City Hall Park in New York City is often home to public art exhibits. The current installment is Sol LeWitt’s Structures. LeWitt is the American artist often credited with creating minimalism and conceptualism. He is known for his sculptures—which he described as “structures.” The installation shares a collection that spans his own transition as an [...]

Consider this image: Is it a work from a modern-day Book of Kells? A Chinese seal? The cover of The Neverending Story?  No. Would you have guessed it is from a U.S. government publication? Here it is in its original context (don’t miss the caption!). Here’s another, of a free-living marine nematode called Draconema (see [...]

Yesterday’s L.A. Times ran a charming piece about ant sex by biologist Marlene Zuk: What ant sex reminds us is that spring can be kind of scary, or at least sobering, particularly for non-humans. Millions of ants, millions of robin eggs, millions of flower seeds, most destined to die before they are even fully grown, [...]

Animals with backbones (vertebrates) make up only 4% of the species on our planet. Yet when you walk into a natural history museum, they’re all you see. The dinosaur skeletons stretching across a ballroom? Vertebrates. Dioramas starring posed buffalo, lions, or zebra? Vertebrates. The endless cases of delicate stuffed birds? You guessed it: vertebrates. “It’s [...]

Dillon Marsh’s photographs of sociable weaver nests, taken in the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, beautifully illustrate traditional nature–the realm of wild animals–overlapping with human civilization. The apparent bales of hay draped over the tops and sides of telephone poles are home to hundreds of songbirds, which construct and maintain their monstrous nests communally. While [...]

We’re in a new location now after a few days of steaming around looking for Ehux. Plankton hunting is a science, but I’ve learned that it’s also an art. The team uses really high tech satellite data to point them in the right direction. Satellites can measure chlorophyll content of the water, currents and the [...]

By now, our overwhelming tendency to look for what confirms our beliefs and ignore what contradicts our beliefs is well documented. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and its ubiquity is observed in both academia and in our everyday lives: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch MSNB; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, [...]

If you take a small sample of animal tissue and encourage it to grow in vitro, separate from the original animal’s body, it is possible to create an edible piece of meat. Culturing living tissue is a routine lab procedure and an important part of medical and biological research, but using the tools and techniques [...]

Last week, a very prominent artist in the paleontology community somewhat publicly blew a gasket. His tirade started a conversation that has been sorely in need of attention for some time now. At issue is a fundamental conflict of interests: between science and its tradition of cumulative knowledge, and the rights of the artists who [...]

Data visualization. Infographics. Ooh, better yet, make that interactive infographics. The recent buzz around the visual display of information makes it seem like everyone should be rushing to whip up some multi-colored cartogram, bubble chart or word cloud. Never before have we had both the tools and the vast amounts of raw data to play [...]

Cheese is an everyday artifact of microbial artistry. Discovered accidentally when someone stored milk in a stomach-canteen full of gut microbes, acids, and enzymes thousands of years ago, cheesemaking evolved as a way to use good bacteria to protect milk from the bad bacteria that can make us sick, before anyone knew that bacteria even [...]

When you type the word "trilobite" into Google’s Blog Search, my science-art blog The Flying Trilobite is currently the first to come up. But I stick wings on them. Trilobites are a huge group of extinct aquatic arthropods that died out about 250 million years ago. Don’t I have any sense of responsibility? At this [...]

At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying [...]

When the interplanetary missions Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in the late 1970s they each carried a metal plaque engraved with a set of pictorial messages from humanity. Eventually these extraordinary probes will traverse interstellar space, carrying these hopeful symbols towards anyone, or anything, that might one day find them. A few years later also [...]

Isaac Newton, the giant of classical physics and co-inventor of calculus, was a pill. His anti-social and arrogant ways are well documented, providing a small comfort to people today who might feel daunted by the towering achievements of this 17th-century genius. Yet, there is no denying his foundational importance to science, known at the time [...]

Math can be a beautiful, immersive, full-body experience, according to the creators of the newly opened Museum of Math, or MoMath, in New York City. A sculpture that lights up and plays music, a touch-screen floor that turns into a maze and a square-wheeled tricycle that one can ride around a bumpy track are just [...]

