Science

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Art Science

Outbreak: Hand Cut Paper Microbes and Pathogens by Rogan Brown

Artist Rogan Brown (previously) just completed work on his latest paper artwork titled Outbreak, a piece he describes as an exploration “of the microbiological sublime.” Over four months in the making, the work depicts an array of interconnected sculptures—entirely hand cut from paper—based on the smallest structures found within the human body: cells, microbes, pathogens, and neurons. Outbreak represents nearly four months of tedious planning, cutting and assembly. He shares about his process:

I am inspired in part by the tradition of scientific drawing and model making, and particularly the work of artist-scientists such as Ernst Haeckel. But although my approach involves careful observation and detailed “scientific” preparatory drawings, these are always superseded by the work of the imagination; everything has to be refracted through the prism of the imagination, estranged and in some way transformed.

You can see more details over in his portfolio.

Photography Science

Amazing Solar Flare Eruptions Captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory

This amazing composite image taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (Little SDO) shows a series of significant solar eruptions that occurred over a period of three days back in January of 2013. The photo was created using three wavelengths of light that have been colorized in red, green, and blue to better show the dynamics of each eruption. You can read more about solar scientist Nathalia Alzate’s findings regarding the event over on this Facebook post. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

Design Science

Unearth the Secrets of the Green Kingdom with the ‘Plants’ App from Tinybop

You might remember an awesome app mentioned here a few months ago from the creative team over at Tinybop called The Human Body. The educational app takes you deep inside the, erm, bowels of the human body using artwork from illustrator and designer Kelli Anderson. Less than a year later we get to see the latest addition to Tinybop’s Explorer’s Library series, Plants.

The educational title lets you explore two interactive dioramas (forest and desert) illustrated by Marie Caudry where you learn about the lifecycle of plants and how they interact with the rest of the world. Tundra and grassland biomes coming soon.

Tinybop also invited Anderson back in a partnership with Daniel Dunnam to create this paper stop motion short to promote Plants. Download the app here here. (via Colossal Swissmiss)

Science

Incredible Supercell Thunderstorm Time-lapse Over Kansas by Stephen Locke

Over the past few days there have been several time-lapse videos circulating around the web of a supercell storm forming over the skies in Wyoming. While that video is incredible, this footage by photographer Stephen Locke, captured near Climax, Kansas on May 10th of this year, is even more astounding. A massive vortex of clouds, rain, lightning, and a clearly visible sunset to boot. (via Vimeo)

Photography Science

Fantastic Fungi: The Startling Visual Diversity of Mushrooms Photographed by Steve Axford

To think any one of these lifeforms exists in our galaxy, let alone on our planet, simply boggles the mind. Photographer Steve Axford lives and works in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales in Australia where he spends his time documenting the living world around him, often traveling to remote locations to seek out rare animals, plants, and even people. But it’s his work tracking down some of the world’s strangest and brilliantly diverse mushrooms and other fungi that has resulted in an audience of online followers who stalk his work on Flickr and SmugMug to see what he’s captured next.

Axford shares via email that most of the mushrooms seen here were photographed around his home and are sub-tropical fungi, but many were also taken in Victoria and Tasmania and are classified as temperate fungi. The temperate fungi are well-known and documented, but the tropical species are much less known and some may have never been photographed before. Mushrooms like the Hairy Mycena and the blue leratiomyces have most likely never been found on the Australian mainland before, and have certainly never been photographed in an artistic way as you’re seeing here.

It was painfully difficult not to include more of Axford’s photography here, so I urge you to explore further. All photos courtesy the photographer. (awkwardsituationist.tumblr)

Design Science

The Cyanometer Is a 225-Year-Old Tool for Measuring the Blueness of the Sky

Hot on the heels of a post earlier this week about centuries-old guide for mixing watercolors, I stumbled onto this 18th century instrument designed to measure the blueness of the sky called a Cyanometer. The simple device was invented in 1789 by Swiss physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt who used the circular array of 53 shaded sections in experiments above the skies over Geneva, Chamonix and Mont Blanc. The Cyanometer helped lead to a successful conclusion that the blueness of the sky is a measure of transparency caused by the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. You can learn more at the Royal Society of Chemistry. (via Free Parking)