Tag Archives: GrrlScientist

A beatbox/bird song musical hybrid

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Thank you to GrrlScientist for your April 21, 2015 post about Jason Mirin and his musical hybrid on the Guardian science blogs (Note: A link has been removed),

I love beatboxing, but as an ornithologist and birder, I am absolutely delighted by this amazing experiment that a fellow New Yorker, Ben Mirin, is working on: he is using birdsong produced by birds that can be found in New York state as the inspiration for his beatboxing.

Mr Mirin is a professional beatboxer, freelance writer and videographer who combined his two passions — beatboxing and birding. Born in Boston, he relocated to New York City in 2013. At that time, he began composing music using local bird songs and his own voice to merge his two interests into a single idea.

“The result was a union of two musical languages whose sounds carry meanings and messages beyond the flow of a melody or the rhythm of a beat”, writes Mr Mirin on his blog, Wingbeat.

GrrlScientist’s April 21, 2015 post hosts the video I have here plus another Mirin recorded in honour of World Wetlands Day in February 2015. She also has more information about Mirin and his work. Or you can go to the horse’s mouth, here’s where you can find Wingbeat (Mirin’s blog).

Sensational Butterflies exhibit and the Blue Morpho

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It’s time to give the Blue Morpho butterfly a little attention that isn’t nanotechnology-inflected. Happily, GrrlScientist has written an April 13, 2015 post for the Guardian science blog network about the blue butterfly featured in an exhibit (Sensational Butterflies) in London (UK) at the Natural History Museum,

Blue morpho butterflies are native to Mexico, Central American and the northern regions of South America. In the wild, as they fly through the thick foliage, their wings provide brief flashes of brilliant blue that are visible from a long distance. This helps them find mates and defend their territories.

The blue morpho lives for only 115 days — and most of their lifetime is spent on “the Three Fs”: feeding, flying and … reproduction. As fuzzy caterpillars, blue morphos are nocturnal and herbivorous; munching their way through the leaves from many tropical plant species by night — or they can be cannibals; munching their way through their siblings!

Here are two views of the Blue Morpho butterfly (topside and bottomside of the wings)

Adult peleides blue morpho, Morpho peleides, wings open. (Also known as the common morpho, or as The Emperor.) Photograph: Thomas Bresson/Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)

Adult peleides blue morpho, Morpho peleides, wings open. (Also known as the common morpho, or as The Emperor.) Photograph: Thomas Bresson/Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)

Adult peleides blue morpho, Morpho peleides, wings closed (Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati, Ohio). Photograph: Greg Hume/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0

Adult peleides blue morpho, Morpho peleides, wings closed (Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati, Ohio). Photograph: Greg Hume/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0

Back to GrrlScientist,

Blue morphos are amongst the largest butterflies in the world, with a wingspan that ranges from 7.5–20 cm (3.0–7.9 inches). The underside of their wings are pigmented with black, brown, tan, orange and white, and with a number of eyespots (ocelli). This colouring provides cryptic camouflage to protect them from sharp-eyed predators, especially at night when the adults roost in the foliage to sleep.

The uppersides of the blue morpho’s wings are vivid metallic blue, edged with black. The blue colouring is not supplied by pigments, but by iridescence, where the scales are arranged in a tetrahedral (diamond) pattern across the wing surface, and where individual scales are comprised of several layers, or lamellae, that reflect incident light repeatedly from each successive layer. …

It’s an interesting description of how colour for the topside of the wings is produced. I would have said the colour is supplied by structures on the wing (see my Feb. 7, 2013 post for more about structural colour which is found in plants, fish, peacock feathers, and elsewhere in nature).

GrrlScientist has more about the Blue Morpho Butterfly, including a video of the butterflies emerging from their chrysalises. As for the exhibition, Sensational Butterflies at the Natural History Museum in London (UK) which opened April 2, 2015 and runs till Sept. 13, 2015, you can find out more here.

One last word about the Blue Morpho, there are several species of butterflies known as ‘blue morphos’ (from the April 13, 2015 post by GrrlScientist),

… the Sensational Butterflies exhibition’s blue morphos are peleides blue morphos, Morpho peleides

Enjoy!

