Superhero Scientists with Tentacles? Bring 'em on.

Great article and slide show up on the New York Times website from this past Monday about the considerable body of work comic art genius Jack Kirby left behind on the drawing board when he died in 1994. Dave Itzkoff's article, "Jack Kirby's Heroes in Waiting," details how the talented and prolific Kirby moved from New York to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, working first for Hanna-Barbera and then for Ruby-Spears, creating character designs for their Conan-lite Saturday morning serial, Thundarr the Barbarian.

Clicking through the slideshow, my attention was immediately caught by the slide for a presentation board for a show called the Gargoids, "scientists who gain superpowers after becoming infected with an alien virus."

It would be great if the producers now looking to bring some of these concepts to the big and small screens took the opportunity to learn something about the amazing superpowers of viruses themselves. Stop someone on the street and ask them what a virus is and you'll find that, despite decades of media noise about HIV and West Nile and H1N1, we don't really know. A project in the Omaha, Nebraska, public schools is empowering kids with the knowledge and journalism skills to create videos for use in classrooms to educate their peers about viruses--not just what they are and how they make us sick, but how viruses in all their amazing diversity are a vital part of life on Earth. It's an inspiring example of students learning to use storytelling to first make sense of science and then share their new expertise with others.

The World of Viruses project is spreading that message through other media as well--including Kirby's chosen medium. Bringing together comic book vets Martin Powell, Brent Schoonover, and Thomas Floyd, the World of Viruses project is creating graphic novels that bring viruses to life through traditional superhero graphics and story lines.

The science content is vetted by virologists through the Nebraska Virology Center and story lines and art alike go through several drafts to pass scientific muster.  The comics that result are bound together with nonfiction essays by award-winning science writer Carl Zimmer. The first three issues tell the stories of the human papiloma virus, influenza, and an ocean virus called EhV.

Printed and bound copies of the comics are being distributed to teachers and students through schools and libraries, but if you want your own copy you can download it for free through iTunes, as an iPhone app or in full-sized glory on the iPad.

Full disclosure: Elefolio provides some editing support for the World of Viruses project. (My paying clients are always listed on the front page of this blog.) I'm a huge fan of the graphic format, and especially interested in the possibility of the graphic novel form in furthering the public understanding of science, so it's been a special treat to be involved with the project in even a small way.

Steamboys

I’m always happy to watch movies about dirigibles and robots, and never more so when the hero is a young inventor.

Not so long ago we watched Steamboy, Katsuhiro Otomo’s 2004 steampunk anime. I have a budding animator with a tinkering bent at home, and it was a pleasure to watch a movie with him that featured a young inventor hero, Ray Steam.  (There are also great pleasures to be had from the scenes of the young female aviation designer, Fio, in Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso.)

The tinkering bent brings with it a constellation of related interests. The science fair experiment in progress at our house involves an investigation into air pressure via a homemade potato cannon. We sampled the invention camp sponsored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and that was fine, but we’re migrating back to a camp with a more unstructured, self-directed Maker Faire ethic—Parts and Crafts, based in NYC and Boston. There is just a little whiff of void-the-warranty anarchy that we like.

So it was with glee that we caught the viral video by OK Go, in which a team of engineers crafted a huge Rube Goldberg machine timed to the verses of “This Too Shall Pass.” Wired has an article about the team that created the video and the video itself up on their site.  The OK Go video was fresh in my mind when I got a call from Shawn Jordan, Perdue grad and Rube Goldberg machine builder extraordinaire and veteran of the National Rube Goldberg Machine Building Contest. I’ll be talking about the Rube Goldberg contest itself more in a later post, but it was in reconnecting with Jordan that I learned about ST∑@M. STEM is used in K-12 education parlance to refer to a constellation of disciplines: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. ST∑@M is devoted to the idea that you gain more traction and bring more kids into the circle when you add the A (or @) for Art.
In a March 9 Commentary in Education Week, Joseph Piro of Long Island University wrote urging we not overlook the arts in the push to create a scientifically literate citizenry. He concluded

