SciArt Link Roundup #10

Sorry to all our readers named Dave.
(Image adapted from '-kol)

Fourty-four years ago this week, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in a D.C. theater. SciArt Saturday celebrates Kubrick's legacy with an homage to the sci-fi genre, futuristic technology, and a whole lot of space.

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.


Sci-Fi Special

• Take a tour through the universe with Brian Cox as your guide. On your iPad, of course. 

• The original 2001: A Space Odyssey program. 

• Google's 'Project Glass' is making headlines this week with a possible foray into augmented reality. I enjoyed this take on it much more. 

• This year's Space Foundation Art Contest asked kids to draw what they think space looks like. In other news, I have lost all confidence in being able to artistically outperform a gradeschooler. 

• NASA's solar instrument flips around twice a year to adjust its calculations, or else the sun does a barrel roll when we're not looking.

• Maybe you don't have to worry about HAL9000, but there are still all sorts of crazy lab machines out to get you. 

• At this London Nitro-Ice Cream Parlor, a man in a labcoat prepares your ice cream with liquid nitrogen and hands it to you in a beaker. Wishing I were British (but really, that's nothing new). 

• Favorite find of the week: Ian Frazier discusses Dutch kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen, who Frazier profiled for the New Yorker last year. For 21 years, Jansen has sent his wind-powered sculptures crawling and walking (yes, walking) down the beach. His creations are chilling and wonderful to watch. 

• Krulwich Wonders takes you out into space for the sights and sounds of the trip (another favorite Krulwich piece on the demise of a Soviet cosmonaut). 

• Some advertisers are taking full advantage of the GoogleMaps era to promote their companies. 

• If you must see Titanic's timely (?) rerelease in theaters, at least now you can appreciate accurate on-screen starfields thanks to Neil Degrasse Tyson. Tyson was only vocalizing what Rose was thinking the whole time, I'm sure. 

Everything Else

• DNA and basic genetics in a graphic novel; ever since I picked up a copy of Feynman (which is phenomenal, even to someone like me who hasn't read much more than Maus), I've liked the idea of explaining science and history in visual form. 

• In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Romneyn Beck Hough collected and mounted specimens of wood sections from every tree he could find in a book. The original copy will run you an incredible $30,000, or you could pay about a thousand times less and see all the scans in a new edition. 

• MIT's neuroscience and computer science departments are looking for help in mapping the retinal connectome, and they're appealing to the citizen scientists with an online game called Eyewire.

• Photographer Patrick Gries envisions a gorgeous, monochrome world stripped bare to its bones while scientist Jean-Baptiste de Panefieu explains the evolution behind it. 

• One scientist doodle a day, with biographical information. 

• A set of chemical glassware is repurposed for tea. 

• I really like these entomological illustrations I found this morning --monographs dating all the way back to 1630. 

• A digital library based in the Netherlands has some really neat, old illustrations to browse. 

• This BBC interactive feature lets you dive to the bottom of the ocean, no worries. 

• A couple of organic chemists from Rice University synthesized a class of anthropomorphic compounds back in 2003. They took a hint from Jonathan Swift and called them the NanoPutians. I don't really know how this thesis came to be (or how it came to be in The Journal of Organic Chemistry), but I'll stop asking questions for a moment and just enjoy molecular beings dancing across my screen. 

• A phylogenetic history of The Legend of Zelda? Hmm. 

• It's kind of interesting to find my evolution lesson from a few weeks ago embedded in a comic about the evolution of altruism and 'cheaters'. 

• I guess they make plushies of everything now. 

• The spontaneous appearance of a starling flock surprises a group in a canoe, and I can't stop watching with them. The birds form into a single, two-dimensional plane that twists around itself; it thrashes about, breaks apart, and finally becomes whole again as it floats away over the trees.