3D Printing and Animation

Artists and scientists have for a while now made use of 3D printing as a way to render their imagined models in a 3D format.

Recently 3D printing has found a new home in animation– Het Klokhuis, a Dutch science show for kids, used it for their opening title sequence and Coraline animators also used it for creating the awesome graphics that went into their film– see a short blurb about it in Make.

Science & Education

I really feel that this post is about getting kids excited about Science. I don’t think it really matters how you do it, just that you get across the message that Science is Cool, which it is, and it’s not just because I’m a nerd at heart, which I am.

This teacher & student run science blog, Extreme Biology, is a great example of how one teacher, Miss Baker of Staten Island Academy, uses independent research and thought, as well as blog writing, to get her students excited about science by allowing them to be part of the discovery process. I used to lead kids on nature hikes and found that the best hikes were the ones where the kids made the discoveries and I shared in the enthusiasm. Miss Baker’s teaching approach was highlighted on NPR’s Science Friday in a discussion on “Building Science Education” (you can listen in to the podcast here). I loved the caller who talked about teaching science to pre-schoolers, how they are completely capable and receptive to science topics. The caller went on to note the importance of bringing in outside scientists who are themselves enthusiastic about the subject. Not only does it allow the students to see how science is applied in the real-world, but enthusiasm is contagious!!

If you have your own young scientist at home, the Kids’ Science Challenge is a great program to encourage your child to explore their natural inquisitiveness by posing questions to challenge, and perhaps stump, great scientific minds.

Christmas Party Science Tricks

Well, I decided to replace my most recent post with something a bit more appropriate for all ages. Plus, this one made me laugh more because of its sheer silliness–it’s of very simple science tricks that you can use to entertain your Holiday guests. This particular video is a you tube video by Professor Richard Wiseman posted on BioEphemera’s blog. There is also an Extreme Physics Party Tricks video that follows. And who doesn’t want to dazzle(!) & amuse their guests with goofy science tricks? I think the vaudevillean background music is a necessity, perhaps also with a Charlie Chaplin mustache & top hat.

More Holiday fun:

Are all snowflakes unique? Find the answer here as well as some pretty snowflake pictures and also info on “Designer Snowflakes” (who knew?)

This is totally un-science-y, but I just love it, even if it is an ad–Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy–music by your maytag washer and originally found on NotCot

And here, in case I don’t personally get back on this thing to wish you merry holidays, a holiday math message from David Ng on Science Blogs :)

Generative Art

First off, I just want to say that I love that my computer screen is “snowing” on the wordpress log-in site. Here in Austin we get very little of that & the mini- flurry we had today was pretty sweet.

Lately I’ve been writing alot about computer art it seems, but since I’m a graphic designer/digital illustrator I find myself constantly happening upon art created on the computer that blows me away. Today I came across a Generative Artist named Natan Sinigaglia. (Generative Art is art that is created using computer software algorithms, remember the mandelbrots?) Natan’s work has a very organic feel to it, and he mentions on his website that it is inspired by nature. Some of the warm, luminescent colors of his “Places” series remind me of Arches National Park in Utah. And then there is the composition Celeste Moteste by Natan Sinigaglia and Pedro Mari. It is described in the notes as

an audiovisual suite in three movements with both the music and the visuals are generated in realtime using the input of two electric instruments (a wind instrument and a piano).  The theme of the suite is the growth of consciousness, a growth that develops during the three movements.

The original setup is meant to be a three screens span mode resulting in a panoramic 4:1 view.

Torvald Hessel, if you’re listening, the soon to be Austin Planetarium would be a great place to showcase this type of concert, right?

