Posts

April 07, 2013

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Who – or what – do you think you are? You probably think that your memories and personality are an important part of what you call your “self,” and you’d be right. But the core of your sense of self is something that you probably take completely for granted – your body. Philosophers have [...]

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4:09 PM | Festival bites: BNA 2013 Day 1

Over the next four days BNA 2013: Festival of Neuroscience is filling the Barbican with an extravaganza of brain science. A lucky group of science writers from the Wellcome Trust are attending the Festival. Each day, we’ve asked them to give a short account of the seminars and lectures which they attend, to share the [...]

April 05, 2013

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3:00 PM | Painting With Chimps

[It's with great pleasure the Symbiartic team is featuring this Guest Post by illustrator Nathaniel Gold. Gold is the artist behind the wonderful illustrations found on The Primate Diaries by Eric Michael Johnson, and has twice been featured as Image of the Week (once, twice) here on the Scientific American Blog Network. I was excited [...]

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8:35 AM | I’m a neuroscientist, get me out of here!

This Tuesday evening will see neuroscientists going head to head, or brain to brain, live on stage at the Barbican for ‘I’m a neuroscientist, get me out of here!’. The event is part of the Barbican’s Wonder Season, supported by the Wellcome Trust. Comedian and songstress Helen Arney will be the host, pitching questions from [...]

April 04, 2013

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7:56 AM | Behind-the-scenes at Wonder with Amy Sanders

Back in January, Amy Sanders, Programme Manager in Engaging Science at the Wellcome Trust, introduced the Wonder season on ThInk. Four months down the line, and with the season finale approaching, I caught up with Amy to get another sneaky peak behind-the-scenes at Wonder. “It’s like organising a big party and suddenly wondering who will [...]

April 02, 2013

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7:25 PM | SCIENCE AND ART: HAPPENING HERE AND NOW

ASKlabs relocated from LA to Boston ten years ago seeking the #sciart scene. Right away, we discovered the Boston Cyberarts Festival, the Decordova Museum, the ICA, the MIT Museum, the MIT List, MIT's Media Lab, and Arts Interactive. Lately we’ve noticed a groundswell of art and science happenings in the Boston area. With world-class scientific research and outstanding arts and cultural institutions in such proximity, it seems natural that the two would intersect, blend, even […]

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11:52 AM | Maximal oriented Wicks forms

This board was created by Stacey Aston, a PhD student at Newcastle University. She is doing research in the area of geometric group theory and was trying to work through one of her supervisor’s papers on maximal oriented Wicks forms. A Wicks form is a word on the fundamental group of a graph on a [...]

March 31, 2013

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8:23 PM | Find All the Absurdities!

A little blast from the past to puzzle over while your head spins from chocolate overload this weekend. Two centuries before M.C. Escher confounded us with his optical illusions and play on perspective, William Hogarth (1697-1764) created Satire on False Perspective. Hogarth was a British painter and engraver sometimes credited with beginning the tradition of [...]

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7:44 AM | Can You Scaiku?

A couple weeks ago, I was reminded how much I enjoy the poetry format known as haiku. On a whim, I threw out a tweet soliciting #scaiku, science-themed haiku, to see what delights my tweeps would come up with. Some made me laugh out loud: This one time at lab we dropped acid and then [...]

March 29, 2013

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9:50 PM | Blood Goats. You Heard Me.

Sometimes we feature artwork on Symbiartic because it’s astounding and thought-provoking. You may have seen Kaitlin Beckett’s work on Symbiartic before (when we showed off her Katana Sharks and Fan Fish), or on her site, A Curious Bestiary. Today, Blood Goats. Something about these seemes sad and powerful to me. There’s something elderly here, from [...]

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12:04 AM | Hard Drive Controller Wallet

Arthur is a computer programmer who builds virtual machines. There is usually enough physical redundancy that nothing can catastrophically fail, but once in a while things do. When cascading hard drive controllers fail at Arthur’s work, large amounts of data…Read more ›

March 28, 2013

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11:50 PM | Gull Poop Beach Ecosystem

No summary available for this post.

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7:18 PM | An Interactive Scale of Everything in the Universe

This infographic may look modest, but it is nothing short of exceptional. A few days ago, I posted it to Twitter and it seems at least the Twittersphere agrees. Now the graphic is up on Visual.ly with an embed button, so of course I had to pass it along! Truly an awesome graphic in scope [...]

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7:32 AM | Beauty and the Brain

Can there possibly be a universal standard for what constitutes ‘the beautiful’ in art? The Ice Age Art exhibition, currently on at The British Museum, confronts us with this question by rooting the creation and appreciation of art in …

March 27, 2013

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9:17 AM | Drawing inspiration from neuroscience: the Neurocomic

Matteo Farinella is one of the creators of Neurocomic, an exciting new initiative that brings neuroscience to life in a fictional comic story. Here he gives an insight into how, and why, this unique project came about. I have spent the past 5 years using computer simulations to study how particular brain cells process information [...]

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3:35 AM | Strong Marriage

Gay marriage in Canada has been around about as long as my marriage to Michelle. It has in no way been a detriment to the country. Here's hoping things change in the U.S. and the rest of the world faster than they have so far. When we were married, we had a Unitarian minister. I'm an atheist, and my wife's belief system is not up to me to say. It felt strange inviting friends who are part of the LGBT community to our wedding if it wasn't something they could take part in. Unitarian […]

March 26, 2013

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6:50 PM | Any Questions?