Science, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Sherlock Holmes

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GrrlScientist (Guardian science blogs) has written a review of a Sherlock Holmes book published last year in her Jan. 22, 2014 posting (Note: Links have been removed),

Breathless with anticipation, I breezed through a fun little treatise by James O’Brien, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics [Oxford University Press, 2013; …]. This book is an absorbing and scholarly exploration of the history of the science and forensics described in the Sherlock Holmes stories, which were written more than 100 years ago by Scottish physician and writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Written by an avid “Sherlockian” and emeritus chemistry professor from Missouri State University, this book shows that the fictional Sherlock Holmes characters, their stories and their crime-solving methods are all based in reality. …

….

I particularly enjoyed the history of using fingerprints to identify individuals, how fingerprint analysis became a science and how this new science inspired and informed the development of searchable databases containing millions of individual fingerprints. According to the author, this database provided investigators with the evidence — sometimes within seconds — necessary to resolve cases that had lingered for many years. Professor O’Brien also places fingerprint technology into its historical context, mentioning that fingerprints were recognised as unique identifiers as early as 3000 BC by the ancient Chinese and by the Babylonians in 2000 BC. …

…

The chapter on chemistry — Holmes’ first love — was, of course, quite good. Amongst the topics covered, the author examines the reference materials that were available during Holmes’s lifetime to specifically address the accusation by chemist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that Holmes was “a blundering chemist”. The author concludes that Holmes was neither as bad as Asimov argued, nor as good as originally claimed by Dr Watson, his crime-solving colleague …

While GrrlScientist enjoyed the book she does note this,

Overall, I thought this book was more heavily focused upon exploring the history of science and forensics than clarifying the details of Holmes’s scientific methodologies.

Matthew Hutson had this to say in his Jan. 11, 2013 book review for the Wall Street Journal,

Arthur Conan Doyle draws readers into the process of detection with what his biographer John Dickson Carr called “enigmatic clues.” Holmes signposts a piece of evidence as significant but doesn’t immediately reveal its use, leaving it as an exercise for the reader. “The creator of Sherlock Holmes invented it,” Carr wrote in 1949, “and nobody . . . has ever done it half so well.” In one of the most celebrated examples, Sherlock Holmes quizzes a client about the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” the man says. “That was the curious incident,” remarks Holmes.

Holmes’s supreme rationality is of a piece with his interest in science. “The Scientific Sherlock Holmes,” by James O’Brien, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Missouri State University, explores the forensic methods and scientific content in the Holmes canon as well as his creator’s own scientific background. Born in 1859, Conan Doyle took to books at the encouragement of his mother. Frustrated by the rigidity of his Catholic schooling, he moved toward science. At 17, he began medical school in Edinburgh. There his mentor was Dr. Joseph Bell, a man with sharpened diagnostic abilities who would serve as a model for Holmes. In one instance, Bell gleaned that a woman who had come in with her child was from the town of Burntisland (her accent), had traveled via Iverleith Row (red clay on shoes), had another child (a too-large jacket on the one present) and worked at a linoleum factory (dermatitis on fingers).

Hutson knows a lot about Conan Doyle and, thankfully he’s not shy about sharing;. Although he does mention O’Brien’s book, he seems not all that interested in it,

Mr. O’Brien spends most of his slim book, a volume most suitable for those already fond of Sherlock and not afraid of section titles with catchy names like “Section 4.2,” exploring the various fields that Holmes draws on—principally chemistry, with a little biology and physics. We learn about the use of coal-tar derivatives and handwriting identification in both Holmes’s world and ours. Some techniques, such as fingerprinting, appeared in the stories even before they were widely adopted by real police.

His real passion seems to be about thought processes,

Another look at the cogs under the deerstalker is offered by “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes,” by Maria Konnikova, a psychology graduate student at Columbia University. Following Holmes’s metaphor of the “brain attic,” she describes how Holmes stocks his attic (observation), explores it (creativity), navigates it (deduction) and maintains it (continuing education and practice). In the process, she lays out the habits of mind—both the techniques Holmes employs and the errors he avoids—that we might usefully emulate.

