bioephemera | January 17, 2011
TurningArt is a startup that lets you make a queue of prints by various independent artists, try the prints out in your home or office, and exchange them as often as you like. After you've lived with the print long enough, you can trade it in for the original canvas, watercolor or collage; you just pay the balance of the original's cost (and your subscription fees count as credit toward the purchase price).
Check out how it works, below the fold. . .
Easy, right? (As an artist, my anxieties are greatly allayed by the fact that they're shipping prints around in those tubes, not the…
bioephemera | January 17, 2011Observatory is hosting another great event tonight:
From Heumann Heilmittel, "Eine Reise durch den menschlichen Körper" (1941)
Body Voyaging: an illustrated lecture with Kristen Ann Ehrenberger
Date: TONIGHT, Monday, January 17th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
We human beings have a seemingly insatiable desire to experience the bodies underneath our skins. While many scholars have treated the subject of looking into or through bodies via medical imaging, one perhaps understudied trope is that of "body voyaging." A few writers and artists have imagined what it…
bioephemera | January 16, 2011
Caption for non-PhDs: aren't these sciencepunk brain ice cubes awesome? BRAIN FREEZE!
Caption for PhDs: Still hoping against hope to celebrate your thesis defense in style? Try cocktails with roughly anatomically accurate cortical ice cubes. [Look at it this way: even after six years of beating your bruised cerebrum against intransigent experiments and unsympathetic advisors, you can still out-think and out-publish a chunk of solidified H2O! Take comfort in that, have a stiff drink, be liberal with the bitters - and good luck with those postdoc applications.]
P.S.: They're on sale here, or…
bioephemera | January 16, 2011Peter Eudenbach's mixed media artworks are inspired by technology gone right and gone wrong. Check out his coffee table that actually brews coffee, his Failed Attempt at Perpetual Motion, "based on a 16th century theory of perpetual motion that was never tested," or (euw) lead castings from the eye sockets of a human skull.
bioephemera | January 15, 2011
A video montage from a sci|art institute for high school students hosted by UCLA's Art | Sci Center and the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). The stuff they're playing with is cooler than what I got in grad school! Jealous now.
More information about the course here. I don't know when registration/applications open, but the site seems to suggest checking back Jan 15 (that's today!).
bioephemera | January 13, 2011Isis the Laboratory Goddess sent me a Buzzfeed link featuring this incredible anatomical gown:
The artist/seamstress deserves credit for what appears to be an incredibly elaborate embroidered stiff satin gown that, on different panels, depicts circulatory, skeletal, muscular and pulmonary systems. Wow. I can't figure out who made it, so if you know the original source, please email me the link so I can update the post with the creator's information Mystery solved! The photo is by miyake juin, from a Fashion Week event at Shih Chien University. The gown's designer is Chinese; I direct you to…
bioephemera | January 13, 2011
The City: Majestic
miniature diorama
Lori Nix, 2006
The Ruins of Detroit: United Artists Theater
photograph
Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre, 2010
Is urban decay beautiful, heartwrenching, or both?
bioephemera | January 12, 2011
An unbelievable octopus chair - nay, throne - by Maximo Riera.
"the Octopus Chair places the animal and human being in harmony, where each is considered equal and one is not subject to the other. The octopus is not decoration; it is as intrinsic to the chair as the person sat upon it."
Via NotCot (there are even "making of" pictures!)
Want one? email info@maximoriera.com.
bioephemera | January 12, 2011
A new biology game called EteRNA "crowdsourc[es] the scientific method" by inviting players to design their own self-folding RNAs. The best designs are synthesized and tested in the lab to see how well the predicted structure plays out in the physical world - an innovation the game's creators see as an improvement over other folding games like Foldit, where there is no experimental feedback.
"Putting a ball through a hoop or drawing a better poker hand is the way we're used to winning games, but in EteRNA you score when the molecule you've designed can assemble itself," said one of the PIs…
bioephemera | January 12, 2011
Like a snake
Transfer/painting on aluminum
Berit Myreboee, 2010
Norwegian artist Berit Myreboee's aluminum transfer paintings are like troubled seaside dreams: tattooed skin dissolves into floating tendrils and tentacles of black and prussian blue. Each image is the product of an idiosyncratic layering process, first laying on photographs, then painting over them with saturated oils.
'U.T'
Transfer/painting on aluminum
Berit Myreboee, 2010
Since Myreboee's "canvas" is highly polished aluminum, the final paintings absorb and reflect a distorted version of their surroundings, like the…
bioephemera | January 11, 2011The 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, a child's perfect-attendance pin, a medallion that says "Carry me for good luck." . . . He was so intent on assembling his collection that he once refused to return a swallowed quarter, even when its owner threatened his life."
On February 18, the Mutter Museum, which owns Jackson's collection,…
bioephemera | January 10, 2011. . . from gun violence.
A new PSA campaign is based on artwork by artist Francois Robert. Via fubiz.
bioephemera | January 7, 2011Here 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 Sun discusses "graphical abstracts" at nature network:
Although they are irrelevant to the quality of the research in my opinion, graphical abstracts (GAs) are in fact increasingly appreciated nowadays. No matter you like them or not, chances are that you have to draw one in order to publish your…
bioephemera | 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 volume at all on the, ahem, musical clip that is supposed to be the focus of attention. Pathetic, msnbc. I retaliated by replacing it with an itnnews clip from YouTube that has none of those problems. Click through to see the msnbc clip if you'd like more ice music.
bioephemera | January 7, 2011This 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 _ 5, etc.
It's just . . . unexpected to see an octopus with a tentacle marked "15."
Wait - a second odd thing is that it has a small parts warning: for 3 yrs & up. Aren't most kids losing interest in basic counting toys by 3-4? Oh well, it's still adorable.
Via NOTCOT.
bioephemera | January 6, 2011Unfortunately, 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 they show the cd in a Discman. Who still has those?)
Design by Mother Eleganza.
bioephemera | January 5, 2011What 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 video is a parody of Ke$ha's "We r who we r" . And this is a parody of "Take it off" about meteors, asteroids, and comets.
From Jank.
bioephemera | January 4, 2011NYC 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, befuddled New Yorkers puzzle over a vial of Drosophila ("that's something I don't want on my body"). I was surprised and tickled to see that one of my friends, a former fly researcher, makes an appearance. The scientific community is so small!
The clip I enjoyed most, though, is the one I've embedded for…
bioephemera | 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 and below. These are fun and surprisingly affordable - I might get one for myself!