An Artistic Portrait of Stephen Fry Made From His Own Bacteria

Stephen Fry is tak­ing part in a curi­ous sci­ence exper­i­ment. It involves cre­at­ing a por­trait of the writer/comedian/science enthu­si­ast, using noth­ing but his own bac­te­ria and cells. Accord­ing to the web site of The Big Bang UK Young Sci­en­tists & Engi­neers Fair, the “bac­te­ri­ographs” — as the por­traits are called — are “made from the sub­jects’ own cells – and have been grown by Zachary Copfer, an Amer­i­can micro­bi­ol­o­gist and pho­tog­ra­ph­er.” “To make the Pop Art style images, Zachary clev­er­ly expos­es areas of a petri dish to radi­a­tion in order to stim­u­late the bacteria’s growth. This cre­ates a pho­to­graph grown entire­ly from the bac­te­ria itself.” Find more of Copfer­’s work below, and oth­er sci­en­tif­ic work fea­tur­ing Stephen Fry fur­ther down the page.

Bacteriographs

Relat­ed Con­tent

Stephen Fry Hosts “The Sci­ence of Opera,” a Dis­cus­sion of How Music Moves Us Phys­i­cal­ly to Tears

Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Com­put­ing in a Short Ani­mat­ed Video

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

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“Exceptional, Spooky and Beautiful” Moments With Birds: Dennis Hlynsky’s Creepy Nature Videos

If, by some stretch of the imag­i­na­tion, the end timers have it right, I hope artist Den­nis Hlyn­sky will con­sid­er set­ting up his tri­pod as demons spew forth from the earth­’s crust.

His small brains en masse project has me con­vinced that he is the per­fect per­son to cap­ture such an event. Have a look at how he doc­u­ments the com­ings and goings of birds.

I’ve nev­er expe­ri­enced a star­ling mur­mu­ra­tion myself, out­side of the famous, shot-on-the-fly footage (right above) of Sophie Wind­sor Clive and Lib­er­ty Smith, indie film­mak­ers who chanced to find them­selves in the right canoe at the right time, ornitho­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing. I admire these young wom­en’s sang-froid. I would’ve been cow­er­ing and slash­ing at the air with my pad­dles. That fun­nel cloud of black wings is unnerv­ing even from the safe remove of my liv­ing room, but a groovy sound­track by Nomad Soul Col­lec­tive encour­ages even the most bird-pho­bic amongst us (me) to see it as some­thing gor­geous and awe-inspir­ing, too.

Hlyn­sky does­n’t attempt to lead the wit­ness with reas­sur­ing sound cues. Instead, he amps up the creepy via “extrud­ed time,” lay­er­ing sequences of frames atop one anoth­er until the dark­est pix­els become trac­ers empha­siz­ing flight paths. The com­bi­na­tion of every­day sound and visu­al por­tent makes it dread­ful­ly easy to imag­ine one’s truck break­ing down at an inter­sec­tion right around the 7 minute mark.

Per­haps I’ve seen too many zom­bie movies.

Or have I?

Hlyn­sky is obvi­ous­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by nature, but he also states that “to some degree these videos are stud­ies of mob behav­ior. Are these deci­sions instinc­tu­al or small thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tions? Does one leader guide the group or is there a com­mon brain? Is a virus a sin­gle crea­ture or a dif­fused body that we inhab­it?”

Put anoth­er way, per­haps there’s a rea­son it’s called a mur­der of crows, as opposed to a brunch, hug or sweat­shirt of crows. Hlyn­sky, who’s the type of guy to seek their com­pa­ny out, describes his time spent film­ing them to be among the most “excep­tion­al, spooky and beau­ti­ful” moments of his life.

As for these New Jer­sey seag­ulls, “throw a french fry in the air and with­in 30 sec­onds the entire screech of birds will come.” Yikes. Here, extrud­ed time con­spires with the ambi­ent sounds of a board­walk amuse­ment park, in a tour-de-force of avian-inspired psy­chic unrest.

Pag­ing Tip­pi  Hedren… I’m out of here!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Fal­con and the Mur­mu­ra­tion: Nature’s Aer­i­al Bat­tle Above Rome

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Para­Hawk­ing in Nepal: What It’s Real­ly Like to Fly with Birds

Ayun Hal­l­i­day wish­es she had a cat instead of a mean, orange-striped owl. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Download 100,000+ Images From The History of Medicine, All Free Courtesy of The Wellcome Library

L0043496 Ambroise Pare: prosthetics, mechanical hand

The Well­come Library, in Lon­don, spe­cial­izes in the his­to­ry of med­i­cine. While the insti­tu­tion has long offered a good dig­i­tal col­lec­tion for brows­ing, the library announced yes­ter­day that they are mak­ing more than 100,000 his­tor­i­cal images free to down­load under a Cre­ative Com­mons CC-BY license. (Users can dis­trib­ute, edit, or remix at will; the license even allows for com­mer­cial use, with attri­bu­tion.)

