Lehrer-inspired science album

For a while now I have been meaning to blog about a band whose last album was dedicated to songs about different areas of science. I know, I know, it sounds pretty terrible, but They Might Be Giants really hit the nail on the head if you ask me. (By the end of this post, I challenge you to stop the lyrics 'The sun is a mass of incandescent gas' from pin-balling around your head).

The album, titled 'Here comes the science' includes such songs as 'Speed and Velocity', 'Solid liquid gas' and  'Why does the sun shine?' and they music isn't half bad either. What finally pushed me to post this was a reminder in a Science-Online 2011 chatroom today about Tom Lehrer's famous 'The elements' song, a groundbreaker in packaging science up for the masses (simply putting the name of every element of the periodic table to a relatively catchy tune). Here's 'The Elements' if you're unfamilair with it -



That's the reason for deciding to finally blog about them. Now for the reason I'd always been holding back; it's difficult to get music, in any easily accessible format, into a blog post so here are a few ways for you to listen:

• on Spotify if you have an account
• on Myspace
• on this Youtube playlist.

Now, whilst the science isn't always accurate and the music is, on the odd occasion, a little irritating; their effort to educate is commendable and the lyrics are nothing short of genius. The fact that they follow up the song 'Why does the sun shine?' with 'Why does the sun really shine?' reflects the familiar feeling of learning one thing and being satisfied, only to find later that you had only scratched the surface. That the deeper and deeper you study, the more detail there is to find. No one will ever know everything about science, and that is an idea that I, personally, am comfortable with.

That fact accepted - I will, however, endeavour to fill my future children's neuro-plastic little brains with such catchy nuggets of information as these. Can't hurt to start them young.

Visualising statistics: internet censorship

Last month's Facebook: mapping earth post provoked some discussion about why the north of Asia was AWOL and why Facebook, which seems to offer something for everyone, hasn't managed to penetrate into the huge hunk of landmass that dominates one half of the world map (read the previous post for a refresh).

The empty spaces occupying rural Africa, the Amazon and central Australia are easily explained away by geographical location, as too are those countries with a lower GDP. However, the Asian countries with captive audiences and technology coming out of their ears have kept Facebook at arm's-length through censorship.  The uber-talented guys at Information Is Beautiful have come up with a very pretty and easy-to-digest analysis of such censorship. Below are the Facebook map from Paul Butler and the censorship map from David McCandless.  Draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, here's the link to the full visualisation. One particularly information-rich diagram is the good old fashioned venn diagram showing the various overlapping reasons for internet censorship in the different regions. It's pretty cool. Have a browse, learn something new, drink a beer (just because).

Artificial Body Clock

Imagine an object that could tell a woman the exact moment she is ready to have a child. An object that recieves information from her doctor, therapist and bank manager and alerts her when she is physicallly, mentally and economically ready to start a family.

Revital Cohen, a Royal College of Art graduate, is a designer whose future-oriented work examines the relationships and possibilities between medical machines, animals, and humans, exploring the juxtaposition of the natural with the artificial.

Whilst much of her work is far-fetched and more a comment on our reliability on, and the possibilities posed by, technology; some don't seem to stray too far from the line we are already treading. The Artficial Biological Clock is one such object. Cohen says

'The promises posed by new reproductive technologies such as IVF, test tube babies and egg freezing, are blurring perceptions of the reproductive cycle amongst women, and consequently, the age of conception is constantly being challenged. The female body clock relies on moonlight to regulate the menstrual cycle. The use of artificial light and contraceptive hormones, along with the growing pressure to develop a career, are distorting the body’s reproductive signals. The artificial biological clock compensates for this increasingly lost instinct. This object acts as constant reminder of the temporary and fragile nature of fertility. Given to a woman by her parents or partner, it reacts to information from her doctor, therapist and bank manager via an online service. When she is physically, mentally and financially ready to conceive the object awakes, seeking her attention.'

NB.(Next post will be less what-is-my-purpose-in-life? Promise)

Molecular wallpaper

I am too spring a chicken to remember the original Time-Life Science books but having made a trip to the British Library to check them out for myself I now consider myself up-to-scratch. The Time-Life series was a series of hardbound books published in the 60s on 26 areas of natural science intended for the lay-reader and would fit in fairly comfortably on today's popular science shelves in Waterstones (and also on my own library shelves. When I have a library. When I'm big).
Dan Funderburgh's recent series of sci-art wallpapers were inspired by these iconic Time-life books, a collection he calls a "repudiation of the fabricated schism between art and decoration". Amen Funderburgh, we too repudiate that schism.

The retro palette from the series compliments the printed sci-art designs and images, making for a beautiful collection of wallpapers, any of which I would happily hang in my own living room.

Though they are all pretty, I am particularly fond of the design in the next picture, reminscent of a sketchbook doodle penned in a particularly dull biomolecular science class.

"The work is a recognition of the art of knowledge and of the poetry of things we do not and can not know". Funderburgh

The collection is showing at Vallery in Barcelona and since it's a bit of a trek for us Londoners, you can see the photos from the opening of the exhibit on the Vallery website.

All images courtesy of Dan Funderburgh. See more on Flickr.

Time: Animated

Philip Zimbardo visualises hedonism, time perspective and pace of life in this superb animated guide to 'The Secret Powers of Time'

The smallest periodic table ever in the World ever?

I have seen myriad videos of images being basically printed onto strands of human hair; university logos, names, shapes...but this one takes the biscuit.  The University of Nottingham gave Professor Martyn Poliakoff a birthday treat by 'printing' the periodic table onto one of his hairs.

The printing is done by radiating the hair with ions of gallium which flake away teeny weeny bits of the hair at a time.  The resulting periodic table is 86 microns long (you could fit a million of them onto a square the size of your palm) and whilst this little trick is itself ultimately useless it does demonstrate the awesome (in it's richest and less colloquial sense) capabilities of nanotechnology.

See for yourself. I mean, aside from the lovely chap's odd-yet-endearing nutty professor appearance and poor televisual suitability, there is some pretty cool technology on show.

Facebook: mapping earth

There are six degrees of separation, so they say, and the world is an intricate web of mothers, husbands, colleagues, cousins, friends, enemies, frenemies. But this we're-all-the-earth's-children hippy talk of all being 'connected' is turned on it's tie-dye bandana-adorned head when searching through facebook and finding the right name, a similar face (but the picture's so small, I'm just. not. sure.) and to top it off, no mutual friends.

That is, until now. You may not feel connected to the rest of the world through your photo tags and wall posts and stalking the guy that you're inconveniently in love with, but an intern at Facebook has spent an undisclosed (obscenely large) amount of time poring over data to create this map of the world through Facebook's eyes, forcing you to admit that actually, we are a pretty snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug close knit family unit.

by Paul Butler (intern), crucial cog in the Facebook machine

Each line connects cities with pairs of friends, with brighter lines sprouting from the cities with the most pairs of friends.

Paul said of his digital creation:

"Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. [...] What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships."

You'll notice that large chunks of the Earth appear to be missing, such as China and most of rural Africa, and this is because Facebook hasn't quite permeated into the pores of their very existence yet...but give it time.