media to explore

sharing what looks good to us

This microblog features links to items in the media that are innovative, intriguing, useful, or just plain fun to share with the hsci/med/tech community here at OU -- and with anyone else who's interested! Have a suggestion of your own? Great! Send it along to assoc. prof. katherine pandora, the department's contact for digital media.

undergrad hsci/med/tech club: eventful

As the Undergrad hsci/med/tech club gets rolling again for 2011 -- dodging and weaving in between all the snow day cancellations! -- here's a media post that takes its inspiration from some of their activities this academic year. Coming up, is the movie Agora -- a look at the Hypatia story. The watch party will be Wednesday Feb. 16th, in the hsci conference room, 6th floor PHSC, 6:00-9:00, with the estimable Dr. Weldon providing commentary. Everyone's welcome! There's a great post on the movie at the Harvard University Press blog -- they published Maria Dzielska's fabulous treatment of the Hypatia myths and reality -- the reality that Dzielska meticulously reconstructed from historical shards -- Hypatia of Alexandria. It should have been required reading for the filmmakers . . . but sounds like it wasn't ;-)

Last semester, the hsci/med/tech-ers took in the OU Theater Department's production of the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, which offers a startling set of intersections and deflections among science, politics, morality, and the nature of human communication, all wrapped up in a real-world mystery about nuclear knowledge and the race between the Allies and the Axis for control of atomic weapons, as seen in a fateful meeting in 1941 between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. If you haven't seen the play performed in public, there's an excellent filmed version by PBS, or you can read the published play.

Seeing Copenhagen reminded me of Jim Ottaviani's  G.T. Labs, and their wonderful graphic novels on science -- one of which features Bohr: Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped. Other cold war titles include Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, a book on the space race, and published elsewhere, Feynman. Just as the play Copenhagen adds layers of insight and depth to the story through the embodiment, movement, and visualization of the historical events and conceptual science -- more than words -- the graphic novels do likewise, with striking imagery that provokes, underlines, and comments on the textuality of the stories. Once we leave the world of children's picture books behind, the illustration of adult books is often a meager and routine affair (if you get any!) and the verve and challenge of the G.T. Lab books is a wonderfully engaging. (I have to admit, sometimes when I assign them, the students get perplexed -- how do you memorize comic book pictures as test prep?) There's way more -- an exploration of where magic and science intersect, the Dinosaur Wars of Cope and Marsh, and women scientists, for example. It's all comic book history of science: and that's a good thing!

a carnival of study break ideas

Need a study break, but still want to stay in the zone? Maybe something kidlike, fun, or silly will fill the bill! You can warm-up your mind for everything from photosynthesis to DNA to computer-assisted design to speed and velocity to outer space with They Might Be Giants' latest children's album, "Here Comes Science": (and here's a video interview by Time magazine).  A review in boingboing states flat-out that "this is the album They Might Be Giants was put on Earth to record," and throws out the possibility that the song "Put It To the Test" is "possibly the best kids' song ever written about falsifiability in hypothesis formation" (heh!). To top things off, they model the self-correcting nature of science by offering not only "Why Does the Sun Shine? ("the sun is a mass / of incandescent gas") but correct themselves in the follow-up  tune "Why Does the Sun Really Shine?" -- it turns out that "the sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma / the sun's not simply made out of gas / . . . forget what you've been told in the past"). Some of the songs are so catchy you may find yourself chirping away at the oddest moments to "I am a Paleontologist," "The Bloodmobile," or "Electric Car." Works better than caffeine to perk up the brain cells, guaranteed!

If you're working on biology, how about The Rap Guide to Evolution, from the minds of Charles Darwin and Baba Brinkman? You can listen to cuts on "Natural Selection" ("the weak and the strong / Darwin got it goin' on"),  "Artificial Selection," "Unity of Common Descent" and more at his website, and download the album by naming your own price. For a review of Brinkman's theatrical performance of his songs, see Olivia Judson's essay in the New York Times for May 4, 2010, which is where I got the tip. Judson writes that Brinkman spreads the word on evolution:

. . . not by attacking its deniers, but by revealing the subject’s scope, from natural selection to the evolution of human culture and language. At the same time, he teases the audience, sends up post-modernism, mocks himself and satirizes the genre of hip-hop, all with fizzing energy and spell-binding charisma.

Sounds like he deserves an end-of-the-semester A!

Are you less aural, and more a visual hands-on kind of learner? Then what about Crayon Physics, a 2-D Puzzle / Sandbox Game (the Grand Prize Winner at the Independent Games Festival in 2008)? Created by Petri Purho, then a 24-year old student from Helsinki, Finland, Purho explains that "It's a game where your crayon drawings come to life... You draw stuff and your drawings behave physically correctly. As soon as you release the last button, the laws of physics are applied to your drawing." For more, see the game in action, excerpts from some reviews, or the game's forum; you can download a demo or buy it for $20. For fans of doodling and/or mass, acceleration, gravity and the like, it may get those creative energies jumping when you've come to a standstill.

Any readers out there? I'm stocked up for the summer, with the likes of the Jane Austen mash-up Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (1811 and 2009 -- Jane is joined by Ben H. Winters) -- two of my favorite things brought together at last! It's got a giant rampaging mutant lobster, octopi with glittering tentacles, and lots and lots of pirates -- summer reading at its most memorable!

Got any ideas to share? If so, you can add them right here! In any case, best of luck to everyone on their finals and congratulations to those who are graduating this May!

