Hooray for immature brains! December 15, 2009

Here’s one more awesome thing about being a kid: you don’t get fooled by certain optical illusions. From Science News and Wired:

Sometimes seeing means deceiving before believing, depending on your age. Children and adults size up objects differently, giving youngsters protection against a visual illusion that bedevils their elders, a new study suggests.

This unusual triumph of kids over grown-ups suggests that the brain’s capacity to consider the context of visual scenes, and not just focus on parts of scenes, develops slowly, say psychologist Martin Doherty of the University of Stirling in Scotland and his colleagues. Even at age 10, children lack adults’ attunement to visual context, Doherty’s team concludes in a paper published online November 12 in Developmental Science.

As a result, visual context can be experimentally manipulated to distort adults’ perception of objects’ sizes. But Doherty’s group finds that children, especially those younger than 7, show little evidence of altered size perception on a task called the Ebbinghaus illusion.

“When visual context is misleading, adults literally see the world less accurately than they did as children,” Doherty says.

This pattern holds for Scottish children and adults in the new study as well as for Japanese children and adults who participated in other investigations conducted by Doherty’s team.

Some researchers argue that East Asians focus broadly on the context of what they see while Westerners focus narrowly on central figures. Doherty says the new findings instead indicate that adults in both Scotland and Japan can’t help but track visual context, although this tendency was stronger in the Japanese adults.

Other investigators have noted that children with autism don’t succumb to visual size illusions, consistent with the idea that autism involves an excessive focus on details. But visual context largely eludes all young children, not just those with autism, Doherty asserts.

Even if the new findings hold up, it’s still possible that further research will show that children with autism develop a susceptibility to size illusions more slowly than those without it, remarks psychologist Danielle Ropar of the University of Nottingham in England.

Read full post

Mandelbrot! December 14, 2009

Mandelbrot. Say it with me: Mandelbrot. I just love the word, and now I love the art that goes with it!

The quest by a group of math geeks to create a three-dimensional analogue for the mesmerizing Mandelbrot fractal has ended in success.

They call it the Mandelbulb. The 3-D renderings were generated by applying an iterative algorithm to a sphere. The same calculation is applied over and over to the sphere’s points in three dimensions. In spirit, that’s similar to how the original 2-D Mandelbrot set generates its infinite and self-repeating complexity.

If you were ever mesmerized by the Mandelbrot screen saver, the rest of the images are worth a look.

Inventing the 80s December 8, 2009

I’m supposed to be unavailable this week, but I saw this and couldn’t help myself:

Take Day-Glo colors. We see them every day on Blaze Orange traffic cones and hunter’s caps, Signal Green sticky notes, and Saturn Yellow highlighter markers. But did you ever stop to think why some pinks look rosy while others are actually hot?

Like most people, author Chris Barton didn’t give Day-Glo colors a second glance until he happened to read an obituary of Robert Switzer, who with his brother Joe turned an interest in magical illusions into an industry — and along the way created hues Nature never dreamed of. The Day-Glo Brothers tells about Joe’s fascination with ultraviolet lamps, which he wanted to use to make objects in his magic shows glow in the dark. Poking around in their father’s drugstore, they found chemicals which they used to create the first fluorescent paint. Then Bob got the idea to make glow-in-the-dark ink for store signs and billboards. It was an accident that some of the paint they developed also glowed in the light. World War II made the brothers rich selling glowing paint for buoys, signal flags and safety jackets. Psychedelic posters and bright green tennis balls came later.

read the whole article

Gone next week December 4, 2009

That’s write, art and science lovers. I will be out patrolling the west coast next week, and doubt I’ll have time to post much. Plus, I have my second annual SPIE ART SHOW happening today, so I am swamped!

But as a consolation prize, some mini art of microbes for you:

Check out the whole slideshow.

As the head of the Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimetre, van Egmond has created the Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms, an online gallery of all creatures tiny and tinier. To gather his collection, van Egmond sampled organisms from anywhere he could find water, scooping up critters from urban puddles and country ditches as well as the ocean. From desmids to diatoms, he captured all the stunning features of these normally invisible creatures using a standard light microscope.

Physical therapy through dance December 3, 2009

I read this article almost a week ago, but am only posting it now; an actor with cerebral palsy has made dramatic improvements of his body control through dance. Go art!

Gregg Mozgala, a 31-year-old actor with cerebral palsy, had 12 years of physical therapy while he was growing up. But in the last eight months, a determined choreographer with an unconventional résumé has done what all those therapists could not: She has dramatically changed the way Mr. Mozgala walks.

