The bats are cool enough without him.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is beautiful, I’d hang it on my wall. It’s a genetic map of the first synthetic organism, and it and many others will be on display in the Serpentine Gallery in London this weekend.
And gosh, what do you know, I am going to be in London this weekend! I may have to sneak out of The Amazing Meeting a bit, which is going to be hard to do since it’s so jam-packed with cool people and cool stuff, but some of them might want to join me in a little extracurricular travel as well.
What is it about Elsa Lanchester and The Bride of Frankenstein? She’s the “it” girl of the 20th century, and here’s a whole gallery of Bride images. I have a favorite, for some reason.
Dr Charles is having a Poetry Contest, with wonderful prizes to be awarded to the winner with the best poem about “experiencing, practicing, or reflecting upon a medical, scientific, or health-related matter.”
It sounds great until you realize you’re probably going to have to compete against the Cuttlefish.
I use a very pretty radial tree of life diagram fairly often — the last time was in my talk on Friday — and every time I do, people ask where I got it. Here it is: it’s from the David Hillis lab, with this description:
This file can be printed as a wall poster. Printing at least 54″ wide is recommended.
(If you would prefer a simplified version with common names, please see below.)
Blueprint shops and other places with large format printers can print this file for you.
You are welcome to use it for non-commercial educational purposes.
Please cite the source as David M. Hillis, Derrick Zwickl, and Robin Gutell, University of Texas.
About this Tree: This tree is from an analysis of small subunit rRNA sequences sampled
from about 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life. The species were chosen based
on their availability, but we attempted to include most of the major groups, sampled
very roughly in proportion to the number of known species in each group (although many
groups remain over- or under-represented). The number of species
represented is approximately the square-root of the number of species thought to exist on Earth
(i.e., three thousand out of an estimated nine million species), or about 0.18% of the 1.7 million
species that have been formally described and named. This tree has been used
in many museum displays and other educational exhibits, and its use for educational purposes
is welcomed.
There’s also a simplified version:
Both of those are available as scalable pdfs, so you can zoom in and out to get just the right view, which is very handy.
It’s a calibrated infographic illustrating the highest highs and the lowest lows on the planet. Bring in the kids and have them scroll up and down for hours.
It includes the Deepwater Horizon. Boy, that thing was way, way down there.
This is a thoughtful contemplation of online personas and what they mean to people. It also has some useful implications: “What will happen if Dublin is invaded by zombies?”, indeed. I worry about that all the time.
Avatar Days from Piranha Bar on Vimeo.
Here’s an almost impressive compendium of evolution t-shirts. I say “almost” because, dang it, most of them are variations on the infamous March of Progress image, which I detest.
That thing feeds on and is the source of some of the most common misconceptions about evolution. Please, graphic designers, if you want to create something about evolution, just throw the Zallinger image out and do something different. I know it’s a powerful piece of work with iconic status, but it’s also misleading.
Somebody ought to publish this 15 page comic about the anti-vaccination movement…and send it around to pediatricians’ waiting rooms.
(Bath mosaic from Herculaneum, 79CE. From Joe Wilkins.)