Everyone else, see you back here in August for Fall 2010 and more history of science, technology and medicine media tips!

video break

I was updating my bookmarks and came across the original "shift happens" video one of my students sent to me, and looked to see if there were updates. Here's a more recent version, along with links below to one they've just produced on social media. The focus is on the future of technology, and the argument is that "we are living in exponential times" -- with the corollary, it seems, that everything we thought we knew is little help in charting the course ahead. These little comparative fact nuggets certainly make for provocative viewing. Useful? Loaded? Needing context? Raising issues that get avoided? Missing essentials? Different feel if different music were used? How do they strike you?

Here's the link to their new one on social media (are you part of the global experiment)?

Hope you had a restful break -- if these videos are right, you sure needed it!!!

catching history before it melts

In honor of our latest snowfall in this very snowy winter, here's a link to Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht's site on snow crystals -- where you can find everything from the physics of snowflakes to, yes, historic snowflakes (via Kepler, Descartes, Hooke, Bentley, and Nakaya), time-lapse movies of snowflakes growing in the lab, and instructions on how to go snowflake watching yourself on a winter's day, with magnifier in hand.

If you'd rather stay indoors with an excellent book, the recently published examination of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot would be a good candidate to consider. I'm one-third of the way into it and find it hard to put down, because each thread of the book is so riveting.

Henrietta Lacks was a young African-American woman with cancer who was treated at Johns Hopkins in the post-World War II era of segregation, where medical researchers obtained a sample of her cells and successfully nurtured them in cell culture for research purposes. While Lacks would die in 1951, her cancerous cells were the first that proved to be "immortal," continuing to divide over and over again, multiplying on into the future, being replicated at such a scale that one estimate places their number at 50 million metric tons. The cell line was named HeLa after the first letters of her name, and the cells were the "first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry." The interweaving stories of the Lacks family and the white medical establishment, of the evolution of medical research at the cellular level, of the emergence of bioethical quandaries, of how generations have been dependent on medical breakthroughs made possible with the HeLa line -- each reveals different facets of the reality that we are all Henrietta's children in a profound way, as individuals and as a modern society. Even before I've finished the book, I can see how Skloot's skill and ingenuity aids us in bringing together insights about how the history of science, medicine, and technology can help us ask better questions about the present we live in and the future we envision, while demanding from us a better accounting of the past.

You can hear an interview about the book via podcast from NPR's Science Friday. And here's an excerpt from the book's website.

Also new, is a series of podcasts by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, who is counting down A History of the World in 100 Objects in partnership with the BBC. Last week featured the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus from circa 1550 bce, which "contains 84 different calculations to help with various aspects of Egyptian life, from pyramid building to working out how much grain it takes to fatten a goose." The episode features a discussion of humanity's "early experiments with numbers and how the Egyptians’ understanding of mathematics enabled them to build a state machine, which could manage food supplies and even compute the flood levels of the Nile" (14 minutes). Next up, three days of the mysteries of Ramesses II's giant statue. [For the Mad Magazine version of this sort of learned historical tour, see the Onion's "Top Ten Stories of the Last 4.5 Billion Years." Which was my favorite? There were too many to pick just one :-)

And, speaking of reeeeeeeeeeeeallly old stuff, Archaeology poses the question: "Should We Clone Neanderthals? The Scientific, Legal, and Ethical Obstacles" (by Zach Zorich in the March/April 2010 issue). The folks at the blog 80beats (Discover.com) think it over and conclude that "some things are best left in the past." Take a look -- what do you think?

let's get started!

Starting this weekend, you can catch science on the big screen at the Sunday Science Film Series at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the south end of campus. Start-time is 2 p.m. and the films are free with museum admission (OU students already get free admission to the museum; for admission prices for others, see the museum's info page). First up is the 1943 b&w classic Marie Curie starring Greer Garson, and January's other offering on the 31st is Chain Reaction (1996) with Keanu Reaves. The line-up includes The Story of Louis Pasteur, 28 Days Later, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, Pi, Ek Doctor Ki Maut (Death of a Doctor), Gattaca, and Semmelweis.

You can delve into one of the more chilling episodes in the history of technology at the newly-launched website "Dora and the V-2: Slave Labor in the Space Age," sponsored by the University of Alabama at Huntsville in relation to an exhibit they will open in February. "Dora" was the code name for the concentration camp that housed the slave laborers who built the V-2 rockets produced late in World War II. The website provides overviews, links to a wide array of sources that further flesh out the history, and photographs and other images that bring home the reality behind the scientific and technical feats led by physicists and engineers such as Wernher von Braun and others who were brought to work in the U.S. space program after the war under "Operation Paperclip."

A recent podcast from NPR's Science Friday asks the question: "Is there a biological basis for race?"

The 2010 census form has a box to check for race, but what do the categories mean? Some scientists say there’s no biological basis for dividing people into races. Others say race can be an important marker for disease. Ira Flatow and guests look at the science of race. [Broadcast January 15, 2010 / 35 minutes, 22 seconds]

The guests include Esteban González Burchard, MD, associate professor from UC San Francisco's Depts. of Bioengineering, Therapeutic Sciences and Medicine, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology; Pilar N. Ossorio, associate professor of law and bioethics, University of Wisconsin, School of Law and School of Medicine; and Alan Goodman, past president, American Anthropological Association, co-director, The Race Project, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, Hampshire College.

. . . and, what are you finding out there in the mediascape that looks interesting? Let us know!