Activity from dhruva

Mars Rover Spirit's Entire Journey on Mars (A time lapse)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 6:59 PM on November 21, 2011 (47 comments)

Leaping Sundogs "...that little wisp suddenly snaps into a new shape, as if someone had stopped the video, waited for the cloud to change, then started up the video again." More here.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 9:54 AM on November 17, 2011 (11 comments)

Princeton's 5th annual Art of Science Competition "The Art of Science exhibition explores the interplay between science and art. These practices both involve the pursuit of those moments of discovery when what you perceive suddenly becomes more than the sum of its parts. Each piece in this exhibition is, in its own way, a record of such a moment."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 10:15 AM on November 15, 2011 (8 comments)

How to hatch a dinosaur: 'So making a chicken egg hatch a baby dinosaur should really just be an issue of erasing what evolution has done to make a chicken. Every cell of a turkey carries the blueprints for making a tyrannosaurus, but the way the plans get read changes over time as the species evolves.' [via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 9:26 AM on October 7, 2011 (54 comments)

Compressed "I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism. " (via)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 6:07 PM on August 30, 2011 (21 comments)

Möbius: A collaborative stop motion sculpture "Twenty-one large triangles animated by Melbourne, throughout Federation Square. MÖBIUS is a sculpture that can be configured into many cyclical patterns and behave as though it is eating itself, whilst sinking into the ground." (by Ducroz)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 11:37 AM on August 16, 2011 (21 comments)

Samosapedia "The definitive guide to South Asian lingo". Eg., Enthu Cutlet: An enthu cutlet is an earnest eager beaver who is able to muster up inordinate amounts of energy, inspiration and enthusiasm towards a variety of things. (via)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:47 AM on August 9, 2011 (14 comments)

The re-invention of silk "For a millennium, traders brought silk fabrics from the Far East along the Silk Road to Europe, where the beautiful yet tough material was fashioned into dazzling clothes. Today bioengineers (video interview)are infusing the natural protein fibers spun by silkworms with enzymes and semiconductors. They are processing the modified strands under varying temperature, shear and acidic conditions to create novel materials with remarkable properties."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 11:22 AM on March 8, 2011 (13 comments)

Nabokov Butterfly Theory Is Vindicated "Nabokov came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves. Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 6:35 AM on January 26, 2011 (27 comments)

Amazing World of Insect-Wing Color Discovered "A closer look at seemingly drab, transparent insect wings has revealed realms of previously unappreciated color, visible to the naked eye yet overlooked for centuries. Until now, the wing colors of many flies and wasps were dismissed as random iridescence. But they may be as distinctive and marvelous as the much-studied, much-celebrated wings of butterflies and beetles." The paper (pdf) was published in PNAS.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 10:49 AM on January 5, 2011 (10 comments)

The Manganiyar Seduction "The Manganiyars are a group of hereditary professional folk musicians from Rajasthan, India."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 2:15 PM on December 24, 2010 (4 comments)

Take Back Yoga : A group of Indian-Americans have ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism. The campaign, labeled “Take Back Yoga,” does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism ... but only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:57 AM on November 28, 2010 (66 comments)

Seasonal Poetry in Sanskrit : The blog Sanskrit Literature has been running an excellent series on plants that appear in sanskrit poetry. Some examples : Jasmine (malati), Lotuses and Water Lilies, Mango.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 9:03 AM on November 2, 2010 (6 comments)

Fake Eyes "To small tropical birds foraging on the rainforest floor, those two scowling eyes peering back at them from between the leaves could be a predator. But they also could belong to one of the hundreds of caterpillar species that have evolved eyelike spots and patterns to trick feasting birds."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 12:35 PM on June 14, 2010 (43 comments)

We Need a General Theory of Individuality : "One of the unspoken secrets in basic scientific research, from anthropology to zoology (with intervening stops at physiology, political science, psychology, psychiatry, and sociology) is that, nearly always, individuals turn out to be different from one another, and that—to an extent rarely admitted and virtually never pursued—scientific generalizations tend to hush up those differences"
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 10:05 AM on May 5, 2010 (75 comments)

Hand Drawn Maps "These humble maps can be beautiful. They can also be messy, indecipherable, inaccurate, and unattractive ... The crucial advantage of the handmade map is that it is designed for a particular person confronting a particular task. " [via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 7:37 AM on April 30, 2010 (16 comments)

The Anachronism "On a sun dappled summer day a science expedition propels two children toward an enigmatic encounter at the edge of their known world. Arriving on an isolated beach, they stumble upon the shipwreck of a robotic squid submarine." A short film, project site, via.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 5:44 AM on April 23, 2010 (17 comments)

