A Stunning, Hand-Illustrated Book of Mushrooms Drawn by an Overlooked 19th Century Female Scientist

in Biology, Gender, History | November 7th, 2022

Mush­rooms have qui­et­ly become super­stars of the glob­al stage.

Sure, not every­one likes them on piz­za, but who cares?

In the 21st-cen­tu­ry, they are hailed as role mod­els and poten­tial plan­et savers (not to men­tion a wild­ly pop­u­lar design motif…)

Time-lapse cin­e­matog­ra­phy pio­neer Louie Schwartzberg’s crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed doc­u­men­tary, Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi, has made experts of us all.

Go back a cen­tu­ry, and such knowl­edge was much hard­er won, requir­ing time, patience, and prox­im­i­ty to field or for­est.

Wit­ness Fun­gi col­lect­ed in Shrop­shire and oth­er neigh­bor­hoods, a hand­bound, hand-illus­trat­ed 3‑volume col­lec­tion by one Miss M. F. Lewis, of Lud­low, Eng­land.

Miss Lewis, a tal­ent­ed artist with an obvi­ous pas­sion for mycol­o­gy spent over 40 years painstak­ing­ly doc­u­ment­ing the spec­i­mens she ran across in England’s West Mid­lands region.

Each draw­ing or water­col­or is iden­ti­fied in Miss Lewis’ hand by its sub­jec­t’s sci­en­tif­ic name. The loca­tion in which it was found is duti­ful­ly not­ed, as is the date.

The hun­dreds of species she cap­tured with pen and brush between 1860 and 1902 def­i­nite­ly con­sti­tute a life’s work, and also an unpub­lished one.

Cor­nell University’s Mann Library, where the only copy of this pre­cious record is housed, has man­aged to truf­fle up but a sin­gle ref­er­ence to Miss Lewis’ sci­en­tif­ic myco­log­i­cal con­tri­bu­tion.

Eng­lish botanist William Phillips, writ­ing in an 1880 issue of the Trans­ac­tions of the Shrop­shire Archae­o­log­i­cal and Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Soci­ety, not­ed that he been “per­mit­ted to look over [a work] of very much excel­lence exe­cut­ed by Miss M. F. Lewis, of Lud­low”, adding that “sev­er­al rare species [of fun­gi] are very artis­ti­cal­ly rep­re­sent­ed.“

The his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of Miss Lewis’ work extends beyond the fun­gal realm.

As Sage writes in Miss­ing Miss­es in Mycol­o­gy, a post on the Mann Library’s Tum­blr cel­e­brat­ing Miss Lewis and her con­tem­po­rary, Eng­lish mycol­o­gist and illus­tra­tor, Sarah Price, women’s work was often omit­ted from the offi­cial sci­en­tif­ic record:

While we’re now see­ing con­sid­er­able effort to rec­ti­fy the record, the dis­cov­ery of untold sto­ries to fill in the blanks can be tricky busi­ness. It’s not that the sto­ries nev­er hap­pened — the field of botany, for one, is replete with some pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar evi­dence of women’s (often unac­knowl­edged) engage­ment with sci­en­tif­ic inquiry, embod­ied in the detailed illus­tra­tions that cap­tured the insights of obser­va­tions from the nat­ur­al world. But the pub­lished his­tor­i­cal record is often woe­ful­ly scant when it comes to clos­er detail on the lives and careers of the women who have helped car­ry mod­ern sci­ence for­ward.

We may nev­er learn any­thing more about the par­tic­u­lars of Miss Lewis’ train­ing or per­son­al cir­cum­stances, but the care she took to pre­serve her own work turned out to be a great gift for future gen­er­a­tions.

