Category Archives: public perceptions

Art is a feeling in my body (and yours too)

I stumbled across this piece of research about the same time as I received a book from the library (requested months ago), “All the Beauty in the World; The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me” by Patrick Bringley. 2023 (Simon and Schuster). The author is describing his earliest experience of art in the context of starting a new job as a guard at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the wake of his brother’s death,

Roaming the old master wing, i was stopped and held fast by Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters, from 1565. I responded to that great painting in a way that I now believe is fundamental to the peculiar power of art. Namely: I experienced the great beauty of the picture even as I had no idea what to do with that beauty. I couldn’t discharge the feeling by talking about it—there was nothing much to say. What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint—silent, direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest. And I didn’t know what to make of that. It is always hard to know what to make of that. As a guard, I will be watching countless visitors respond in their own ways to the curious feeling. [all emphases mine; p. 10]

This research into art and its effects on you is focused solely on digitized paintings viewed on screens (more details about with paintings follow after the citation and link to the paper). With that in mind, from a March 27, 2023 news item on ScienceDaily,

People all around the world are drawn to creating and consuming art, and human emotions are often a central subject in visual artworks as well as in music and performance art. However, the mechanisms underlying the feelings that art evokes remain poorly characterised.

A new study reveals how viewing visual art affects our emotions. The research subjects viewed different kinds of artworks and described the feelings that the art stimulated in their bodies. The researchers recorded the subjects’ eye movement while they viewed the art. In addition, the subjects assessed what kind of emotions each piece of art evoked.

I find the image illustrating the research quite fascinating,

Caption: The image shows the bodily sensations evoked by art (A) as well as the most interesting areas in the paintings (B) and eye movements while viewing the art (C). Credit: Lauri Nummenmaa

A March 27, 2023 University of Turku (Finland) press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, explains the research,

“Viewing the art evoked many different kinds of feelings and emotions in people. Even though many of the pieces handled sad or scary topics, the emotions that the people experienced were mainly positive. The bodily sensations evoked by art also contributed to the emotions: the stronger the body’s reaction was to the artwork, the stronger were the emotions experienced by the subject,” says Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from the Turku PET Centre at the University of Turku, Finland.

“In the artworks, human figures were the most interesting subject and were looked at the most. People have a tendency to empathise with each other’s emotions and this is probably also the case when we view human figures in art. The human emotions presented in art pieces can be absorbed by the viewer unnoticed, through so-called mirroring,” says Academician Riitta Hari from Aalto University.

Altogether 1,186 people from different countries participated in the study and they assessed the emotions evoked by over 300 artworks. The research was conducted with online surveys and eye movement recordings in the laboratory.

“Our results suggest that our bodies have a significant role in the aesthetic experience. Bodily sensations can draw people to art: art evokes feelings in the body, and such stimulation of the body’s pleasure centres feels pleasant to the viewer. This is why the emotions and bodily sensations evoked by art can be used, for example, in mental health rehabilitation and care,” Professor Nummenmaa recounts. 

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Bodily feelings and aesthetic experience of art by Lauri Nummenmaa & Riitta Hari. Cognition and Emotion DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2023.2183180 Published online: 13 Mar 2023

This paper is open access.

It looks to me, based on what’s described in the introduction, WikiArt’s homepage (source of the digitized paintings used in the study) and the list of famous paintings, that they have focused heavily on European art, Note 1: Links have been removed; Note 2: Researchers have limited funds and may have to constrain their interests,

Emotion is central to art. Humans all around the world are drawn to creating and consuming art due to its capability to evoke emotions (Chatterjee & Vartanian, Citation2014; Zentner et al., Citation2008), and human emotions are also a central subject of numerous artworks ranging from The Scream by Edvard Munch to The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. Emotions coordinate physiological and behavioural activation patterns to promote survival and govern decision-making across contexts ranging from mate selection (Johnston, Citation2006) to feeding (Spence et al., Citation2016) and environmental preferences (Kaplan, Citation1987). …

Yet, humans may experience powerful emotions in the absence of survival challenges, notably when encountering art. …

The stimuli were digital photographs of 336 paintings and drawings spanning multiple genres and periods. Most of the stimuli were retrieved from the WikiArt Emotions database (Se ID:s in Supplementary Text 1) and were chosen based on their capacity to evoke emotions in the viewers (Mohammad & Kiritchenko, Citation2018). These artworks were complemented with 20 internationally famous paintings and 20 famous Finnish paintings presumably not widely known outside Finland (see Supplementary text 2); this was done to make sure the stimulus contained also well-known and well-liked as well as unfamiliar artworks. …