The Wellcome’s hold­ings rep­re­sent the institution’s long-term inter­est in col­lect­ing art relat­ed to med­i­cine, the body, pub­lic health, and med­ical sci­ence. The drop-down menu labeled “Tech­nique” in the stan­dard search box returns a stag­ger­ing array of types of visu­al cul­ture, from aquatint to carv­ing to fres­co to X‑ray. The library reports that the ear­li­est image avail­able is from 400 AD: a frag­ment of papyrus from an illus­trat­ed herbal man­u­script, fea­tur­ing a fad­ed col­or draw­ing of a plant.

L0031627 Mastectomy, attributed to a Dutch artist, 17th century

Some images in the col­lec­tion are, per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, squirm-induc­ing (an 1851 Japan­ese wood­cut show­ing an ampu­ta­tion of the low­er leg; a Dutch etch­ing depict­ing a 17th-c mas­tec­to­my; a Ger­man illus­tra­tion show­ing 17th-cen­tu­ry monks per­form­ing eye surgery). But there is plen­ty of beau­ty here, as well. I loved an a 19th-c wood­cut of a sumo match, and a Tibetan illus­trat­ed man­u­script used in the pro­duc­tion of med­i­cines.

L0038345 Tibetan plant manuscript Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images <span 
                data-original-string=&apos;UlgPeu0WjCCY4K40Ur5sSw==0bc2FM6zRt/ZFHHrTHf9UcRf7ikUXJblsSP3VxrIXlrgRc=&apos;
                class=&apos;apbct-email-encoder&apos;
                title=&apos;This contact has been encoded by Anti-Spam by CleanTalk. Click to decode. To finish the decoding make sure that JavaScript is enabled in your browser.&apos; srcset=im****@*********ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Illus­tra­tions of Tibetan mate­ria med­ica, plant and ani­mal, used in the pro­duc­tion of med­i­cine. Title: ‘A Selec­tion of Sub­stances used for the Pro­duc­tion of Med­i­cine based on the Teach­ing of the four (med­ical) Tantras’ This anony­mous man­u­script is writ­ten in the ‘Trung­pa’ (‘khrungs dpe) genre of Tibetan med­ical lit­er­a­ture. Enti­tled, ‘Sman bla’i dgongs rgyan rgud bzhi’i nang gi ‘khrungs dpe re zhig’, it deals with var­i­ous mate­r­i­al med­ica, plant and ani­mal, used in the pro­duc­tion of med­i­cine. The book com­pris­es unbound sheets of thick (per­haps Russ­ian?) paper held togeth­er by two boards and wrapped in a piece of cloth. The med­ical illus­tra­tions are fin­ished in colour. The man­u­script is very rare and obvi­ous­ly very expen­sive. Its own­er made a sig­nif­i­cant effort to obtain illus­tra­tions for every med­i­cine men­tioned, includ­ing plants, stones and ani­mals. There are sev­er­al sug­ges­tions about the ori­gin of the man­u­script. It might well be a copy from Sangye Gyat­so’s ‘tankas’, pos­si­bly writ­ten by a painter or doc­tor who trav­elled from Mon­go­lia to Lhasa. It could have been tran­scribed in Tibet and sub­se­quent­ly sold to Mon­go­lia. There is a sim­i­lar­i­ty between the images of mate­r­i­al med­ica in this man­u­script and those found in the 19th cen­tu­ry Tibetan xylo­graphs of med­ical works, like the ‘Mdzes mtshar mig rgyan’, which cir­cu­lat­ed in the ter­ri­to­ry of Mon­go­lia in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. 18th cen­tu­ry Sman bla’i dgongs rgyan rgud bzhi’i nang gi ‘khrungs dpe re zhig ‘A Selec­tion of Sub­stances used for the Pro­duc­tion of Med­i­cine based on the Teach­ing of the four (med­ical) Tantras Pub­lished: — Copy­right­ed work avail­able under Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/” />

Browsers inter­est­ed in dip­ping a toe into the stream of images may try out the gal­leries list­ed on the Images home­page. The “Olympic Sports” gallery offers an 1829 engrav­ing of the famous con­joined twins Chang and Eng hold­ing bad­minton rack­ets, and an 1870 illus­tra­tion of rec­om­mend­ed ring exer­cis­es for lady gym­nasts. The “Witch­craft” col­lec­tion (under the “Favourites” tab) con­tains many illus­tra­tions from his­tor­i­cal books cov­er­ing witch­craft in Europe and the Amer­i­can colonies, along with a more sur­pris­ing 19th-cen­tu­ry Malayan black-mag­ic charm.