Leaf through all three vol­umes of Miss M.F. Lewis’ Fun­gi col­lect­ed in Shrop­shire and oth­er neigh­bor­hoods on the Inter­net Archive:

Vol­ume I

Vol­ume II

Vol­ume III

Via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent 

John Cage Had a Sur­pris­ing Mush­room Obses­sion (Which Began with His Pover­ty in the Depres­sion)

How Mush­room Time-Laps­es Are Filmed: A Glimpse Into the Pio­neer­ing Time-Lapse Cin­e­matog­ra­phy Behind the Net­flix Doc­u­men­tary Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi

The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Atlas of Mush­rooms: Edi­ble, Sus­pect and Poi­so­nous (1827)

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How Plants Move in a 24-Hour Period

in Biology, Random | October 9th, 2022

Neat to watch. Learn more about how plants move over on this Penn State web site.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Behold the Medieval Wound Man: The Poor Soul Who Illustrated the Injuries a Person Might Receive Through War, Accident or Disease

in Art, Biology, Health, History | September 29th, 2022

Do you swoon at the sight of blood?

Suf­fer paper cuts as major trau­ma?

Cov­er your eyes when the knife comes out in the hor­ror movie?

If so, and also if not, fall to your knees and give thanks that you’re not the Wound Man, above.

A sta­ple of medieval med­ical his­to­ry, he’s a gris­ly com­pendi­um of the injuries and exter­nal afflic­tions that might befall a mor­tal of the peri­od- insect and ani­mal bites, spilled entrails, abscess­es, boils, infec­tions, plague-swollen glands, pierc­ings and cuts, both acci­den­tal and delib­er­ate­ly inflict­ed.

Any one of these trou­bles should be enough to fell him, yet he remains upright, dis­play­ing every last one of them simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, his expres­sion sto­ic.

He’s hard to look at, but as art his­to­ri­an Jack Hart­nell , author of Medieval Bod­ies: Life, Death and Art in the Mid­dle Ages writes in British Art Stud­ies:

The Wound Man was not a fig­ure designed to inspire fear or to men­ace. On the con­trary, he rep­re­sent­ed some­thing more hope­ful: an imag­i­na­tive and arrest­ing her­ald of the pow­er­ful knowl­edge that could be chan­nelled and dis­pensed through the prac­tice of medieval med­i­cine.

A valu­able edu­ca­tion­al resource for sur­geons for some three cen­turies, he began crop­ping up in south­ern Ger­many in the ear­ly 1400s. In an essay for the Pub­lic Domain Review, Hart­nell notes how these ear­ly spec­i­mens served “as a human table of con­tents”, direct­ing inter­est­ed par­ties to the spe­cif­ic pas­sages in the var­i­ous med­ical texts where infor­ma­tion on exist­ing treat­ments could be found.

The pro­to­col for injuries to the intestines or stom­ach called for stitch­ing the wound up with a fine thread and sprin­kling it with an anti­he­m­or­rhag­ic pow­der made from wine, hematite, nut­meg, white frank­in­cense, gum ara­bic, bright red sap from the Dra­cae­na cinnabari tree and a restora­tive quan­ti­ty of mum­my.

The Wound Man evolved along with med­ical knowl­edge, weapons of war­fare and art world trends.

The wood­cut Wound Man in Hans von Gersdorff’s 1517 land­mark Field­book of Surgery intro­duces can­non­balls to the ghast­ly mix.

And the engraver Robert White’s Wound Man in British sur­geon John Browne’s 1678 Com­pleat Dis­course of Wounds los­es the loin­cloth and grows his hair, mor­ph­ing into a neo­clas­si­cal beau­ty in the Saint Sebas­t­ian mold.

Sur­gi­cal knowl­edge even­tu­al­ly out­paced the Wound Man’s use­ful­ness, but pop­u­lar cul­ture is far from ready for him to lay down and die, as evi­denced by recent cameos in episodes of Han­ni­bal and the British com­e­dy quiz show, QI.


Delve into the his­to­ry of the Wound Man in Jack Hart­nel­l’s British Art Stud­ies arti­cle “Word­ing the Wound Man.”