And, finally, check out Natan’s Neuronal Stormo Test 16 on FlickR, –art+nature inspired+science

Outsider Science

I’ve always loved what is called “Outsider Art”–art created by artists who have not been educated in the field of art– for its immediacy to an emotional connection, it’s raw colors and simple forms. In the same way, I have also felt that children’s art, unschooled, is some of the best art there is. I was an (uneducated) art teacher at one point—on my shift to trying to make art become my career. I wasn’t really trying to teach the kids “how” to create art, since they instinctively know how to find a voice in art for what they want to say, but rather, introducing them to new materials to work with & maybe new ways of seeing. But I always ended up feeling like I learned so much more from them.  James Hampton, an outsider artist, was a janitor who used found bits of scraps that he found on the job, covered his creations with foil, and created pieces of homage to his religious visions. Some of his Outsider Art was later to be displayed at the Smithsonian.

We often think of the field of art as being hard to infiltrate if not having received an education in Fine Art, but Science has the same invisible borders. With a degree in Ecology/Conservation biology, I’ve worked as an environmental chemist and as a research assistant in a lizard lab. There have been few people that I have come across in my career in science who did not have some sort of education in that field. In fact, having myself made the shift from being in the science field to the art field, my own experience is that it seems more unlikely and difficult to enter the field of science as a researcher as opposed to art. So, I love when I come across people who have been successful in that shift. A local example of someone who has bridged the gap from art to science is Zach Booth Simpson. His start was in art as a video games creator and then later made the shift to science as a research fellow with the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. You can see some of his current art and science projects here at his “Experiments in Art and Science Blog: Projects of Zach Booth Simpson”.

Technology as an Art form

Technology has enabled more people to be able to have the tools for creating art at their hands as well as a faster & more egalitarian way of sharing their art. Here is a beautiful video on liquids found on vimeo, shot close enough so that you can appreciate the properties of the subject. It was created by phantomcolor.com with sound by l’ascenseur.

Music as a meditation on Science & Landform in Antartica

Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky), in collaboration with Golden Hornet Project, will be performing his Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antartica tonight at UT’s Hogg Auditorium. It is a multi-media piece created in Antartica from portable studios set up in the field to

capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms, reflect a changing and even vanishing environment under duress. Coupled with historic, scientific, and geographical visual material, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica is a seventy minute performance, creating a unique and powerful moment around man’s relationship with nature.

Sinfonia Antarctica will be an acoustic portrait of a rapidly transforming continent made of ice and condensation. In many ways, because there is little rain, the interior of the continent is technically one of the largest deserts in the world. What Sinfonia Antarctica proposes to do is explore the realm of fiction and ideas that underlie almost all perceptions of Antarctica – from the interior desert plains, to the Transantarctic Mountains that divide the continent, the Suite will take samples of the different conditions, and transform them into multi-media portraits with music composed from the different geographies that make up the land mass. (quoted from his website)

Earlier this week, DJ Spooky spoke and gave a visual presentation at North Branch Public Library with UT Assistant Professor Ginny Catania who has done field work in Antartica (see Events page) about the continents’ changing climate patterns.

Looking Closely

Artists and scientists often find themselves looking closely at their subjects to discover that which might have appeared to be invisible previously, it involves slowing down and being aware of what is around us. I always find it a gift to be shown something by someone that I was completely unaware of before, or perhaps in a way that I hadn’t quite looked at it before– it allows me moments of re-discovery in our amazing world.

David Littschwager shares his process of discovery through looking closely in his work on Marine Microfauna — his photographic study of organisms in tidal pools. He is now a contributing nature photographer with National Geographic, and at one time worked in advertising. The transition to nature photography occurred for him when he was first asked to photograph endangered species for the California Nature Conservancy (please find more about David Littschwager in this article about his work process by Joe Cellini of Apple). David Littschwager’s work is both beautiful and ethereal. I love how his work highlights the colors & form of the Flying Fish, the incredible shape of the Squid, the shimmery & floral appendages of the Blue Sea Slug, the delicate light, and gorgeous structure to the Invertebrate Egg Mass.

I also appreciate what Littschwager says about his respectful approach to his subjects:

“I photograph principally natural history subjects, meaning anything from museum specimens to plants and animals out in the wild,” he says. “But a lot of it is trying to show creatures as individuals, for example by stripping away the background and doing formal portraits, even of zooplankton.”