If you want to get a feel for how James (Jim) O’Brien, the author of ‘Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics’ writes,  you can check out his Jan. 25, 2013 posting about his book on the Huffington Post.

Little skates, mermaid purses, nature, and writers

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GrrlScientist has written a fascinating ;piece about skates (fish), poetry, and Twitter for her Dec. 5, 2013 posting on the Guardian Science Blog network (Note: A link has been removed),

Twitter is a wonderful medium. For example, a couple days ago, I met University of Washington Biology Professor Adam Summers on twitter. It turns out that he is Associate Director of Friday Harbor Labs, where I spent a summer taking an intensive molecular neurobiology course during my graduate training in zoology. …

…

“Skates are fabulous animals”, Professor Summers writes in email.

“They make up a quarter of the diversity of cartilaginous fishes and every darn one of the 250 species looks pretty much exactly like every other one.”

Thus, studies into the anatomy and development of one species may provide insight into these processes for other, rarer, species.

“The little skate, also called the hedgehog skate, was one of my go-to organisms for many years”, writes Professor Summers in email.

These studies provide the basis for a physical or a mathematical model that may help understand function. This model is of course tested both against its inspiration and as a predictive tool. For example, the skate’s tail is very important, even for the developing embryo.

“I figured out that it can’t survive on the oxygen that diffuses through the capsule. Instead it has to pump water through by vibrating its tail.”

Perhaps this is the reason that the tail muscles differ from what’s considered normal.

“A wonderful muscle physiologist showed that the muscle in the tail is cardiac muscle rather than the striated muscle it should be”, Professor Summers writes.

While colleagues thought Summers’ specimens were good enough to be compared to visual art, his little skate specimens also inspired a poet (from the posting),

“I got chatting with a friend who teaches a poetry class up here [at Friday Harbor]. Sierra Nelson and I had several long conversations about the similarity of the lens that poets and scientists bring to the world.”

“I think the poem does a much better job of engaging the viewer than my dry prose on the critter.”

Little Skate
Leucoraja erinacea

Littlest of little skates, just barely hatched!
You can still see the remnants
of my yellow egg sac.

And my tail’s a little longer
than my whole body
(I’ll grow into it more eventually).

….

Adam Summers shared one of his images of his ‘stained’ little skate specimens on his twitter feed (pic.twitter.com/UWCKeVMmYB)

Here's an embryo of the little skate, Leucoraja erinacea. pic.twitter.com/UWCKeVMmYB

Here’s an embryo of the little skate, Leucoraja erinacea. pic.twitter.com/UWCKeVMmYB

I recommend reading GrrlScientist’s posting (Inside a mermaid’s purse; A poetic intersection between life and science, art and photography) for the whole story and, for that matter, the whole poem. As for the mermaid purse, this is the name for the little skate’s egg sack when found on the beach.

This all reminded me of Aileen Penner, a writer, poet, and science communications specialist located in Vancouver, Canada and her work in science and creative writing. She wrote a Nov. 19, 2013 posting about the intersection of nature and writing titled: US Forest Service Scientist Says Writers Help Gather “Cultural Data” on our Relationship With the Natural World (Note: Links have been removed),

Who is Fred Swanson you ask? Yes he is a retired U.S. Forest Service scientist and yes he is a Forest Ecology Professor at Oregon State University (OSU), but he is also a key figure in the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. This is a program I have been following since 2006 and greatly admire for their commitment to bring together “the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the clarity of philosophical analysis, and the creative, expressive power of the written word, to find new ways to understand and re-imagine our relation to the natural world.”

In April of 2012, I went to OSU to interview the Director of the Spring Creek Project, Charles Goodrich. I wanted to know how to fund such a long-term interdisciplinary project. Charles talked a lot about Fred Swanson and his enthusiasm for having writers as part of the inquiry process and about Swanson’s personal commitment to writing the arts into scientific funding proposals for his work at the H.J. Andrew Experimental Forest.

