sciencepunk | October 29, 2012May K is a Russian artist living in Germany who draws cartoons based on the structure of proteins. Below is Bedouin Riding a Camel, which as it happens, is based on a protein found in a dromedary:
You can see more examples at her website, Protein-Art.com
sciencepunk | October 25, 2012From London's Pathology Museum at St Bart's Hospital: the Eat Your Heart Out Pop-Up Cake Shop, where the foul fondants and fancies reflect various medical conditions and other disease detritus. Below: varicose vein cupcakes.
sciencepunk | October 23, 2012William Seabrook achieved fame in the early 20th century as a man willing to travel the world in search of adventure (and drink), eating with cannibals in West Africa and uncovering the Haitian zombie. His fascination with the occult and witchcraft guided many of his travels, and he was guest of honour at a remote cabin in the Maryland woods in January 1941, where a group of right-on youths were attempting to put a hex on Hitler. Life magazine has the details of the hexing party, reporting that having "bedeviled themselves with rum", the group dressed a dummy as the German leader, and beat…
sciencepunk | October 19, 2012I thought this was a really interesting piece, and a very important one to anyone interested in public healthcare. The original source appears to be a Moscow paramedic writing under a pseudonym. Apologies for the machine translation, but you get the main points.
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The secret side of medicine or why doctors are silent?
In recent years, in private conversations, I often ask: Why are silent your colleagues? It would seem, who does not like doctors to sound the alarm about the real state of affairs in medicine. Why are they silent? Try to understand.
It is such a red booklet. In Soviet times…
sciencepunk | October 11, 2012
My Design Stories has the scoop on these handsome shoes:
British studio fantich and young have re-interepreted the humble dinner shoe by replacing a regular rubber sole with hundreds of dentures. The ‘apex predator shoe’ transforms the elegant savile row oxford shoe, inlaying 1050 fake teeth and accompanies an entire suit made of human hair and glass eyes.
As the citizen on dirty.ru who posted this image put it: "What is there else to say?".
sciencepunk | October 9, 2012So I've peeled my calendar off the wall where the persistent, driving rain has seeped into the brickwork and glued it into place, and what do you know, summer's over! And thankfully, all that rain drove away the wasps. Do you realise how fortunate you are? Yeah, I'm talking about these little buzzing slivers of nightmare dust.
Pure evil.
They build nests out of paper vomit, invade picnics, sting you. Not many people like wasps. Normally I'd be the first to defend these creatures, with their marvellous evolutionary adaptations to extraordinary ecological niches. Hey, live and let live,…
sciencepunk | October 5, 2012So a couple of weeks ago I unfollowed every science-type person in my Twitter feed. Not because I don’t like them, in fact, many were friends and colleagues. But there’s something sickly in the online science community, and this was an experiment in ways I might build around that.
I have mixed feelings about Twitter. On the whole, I think it’s a marvellous invention, which exposes me to people and ideas that I might not ever come by otherwise. I’ve gotten work through it, made pals, and learned many interesting things. But there’s also a certain predisposition to sourness. It’s a poor format…
sciencepunk | October 1, 2012So here's a crude attempt at something that's been on my mind for over a year now. I thought it'd be interesting to represent the elemental composition of different objects using a three-dimensional periodic table. So, for example, here's the elemental composition of the human body:
It's not a great mockup, but it's the best I could do with the tools and skills available to me. I made the chart in Excel using data from Wikipedia, and manually coloured all those little cells. When it came time to do the lettering I really couldn't figure out a way to do it that didn't involve scissors and…
sciencepunk | September 26, 2012I was at the beach recently, staring out at the cargo ships waiting offshore, and beyond them to the distant horizon, and I thought, how far away is the horizon after all? Luckily, Phil Plait has the answer to that on his website, it's a simple question of trigonometry:
Taking the Earth to be 6365km in radius, a man of average height (5' 9" or 175.26cm) standing with his toes in the ocean can stare 4.72km out to sea*. The higher up you are, the further your horizon retreats. But while Phil was thinking big - about how far you might see from an airplane or the space station, I'm curious…
sciencepunk | September 17, 2012AN UNWELCOME SURPRISE
The WMD was discovered, quite by chance, lying by the side of a Bridgeville road in late July by a Delaware state trooper on an unrelated callout. Jutting out of the ground, the 75mm shell was encrusted in barnacles and pitted with rust; barely recognisable as a munition at all. The trooper called in his find and a military team took the bomb to Dover Air Force Base for disposal. As with most conventional rounds, a small charge was placed on the side of the shell and detonated to trigger the vintage munition’s own explosive. But something went wrong, and the bomb failed…
sciencepunk | September 11, 2012I spend a lot of time being frustrated by the constraints of blogging as it is usually done. Even now I’m squirting these words at you from a narrow gully of text some 500 pixel wide, while the rest of your screen goes mostly unused (and once we get below the fold, entirely unused. Were I to keep writing, my words will cascade endlessly in tight formation down the centre of a blank expanse of screen, like the kilometre-high waters of Angel Falls cutting through white clouds).
