As Gwenn Seemel points out in her richly illustrated book, Crime Against Nature, the non-human animal kingdom is chock-full of examples that challenge many of our deeply held beliefs about what is “natural” behavior in everything from sexual preference to lifestyle choices to gender roles and even gender identity. A third gender, male pregnancy and [...]

If I told you that a tennis ball could kill, would you roll your eyes or laugh in my face? What if I showed you this? Like a cork in a bottle, a fumbled tennis ball in an innocent game of fetch can lodge in a dog’s esophagus with the unfortunate consequence of asphyxiating your [...]

Science communication has seldom had a better champion than Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield who just returned to Earth last night. Astronauts tweeting and talking from space is not a new phenomena, and though interesting scientific experiments abound way up on the ISS, they weren’t what caught the public’s imagination this go round. It was [...]

Recently, artist Michele Banks (better known as @artologica) told me she was trying out Yupo and mylar with her watercolours. I was excited to ask her to share the results here on Symbiartic. Banks has been seen and interviewed here on Symbiartic before, and in addition to running one of the most popular science-art Etsy [...]

Science-artist creator and connoisseur Hayley Gillespie is chasing down a goal that until now I’ve only daydreamed about: she and the rest of her crew at Art.Science.Gallery are attempting to make a real, bricks & mortar science-art gallery come true!  And there’s less than 24 hours left to do it! * Some of the prizes are gorgeous, [...]

I felt inspired after reading Darren Naish’s recent post, Herring gull eats sea star, and other tales of larid gastronomy. He describes seeing gulls eating sea stars, sometimes in one piece and sometimes just an arm (or two, I suppose). Thinking about the regenerative powers of sea stars, I decided to draw one for you. [...]

Sometimes we just have to put up an image because it calms everything down. This beautiful Protoceratops digital speed painting by scientific illustrator and concept artist Ville Sinkkonen evokes quiet contemplation outdoors. A hazy day, and the promise of summer to come. [h/t to David Orr] – - See more of Sinkkonen’s evocative work: There [...]

Bricks, sticks, and hay are decidedly pedestrian building materials in comparison to a new building that just opened to the public last Thursday in Hamburg, Germany. Ambitious architects have built an apartment covered in a thin layer of living, breathing algae. The building, known as BIQ (for Bio Intelligent Quotient), meets the extremely stringent passive-house [...]

I really don’t enjoy playing Internet Police. After this happened and this needed to be said, I don’t want to write another story about image misappropriation. About another brazen misuse of some science illustration. Le sigh. Oh wait, first rule of writing something impactful: start positive. Ok. Ahem. Once more unto the breach! In a [...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time around robots lately (hey, there’s something I never thought I’d say). I got a chance to see and interact with several different kinds of robots recently at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering’s Robotics Open House. I saw robots that sort colored objects like the [...]