This Thursday, the 28th of March, at 13.00, the Wellcome Trust will be hosting a Q&A with David Nutt live on Twitter. David Nutt is President of the British Neuroscience Association and is also a psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist. He is perhaps best known for specialising in research on drugs that affect the brain and conditions such [...]

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5:30 PM | Bacteriography – SciArt needs a Kickstart to Escape the Lab

Bringing sciart to the public isn’t always an easy task – and the growing (culturing, har har) field of bioart is some of the toughest art to showcase of all. It’s harder than hanging a painting without using nails, as many contemporary galleries insist, leading to those dangling chains from ceiling braces. Bioart, the field [...]

March 25, 2013

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6:47 PM | Science Art on a T-Shirt

Etsy is a great place to find handmade or vintage items. I’m a regular shopper there, as I love both supporting artists and finding unique gifts. I began searching the massive Etsy community for science-inspired artwork, and I found the most amazingly robust and beautiful science t-shirt shop, nonfiction tees. The shop is run by [...]

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9:00 AM | Hot on the heels of brain diseases with the Neurodegenerative Disease Initiative (NDI)

This week, London played host to the opening symposium of The Wellcome Trust/MRC Neurodegenerative Disease Initiative (NDI), a collaboration of UK neuroscientists from University College London (UCL), King’s College London (KCL), and Cambridge University. Joseph Jebelli, a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Neurology, reflects on the event. Neurodegenerative diseases are placing an ever-increasing [...]

March 22, 2013

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4:18 PM | How a Martian Goddess Changed My Mind About Copyright

Creative Commons Habits Are Hard to Break Creative Commons Licences are Good Things, in my estimation. I’ve had one on my personal art blog The Flying Trilobite since almost the very beginning. There are different grades of Creative Commons Licences (CCL), and like many artists, I’ve stuck with the most restrictive one. Without giving you [...]

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1:30 PM | Winner of Inflammatory Language Contest!

from cofisher.blogspot.comThe Febrile Muse has chosen three illustrations by Dr. Monica Lalanda, an Emergency Room physician in Spain, as the winning entry of the Inflammatory Language contest. Dr. Lalanda will receive The Best Science Writing Online 2012 as her prize. Congratulations!In all honesty, I feel that by meeting Dr. Lalanda, I have won. She has great incite into the plight of healthcare on a global scale, namely that of Spain. In this day […]

March 20, 2013

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11:27 PM | ANDY GOLDSWORTHY BUILDS US A HOUSE

The incredible and often ephemeral work of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy is deservedly legendary. Goldsworthy uses geometric shapes like spheres, spirals, squares, and circles, as well as archeological structures like cairns and arches, to create mind-blowing works out of, say, leaves of grass, rowanberries, intertidal sand, icicles, sticks. Goldsworthy’s interest in natural elements and materials lends itself to a study of time, decay, climate, and season. As his pieces are frequently […]

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7:41 PM | Not Your Granny’s Mothballs

Spring traditions range from the ridiculous to the sublime, from balancing an egg on its end to the scrubbing and purging of spring cleaning. I, for one, will forever associate the smell of mothballs with grandma’s annual spring purge. But here’s a take on moth balls you may not have considered. Fiber artist Claire Moynihan [...]

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4:33 PM | Call for Art & Science Exhibition Proposals for ISMB ECCB 2013 in Berlin

Call for Art & Science Exhibition Proposals – ISMB/ECCB 2013 Scientists and artists are invited to submit images and videos that illustrate research projects, scientific principles and draw a link between art and science. Images and videos will automatically enter an online contest for a $200 (USD) award. This year the International Conference on Intelligent [...]

March 19, 2013

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9:32 PM | Rethinking mental health care: what the developed world can learn from the developing

Vikram Patel is Professor of International Mental Health, and a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. For most of the year he is based in Goa working with Sangath, a local NGO of which he is a co-founder, and the Public Health Foundation of India. In this, [...]

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10:31 AM | Multi-type branching processes

This board comes from the office of Peter Keller, a new postdoc working at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently thinking about multi-type branching processes in biology and wanted to draw some pictures on the board to help him figure out what was going on. In a branching process you have a population of [...]

March 18, 2013

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9:09 PM | If Only Images Were Shared Like Videos

Two interesting things happened recently for me on Facebook: one of my comics went viral, and another one was stolen. In the first case, a comic I did about mental health was widely shared, and according to Facebook’s “insights” 2.2 million people saw it due to the tens of thousands of comments, likes, and shares. [...]

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9:36 AM | Stories from psychiatry’s past: Sign here please

There’s a lot to do when you live in London, and sometimes you end up somewhere slightly odd. I can’t say I was overly enthusiastic when, in October, my husband suggested we go to the ‘London Writing Equipment Show’, but reasoned that it at least sounded like the kind of place where I might pick [...]

March 17, 2013

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1:52 PM | Art Barrage

Gutting my studio space and tossing old supplies I'll never use. This also has the added effect of cleaning up the front hall, since that's where my studio is. The big question: barrage visitors to our home by hanging all my paintings in a giant egotistical monument to my awesomeness, or store them neatly in the corner? - - - - - - - -Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.PortfolioBlogPrint ShopFind me on Symbiartic, the […]