Microbial Musing

Have you ever wondered what makes Michele Banks tick? Nature Microbiology did. So, they asked her. You can read their interview with Michele here and gaze upon her lovely artwork for their homepage here.

Nature Microbiology: When did you first become exposed to scientific images?

Michele Banks: I started doing watercolours about 15 years ago. I was mainly working in pure abstraction, just playing with colour and with the properties of the paint. One of the things I love to do is wet-in-wet technique, which gives a ‘bleeding’ effect. I showed some of my wet-in-wet work at the Children’s National Medical Center here in Washington DC about 10 years ago, and they told me they liked my work because it looked like things under a microscope.

We hope the interest in the overlap of science and art will be a theme that continues throughout future Nature Microbiology issues – also open access, gender balance in publishing, shying away from bogus impact factors. etc. etc…


Filed under: Items of Interest, Notice Board, The Art of Science Tagged: Art, Linkonomicon, Michele Banks, microbiology, Nature Microbiology, science art

Attendance is Mandatory

I have taught this class. It was called “Introduction to Biology for Non-Majors”.

Incidentally, I got pretty good student evaluations and none of my South Carolinian students argued with me about evolution.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Education, Linkonomicon, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Science Education, Zach Weinersmith

Impossible

xkcd by Randall Munroe (CC BY-NC 2.5)

xkcd by Randall Munroe (CC BY-NC 2.5)

Turns out biology is hard because biology is hard.


Filed under: Curiosities of Nature Tagged: Biology, dna, evolution, Linkonomicon, randall munroe, xkcd

How to advance science by failure

Stewart Firestein has a provocative piece in Nautilus on the role of failing well in science:

As your career moves on and you have to obtain grant support you naturally highlight the successes and propose experiments that will continue this successful line of work with its high likelihood of producing results. The experiments in the drawer get trotted out less frequently and eventually the drawer just sticks shut. The lab becomes a kind of machine, a hopper—money in, papers out.

My hope of course is that things won’t be this way for long. It wasn’t this way in the past, and there is nothing at all about science and its proper pursuit that requires a high success rate or the likelihood of success, or the promise of any result. Indeed, in my view these things are an impediment to the best science, although I admit that they will get you along day to day. It seems to me we have simply switched the priorities. We have made the easy stuff—running experiments to fill in bits of the puzzle—the standard for judgment and relegated the creative, new ideas to that stuck drawer. But there is a cost to this. I mean a real monetary cost because it is wasteful to have everyone hunting in the same ever-shrinking territory…

How will this change? It will happen when we cease, or at least reduce, our devotion to facts and collections of them, when we decide that science education is not a memorization marathon, when we—scientists and nonscientists—recognize that science is not a body of infallible work, of immutable laws and facts. When we once again recognize that science is a dynamic and difficult process and that most of what there is to know is still unknown.


Filed under: Items of Interest Tagged: Linkonomicon, scientific method

It is not polite to talk about one’s “Chaos Regions” in public

You can argue that Pluto is not really a planet (really, at this point, why would you?), but the New Horizons probe has categorically dismissed any notion that Pluto and its associated moons are boring. Pluto has a “Chaos Region”. Boring things do not have “Chaos Regions”.

Chaos-Region-9-10-15

HT: Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing.


Filed under: Curiosities of Nature Tagged: Linkonomicon, NASA, New Horizons, planet, Pluto, Space exploration

This Week in Virology Art

The most recent guest on This Week in Virology (or TWiV) is none other than our own Michele Banks. Michele welcomes host Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University into her home for an extended conversation about the hows and whys of her science-inspired art.

For those of you who are not regular readers of Michele’s Art of Science series, what I have always found fascinating about discussing art and the process of creation with Michele, is her engagement with the current art world and the history of art, with an honesty and clarity that is quite brave – when so many artists armor themselves (like scientists) against public judgment in overly complex jargon.

I can’t send Michele to everyone’s living room to have that conversation with you; but, thanks to TWiV, I can send Michele’s living room to you.


