The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Science Art: Triceratops-Eotriceratops size 02, by Conty.

^{Click to embiggen}

Image from Wikimedia Commons, where it soon might be deleted for making the Eotriceratops too large.

They always seem to put the people at the wrong end.

Entered on 22 August 2010 at 6:16 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Deep Sea Angler, by Justin Marshall, QBI.

^{Click to embiggen}

This is a photograph taken off Osprey Reef by researchers with the Sensory Neurology Group of the Queensland Brain Institute. No, not marine biologists – but scientists trying to find out how sight evolved. Where else but the lightless deep to investigate the origins of vision? Things glow down there. And, more importantly, they use senses other than sight to get around. Those spots on the anglerfish’s side, they’re vibrational sensors. It uses them to detect the tiny motions made by living things, like invisible auras in the water 4,000 feet down.

Next month, the QBI team is traveling to a trench off Peru to see what else they can find. See?

Photo credit: Justin Marshall, Queensland Brain Institute. More images and information here and here.

Entered on 15 August 2010 at 6:59 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Ventricose Cuttlefish, probably by Charles Knight

^{Click to embiggen}

A close-up from another page of Charles Knight’s Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature. This may be mistitled – other creatures on the same page were called cuttlefish but looked for all the world like octopuses. It’s certainly ventricose, though. No doubt about that.

Entered on 8 August 2010 at 6:46 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Seals, from The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature.

^{Click to embiggen}

Seals and seal hunters, from Charles Knight’s Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature, exact publication date unknown but currently accessible at archive.org.

They have teeth. They live in the water. They are hunted in kayaks. What more does one need to know?

Entered on 1 August 2010 at 6:12 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Venus and the Ark, by Anne Sexton

The missile to launch a missile
was almost a secret.
Two male Ph.D.’s were picked
and primed to fill it
and one hundred
carefully counted insects,
three almost new snakes,
coiled in a cube,
exactly fifty fish creatures
in tanks, the necessary files,
twenty bars of food, ten brief cures,
special locks, fourteen white rats,
fourteen black rats, a pouch of dirt,
were all stuffed aboard before
the thing blasted from the desert.

And the missile that launched
a missile launched out
into a marvelous scientific balloon
that rolled and bobbed about
in the mists of Venus; suddenly
sank like a sweet fat grape,
oozing past gravity to snuggle
down upon the triumphant shape
of space. The two men signaled
Earth, telling their Continent
VENUS IS GREEN. And parades assembled,
the loud earth tellers spent
all fifteen minutes on it, even
shortened their weather forecast.
But rival nations, angry and oily,
fired up their best atom blast
and the last Earth war was done.
The place became crater on each side,
sank down to its first skull,
shedding forests, oceans, dried
bones and neons, as it fell through
time like a forgotten pitted stone.

These two men walked hopefully out
onto their hot empty planet
with machines, rats, tanks,
boxes, insects and the one odd set
of three almost new snakes,
to make the tests they were meant to do.
But on the seventh month the cages
grew small, too small to interview,
too tight to bear. The rats were gray
and heavy things where they ran
against wire and the snakes built eggs
on eggs and even the fish began
to bump in water as they spawned
on every side of each other’s swim.
And the men grew listless; they opened
the pouch of dirt, undid each locked bin
and let every creature loose
to live on Venus, or anyhow hide
under rocks. Bees swarmed the air,
letting a warm pollen slide
from their wings and onto the grass.
The fish flapped to a small pool
and the rats untangled their hairs
and humped over the vestibule
of the cramped balloon. Trees sprang
from lichen, the rock became a park,
where, even at star-time, things brushed;
even in the planet’s new dark
crotch, that air snag where snakes
coupled and rats rubbed in disrepair,
it grew quick and noisy with
a kind of wonder in the lonely air.

Old and withered, two Ph.D.’s
from Earth hobbled slowly back
to their empty balloon, crying alone
for sense, for the troubling lack
of something they ought to do,
while countless fish slapped
and the waters grew, green came
taller and the happy rats sped
through integrated forests,
barking like dogs at the top
of the sky. But the two men,
that last morning of death, before
the first of light, watched the land
of Venus, its sweetless shore,
and thought, “This is the end.
This is the last of a man like me.”
Until they saw, over the mists
of Venus, two fish creatures stop
on spangled legs and crawl
from the belly of the sea.
And from the planet park
they heard the new fruit drop.

Found on PoetryFoundation.org; this is not the first time that Anne Sexton has been mentioned on these pages in the context of interplanetary exploration.

I knew it. Always.

Entered on 25 July 2010 at 6:27 in the Science Art file | 1 Observation |  Print

Science Art: Giovanni de Dondi’s Astrarium, 1364.

This is a modern tracing
of a 1461 illustration
of a 1364 drawing
of a mechanical clock
that represented the movement of the universe.

Entered on 11 July 2010 at 6:44 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Venice, Italy, by Landsat 7, 2001.

^{Click to embiggen vastly}

Funny how Venice itself looks like Venetian glass from far enough away, ain’t it?

From NASA’s Landsat 7 archive.

Happy birthday, America – named for Amerigo Vespucci, who was from Florence, but loved Venice enough to name Venezuela after it.

Entered on 4 July 2010 at 6:10 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: “Lemurs,” from The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature, 1844.

Lemurs. The monkey-like creatures found sporting with the chameleons on Madagascar, what?

Look at all of them. There are some marmosets and manikins in there as well. Like children. Little hairy children.

[via Old Book Illustrations]

Entered on 27 June 2010 at 18:21 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Ursa Major, Sidney Hall

^{Click to embiggen vastly}.

This is the Great Bear, which has led our eyes to the North Star for centuries.

Sidney Hall was an engraver best remembered for maps and atlases of our world here. But it’s hard to get a sense of “here” without looking up from time to time. Ursa Major was part of Urania’s Mirror, a set of star-locator cards that Hall engraved in 1825. The cards have little holes punched where the stars are. Go out at night, line up the stars with the holes, and you know their names, their relative positions and how to find them in the real world.

Found on Wikimedia Commons, which also has the names of all the stars pictured.

Entered on 20 June 2010 at 6:51 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Take it ALL off.

The bloggers at ufunk.net have appealed to my prurient side with the Eizo Pin-up Calendar:

Miss June, 2010.

Yes, it’s a calendar that really shows it all. Eizo is a German medical imaging company. The calendar is the brainchild of their advertisers, Butter.

Read more here.

Entered on 16 June 2010 at 21:18 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print