If American schools are to become a leading force in guaranteeing that the country is well prepared to negotiate the complexities of the future, they must be encouraged to make every student’s education one that is broad and comprehensive. And in meeting this goal, we might take a cue from Albert Einstein. While Einstein’s reputation undoubtedly rests on his scientific contributions, a lesser-known fact about him was his estimable musical ability. This great physicist, theoretician, and STEM-exemplar was known for revering Bach and Mozart, and to have once said: “I know that the most joy in my life has come to me from my violin.”

I will be thinking about the care and feeding of my own steamboy as I hear him practicing violin out in the kitchen, the sheet music secured to our fridge with a magnet.

Technovelgy: Tracking How Science Fiction Becomes Science Fact

This is really a short follow-up to my earlier post, "Where's my #@%&!*S jetpack?! Oh, wait," from January 12.

I am writing a book for Lerner Books on elephant communication, and yesterday was researching an arcane bit of elephant sensory anatomy in the trunk called vellus vibrissae, sensory whisker-like hairs that don't break the surface of the skin. This sent me off on a long tangent into the science of the mammalian whisker as a sensor, and I soon uncovered some awesome whiskered robots. From there, it was a short jump to the technovelgy website: an exhaustive list of inventions predicted by science fiction writers, and a subset of those that are coming true. (One of my favorite science fiction novels, Jonathan Lethem's Gun with Occasional Music, is distressingly less fictional all the time. The self-aware talking kangaroos still aren't here, it's true, but the arsenal of pharmaceuticals with names like Acceptol, Avoidol, Forgettol appears to have arrived.) At last count, the brain(s) behind technovelgy has assembled 1,865 examples of science fiction inventions, dating back to Johannes Kepler's description of weightlessness in his 1634 work, Somnium. Check the "Science Fiction in the News" part of the site to see which ones are coming true.

Of course, robot mice without whiskers are hardly new: this competition for robot mice to run a maze dates back to the 1970s.

Robots with whiskers have real-world applications, including being able to search rubble after natural disasters. The ScratchBOT robic "rat" in development at two UK universities may soon be put to use in search and rescue missions. Amazing video of it at work here.

Who is this technovelgy guy? It's not really clear. But I am signing up for the RSS feed and checking out his blogroll.

In Appreciation of Squirrels and Other Urban Wildlife

Science + Story would like to point out that tomorrow is Squirrel Appreciation Day. Founded in 2001 by North Carolina-based wildlife rehabilitator Christy Hargrove, it is a holiday with no greater agenda than to further the appreciation of the Sciuridae. Hargrove suggests putting out extra food or learning something new about your backyard squirrels.

If you are motivated to celebrate the occasion in a manner other than scattering some peanuts in the shell, you might visit the website of Project Squirrel at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. Become a citizen scientist and log your observations of your neighborhood squirrel species into their database and contribute to the body of knowledge about the Gray Squirrel, the Fox Squirrel, and urban ecology more generally.

If your feelings toward urban wildlife run to darker or more ambivalent emotions, I recommend visiting the website of visual artist Amy Stein. An exhibit of her photographs, Domesticated: Modern Dioramas of Our New Natural History, premieres at the Harvard Natural History Museum January 22 and will remain up until April 18, 2010. From the Museum website:

Informed by actual newspaper accounts and oral histories from residents of the small town of Matamoras in northeastern Pennsylvania, Stein’s photographs are staged scenes, often using taxidermied animals, illustrating real-life encounters between humans and animals. A girl and huge bear stare at each other from opposite sides of a fence surrounding the family pool. Coyotes howl at a street light. Stein’s images, at the same time both surreal and paradoxical, explore the increasingly permeable boundary between the human/built environment and the wild. Stein writes, “We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature."

