SciArt Link Roundup: The Last

Good things come in dozens: flowers, cookies. SciArt Link Roundups.

SciArt Saturday is finally calling it quits in preparation for finals week over here on campus (pay no attention to that girl behind the curtain, because she needs to study study study).

I'm pulling out the big guns, though, for a series of reflection pieces slated for the beginning of next week; I'll be talking to some of my favorite SciArt Saturday artists about their work. Be sure to check back for those soon!

In the mean time, click below to enjoy the last gathering of pretty science things.

• The geological history of the Earth in a cool illustration.

• At first, I couldn't tell if these images of birds in flight were paintings or photographs (turns out they're the latter). Watch how Paul Nelson makes his Audubon-inspired art here. 

• Polydactyly jokes are the best jokes. 

• Today and tomorrow, the International Space Apps Challenge invites science enthusiasts to collaborate on problems relevant to modern day space exploration. 

• This clever ad campaign reminded me of our class reading about mass frog extinction. 

• Maybe this physicist didn't get out of his traffic ticket by virtue of his four-page mathematical analysis "The Proof of Innocence", but I give him credit for trying.  

• One more aurora video for the road. (Or, catch it live every night until May via the internet.)

• Finally posting a link to Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium. Dedication (and maybe craziness) looks like the Sonic hedgehog gene twisting down the full length of your leg. 

• Last year, Harvard hosted a course called "Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter" and invited the public to attend demonstrations given by both scientists and world-class chefs. You can watch them now in the YouTube archives; I'm all over the cupcake one. 

• I saw an owl sleeping in a tree on my way to class yesterday. Then I found this live feed of a hummingbird nest. All these cozy-looking birds at rest are making me jealous during finals prep. 

• Anatomical flap books from the 1600's through the 1900's. 

• I propose a dance-off between Bill Nye and Elaine Benes. (Favorite Youtube comment: "Has anyone ever seen Bill Nye and David Byrne in the same place at the same time?") 

• Have a look inside the seed bank at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. 

• Hark! A Vagrant does Rosalind Franklin. 

• Darwin explored the range of human emotion and facial expressions through photography. A modern re-run of the experiment asks you what you think the facial expressions say, too. 

• Sparking interest in the disinterested is a tough job for a high school math teacher. James Murphy decided to teach the importance of his subject by having his students make complicated string figures, and over his 20 years of teaching he has collected portraits of many of them with their figures. 

• Jer Thorp delivers his TED talk on the art of visualizing data. 

• A portrait series of the men and women working in evolutionary biology today, plus another for the medical field. James Watson, Steven Pinker, Sean Carroll, Daniel Dennett --they're all here. 

• I'm glad one of the astronauts on the International Space Station moonlights as a photographer; check out these images of the Earth lit up at night. 

• A surgeon thanks his middle school science teacher 30 years later. This is why people become teachers, for moments like this.  

• Sculptures made of honeycomb and beeswax. The artist has also used live bees in his work; I'm not a fan of that piece, but you can decide for yourself here.