The Eyes Have It

While browsing the gallery of award winners, you can listen to commentary from the creator of each image describing how it came to be.

The winners of the Awards challenge the public perspective that scientists don’t have an artistic side. Working every day with microscopes and imaging technology, these biologists have been able to capture stunning images through a blend of original and innovative techniques.

Despite the obvious visual appeal of the pictures, their primary purpose is investigation. The images are from research projects with the ultimate goal of helping to improve healthcare through new forms of prevention, treatment and vaccination.

“A website about films + filmakers, science + scientists, Science Cinémathèque is a forum for short films, interviews, and articles that enhance the public understanding of Science and technology.”

This is an online exhibition located on the Museum of the Moving Image’s site.

[via Boing Boing]

“The Power of the Blog”, an article by David Secko in the August 1, 2005 issue of The Scientist, examines why weblogging hasn’t penetrated the scientific community as completely as it has the business community. It documents what progress has been made so far and provides a great list of science blogs which, by the way, includes TEHI (welcome to everyone who followed the link here). I strongly agree with Secko’s major theme:

Blogging is a form of communication that is sweeping through business, and although it’s yet to significantly break into the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, few believe it’s going to stop at their gates. So, if you’re not reading one, or better yet, writing one, you’re missing the opportunities others are taking advantage of.

It sounds like a whole lot of people better get cracking.

I’ll trade you a Cryptosporidiosis and a Cyclosporiasis for two Ecoli O157:H7 Infections.

The Center for Disease Control is offering 31 disease trading cards. The cards are very nicely designed and laid out. The images are compelling. The only thing I don’t like about them is that there is no way to download all the cards at once. Each individual card is in it’s own PDF file.

“Pictures have always played an important role in the scientific process, especially in the history of anatomy Whether woodcut, sketch, sculpture, X ray, or MRI, visual images have helped us observe describe, model, categorize, analyze, and conceptualize the human body. How has this imagery changed the ways we look al our bodies? The Exploratorium invites you to delve into this provocative question posed by Revealing Bodies, an exhibition from March 18 to September 4, 2000, made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the California Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts“

“NetAnatomy is designed to teach human anatomy to students of the health professions, including undergraduate medical, health sciences, and nursing students. NetAnatomy also serves as a place to review anatomy after one’s initial exposure to the subject, e.g. students beginning a clinical rotation, USMLE (National Board) preparation, etc.”

“Art images for the cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases are selected for communication effectiveness, audience appeal, artistic quality, stylistic continuity, and technical reproducibility. Art is drawn from many periods (ancient to contemporary) to ‘humanize’ and enhance the scientific content by creating order and harmony, showing chaos, revealing truth, raising consciousness, immortalizing, surprising, fantasizing, illustrating ideas, stimulating the intellect, and firing the emotions. … Emerging Infectious Diseases is not about art. The journal has a cover to protect the scientific content from the elements. But as a communication tool, art seems to work. Our readers enjoy the covers. We don’t know exactly why. But as Georges Braque once said, ‘There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.’”

[Via eyes of the goof]

When gratuitous sex and violence won’t capture the eyeballs any more, it shouldn’t be surprising that gratuitous decomposition seems like the appropriate next step in the progression to some TV executive somewhere.

Britain’s Channel Four Recruits Rotting Corpse
(Thursday, November 04 03:00 PM)
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) Which is more entertaining: watching paint dry or watching a human body decompose? Thanks to Channel 4, British audiences may soon get to decide for themselves. The tentatively titled documentary “Dust to Dust” will tackle the taboo of rotting human flesh and bring those images into British homes.

According to the Guardian newspaper, producers on the show are currently searching for a terminally ill patient whose family is willing to sign off on letting a national television audience watch him rot. After the patient’s death, the body will be placed in a private area of London’s Science Museum and a number of cameras and scientists will get to watch the body decompose.

[via boingboing]

“My current work plays on the sensuality and beauty which underlies sense and being itself. My work takes a literal look at the foundation of our physical existence. I create sculptures of proteins, the universal building blocks of life. … Creating organically shaped sculptures out of a large number of geometric pieces fascinates me, because the complexity of a living being is similarly made up of simple “inanimate” subunits. I want to follow science in its reductionist approach and present its isolated finds in an art context. Science needs to separate; it requires the scientist to detach himself from the observed object and separate the object into its parts in order to objectively analyze it. Art, on the other hand, requires the artist to become one with the object in order to transform it into an art object. Because of this, art has the unique power to heal what has been separated: The art object is an object that has been given life by the artist and the ability to live in the viewer. My protein sculptures offer an emotional experience of a world that is usually accessible only through our intellect.”

[via Btang Reblog]

Kidney stone photographs from the Louis C. Herring & Co. Kidney Stone Analysis Laboratory (”We Leave No Stone Unturned”). Painfully and surprisingly beautiful. There’s also poetry in their reports and analyses as well as in they way they describe the initial visual inspection of the stones:

“The true nidus is invisible because it is the first crystal or aggregate of crystals precipitated from solution and deposited at what eventually becomes the stone site. An “apparent nidus” is either a region from which crystalline forms radiate or the geometric center surrounded by concentric laminations.”

[via lonita’s links log]