Stein opens the exhibit with a gallery talk January 22 at 4:00 pm.  The museum is also hosting wildlife biologist Stephen DeStefano, reading from his book about urban wildlife, Coyote at the Kitchen Door, January 23 at 2:00 pm. You can bring peanuts for the squirrels on the museum's snow-covered lawn.

Photo from Domesticated by Amy Stein.

Where's my #@%&!*S jetpack?! Oh, wait.

We are huge fans of Threadless , the T shirt site where the community designs the shirts and votes on which ones gets produced. It has been for the last four years the only way I dress my son, who seems to be channeling some combination of Thomas Edison and H. P. Lovecraft.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about this design by John Slabyk, titled "Damn Scientists." The text is kind of hard to read, but it says: "They lied to us. This was supposed to be the future. Where is my jetpack? Where is my robot companion? Where is my dinner in pill form? Where is my hydrogen fueled automobile? Where is my nuclear powered levitating house? Where is my cure for this disease?"

It appears this shirt is going to have to be revised soon as the sci-fi future bears down on us. Witness the story in the last Food Issue of the New Yorker about "The Taste Makers" at the company Givaudan. The flavorists at Givaudan are on the verge of creating, if not dinner in pill form, then a pretty accurate version of Violet Beauregarde's Three-Course-Dinner Chewing Gum from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Robot companion? Check.
Jetpack? Working on it.
Hydrogen car? Honda has that.

Smart phones are looking more and more like tricorders from Star Trek. If you think that's a stretch, Google "Science apps for iPhone."

My point here is that the future has a way of creeping up on you. I guess when I pictured the future, I imagined a digital world, all glass and steel, and gizmos looking something like the Kindle. I just didn't envision the messy part, where the Kindle and the book were coexisting, like Cro Magnons and Neanderthals.

Maybe some far-future PhD candidate will write a thesis on the demise of the book and whether the Kindle was the death knell for books with pages and that wonderful dead-tree smell. In the meantime, I may check out Dan Wilson's Where's My Jet Pack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived.  Already a little outdated, perhaps (see above), but I think Wilson, a roboticist, has interesting things to say about how science and society march to different drummers and why some inventions just never catch fire. And check out Wilson's blog here, where you can find out more about the coming robot apocalypse.

You can get your own "WHERE'S MY #@%&!*S JETPACK?!" poster by Paul Sizer, DeviantArt.com.

10 Red Balloons

At the beginning of a new decade, battered by all kinds of best-of and year-end listmaking, I decided to go for a walk with my Blackberry to listen to some science podcasts that had accumulated, waiting for me to listen to them. And so I heard this Science Friday podcast from December 11 about the DARPA Network Challenge. From the Science Friday site:

The challenge: find the geographic coordinates of 10 red weather balloons scattered across the country, as quickly as possible. The contest, sponsored by DARPA, aimed to "explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems."

It's old news now that a team from MIT found all 10 balloons in a staggering 9 hours, using the power of social networking, but the phrase in the podcast that leapt out at me was "viral collaboration." Since I've listened to the red balloon story, friends on Facebook have been reposting a YouTube video titled "Just One Dog" about a mutt in a high-kill animal shelter saved through the efforts of people enlisted through social networks. And tomorrow, friends and family of Utah resident Susan Powell, missing since early December, will begin a media blitz on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to try and draw attention to her case in an effort to locate her. The real-world ribbons tied on signposts and trees during the disappearance of Salt Lake teenager Elizabeth Smart in 2002 have eight years later become virtual ribbons online. As the Deseret News says in the lead to their story, "Friends and family of Susan Powell want the search for the missing mother of two to go viral."

It's a more than a little disconcerting to me that it's DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that's interested in the power of viral collaboration. But I thought back to the role that Twitter played in citizen reporting during the Iranian election in the summer of 2009, and I wanted to know more about how the viral power of social media was being tapped for positive change. Was this just a new buzzword, like the "crowdsourcing" of 2005? Or did it have the potential to be much more, especially in the role of citizen science?