Suuplementary text 2 [sic?]
Famous Finnish and international paintings included in the study

Finnish: Gunnar Berndtson: Morsiamen laulu, Albert Edelfelt: Lapsen ruumissaatto, Albert Edelfelt: Leikkiviä poikia rannalla, Akseli Gallen-Kallela : Lemminkäisen äiti, Akseli Gallen-Kallela : Symposion, Pekka Halonen: Tienraivaajia Karjalassa, Werner Holmberg: Postitie Hämeessä,Edvard Isto: Hyökkäys, Tove Jansson: Juhlat kaupungissa, Eero Järnfetl: Kaski, Eero Järnfetl: Maisema Kolilta, Juho Rissanen: Kuppari, Juho Rissanen: Lapsuuden muisto, Juho Rissanen: Piipunsytyttäjät, Tyko Sallinen: Piruntanssi, Tyko Sallinen: Saunassa, Helene Schjerfbeck: Toipilas, Hugo Simberg: Haavoittunut Enkeli, Hugo Simberg: Vanhus ja lapsi, Ellen Thesleff: Kaiku. International: Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights, Sandro Botticelli: La Primavera, William-Adolphe Bouguereau: The Wave, Francisco de Goya: El Tres de Mayo, Grant Wood: American Gothic, Francisco de Goya: La maja desnuda, Hokusai: The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Edward Hopper: Nighthawks, Wassily Kandinsky: Composition 8, Gustav Klimt: Der Kuss, Édouard Manet: Olympia, Edvard Munch : Aske, Pablo Picasso: The Old Guitarist, Rembrandt van Rijn: Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee, Auguste Renoir: Le Moulin de la Galette, Diego Riviera: The Flower Carrier, Henri Rousseau: The Sleeping Gypsy, Peter Paul Rubens: Massacre of the Innocents, Vincent van Gogh: Starry night, Johannes Vermeer: Meisje met de parel

It would be interesting to find out if there are differences attributable to a viewer’s unconscious assumptions about art, specifically paintings. Would we experience our emotions differently in front of prehistoric art, or ancient Egyptian art, or art uninfluenced by European art?

As it turns out, I have an August 23, 2016 posting titled, “Georgina Lohan, Bharti Kher, and Pablo Picasso: the beauty and the beastliness of art (in Vancouver).”

Celebrating Italian Research in the World Day at The Age of Immunotherapy, an April 12th, 2023 event in Vancouver (Canada)

ARPICO (Society of Italian Researchers and Professionals in Western Canada) is co-presenting an event with the Consulate General of Italy in Vancouver to celebrate Italian Research in World Day.

From a March 21, 2023 ARPICO notice (received via email), Note: i have reformatted parts of the text,

It is our pleasure, with the Consulate General of Italy in Vancouver, to invite you to ARPICO’s next public event “The Age of Immunotherapy” to be held on Wednesday, April 12th, 2023 at 7:00 PM at the Museum of Vancouver, History Room & Garden Patio, 1100 Chestnut Street, Vancouver, BC.

The event is in celebration of Italian Research in the World Day instituted in 2018 to value the quality and competencies of Italian researchers abroad and promote concrete actions and investments to allow Italian researchers to continue pursuing their careers in their homeland as well as make Italy an attractive environment for foreign researchers.

Main Event Details

The Age of Immunotherapy, a lecture by Dr. Gregorio Aversa

The Immune system has evolved primarily to protect the body against foreign pathogens such as viruses, bacteria and fungi but sparing the body, recognizing it as “self”. However, sometimes the immune system can also can attack the body’s own tissues, as in autoimmune diseases, or react against harmless molecules, as in allergies. It is now clear that the immune system can also recognize cancer cells, but their elimination can be challenging as the cancer deploys sophisticated mechanisms to evade the immune surveillance. The deeper understanding of the immune system, the key molecules involved in cancer-immune cell interactions and advances in antibody and cell engineering accumulated over the past three decades, have resulted in the recent development of novel and effective immunotherapeutic treatments for cancer. For example, antibodies that target suppressive signals in immune cells are now used to “awaken” the immune system to kill a variety of tumors, resulting in often curative therapies for previously lethal cancers. Multiple new immunotherapeutic approaches and combinations are currently being developed and clinically tested for a variety of cancers and other diseases such as autoimmune diseases, transplant rejection, allergies and viral infections, thus paving the way for potential cures for currently challenging diseases.

