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aamukherjee A Slice of Entropie -
alchymista Alchymista -
crownedrose Fading Like A Dead Star -
expose-the-light Quarks to Quasars -
ikenbot CWL -
abluegirl A Blue Girl -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
Via thekidshouldseethis, a truly beautiful animated look that explains the simple elegance of DNA, and how, with just four bases at its disposal, it can code for everything that we are and everything that we know:
Director William Samuel and London-based studio Territory made this beautifully illustrated explainer of DNA for BBC Knowledge and Learning. Read more about their inspiration (hint!) and the BBC’s forthcoming site here.
via FastCoDesign.
Wow, what a great use of motion graphics to explain a very complex topic. Well done!
ucresearchEver thought of what human curiosity might look like in a form expressed other than words or drawings? Designers Brian W Brush and Yong Ju Lee did just that when they began creating what they now call ‘Filament Mind’, where your curious searches and questions are linked with the library that ends up displaying these searches in varying colors. Education and design just had another baby, and this is it. I can Imagine this being used across more libraries, I think a lot of people might enjoy this (kids especially) and see it as an addition to the wonderful world of libraries and the awe they already come with when we open those books up.
Designers Brian W Brush and Yong Ju Lee of E/B Office New York created an extensive fibre-optic installation for the Teton County Library grand opening in Wyoming that visualises library searches in flashes of coloured light. Dubbed Filament Mind, the installation, which opened at the end of January, uses over eight kilometres of fibre-optic cables and 44 LED illuminators to collect, categorise, and render searches from libraries all across the state of Wyoming into glowing bursts of colour.
Visualisations begin when a person uses specific words while searching online library catalogues. Subjects including social sciences, arts, languages, history, and philosophy have been categorized by the Dewey Decimal System into 904 text labels, so that when a person uses any one of those labels in their search, it’s filtered through the categories and the corresponding fibre optic cable lights up. If a person clicks on one of the results of their search, another cable will light up. There’s also a donor mode in which the entire display flashes with all the different colours of light, as a way to thank the private donors that made the project possible.
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Filament Mind may live at the Teton County Library, but it lights up the searches from all the libraries in the state as a reminder of the continuous search for knowledge taking place at different libraries.
ikenbotFor Your Consideration: Anti-Drone Hoodie
The anti-drone hoodie which can make its wearer invisible to spies in the sky
Those concerned about the conspiratorial machinations of the state surveillance infrastructure can now swap their tin-foil hats for a more fashion conscious accessory.
A New York-based artist has designed an ‘anti-drone hoodie’ stitched from metallised material used to counter the infra-red cameras that spy drones use to spot people on the ground. It is part of a line of high-tech ‘Stealth Wear’ that can thwart cameras and block tracking signals, which has been unveiled in London this week.
Also on offer is a pouch for carrying mobile phones made from a special ‘attenuating fabric’ which blocks the signal so it can’t be tracked or intercepted by the authorities. And there is also a shirt designed with an x-ray shielding print in the shape of a heart which is intended to protect the wearer’s heart from damaging x-ray radiation.
Artist Adam Harvey, who collaborated with fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield to come up with the range, said the pieces are intended to provoke a debate about the increasing ubiquity of surveillance across society. A landmark Freedom of Information lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation last year forced federal authorities to reveal there are at least 63 active drone sites around the U.S. The unmanned planes – some of which may have been designed to kill terror suspects – are being launched from locations in 20 states and flying spy sorties across American soil.
Most of the active drones are deployed from military installations, enforcement agencies and border patrol teams, according to the Federal Aviation Authority. In the UK police forces including Merseyside Police have trialled the use of remote-controlled drones to replace helicopters to conduct surveillance that would usually be undertaken by helicopters.
It was this increased use of military-style surveillance technologies in civilian environments that inspired the 31-year-old artist to come up with with the clothing line. ‘Military technology is coming home from the war,’ Mr Harvey told Slate. ‘These pieces are designed to live with it, to cope with it — to live in a world where surveillance is happening all the time.’ He came up with the range, which also includes an anti-drone scarf, primarily as an exercise in provocative conceptual art, but the garments will also be manufactured for sale to the public.
However, due to the expensive materials used in the design of the clothing, they are unlikely to go on sale in your local Primark anytime soon. Mr Harvey, who hasn’t yet pinned down the retail prices for his garments, jokes that his target demographic is the ‘fashionably paranoid market’. The counter-surveillance Stealth Wear range is on display from today at the Primitive boutique in Great Portland Street in West London, until January 31.
A moss-covered table that harnesses electricity from moss and algae photosynthesis to power small electronics (called “photovoltaics”) and a fiber-optic chandelier that shines through petri dishes of customizable bacterial cultures from this awesome New York Times article on science and design in the home. Don’t miss the slideshow.
Maps, diagrams and all kinds of science-y goodness in wearable form from the nonfictiontees Etsy store.