His work is a reminder of the beauty that remains in our world, how precious and fragile and breath-catchingly wonderous. I easily know what I would like for my next birthday present/

The Science of Art Exhibit

Research labs are not typically considered places of beauty, but then, beauty is in the eye of the beholder–one person might describe a research project as having an elegant design, another might wax poetic about a bit of beautiful engineering, and anybody who has gotten to look at images of water bears produced by a scanning electron microscope, photos of nebula taken through telescopes, or micro-particles seen under fluorescent microscopy knows that those images can be works of art in their own right.

Princeton University highlights these aesthetically beautiful images captured during scientific research in its annual “Art of Science” competition. The exhibit represents works by students & faculty of Princeton. A faculty member with their Department of Chemical Engineering, Celeste Nelson studies tissue development and submitted this image of baby squid taken under bright-field microscopy during her research. Her image received 1st place in an on-line voting poll. (All photos shown here with permission from Princeton).

"Baby squid"-Celeste Nelson (faculty) Department of Chemical Engineering --"My tissue morphodynamics laboratory studies the dynamic processes that control tissue development. This image of squid (Loligo pealeii) embryos was taken using bright field microscopy."

Here are a few of the additional submissions, with the science behind the art in the researcher’s own words:

"Semiconducting Feathers"-- R. R. Lunt '09 Department of Chemical Engineering ---"Organic electronics is an emerging field that holds promise for high-quality displays, low-power white lighting, and low-cost photovoltaic applications. This image of an organic semiconducting film was taken using an optical microscope with cross-polarizers and a Nomarski filter. The film is composed of many micron-sized crystallites with a common crystalline stacking direction that was formed through a fast melting/cooling process which led to the formation of feather-like features. The variations in color stem from the anisotropic indices of refraction in combination with the rotation of the crystallites with respect to the polarizer configuration. This film was subsequently incorporated into a thin-film photovoltaic solar cell."

"Laser Forward Transfer"-- Matt Brown (graduate student) Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering ---"Laser forward transfer is a direct-write technique used to print a variety of complex materials, from organic electric precursors to biological materials. In the laser forward process, a transparent substrate is coated with the ink material and a pulsed laser is focused into the ink to initiate the ejection of a small amount of material onto a receiving substrate. Motion of the ink and receiving substrates between successive laser shots allows printing of complex patterns. Laser printing of stem cells is currently being investigated for tissue engineering applications. This image shows a laser transfer from a model system of 20 micron polystyrene beads in glycerol used to simulate the transfer of human stem cells. The ejected plume is less than 500 microns wide yet moves at tens of meters per second. To freeze the motion, the image is strobed with a 25 nanosecond pulsed plasma lamp, 10 microseconds after the laser hits the ink."

"Social Evolution in Cell Groups"-- Carey Nadell, Joao Xavier, and Kevin Foster Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology---" Expanding clusters of cells are commonplace in the natural world, and depending on the context, they may be beneficial or harmful to humans. Understanding the impact of cell groups on their environment requires that we understand evolution within such cell populations. Some cell behaviors -- especially those that give the cell group its ability to exploit environmental resources -- are cooperative in nature, and whether or not such behaviors evolve depends on how the group is structured. When genetic relatives are clustered together, cooperative cell behaviors like extracellular enzyme secretion can evolve more easily. Secreted enzymes, in turn, may allow a pathogenic bacterial colony to become more virulent, or a nascent cancerous tumor to become malignant. Using a computer simulation framework that implements independent cells in explicit space, we have shown that the internal structure of cell groups can depend very heavily on the environment. In the three images shown here, the red and blue cell types do not differ in any way other than their color, which is used to determine whether a cell group remains well-mixed, or whether related cells tend to cluster together. From left to right, environmental nutrient concentration was decreased from ubiquitous, to moderate, to sparse. As nutrient concentration decreases, the tendency for different genetic lineages to spontaneously segregate increases, which favors the evolution of cooperation. This result may inform our understanding of pathogenic cell groups, in which cooperation between cells is harmful for their host."