Penner was inspired by an Andrew C. Gottleib article (About Earth Scientist Fred Swanson) in Terrain’s Fall 2013 issue and quotes from it throughout her own posting. She also notes this (Note: Links have been removed),

Terrain interviewer Andrew Gottlieb will moderate a panel “Artists in the Old-Growth” with Alison Hawthorne Deming, Fred Swanson, Charles Goodrich and Spring Creek Project Founder, Kathleen Dean Moore at the upcoming AWP conference in Seattle on February 27, 2014. If you are in Seattle for this – go see it!

Before investigating the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2014 conference and the special session any further, here’s a bit more information about the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, from the homepage,

Spring Creek Project engages the most daunting and urgent environmental issues of our times while remembering and sharing our perennial sources of joy, wonder, and gratitude. We are a convening organization that sponsors writers’ residencies, readings, lectures, conversations, and symposia on issues and themes of critical importance to the health of humans and nature. We believe sharing insights, inspiration, and methods from many perspectives increases our understanding of the place of humans in nature. Our goal is to include participants and audience members from every discipline and persuasion, from creative writing and the other arts, from the environmental and social sciences, from philosophy and other humanistic disciplines.

The AWP conference seems mainly focused on fiction and literary nonfiction (at least, that’s what the video highlights [on the 2014 conference homepage] of the 2013 conference would suggest). Here’s more from the 2014 AWP conference homepage,

Each year, AWP holds its Annual Conference & Bookfair in a different city to celebrate the authors, teachers, students, writing programs, literary centers, and publishers of that region. More than 12,000 writers and readers attended our 2013 conference, and over 650 exhibitors were represented at our bookfair. AWP’s is now the largest literary conference in North America. We hope you’ll join us in 2014.
2014 AWP Conference & Bookfair

Washington State Convention Center &
Sheraton Seattle Hotel
February 26 – March 1, 2014
Key Dates:

November 8, 2013: deadline for purchasing a conference program ad
November 15, 2013: offsite event schedule opens
January 22, 2014: preregistration rates end
January 23, 2014: will-call registration begins
February 26, 2014: onsite registration begins

Here are some details about the R231 Artists in the Old-Growth: OSU’s Spring Creek Project & the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest
AWP 2014 conference session,

Room 602/603, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6
Thursday, February 27, 2014
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
How can a residency program empower and generate inquiry and creative responses to our astonishing world? How can a long-term, place-based program affect the way we see our relation to the forest? The world? Join this discussion with the founders and participants of the Oregon State University-based Spring Creek Project that brings writers to a place of old-growth forest and ground-breaking forest science.

Andrew Gottlieb Moderator

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Book Reviews Editor for Terrain.org, and his writing has appeared in journals like Ecotone, ISLE, Poets & Writers, and Salon.com. He’s the author of a chapbook of poems, Halflives, and he won the 2010 American Fiction Prize.
Fred Swanson

Fred Swanson co-directs the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program based at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascade Range, which has hosted more than forty writers in residence and a variety of humanities-science interactions. He is a retired US Forest Service scientist.
Kathleen Dean Moore

Kathleen Dean Moore is an essayist and environmental ethicist, author of Riverwalking, Holdfast, Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort, and co-editor of the climate ethics book, Moral Ground. She is co-founder and now Senior Fellow of the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University.
Alison Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming is author of four poetry books, most recently Rope, and three nonfiction books with Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit forthcoming. She is Director and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.
Charles Goodrich

Charles Goodrich is the author of three books of poetry, A Scripture of Crows; Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden; and Insects of South Corvallis; and a collection of essays, The Practice of Home. He serves as Director for the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word

One last note about nature and writing, I interviewed Sue Thomas, author of Technobiophilia: nature and cyberspace, in a Sept. 20,,2013 posting about her book and other projects.

The Owl and the Pussycat’s Edward Lear commemorated in London exhibit

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An artist, science illustrator, poet, and more, Edward Lear is being celebrated by Britain’s Royal Society on the bicentenary of his birth as per GrrlScientist’s Aug. 29, 2012 posting on the Guardian Science blogs,

Do you love art, science and books? If so, then the Royal Society has a real treat for you! As of today, the Royal Society is hosting a public display of Edward Lear’s works. Displayed works include rare and valuable books, drawings and lithographs. Edward Lear, a British artist, scientific illustrator, author and poet, is perhaps most famous for his endearing nonsense poetry, particularly “The Owl and the Pussycat”.

