Seed Media Group: Blog

Monday, March 29, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

NatGeo Wins AdWeek’s Website of the Year

ScienceBlogs’ Partner National Geographic.com named AdWeek’s Magazine Website of the Year. AdweekMedia’s picked NationalGeographic.com “for harnessing the brand’s value through top-notch photography intertwined with robust reader interactivity.”
NationalGeographic.com recently went through a redesign.

From the article on AdweekMedia:

The relaunch is the achievement of Rob Covey, svp of content development and design for National Geographic Digital Media. A longtime print and television artistic designer, he was brought on board in 2007 by Johns to tap the portal’s potential. “The clear purpose of the redesign was to build a site that placed photography out front because that’s one of the strongest representations of the brand,” Covey explains. “We wanted to let the photography be the centerpiece around which we designed a branded house of all the component parts of National Geographic. And we wanted it to be representative of the magazine: clarity of design, direct and unadorned imagery, ease of navigation and based on the philosophy of the society—not to mention a ton of content.” Yet Covey knew that the brand’s best-of-class photography wasn’t enough to drive visitors to the site. “People are inherently interested in sharing, whether it’s our brand or another brand,” he says. “They want to see their thoughts and images, and so once you accept that fact, it’s the way to attract traffic and distribute our content.” The strategy has paid off handsomely. In the past year, the site has more than doubled its audience to 7.3 million unique monthly visitors, per comScore. (National Geographic’s in-house estimate puts the monthly traffic much higher, at 14.5 million uniques.)

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Famous people and their letterheads

The blog letterheady by writer Shaun Usher (who also created the addictive correspondence-collection Letter of Note) collects letterhead design from famous people. If you have one on file you can submit it, or just browse around and see what Ayn Rand and Tomas Edison wrote their thoughts on.

Via Coolhunting

Nicolas Tesla’s letterhead:

Wednesday, March 17, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Living in bubbles

In 1900, Mary Mallon took a job as a cook in Manhattan. Soon everyone in the family she worked for fell ill, and the laundress died. Mary moved on to the next job, and the next, and in each house she worked, sickness would follow. The longer she stayed around to care for her employers, the sicker they would become.

Mary Mallon is now known as Typhoid Mary, the first known healthy carrier of Typhoid fever. During her career as a cook, she managed to infect 53 people, before she was isolated against her will and died in quarantine.

Typhoid Mary’s last home, along with Chernobyl’s Zone of Exclusion and other bubbles set up to shield either the world inside our outside of them from danger, are the inspiration for the exhibition ‘Landscapes of Quarantine’.

The exhibition, currently up at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, is curated by Future Plural, Geoff Manaugh and  Nicola Twilley, and is the result of a series of workshops in New York with designers, artists, and architects, exploring the idea of quarantine. The curatorial statement reads:

Quarantine, at its most basic, is the creation of a hygienic boundary between two or more things, for the purpose of protecting one from exposure to the other. It is a strategy of separation and containment—an ancient spatial response to suspicion, threat, and uncertainty – but one that is again relevant in today’s era of globalization, pandemic flu, and bioterrorism.

Through April 17.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

A spider web as man would build it

With the help from astrophysicists, spider researchers, architects, engineers, and a lot of elastic black rope, Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno has constructed a gigantic version of a Black Widow’s web in Bonniers Konsthall (Bonnier’s Hall of Art) in Stockholm. (The hall is about 400 cubic meters.) The project, called ‘14 Billions’ is inspired by how scientists use the spider web to model the structure and origin of the universe. Along with the exhibition, Bonniers Konsthall is publishing a book with texts from the artist and the involved scientists as well as producing a lecture series with physicists and mathematicians.

Saraceno is Inspired by architects and theoreticians such as Richard Buckminster Fuller, Peter Cook, and Yona Friedman. His main interests as an artist is to explore how scientific innovations can develop new ideas for a more sustainable society and how art may build dreams for the future.

14 Billions is up until June 20.

Tomás Saraceno in front of his web.