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Dis­cov­er the Per­sian 11th Cen­tu­ry Canon of Med­i­cine, “The Most Famous Med­ical Text­book Ever Writ­ten”

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Biology of Bonsai Trees: The Science Behind the Traditional Japanese Art Form

in Art, Biology | June 21st, 2022

The art of bon­sai orig­i­nat­ed in Chi­na. As sub­se­quent­ly refined in Japan, its tech­niques pro­duce minia­ture trees that give aes­thet­ic plea­sure to peo­ple all around Asia and the wider world beyond. This appre­ci­a­tion is reflect­ed in the cou­ple-on-the-street inter­view footage incor­po­rat­ed into “The Biol­o­gy Behind Bon­sai Trees,” the video above from Youtu­ber Jon­ny Lim, bet­ter known as The Back­pack­ing Biol­o­gist. Not only does Lim gath­er pos­i­tive views on bon­sai around Los Ange­les, he also finds in that same city a bon­sai nurs­ery run by Bob Pressler, who has spent more than half a cen­tu­ry mas­ter­ing the art.

Even Pressler admits that he does­n’t ful­ly under­stand the biol­o­gy of bon­sai. Lim’s search for sci­en­tif­ic answers sends him to “some­thing called the api­cal meris­tem.” That’s the part of the tree made of “stem cells found at the tips of the shoots and roots.” Stem cells, as you may remem­ber from their long moment in the news a few years ago, have the poten­tial to turn into any kind of cell.

The cells of bon­sai are the same size as those of reg­u­lar trees, research has revealed, but thanks to the delib­er­ate cut­ting of roots and resul­tant restric­tion of nutri­ents to the api­cal meris­tem, their leaves are made up of few­er cells in total. Lim draws an anal­o­gy with bak­ing cook­ies of dif­fer­ent sizes: “The com­po­nents are exact­ly the same. The only dif­fer­ence is that bon­sais have less start­ing mate­r­i­al.”

Hav­ing gained his own appre­ci­a­tion for bon­sai, Lim also wax­es poet­ic on how these minia­ture trees “still grow on the face of adver­si­ty, and they do so per­fect­ly.” But as one com­menter replies, “Why recre­ate adver­si­ty?” Claim­ing that the process is “crip­pling trees for just aes­thet­ics,” this indi­vid­ual presents one of the known cas­es against bon­sai. But that case, accord­ing to the experts Lim con­sults, is based on cer­tain com­mon mis­con­cep­tions about the process­es involved: that the wires used to posi­tion limbs “tor­ture” the trees, for exam­ple. But as oth­ers point out, do those who make these anti-bon­sai argu­ments feel just as pained about the many lawns that get mown down each and every week?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art & Phi­los­o­phy of Bon­sai

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

What Makes the Art of Bon­sai So Expen­sive?: $1 Mil­lion for a Bon­sai Tree, and $32,000 for Bon­sai Scis­sors

The Art of Cre­at­ing a Bon­sai: One Year Con­densed Con­densed Into 22 Mes­mer­iz­ing Min­utes

Daisu­gi, the 600-Year-Old Japan­ese Tech­nique of Grow­ing Trees Out of Oth­er Trees, Cre­at­ing Per­fect­ly Straight Lum­ber

A Dig­i­tal Ani­ma­tion Com­pares the Size of Trees: From the 3‑Inch Bon­sai, to the 300-Foot Sequoia

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Ergonomics Experts Explain How to Set Up Your Desk

in Biology, Design, Life | April 15th, 2022

Ergonom­ics aren’t a joke, Jim. — Dwight Schrute, The Office

Tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions are snow­balling faster than ever in the third decade of the 21st-cen­tu­ry. A home office set-up that would have been cause for pride in 2019 seems woe­ful­ly inad­e­quate now.

Just ask any­one whose desk job piv­ot­ed to vir­tu­al in March of 2020.

So, per­haps don’t take phys­i­cal ther­a­pist’s Jon Cinkay’s near­ly three year old advice in the above Wall Street Jour­nal video as gospel, but rather as a chance to check in with your carpal tun­nels, your aching neck and back, and your favorite refur­bished office fur­ni­ture out­let.