I strongly encourage visiting GrrlScientist’s posting as she has a marvelous image of toucans (as illustrated by Lear) and a charming video of a song based on The Owl and the Pussycat.

The exhibition runs from Aug. 29 – October 26, 2012. It’s free to the public but you must arrange an appointment. From the exhibition webpage,

Visiting times
The exhibition is open on Mondays to Fridays from 10am – 5pm. To arrange a visit please call +44 (0)20 7451 2606 or email .

Special weekend opening
The exhibition will also be open on Sat 22 and Sun 23 Sep 2012, when the Royal Society participates in Open House Weekend 2012. No appointment is necessary [sic] for visits during this weekend.

Unfortunately, the Royal Society has a fairly draconian approach to sharing its materials (from their Terms and Conditions webpage),

Intellectual property rights

We are the owner or the lawful representative of the owner of all intellectual property rights in our site, and in the material published on it.  Those works are protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world.  All such rights are reserved.

You may view the Images available on our site provided for the purpose of preview.

You must not use in whole or in part any materials on our site for purposes other than your private, personal use without obtaining a Licence to do so from us.

If you print off, copy or download any part of our site and/ or any materials published on it in breach of these terms, your right to use our site will cease immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made. Unauthorised use of our site and/ or materials may lead to the institution of legal proceedings against you.

I trust that copying portions of the exhibition webpage and portions of their Terms and Conditions does not contravene the copyright they are asserting for their materials.

Sniffing old books

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I don’t know if it’s nano but this story about old books and their smell ‘speaks’ to me. Thanks to GrrlScientist for her May 1, 2012 posting about this interesting work on degradomics,

Every time I catch a whiff of that special old books smell, I am transported through time and space to the cool welcoming basement of The Strand Bookstore in New York City, where I spent many hot humid summer afternoons, searching for some used book I’ve never seen nor even heard of, or sitting on the cold concrete floor, reading. The smell of old books isn’t pleasant, exactly, but it is unmistakable — and powerfully evocative.

“A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness,” writes an international team of chemists from University College London (UCL) and the University of Ljubljana (UL) in Slovenia in their scientific paper ([Material Degradomics: On the Smell of Old Books] doi:10.1021/ac9016049 [this paper is behind a paywall despite the fact the paper was published in 2009]).

Here’s an entertaining video about this work,

Not all old books are deteriorating and expelling gases. There are some very old books that are in pretty good condition. The problem arises with the paper production techniques of the 19th and 20th centuries. We put a lot of acid in our papers and that’s what’s breaking down the material. From GrrlScientist’s May 1, 2012 posting,

The one factor that speeds a book’s death more rapidly than any other is acidity: paper that is too acidic significantly decreases a book’s lifespan. These papers are cheap and easy to mass produce. This explains why a newspaper clipping left in the pages of a book creates an ugly orange-brown stain on the book’s pages. But books have also been printed on acidic paper. Many of the books now crowding onto shelves in used bookstores were published in the 19th and 20th centuries; yellowing books with brown spots and crackling bindings that were mass printed on cheap paper that was too acidic. These books are aging rapidly whilst much older books are still in good shape because the paper they were printed on was much purer.

The paper’s lead author, Matija Strlič, is a senior lecturer at the University College of London (UCL) and he has a research interest that I did not realize existed, Heritage Smells,

Research interests span multi-disciplinary research linked to cultural heritage. The focus of these efforts are the development of new scientific tools and methods of study of heritage materials, collections and their interactions with the environment. Among the pioneering contributions are the development of degradomics, use of Near Infrared Spectrometry with chemometric data analysis in heritage science, use of chemiluminometry for studies of degradation of organic heritage materials, and studies of emission and absorption of volatile degradation products in heritage collections. My current research interests include development and use of damage functions and integrated modeling of heritage collections.