Friday, February 26, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Science news in review

Every Thursday, Seedmagazine.com’s home page editor Evan Lerner comments on the course of science reporting and publishing. Week in Review is an ongoing analyses of how changes in media, publishing, technology, and science policy affect the scientific conversation; why science news are being reported the way they are, who is talking under which agenda, and whose point of view seems to be the most accurate.

In this week’s column, Lerner looks at the entertainment industry to ponder the role of movies as vehicles for scientific ideas.

Despite the compound scientific impossibilities inherent in its premise, Avatar is a movie about science, whereas Independence Day and its ilk are movies about blowing things up. After watching Avatar, one can talk about the scientist’s role in the technological dichotomy inherent to colonialism without getting into the economics of shipping magic rocks four light-years to hit quarterly profit targets. Likewise, as Perkowitz suggests, was The Day After Tomorrow a “teachable moment” on climate change, even if it got the science totally wrong.

Illustration: Mike Pick

Saturday, February 20, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Transdisciplinary design & and its friends

Parsons The New School for Design is launching a Masters of Fine Arts program in Transdisciplinary Design in the fall. Jamer Hunt, chair of Urban and Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons who is directing the program, recently took to the streets of New York to ask people if they could explain what transdisciplinary design actually means. In the end, he happens upon a certain someone at the Museum of Modern Art who can tell us exactly…

Leading up to the launch of the new program, Parson’s is arranging a lecture series that’s exploring the increasingly expanded role of the designer:

From Hunt’s Transdisciplinary blog:

“Designers are rethinking their practices as they increasingly confront a world in which the complexity and interconnectedness of its people, infrastructures, networks, and economies challenges traditional, disciplinary responses. Designers are increasingly designing businesses, services, experiences, policies, and even emergent social forms; and along the way they are inventing new methods, new tools, and new ways of conceiving design.”

This is the line-up of speakers:

Tuesday, February 23, 6-8 pm
Yochai Benkler, professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and Anna Valtonen, rector of the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden on:

How are networks—global, immediate, and decentralized—changing the way we live, work and design? What are the possibilities and challenges of working and living in an always on, always connected global marketplace? And how can we leverage the power of these networks to transform lives for the better?

Thursday, March 25, 6-8 pm
March 25, Andrew Blauvelt, design director and curator at the Walker Art Center in conversation with eating designer Marije Vogelzang, Principal, Proef and Studio Marije Vogelzang in Amsterdam on:

What are the pressures on design consultancies and businesses as the rules of the game are shifting in unpredictable ways? How are design-led businesses succeeding at defining new territories to work in and new ways of operating?

April 6, Natalie Jeremijenko, Professor of Visual Arts at New York University and Nigel Snoad, Lead Researcher, Microsoft Humanitarian Systems on

Can design play a role in governmental and non-governmental delivery of things like infrastructure, education, and health care? What kinds of alliances and collaborations are forming to bring design-led practices into large scale social and technological services?

Venue: Theresa Lang Student & Community Center, Arnhold Hall, The New School 55 West 13th Street, New York
The event is free and open to the public

Tuesday, February 16, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Mood architecture

We wish we were in Paris for this… Earlier today, architect François Roche and Le Laboratoire held their SYNAPSES SPEECHES, a symposium on science and architecture. They discussed ideas like how the insights from contemporary science and philosophy is inspiring architecture that could react to the mood of its future inhabitants - structures that responds to the dopamine, hydrocortisone, melatonin, adrenaline and other molecules secreted by human bodies…

The speakers included: Mark Burry, François Jouve, Rupert Soar, Antonio Negri, Judith Revel, Behrokh Khoshnevis, Jean-Didier Vincent, Jeanette Zwingenberger, Chris Younes, Stephan Henrich, Winston Hampel, Natanel Elfassy and François Roche. Moderated by Giovanni Corbellini.

Read an interview with Roche here.

Friday, February 12, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Shadow play from Olafur Eliasson

For his new show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea, NY, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson set up rooms of screens and lit them with different-colored spotlights to create shadows of all visitors. Sometimes it was one, sometimes many, sometimes it was you, sometimes someone else…

Upstairs, he played again with the phenomenon of the afterimage: what we see after staring at a shape for long enough.
From February 11 - March 20.

