During the same week when House Republicans passed a bill forbidding scientists from advising the EPA on its own research, NASA climate scientists (coincidentally but maybe inconveniently) released a video documenting A Year in the Life of Earth’s CO2. According to NASA, “The visualization is a product of a simulation called ‘Nature Run,’ ” which “ingests real data on atmospheric conditions and the emission of greenhouse gases and both natural and man-made particulates. The model is then left to run on its own and simulate the natural behavior of the Earth’s atmosphere.” The video above visualizes how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traveled around the globe from January 2006 through December 2006. Hopefully the take-away isn’t look at all the pretty colors. The video is in the public domain and can be downloaded here.
I once spent a summer as a security guard at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. A wonderful place to visit, but my workday experience proved dreadfully dull. By far the highlight was being pulled off whatever exhibit I happened to be guarding to assist in collections, a cavernous backstage area where untold treasures were shelved without ceremony. The head conservator confided that many of these items would never be singled out for display. The thrift store egalitarianism that reigned here was far more appealing than the eye-catching, educational signage in the public area. From the oblivion of deep storage springs the potential for discovery.
You can make new discoveries in Collections just like you can out in the field. You can walk around the corner and see something that no one’s quite observed that way before, describe a new species or a new feature that’s important to science.
The institution can choose from among more than 33,430,000 goodies, from ancient objects they’ve been carefully tending for more than two centuries to the samples of frozen tissue and DNA comprising the barely 13-year-old Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection for Molecular and Microbial Research.
Future episodes will call upon in-house ichthyologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, astrophysicists, and herpetologists to discuss such topics as specimen preparation, taxonomy, and curation. Stay abreast (and — bonus!- celebrate Nero’s birthday with turtles) by subscribing to the museum’s youtube channel.
Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She goes into more detail about her short-lived stint as a museum security guard in her third book, Job Hopper. Follow her @AyunHalliday
When it comes to matters of broad scientific consensus, I’m generally inclined to offer provisional assent. Like everyone else, I have to rely on the expertise of others in matters outside my ken, and in many cases, this rational appeal to authority is the best one can do without acquiring the relevant qualifications and years of experience in highly specialized scientific fields. In the case of evolution, I happen to find the evidence and explanations nearly all biologists proffer much more persuasive than the claims—and accusations—of their mostly unscientific critics. But as we know from recent survey data, a very large percentage of Americans reject the theory of evolution, at least when it comes to humans, though it’s likely a great many of them—like myself—do not know very much about it.
But as a layperson with an admittedly rudimentary science education, I’m always grateful for clear, simple explanations of complex ideas. This is precisely what we get in the video series Stated Clearly, which harnesses the power of web animation as an instructional tool to define what the theory of evolution is, and why it explains the observable facts better than anything else. Stated Clearly’s tagline is “science is for everyone,” and indeed, their mission “is simple”: “to promote the art of critical thinking by exposing people from all walks of life, to the simple beauty of science.” The video at the top gives us a broad overview of the theory of evolution. The animation just above presents the evidence for evolution, or some of it anyway, in clear, compelling terms, drawing from at least two of the many independent lines of evidence. And below, we have a Stated Clearly take on natural selection, an absolutely key concept of evolutionary biology, and one regularly misunderstood.
After watching these three shorts, you might agree that what is “often considered a complex and controversial topic” is “actually a very simple concept to understand.” In layman’s terms, at least. In fact, artist, narrator, and creator of the series, Jon Perry, admits that he himself has no formal scientific training. “He believed,” his bio states, “that if he could create just one good animation on his own, scientists and educators would realize the potential of this project and help him create more.” And indeed they have. Stated Clearly has a distinguished panel of science advisers and partners that include the Center for Chemical Evolution, Emory University, Georgia Tech, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. Learn much more about Stated Clearly’s goals and affiliations, or lack thereof, at their website. And below, see the fourth video of the series, “Does the Theory of Evolution Really Matter?,” which addresses the practical, real world implications of evolutionary theory, and scientific literacy.
A couple of years back, Marco Tempest, a technoillusionist from Switzerland, retold the life story of inventor Nikola Tesla using the principles of Tanagra theater, a form of theater popular in Europe nearly a century ago. A good description of this forgotten form of theatre is surprisingly hard to come by. Perhaps the best I encountered comes from this academic web site:
Tanagra Theatres existed in many European cities in the years 1910–1920. The name comes from the figures excavated at Tanagra in the 1890s whose name became synonymous with perfect living miniatures, particularly female. The sideshow illusion consisted of a miniature stage where living actors appeared as real but tiny figures, through an arrangement of plain and concave mirrors. Its development as a sideshow attraction came about as a by-product of research into optical instruments which could better sustain the perception of depth. The use of concave mirrors has a long history in magic but for the Tanagra the stronger light of electricity was essential.
In his presentation, Tempest takes the concepts of Tanagra to a whole new level, combining projection mapping and intricate pop-up art. As you watch the show, you might find yourself intrigued as much by the method as by the story itself. If that’s the case, you will want to watch the “behind-the-scenes” video below. Tempest also gave his presentation at TED. You can watch it here.