Presently, Matija Strlic is the Principal Investigator of the UK AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage Programme project Collections Demography (2010-2013) and a Co-Investigator on Heritage Smells! (2010-2013).  He is also involved in  several other projects, including the EU projects POPART (2009-2012, “Preservation of plastic artefacts in museum collections”) and TEACH (2009-2011, “Technologies and tools to prioritize assessment and diagnosis of air pollution impact on immovable and movable cultural heritage”), and UK Technology Strategy Board-funded project Heritage Intelligence (2009-2011).
In the past few years he has been  involved in other large collaborative projects: coordination of SurveNIR (2005-2008, “Near Infrared Tool for Collection Surveying”), scientific coordination of Papylum (2001-2004, “Chemiluminescence – a novel tool in paper conservation studies”), and participation in PaperTreat (2005-2008, “Evaluation of mass deacidification processes”), InkCor (2002-2005, “Stabilisation of iron-gall ink containing paper”) and MIP (2002-2005, “Metals in paper”). He co-coordinated the 8th European Conference on Research for Protection, Conservation and Enhancement of Cultural Heritage, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 10-13 November 2008.

Our paper is crumbling, eh? That means song sheets with the notations from composers such as Beethoven, etc.; original editions of important books of literature and nonfiction; drawings and prints by important artists; and scientific and other research papers; in other words,  historical documents of all kinds will be disappearing unless researchers can find a solution to the problem.

Math puzzles and sunflowers at the Manchester Science Festival

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The Manchester Science Festival (UK) has organized a citizen science project in honour of the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s (Wikipedia essay) birth (from the essay [Note: I have removed links and bibiographic references]),

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (… TEWR–ing; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He was stockily built, had a high-pitched voice, and was talkative, witty, and somewhat donnish. He showed many of the characteristics that are indicative of Asperger syndrome.

Here’s more about the project, thanks to the GrrlScientist April 16, 2012 posting on the Guardian Science blogs,

What do sunflowers and Alan Turing share in common? Basically, Turing noticed that the number of spirals in the seed patterns of sunflower heads often conform to a number that appears in the mathematical sequence called the Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…). Other plants also show this pattern. When Turing came to the University of Manchester, he began exploring how this phenomenon might help us to understand the growth of plants, a field now known as phyllotaxis.

Tragically, Turing died before his work was complete, so the Manchester Science Festival is asking for you to help mathematicians explore Turing’s ideas about plant growth.

This video on the GrrlScientist posting (there are other related videos in the posting) by Brady Haran, the video journalist who amongst other projects films the Numberphile series, explains Turing’s interest in sunflowers and Fibonacci’s spiral,

You don’t have to be a mathematician to join in although it seems that it’s best if you’re in Manchester (the festival doesn’t specify residence there as a requirement), from the Turing’s Sunflowers webpage on the Manchester Science Festival website,

This spring, we need your green fingers! Join Manchester Science Festival and MOSI (Museum of Science & Industry) for a mass planting of sunflowers as part of an experiment to solve the mathematical riddle that Turing worked on before his death in 1954.

…

Brighten up Manchester and the Nation, whilst helping mathematicians to explore Turing’s theories about plant growth. We need you to sow sunflower seeds in April and May, nurture the plants throughout the summer and when the sunflowers are fully grown we’ll be counting the number of spirals in the seed patterns in the sunflower heads. Don’t worry – expertise will be on hand to help count the seeds and you’ll be able to post your ‘spiral counts’ online.

The results will be announced during the Manchester Science Festival 2012 (27 Oct – 4 Nov), alongside a host of cultural events connected to Turing’s life and legacy, at MOSI, Manchester Museum and other cultural spaces.

You can find out more about the Manchester Science Festival, which runs from Oct. 27 – Nov. 4, 2012, here.

Although they don’t identify it on the Turing’s Sunflowers webpage,I’m pretty sure this is a bronze of Turing seated on a bench. Someone has thoughtfully given him a bouquet of sunflowers,

Bronze of Alan Turing in Manchester. (downloaded from http://www.manchestersciencefestival.com/connect/getinvolved/sunflowers)

Have fun!

Do you have any suggestions for the diamond engraved with Queen Elizabeth 2’s image?

