Latest from Science Gallery: Evolvaphone November 23, 2009

27:11:09 at 18:00
EVOLVAPHONE WORLD PREMIERE

Join the world premiere of the Evolvaphone – a new collaboration between composer George Higgs and evolutionary biologist Aoife McLysaght, voiced by Sinead Cusack. Supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Arts Council, Evolvaphone allows voices to be combined and to evolve according to Darwinian principles, and is being launched to coincide with the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species.

Limited tickets are available to Science Gallery members.

Http://www.sciencegallery.com/events

Celebrating all thing small November 20, 2009

Deadly tentacle of a Portuguese man-of-war stands out as a delicate pink ribbon containing toxin-filled beads. Alvaro Migotto

I thought I’d posted on this already, but there are SO MANY small photo competitions these days…sheesh! Small is big, or something:

10 Scientific American Magazine Bioscapes Photo Contest Winners Revealed: A gallery of images captured by light microscopy reveals the high art of the natural world

We are approaching the millennial anniversary of the first meaningful written description of how lenses and light could be used to magnify objects. It was in 1011 that Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) began writing the Book of Optics, which described the properties of a magnifying glass, principles that later led to the invention of the microscope. The entrants in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition provide fitting tribute to nearly 1,000 years of making the invisible visible.

Optical microscopy, energized by generation after generation of technological advance, continues to furnish dazzling proof that beyond the resolution of the human eye resides a sweepingly large world of small things, both around and within us. The artistic beauty of the microcosm can be witnessed in these photographs of the beadlike band of toxin-carrying compartments on the tentacle of the Portuguese man-of-war, the gemlike quality of row on row of single-celled algae and the red-and-yellow patterning of a Triceratops bone, reminiscent of a loud necktie. A selection of winning and honorable mention images that particularly appealed to us at Scientific American follows.

View Top Ten Winners Slideshow

Global living November 19, 2009

Not global in the world sense, but in the circular sense:

Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes have reached new heights: as tree houses for the rich and famous. Arboreal architect Dustin Feider is installing them all over the Los Angeles area. Producer and writer Mark Levin has two in his backyard. The LA County Museum of Art has exhibited one. And the nest shown here belongs to Doors guitarist Robby Kreiger. “There’s way more business in California,” says 26-year-old Feider, a Wisconsin native who landed in LA last year. “There are a lot of creative people — with a lot of money.”

He chose the geodesic shape for his constructions, which average $20,000 and 1,500 pounds, because it requires minimal material for great strength; the wooden polygons distribute stress across the entire structure. And lucky for the dome’s leafy host, Feider uses a cable suspension system to hang the orbs without drilling a single hole in the trunk or branches. “The house moves with the tree,” he explains, “like a boat in water.”

Kreiger says he wanted a dome so he could sit in it at dusk and watch the wild critters scurrying through the canyon below, “to see them without being seen.” Luckily, LA’s fauna appears to be unfazed by giant floating buckyballs.

Read original post.

Astronomy groupie November 18, 2009

Technology and art bringing the geeks together…

Featured on Wired Science.

Image: The Orion Nebula. / Elias Jordan

We have been amazed by the astrophotos our readers and followers have been sharing with us. So to facilitate our ongoing amazement, and in keeping with our belief that there can never be too many space photos, we have created a new Flickr group for you to upload your favorite shots. We’ll run the best of the bunch on Wired Science periodically so that your work can be properly gawked at by your fellow Wired.com readers.

So join our DIY Astronomy Flickr group, and start wowing us with your nebulas, clusters and galaxies! Our first submission, the Orion Nebula by Elias Jordan, is pictured above. We’ll also be tweeting @wiredscience about your astrophotography, so follow us there.

No post and LED dress November 17, 2009

Sorry about the lack of posting yesterday: power outages threw my whole day out of whack.

Today I bring you…a night light dress. Never be afraid of walking home in the dark, or cold, again!

24,000 LEDs

From Wired:

Next time you compliment a woman at a party that’s she glowing, it may literally be so. Two London-based designers have created a dress embroidered with 24,000 full color LEDs.

The ‘Galaxy Dress’ claims to be the largest wearable display in the world and it will be the centerpiece of an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

“We used the smallest full-color LEDs, flat like paper, and measuring only 2 by 2 mm,” say designers Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz in an e-mail. “The circuits are extra-thin, flexible and hand-embroidered on a layer of silk in a way that gives it stretch so the LED fabric can move like normal fabric with lightness and fluidity.” The duo run an interactive clothing company called CuteCircuit.

Beyond the LEDs themselves, the Galaxy Dress is crafted in a way that should make the pickiest seamstresses proud.

