A picture is worth how many words?
Effective illustration
Courtesy Da Vinci
When attempting to communicate the world of science, visualization often works better than words. Illustrations are a quick and effective means for communicating science, engineering and technology to an often scientifically challenged population.
Competition makes us better
The National Science Foundation and the journal, Science, created the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge to encourage the continued growth toward this journalistic goal.
Judges appointed by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science will select winners in each of five categories: photographs, illustrations, informational graphics, interactive media and non-interactive media. NSF.gov
Want to see the winners?
This link will take you to the 2004-2009 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge winners. I am also embedding a You Tube video of past competitions below.
.
Tags : Check out the awesome Triceracopter over at Gizmodo.com. The saurian-machine hybrid is an imposing sculpture created in 1977 by artist Patricia Renick. Now it's for sale. You should buy it (for me) - collectibles are a great hedge against inflation.
Some of my dinosaur drawings from c. 1963: I was obviously partial to Stegosaurus although I seemed to be limited to a side view.
Courtesy Mark Ryan January 30th is Draw A Dinosaur Day. It also happens to be my birthday, and I can't think of a better way to celebrate than to draw a dinosaur and upload it to the Draw A Dinosaur Day website. It doesn't have to be your birthday to participate in the festivities - anybody can submit a picture. Just grab some paper and a pencil, pen, paintbrush, or even your mouse and computer and draw your favorite dinosaur. Then scan it or whatever, and post it to their site between now and February 2nd. Personally, my drawing technique is a bit rusty so I've dug through the archives and found some dinosaur pictures I drew back in the middle of the last century that I'm thinking of uploading. This is the holiday's 4th year.
Scientist's words turned into a music video.
Pretty cool. There are more if you click the link.
Hey - I'm John Boswell, the head musician and producer behind the Symphony of Science. The goal of the project is to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the masses, in a novel way, through the medium of music.
Living Artwork in a Petri Dish
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
art in a petri dish
Courtesy Eshel Ben-JacobTake a close look at the image pictured here. Do you think it's the work of an artist, a scientist, or some other living organism?
The answer is: all of the above.
Eshel Ben-Jacob, an Israeli artist who is also a scientific researcher, created the image in collaboration with tens of billions of microorganisms, a colony of bacteria living in a petri dish. Why did he do it?
He was curious about how bacteria cope with stress in their environment, for example when humans try to eliminate them using antibiotics. One way he found to study the coping strategies of these persistent microbes was by creating stressful petri dish environments and studying how the living organisms respond. The results are beautiful and complex patterns like this one, which also tell a story about how living organisms adapt.
Turns out that bacteria actually cooperate to solve challenges, communicating to exchange genetic information that tells them how to survive as a group. It's a kind of underlying social intelligence, one that can make it difficult for us humans to keep up. In the case of the image here, you can see how the colony branches out in search of nutrients. That's just one of the things these researcher were able to learn more about by studying petri dish patterns.
Eshel Ben-Jacob realized that in addition to loads of interesting scientific data, these colonies make thought provoking artworks, reminding us never to underestimate the adaptive powers of living organisms. He added a bit of color to the patterns and has compiled a series of the resulting images in an online gallery. Take a look, and let me know what you see!
Ben-Jacob's work is also part of a fascinating collection cataloged on the website Microbial Art, which features artworks by scientists and artists from around the world who use a wide variety of taxa and techniques. You may not see it hanging in an art museum, but it's one of the most interesting examples of science-art collaborations that I've ever seen.
A new exhibit featuring artwork by geologists, other earth scientists, and geoscience students is being presented this month at the Two Wall Gallery on Vashon Island, Washington.
Fabric art
Courtesy Linda Hope Ponting“Geo sapiens, Geology and Art” could be the first-ever show of its kind, and will feature artwork from entrants from such places as the US, Canada, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, and Okinawa. Artwork includes sculpture, painting, photography and fabric art.