"Vortex Waltz"-- J. Luc Peterson (graduate student) and Greg Hammett (faculty) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory ---"Two-dimensional fluid vortexes attract, swirling and merging with their partners in a turbulent ballet. This natural behavior influences phenomena ranging from weather patterns in the atmosphere to the performance of nuclear fusion devices. Advanced numerical algorithms and high-performance supercomputers allow for turbulence simulations of unprecedented detail. This snapshot catches the vortexes in the act. Originally entirely separated, the two vortex centers (dark red) have sent out spiral bands and shock waves throughout the background fluid as they've circled each other and combined. If left alone long enough, the two will complete their dance as a single, larger vortex."

"surface quasi-geostrophic turbulence"--- Isaac Held (lecturer with rank of professor) Atmospheric and Oceanice Sciences Program/Geosciences ----"A snapshot of a numerical simulation of a distinctive kind of turbulence thought to be relevant to rapidly rotating fluids such as the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. These simulations, and the equations on which they are based, are used to study the interaction between small- and large-scale structures. In particular, they help us understand the spectra of atmospheric and oceanic turbulent flows -- that is, the relative magnitude of the excitation of different scales of motion. This is a simulation of a very idealized homogeneous system in which every point in this square domain is physically indistinguishable from every other point. The domain has no walls or boundaries, but is, rather, re-entrant in both dimensions -- as one leaves one side of the domain one enters on the other side. This system is proving to be of interest not only to atmospheric and oceanic scientists, but also to mathematicians, because of the fractal character of its solutions and due to the possibility that it can help us understand how singularities form in fluid flows."

"Light Deflection 2b"-- Joachim Wambsganss (faculty) Department of Astrophysical Sciences-- "According to Einstein's Theory of Gravity, a ray of light is attracted by a clump of matter. As a consequence of "gravitational lensing", the light ray changes its direction from a straight line by a minute amount when it passes close to a cosmic object. Stars and planets in our Milky Way or in other galaxies can act as "microlenses": They focus the light of a background source in a very characteristic way. The main effect is a time-variable magnification of the background source due to relative motion.In our research, we simulate the effects of light deflection by tracing light rays backward through a field of lensing objects and calculating their deflection. The colors in the resulting two-dimensional maps in the "source plane" reflect the density of light rays, they indicate the magnification of the background source as a function of its position. The sharp "caustic lines" are locations of very high magnification. When a background star moves across such a pattern, we can measure its variable brightness with our telescopes and deduce properties of dark matter or discover extrasolar planets. Figure 2b: This microlensing pattern indicates the magnification of a distant "quasar" as a function of its position; it is produced by the light deflection of many stars in an intervening galaxy. (Zoom of "Light Deflection 1")"

"The Persistence of Memory"-- J. Alex Halderman, Seth D. Schoen, Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, William Paul, Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman, Jacob Appelbaum, and Edward W. Felten Center for Information Technology Policy---"Contrary to what most people think, computer memory is not instantly erased when power is cut. Rather, it fades gradually over a period of seconds to minutes as charge leaks out of the DRAM cells. We loaded a bitmap image into memory on a test computer, then cut power for varying intervals. After 5 seconds (left), the image is nearly indistinguishable from the original; it gradually becomes more degraded, as shown after the computer has been off for 30 seconds, 60 seconds, and 5 minutes. Even after this longest trial, traces of the original remain. The decay shows prominent patterns. Some areas of the memory chip are wired to interpret lack of charge as a 0 bit, others as a 1 bit -- this results in the alternating horizontal bars. The fainter vertical bands are caused by physical variations in the chip, which cause charge to leak out slightly faster or slower in different areas. Our research shows that this little-known phenomenon, called memory remanence, has dangerous security implications. For example, it could be used to break the disk encryption on a stolen laptop and reveal sensitive data."