Read more about Olafur Eliasson on ScienceBlogs.

Thursday, February 11, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

30 Seconds of Aluminum Cans

Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan continues his reflections on American consumption. Jordan is trying to make us actually understand and feel the numbing numbers that are constantly tossed around: The pounds of plastic dumped in the ocean each day (2.4 million); the number of cell phones discarded in the US every 24 hours (426.000).

Watch the Seedmagazine.com Slideshow “The Age of Impossible Numbers” here:

Below: The number of aluminum cans consumed in the US every 30 seconds.

Jordan used the colored dot that is each can to digitally reinterpret Georges-Pierre Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte with the same technique, pointillism (the creation of an image by using small dots of pure color) that Seurat used for the original painting.

Thursday, January 21, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Into the unknown

In the Space Project, French photographer Vincent Fournier, has visited The Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre of the Russian Federation, the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, the Guiana Space Centre, the Atacama Desert Observatories in Chile… all the remote, austere places where dreams of space feel a little closer.

Read the story on the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah on Seedmagazine.com:

“THE UTAH STATION IS ONE of two research sites that the Mars Society operates to learn to live and work on another planet; the other is in the high Arctic. The earth here is rich in sedimentary deposits,. The gray deposits are from the Cretaceous, when the area was underwater, part of a vast inland sea—there are marine fossils here. There’s evidence that whole oceans or seas existed on Mars, so it’s useful to have an analog site that was under a sea in the geological past.”

Monday, January 18, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Anthill realism

In Trailhead, which is an excerpt from biologist and - we are thrilled to see - debut novelist E.O. Wilson’s novel Anthill, Wilson offers us a perspective that few, if any, people in the world could provide in such detail.

Wilson evokes the entirely connected, scent-driven, and beautiful but brutal world of an ant colony. The more you read, the more insights unfold that may very well apply for a species even more familiar to us than ants…

“She had become an extreme specialist: she laid eggs, while the workers performed all the labor necessary to raise her offspring, their sisters. They were the Queen’s hands and feet and jaws, and increasingly they replaced her brain. They functioned together as a well-organized whole, dividing up the tasks without regard to their own welfare. The Trailhead Colony began to resemble a large, diffuse organism. In a word, it became a superorganism…..

“Even as her body began to decay, the pheromones she had manufactured in life persisted in the minds and bodies of her colony. Her visual appearance, her stillness, meant nothing. The Queen could have lain on her back with her legs held rigidly up in the air. She could have turned red, black, metallic gold, or any other hue or shade—it would not have mattered. The Queen had to smell dead in order to be classified as dead.”

Read Trailhead here:

Monday, January 11, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Carol Browner on Whitehouse.gov

At 3.30PM (EST) Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate, will discuss the President’s plan for a clean energy economy.

This is part of the Obama Administration’s initiative to allow Americans to communicate directly with some of the President’s senior advisors. Every morning this week, a senior advisor will give an update on the Administration’s work in their field; every afternoon the advisor will answer questions from the public via video chat on Whitehouse.gov.

Watch the chat here:

Wednesday, January 06, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

The evolution song

A new video from Symphony of Science with David Attenborough, Jane Goodall and Carl Sagan: “The unbroken thread”

Thursday, December 10, 2009 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Postcard from the McMurdo Base

Jeff Hoffman and Jeff McQuaid from the J. Craig Venter Institute collect samples to determine the microbial diversity of the Ross Sea.

While sampling on the sea ice they were joined by groups of emperor penguins.

(Picture was taken on ice edge 21 miles from the NSF run McMurdo Base, Antarctica)

Monday, November 23, 2009 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #

Tomorrow’s Weather in Copenhagen

Swedish artist duo Bigert & Bergström just completed Tomorrow’s Weather, a double helix-shaped glass sculpture, inside of media company Aller’s headquarters in Copenhagen.

The sculpture is fed by the digital representations of forecasts from the Danish Meteorological Institute, and in cue with tomorrow’s weather forecast, the light of the globes shifts it hues…