The social networking site ScienceforCitizens.net is supposed to launch later this month. It's billing itself as Craigslist meets Match.com for Citizen Scientists. I know I'm intrigued. Until the social network for citizen scientists goes live, you can find a citizen science project through the blog of the Science Cheerleader. That's where I also found news of EpiCollect, a data gathering application originally designed for epidemiology but now allowing a diffuse network of users to contribute data points to a single Google Map. I'm picturing elementary school kids fanned out on a species inventory, snapping images of flora and fauna with Android-powered smartphones, and then being able to see the images as points on a global map. That's a kind of viral collaboration that's anything but scary.

From the Food Network to Foodsheds

This week’s mail brought the Food Issue of The New Yorker--fittingly enough for Thanksgiving week and the season that saw the demise of the magazine Gourmet. The first article I turned to was Adam Gopnik’s essay on our hunger for cookbooks and the role they have come to play in the era of the celebrity chef. Every age gets the cookbooks it deserves, he writes, and it says something about us that our cookbooks have become as much about memoir and spectacle as about putting something delicious on the table. Home cooks are left chasing an ever-receding ideal.


The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages—all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night’s was.

But as I look at the cookbooks in my own kitchen—and they occupy a long bookcase under the dining room window, which they share with field guides to birds and bugs and shells and the binoculars—I see something else: cultural anthropology, shared ethnic heritage, what food says about where our ancestors made their own hearths and what of that heritage we still carry with us. To me, cooking is an initiation into a long chain of human ritual of applying fire to food that stretches back and back and back to the first moment that humans cooked game over a fire and decided it might taste better with some salt on it.



Cookbooks in America were created for homesteaders, young married women setting up house far from their birth families and learning to “stand facing the stove.” English cookery books had no advice on how to cook such New World wonders as crawfish, corn, turkey, cranberries, and squash. It was women such as Eliza Smith, Amelia Simmons, and Fannie Farmer who taught American women (and home cooking was women’s work) how to turn the fruits of the American plains into hoppin’ john and rhubarb pie. As early as the eighteenth century, cookbook writers stepped up to offer advice and recipes and by the middle of the nineteenth century American publishers were putting out hundreds of cookbooks.

You can explore this rich history through the digital collection of American cookbooks at the Michigan State University’s Feeding America project. For the 200th birthday of the cookbook in America back in 1996, the university digitized 76 examplars from their collection of 7000 American cookbooks, representing the late 1700s to the early 1900s.

Gary Nabhan, known for his book with Stephen L. Buchmann, The Forgotten Pollinators (Island Press, 1996), has moved in recent years to writing and thinking about “foodsheds” and endangered foodways. As a counter to the cult of personality on the Food Network and the high theatrics of Iron Chef America, the whole slow-and-local food movement is shining a light on vanishing food traditions and heirloom varieties of native foods that are in danger of passing from our culture. Nabhan is an ethnobiologist, nutritional ecologist, and leading proponent of preserving old foodways and thinking about food ecologically, tracing food from source to table in a foodshed the way we trace water from its source to the sea in a watershed.  You can check out his many books at his website. I’m looking forward to reading the one (Why Some Like It Hot) that will explain my nine year old’s obsession with Cholula hot sauce.

Finally, I’m marking my calendar to attend this upcoming talk in January at the Harvard Natural History Museum by Richard Wrangham on the cooking hypothesis, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Wrangham is a biological anthropologist who has put forth the hypothesis that cooking back in Paleolithic times “drove large-scale changes in our physiology, behavior, and cognition and has defined our species to this very day.”

One by one,  traits long touted as uniquely human--to play, to grieve, to use language and tools--have been found among the other taxa. But so far, cooking is still ours.

More about Nabhan’s Renewing America’s Food Traditions iniative at Slow Food USA.