Block print
Courtesy Greg WesselCurator Greg Wessel, who co-owns the gallery - and is also a working geologist - put out a call for submissions to geo-science websites and magazines.
Meteor Crater
Courtesy Mark Ryan"There is a lot of potential to generate works of art that exhibit the wonder and beauty of nature,” Wessel said. “Most geologists take a lot of photos, for example. But in addition, I'm looking for connections both in the brains of the geologists and in their conscious application of geologic themes to the creation of artworks."
Stone Sculpture
Courtesy Bill LapradeWessel received nearly twice as many entries than his small gallery can hold but he promised to show as many pieces as possible. And I’m happy to report that a photograph by yours truly is included in the exhibit.
“Geo sapiens, Geology and Art” opens tomorrow and runs though November. Vashon Island is located in Puget Sound about 8 miles from Seattle.
The folks from National Public Radio's Science Friday program have recently launched a new blog that Science Buzz readers might like called SciArts. It features stories highlighting some of the interesting connections between the creative endeavors of science and art (once you start looking, those connections are everywhere). In addition to things like Cro-Magnon artists and bird song research, the blog's authors recently turned me on to musician John Boswell's awesome remix tribute to the astronomer and popular science author Carl Sagan. I've posted this video here because it's just really cool.
And here are some links to past Science Buzz stories that feature art.
The golden web of an orb-weaver: Little does this spider suspect that it is about to be captured and milked by the clinically insane.
Courtesy Tai Po Kau Nature ReserveAfter decades of frustration and failure, mankind’s dream of weaving a blanket entirely from the stuff of nightmares has become a reality.
For centuries, the very possibility of creating fabric from nightmares was considered little more than a fever dream, and the criminally insane resigned themselves to nightmare cloth substitutes, like hammered-flat baby rabbits, and prison toilet paper. Inventive though these are, like soymilk, they fooled no one.
Then, at the end of the 19th century, reports began to filter from Africa that a French missionary in Madagascar, exploring the dark peaks of his own madness, was creating fabrics of almost pure nightmare.
The missionary had supposedly created a spider-milking machine, into which he was placing massive Golden orb-weaver spiders, collected in their hundreds by local young girls. (Having little girls collect the spiders made the nightmare purer, but was not strictly necessary. Leave it to a missionary for such meticulous detail.)
The spiders were restrained in “a sort of stocks,” and then the beginnings of a strand of silk was coaxed from their abdomens and attached to a hand cranked wheel, at which point several hundred yards of the orb-weavers’ characteristically golden silk could be withdrawn from each spider. When the creatures could yield no more silk, they were released, apparently unharmed, back into the wild, where they would regenerate their webbing material after several days. The spooled spider silk could then be woven like any other material… but scarier.
Seemingly too “good” to be true, the missionary’s experiments were never replicated, and generations of madmen made do with sheets of dried bat saliva and mortuary blankets. Until now.
A “textile expert” and a visionary in what liberal arts colleges refer to as “insane studies,” Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley, recreated the missionary’s spider-milking machine, and after four years and one million spiders they have created an indestructible golden blanket, woven of pure nightmares.
The madmen discovered that while a single spider might produce a strand of silk up to 400 meters long, the material is, of course, exceptionally light. It took approximately 14,000 spiders to produce a single once of silk. The final 11 foot by 4 foot piece of fabric weighed about 2.4 pounds (~38 oz). So many, many spiders were involved, and lots of time. To help pass the long months of spider-milking, the artists whispered their secrets into mouse holes, and built razor blade houses.
The final intricately patterned textile has a rich, naturally golden color—the golden orb-weaver is named for the color of its silk, which attracts pollen-seeking insects in sunlight, and blends with background foliage in shadow. The spiders can adjust the exact tone of their webbing based on ambient light levels and color, so this textile has a unique shade based on how a million spiders perceived the room containing the tiny spider stocks.
