Creativity in Biology

Volcanic Lightning: What causes it?

The cause of ordinary lightning in a thunderstorm is still being studied, and the nature of volcanic lightning is even less clear. One hypothesis suggests that emitted bubbles of magma or volcanic ash have an electrical charge, and when they move there are separated areas. However, volcanic lightning may be caused by collisions and suggestive charge in volcanic dust.

What if building materials were more like skin? Flexible, porous, reactive? That’s the idea behind Doris Kim Sung’s buildings. Her architectural designs are built from thermo-bimetals, smart materials that respond dynamically to temperature and sunlight, curling and shifting to control the amount of sunlight allowed into the building and the amount of hot air left in or sent out.

Doris was a biology major before she took up architecture, and she found inspiration from an unexpected creature: a grasshopper.

“Grasshoppers have a different kind of breathing system,” Doris says in her talk at TEDxUSC, “They breathe through holes in their sides called spiracles, and they bring the air through and it moves through their system to cool them down.

I’m trying to look at how we can consider that in architecture too, how we can bring air through holes in the sides of a building … When it’s cold, the thermo-bimetal is flat so it will constrict air from passing through the blocks, and [when it’s warm], the thermo-bimetal curls and allows that air to pass through…

It’s a completely different thing [than normal buildings], because you can imagine that air could potentially be coming through the walls instead of opening windows.

You can see “Bloom,” an example of Doris’s work above. The installation is 20 feet tall and made with 14,000 completely unique pieces of thermo-bimetal, whose curling and shifting create a building that “breathes,” regulating its own temperature. Learn more about Doris’s work by watching her talk here, and hear about new projects in this interview with The Creators Project.

Pocket-size compendia were produced by specialist instrument makers. This one contains the universe in a box! Provided its owner had basic understanding of math, astronomy, astrology and geography, he or she could use the dials, tables and maps to plan journeys, predict the time of sunset in many towns in Europe (useful when travelling), make astrological predictions, measure the heights of stars and configure the positioning of the stars for any time in the past or future. 

Those Instruments were also made as treasury items. By the 1560s, it was fashionable for wealthy gentlemen to have a sound understanding of all branches of learning, from arts and literature to mathematics and science. More: V&A

Bioluminescence — the ability for organisms to generate their own light — has evolved independently at least 50 times. All around the world, oceans glow, trees sparkle, and the forest floor flashes. It may be difficult to see many of these phenomena, but take a tour with us through the land, air and sea as we survey one of nature’s most awe-inspiring spectacles.  

Atlas Obscura’s Essential Guide To Bioluminescence

via atlasobscura

This is awesome. For more bioluminescence fun (and for those of you who have iPads), the FREE APP “Creatures of Light” is a companion app to the Natural History Museum’s “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence" exhibit. Description and images below via iTunes:

Enjoy interactive animations, photo galleries, and videos that reveal the beauty of this amazing natural phenomenon, how it works, and how scientists study it. Each chapter of the app, which is adapted from the iPad content featured throughout the exhibition gallery, is set to a symphonic soundtrack composed exclusively for Creatures of Light.

Cannot recommend this flash game explaining microarrays enough. Not only is it a nostalgia trip (replete with crunchy sound effects) it also gives you a solid walkthrough of the boring labour that accompanies genomic sequencing (and is a mainstay of many lab technicians day to day). It’s also wonderfully fastidious about ensuring all pipettes are discarded!

Surreal Photos of Singapore’s Solar-Powered Supertrees | via

As CNN reported on the supertrees, “It’s pretty innovative stuff. The structures mimic the ecological functions of real trees through their environmentally sustainable features. Some have photovoltaic cells on their canopies to harvest solar energy to light up at night, others are integrated with cooled conservatories and serve as air exhaust receptacles.”

Awesome orthographic projections of hypercubes; a 8-cube, a 12-cube and a 50-cube respectively.