Cinkay assumes that your desk is a stan­dard 29 — 30” tall, which is not the case here, but okay…

Our bod­ies’ unique dimen­sions mean that no desk can be a one-size-fits-all propo­si­tion, and Cinkay makes a robust case for mak­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tions:

1. Adjust your desk chair

Cinkay rec­om­mends adjust­ing the seat height until your elbows are bent at a 90-degree angle when your fin­gers are on the key­board. (As of this writ­ing, key­boards have not yet become obso­lete.)

In a 2020 arti­cle for the Hos­pi­tal of Spe­cial Surgery, he also rec­om­mends mak­ing sure your chair’s arm­rests can fit under your desk to avoid pos­tur­al com­pro­mis­es when reach­ing for your key­board or mouse.

He also wise­ly advis­es look­ing for a chair with a min­i­mum 30-day war­ran­ty so you don’t get stuck with an expen­sive mis­take.

2. Con­sid­er a foot­stool

If crank­ing your desk chair to the per­fect height leaves your feet dan­gling, you’ll need a foot­stool to help your knees main­tain a prop­er 90-degree bend. If you can’t invest in a high tech adjustable foot­stool, a ream of paper will do in a pinch.

Tech expert David Zhang, who we’ll hear from soon below, rests his cute striped socks on a yoga mat.

Who among us does not have dozens of things that could be pressed into ser­vice as a foot­stool?

I am left to pon­der the fate of the dec­o­ra­tive needle­point­ed foot­stools my late grand­moth­er and her sis­ters scat­tered around their liv­ing rooms.

Can an actu­al foot­stool be con­sid­ered a foot­stool hack?

3. Adjust the height of your mon­i­tor 

To avoid neck pain, use a mon­i­tor stand to posi­tion the top of the screen lev­el with your eyes. If you’re work­ing with a lap­top, you’ll need a stand, a sep­a­rate key­board and and a mouse.

Cinkay’s mon­i­tor stand hack is — you guessed it — a ream of paper.

Mine is 5000 Years of the Art of India which is about the same thick­ness as a ream of paper and was in easy reach at the library where I work.

To judge by some of the com­ments on Cinkay’s Wall Street Jour­nal video, his key­board dates to the Stone Age.

What­ev­er his key­board vin­tage, the afore­men­tioned arti­cle did sug­gest gel wrist rests to relieve pres­sure on the sen­si­tive carpal tun­nel area, but watch out! Zhang is not a fan!

4. Get a Head­set

Leav­ing aside the fact that the phone in ques­tion appears to be a land­line, a head­set allows you to keep your head on straight, thus min­i­miz­ing neck and shoul­der pain.

5. Remem­ber that you’re not chained to your desk

Of all the ergonom­ic advice offered above, this seems like­li­est to remain ever­green.

Take a snack break, a water break, a bath­room break, and while you’re at it toss in a cou­ple of the stretch­es Cinkay rec­om­mends.

(The Mayo Clin­ic has more, includ­ing our favorite shoul­der stretch.)

Zhang’s desk-cen­tric video was uploaded in 2017, when key­board trays were already becom­ing a rel­ic of a bygone era. 

As men­tioned, he’s anti-wrist rest. If your wrists are in need of sup­port, and they are, get a palm rest!

Zhang’s also crit­i­cal of draw­ers and — unusu­al for 2017 — stand­ing desks though like Cirkay, he’s a big fan of stand­ing up and mov­ing around.

His video descrip­tion includes some com­mon sense, ass-cov­er­ing encour­age­ment for view­ers with irreg­u­lar symp­toms or pain to seek pro­fes­sion­al help. We think this means med­ical pro­fes­sion­al, though unsur­pris­ing­ly, ergonom­ic assess­ment is a fast grow­ing field. It’s expen­sive but pos­si­bly costs less in the long run than rush­ing out to buy what­ev­er a stranger on the inter­net tells you to.

To that end, we appre­ci­ate Zhang’s trans­paren­cy regard­ing his channel’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Ama­zon Ser­vices LLC Asso­ciates affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing pro­gram.

