SciencePunk

Fleming Painted With Bacteria

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:57:04 -0700

The Smithsonian has an interesting article on Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin, revealing how the scientist used his bacterial cultures to paint works of art. Fleming used different bacterial strains to create a range of colours, timing his innoculations so that the different species would mature at the same time.

From the OP:

It is not clear why Fleming started painting microbes; perhaps he picked up a brush one day and noticed that it felt like the loop he used for his bacteria. Or maybe it was due to the promiscuous sexual predilections of artists. Fleming worked at St. Mary's hospital in London, where he treated syphilis cases. Many of his patients were painters, and those painters sometimes gave Fleming paintings and perhaps even lessons in return for treatment. Fleming's palette grew richer with time as he found bacteria with the colors he needed. He found joy in discovering a strange new strain of bacteria, in the way that a field biologist might feel the same in happening upon some new and wondrous bird. He collected unusual life forms in the hope that one of them might someday prove useful.

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The Bio Art of Michele Banks

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:51:15 -0700

From Make:

Washington, DC artist Michele Banks, aka Artologica, is a painter who, in her own words, "uses an old and often-disrespected medium, watercolor, to create pieces that are anything but old-fashioned." Her works in Makers Market focus on biological and medical themes, particularly the microscopy of living cells.

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Clock shows time in every time zone

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:35:14 -0700

Dezeen Magazine has the drop on this superb clock that shows the time in every time zone, using just one hand.

The clock is called Bent Hands and is designed by Giha Woo and Shingoeun.

Via Neatorama

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Using Twitter to probe audience share of microbloggers

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 05:38:10 -0700

A conversation cropped up on Twitter the other day about shared audiences. Specifically, Ed Yong and Alice Bell used this tool to compare the overlap in their followers.

So we science nerds wondered, how does that overlap look when you start adding in more bloggers? What is the shared audience between five, 10, 20 of the most prominent writers? This is very interesting to me, because I suspect that, even within a portal like ScienceBlogs, there is in fact very little sharing of audiences. Perhaps that's a reflection of the number of blogs people can reasonably follow. Maybe it's the long tail effect of having 80 blogs where interests don't overlap as much as you'd expect. Measuring this share on ScienceBlogs would be tricky, measuring it on science blogs across the world would be very very hard. But luckily on Twitter, the data on who is following who is freely available! It's basically a big set of subscriber lists that we can compare.

My first instinct was to Venn the shit out of that, but the problem is, Venn diagrams are lovely for two dimensions, and workable at three. But the number of different overlapping areas needed grows exponentially as you increase the number of sets you are comparing. Just look at this 6 dimension Venn!

So how best to show the overlap amongst 10 people on Twitter? I sketched a lot of charts, and none seemed right, until I realised that instead of focussing on bloggers, I should focus on the audience. Good advice for any day, really.

Instead of asking, who do I share?, we should ask: who are the power users, who is following many writers? Who is following just a few? In this way, I imagined pooling all the followers of several writers on Twitter. I than imagined assigning them a value based on the number of writers in my set that they follow. Finally, the followers would be grouped according to their score. A bit like this:

Here the people in the top left follow six out of six writers that I am comparing. The next bracket are all those who follow five - any five - of the six writers I am comparing. And so on. The relative size of the brackets will tell us the overlap. What it won't immediately tell us is the quality of the overlap (i.e. which combination of bloggers they follow). But this could be added in as shading, or as a mouseover text. The final frame would show the unique audience, who only follow one of the writers each, and it would be easy and worthwhile to separate these into groups. It would also be worthwhile to add the functionality to highlight a single writer's followers across all the groups, making comparisons bewteen two or three writers within the dataset easy.

Why is this important? Well, it tells us several things. One, if there is a large amount of overlap in my audience and Ed Yong's, there's little value in me retweeting something he's already said. (As a follower, I already exploit this, and will happily not follow certain people because I know that anything they say of interest to me will be retweeted by someone I DO follow - in effect, treating the middle man as an editor). You might also use this tool in deciding who to work with to further collective action - for example, putting both Martin Robbins and Ed Yong on a panel together might not double the draw of your event if they appeal to a very similar audience. Not that both aren't worth seeing in their own right! But I'd guess there's a law of diminishing returns at work to how many people you're reaching for the amount of investment you're spending. To really reach out, we need to pair people with little overlap and large numbers of unique followers, else we risk preaching to the choir. What else could we do with this info? And will someone make the tool a reality (maybe it already exists)?

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Robins Literally See Magnetic Fields

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 04:58:05 -0700

With apologies to Ed Yong; see his excellent piece: "Robins can literally see magnetic fields, but only if their vision is sharp"

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The Ballad of Edwin Rowlette, Modern Day Orpheus

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:00:00 -0700

To celebrate Zombie Day at ScienceBlogs, I'm pleased to reveal a short excerpt from my forthcoming book Zombology: the new science of reanimation and mind control. I hope you enjoy it!

