Random Acts of Altruism
bioephemera | September 6, 2011Photo of Vermont highway courtesy of Kyle Cornell
Last week, I had my long-awaited vacation semi-ruined when, thanks to Hurricane Irene, my flight back from the West Coast was cancelled. I had to rent a car and drive across the country in a rush - not my favorite way to spend three and a half days. But based on what I saw passing through New York, and what I've heard about the damage in Vermont, I can't complain: flooding has overturned homes, isolated entire towns, and destroyed everything some families own.
Vermonters are a notoriously self-sufficient bunch, and I haven't seen that much…
sb admin | September 6, 2011Photo of Vermont highway courtesy of Kyle Cornell
Last week, I had my long-awaited vacation semi-ruined when, thanks to Hurricane Irene, my flight back from the West Coast was cancelled. I had to rent a car and drive across the country in a rush - not my favorite way to spend three and a half days. But based on what I saw passing through New York, and what I've heard about the damage in Vermont, I can't complain: flooding has overturned homes, isolated entire towns, and destroyed everything some families own.
Vermonters are a notoriously self-sufficient bunch, and I haven't seen that much…
sb admin | August 26, 2011Gold Cortex
16 x 20, 2010Greg Dunn
I used to have a beautiful gold Japanese folding screen, which was purchased by my great-grandmother's feisty sister on a trip in the 1920s. I loved the gold patina and the surprisingly modern impact it had on my wall. At the moment, it's loaned to a friend, but looking at Greg Dunn's artwork, I couldn't help but be reminded of the best aspects of my screen: the gold leaf, crisp black patterns, and way that the scene seemed half natural, half abstract.
The biggest twist Greg, a 6th year graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania,…
bioephemera | May 20, 2011Cell Division IV
Michele Banks
DC area artist Michele Banks has donated one of her cell division watercolors to raise funds for art outreach. Check out the online auction - the painting is matted and framed and currently going for only $52.
Michele is not a biologist, but she's been on a sci-art kick for a while, inspired by the fortuitous resemblance of watercolor patterns to cellular structures. To see more of her work, visit her etsy shop, artologica.
bioephemera | April 12, 2011
Calling all dataviz peeps: you know you want to meet Stephen Colbert. All you have to do is win DonorsChoose's version of the Netflix Prize.
It's a contest called "Hacking Education". DonorsChoose explains, "We've opened up [our] data, and invite you to make discoveries and build apps that improve education in America. Help to shape your school system's budget by revealing what teachers really need. Build the first mobile app for hyper-local education philanthropy. We've got a list of suggestions to help get you thinking."
Good luck!
bioephemera | March 18, 2011
. . . I know we are all thinking of the victims of last week's earthquake and tsunami, and of the ongoing nuclear plant crisis.
The Japanese Embassy directs would-be donors to the Red Cross, and asks that donors give to their local chapters. In the US, one can donate to the Red Cross here, or text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation.
image: origami crane by kekremsi, from a design by Roman Diaz and Daniel Naranjo.
bioephemera | February 8, 2011Remember the synthetic biology documentary I blogged about a while back? Well, the filmmakers are still working toward their goal. They have a little less than a month left, and I just noticed that they've seriously beefed up the rewards you can get for funding them. There are some interesting gifts from $10 up, but now at $300$1000*, they will send you a rough cut, solicit your input, and credit you in the final version. For everyone concerned about how scientists appear in the film, this is an intriguing option!
*Correction -the cost is actually $1000. For some reason Kickstarter bins all…
bioephemera | January 21, 2011So I'm all in favor of promoting struggling artists, and that includes documentary filmmakers. But I have to say I'm a little taken aback by the aesthetic of the "Synthetic Bio" documentary project by Field Test Films (and endorsed by Carl Zimmer). They've posted a short over at Kickstarter, where they're trying to raise $30K to finish the film in time for Sundance. But as one of my biologist friends pointed out, the soundtrack they use for the sample short (on producing spider silk in goat's milk) is eerie, mad-scientist stuff, complete with a Exorcist-like choir at the end.
I'm posting the…
bioephemera | November 24, 2010
David HochbaumGenisis
NYC artist David Hochbaum, the creator of beguiling ephemera-inspired art, is a long-time favorite of BioE (and our friends at Phantasmaphile). Check out his Open Call portfolio, and if you will, take a moment to rate it five stars - you could help him win an artists' residency!
