The super-advanced physics kitties at CERN (Chats Européens pour la Recherche Nucléaire) haz some good news and bad news. First the bad news:
Oops. Luckily, they has builded anofer amazing particle accelerator thingie, and this one will crack it for sure. Introducing the
Oooooooh, shiny! Stay tuna-ed for moar updates.
photos via Cheezburger.com
Fujiko Nakaya is the world’s foremost sculptor of fog. And in the sense that it is not really possible to sculpt fog, you could say she has been doing the impossible for over 40 years.
Nakaya began her career in Japan as a painter. But, frustrated with the limitations of painting and inspired by her father, a scientist who is credited with making the first artificial snowflakes, she essentially invented her own medium. Working with engineers, she developed a system to create and disperse water vapor through pipes to create fog. For her first fog sculpture, she covered the entire Pepsi pavilion at Osaka’s Expo ’70 in fog. Since then, using the same technology, she has created more than 50 fog sculptures in environments ranging from art galleries to bridges to forests.
Using water vapor as a sculptural element is at once simple and profound. It transfigures the environment, making the familiar seem strange and dreamlike, and then disappears without a trace, absorbed back into the air. The artist says that in ancient Japan, fog was seen as “the breathing of the atmosphere.”
Intriguingly, Nakaya’s latest fog sculpture is set to debut at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a city famous for fog. Her work will be installed along a pedestrian bridge in the sure-to-be-spectacular new Exploratorium space which will open on April 15 on the Embarcadero waterfront. As Nakaya explained to ArtNews, “On calm days, fog will bundle on the bridge and gently flow along the canal onto the ocean,” she says. “With a strong wind, it will hoist upward into the sky like a dragon. On humid days, it floats over the water and lingers in tufts. Its ever-changing form is the probe, in real time, of its immediate environment.”
If you can’t make it to San Francisco, here’s a video of Nakaya’s installation Cloud Forest, from 2010.
On Sunday, I participated in a panel discussion of the ENCODE project and issues related to it, with the folks from ScienceSunday via Google+ Hangouts. Ian Bosdet and I joined hosts Rajini Rao, Buddhini Samarasinghe, and Scott Lewis. to talk about ENCODE and make it accessible to those without a decade of post-graduate training in genomics If you have a spare 78 minutes, the discussion can be viewed on YouTube.
What was the best April Fool’s joke you saw this year? I bet it was one that had some elements of truth in it. You initially believed it, and thought “….what?” before remembering the date, and regaining skepticism. That feeling right before you realized it was fake, when you were still impressed and wowed by this unbelievable news, but confused about certain aspects of it, is the exact feeling you have when you’re in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, but you NEVER snap out of it.
I visited in 2008, and I’m still not sure what I saw and which parts of it were real or fake. This is a normal reaction. BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder has said “I visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology once every few years to convince myself that it exists and isn’t just part of my dreams.” And New York Times’ Edward Rothstein wrote last year that he had “never been in a museum where the persistent question is: what kind of place is this?”
I also have to echo the New York Times’ warning that reading any further will spoil the experience for you. If you want to be surprised and amazed, stop reading right now, get on a plane to LA, and visit the museum yourself. If it’s real.
Oh, Science Bunny. Maybe stick to delivering eggs : (
The Finch and Pea 