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

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.

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

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.

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”.

What more do you need out of a graphic novel than art and time travel? Oh, crime solving, of course! The graphic novel Luna Park was reviewed in Underwire:

Druggy, thuggy graphic novel Luna Park tracks a slipstreaming Russian soldier through time and annihilation. A gripping but arty hardcover, Kevin Baker and Danijel Zezelj’s crime-travel comic samples cultural staples as different as Alexander Pushkin, Chinatown and The Manchurian Candidate.

But Luna Park also cleverly carves out its own gang tattoo, using a potent combination of dramatic graphics and fractal narrative that skips sharply across time, history and myth without leaving readers behind. The result is one of 2009’s best graphic novels.

“Time travel works particularly well in comics. You can just show it, instead of having to describe the hell out of it,” said the award-winning Baker, author of historical novels like the City of Fire trilogy. Luna Park, released earlier this month, follows that visual code with poetry, balancing Baker’s dense knowledge of history with Zezelj’s roughened but still cinematic illustrations.

“Luna Park gave me a chance to play with history,” said Baker of his first graphic novel. “But I’m just trying to hone and humanize it, to tell individual stories within its sweep. It bends me more than I bend it.”

See more art and more from the author.

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

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

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.

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.