In nature, everything is connected — connected in ways you might not expect. The short video above is narrated by George Monbiot, an English writer and environmentalist, who now considers himself a “rewilding campaigner.” The concept of rewilding and how it can save ecosystems in general, and how wolves changed Yellowstone National Park in particular, is something Monbiot explains in greater detail in his 2013 TED Talk below, and in his new book — Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding.
A decade before tens of thousands turned on, tuned in, and dropped out at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, psychiatrist Sidney Cohen was investigating the effects of LSD on human consciousness. If his voluntary subjects at LA’s Veteran’s Administration Hospital found themselves suddenly able to “see the music” a la Lizard Queen Lisa Simpson, they did so in a very respectable-seeming, mid-1950s setting.
Witness this session with the polite young wife of a hospital employee, above. She’s a bit nervous, but not because of any media-fueled preconceptions regarding the trip she’s about to take. It was 1956, and another of Dr. Cohen’s guinea pigs, publisher Henry Luce, had yet to regale the public with some of acid’s more colorful properties via multiple articlesin both Time and Life magazines.
As such, our unidentified participant is as pure as the glass of water she’s served at the one minute mark. Purer, actually, given that the drink has been dosed with 1/10th of a milligram Lysergic acid diethylamide.
Three hours further along, she’s tripping her brains out, still seated demurely in the same chair in which her intake interview was conducted. Had it been filmed 20 years later, her revelations would seem trite, but the context renders them endearing. If she’s bummed out about anything, it’s that the nice doctor questioning her about her mind blowing journey isn’t able to see the molecules too.
I’d love to know what became of her.
Cohen continued observing LSD, with subjects as celebrated as writer Aldous Huxley, philosopher Gerald Heard and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. He published his findings inThe Beyond Within: the LSD Story. His ultimate takeaway was that ”beatnik microculture” destroyed LSD’s chances for achieving its potential as a psychotherapy tool.
This may be why we never hear him urging his subject to check out the drapes, which is surely what several young men of my acquaintance would have resorted to, back in the day.
David Lynch-style austerity of the setting aside, perhaps such coaching was unnecessary. Whatever this woman’s brain had her seeing, it made her want to “talk in technicolor.”
May I suggest that we’re just as delusional if we assume that someone who could be described as a 1950s “housewife” must have inhabited a world we can only perceive in black-and-white?
Scientists who study and write about intestinal gases—just like the rest of us, I guess—find it hard to resist the occasional fart joke. And when they’re John Jundberg and Eddie Weitzberg, two professors at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, they can’t resist couching their occasional fart joke in a Bob Dylan lyric, part of a now seventeen-year tradition among five Swedish scientists who’ve been slipping Dylan lyrics into their publications, wagering on who can fit the most in before retirement.
It all began with Jundberg and Weitzberg’s “Nitric oxide and inflammation: the answer is blowing in the wind,” published in the journal Nature Medicine in 1997. (See Dylan play the paper’s inspiration above in 1963.) Next came articles like “Blood on the tracks: a simple twist of fate” by Konstantinos Meletis and Jonas Frisen and “Tangled up in blue: Molecular cardiology in the postmolecular era” by Kenneth Chien.
The five aren’t the only scientists who try to spice up dry research publications with wordplay. “If you read other scientific articles,” ways Weitzberg, “you’ll find people trying to be clever in different ways.” But they don’t do so at the expense of the science, or their careers: “We’re not talking about scientific papers—we could have got in trouble for that-but rather articles we have written about research by others, book introductions, editorials and things like that.”
The writer with the most Dylan references gets lunch in a restaurant in Solna, a town north of Stockholm. But thanks to interest from outlets like the Washington Post, he may also get a few extra minutes of fame. Weitzberg’s response? “I would much rather become famous for my scientific work than for my Bob Dylan quotes, but yes, I am enjoying this!”
It’s nothing to be ashamed of—anything above zero constitutes a passing score. The founder of the Medical Society of London, Lettsom was a proponent of true temperance, not total abstinence. According to his rubric, a “small beer” has all the virtues of milk and water.
Dip below a zero, though, and you’re in for a bumpy night.
Punch is apparently the gateway to such demon influences as flip, shrub, whiskey and rum. Gosh. You may as well just skip the punch and go straight for the hard stuff, if, as in Lettsom’s view, they all end in the same vices and diseases.
Puking and Tremors of the Hands in the Morning?
Yes, on occasion.
Peevishness, Idleness, and Obscenity?
Yep, that too.
Murder, Madness, and Death?
Mercifully, no. At least not yet.
While not entirely free of stigma, alcoholism is now something many view through the lens of AA, a problem best remedied through a system of personal accountability shored up by a network of nonjudgmental, sympathetic support.
Back in Lettsom’s day, when an alcoholic hit rock bottom, it was assumed he or she would stay there, a task made easier when the wages of this particular sin included the poor house, a one way ticket to the Botany Bay penal colony, and the gallows.
Such looming consequences are easily laughed off when you’ve had a snoot, which may be why Lettsom also published the illustrated version of his thermometer below. A picture is worth a thousand words, particularly when depicting the pre-Dickensian misery that awaits the drunkard and his family.
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