One of the questions that has become more prescient lately is whether location is relevant anymore. It used to be that…
sciencepunk | August 11, 2012
In 1949 LIFE magazine dedicated a huge part of their May issue to The Atom, including the gorgeous illustration shown above. As well as discussing the properties of the atoms, their internal structure and chemistry, the team produced a stunning series of images accompany the text. Science reporter Robert Campbell and photographer Fritz Goro spent a year trying to solve the problem of showing the intricate, invisible nature of atoms; going so far as to blow their own luminescent glassware, lighting candles in sealed containers with magnifying glasses and building models out of Christmas tree…
sciencepunk | August 2, 2012Located in the northeast of India, the state of Uttar Pradesh is known for the Taj Mahal, the Ganges and the holy city of Varanasi. It's also home to the eastern 'Badlands', an area that boasts high levels of poverty, crime, and acute pressures on land. (In fact, land is in such short supply that people will have living family members legally declared dead in order to speed up the inheritance process.) Peasant farmers work small family plots, and with each successive generation, the plot is divided amongst the children, getting smaller and smaller until people are farming strips of land "…
sciencepunk | July 26, 2012First: the backstory. I'm slowly going deaf. No one knows why. First doctor blamed rock'n'roll. Next one blamed my genetics. I'm still waiting for video games and teen sex to be indicted. They all agree that it's irreversible. Just shitty luck. Today I went to have some phones fitted - something I've been putting off for quite a few years.
The audiologist has a soft face and clean, nimble hands. His examination room is a brightly-lit white cube buried in a North London basement with a soundproof isolation chamber in the corner like a phonebox you'd go into to avoid speaking to someone. …
sciencepunk | July 24, 2012Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NPR both have features on watchmaker Garo Anserlian, who designed a special watch that keeps time with Martian solar days. Snip:
The martian day is longer than Earth's, but this minimal variance can amount to physical and mental fatigue. Every day, team members are reporting to work 39 minutes later than the previous day.
"Everything on this mission is based on local solar time on Mars," said Julie Townsend, Mars Exploration Rover avionics systems engineer. "From home, during the mission practice tests, it was very difficult to constantly translate Earth…
sciencepunk | July 18, 2012I was browsing through some old notes when I found this - I think I wrote it in sheer exasperation after yet another email from a production company demanding I work for nothing because, gee whiz, everyone wants to be in TV, right? I think this will reverberate with anyone who's freelanced for a living. Apologies to Dr Seuss.
I will not work your show for free!
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I will not work your show for free!
I will not be your radio host
I will not write you a blog post
I will not pen a sharp riposte
I will not keep readers engrossed
I will not get your brand exposed.
I will not write a trial…
sciencepunk | July 17, 2012Some time back, I pitched a few editors the idea of doing something on a new breed of airborne aircraft carriers. Sadly it didn't stick, because no one had invented them yet. Such are the constraints of writing non-fiction. Reality has a way of catching up though, and New Scientist broke the news today about the latest in air tech: floating fortresses that dispense drones and guided missiles on command.
The concept of an airborne aircraft carrier is not new. Almost as soon as we were in the air, we started trying to compound air power by sticking one craft on top of (or under, or alongside)…
sciencepunk | July 16, 2012Ai Hasegawa, a second-year student at London's Royal College of Arts, asks if women might consider gestating something other than human children in the future, for a project entitled I wanna deliver a shark.
Ai writes:
We are genetically predisposed to raise children as a way of passing on our genes to the next generation but we live in an age where the struggle to raise a child in decent conditions is becoming harder with gross over-population and difficult environmental conditions.
We must also eat, and we are equally facing growing food shortages as a result of over-fishing, land use…
sciencepunk | July 15, 2012I live in Haringey, an as-yet-ungentrified part of North London, and there's a small park near me with a very curious chair in it.
The park isn't much - just a strip of lawn passing by a basketball court and a small playground for toddlers. Sprouting like mushrooms here and there are chairs like this one. Lonely little chairs just big enough for one person to sit on.
When I first saw these, I thought they were a little odd, but didn't put much weight on it. Just another poorly thought out piece of urban design, and lord knows Britain has plenty of that to go around. One afternoon I saw a…