Filed under: The Art of Science Tagged: American Society for Microbiology, Artologica, Linkonomicon, Michele Banks, sciart, This Week in Virology, TWiV, Vincent Racaniello

There is enough room in this rabbit hole for all of us

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From p305 of “The British Miscellany: or, coloured figures of new, rare, or little known animal subjects, etc. vol. I., vol. II” by James Sowerby

The British Library’s Flickr account is a bloody rabbit hole of lovely. And, all the images are being released for free without copyright restrictions*. I won’t guarantee that there is something there for every flavor of nerdery, but, if you don’t find your interests represented by something here, I think you need to seriously question your life choices.

*The British Library does offer you the option to purchase higher-than-screen quality images, which seems like a workable model to me.

The technology to receive HBO in 1989 was predicted a hundred years earlier…from p134 of the “The Conquest of the Moon: a story of the Bayouda” by André Laurie – pseud. [i.e. Paschal Grousset.]


Filed under: The Art of Science Tagged: Flickr, Linkonomicon, The British Library

The hard…is what makes it great

There are a lot of things to love in this piece from Christie Aschwanden about why retractions, studies that don’t hold up to reproduction, and even sub-fraudulent “p-hacking” do not mean that science is broken, but it is, simply, very hard. Among those things are the great visuals from Ritchie King – including a fun “p-hacking” demonstration tool.

For me, the real take home message goes beyond the “science is hard” catchphrase. Science isn’t just hard in the way implied by Tom Hanks’ Jimmy Duggan character in A League of Their Own:

It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.

Contrary to the rhetoric that would portray “science is hard” as an endorsement of success over a monumentally difficult task, this is not the point.

As Ashwanden addresses, science is hard because it is messy and complicated and requires a communal effort from members of a species that is only dubiously social outside of relatively narrow local groups.

If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result.

There are things like sampling variance and mistakes and uncontrollable environmental variables and resource limits and the fabled “orthologous methods” that inject all sorts of inconsistency and challenges into the textbook scientific method. This is why the great philosophers of science* spoke about disproof rather than proof, about independent reproducibility, about probability rather than certainty.

These issues do not indicate that science is broken. There simply is no other way it could work in the hands of mere humans. What may be broken is the way we perceive science. We need to understand that it is a gradual and a community effort. We need to understand that our mythos of science – of the great, usually in the stories, man performing a great experiment and making a great discovery – are almost always false summaries which are convenient and inspiring, but do not represent why science is truly hard.

*It is also why those who dismiss the philosophy of science as a waste of time – I’m looking at you Neil DeGrasse Tyson – deserve nothing but the most vigorous of side-eyes on that point.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Christie Aschwanden, FiveThirtyEight, Linkonomicon, retractions, Ritchie King, science, scientific method, Scientific Process

F is for Ferrolic

Ferrolic uses magnets, “Ferro Fluid1“, and the unpredictability/non-intuitive behavior of fluid dynamics2 to tell you the present things like the time in hynoptically beautiful ways.

Because the fluid behaves in an unpredictable way, it is possible to give the bodies, perceived in the Ferrolic display, a strong reference to living creatures. It is this livelihood that enables Ferrolic to show a meaningful narrative such as having the creatures play tag. In addition the natural flow of the material, Ferrolic can be used to form recognisable shapes and written characters. – Ferrolic

1From the Latin words for “iron” and “ewww, that’s damp”.
2Depending on whom you ask.

HT: Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing


Filed under: The Art of Science Tagged: BoingBoing, ferro fluid, Ferrolic, Linkonomicon, magnetism, magnets, Rob Beschizza

Demographics

In his interview with Ian McKellen on the WTF Podcast, Marc Maron said one the smartest things I’ve heard about modern niche marketing:

I don’t have a demographic. I have a disposition.

You should listen to the rest of the interview too.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Ian McKellen, Linkonomicon, Marc Maron, marketing, Podcast, WTF, WTF Podcast