Blogger’s note: I am going to be out of blog contact for the next several weeks as I get hitched (yay!), honeymoon (double yay!), and move (goodbye Colorado! Very sad to leave). In the meantime, I will be bringing you some classic Artful Amoeba. This post originally appeared on January 13, 2010. Since I wrote [...]

In the Nature podcast interview that went along with my Kawasaki Disease story at Nature (look for the interview halfway down the page at the story here), I talked about the tantalizing work of Dr. Anne Rowley at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. She has studied the tissues of Kawasaki Disease patients and believes [...]

Back in 1994, Richard Preston scared the bejeesus out of everyone with his eye-opening non-fiction thriller “The Hot Zone”. It was a gripping read, and teenage me couldn’t put it down. In it, Preston documented the depredations of filoviruses — a family of wildly contagious filamentous RNA viruses that cause horrible, gory, swift deaths by [...]

Purple packages of pain: false colored (no, they’re not purple in real life) transmission electron micrograph of human norovirus. CDC/Charles D. Humphrey. CDC Public Health Image Library ID 10708, click for link. If there is a central circle of hell, I now know what’s there: endless glasses of water spiked with norovirus that you must [...]

Artist Luke Jerram is a UK-based sculptor whose glass sculptures of microscopic life make the invisible visible. I was instantly transfixed by his sculptures’ delicacy and intense beauty. For me, something is captured in these sculptures that is lost in the false-color scanning electron microscope images we typically see of viruses and other extremely small [...]

Oh, my. The more I look, the more I find. Get your sciart on, peeps! _____________ EXHIBITS: NORTHEAST REGION Pulse: Art and Medicine February 16 to April 13, 2013 The Mansion at Strathmore 10701 Rockville Pike North Bethesda, MD Imagine the place where art, science and the human body intersect: that’s the idea behind Pulse: [...]