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.

LCROSS Twitters “Hitchhiker” October 13, 2009

OMG So Cute! From The Guardian:

In one of its less-reported actions last week, Nasa’s LCROSS lunar mission last week gave Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the extra-planetary exposure it has always deserved. A Twitter feed from the satellite sent crashing onto the moon’s surface on Friday channelled the voice of an improbably created sperm whale that discovers itself hurtling towards a different outer-space collision in Adams’s much-loved story.

Published 30 years ago, the classic novel features two missiles, aimed at Zaphod Beeblebrox’s spaceship the Heart of Gold, turned into a whale and a bowl of petunias by the vessel’s Improbability Drive (at an Improbability Factor of 8,767,128 against). The whale spends the last few minutes of its life pondering its existence – “Ahhh! Woooh! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?” – before it crashes into the surface of the planet Magrathea.

As Nasa’s LCROSS spacecraft travelled towards the moon at more than 9,000 kilometres per hour on Friday afternoon, it tweeted in the whale’s words: “And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round … it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! … That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me?”

Then it crashed into the moon, unfortunately failing to produce the 10km plume of dust and rock which could have been scanned for evidence of frozen water. Nasa made no mention of Adams’s bowl of petunias, which thought only “Oh no, not again” as it tumbled towards Magrathea.

Read on…

Twilight Zone turns 50 October 7, 2009

Copyright CBS, Inc.

You are now entering the Twilight Zone of cinema and science!

On October 2, 1959, the first episode aired of what would turn out to be a seminal work of science-fiction television. For the first time the famous four-note musical motif played, and for the first time Rod Serling told viewers that they were “entering a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.” Yes, it may be hard to believe, but October marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of The Twilight Zone.

The first episode, titled “Where Is Everybody?” and starring Earl Holliman, was written by Serling and very much set the tone for the series: Holliman plays a man, dressed in an Air Force jumpsuit, who wanders about a town that seems to have no other people in it, though has evidence of very recent habitation (food on the stove, burning cigarettes in ashtrays, etc.). It turns out (SPOILER ALERT) that he is imagining the whole thing, and that he’s actually been put in isolation to see if he can stay sane for a trip to the moon.

Review of the latest in science culture September 29, 2009

I’m a little late today with my posts (and not very insightful), my apologies. I’m also taking the rest of this week off, so we’ll see if this blog will magically keep itself alive.

From Discover Magazine, a review of all the latest in science culture, including cinema, books, and other art/science goodies.

The most intriguing to me?

How to Build Your Own Spaceship, by Piers Bizony
When it comes to actually building a craft, your mileage may vary, but Bizony delivers an engaging survey of the commercial space technology that could soon send multitudes of civilians into orbit. Explanations of modern rocketry are remarkably readable, and there are even tips for space-bound entrepreneurs on lunar-base placement and space suit redesign.

Free Museum Day tomorrow September 25, 2009

September 26th is Annual Museum Day, and lots of museums and parks are offering free admission in celebration. Read on for more:

On Sept. 26, as part of the fifth annual Museum Day program, Smithsonian magazine has convinced more than 1,200 other museums, zoos, and arts and cultural attractions across the country to also welcome visitors for free.

In California, you’ll can use your Museum Day admission card to visit the classic cars displayed at the California Automobile Museum in Sacramento (regular adult admission: $8), in New York City you can use your pass at the South Street Seaport Museum (regular adult admission: $10), and in Dallas, your pass will get you into the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (regular admission: $13.50), which explores the assassination and legacy of President John F. Kennedy. 

To see the full list of all the participating museums so you can plan your day, visit the Smithsonian’s Museum Day 2009 Web site and poke around. Be ready to be a bit overwhelmed.

Biggest, coldest, slowest waterslide ever! September 22, 2009

Photographs of glaciers taken from space: beautiful, artistic, and kind of scary. From Wired: “Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past.”

This image taken in 2005 of Bear Glacier highlights the beautiful color of many glacial lakes. The hue is caused by the silt that is finely ground away from the valley walls by the glacier and deposited in the lake. The particles in this “glacial flour” can be very reflective, turning the water into a distinctive greenish blue. The lake, eight miles up from the terminus of the glacier, was held in place by the glacier, but in 2008 it broke through and drained into Resurrection Bay in Kenai Fjords National Park.

Read more about the destruction and destructive power of glaciers.

Best science visualization videos August 26, 2009

Some of the most impressive images in science are produced when researchers take numerical data and represent it visually through modeling and computer graphics. The Department of Energy honored 10 of this year’s best scientific visualizations with its annual SciDAC Vis Night awards, at the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing conference (SciDAC) in June. Researchers submitted visualizations to the contest, and program participants voted on the best of the best. From earthquakes to jet flames, this gallery of videos and images show how beautiful (and descriptive) visual data can be.

More from WIRED.

Quote of the Day: August 14, 2009

“Artists and scientists are the official noticers of society. They notice things other people either have never seen or have learned to ignore.”
    -Frank Oppenheimer, physicist who worked on the atomic bomb and founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA.

Hear a story about him on NPR.

Engineering photo contest August 12, 2009

From BBC NEWS:

Each year, Cambridge University runs a competition to find the best photos taken by staff and students from its engineering department. See the winning pictures.

This wasn’t the winner, but it’s my favorite:

(Actually my real favorite is the rocket explosion, but this one’s so cute! Especially considering the story that goes with it.)

Patent models August 3, 2009

From Wired:

From 1790 until 1870, U.S. patent law required inventors to submit actual physical models of their novel machines along with their drawings and descriptions.

These miniature testaments to innovation — “not more than twelve inches square … neatly made” — are the subject of a new exhibition at Harvard University, Patent Republic. The display draws on the collection of Susan Glendening, a New York psychoanalyst by day and fervent collector by night. Seventy-five of her models are on display in Cambridge.

The patent models have taken a strange and winding path from their original creation to Glendening’s collection. After the patent office stopped requiring models, it spent more than 50 years trying to figure out what to do with them. Before they were auctioned in 1925, mostly to Sir Henry Wellcome, a pharmaceuticals magnate, they had a variety of homes in the nation’s capital. They were stuffed anywhere space could be found in the patent office building, but eventually lost their spots.

“Crowded out of the hallways, the models were put on display in a rented building. Early in the present century a wave of economy caused that practice to be abandoned,” reads a 1925 New York Times article. “For a while the old models were stored in a leaky tunnel near the House of Representatives’ office building.”

Glendening wants to provide them with a much comfier home: her own. She plans to transform her mid-18th century house into a museum, as soon as she can round up some funding.

Read more and see more pics