About Our Speaker

Dr. Gregorio Aversa is an experienced immunologist and industrial scientist. He has made significant contributions to the discovery of novel monoclonal antibodies and molecules involved in immune regulation in allergies, autoimmune diseases and transplant rejection. Over the past 25 years Dr. Aversa has held executive leadership positions in global Pharmaceutical companies, Biotech, and a Translational Research Institute. These positions include Senior Vice President of the Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD) on UBC campus, Unit Head of the Autoimmune Diseases, Biology and Cellular and Molecular Biology Units at Novartis (Vienna, Austria) and Vice President of Research at Inflazyme Pharmaceuticals. He also previously held positions at the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, California (now Merck), and has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UBC. Dr. Aversa is currently President of his own private biotechnology business, Abimmune Technologies Inc., in Vancouver, Canada, focusing on the development and commercialization of monoclonal antibodies for research and clinical use. [Note: Dr. Aversa is listed as Principal for Abmedix Biomedical {as of March 24, 2023} on his LinkedIn profile; I cannot websites for either Abmedix or Abimmune.] Dr. Aversa did his Ph.D. work in Transplantation Immunology at the University of Sydney and Stanford University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney School of Medicine in Australia. Dr. Aversa has over 60 publications in international scientific journals and is an inventor on several patents.

Evening Program

  • 6:30 PM – Doors open for registration.
  • 7:00 PM – Start of the event with introductions by the Consul General of Italy, Fabio Messineo, and ARPICO’s president, Nicola Fameli.
  • 7:15 PM – Talk “The Age of Immunotherapy” by Dr. Gregorio Aversa, immunologist and industrial scientist.
  • 8:00 PM – Q & A Period
  • 8:15 PM – Mediterranean refreshments catered by Bottles and Bottega offered by the Consulate General of Italy.

We look forward to seeing everyone there.

RSVP: Tickets for this event are required, but FREE; all wishing to attend are requested to obtain “free-admission” tickets on EventBrite

Further details are also available at arpico.ca, arpico facebook, and EventBrite.

If participants wish to donate to ARPICO, this can be done within EventBrite or in person at the event; this would be greatly appreciated in order to help us continue our public lecture program and to build upon our scholarship fund.

FAQ

  • Where can I contact the organizer with any questions?
  • info@arpico.ca
  • Can I update my registration information?
  • Yes. If you have any questions, contact us at info@arpico.ca
  • I am having trouble using EventBrite and cannot reserve my ticket(s). Can someone at ARPICO help me with my ticket reservation?
  • Of course, simply send your ticket request to us at info@arpico.ca so we can help you.

Happy Italian Research in the World Day!

The last Ada Lovelace Day?

[downloaded from https://www.wthub.org/article/happy-ada-lovelace-day-sadly-the-last/]

I love this image. Unfortunately, it heralds what seems to be the last Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) according to the Women’s Tech Hub ~ Bristol,

Posted on by serrie

Happy Ada Lovelace Day – sadly the last!

This year, Ada Lovelace Day was celebrated on October 11, 2022 as Sue Gee notes in her ALD post on programmer.info (Note: Links have been removed),

Last Ever Ada Lovelace Day

Today [October 11, 2022] sees the final ever Ada Lovelace Day, an event which aims to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. The flagship event, combining science and comedy from an all-female line up takes place online starting at 8:00pm London time

Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) was founded by Suw Charman-Anderson in 2009 and became an international event celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

So why was a nineteenth century aristocrat chosen to be the symbol of an effort to inspire women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and maths, STEM?

The answer is that, due to her involvement with Charles Babbage, she is widely regarded as the person who wrote the first computer program, for more on this theme see our history article, Ada Lovelace, The First Programmer. This achievement has been widely popularized, including in children’s books, making hers a name that girls might recognize.

While the Finding Ada Network, which provides one-to-one mentorship for women in STEM and advocates who work towards gender equality, appears to be continuing, this year’s Ada Lovelace Day is the final such event due to lack of financial backing. Suw Charman-Anderson told the BBC the reason it was now coming to an end was:

“incredibly simple – we just couldn’t raise the funding to continue”. 

