malaria parasite" is also known as Plasmodium falciparum. Read more about Jerram's sculpture here - no, I don't know when the auction will be, but I imagine he'll update his website with the news.