Peter Miller has created a great gallery of images which, as you might say it, are art in its automated sense. His creation — images of organic materials, flowers and other similikes — are not painted nor created by hand, but by math.
All kinds of vital organic patterns, textures and shapes arise from descriptions that seem purely mechanistic and devoid of life.
Long gone are the days where Life itself seemed to be just a couple of lines of code in mathematica. THIS is enjoyable and visible, and much easier to understand for the layman.
Popular Science has posted a story about Godfrey Louis’s research concerned with the mysterious “blood-colored showers”. His findings suggest that the coloring compound within those showers are actually alien life forms capable of replication. Although “life”, nothing like anything we would know of. No DNA and stable above very high temperatures. Published in
Astrophysics and Space Science (doi://10.1007/s10509–005–9025–4, abstract)
from the abstract:
The striking red colouration of the rainwater was found to be due to the suspension of microscopic red particles having the appearance of biological cells. These particles have no similarity with usual desert dust. An estimated minimum quantity of 50,000 kg of red particles has fallen from the sky through red rain. An analysis of this strange phenomenon further shows that the conventional atmospheric transport processes like dust storms etc. cannot explain this phenomenon. The electron microscopic study of the red particles shows fine cell structure indicating their biological cell like nature. EDAX analysis shows that the major elements present in these cell like particles are carbon and oxygen. Strangely, a test for DNA using Ethidium Bromide dye fluorescence technique indicates absence of DNA in these cells. In the context of a suspected link between a meteor airburst event and the red rain, the possibility for the extraterrestrial origin of these particles from cometary fragments is discussed.**
nodalpoint.org reports about a new scientific journal opening soon: Source Code for Biology and Medicine, which will cover
Source Code for Biology and Medicine aims to publish source code for distribution and use in the public domain in order to advance biological and medical research. Through this dissemination, it may be possible to shorten the time required for solving certain computational problems for which there is limited source code availability or resources.
Hopefully this initiative will make some things more transparent, create better tools for other’s to use and create fame for all those fancy wizards making great useful software for scientists!
Molecular mixology, the newly coined term for the return of mixing cocktails with much more sophisticated methods than just “mixing”, including e.g. addition of baking powder as a source of “fizz”, is the little brother of molecular gastronomy. This term was first used in 1969 by Nicolas Kurti, but is more recently known through the lips of french scientist Hervé This (more details on the previous link to Wikipedia). This has written an essay about this, detailing some of the scientific/chemical methods used… very enjoyable and interesting to read. A list of books about this topic (and much more) is also available.
(just a quick primer to catch your and my attention. Ⅰ will come back to this in the future!)
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