Caveat emp­tor!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Why Sit­ting Is The New Smok­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Expla­na­tion

Who Wrote at Stand­ing Desks? Kierkegaard, Dick­ens and Ernest Hem­ing­way Too

Behold the Elab­o­rate Writ­ing Desks of 18th Cen­tu­ry Aris­to­crats

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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What Did People Do Before the Invention of Eyeglasses?

in Biology, Health, History | April 7th, 2022

You remem­ber it — one of the most heart­break­ing scenes on TV. A man longs for noth­ing more than time to read, to be free of all those peo­ple Sartre told us make our hells. Final­ly grant­ed his wish by the H‑Bomb, he then acci­den­tal­ly break his glass­es, ren­der­ing him­self unable make out a word. Oh, cru­el irony! Not an optometrist or opti­cian in sight! Sure­ly, there are “Time Enough at Last” jokes at eye care con­ven­tions world­wide.

Moral­i­ty tales wrapped in sci­ence fic­tion might make us think about all sorts of things, but one of the most obvi­ous ques­tions when we wit­ness the fate of Mr. Hen­ry Bemis, “char­ter mem­ber in the fra­ter­ni­ty of dream­ers,” might be, but what did peo­ple do before cor­rec­tive lens­es? Were mil­lions forced to accept his fate, liv­ing out their lives with far­sight­ed­ness, near­sight­ed­ness, and oth­er defects that impede vision? How did ear­ly humans sur­vive in times much less hos­pitable to dis­abil­i­ties? At least there were oth­ers to read and describe things for them.…

In truth, the Twi­light Zone is not far off the mark. Or at least near­sight­ed­ness and read­ing are close­ly linked. “As long as pri­mates have been around, there’s prob­a­bly been myopia,” says pro­fes­sor of oph­thal­mol­o­gy Ivan Schwab. But Schwab argues in his book Evo­lu­tion’s Wit­ness: How Eyes Evolved that the rise of read­ing like­ly caused sky­rock­et­ing rates of myopia over the past three hun­dred years. “Though genes and nutri­tion may play a role in near­sight­ed­ness,” Natal­ie Jacewicz writes at NPR, “[Schwab] says edu­ca­tion and myopia seem to be linked, sug­gest­ing that when peo­ple do a lot of close work, their eyes grow longer.”

As the His­to­ry Dose video above explains, the old­est image of a pair of glass­es dates from a 1351 paint­ing of Car­di­nal Hugh of Saint-Cher. The paint­ing is an anachro­nism — spec­ta­cles, the nar­ra­tor tells us, were invent­ed 23 years ear­li­er in Pisa, after the car­di­nal’s death. They “grad­u­al­ly spread across Europe and trav­elled the Silk Road to Chi­na.” (The old­est sur­viv­ing pair of glass­es dates from around 1475). So what hap­pened before 1286? As you’ll learn, glass­es were not the only way to enlarge small items. In fact, humans have been using some form of mag­ni­fy­ing lens to read small print (or man­u­script or cuneiform or what-have-you) for thou­sands of years. Those lens­es, how­ev­er, cor­rect­ed pres­by­opia, or far-sight­ed­ness.

Those with myopia were most­ly out of luck until the inven­tion of sophis­ti­cat­ed lens-grind­ing tech­niques and improved vision tests. But for most of human his­to­ry, unless you were a sailor or a sol­dier, you “like­ly spent your day as an arti­san, smith, or farm work­er,” occu­pa­tions where dis­tance vision did­n’t mat­ter as much. In fact, arti­sans like medieval scribes and illu­mi­na­tors, says Neil Han­d­ley — muse­um cura­tor of the Col­lege of Optometrists, Lon­don — were “actu­al­ly encour­aged to remain in their myopic con­di­tion, because it was actu­al­ly ide­al for them doing this job.”