The announcement about the last Ada Lovelace Day is here in an October 11, 2022 BBC tech news item. Suw Charman-Anderson’s Finding Ada (Lovelace) website is here, where oddly enough I was not able to find confirmation that 2022 is the last year for ALD.

I have a lot of Ada Lovelace postings here but this October 13, 2015 post stands out for me, ‘Ada Lovelace “… manipulative, aggressive, a drug addict …” and a genius but was she likable?

Farewell Ada Lovelace Day.

Documentary “NNI Retrospective Video: Creating a National Initiative” celebrates the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) and a lipid nanoparticle question

i stumbled across an August 4, 2022 tvworldwide.com news release about a video celbrating the US National Nanotechnology Initiative’s (NNI) over 20 years of operation, (Note: A link has been removed),

TV Worldwide, since 1999, a pioneering web-based global TV network, announced that it was releasing a video trailer highlighting a previously released documentary on NNI over the past 20 years, entitled, ‘NNI Retrospective Video: Creating a National Initiative’.

The video and its trailer were produced in cooperation with the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), the National Science Foundation and the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Video Documentary Synopsis

Nanotechnology is a megatrend in science and technology at the beginning of the 21 Century. The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) has played a key role in advancing the field after it was announced by President Clinton in January 2000. Neil Lane was Presidential Science Advisor. Mike Roco proposed the initiative at the White House in March 1999 on behalf of the Interagency Working Group on Nanotechnology and was named the founding Chair of NSET to implement NNI beginning with Oct. 2000. NSF led the preparation of this initiative together with other agencies including NIH, DoD, DOE, NASA, and EPA. Jim Murday was named the first Director of NNCO to support NSET. The scientific and societal success of NNI has been recognized in the professional communities, National Academies, PCAST, and Congress. Nanoscale science, engineering and technology are strongly connected and collectively called Nanotechnology.

This video documentary was made after the 20th NNI grantees conference at NSF. It is focused on creating and implementing NNI, through video interviews. The interviews focused on three questions: (a) Motivation and how NNI started; (b) The process and reason for the success in creating NNI; (c) Outcomes of NNI after 20 years, and how the initial vision has been realized.

About the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI)

The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) is a U.S. Government research and development (R&D) initiative. Over thirty Federal departments, independent agencies, and commissions work together toward the shared vision of a future in which the ability to understand and control matter at the nanoscale leads to ongoing revolutions in technology and industry that benefit society. The NNI enhances interagency coordination of nanotechnology R&D, supports a shared infrastructure, enables leveraging of resources while avoiding duplication, and establishes shared goals, priorities, and strategies that complement agency-specific missions and activities.

The NNI participating agencies work together to advance discovery and innovation across the nanotechnology R&D enterprise. The NNI portfolio encompasses efforts along the entire technology development pathway, from early-stage fundamental science through applications-driven activities. Nanoscience and nanotechnology are prevalent across the R&D landscape, with an ever-growing list of applications that includes nanomedicine, nanoelectronics, water treatment, precision agriculture, transportation, and energy generation and storage. The NNI brings together representatives from multiple agencies to leverage knowledge and resources and to collaborate with academia and the private sector, as appropriate, to promote technology transfer and facilitate commercialization. The breadth of NNI-supported infrastructure enables not only the nanotechnology community but also researchers from related disciplines.

In addition to R&D efforts, the NNI is helping to build the nanotechnology workforce of the future, with focused efforts from K–12 through postgraduate research training. The responsible development of nanotechnology has been an integral pillar of the NNI since its inception, and the initiative proactively considers potential implications and technology applications at the same time. Collectively, these activities ensure that the United States remains not only the place where nanoscience discoveries are made, but also where these discoveries are translated and manufactured into products to benefit society.