Motherboard Earth by Alain Bousquet
Encoded in our DNA is the organic circuitry of life, programming everything from our physical structure to the hardwired commands needed to run, fight, or play. Alain’s series of interlaced circuits create a user interface for the abstract ideas we use to build our world.
Etsy shop The Geekerie has me geeking out a bit over their Fringe Science Warning Posters. I might have paid a bit more attention in science class had these been hanging on the wall.
Sweet I’ll have all of them.
Back to the Future With 1970s Space Colonies
Back in the 1970s, NASA’s Ames Research Center conducted three space colony studies, when man was fresh off the moon landing and colonization of space seemed imminent. As part of the project, artists were asked to render the studies’ findings in dazzling color and detail. Together, these images evoke a unique sense of time and place with stunning precision, leaving the viewer with a bizarre feeling that is simultaneously retro and futuristic.
The Bernal design featured here was a spherical living area that could hold about 10,000 people.
Perhaps the most famous of these circular rotating stations were those of Space Station V, depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey—which now seem brilliant: The centrifugal force created by the rotation would have an effect indistinguishable from gravity, as we can see in the scenes in which Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) is merrily jogging around the revolving wheel of a station.
DNA ‘LEGOs’ Build a Mini Space Shuttle
A tiny space shuttle made out of DNA “LEGO bricks” shows how scientists could someday build new technologies on the smallest scales.
Image: DNA ‘bricks’ can self-assemble into complex 3D shapes such as a miniature space shuttle. Credit:Kurt V. Gothelf | Yonggang Ke et al
Single DNA strands became “LEGO bricks” that could assemble together by themselves into 102 individual 3D shapes. Harvard researchers manipulated the DNA coding of the bricks so that they could form solid shapes such as the tiny shuttle, honeycomb structures, and even “written” features on a solid base such as numbers and letters of the English alphabet.
“Once we know how to compile the correct code of complex shapes and add it to the synthetic DNA strands, everything else is simple and natural,” said Yonggang Ke, a chemist at Harvard University. “Those DNA strands are like smart LEGO bricks that know exactly where to go by themselves.”
Design for Corner Lithography
“The structure pictured below is a “microscopic pyramid,” New Scientist explains, “a cage for a living cell, constructed to better observe cells in their natural 3D environment, as opposed to the usual flat plane of a Petri dish.”
It was constructed “by depositing nitrides over silicon pits. When most of the material is peeled away, a small amount of material remains in the corners to create a pyramid.”
This is called corner lithography, a technique used for creating the “cell trapping device” seen above.
The Giza-like, seemingly alien geometry of the pyramidal cage compared to the wild and barely containable spheroid burr of the cell itself is remarkable. The literally monstrous vitality of the cell caught inside the imposed order of the pyramid offers us an image of two fundamentally opposed methods of material organization in conflict with one another, a collision of orders as if the Gothic met the Doric or the Baroque met the Romanesque.
Interestingly, though, at least according to New Scientist, “Because the pyramids have holes in the sides and are close together, the cells can interact for the most part as they naturally do.” In other words, these apparently oppositional modes—the fuzzy and the straight—incredibly, even miraculously, don’t interfere with one another at all.Functionally speaking, it’s as if, from the cell’s perspective, the pyramid isn’t even there.”
(via BLDGBLOG)
(via ikenbot)
Chirurgicale illustrée, anatomy in color. French. Archives de Doyen, 1911
(via ikenbot)
Space, the Final Frontier
Fantastic structures floating in space housed utopian communities according to these conceptual art works from the 1970s commissioned by NASA Ames Research Center. Nostalgic images of the future, long ago superseded by the bleak images of movies like “Blade Runner”.
(via ikenbot)
Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution by Theodore W. Pietsch.
Mapping 450 years of mankind’s curiosity about the living world and the relationships between organisms.
1. Ernst Haeckel’s famous ‘great oak,’ a family tree of animals, from the first edition of his 1874 Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des menschen (The evolution of man).
2.The ‘Crust of the Earth as Related to Zoology,’ presenting, at one glance, the ‘distribution of the principle types of animals, and the order of their successive appearance in the layers of the earth’s crust,’ published by Louis Agassiz and Augustus Addison Gould as the frontispiece of their 1848 Principles of Zoölogy. The diagram is like a wheel with numerous radiating spokes, each spoke representing a group of animals, superimposed over a series of concentric rings of time, from pre-Silurian to the ‘modern age.’ According to a divine plan, different groups of animals appear within the various ‘spokes’ of the wheel and then, in some cases, go extinct. Humans enter only in the outermost layer, at the very top of the diagram, shown as the crowning achievement of all Creation.
3. The frontispiece of William King Gregory’s two-volume Evolution Emerging. Gregory, 1951, Evolution Emerging: A Survey of Changing Patterns from Primeval Life to Man, vol. 2, p. 757; fig. 20.33; courtesy of Mary DeJong, Mai Qaraman, and the American Museum of Natural History.
(via Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution | Brain Pickings)
(via ikenbot)
