West Whim

Art Forms of Nature – The Ernst Haeckel Collection

“Ernst Haeckel – philosopher, professor, physician, naturalist, biologist and artist. The pinnacle of his work – Art Forms of Nature - began publication in 1899 and is still an astonishing record of life on earth.”

What Lives Inside Your Navel? An in-depth investigation of what lives inside the human belly button uncovers hundreds of organisms.

“[Our] closest relationships in life are with the mysterious, ultra-tiny organisms.

“They are partners more intimate than our lovers, children, pets or any other organisms,” Dunn said. “You are covered in unknown life. That life is doing things for or to you. Don’t you feel like you should know about it?”

I’ve got an innie, which means my “belly button is home to at least 60 to 100 or more species of bacteria, fungi and yeasts, according to new research.”

You?

(Painting is via, a tumblr focused on belly button art, article via.)

topherchris:

If you didn’t realize it already, this world is completely insane.

You got that right!

(via topherchris)

BERKELEY — Engineers at UC Berkeley have developed a pressure-sensitive electronic material from semiconductor nanowires that could one day give new meaning to the term “thin-skinned.”

“The idea is to have a material that functions like the human skin, which means incorporating the ability to feel and touch objects,” said Ali Javey, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and head of the UC Berkeley research team developing the artificial skin.

The artificial skin, dubbed “e-skin” by the UC Berkeley researchers, is described in a Sept. 12 paper in the advanced online publication of the journal Nature Materials. It is the first such material made out of inorganic single crystalline semiconductors.

A touch-sensitive artificial skin would help overcome a key challenge in robotics: adapting the amount of force needed to hold and manipulate a wide range of objects.

(more)

Designers of a bra that turns into gas masks and a team who found that named cows produce more milk were among the winners of the 2009 Ig Nobel prizes.

Dr Elena Bodnar won the public health prize for the bra that, in an emergency, can be converted into two gas masks.

She demonstrated her invention and gave one to each of the Nobel laureates as a gift.

The peace prize went to a Swiss research team who determined whether it is better to be hit over the head with a full or empty bottle of beer.

“The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.” Improbable Research

The event began with little warning when a gentle gust of solar wind delivered a bundle of magnetic fields from the Sun to Earth. Like an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a big clam, solar magnetic fields draped themselves around the magnetosphere and cracked it open.

“The opening was huge—four times wider than Earth itself,” says Wenhui Li, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire who has been analyzing the data.

He’s talking about a breach in the earth’s magnetic field, a breach ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Read why the next few years could be “lively” here.

(photo)

By coincidence, I just ran across this photo of a T4 bacteriophage — & he’s right! — it DOES look like that creepy squid. (See below.)

More micrographs here.