Seed Media Group: Blog

Tuesday, April 06, 2010 • New • by Saira Jesani • #

Mad Men: The Science Category

As I was mindlessly searching Flickr the other day, I came across an entire collection of science and tech ads from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Bustbright, an after-hours studio based in Los Angeles, has uploaded over 1200 ads culled from the science magazines of yesteryear.

It’s worth checking out

Tuesday, February 23, 2010 • New • by Eva Wisten • #

USA Science & Engineering Festival launches blog on ScienceBlogs.com

The USA Science & Engineering Festival, America’s first national science festival, continues to sign up participating scientists. The festival, which consists of a two day expo in the nation’s capital, preludes with a two week long series of events spread out over the country - all with the purpose of fulfilling President’s Obama’s imperative to inspire young people to go into science. Among the most recent additions to the pre-expo programming, we find the following speakers:

Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, Brain Surgeon and Researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, will talk about how he went from being an impoverished illegal immigrant to becoming one of the nation’s top brain surgeons.

Mario Livio, Director of Public Outreach at The Space Telescope Institute, will lecture to students about black holes, dark energy and supernovas.

Bonnie Bassler, Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University will give students insight into the mysterious world of bacteria and how these microbes communicate with each other.

and

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, will take students on a journey through the cosmos to answer the question: Is there life on other planets?

ScienceBlogs.com recently joined USA Science & Engineering Festival as the Official Blogging Partner. We will have our bloggers on site, and ScienceBlogs.com is hosting the official festival blog with updates from the festival planning and greetings from the participating scientists.

Friday, January 15, 2010 • New • by Eva Wisten • #

ResearchBlogging Awards seeks to honor its best bloggers

Seed’s ResearchBlogging Awards honor the outstanding bloggers who discuss peer-reviewed research. With nearly 1,000 blogs registered at ResearchBlogging.org and 8,500 posts about peer-reviewed journal articles collected, it is time to recognize the best of the best.

Any blog that discusses peer-reviewed research is eligible for nomination, and the winners will be determined by votes from their peers in the Research Blogging community. All finalists will be highlighted on ResearchBlogging.org, and winners will receive cash prizes totaling $2000.

See guidelines and complete list of categories here.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 • New • by Eva Wisten • #

Science on the playground

Jane Clark Chermayeff & Associates (JCC&A), a New York-based concept- and exhibition design firm, recently launched PlayLab - an initiative to teach science on the playground.

The first PlayLab product is Play Cards, a stack of cards that talks about the science behind the things you experience on the playground: bumping into a friend while running, stepping in a puddle or dropping your ice cream. By explaining easy concepts and posing questions, the Play Cards encourage children to pay attention to the world around them. We were thrilled about the invitation to write an introductory essay.

Here’s what Adam, Seed’s founder, wrote.

It started with my 70-year old neighbor. I was five or six, and Dr. Kato and his wife lived next door to us, our backyards touched. There was something about him that naturally encouraged naïve curiosities. Everything was endlessly interesting. I wanted to know how everything worked: the sky, his beanstalks. Dr. Kato seemed to possess answers to all my questions and this, naturally, would just beget more questions.

For my first experiment I folded paper into airplanes and watched them fly (or not). My second experiment involved growing rotifers in petri dishes in my lab (aka our kitchen) and determining whether I could extend their lives. The fourth experiment I carried out required a microscope, some chicken hearts, and a glass homogenizer.

I graduated out of the kitchen and into a real lab eventually, and spent endless nights and weekends and holidays there. I got a better microscope. And my experiments soon meant that I could watch life happen, I could – in vivid fluorescents – see a magical microscopic world revealed. Dazzling patterns and shapes and colors. I could see what few people get to see.

It is an amazing thing to know something. And for a brief moment, to feel like you’ve reached some essential truth about life perhaps, or the universe. Dr. Kato once told me that science, at its best, lets you peer under this tablecloth and catch a glimpse of nature’s secrets. It’s a unique and surpassingly good feeling.

I realize today that Dr. Kato’s greatest influence on me was not the scientific knowledge that he so generously passed on; it was his view of the world. It was the way he played music, discussed history, talked about the news. For him, science was more than a subject of study, it’s a lens through which we can look at the world and understand its complexities. It’s a way to think and to live.

It begins in a backyard, a playground, anywhere ants march or a leaf wafts to the ground, anyplace can be the place to observe and feel the sheer beauty of the stuff that surrounds us. A child who gravitates to such investigations will have endless opportunities to play, see, learn, and grow passionate about the state of the world.