(psst, cephalopodphiles: this is the artist behind Mother, a piece I blogged about way back in 2007.)
bioephemera | October 26, 2010
Wildlife of Vietnam, by Brendan Wenzel
This bundle of exotic animals by Brendan Wenzel is whimsical, yet unsettling. On the one hand, it would be perfect for a children's book; I imagine a tale in which the animals overcome their natural animosities, cooperate to free themselves, dump a hapless and ineptly nonthreatening poacher in the river, and return safely to their various homes, in the happiest of ecological endings. But we all know that's not how the story really goes.
Wenzel, a New York illustrator who until recently lived in Vietnam, says his work was inspired by the worsening…
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.
bioephemera | March 16, 2010
Polly Law's Word Project is a series of mixed-media illustrations representing obscure words like dasypygal and nidifice. Though Law has exhibited her work in galleries, she hasn't found a backer to publish them as a book. . . yet. So she's seeking help at the entrepreneurial startup Kickstarter.com:
The Word Project book will be a soft cover, 10"x10". Each piece will get its own spread accompanied by its meaning, pronunciation & an example of use. Since 2002 I have been raiding the attics, basements and dusty cupboards of the English language in search of intriguing, odd & obscure…
bioephemera | February 28, 2010
From the Center for Biological Diversity, "Endangered Species Condoms":
To help people understand the impact of overpopulation on other species, and to give them a chance to take action in their own life, the Center is distributing free packets of Endangered Species Condoms depicting six separate species: the polar bear, snail darter, spotted owl, American burying beetle, jaguar, and coquà guajón rock frog.
You can even sign up to win a lifetime supply. Whatever that is.
bioephemera | February 17, 2010
Last week, I braved a nasty sleety Cambridge evening to see Rebecca Skloot read from her excellent new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I'm thrilled to tell you it's finally being released on Amazon tomorrow, so if you haven't already been to your local bookstore, go snag a copy (or enter to win one from Sb, through 2/23/10!)
In case you don't know the story, Henrietta Lacks was a young African-American mother who was stricken with a particularly invasive form of cervical cancer back in the early 1950s. She died within months, but her cancer cells remain alive today - millions of…
bioephemera | January 10, 2010
The Endangered Species Print Project has a clever approach to conservation: a series of limited-edition prints depicting endangered species, with the number of prints correlating with the number of individuals left in the wild. For this sunlight-saturated Panamanian Golden Frog by Jenny Kendler, that's a wild population/print run of only 100. All the proceeds from print sales go to Project Golden Frog. (For other species, proceeds go to a conservation group helping that particular species).
Artists Jenny Kendler and Molly Schafer created the project, and maintain a detailed blog on…
bioephemera | January 7, 2010It wasn't exactly a New Year's resolution, but Scibling Abel Pharmboy announced a new mission for Terra Sigillata this year:
Terra Sigillata will broaden its focus area to become an open platform for scientific and career development issues specific to underrepresented or underserved minority groups as described in the US by the National Institutes of Health: African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans/Alaska Natives who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment, Hawaiian Natives and natives of the U.S. Pacific Islands, persons with disabilities, and underserved groups…
bioephemera | January 4, 2010
Beggar
Joao Ruas
Starting January 8, Thinkspace in Los Angeles is hosting a group exhibition to benefit wildlife conservation efforts:
Though we live in the city, animals exist all around us - they sleep in our beds, creep past our windows at night and visit us in our dreams. Symbolizing all that is free, unspoiled and elemental in the world, they also comfort us with guileless affection, amuse us with their playful abandon, and represent us metaphorically in a million works of art and literature. In every niche of the new contemporary scene, artists have employed animals to envisage…
bioephemera | December 14, 2009Hey readers, since blogging about my holiday educational fundraising push, I've noticed that clicks and views are up - thanks to everyone for helping out! All BioE traffic through the end of December will help benefit CEF, a scholarship and grant program for kids in Washington state, so keep sharing those links! :)
bioephemera | December 7, 2009
Every year, I do my charitable giving at the holidays. It doesn't make much sense from a personal budget standpoint, since I'm always running out of money and time, but it just feels like a good thing to do. This year, I'm going to feature one recipient here on the blog, in the hopes of raising awareness of all the great local charities out there who don't get much press.
Unlike my perennial favorites Doctors Without Borders and DonorsChoose - both wonderful organizations who do a lot of good, and have been featured on BioE already this year - or media groups like NPR and Wikimedia, there…
bioephemera | 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 plaintiffs were not defamed and had not suffered any harm or actual injury to their reputations; that Diamond and The New Yorker had not acted with "actual malice" or with knowledge that The New Yorker story was false; that the article was "substantially true" and thus protected under the First and 14th…