In the process, she has changed his view of himself and of his possibilities.

Mr. Mozgala and the choreographer, Tamar Rogoff, have been working since last winter on a dance piece called “Diagnosis of a Faun.” It is to have its premiere on Dec. 3 at La MaMa Annex in the East Village, but the more important work of art may be what Ms. Rogoff has done to transform Mr. Mozgala’s body.

“I have felt things that I felt were completely closed off to me for the last 30 years,” he said. “The amount of sensation that comes through the work has been totally unexpected and is really quite wonderful.”

Read the full article

See a video of the rehearsal of the dance piece Mozgala will be performing.

Burning Man <3's evolution December 2, 2009

I even had a couple of friends go to Burning Man this year, one of them a graphic artist, and yet somehow I missed the awesome poster. Thanks Bioephemera!

Burning Man 2009, by Corey and Catska Ench

Da Vinci strikes again December 1, 2009

I saw a version of this exhibit earlier this year in San Jose, CA, and it is awesome! There are robots (yes, robots), giant horses, science experiments, and other amazing thought exercises on display. Da Vinci was truly a successful explorer of art and science.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Workshop, an exhibit now open in New York, features life-size models of the great inventor’s machines, including his Mechanical Lion (pictured), weapons of war and flying machines.

The replicas were re-created from Leonardo’s personal notebooks, or codices, using authentic materials, according to a press release about the exhibit. Touchscreen-powered interactive exhibits let visitors “build” Leonardo’s brilliant machines themselves, translating more than 500 sketches from Leonardo’s Codices into 3-D models.

High-resolution digital images of some of the artist’s masterpieces, pre- and-post restoration, offer a new look at the famous paintings. For instance, in The Last Supper, a salt shaker that appears to have been knocked over by Judas can be seen on the table.

Read the full article from Scientific American.

Listening with our skin November 30, 2009

People usually think of hearing exclusively done through the ears. Now, scientists are finding we also hear with our skin. I wonder if this helps explain why live concerts are so much fun.

Scientists have known for years that we also hear with our eyes. In a landmark study published in 1976, researchers found that people integrated both auditory cues and visual ones, like mouth and face movements, when they heard speech.

That study, and many that followed, raised this fundamental question about speech perception: If humans can integrate different sensory cues, do they do so through experience (through seeing countless speaking faces over time), or has evolution hard-wired them to do it?

A new study that looks at a different set of sensory cues adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests such integration is innate. In a paper in Nature, Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick of the University of British Columbia report that people can hear with their skin.

The researchers had subjects listen to spoken syllables while hooked up to a device that would simultaneously blow a tiny puff of air onto the skin of their hand or neck. The syllables included “pa” and “ta,” which produce a brief puff from the mouth when spoken, and “da” and “ba,” which do not produce puffs. They found that when listeners heard “da” or “ba” while a puff of air was blown onto their skin, they perceived the sound as “ta” or “pa.”

Dr. Gick said the findings were similar to those from the 1976 study, in which visual cues trumped auditory ones — subjects listened to one syllable but perceived another because they were watching video of mouth movements corresponding to the second syllable. In his study, he said, cues from sensory receptors on the skin trumped the ears as well. “Our skin is doing the hearing for us,” he said.

Read full article

Invent your own color November 30, 2009

Hope everyone in the U.S. had an amazing vacation.

I didn’t think this was possible, but according to the New York Times it is: scientists have invented a new shade of blue!

Blue pigments of the past have often been expensive (ultramarine blue was made from the gemstone lapis lazuli, ground up), poisonous (cobalt blue is a possible carcinogen and Prussian blue, another well-known pigment, can leach cyanide) or apt to fade (many of the organic ones fall apart when exposed to acid or heat).

So it was a pleasant surprise to chemists at Oregon State University when they created a new, durable and brilliantly blue pigment by accident.

The researchers were trying to make compounds with novel electronic properties, mixing manganese oxide, which is black, with other chemicals and heating them to high temperatures.

Read full article.

Mind of an actor November 25, 2009

Just a heads up I will not be posting over Thanksgiving weekend.

For now, a cool article from the BBC about the Neuroscience of an actor’s mind.

Excerpt:

For an actor, the performance conditions weren’t exactly ideal: flat on her back in a large machine, under strict instructions to lie as still as possible, speaking in short bursts interspersed with the shrill sound of a magnetic resonance imaging scanner.

But last week Fiona Shaw, one of Britain’s leading actresses – who has in her time played everything from the tragic heroine Medea to Shakespeare’s Richard II – volunteered in the cause of science to spend an hour having her brain scanned while “acting”.