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The folks at the University of Nottingham’s Periodic Table of Videos have come up with a way to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s 60th anniversary (diamond) jubilee of her reign. Thanks to the April 11, 2012 posting by GrrlScientist on the Guardian science blogs I’ve gotten a really explanation of how a focused gallium ion beam can be used to engrave diamonds.  In my April 9, 2012 posting about computers in diamonds and a ring that’s 100% diamond, I noted my interest in focused ion beams and I’m delighted to include this video where scientist Martyn Poliakoff offers an explanation and demonstration,

If you do have any suggestions for what they could do with this diamond (I like Poliakoff’s suggestion of sending it to institutions that have diamond-jubilee themed exhibits for display), you can contact them via email periodicvideos@gmail.com or one of two twitter accounts @periodicvideos or @UniofNottingham.

Since posting on April 9, 2012 I’ve had this old pop song (‘This Diamond Ring’ by Gary Lewis and the Playboys) on a continuous loop in my brain,

I hope by placing the video here, the song will finally disappear. (I’m also hoping it doesn’t get replaced with ‘Diamonds are a girl’s best friend’.)

ETA April 16, 2012: There’s a bit more detail about the engraving process, which took place in the Nottingham Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Centre [NNNC] in this April 16, 2012 news item by Tara De Cozar on phyorg.com.

Art/science project (Clipperton) in Mexico

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This art/science project (Clipperton Project) is taking place off Mexico’s Pacific coast. From the Feb. 29, 2012 news item on Physorg.com,

Twenty artists and scientists from eight countries set sail Thursday [March 1, 2012] for Clipperton Island, an isolated French atoll off Mexico’s Pacific coast, to investigate effects of climate change and the island’s history.

Named after British pirate John Clipperton, the uninhabited island, also known as the “Island of Passion,” is some 2.3 square miles (six square kilometers) in size, has no drinkable water and is home to poisonous crabs and rats.

Here’s more about the Clipperton Project from a Feb. 25, 2011 news item on Huffington Post,

The Clipperton Project is a multi-disciplinary, four-nation arts and science project which aims to take some of the very best practitioners in the arts and sciences from Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States and France on an expedition to the forgotten island of Clipperton in October 2011.

The participants will then produce work based on the history of the atoll (specifically Mexico’s damned colony of 1917) and its ecological, geological and human history in order to paint a cross-cultural portrayal of this unique island in the middle of the Pacific, displaying its work at some of the most important forums in these countries between 2011 and 2014.

I gather from the item on the Huffington Post that this expedition has been rescheduled at least once. I’m glad to see they’ve been able to pull it off.

The latest news from the expedition organized by Jonathan Bonfliglio (from http://www.clippertonproject.com/ Note: this looks like the home page so it might not always feature the latest news and images but the Expeditions webpage is sure to feature the most up-to-date information live from the ship.),

The team has arrived in Cabo Pulmo National Park. They will be spending the day there with the local community and will be involved in a series of events in association with Greenpeace México. The events are intended to promote the fascinating story of this threatened marine reserve. Accompanying them on this leg of the journey are TV Azcteca (Mex), France 24 (France) and National Geographic (international).

One of the latest images from the expedition,

Clipperton Island on Day 2 (March 2, 2012) of Clipperton Island art/science project

ETA June 26, 2013: A commenter has noted that [this] is not an image of Clipperton Island. In reviewing the project website’s Gallery of images, I’ve not been able to find this picture and am at a loss to explain this error.

Sometimes you just have to love the internet. One minor question, why aren’t there any Canadians on this expedition? It just seems odd since we are part of North America along with the US and Mexico and we have strong ties historically with the UK and France not to mention that we do a lot of ocean-based research ourselves. In fact, GrrlScientist one of the Guardian science bloggers featured a video from Ocean Networks Canada Observatory on her March 1, 2012 posting, which you can view there or on the Ocean Networks Vimeo channel. Here’s one of the earlier videos from their channel (it’s a bit heavy on the marketing),

Canada’s Ocean Observatory from Ocean Networks Canada on Vimeo.

Personally, I think they could have done with a poet or two helping out with the narration. I hope that in the future they’ll be inspired by the Clipperton Project approach.