yellow on Flickr.
Another great color feature from the BBC: Future site, which also brought you the feature earlier today about whether we all see the same colors. This latest piece asks where the names for colors come from.
Unlike so many other language-based classifications (like having dozens of words that describe snow, or not having a word for “war”), colors are thought to be arise from a natural need to classify a sensory input. In other words, the spectrum is the spectrum and we all see it … every language should have to fill in the names, right?
Wrong. Not only do some cultures just not recognize certain colors (like the fact that blue and green are often not differentiated in Vietnamese), but pre-literate languages seem to adopt colors into their lexicon in a very particular order! Looks like you can’t get a word for “green” without several other steps happening first (like black, white and red).
A fascinating look at where the cultural and neurological aspects of language intersect.
Brooklyn
0019
- Phone Arts is an International collaborative project experimenting using only the mobile phone as the medium to create unique compositions. They explore the boundaries of the phone to create graphic illustrations and designs.
blue on Flickr.
David S. Goodsell is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Both a researcher and an artist, Goodsell creates beautiful pictures of intracellular machinery alongside his scientific experimentation to help everyone visualise molecular and cell biology in a different - and stunningly beautiful - way.
When asked about his work, Goodsell responded, “Biological systems are a source of constant amazement for me. I use a combination of hand-drawn and computer graphics illustrations to reveal the invisible world of molecules inside cells. Computer graphics is a perfect way to display the atomic details of biological molecules. Using experimental coordinates determined by x-ray crystallography or other methods, we can see the position of every atom, and examine how they work together to catalyze a reaction or carry genetic information.”
His paintings are usually created through ink drawing and watercolour, taking inspiration from computer models and graphics of cells. The images shown here are six illustrations commissioned as a project for Biosite.
Top left: This illustration shows a portion of basement membrane, a structure that forms the support between tissues in the body. It is composed of a network of collagen (yellow green), laminin (blue-green cross-shaped molecules), and proteoglycans (deep green, with three arms).
Top right: A small portion of cytoplasm is shown, including three types of filaments that make up the cytoskeleton: a microtubule (the largest), an intermediate filament (the knobby one) and two actin filaments (the smallest ones). The large blue molecules are ribosomes, busy in their task of synthesising proteins. The large protein at bottom center is a proteosome.
Middle left: Blood serum is shown in the picture, with many Y-shaped antibodies, large circular low density lipoproteins, and lots of small albumin molecules. The large fibrous structure at lower left is von Willebrand factor and the long molecules in red are fibrinogen, both of which are involved in blood clotting. The blue object is poliovirus.
Middle right: Part of a muscle sarcomere is shown here, with actin filaments in blue and myosin filaments in red. The long yellow proteins are the huge protein titin.
Bottom left: This view shows DNA being replicated in the nucleus. DNA polymerase is shown at the center in purple, with a DNA strand entering from the bottom and exiting as two strands towards the top. The new strands are shown in white. Chromatin fibers are shown at either site of the replication fork.
Bottom right: A portion of a red blood cell is shown in this illustration, with the cell membrane at the top, and lots of hemoglobin (red) at the bottom.
All images courtesy of David. S. Goodsell, whose homepage can be found here.
(Source: amolecularmatter, via scinerds)
Images of Aggregation by Andy Lomas.
Lomas on his work:
These works come from a study of organic natural forms and their relationship to simple mathematical rules.
Influenced by the work of D’Arcy Thompson, Alan Turing and Ernst Haeckel, they study how intricate forms of plant and coral like structures can be created by digital simulation of flow and deposition.
The sculptural shapes are created by a process of accretion over time. They are gradually grown by simulating the paths of millions of particles randomly flowing in a field of forces. Over time they build on top of an initial simple seed surface to produce structures of immense complexity.
(via proofmathisbeautiful)
In his second year of neuroscience grad school, Greg Dunn was moonlighting with a different kind of experiment: blowing ink across pieces of paper. The neuron-like pattern it formed was instantly recognizable to him as a neuroscientist. “Ink spreads because it wants to go in the direction of less resistance, and that’s probably also the case of when branches grow or neurons grow,” he says. “The reason the technique works really well is because it’s directly related to how neurons are actually behaving.”
Dunn calls this the “fractal solution to the universe,” which he sees as the “fundamental beauty of nature.” He’s fascinated that this branching pattern holds true across orders of magnitude, whether that’s nanometers for neurons, centimeters for ink, or meters for a tree branch.
Since graduating with his PhD last fall, Dunn has continued to spend his days with neurons—big, golden ones ten thousand times the size of neurons in your brain. The former University of Pennsylvania grad student now creates paintings of neurons for a living.
(via scinerds)
