Medgadget

Half Life Lamp Powered by Living Hamster Cells

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:00:01 -0800

Dutch designer Joris Laarman created a desktop lamp that, though will not be good enough to illuminate your workspace, will be sufficient enough to compound and excite your guests. Powered by a mix of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells infused with luciferase, a bioluminescing enzyme, this is essentially light out of life.

Friedman Benda, whose gallery will be hosting an exhibit of Mr Laarman's works, spoke with Fast Company about the logistics of displaying the Half Life Lamp project:

Sadly, Laarman's attempt to bring a "Half Life Lamp" to New York failed when the stress of the trans-Atlantic trip proved too much for the little critters "They're dead," says Benda.

Here's what the lamp looks like in the dark:

Fast Company: Joris Laarman Lets His Skeletal Chairs and Hamster Cell Lamps Do Their Own Thing

(hat tip: Gizmodo)

Winners Announced for The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2009

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:40:18 -0800

The National Science Foundation and journal Science have revealed the winners in this year's Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. As always, we're happy to see the life sciences strongly represented in this contest of the best imagery that "would intrigue, explain and educate".

One of the first place winners in the Illustration category is an amazing installation (below) by biologist Peter Lloyd Jones and architect Jenny E. Sabin of the University of Pennsylvania's Sabin + Jones LabStudio. Be sure to check out the high resolution photo of the art piece to get an idea for its maddening complexity.

"Branching Morphogenesis" aims to reveal--through abstraction--the unseen beauty and dynamic relationships that exist between endothelial cells and their surrounding extracellular microenvironment. Movies of networking endothelial cells cultured on a 3-D matrix were analyzed to generate computational tools that simulate this process. Next, large-scale templates from simulations were overlaid with more than 75,000 inter-connected zipties.

One of two winners in the Noninteractive Media category is a video by Harmony Starr, Molly Malone and Brendan Nicholson of University of Utah explaining why identical twins are no longer as identical in later life. Watch and learn (ignore the error message):

Link to all the winning entries: The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2009...

Press release: 2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners Announced ...

Engaging Graphics Help Visualize Effects of Jetlag

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:34:49 -0800

Being fans of beautiful and innovative graphics and animations, we enjoy checking up on the latest in the field via the Vizworld blog. One thing that caught our eye is an attractive infographic from Matt Kursmark who designed it, to explain how jetlag influences our bodies, as an assignment for his Information Design Class at Ohio State University.

Matt Kursmark: Circadian rhythm information graphics...

More at Vizworld...

Hi-Def Intracellular Image Contest Winners Announced

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:33:18 -0800

GE Healthcare just announced the winners of this year's IN Cell Image Competition. The annual contest aims to profile High Content Analysis (HCA) technology and the beauty that can be captured with expensive scientific apparatus. Above is the North American winning submission: "Human neural stem cells from fetal cortex stained for DNA (blue), neuronal (green), and astrocyte (red) markers. [Coreey Seehus, Brain Cells Inc, US]"

Here's a video created using submitted images to the contest:

All the top entries: IN Cell Analyzer Image Competition 2010...

Press release: Science transformed into art: Stunning high-definition images of the inner workings of cells...

Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:58:41 -0800

The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan is currently hosting an exhibition that highlights the intersection of art and medicine, and the role of the human body in bringing those two intellectual worlds together. Though the collection mainly consists of historical objects, many from the distant past, the aim of the curators is to draw attention to how medical technology will impact our lives in the future.

For most human beings their own body represents both the most familiar and most unknown of worlds. From ancient times humans have sought to unravel the secret mechanisms of the body, developing in the process a wealth of medical expertise. At the same time we have seen our own bodies as vessels for the representation of ideals of beauty, and long sought to depict our bodies in paintings and drawings. Leonardo da Vinci, who went so far as to dissect human bodies in order to make more accurate depictions of them, is perhaps the single creator whose output best embodies the integration of the scientific and artistic aspects of the body.
This exhibition, with its theme of "the human body as the meeting place of science (medicine) and art," was made possible with the cooperation of the Wellcome Trust, the world's largest independent charity funding research into human health. Consisting of around 150 valuable medical artifacts from the Wellcome Collection and around 30 works of old Japanese and contemporary art, the exhibition presents an integrated vision of medicine and the arts, science and beauty. The show is a unique attempt to reconsider the science's role in health and happiness and also the meaning of human life and death.

Mori Art Museum: Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love...

(hat tip: ScienceRoll)

Block Puzzle for The Aspiring Radiologist in Your Family

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:01 -0800

Neil Fraser, a software engineer at Google, used volumetric MRI data of a brain scan to create a 3D wooden block puzzle.

Celldance Image and Video Awards Winners Announced

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:29:02 -0800

The American Society for Cell Biology recently announced winners of its 2009 Celldance competition that profiles the beauty of cellular science. Image and video entries were ranked based on their contribution to science and the subjective allure they gave to the judges' eyes. Here are a couple of the top winners:

First place: "Save the Last Dance for Me" - Tetrahymena thermophila organism by Aswati Subramanian of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio

Third place: "Chaperone's Embrace" - The image reveals how the folding pathway of a protein is altered by a chaperone molecule. By Graham Johnson of Scripps Research Institute

Link: 2009 Celldance Image and Video Winners...

(hat tip: Technology Review)

3D CT Scans of a Lego Toy MRI

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:55:59 -0800

Flickr user voxel123, who describes himself as "master of volume rendering (MRI, CT)," has posted a set of reconstructed CT images of a Lego MRI system.

Here's how voxel123 describes the picture above:

Some time ago, I built a Lego MRI system as a giveaway for a pediatric radiologist and had it CT scanned later.
This is a volume rendering based on the axial scan. Note that the density of the bricks is different for each color.

Link: Lego MRI...

(hat tip: SCOPE blog @ Stanford Medicine)

Nikon Small World 2009 Winners Announced

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:47:26 -0800

The winners in this year's Nikon Small World photomicrography contest have been announced. The competition, held annually since 1974, gives a good overview of how optics and digital technology have opened up the beauty of the microworld. Below is the grand prize winner and one of the runners up that we particularly enjoyed.

Heiti Paves, Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress) anther (20X)

Arlene Wechezak, Algae and diatoms (10X)

Link: Nikon Small World 2009 Winners...

Video: The Beautiful Side of a Viral Infection

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:43:33 -0800

NPR's Robert Krulwich sat down with David Bolinsky of XVIVO, a firm that makes amazing animations for medicine and life sciences, to explain to the general public how viruses infect cells and reproduce themselves. For demonstration they used animation XVIVO produced for Zirus, a company developing novel methods to fight pathogenic viruses.

Watch the full video produced for Zirus here...

Link @ NPR: CDC: Swine Flu Cases Widespread And Rising...

Zirus homepage...

XVIVO flashbacks: The Inner Life of the Cell; The Inner Life of the Cell: A Full Version ; Can a Digital Projected Heart Replace a Much Beloved Solid One?