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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A little history, a little word play, and a little cartography, plus seeing where Copernicus got some of his crazy ideas. What better way to get your morning started?

Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today… and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun.

Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought – and indeed in the larger history of ideas.

Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.

But that was just the beginning. Waldseemuller and Ringman in fact had written the Introduction to Cosmography merely as a companion volume to their magnum opus: a giant and revolutionary new map of the world. It’s known today as the Waldseemuller map of 1507.

Read full article

I occasionally report on events happening at the Science Gallery housed in Dublin. Here’s a cool event which spans two continents, in a way:

15 Oct 09 at 18:30
UPDATE FROM SILICON VALLEY, by Joel Slayton
Paccar Theatre, Science Gallery

Joel Slayton, Executive Director of ZER01 (the art and technology network responsible for the ultra-hip art, technology and digital culture event- 01SJ Biennial), will discuss upcoming plans for the 3rd 01SJ Biennial in 2010 and tell the tale of his work with C5 Corporation – a 10 year collaborative initiative focused on blurring the boundaries of art, research and business practice.  http://www.c5corp.com/.  

Students free (must show student ID) €5 for non-students (10% off original price for members) | Pre-book on http://www.sciencegallery.com/events

In association with TRIARC (Trinity Irish Art Research Centre) and Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, TCD.

From New York Times:

If you believe, as Maurizio Seracini does, that Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest painting is hidden inside a wall in Florence’s city hall, then there are two essential techniques for finding it. As usual, Leonardo anticipated both of them.

First, concentrate on scientific gadgetry. After spotting what seemed to be a clue to Leonardo’s painting left by another 16th-century artist, Dr. Seracini led an international team of scientists in mapping every millimeter of the wall and surrounding room with lasers, radar, ultraviolet light and infrared cameras. Once they identified the likely hiding place, they developed devices to detect the painting by firing neutrons into the wall.

“Leonardo would love to see how much science is being used to look for his most celebrated masterpiece,” Dr. Seracini said, gazing up at the wall where he hopes the painting can be found, and then retrieved intact. “I can imagine him being fascinated with all this high-tech gear we’re going to set up.”

More at NYT:

Maurizio Seracini, on scaffolding, and the “Battle of Marciano” mural.

More imaging, and more “old” stuff, although this time not quite as old:

Late last year when Kodak announced it would no longer be manufacturing polaroid film, there was a loud outcry by fans and photographers. Back in May, the New York Times captured some of the polaroid-angst of five photographers who love the Polaroid medium:

Here is a slideshow of the photographers plea for Polaroid (with audio)

NYT also had a related article about how “a small group of Dutch scientists and one irrepressible Austrian salesman have dedicated themselves to the task of reinventing one of the great inventions of the 20th century — Polaroid’s instant film.”

You can also upload scanned images of Polaroid pics and see others’ work here.

An art exhibit in the UK this past week featured some of the finest photos taken on Polaroid film.

Swinger, 2008, by David Bailey

So far, Kodak stands firm on its decision.

RIP Polaroid

The latest science behind restoring and preserving art. From BBC News:

Porcupine quills and cactus spines are among the tools used to prepare a £1m hoard of Viking treasure that went on public show in York on 17 September.

We will never know if the Vikings who buried a princely hoard of silver in a gilded cup near Harrogate in the 10th century expected to see it again.

They surely did not anticipate that the treasure would emerge from the earth after 1,100 years, to be set upon by highly-skilled conservators wielding items such as quills and ultrasound vibrators.

But that is what has happened.

After a “quick turn-round” in the conservation department of the British Museum (BM) the hoard – or some of it; only some 100 of 617 coins have yet been cleaned – is ready to go on show at the Yorkshire Museum.

Much more work remains to be done, say the conservators – but already they are enthusiastic about the quality of the find.

“We had a very tight turn-round time and very few people to deliver it. We were trying to get this to look as good as possible in the least time possible… We only had two or three weeks,” says Fleur Shearman, a metals conservator at the BM.

But, she adds: “apart from soil encrustations and the corrosion related to the lead and a little bit related to the copper in the cup, it’s in superb, really outstanding condition.”

Read full story.