Chai Why? The Triumph of Tea in India : "But whereas I initially supposed tea-drinking to be as Indian, and perhaps as old, as the Vedas, I have come to know that it is, in the longue durée of Indian history, a very recent development; one that (in many parts of the country) did not much precede my first visit, or that even followed it."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:42 PM on April 19, 2010 (18 comments)

Robert Hodgin's Magnetic sculptures: "These forms are created with cylinder magnets, spherical magnets, and ball bearings. Magnetism is the only thing holding the forms together. They are fairly fragile and picking them up will likely crush them. All of the forms I created were variations of the 12 sided dodecahedron. This particular platonic solid seems to be the form the magnets are happiest with." [via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 2:27 PM on April 14, 2010 (11 comments)

Botanical Drawings for the Digital Age "Macoto Murayama can spend months on one of his botanical illustrations, and when he’s done, the plant looks like something that blossomed in outer space."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:18 AM on March 5, 2010 (11 comments)

Visualizing Whale Songs "Mark Fischer, an expert in marine acoustics, has come up with another way to illustrate whale song. He uses a more obscure method, known as the wavelet transform, which represents the sound in terms of components known as wavelets: short, discrete waves that are better at capturing cetacean song."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:50 AM on January 29, 2010 (12 comments)

The Nine Eyes of Google Street View "It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality—as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 5:15 PM on January 7, 2010 (35 comments)

Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved "Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid's proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the "semi-logic" of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 11:08 AM on December 16, 2009 (30 comments)

The Mandelbulb "The original Mandelbrot is an amazing object that has captured the public's imagination for 30 years. It's found by following a relatively simple math formula. But in the end, it's still only 2D and flat - there's no depth, shadows, perspective, or light sourcing. What we have featured in this article is a potential 3D version of the same fractal."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 10:06 AM on November 12, 2009 (117 comments)

A (mostly) vegetarian spider: "A small jumping spider has taken to hunting plants instead of bugs. Bagheera kiplingi dodges throngs of aggressive ants to feast on the leaf-tip morsels of acacia shrubs, making it the first mostly vegetarian spider known to science."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 5:54 PM on October 13, 2009 (37 comments)

The Revolutionary "Consider, then, the Fosbury Flop, an upside-down and backward leap over a high bar, an outright—an outrageous!—perversion of acceptable methods of jumping over obstacles. An absolute departure in form and technique. It was an insult to suggest, after all these aeons, that there had been a better way to get over a barrier all along. And if there were, it ought to have come from a coach, a professor of kinesiology, a biomechanic, not an Oregon teenager of middling jumping ability."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 6:57 PM on September 14, 2009 (27 comments)

Colombia Confronts Drug Lord’s Legacy: Hippos "In what ecologists describe as possibly the continent’s most ambitious effort to assemble a collection of species foreign to South America, Escobar imported animals like zebras, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses and, of course, hippopotamuses. Some of the animals died or were transferred to zoos around the time Mr. Escobar was killed. But the hippos largely stayed put, flourishing in the artificial lakes dug at Mr. Escobar’s behest."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 11:11 AM on September 11, 2009 (86 comments)

Glass Microbiology "These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the doctoring of scientific imagery affects our visualization of phenomena."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 4:21 PM on September 3, 2009 (9 comments)

The foreign exchange student "Some years ago we had a foreign exchange student come to live with us. We found it very difficult to pronounce his name correctly, but he didn’t mind. He told us just to call him 'Eric'." A short story in pictures by Shaun Tan. Previously.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:26 AM on July 27, 2009 (38 comments)

An Outsider's View "Over the past fifty years, factions of biologists have had a complex relationship. Some scientists have continued to carry out relatively traditional natural history work, with little need to delve into molecular (or computational) biology. Others have given little attention to natural history, focusing their efforts instead on deciphering the complexities of a membrane channel, or building new algorithms for identifying open reading frames. In some cases, biologists have bridged this divide, and the result has been a fruitful collaboration. But in other cases—such as the DNA studies on whales and hippos—one group moves into the other's traditional territory, sparking new conflict."[via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 3:18 PM on July 22, 2009 (12 comments)

The Quality-Control Quandary "As newspapers shed copy editors and post more and more unedited stories online, what’s the impact on their content?" [via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 6:20 AM on July 8, 2009 (23 comments)

How does our language shape our thinking? :"What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:52 AM on June 25, 2009 (101 comments)

Getting up to speed : "If it can get started, the California high-speed train would almost certainly be the most expensive single infrastructure project in United States history. Judging by the experiences of Japan and France, both of which have mature high-speed rail systems, it would end the expansion of regional airline traffic as in-state travelers increasingly ride the fast trains. And it would surely slow the growth of highway traffic."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 7:04 PM on June 14, 2009 (77 comments)

