The delightful dung cannon.

Well I've posted about a few people who blend science and art, but I like to do it too! So here's a little drawing I did of one of the fastest living things on the planet... the fungus Pilobolus, colloquially known as the "Dung cannon", which shoots its capful of spores at mind-boggling speeds. I drew this as a card submission for the Phylomon project - think Pokemon meets biology/ecology education.

I "drew" my inspiration from two places:
1) Time-lapse photography videos of Pilobolus crystallinus made at Cornell University (like this one here).
2) The PLoS One paper that documented Pilobolus keinii expelling its spores using super high-speed photography (watch this awesome video of it).

According to the authors, the spore-expulsion speeds documented for P. keinii and the 3 other fungi (Ascobolus immersus, Podospora anserina, and Basidiobolus ranarum) are the fastest accelerations (of any kind... bird, cheetah... rocket ship?) known in nature!

Visualizing Science

I had a fantastic science teacher, Mr. Rees, in high school. He made it apparent to me that an unfortunate divide exists between the general public and the scientific community when it comes to understanding scientific concepts. David Suzuki, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and other great names, have devoted great efforts to bridging this gap and helping people appreciate science.

Now, I give you Felice Frankel...

Felice Frankel is a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard and research scientist at MIT, working with scientists to make spectacular, and communicative, images of their work. Working with researchers to create these images, she found that having them draw images for her improved not only her understanding, but improved the researchers ability to communicate their concepts. Enter "Picturing to Learn", a collaborative project she is heading that challenges undergraduate students in the sciences to draw illustrations that can explain a scientific concept to a different target audience, for example a high school student.

Science is increasingly involved in every aspect of our lives... without a fundamental understanding , everything from our cell phones and pharmaceuticals to our brains and babies is just a black box.

Images:
Ferrofluid photographed by Felice Frankel (Top)
Student Illustration of a Particle in a Box (Bottom)