"Go, my dear Ernst," she said very gently; "go, and forget me. You might as well love a buried corpse as love a woman with such a fate as mine."

"My love should have the power to magnetise the corpse into fresh life!"
--Ouida, The Massarenes

Death has always been seen as a permanent barrier that only the most divine could cross at will. For the rest of us mortals, it was intended to be a one-way trip, and cautionary tales about those who would break this covenant abound throughout history. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Greek tragedy of Orpheus, the peerless lyre player who sang so sadly at the death of his wife Eurydice that even the gods wept, and at their behest he travelled into the underworld to retrieve her. Likewise softened by Orpheus's melancholy music, Hades and Persephone allowed Orpheus to lead Eurydice back to the living realm on the condition that he not look upon her until they were both at the surface. As soon as he set foot in the upper world he looked back, forgetting that they both needed to be on the surface, and Eurydice was swallowed up by underworld forever more. Some retellings of the myth are less sympathetic to Orpheus, underscoring his impetuousness to demand Eurydice be returned to the world of the living; they imply that if his love had been true, Orpheus would have killed himself and followed his wife into the underworld. In this reading, Hades and Persephone present Orpheus with nothing more than an apparition, a cruel trick to rid themselves of an unwelcome houseguest. Similar stories warning of the inviolate nature of death appear across a wide range of cultures, and can be found in Sumerian, Japanese, Native American, Germanic, Roman, and Mayan folklore. Even today, we only have to look to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to find a warning against the hubris of overturning what some see as sacred laws. Of all natural processes, a select few are deemed by sections of society to be sacrosanct, death amongst them, and those people that would seek to bend or break these house rules are disparagingly said to be "playing God". However, several thousand years of forewarning didn't stop one Arizona citizen from following in Orpheus's footsteps, setting out on a path that was fated to lead to a similarly unhappy end.

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Counting the Petals of Mystic Rose: A Tale of Maths and Obsession

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:09:21 -0700

This is a story about how a simple puzzle ended up haunting me for over 20 years. It's a story of hubris blocked by a mountain of cold mathematics, and the obsession spawned by knowing an answer is out there, but not knowing how to find it.

Growing on a remote island, my youthful thirst for new reading material was quenched in regular bursts from the Scholastic catalogue, a thrilling piece of folded A3 paper that flaunted great collections of tremendously exciting tomes on everything from monsters to maths. The best were the ones that combined the two.

Popular at the time, these adventure books were printed RPGs that demanded you solve puzzles to advance through the story. To the best of my memory, the problem that proved so terrible to me started out like this:

James is given a lucky pendant from an old witch. On the charm are five points arranged in a circle, each connected to all the others, forming a five pointed star enclosed in a pentagon. The lucky charm will only work if the number of triangles that appear in this diagram is written into the centre of the star. How many triangles appear in the symbol?

Stand up mathematician Matt Parker has a good description of the puzzle here.

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The incessant hum of the insect heart

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:25:16 -0700

If you could press your ear to a ladybird's chest, what would you hear? Not the steady thump thump of a human heart, but something quite different. Discovery News reports on work carried out by Igor Sokolov and his team at Clarkson University, who used an atomic force microscope to listen to the faint sounds emanating from inside living insects.

Listen to a ladybird

The researchers used this atomic stethoscope to record the internal sounds of other insects including a fly and a mosquito, which you can listen to here.

The work is published in Applied Physics Letters.

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SciencePunk on the Pulse Project Podcast

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:07:20 -0700

Last week I joined Brendon Connelly and Colin Murphy of the Pulse Project Podcast to discuss some of the week's science stories and chat about zombies, blogging and the origins of SciencePunk. Among the highlights are the sheer PR audacity of teaching an dolphin to communicate using an iPad and a guy who takes x-ray images of big things and alters them to fit the way we think the world should look in the x-ray spectrum. Safe to say it's an aural geekout!

You can follow the Pulse Project on Twitter and join them on Facebook. The organisation aims to "reflect and inform debates amongst academics, students, and the wider public alike".

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Giant mayfly swarm caught on radar

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:26:39 -0700

Nature is big. Really big! The US National Weather Service revealed this image taken last Saturday showing a massive swarm of newly-hatched mayflies erupting from the Mississippi River near La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The swarm was captured using doppler radar, which is used to track the direction and velocity of distant objects (it's the same type of technology used by traffic police in speed guns). The National Weather Service says:

The bugs are showing up as bright pink, purple, and white colors along the Mississippi River mainly south of La Crosse, WI. After the bugs hatch off the water and river areas, they are caught in the south-southeast winds while airborne for about 10-20 minutes.