I was excited to find that the University of Texas at Austin also has their own student Art of Science group, check out their blog spot for updates on their activities.

Hiking the Nature Trails Around Austin

A unique feature of our city is the sheer number of green spaces that we get to enjoy, in fact, Austin’s Parks & Recreation Department uses the tag-line “the city within a park”. Just after graduating from college, I moved away from Austin, but returned later to raise my son here. Just prior to moving back to Austin, I remember having a number of very vivid & beautiful dreams about the trees here. I often tell people that it was the trees that brought me back to Austin. I know there are many people who share my love for all the green spaces that our city has to offer– one such person is Jay. Jay recently moved to Austin from having lived in the Northern part of the U.S. He has been enjoying hiking the Nature Trails throughout Austin and has agreed to contribute to this blog by writing about the distinguishing characteristics about some of the different trails and nature preserves in and around our city from his own perspective. Jay’s first write-up is on hiking around the Barton Creek Greenbelt:

As with most things I do, the urge to hike that day was pure spontaneity. I had been up early to go bird watching, more like bird listening because it was still dark for most of the event. But after some tennis drills and a late lunch, I found my energy level still high. With a clear blue day, temperature just right, and a desire to commune with nature, all I had to do was decide where. My first inclination was Enchanted Rock, but a quick look at the clock told me that was not a reasonable choice.  So I decided to hike one of my favorite Austin sites, Barton Creek. Most of my experience with this trail has been running it. Today I decided to slow down and walk a portion I had not previously visited.

With the recent rains the creek was running full. --Photo used with permission by Jay

Getting across was not an option so starting at the Loop 360 Access point I walked the western edge.

The initial track follows the bluffs around the knee of the creek. The knee is where the creek makes a left hand turn and begins flowing easterly. This turn has created some great spots for picnicking or resting in the shade. As I was just starting I carefully picked my way over this one rough spot on the trail. I have to say thanks to the volunteers that have worked on the trail. They have carved steps in certain portions making it easier to navigate this difficult portion. The good news is once you leave this behind the trail is level, fairly smooth and shaded. This makes for a great stress reliever which is what I was looking for. My eye caught a flash of yellow in the sunlight and as I walked out into a little clearing saw across the creek a huge field of yellow flowers.

You can see clear blue sky, a full creek (just like a river) and the swath of yellow that caught my eye. --Photo used with permission by Jay

I passed Twin Falls which was the major attraction that day. Families of all sizes had made the trek to enjoy the sun, water and beauty offered by this amazing slice of nature. I talked with kids about 2 years old, teenagers and adults, so the trail can be navigated by all. By the way, I would recommend a good pair of running shoes if you don’t have boots. Once passed the falls my pace picked up and I enjoyed stretching my legs out.

This pace ate up the distance quickly but I kept my head up and enjoyed the views. --Photo used with permission by Jay

Not to be outdone by the yellow sunflowers, all sorts of smaller wildflowers were in bloom. This kept my eye and brain engaged as I continued walking north. Approximately 1.5 miles after Twin Falls the path was finally blocked by water and terrain, try as I might a clear trail was not available.  I had wanted to walk to the Scottish Woods Trail Access point, but it was not to be. The return trip proved to be fruitful as I saw both a Texas Coral Snake and a large interesting black beetle.

Texas Coral Snake --Photo used with permission by Jay

--Photo used with permission by Jay

Both were on the trail and keeping an eye pealed can provide for some interesting interactions with wildlife. The snake almost got himself run over by a mountain biker. I was glad to be standing over him as the rider came around a bend and I stopped him just in time. Mr Coral did not seem to mind me taking his picture, but as soon as the mountain biker showed, he high-tailed it into the bush.  The sun was starting to drop below the rim of the canyon as I finished my hike. All in all I thoroughly enjoyed myself and would recommend this trail to anyone. All that is needed is a good pair of shoes, bottle of water, and a desire to see the beauty Barton Creek has to offer.