Rights-man­aged images are marked as such in the thumb­nail results that appear after a search. Although the archive requires you to enter a CAPTCHA to access the free images, you can select sev­er­al thumb­nails on the search-results page in order to bulk-down­load files for many images at the same time. The sam­ple files I request­ed arrived on my desk­top at 300 dpi.

The image above is an illus­tra­tion of a mechan­i­cal hand from 1564.

h/t @kirstinbutler

Rebec­ca Onion is a writer and aca­d­e­m­ic liv­ing in Philadel­phia. She runs Slate.com’s his­to­ry blog, The Vault. Fol­low her on Twit­ter: @rebeccaonion

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

The Get­ty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Pub­lic Domain (and There’s More to Come)

The Nation­al Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Art­work Freely Avail­able Online

Watch Morgan Spurlock’s Documentary on the 15-Year-Old Who Invented a New Way to Detect Early Stage Pancreatic Cancer

If you believe, as Whit­ney Hous­ton once did, that chil­dren are our future, you’ll be grat­i­fied by the work of Jack Andra­ka, age 15.

Describ­ing him as a kid with a pas­sion for sci­ence is an under­state­ment on par with call­ing Mr. Peabody a car­toon dog.

Not that I’ve got a crys­tal ball or any­thing, but let’s just say if you or your loved one come down with pan­cre­at­ic can­cer a decade from now, you’ll be very glad this young man—the 2012 grand prize win­ner of the Intel Inter­na­tion­al Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing Fair, as well as the Smith­son­ian Amer­i­can Inge­nu­ity Award—did­n’t squan­der his fresh­man year’s extracur­ric­u­lar hours on sports and glee club.

Instead, he became the “can­cer paper boy.” His men­tor, Johns Hop­kins pathol­o­gist and researcher, Anir­ban Maitra floats com­par­isons to Edi­son. As Mor­gan Spur­lock points out in his show doc­u­men­tary on Andra­ka — You Don’t Know Jack (above) — many of Ein­stein’s dis­cov­er­ies were made before he stuck his tongue out beneath that white mane.

Spurred on in part by the death of a fam­i­ly friend, Jack, then 14, devel­oped an inex­pen­sive pro­ce­dure that can diag­nose the pres­ence of the noto­ri­ous­ly stealthy can­cer of the pan­creas while treat­ment is still an option. Through tri­al and error, he devel­oped an absorbent fil­ter paper dip­stick that helps mea­sure the elec­tri­cal sig­nal of a nan­otube net­work laced with anti­bod­ies spe­cif­ic to the pro­tein mesothe­lin, after a sixth of a drop of blood has been intro­duced.

As a the­ater major, I fear I may not be sum­ma­riz­ing the sci­ence with suf­fi­cient accu­ra­cy. The Smith­son­ian pub­lished an arti­cle describ­ing Jack­’s process in detail.  While I don’t know much about pan­cre­at­ic func­tion, can­cer­ous or oth­er­wise, I do know enough to have deep respect for Jack­’s sup­port­ive par­ents, and Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty, the only insti­tu­tion (of 200 con­tact­ed) to respond in the affir­ma­tive when the then-14-year ‑old got in touch, seek­ing lab space. (Host­ing the Cen­ter for Tal­ent­ed Youth may have primed them for such queries.) If this sci­ence thing does­n’t work out, Jack could total­ly make a go of it as a pub­li­cist. He’s got the tenac­i­ty.

Again, it’ll take anoth­er ten years or so before the fruits of Jack­’s labors can be part of main­stream med­ical prac­tice, but it does give one hope for the future. Some paper boy!

This lit­tle Spur­lock film will be added to the Doc­u­men­tary sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Micro­scop­ic Bat­tle­field: Watch as a Killer T Cell Attacks a Can­cer Cell

Can­cer Patients’ Extreme Makeovers Let Them To For­get Their Ill­ness ‘If Only For A Sec­ond’

Come­di­an Tig Notaro’s “Tru­ly Great” Can­cer Stand-up Set Now Avail­able on Louis C.K.’s Web­site

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author and  Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky, an award-win­ning, hand­writ­ten zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Trace Darwin’s Footsteps with Google’s New Virtual Tour of the Galapagos Islands

As famous­ly stud­ied as they are, the 18 Gala­pa­gos Islands haven’t been well mapped. And research in the Gala­pa­gos, sit­u­at­ed more than 500 miles west of Ecuador, is expen­sive and dif­fi­cult. Maybe that’s part of the islands’ allure—that and the stun­ning bio­di­ver­si­ty.

