bioephemera
Posts by this author
January 11, 2011
The NYT has a great little article about Chevalier Jackson, a turn-of-the-century doctor who kept a collection of foreign objects removed from people's throats. Dr. Jackson
"preserved more than 2,000 objects that people had swallowed or inhaled: nails and bolts, miniature binoculars, a radiator key…
January 10, 2011
. . . from gun violence.
A new PSA campaign is based on artwork by artist Francois Robert. Via fubiz.
January 7, 2011
Here are some essay links I've had open as tabs in my browser for over a week, waiting to be posted. Unfortunately, I don't have time to do the extensive commentary they deserve, so I'm admitting that, and just posting them already. Enjoy.
Graphical Abstracts & Biologists as Designers
Andrew…
January 7, 2011
Well, this is certainly ephemera: a Norwegian musician made instruments out of ice and then played them. Sounds like a lot of very cold work to me.
PS: The msnbc clip I initially found suffers on embedding from A) a stupid preliminary ad, B) high volume on the stupid ad, and C) practically no…
January 7, 2011
This wooden octopus counting toy is adorable!
The only odd thing here is that the tentacles and baby octopi are numbered in a single sequence. It makes sense, I suppose - you want the child to put the numbers in the proper order, and that works better if you're filling gaps between numbers: 1 _ 3…
January 6, 2011
Unfortunately, the shift to digital music sales has largely eliminated the art of traditional album design - framing the music in cleverly designed sleeves and cases. The new Shidlas cd, "Saliami Postmodern," is a meaty exception. Yum:
Via Fubiz (the weirdest thing about the fubiz post is when…
January 5, 2011
What if Ke$ha joined Science Cheerleader? Yes, it would be awesome/disturbing/disorienting. No, it hasn't happened - yet. But this parody may induce a double-take:
Now, NASA should clearly have just used THAT at their press conference.
In case you're not into the auto-tuney-teeny-bop scene, the…
January 4, 2011
NYC scientist and filmmaker Alexis Gambis is building a body of science-themed short films. His documentary A Fruit Fly In New York juxtaposes lab equipment with the infrastructure of New York City; between grad students and postdocs relating the (somewhat deadpan) joys of fruit fly research,…
January 3, 2011
Classes start today for some of us. Are you ready for spring semester? Remember high school, when a spanking new, funky bookbag could recharge your entire dreary January outlook? CraftieRobot has a collection of functional canvas bookbags emblazoned with vintage anatomical art, like the ones above…
January 1, 2011
Michael Reedy's drawings are like 1980s Visual Man and Woman models plopped down in a half-excavated quarry of visual and literary allusions. He achieves a cut-paper, graphic feel by composing on superimposed planes, sort of like a stage set, with strategic uses of outlining and negative space.…
January 1, 2011
Hans Rosling's Joy of Stats is now available in its entirety (one hour) from YouTube! Thanks to flowingdata for the heads up.
December 31, 2010
. . . especially with these delicate, icy Orion constellation cards from Campbell Raw Press.
December 30, 2010
This series of sciart wallpapers by Dan Funderburgh were inspired by the Time-Life Science Library, a series of educational books published in the 1960s. For those of us old enough to remember them, Time-Life's series are objects of nostalgia in themselves. Coupling the vintage design and palettes…
December 30, 2010
Fabrication de bonbons à Berlin from philmotion productions on Vimeo.
Via NOTCOT.
December 30, 2010
No. "If we could gather all the electric eels from all around the world," they would free their imprisoned brother from his Yuletide servitude and bio-tase the crap out of you, bro.
Just sayin'.
December 29, 2010
I have no idea how I missed this before the holidays (sorry!), but NBDesigns has a line of oxidized silver embryo jewelry that is pure vintage lab-chic. The embryonic mice are particularly adorable:
And, on the less-cute, more-sciency end of the spectrum, her embryonic chicks look just like…
December 28, 2010
Tatiana Plakhova's "Music is Maths": what cathedrals should look like on the TRON Grid.
Via fubiz.
December 28, 2010
Via iO9, a Nature News slideshow of natural history engravings by physician Martin Lister's teenage daughters, who contributed technically accurate engravings of shells to one of his books, the Historiae Conchyliorum:
Historians now believe the pair were the first women to use microscopes to help…
December 28, 2010
Because people have been discussing Google ngrams a lot, and because there are always major caveats to new datamining methodologies, I have to link Natalie Binder's excellent series of posts urging caution, not only about the methodology, but about assuming too much about ngrams' utility in social…
December 27, 2010
The ultimate bioephemera: art you eat! This cephalopod by specialty cake artist Karen Portoleo is definitely NOT a cake wreck (although if there were a little cake(ship)wreck under those tentacles, it might not be a bad addition). Karen previously made a "gingerbread" house with an octopus icing…
December 26, 2010
Olivier Valsecchi's portraits of the nude human body, caught in motion, haloed in dust, could convey an incredibly complicated subtext. Or not. "Dust" by Olivier Valsecchi, via ChangetheThought via Street Anatomy.
December 22, 2010
Raise your fingers if this video by Cyriak kinda creeps you out.
Via Street Anatomy.
December 22, 2010
National Museum of Health & Medicine has an amazing flickrstream of vintage medical photographs and other ephemera. Lately they've been adding diagnostic/documentary photos of Civil War soldiers, as well as some military propaganda posters (anti-VD and anti-food waste, of all things). This…
December 21, 2010
Water + physics = beautiful work by Shinichi Maruyama.
Via Neatorama - thanks to Rhett for the tip.
December 21, 2010
To Hold You Again
Chris Peters
Artist Chris Peters just wrapped up a winter show at Santa Monica's Copro gallery. I've blogged about his work before; it's inspired by vintage medical illustrations, but his agonized skeletons are ripped from their anatomical atlases to brood in Hopper-esque gas…
December 21, 2010
As children sleep, dreaming their materialistic dreams of the privileged classes, Santa - less impressive than his Falstaffian reputation would suggest - twists the narrator's grasp of reality beyond all recognition.
A hilarious tale of Christmas horror by Ryan Iverson, inspired by Warner Herzog.…
December 17, 2010
Google Labs just released a new "experiment" - Body Browser. You have to upgrade to Google Chrome beta if you don't already have it, but when you do, you can play with a 3-D, rotatable reconstruction of a (female) human body. Sliders let you fade the circulatory, skeletal, muscular, and nervous…
December 17, 2010
Euw! Ed Yong has a gross-yet-cool post about parasitic nematodes that infect and kill caterpillars - and bring along luminous bacteria whose red glow is unpalatable to birds. If a bird eats the caterpillar host, the parasitic worms die. But the bacterial warning glow protects the worms' immobilized…
December 13, 2010
This is un freaking real.
My friend John O at Armed With Science has dug up a classic animated film produced for the National Naval Medical Center in 1973. It starts with an awards ceremony for the "Communicable Disease of the Year," hosted by the Grim Reaper (who turns out to know a lot about…