The sphere of knowledge

Fossil

Mr. Karl Deckart

Eckental, Germany

Point and Shoot Nautilus Magazine

Reconnected

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Pendle Witch Trials, artist Philippe Handford connected illegally felled trees together along the 2012 Pendle Sculpture Trail. His sculpture, Reconnected 1, features a tree trunk joined with its stump with a smoothly curving metal spine and slices of wood. Reconnected 2 consists of four tree stumps. The stumps are joined in pairs to create two crossing arches. Like the accused “witches” of the Pendle Witch Trials, the trees used in Handford’s sculptures were irresponsibly executed. Handford’s pieces were inspired by the location and were designed to look as if they are falling. Hadford is one among the four artists who were asked to create pieces for the trail. The other artists include Sarah McDade, Steve Blaylock, and Martyn Bednarczuk.

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The development of new medicine is problematic because laboratories cannot replicate the human body’s environment, making it difficult to determine how patients will respond to treatment. At TEDxBoston, Geraldine Hamilton demonstrates how scientists can implant living human cells into microchips that mimic the body’s conditions. These “organs-on-a-chip" can be used to study drug toxicity, identify potential new therapies, and could lead to safer clinical trials. A cross-disciplinary team of researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University are mimicking life-threatening conditions in microchips that are lined by living human cells. These ‘organs-on-a-chip" can be used to study drug toxicity, identify potential new therapies, and open up a whole new way to think about clinical trials.

Anaïs Nin would approve.

Silencing extra chromosomes in cell cultures could lead to new treatments for the disorder

The insertion of one gene can muzzle the extra copy of chromosome 21 that causes Down’s syndrome, according to a study published today in Nature. The method could help researchers to identify the cellular pathways behind the disorder’s symptoms, and to design targeted treatments.

“It’s a strategy that can be applied in multiple ways, and I think can be useful right now,” says Jeanne Lawrence, a cell biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, and the lead author of the study.

Lawrence and her team devised an approach to mimic the natural process that silences one of the two X chromosomes carried by all female mammals. Both chromosomes contain a gene called XIST (the X-inactivation gene), which, when activated, produces an RNA molecule that coats the surface of a chromosome like a blanket, blocking other genes from being expressed. In female mammals, one copy of the XIST gene is activated — silencing the X chromosome on which it resides.

Lawrence’s team spliced the XIST gene into one of the three copies of chromosome 21 in cells from a person with Down’s syndrome. The team also inserted a genetic ‘switch’ that allowed them to turn on XIST by dosing the cells with the antibiotic doxycycline. Doing so dampened expression of individual genes along chromosome 21 that are thought to contribute to the pervasive developmental problems that comprise Down’s syndrome. (via Researchers Turn Off Down Syndrome Genes: Scientific American)

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In a photo lab far, far away…

Ottawa-based artist Dante Penman takes the traditional process of the photogram, and completely turns it around. With a bit of chemical manipulation, his photograms become chemigrams, a process invented in 1956 by Pierre Cordier. What this entails, is that the developing chemicals are not placed evenly on the photopaper. It is the Abstract Expressionism of photography (a connection which Penman made in his artists’ statement). Instead of just painting with developer, Penman adds three-dimensional botanical aspects, such as fern leaves, to mimic the effects of light from pictures in space. Chemistry, botany and astronomy all play pivotal roles in his work.

The Beauty of Lava

Connections: The Tree of Life and Death

Connections are everywhere, be they symbolic or literal. Every connection has its purpose, from the tiny fibers of an adult human fibroblast cell, which connects (or adheres) to extracellular matrixes, to trees, with their deep roots, connecting themselves to the ground. See, even these two seemingly different objects, with their own unique connections, can also find a way to be connected to each other. A photograph of a network of adult human fibroblast cells looks oddly similar to that of a pink tree (taken by Heather Champ) found in San Francisco, but, where the cells actually help produce more cells, more life, the pink tree is in fact, dead. It can no longer grow or blossom, like the cells in their own way. That does not mean this tree cannot still be admired aesthetically in some way.

An unknown artist, upon hearing of the death of the tree, decided to give it new life by transforming it into a small but significant urban art piece. Though it was taken down not long after, it shows that even when dead, natural objects such as trees can still be used to make beautiful art.

So artists go one step further, and create art long after a tree has been cut down and transformed into a new object; a piece of paper. Artist Emma Taylor creates a series of work called “From Within A Book” where she takes pages of a book and sculpts various scenes, such as a stork carrying a baby or a person reading a book. One work that particularly stands out is that of a large tree, coming out from between two pages. It reminded me of the pink tree, and even of the fibroblast cells.  Like the pink tree, the tree used to make the pages is long dead, but the artist has taken the pages, connecting them together like cells, to create a new tree.