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Video: Ben Goldacre talks bad science and barbie detox

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:47:53 -0700

Last year I visited Ben Goldacre in his secret offshore nerdbase to talk about science. While there we set up the famous Barbie Detox experiment as described in his book Bad Science. In this short video Ben talks about why the bogus idea of detox is harmful not just for our bodies, but our understanding of health. Says Ben: "The answer, from the future king of England, to your health problems is a fucking magic potion. It's like something out of a fairy tale!"

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Researchers install window on shark egg

Mon, 31 May 2010 05:22:25 -0700

Treehugger reports on the work of marine scientists at Brazil's Guaruja Aquarium, who have added a plastic window onto a shark egg so they can watch the fish develop.

In the photo above you can see the fetal bamboo shark attached to a large yolk sac. The video below gives a better view.

After noting that the unborn shark was unaffected by the window on its neonatal world, researchers removed the entire animal from its purse and allowed it to grow inside a perspex container. The work will help shed more light on how young sharks develop, an understanding of which is crucial to the conservation of threatened shark species.

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Why I left Facebook, and then went back

Mon, 24 May 2010 02:50:40 -0700

It's rare that I blog off topic - there's so much cool science in the world that I don't have much time for anything else. But my departure from Facebook has co-incided with something of a global trend, so I thought I may as well explore what people thought.

In case you've been wrapped in roofing felt for the last few weeks, here's the scoop. After a series of embarrassing security flaws and anger over the company's attitude toward privacy, Facebook users are leaving in droves. Or at least, that's the claim - the reality is that there's no viable alternative yet, although some bright young things are working on a solution to that, playfully called Diaspora. The excommunication of oneself from Facebook is no new thing, and there are even applications developed exclusively to assist with your online suicide, like virtual Thanatrons.

But here's the rub: although my departure has coincided with an en masse evacuation of the social networking site, I just happened to be by the door when the alarms went off.

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Man as Industrial Palace, Animated

Wed, 19 May 2010 05:08:30 -0700

In 1926 German illustrator Fritz Kahn drew Der Mensch als Industriepalast, part of a series of artworks reinterpreting the body as a mechanical factory. Now fellow countryman and artist Henning Lederer has updated the the famous image, turning it into an interactive animation.

He says:

The visual crossover between industrialization and science in Fritz Kahn's artwork demonstrates surprisingly accurately how human nature became culturally encoded by placing the knowledge in an industrial modernity of machine analogues. He produced lots of illustrations that drew a direct functional analogy between human physiology and the operation of contemporary technologies. Therefore, by illustrating the body as a factory, Kahn was able to relate the body's complex organic interior to the industrialized space so common in society during that period of time.

Via fellow scienceblogger Mo Costandi's unparalleled Twitter feed.

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Play with your scrotum anywhere

Mon, 17 May 2010 07:39:37 -0700

From the Department of Sensible Things That Are Still Quite Funny comes these life size testicles, made with BIOLIKE™ synthetic tissue. Now you can fondle your balls in public without fear of prosecution! Yours for just $115.

One happy customer reports:

One of the best purchases that I've ever made! Several of my co-workers have thanked me for bring them in and sharing. I'm so glad to have them, then one model is attached to the rear view mirror on my VW Beetle. All I can say is stop playing around and get this real deal!

The only downside is that there are two synthetic tumours embedded in each testicle, making them a great tool for teaching self-examination but seriously undercutting the warm, reassuring feeling that comes with juggling ones balls.

Bonus related product: this triple-breast model, which makes it look as though you have that woman from Total Recall hiding inside your partition wall.

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Non-Stop Bullet Train Concept

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 01:55:53 -0700

Board the train that never stops!

Light shed on bee-tricking orchid

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:41:37 -0700

Scientists give bee orchid a new perfume

Tracks left by two-metre prehistoric 'sea scorpion' found

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:40:59 -0700

Love is blind

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:50:33 -0800

So mosquitoes find a partner who can sing in perfect harmony

Sniffing out books in trouble

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:47:36 -0800

Measuring the smell of old books to find candidates for preservation

Self Healing Bio-concrete

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:54:50 -0800

That is all.

The Astronaut's Cookbook

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:43:28 -0800

Recipes from the space race

First film of a 'giant' stingray

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:08:33 -0800

Incredible & beautiful phantom of the ocean

Mice Levitated in Lab

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:36:03 -0700

Anti-gravity machine tackles mammals for the first time

Bad Designs

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:25:56 -0700

A catalogue of failure made before #fail even became a meme

13 more things that don't make sense

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:43:09 -0700

From the big bang to the big bloop

Pfizer fined $2.3bn

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:37:02 -0700

The joys of regulation

DIY cameraphone macro lens

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:07:21 -0700

Requires one old DVD player, zero tech savvy

Unfortunate paper title:

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:06:54 -0700

"Pediatric firearm injuries: time to target a growing population"

T. Rex "Mostly Ate Babies"

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:27:19 -0700

This dinosaur needs a PR agent, fast