Fathom the Universe

When art meets engineering

The GIFs above show Metropolis II, a kinetic sculpture of the modern bustling city.  The project — by artist Chris Burden — took nearly four years to create and features 1,100 cars zipping around 18 roadways, including one six-laner. “The noise and level of activity are both mesmerizing and anxiety provoking,” he explains.  

Burden has created a number of large-scale installations that walk the line between engineering and sculpture:

As an art-school graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, his friends were physics students who played around in the lab the way he experimented and daydreamed in his studio. “They’d say, ‘We follow our hunches, we freeze things to 300 degrees below zero and then we hit them with hammers,’ ” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of what I do.’”

Famous scientist names, illustrated, by Kapil Bhagat.

Iori Tomita - New World Transparent Specimens (2005-)

Fisherman-turned-artist in Yokohama City, Japan, Tomita creates art using the skeletons of various dead marine specimens, which he preserves and then colors with bright shades of dye.

The process strips down each creature to the toughest parts of its remains and Tomita has dyed more than 5,000 dead creatures since 2005, which is amazing, considering each piece takes at least a few weeks to complete, and some up to a year.

Anatomy Vector Posters

"For Anatomy class I wanted to create a series of 5 posters, that had a vector illustration of various parts of the body, with the only things being a name. The illustrations were inspired by those little diagrams that you always see in science classroom text books from grade school. I wanted to “simplify” and borderline “minimalize” the diagrams and place them on a textured background to bring out the “smooth and simple” vector illustration.”

The original meteorite weighted just over a thousand kilogram (~2k pounds), but the rock was so brilliant that everybody wanted a piece of it. Since then it has been divided into dozens of thin slices and auctioned or distributed around the world. Fukang is possibly the most stunning extraterrestrial piece of rock man has ever seen.

Microorganisms are very diverse; they include all of the prokaryotes, namely the bacteria and archaea; and various forms of eukaryotes, comprising the protozoa, fungi, algae, microscopic plants (green algae), and animals such as rotifers and planarians. Some microbiologists also classify viruses as microorganisms, but others consider these as nonliving. Most microorganisms are microscopic.

Microorganisms live in every part of the biosphere including soil, hot springs, on the ocean floor, high in the atmosphere and deep inside rocks within the Earth’s crust (see also endolith). Microorganisms are crucial to nutrient recycling in ecosystems as they act as decomposers. As some microorganisms can fix nitrogen, they are a vital part of the nitrogen cycle, and recent studies indicate that airborne microbes may play a role in precipitation and weather.

Iridescent butterfly wings

Iridescent surfaces, such as butterfly wings, help animals to elude potential predators. When these insects fly, the upper surface of their wings continually changes from bright blue to dull brown because the angle of the light striking the wing changes. As the butterflies move their wings up and down during flight, they seem to disappear, and then reappear a short distance away, looking like ethereal flashes of bright blue light. The dark undersides of their wings strengthen this effect. Combined with an undulating pattern of flight, this ability to change color quickly makes them difficult for predators to pursue.

The wings of butterflies and moths consist of a colorless translucent membrane covered by a layer of scales (the name of the order is Lepidoptera, meaning “scaly wings”). Each scale is a flattened outgrowth of a single cell and is about 100 µm long and 50 µm wide. The scales overlap like roof tiles and completely cover the membrane, appearing as dust to the naked eye.

The iridescence is caused by multiple slit interference. Sunlight contains a full range of light wavelengths. “Interference” occurs when light hitting the wing interacts with light reflected off the wing.

Light is a wave. If the crests and the troughs of the waves are aligned, or in phase, they will cause constructive interference, and iridescence is the result. One light wave hits the first groove, and a second light wave travels half of a wavelength to another groove, and is then reflected back in phase with the first.

If the crest of one wave meets the trough of another wave (out of phase), they will cancel each other out, as destructive interference occurs.

New from Danny Quirk! 

Newest back piece detailing the DEEP intrinsics, and Intermediate intrinsics of the back, accompanied by a step by step progress of the piece. This one took FOREVER, the first piece in a long while to break the 12 hr mark! latex / sharpie / acrylic