Wormholes aren’t just for time travel or teleportation anymore. Some very real and ancient wormholes are now helping to trace the distribution of insect species and artwork. A biologist found himself in the unlikely world of centuries-old European woodblock print art. There, he discovered that many of the small imperfections in the prints could be [...]

Today’s Google doodle pays homage to the photography of Eadweard J. Muybridge, pioneering photographer and inventor of the zoopraxiscope. If he had somehow survived to witness the multimedia era, Muybridge would be marking his 182nd birthday. The running horse video, which replaces the Google logo today, comes from Muybridge’s most famous photographic experiment. Renowned for [...]

The word “sunflower” brings to mind a mane of vibrant yellow petals encircling a dark whorl of seeds. But not all sunflowers are alike. Some sunflowers have scraggly petals, for instance, or small centers. Many of the sunflowers Vincent Van Gogh depicted in his famous series of oil paintings look rather unusual, sporting wooly, chrysanthemum-like [...]

No matter what you think about the Catholic Church, the “Chimp Pope” image (at left) by figurative/narrative artist Nathaniel Gold probably holds your attention and gives you pause about the latest hullabaloo. You can see a color, glossy version of the chimp pope on page 34 of Gold’s book, The Chimpanzee Manifesto, (Jessian Press, 2009). [...]

New York, New York. A metropolis of gleaming skyscrapers, majestic brownstones and concrete as far as the eye can see. But on the northern border of Greenwich Village, a strange, little biological experiment is taking place. An artist is bringing new life to a handful of businesses. Not a remake of the bathroom. No, actually, [...]

There’s a reason that so many sci-fi thrillers are set in space. Well, there are probably many reasons. But it’s certainly true that the tools of space exploration often have a haunting, sterile, almost creepy quality. Vincent Fournier captures that quality in his photographs, taken at the research and operations facilities of space programs around [...]

The search for beauty has spurred great works of art and music, lengthy philosophical treatises and decades of dense cultural criticism. So, is beauty in the object? The eye of the beholder? Somewhere in between? The time has come "for neurobiology to tackle these fundamental questions," Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London, said [...]

The convergence of art and science gets a new treatment in an exhibition opening next week at the American Museum of Natural History. "Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies" features more than 20 sets of large-format and visually engaging images that showcase the wide range of research being conducted at the museum as well [...]

Megan Daalder‘s Project Eureka is a shape-shifting and multidimensional narrative about life, science, and technology after the end of the world. At her work-in-progress exhibition at the UCLA Art|Science gallery, which opened this week, she invites us to visit Eureka’s future, set in the year 2050. In this future “the ‘Naturals’ have won,” and society [...]

Art and science address the question of what makes us who we are in different, difficult, often contradictory ways. Since the phrase “nature and nurture” was first used in the late 19th century, trying to separate the contributions of inborn heredity and external environment to our unique individuality, there have been people who argue for [...]

I have a piece with Sissel Tolaas in the new issue of Current Opinion in Chemical Biology on aesthetics in science. The issue, edited by the artist and designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, includes reviews by scientists, philosophers, and artists discussing the role of aesthetic and senory judgements in the everyday practice of science, the theory [...]

Before there was sound in movies there was smell. In 1906, a Pennsylvania movie theater soaked a wad of cotton wool in rose oil and placed it in front of a fan. When a newsreel about the Rose Bowl played, they turned on the fan and the smell of roses wafted over the theater. Audience [...]

Smell is notoriously subjective and hard to define. Odors can be perceived differently by different people depending on genetics, culture, past experience, the environment, and whether they’ve had a really bad sinus infection or not. Even worse, the same person can perceive the same smell differently at different times, depending on how the smell is [...]

I’ve been walking around my city of Raleigh recently, thrilled with new signs telling me how long it will take me to walk hither or yon. I could see from the signs – simple design, plastic construction, strapped to utility poles – that they weren’t a civic undertaking. Amazing: guerilla direction signs. A culture in [...]