In part­ner­ship with the Charles Dar­win Foun­da­tion and Gala­pa­gos Nation­al Park, Google sent a team armed with Street View Trekker cam­eras to cre­ate an entire­ly new 360 degree Street View expe­ri­ence that makes three major islands, a frag­ile tor­toise breed­ing area and coastal areas, avail­able to vis­i­tors locat­ed any­where with an Inter­net con­nec­tion.

Dar­win made his first expe­di­tion to the islands 178 years ago. This might have been his first view of San Cristo­bal Island.

GalapagosApproach

After explor­ing San Cristobal’s rocky coast, Google trekkers made their way to Gala­pa­guera, a giant tor­toise breed­ing cen­ter, where they saw new­ly hatched babies and adults munch­ing on leaves and stalks.

Off the coast of Flo­re­ana Island, trekkers went under­wa­ter and caught images of seals play­ing in the water. They also shot images inside the Charles Dar­win Research Station’s ver­te­brate, inver­te­brate and plant col­lec­tions.

Google does a good job of doc­u­ment­ing its own process. Trekkers trav­eled to Gala­pa­gos in May and spent 10 days hik­ing, boat­ing, and div­ing. It’s fun to watch them climb and scoot around the islands loaded with a geo­des­ic cam­era back­pack.

Sci­en­tists get real­ly excit­ed when they find new tools to do their work. And why shouldn’t they? These islands are amaz­ing and are home to so many unique species, like the Marine Igua­na. We land­lub­bers may not get there any­time soon, but this is the next best thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read the Orig­i­nal Let­ters Where Charles Dar­win Worked Out His The­o­ry of Evo­lu­tion

The Genius of Charles Dar­win Revealed in Three-Part Series by Richard Dawkins

Dar­win: A 1993 Film by Peter Green­away

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Fol­low her on Twit­ter.

Real Women Talk About Their Careers in Science

A year ago the Euro­pean Union launched a cam­paign to attract more young women into the sci­en­tif­ic pro­fes­sions. In Europe, women lag behind men in sci­ence and engi­neer­ing, mak­ing up only a third of sci­ence researchers. But the video the EU made was laugh­able.

You may recall. It was called, Sci­ence: It’s a Girl Thing! and fea­tured three young fash­ion­istas parad­ing around in high heels while a male sci­en­tist peers quizzi­cal­ly at them over his micro­scope.

Along comes sci­ence jour­nal­ist Ker­stin Hop­pen­haus to set the record straight. Hoppenhaus’s new series for the Ger­man sci­ence site SciLogs is called Sig­nif­i­cant Details: Con­ver­sa­tions with Women in Sci­ence. The inter­views are fresh, infor­ma­tive, and acces­si­ble.

It’s inspir­ing to see such a range of women explain their research and walk us through their process for doing it.

A recent inter­view fea­tured Dr. Kris­ten Pan­fil­io (above), an Amer­i­can biol­o­gist on fac­ul­ty at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cologne. Panfilio’s work focus­es on insect extraem­bry­on­ic devel­op­ment, which means she stud­ies how insect tis­sues devel­op into the bug’s ulti­mate shape by com­par­ing the process in two insects: the milk­weed bug and the red flour bee­tle.

Each con­ver­sa­tion begins with a “sig­nif­i­cant detail” of the woman’s work. With the wry humor and pre­ci­sion of a true sci­en­tist, Pan­fil­io demon­strates how she pre­pares her favorite tool, a glass stick, by soft­en­ing the end with a cig­a­rette lighter.

Panfilio’s spe­cif­ic field is evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­men­tal genet­ics. Along with her lab assis­tants she stud­ies how embry­on­ic cells know what role they should play in form­ing a spe­cif­ic organ­ism shape. How does a bone cell know it’s a bone cell?

The inter­view is about as much like Sci­ence: It’s a Girl Thing! as Meryl Streep is like Lind­say Lohan. This is a real per­son talk­ing about how she has built her career (she want­ed to be an artist when she was a teenag­er and stud­ied ancient Chi­nese his­to­ry at a small lib­er­al arts col­lege) and explain­ing her high­ly spe­cial­ized work.

She also touch­es on one of the most won­der­ful things about sci­en­tif­ic research: Some of the most excit­ing moments are when the results don’t align at all with expec­ta­tions.