I’m embedding the trailer here and a lipid nanoparticle question follows (The origin story told in Vancouver [Canada] is that the work was started at the University of British Columbia by Pieter Quilty.),

I was curious about what involvement the US NNI had with the development of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) and found a possible answer to that question on Wikipedia The LNP Wikipedia entry certainly gives the bulk of the credit to Quilty but there was work done prior to his involvement (Note: Links have been removed),

A significant obstacle to using LNPs as a delivery vehicle for nucleic acids is that in nature, lipids and nucleic acids both carry a negative electric charge—meaning they do not easily mix with each other.[19] While working at Syntex in the mid-1980s,[20] Philip Felgner [emphasis mine] pioneered the use of artificially-created cationic lipids (positively-charged lipids) to bind lipids to nucleic acids in order to transfect the latter into cells.[21] However, by the late 1990s, it was known from in vitro experiments that this use of cationic lipids had undesired side effects on cell membranes.[22]

During the late 1990s and 2000s, Pieter Cullis of the University of British Columbia [emphasis mine] developed ionizable cationic lipids which are “positively charged at an acidic pH but neutral in the blood.”[8] Cullis also led the development of a technique involving careful adjustments to pH during the process of mixing ingredients in order to create LNPs which could safely pass through the cell membranes of living organisms.[19][23] As of 2021, the current understanding of LNPs formulated with such ionizable cationic lipids is that they enter cells through receptor-mediated endocytosis and end up inside endosomes.[8] The acidity inside the endosomes causes LNPs’ ionizable cationic lipids to acquire a positive charge, and this is thought to allow LNPs to escape from endosomes and release their RNA payloads.[8]

From 2005 into the early 2010s, LNPs were investigated as a drug delivery system for small interfering RNA (siRNA) drugs.[8] In 2009, Cullis co-founded a company called Acuitas Therapeutics to commercialize his LNP research [emphasis mine]; Acuitas worked on developing LNPs for Alnylam Pharmaceuticals’s siRNA drugs.[24] In 2018, the FDA approved Alnylam’s siRNA drug Onpattro (patisiran), the first drug to use LNPs as the drug delivery system.[3][8]

By that point in time, siRNA drug developers like Alnylam were already looking at other options for future drugs like chemical conjugate systems, but during the 2010s, the earlier research into using LNPs for siRNA became a foundation for new research into using LNPs for mRNA.[8] Lipids intended for short siRNA strands did not work well for much longer mRNA strands, which led to extensive research during the mid-2010s into the creation of novel ionizable cationic lipids appropriate for mRNA.[8] As of late 2020, several mRNA vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 use LNPs as their drug delivery system, including both the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines.[3] Moderna uses its own proprietary ionizable cationic lipid called SM-102, while Pfizer and BioNTech licensed an ionizable cationic lipid called ALC-0315 from Acuitas.[8] [emphases mine]

You can find out more about Philip Felgner here on his University of California at Irvine (UCI) profile page.

I wish they had been a little more careful about some of the claims that Thomas Kalil made about lipid nanoparticles in both the trailer and video but, getting back to the trailer (approx. 3 mins.) and the full video (approx. 25 mins.), either provides insight into a quite extraordinary effort.

Bravo to the US NNI!

Drag artists making science more accessible

I can remember kids describing science (and mathematics too) as a drag never imagining this, “Meet The Drag Artists Who Are Making Science More Accessible,” a 17 – 20 min. segment on the Science Friday (SciFri ) radio programme (broadcast on US National Public Radio).

Luckily, there’s a webpage devoted to the segment where you’ll find all kinds of interesting tidbits like this (Note: Links have been removed),

Each generation has had science communicators who brought a sometimes stuffy, siloed subject into homes, inspiring minds young and old. Scientists like Don Herbert, Carl Sagan, and Bill Nye are classic examples. But our modern age of social media has brought more diverse communicators into the forefront of science communication, including the wild, wonderful world of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] drag stars.

These are queer folk who mix the flashy fashions of the drag world with science education. Some, like Kyne, use TikTok as a medium to teach concepts like math. Others, like Pattie Gonia, use drag to attract more people to the great outdoors. The accessibility of the internet has made these personalities available to a wide audience.

Kyne and Pattie Gonia join Ira [SciFri host Ira Flatow] to talk about the magic drag can bring to science education, and why they think the future of SciComm looks more diverse than the past.

You’ll find images similar to this one of Pattie Gonia in the SciFri article,

This dress is trash—in a good way. With the help of recycling, one queen’s trash is Pattie Gonia’s treasure. Credit: Pattie Gonia [downloaded from https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/science-friday/segments/science-advisor-resigns-covid-drug-treatments-science-drag-artists-feb-11-2022-part-1]

You can listen to the segment, read transcripts, watch videos, and find more information on the “Meet The Drag Artists Who Are Making Science More Accessible” webpage.