The November/December Scientific American Mind, which debuted online today, examines the origins of genius, a concept that inspires both awe and confusion. Some equate genius with IQ or creativity; others see it as extraordinary accomplishment. As this issue reveals, genius seems to arise from a mosaic of forces that coalesce into a perfect storm of [...]

In Tyson Schoeber’s class at Nootka Elementary School in Vancouver, 15 fourth through seventh graders struggle to read, write or do math at a level near that of their peers in other classes. Ten-year-olds have entered Schoeber’s program, called THRIVE, virtually unable to read independently (see “One Man’s Mission to Save Struggling Students”). Yet Schoeber [...]

VANCOUVER. You could call his classroom a rescue mission. Each September, Tyson Schoeber takes under his wing 15 fourth through seventh graders that normal classrooms have left behind, defeated and too often, deflated. Ten-year-olds arrive unable to decode more than a few words without help. One eight-year-old who loved geography had trouble finding any book [...]

A few years ago, James Gurney, a celebrated artist and author, stood before his easel to paint a deli in Poughkeepsie. Surveying the scene before him, he was immediately overwhelmed with literally millions of details. People strolled by. Insects fluttered overhead. Signs poked out from the store and up from the street. Every tree had [...]

Any evolutionary biologist will tell you that flight has evolved independently several times in the history of life on earth, but can they tell you how many times muscle leggings have evolved? We don’t generally talk fashion here at Symbiartic, but many consider high fashion to be art, so you’ll forgive me for a moment [...]

Lots of great science art exhibitions going on in the next few months. Get your sciart on, peeps! _____________ EXHIBITS: NORTHEAST REGION The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking September 21, 2012 to January 27, 2013 The Bard Graduate Center Gallery 18 West 86th Street New York, NY _____________ DINOTOPIA: [...]

Last month, we posted a wide variety of science-art here at Symbiartic. We thought it’d be nice to post an overview in case you missed or wanted to revisit any. Enjoy!

So I’m putting together this post on great evolution cartoons that focus on the water-to-land transition and I remember this Gary Larson cartoon from the Far Side that depicts three fish in the water staring longingly at their baseball lying on the shore, a few feet from the water’s edge. The caption reads, “Great moments [...]

Should an illustration of a dinosaur skeleton be considered as functional as a pair of jeans? Watching this TED Talk with Johanna Blakley recently discussing copyright and fashion, she points out that some creative industries have little or not copyright. The world of fashion. Automobile design. The tattoo design industry.  The reason, Blakley points out, [...]

One of the most fascinating aspects of art is that two artists can use the same exact materials and create vastly different works. Last week, I posted an interview with Heather Knight, an artist who creates abstract porcelain tiles inspired by nature’s patterns and textures. Today, I introduce Kate MacDowell, another artist working in unglazed [...]

Happy Valentine’s Day from Symbiartic!

Heather Knight is a North Carolina-based ceramic artist. Her work in porcelain extracts patterns from nature and presents them in their simplest repetitive forms. I don’t recall how I came across Heather’s work – perhaps it was a random find at Etsy. I can’t remember. But I do know that since then, the images of [...]

This is the second installment of a 2-part guest post by Jim Perkins, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s medical illustration program. His first post detailed why it’s a good idea to calibrate your computer monitor regularly. This next post walks us through the process and explains the mysterious settings known as gamma [...]

Hey, yo, happy 2012! This edition of the SciArt Buzz features bacterial rocket science among other fascinating shows of intelligence. Get out there and enjoy some science art! SCIART LECTURES/EVENTS **NEW** San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery (San Francisco, CA): Friday, Jan. 20, 2012, 6-8pm | Opening Reception for Vast and Undetectable | This exhibition explores [...]

I’m totally unable to produce any novel material for the blog right now, so – in desperation and frustation – I’m going to post some scanned illustrations. I’ve been meaning to use these for a while; they’re by Leonard Robert Brightwell (1889-1962) and come from the 1941 volume The Miracle of Life, edited by Harold [...]

Sometimes all you have to do to make me buy your book, is think of a good title. Survival of the Beautiful by David Rothenberg definitely did the trick. “No one ever mentions the beautiful”, I thought when I took the book from its shelf in a London book store. Not when it comes to [...]