Best of all, it’s just one of the won­der­ful inter­views in Hoppenhaus’s series.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MAKERS Tells the Sto­ry of 50 Years of Progress for Women in the U.S.

No Women Need Apply: A Dis­heart­en­ing 1938 Rejec­tion Let­ter from Dis­ney Ani­ma­tion

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Fol­low her on Twit­ter @mskaterix and vis­it her web­site to learn more.

 

The Greatness of Charles Darwin Explained with Rap Music

Read Open Cul­ture long enough, and soon­er or lat­er you’ll encounter “geek rap­per” Baba Brinkman, the Cana­di­an MC whose rhyming sub­jects of choice include evo­lu­tion, The Can­ter­bury Tales, and British ver­sus Cana­di­an Eng­lish. Though the hard-read­ing Brinkman has, it seems, staked out the musi­cal genre of “lit hop” for him­self, he’s gained just as much of his dis­tinc­tive brand of rig­or­ous­ly fac­tu­al hip-hop noto­ri­ety by rap­ping for the oth­er of what C.P. Snow defined as the “two cul­tures.” His par­al­lel sci­ence rap­ping career began on a com­mis­sion from Uni­ver­si­ty of War­wick micro­bi­ol­o­gist and Rough Guide to Evo­lu­tion author Mark Pallen. Out of all this came “the first peer-reviewed rap” show, The Rap Guide to Evo­lu­tion, whose devel­op­ment we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured.

Above, you’ll find the music video for “Artif­i­cal Selec­tion,” one song from The Rap Guide to Evo­lu­tion. “Arti­fi­cial selec­tion, it starts with a ques­tion,” Brinkman raps. “How did peo­ple ever get cows, chick­ens and pigs / And oth­er ani­mals and plants to act so domes­tic? / We took them from the wild and we bred them, brethren.” He explores the top­ic fur­ther, touch­ing on Charles Dar­win’s The Ori­gin of Species, the inad­ver­tent usage of evo­lu­tion by ear­ly farm­ers and live­stock breed­ers, domes­tic aphids kept by ant colonies, and even the nat­ur­al selec­tion inher­ent in the MC’s devel­op­ment of his per­for­mance tech­niques. On Brinkman’s offi­cial site, the video comes with tags like “Hered­i­ty,” “Lamark­ism,” and “Uni­ty of Com­mon Descent.” How many rap videos could cred­i­bly do the same?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Baba Brinkman: The Rap Guide to Evo­lu­tion

The Can­ter­bury Tales Remixed: Baba Brinkman’s New Album Uses Hip Hop to Bring Chaucer Into the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Yo

What’s Your Eng­lish? British v. Cana­di­an Rap Bat­tle

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­lesA Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Watch Isabella Rossellini Embody the Animal Kingdom’s Most Shocking Maternal Instincts in Mammas

Moth­er’s Day can elic­it com­pli­cat­ed emo­tions in the human ani­mal. Not so Moth­er Ham­ster. While you were out to brunch, she was mat­ter-of-fact­ly devour­ing the run­ti­est of her lit­ter. And not because he failed to present her with a bou­quet and flow­ery card. “It’s a good morsel to recoup some of the vit­a­mins and pro­tein that are lost dur­ing child­birth,” she explains with a shrug.

This heart­warm­ing vignette is but one of the rev­e­la­tions in Mam­mas, the lat­est web series from the inquis­i­tive and extreme­ly game Isabel­la Rosselli­ni. Hav­ing embod­ied a vari­ety of insects, arach­nids, and marine life in the sci­ence-based Green Porno and its fol­low-up Seduce Me, the moth­er of two is cur­rent­ly suit­ing up to play some of the Ani­mal King­dom’s most noto­ri­ous moth­ers, from the oppor­tunis­tic Cuck­oo to the self-sac­ri­fic­ing Aus­tralian sub­so­cial crab spi­der (Diaea ergan­dros).

The com­i­cal­ly inven­tive cos­tumes are an added bonus, par­tic­u­lar­ly for any human moth­er (or father) with an aver­sion to dress­ing their ani­mal-lov­ing off­spring in store bought dis­guis­es, come Hal­loween. Catch the com­plete series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wild King­dom: Brought to You by Mutu­al of Oma­ha (and YouTube)

Film­ing a Sprint­ing Chee­tah at 1,200 Frames Per Sec­ond

Rainn Wil­son Talks About Life’s Big Ques­tions in His Web Series Meta­phys­i­cal Milk­shake

Ayun Hal­l­i­day thinks Isabel­la Rosselli­ni is the bee’s knees, espe­cial­ly when her glass legs are filled with beer. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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