The Art of Science: Decay All The Way

Artists have explored the beauty of decay  for hundreds of years. Images of dying flowers and falling-down buildings are potent reminders that life is fleeting and that nothing we build will last forever.  But of all the painters and poets that have pointed out this bittersweet fact, few get down to the nitty-gritty of decay quite like Sam Taylor-Johnson.

In her 2001 video piece Still Life, Taylor-Johnson (Formerly Sam Taylor-Wood, and yes, the same one who directed 50 Shades of Grey), presents a classic Renaissance tableau of a bowl of fruit on a table, sets up a camera and lets nature take its course. As the bacteria build up, the fruit begin to shrink and collapse upon themselves.

Unlike a traditional painter, who would typically suggest decay by showing fruit or flowers just past their prime, but still beautiful, Taylor-Johnson keeps the camera rolling until the all that’s left is a rotting black pile topped with angelic white mold, buzzed about by fruit flies.

One of the things that’s fascinating about watching the process is how the fruit keeps moving, at first shrinking and then seeming to regrow as the bacteria multiply furiously. It’s a truly visceral display of the circle of life. If you like this piece, and you have a really strong stomach, watch Taylor-Johnson’s video A Little Death of a dead rabbit (another classic art image) being devoured by insects.

If you’re in the DC area, you can see Still Life as part of the Super Natural exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts until September 13.

 

 

Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition

Every summer, the Royal Society in London opens their doors to the public for the Summer Science Exhibition – a week-long science fair, where universities and research institutes from across the UK show off some of their coolest and most popular research. The University of Leicester was there with a replica of the skeleton of King Richard III, whom they found buried under a parking lot a few years ago. The National Physical Laboratory and University of Coventry brought some conductive fabrics. The Royal Geographical Society had a block of ice and 3D images to illustrate their work studying glaciers at Mount Everest. And all of this in the beautiful Royal Society building, with paintings of former presidents (Newton!) on the walls and old equipment showcased in the hallways.

There were some talks and events throughout the week as well, but I didn’t make it to the exhibition until Sunday, and only had time to walk past the stands.

Here’s a quick impression of some of the things I saw!

Science Caturday: Happy 4th of July!

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Cats and dogs may not be fans, but for most Americans, the defining feature of any 4th of July celebration is fireworks. Behind the spectacular explosions, of course, is science – physics and chemistry. Julia Greenberg gives a brief explanation of what’s inside fireworks at Wired (gunpowder, glitter and starch, basically), while Scientific American’s Science Buddies blog offers a kid-friendly tutorial on making sparklers in various colors.  But keep in mind, fireworks can be dangerous! Drew Magary at Deadspin rounds up readers’ best fireworks horror stories for your horrified holiday lolz.

 

Science for the People: High Price [Rerun]

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This week, Science for the People is revisiting our look at the science and policy of treating drug addiction. We were joined by psychology professor and researcher Carl Hart to talk about his book “High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society.” We also spoke to Donald MacPherson, Director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, about harm reduction strategies to reduce the negative consequences of drug use.

*Josh provides research help to Science for the People and is, therefore, a completely biased and cooperative member of the team.

The Cancer Reproducibility Project is Incredibly Naive, Probably Useless, and Potentially Damaging

I’ve always thought the Reproducibility Project represented an incredibly naive approach to the scientific method. This excellent news piece in Science sums up many of the reasons why. As Richard Young says in the piece, “I am a huge fan of reproducibility. But this mechanism is not the way to test it.” Here’s why:

1) Reproducibility in science is not achieved by having a generic contract research organization replicate a canned protocol, for good reason: cutting edge experiments are often very difficult and require specialized skills to get running. Replication is instead achieved by other labs in the field who want to build on the results. Sometimes this is done using the same protocol as the original experiment, and sometimes by obtaining similar results in a different system using a different method.

2) For this reason, I don’t have much confidence that the results obtained by the Reproducibility Project will accurately reflect the state of reproducibility in science. A negative result could mean many things — and most likely it will reflect a failure of the contract lab and not an inherent problem with the result. Contrary to the claims of the projects leaders, the data produced by the Project will probably not be useful to people who are serious about estimating the scope of irreproducibility in science. At its worst, it could be extremely misleading by painting an overly negative picture of the state of science. It’s already been damaging by promoting a too-naive view of how the process of successful science actually works.

3) As the Science piece points out, there is a much better, cheaper, and scientifically sensible way to achieve better reproducibility. If many papers out there are suspect because they lack proper controls, don’t use validated reagents, fail to describe methods adequately, or rely on flawed statistics, then we don’t need to spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours of effort trying to repeat experiments. We need to make sure editors and reviewers require proper controls, reagents, statistics, and full methods descriptions.

It’s worth reading the full article, but below the fold are some salient quotes: Continue reading “The Cancer Reproducibility Project is Incredibly Naive, Probably Useless, and Potentially Damaging”