To diffuse the LED light, the dress has four layers of silk chiffon and a pleated silk organza crinoline skirt. The extra-thin electronics allow the dress to follow the body shape closely like normal fabric.

Read full article.

Origami DNA November 13, 2009

Origami pattern by Thoki Yenn.

Oldie but goodie from SEED Magazine:

With a few strands of nucleic acids and some ingenious programming, DNA origami is remaking nanotechnology, from drug delivery to chip design.

A smiley face glowed on the March 16, 2006, cover of Nature. “DNA Origami,” read the headline. “Nanoscale Shapes the Easy Way.” Inside, a relatively brief, single-author paper outlined a method for designing shapes made from DNA that would fold up on their own. The smiling prototype and the playful cover line may have been cute. But the changes the paper brought to a number of far-flung fields were nothing short of profound: Tiny, self-assembling structures, with applications in everything from biology to chip design, were now within our grasp.

Three years later, the research sparked by this breakthrough has just begun to bear fruit, as evidenced by a flurry of papers this summer. Caltech’s Paul Rothemund, the author of the Nature paper, and his collaborators at IBM published a way to fasten DNA origami to microchip materials. William Shih at Harvard led a team that developed three-dimensional shapes and curving structures, among many refinements to the technique. And Jørgen Kjems of Denmark’s Aarhus University published a method to build miniature boxes, equipped with multiple locks and molecules that glow red and green. As it turned out, everyone from cell biologists to drug delivery experts to materials scientists had been looking for just such a way to build.

Read full article

Art and Science in India November 12, 2009

Another Reason, by Gyan Frakash

From the Science Blog The Primate Diaries:

As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of his native land but as a stranger in the process of discovery, “India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by invisible threads.” These invisible threads were the spiritual beliefs of the people, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Manu Smriti. The sacred Ganges was a symbol of India’s life blood, as much for the Indian people as for the British colonialists, that, as Rudyard Kipling described in his story “The Bridge Builders,” was a natural force that needed to be conquered if the British were to successfully impose their hegemony. In this way “Mother Gunga–in irons” became a metaphor for the use of Western science in conquered lands. Princeton historian Gyan Prakash, in his survey of science in colonial India, seeks to show that science was both a means of expanding British control over the region and was a conflict zone that the nationalist elite of India sought to reimagine as an indigenous concept in order to reclaim their land.

Another Reason, as Prakash describes it, is a story of “science’s cultural authority as the legitimating sign of rationality and progress” (7). The colonial state used European science to conquer and exploit India and Prakash reveals how the history of science and the history of Western hegemony are akin to the two snakes intertwined around Hermes’ Caduceus, a symbol of reason and authority that seeks to heal but also to control. This can be seen in the early anthropological studies incorporated as part of the 1869 General Industrial Exhibition that sought to celebrate Western science in conquered lands. George Campbell, ethnologist and governor of Bengal, emphasized the importance of studying the “wild tribes” of the land under his purview because “Of all sciences, the neglected study of man is now recognized as the most important.” The racial politics were very clear, as Campbell explained.

“The world is becoming more and more one great country; race meets race, black with white, the Arian with Turanian and the Negro; and questions of miscegenation or separation are very pressing” (28).

Read the whole original post

Extraterrestrial turbulence November 11, 2009

From the November 2009 issue of Discover Magazine, originally published online October 21, 2009:

Image by: Prof. Paul Woodward, Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota

Stellar turbulence!

This computer-rendered image depicts a Rayleigh-Taylor instability: a turbulent, gravity-driven mixing of fluids that occurs in stars (and in boiling water) when a heavy substance sits atop a lighter one.

Astrophysicists at the University of Minnesota conducted a supercomputer simulation of sun-like stars to model this turbulence, which violently but effectively circulates heat in the region just below the stellar surface.

Microbe Art November 10, 2009

Check out this gallery of lovely, sometimes whimsical microbe colonies, from Discover Magazine:

Brainy sofa November 9, 2009

From Wired:

It’s either the ultimate in couch comfort or a totally bizarre idea dreamed up by a pair of designers obsessed with neuroscience. Either way, the “Brainwave Sofa” is clearly a one-of-a-kind piece of furniture.

The couch’s lumpy, bumpy shape is a three-dimensional version of a brain scan, specifically a three-second recording of designer Lucas Maassen’s alpha brain waves as he closed his eyes and thought of the word “comfort.” Data from the electroencephalograph was processed by BioExplorer, a 3-D visualization program, and then fed directly into a milling machine that cut the shape out of soft foam.

The Brainwave Sofa is now on display at the Bits ‘n Pieces Exhibition in New York.