When authors and poets write the news "It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz (scroll down and select June 10th) editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news. Read articles on integration at the giraffe enclosure, love in the cancer ward, mosaics in Tel Aviv, addicts at the Jerusalem rehab centre, and a visit to the grave of a holy man, among others. [via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 3:55 PM on June 12, 2009 (10 comments)

Light Art Performance Photography Long exposure photographs mixed with performance art. [via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 5:01 PM on May 15, 2009 (3 comments)

Calligraphy Qalam An introduction to Arabic, Ottoman and Persian Calligraphy. See a gallery, a timeline of scripts and styles, a blog with entries such as how to design your own square kufic calligraphy, and much more.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:05 PM on May 11, 2009 (8 comments)

"The Boyle Family are a family of collaborative artists based in London. Their best known work, however, continues to be their Journey to the Surface of the Earth. Begun in 1964, this work encompasses many different series. Each of these series has involved various random selection techniques to isolate a rectangle of the Earth's surface. In the case of the World Series 1000 random selections were made from a giant map of the world by blindfolded visitors. Once the random selection has been made, they recreate the site in a fixed and permanent form as a painted fibreglass relief. They recognise that each work is, in a sense, a failure. They know the selections can never be truly random and that it is impossible to eliminate themselves and their own subjective influences."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:23 PM on February 17, 2009 (3 comments)

Early images of Egypt (via)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:21 PM on February 15, 2009 (6 comments)

The Lecture System in Teaching Science "Meanwhile, back at the classroom, the lecture is drawing to a close. Just as the bell rings, the lecturer, if he's a really smooth operator, comes to the end of a sentence, a paragraph, a nice neat unit. He lays down his last piece of chalk — he knows exactly how many pieces the lecture will take — picks up his precious lecture notes, and goes out. The students, tired but happy, rise up and follow after him. Their heads are empty, but their notebooks are full. Their necks are a little tired; it's been like a sort of vertical tennis match: board, notebook, board, notebook. But other than that, everything is all right. Any student will tell you, "I never had any trouble with the course until the first examination."" [via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 7:34 PM on February 6, 2009 (63 comments)

Khoda :"What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting? This idea inspired Reza Dolatabadi to make Khoda. Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minutes film."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 5:45 PM on January 20, 2009 (41 comments)

People of the Screen : "Digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours? We are increasingly distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed—and the paper book just can’t keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming people of the screen, not people of the book?"
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 9:22 PM on January 16, 2009 (31 comments)

Treehoppers (a flickr set)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 10:31 AM on January 12, 2009 (20 comments)

Glass Blowing Venice Man Makes Cat (YouTube link, via)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 4:02 PM on January 1, 2009 (39 comments)

The Hellstrom Chronicle "The film posits a theory any science fiction buff would glom onto in a second—that dominion over the world will come down to a battle between two classes of Kingdom Animalia, Man and insects, and that insects will win." Watch on youtube, 11 parts.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 5:38 PM on December 29, 2008 (35 comments)

The SERPENT project Collaborating closely with key players in the oil and gas industry, the SERPENT project aims to make cutting-edge industrial ROV technology and data more accessible to the world's science community, share knowledge and progress deep-sea research. Galleries, video of rare elbowed squid.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 9:48 PM on November 24, 2008 (5 comments)

Alebrijes, first created by Pedro Linares, are brightly-colored Mexican folk art sculptures of fantastical animal-like creatures.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 7:52 PM on November 15, 2008 (7 comments)

2008 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge "The winners -- in categories including photography, illustration, informational graphics, and multimedia -- captured the crystalline beauty of diatoms, the expanse of the human circulatory system, a fairy tale tea party re-invented, and the dynamic life of a plant cell." (previously)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 11:01 AM on September 26, 2008 (5 comments)

Sculpted Beastlies (A flickr set, via)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:15 AM on September 23, 2008 (12 comments)

A new whale anti-collision system "A remarkable feature of Andre's system is its ability to single out and track an individual whale among all its “family” members in the same area – a breakthrough made with the help of a West African musician. In attempting to unravel the chaotic rhythms of the sperm whale clicks, he was struck by the similarity between his underwater recordings and African tribal music. A Senegalese griot (drummer) confirmed the likeness and – amazingly – was able to pick individual whales from André’s recordings through their distinctive rhythmic structures."[via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 9:43 AM on September 12, 2008 (11 comments)

Genome Quilts "The quilts are visually pleasing, with their strong colors and seemingly traditional design, but they hide and reveal an entirely other construct of information." [via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 8:08 AM on September 5, 2008 (8 comments)

Page: 1 2 3 4

Activity from dhruva

Displaying post 1 to 50 of 174 from mefi