The fabric is also exceptionally strong. Spider silk can stretch to 140% without breaking, and has tensile strength comparable to or exceeding that of modern fabrics like Kevlar, used for bullet-proof body armor. The complex protein structure that gives spider silk its strength has also makes it very difficult to reproduce artificially (that is, it hasn’t been done). Attempts have been made to insert the gene for spider silk protein production into goats, which then produce the protein in their milk, if not actual fibers. Unlike silk moths, spiders aren’t suited for mass production of silk, as they tend to kill and eat each other. And so it takes a madman, obsessed with drawing the secreted material for trapping prey from a hand-sized, venomous arachnid predator, to obtain enough spider silk to actually make something form it.
Despite civilization’s unwritten, yet long-standing rules against allowing madmen to have golden bulletproof cloaks, there is little to be done in this situation, seeing as how they made it themselves. Out of nightmares.
The textile is now on display at the American Museum of Natural History. (And, again, a photo of it can be seen here.
Zoom, zoom, zoom: Retro rocket style lives on today.
Courtesy xparxyDo you yearn to relive the glory days of space travel, back when the space industry was run by scientists and engineers rather than hindered by politicians and the Military-Industrial Complex? Do you drool at the prospect of riding in one of those oh-so-very-cool retro rococo-style rockets popularly portrayed in the media during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s?
Well, then you better get your Earth-bound behind out to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada for the Burning Man Festival starting at the end of this month. This year, the annual counter-culture festival will feature a full-sized cigar-shaped Raygun Gothic Rockethip being constructed right now in a warehouse in Oakland, California.
Three artists, Sean Orlando, David Shulman, and Nathaniel Taylor came up with the idea for the rocket and even got a Burning Man grant to fund the project. Orlando, whose father worked as a contractor at NASA, said he hopes the project will re-convey the wonderment space travel elicited in the industry’s early pre-NASA days.
The vehicle will be out-of-this-world (pun intended) and when completed will stand 40-feet tall with three levels of circular rooms setting upon the 17-foot steel legs. The entire massive steel frame will be covered in a skin of brushed aluminum (polished on site) and held in place by thousands of rivets. A team of more than 60 people is hard at work on the structure, and lest you think it’s just some frivolous art project, well you couldn’t be more… actually you’re probably absolutely right. But just recently Dr. Wade Enright, a leading high voltage researcher from New Zealand joined the team along with Dr. Alan Rorie, a high voltage artist to help develop the Uira Engine, a kinetic, high voltage sculpture serving as the rocket’s power source and engine. Uira means “lightning” in the language of New Zealand's indigenous Maori. This ought to add some excitement and sparks to the rocketship and to the festivities.
The plan is to unveil the spaceship during the festival with great ceremony on a launch pad in the desert. Festival participants will be permitted to climb aboard and make their way up through the three compartments where they’ll interact with all sorts of early-to-mid-twentieth century gadgetry, and navigational components complete with blinking lights. A telescope (for deep space scanning) will be included, and a pilot seat in the cockpit will allow neo-retro (?) astronauts to swivel around to check the instruments, most of which I suspect will have been built by the Acme Corporation. After exploring the vastness of space (both inner and maybe outer), visitors will exit across a bridge to a gantry and back down to terra firma.
If you think this would be something you’d like to see, but can’t make it to the Nevada desert, check out the Raygun Gothic Rocketship site where you can see plans, specs, sketches, photos and videos. There’s even a retro countdown clock so you can follow the spaceship’s progress to blast-off.
SOURCE
Story on cnet.com
Darwin as art
Courtesy Public domainIn commemoration of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England has just opened a new exhibit called Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. The exhibition centers on how Darwin was influenced by the visual arts and how artists in turn were influenced by Darwin’s work. The show opened today and runs until October 4, 2009. Not planning a trip to England this year? Then you’ll just have to be happy watching a preview of the show here.
Subscribe
I want to learn about
Science Buzz is supported by the National Science Foundation.Copyright © Science Museum of Minnesota, 2004-2010, except where noted.
Add a new comment