Saturday, September 12, 2009 • New • by Eva Wisten • #

How science is changing

This week, Adam Bly moderated the panel “Future Revolutions in Science” at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of New Champions in Dalian.

A paradigm shift in particle physics, breakthroughs in stem cell research, and our increasing understanding of complex systems are not only transforming science, it’s also changing how we now look at the world.
In the panel “Future Revolutions in Science”, Adam Bly lead Geoffrey West from Santa Fe Institute, Robbert Dijkgraaf from Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paul Fairchild from the 21st Century School, University of Oxford in the UK and Maximus Johnity Ongkili, Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation of Malaysia, in a discussion on the current development of science and it’s consequences for the future.

In a session called “The Case for Redesign”, Adam made the case that science must play a more fundamental role in a redesign of the world’s political, social and economic systems.

As always, the discussions and insights from Dalian will soon reach Seed’s readers in various forms.

Wednesday, September 09, 2009 • New • by Eva Wisten • #

See the Origin of Species evolve

Far from being an Eureka-moment, Darwin formulated his theory of evolution by the process of natural selection as he wrote.
New work from the Phyllotaxis Lab tracks changes in Charles Darwin’s versions of The Origin of Species, showing the shifts in Darwin’s thinking over time.

Ben Fry on this first version of his project:

“The second edition, for instance, adds a notable “by the Creator” to the closing paragraph, giving greater attribution to a higher power. In another example, the phrase “survival of the fittest” — usually considered central to the theory and often attributed to Darwin — instead came from British philosopher Herbert Spencer, and didn’t appear until the fifth edition of the text.”

Friday, August 21, 2009 • New • by Eva Wisten • #

Ben Fry interviewed by Creative Review

Seed Visualization’s Ben Fry talks about telling stories with design, how far we are from Minority Report-like interfaces, and the importance of being able to sketch, even if your tool happens to be code.

Read the whole feature here.
By Creative Review’s Mark Sinclair:

CREATIVE REVIEW: You started working at Seed Visualization in March this year. Can you explain what Seed does, alongside its Phyllotaxis Lab? It seems that in terms of what you’ve been working on, from being at MIT onwards, that you’re now at the perfect place for your skills and interests?

BEN FRY: Seed Visualization is the client side of things, the Phyllotaxis Lab the research and internal side. For example, for the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, we developed a piece that depicted connections between the different sessions at the conference – there were 180 of them – through various keywords found in their descriptions.

General Electric was another recent client where we wanted to show how the company was involved in healthcare and to show the kinds of things we can learn from healthcare. [The online project visualises the links between gender and age, and a range of illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes].
For the Lab side, this is where we want to push the state of the art a bit, and pursue our interests without the constraints of a client project. The idea is that research and speculative work helps feed ideas for other projects. In the past I’ve found that if I work too much on the practical side, or too far on the purely aesthetic side, the results really suffer. You have to pursue a mixture of both. My Disarticulate piece – a pair of prints, one of which showed the results of a virtual inter pretation of another art piece by Casey Reas – came along during one of these periods. It also sometimes coincides with when I’ll work on a show or exhibition of some sort.

CR: What’s the overall aim, or purpose of visualising all this data?

BF: The personal answer is that it’s just what I’m curious about. I enjoy finding things out, building things that help me make sense out of a complex idea, and being able to see that once it’s done. So for instance, if I read about the H1N1 ‘swine flu’ virus, how it has travelled to 89 countries, and how the virus has continued to evolve, I immediately want to start building something that actually shows that phenomenon. How much has the virus evolved? What does that look like on the dna level? Can we track its changes across the globe? How can we see the progression of the pandemic? I’ve been lucky to be able to pursue this sort of thing and make a living from it.

Professionally, companies and govern ments are ever-more inundated with data, and need help making sense of it. It’s been fascinating watching the progress over the last ten years since I started lecturing more frequently: I no longer need to make the case about ‘lots of data’ or how visualisation might help. The clients are already asking for visualisation help, because they’re completely overwhelmed.

Thursday, August 13, 2009 • New • by Eva Wisten • #

Fish in Color

How do you make the colors show in your underwater photos? Or make the water in front of your subject look clear? For the month of August, science blogger and devoted diver B.N (Bobbie) Sullivan, will exhibit her underwater photography on ScienceBlogs’ Photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis is ScienceBlogs’ showcase of the best science photography on the web. B.N Sullivan is a research psychologist who lives and dives in Hawaii. She and her husband co-authors the blog The Right Blue, which chronicles life in the ocean and features imagery from the couple’s many diving expeditions.