It was­n’t until well after the time of Guten­berg that wear­ing lens­es on one’s face became a thing — and hard­ly a pop­u­lar thing at first. Ear­ly glass­es were held up to the eyes, not worn. They were heavy, thick, and frag­ile. In the 15th cen­tu­ry, “because… they were unusu­al and rare,” says Han­d­ley, “they were seen as hav­ing mag­i­cal pow­ers” and their wear­ers viewed as “in league with the dev­il, immoral.” That stig­ma went away, even if glass­es picked up oth­er asso­ci­a­tions that some­times made their users the sub­ject of taunts. But by the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, glass­es were com­mon around the world.

Giv­en that we all spend most of our time inter­act­ing with small text and images on hand­held screens, it seems maybe they haven’t spread wide­ly enough. “More than a bil­lion, and maybe as many as 2.5 bil­lion, peo­ple in the world need but don’t have glass­es to cor­rect for var­i­ous vision impair­ments,” notes Live­science, cit­ing fig­ures from The New York Times. For many peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in the devel­op­ing world, the ques­tion of how to get by in the world with­out eye­glass­es is still a very press­ing, present-day issue.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World’s Old­est Sur­viv­ing Pair of Glass­es (Cir­ca 1475)

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Japanese Researcher Sleeps in the Same Location as Her Cat for 24 Consecutive Nights!

in Biology, Data, Design, Life | March 25th, 2022


Cross cat nap­ping with bed hop­ping and you might end up hav­ing an “adven­ture in com­fort” sim­i­lar to the one that informs stu­dent Yuri Naka­hashi’s the­sis for Tokyo’s Hosei Uni­ver­si­ty.

For 24 con­sec­u­tive nights, Naka­hashi for­went the com­forts of her own bed in favor of a green sleep­ing bag, unfurled in what­ev­er ran­dom loca­tion one of her five pet cats had cho­sen as its sleep­ing spot that evening.

(The choice of which cat would get the plea­sure of dic­tat­ing each night’s sleep­ing bag coor­di­nates was also ran­dom­ized.)

As the own­er of five cats, Naka­hashi pre­sum­ably knew what she was sign­ing up for…

 

Cats rack out atop sofa backs, on stairs, and under beds…and so did Naka­hashi.

Her pho­tos sug­gest she logged a lot of time on a bare wood­en floor.

A Fit­Bit mon­i­tored the dura­tion and qual­i­ty of time spent asleep, as well as the fre­quen­cy with which she awak­ened dur­ing the night.

She doc­u­ment­ed the phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal effects of this exper­i­ment in an inter­ac­tive pub­lished by the Infor­ma­tion Pro­cess­ing Soci­ety of Japan.

She reports that she eager­ly await­ed the rev­e­la­tion of each night’s coor­di­nates, and that even when her sleep was dis­rupt­ed by her pets’ mid­dle of the night groom­ing rou­tines, bunk­ing next to them had a “relax­ing effect.”

Mean­while, our research sug­gests that the same exper­i­ment would awak­en a vast­ly dif­fer­ent response in a dif­fer­ent human sub­ject, one suf­fer­ing from ail­uro­pho­bia, say, or severe aller­gies to the pro­teins in feline sali­va, urine, and dan­der.

What’s real­ly sur­pris­ing about Nakahashi’s itin­er­ant, and appar­ent­ly plea­sure-filled under­tak­ing is how lit­tle dif­fer­ence there is between her aver­age sleep score dur­ing the exper­i­ment and her aver­age sleep score from the 20 days pre­ced­ing it.

At left, an aver­age sleep score of 84.2 for the 20 days lead­ing up to exper­i­ment. At right, an aver­age sleep score 83.7 dur­ing the exper­i­ment.

Nakahashi’s entry for the YouFab Glob­al Cre­ative Awards, a prize for “work that attempts a dia­logue that tran­scends the bound­aries of species, space, and time” reflects the play­ful spir­it she brought to her slight­ly off-kil­ter exper­i­ment:

 Is it pos­si­ble to add diver­si­ty to the way we enjoy sleep? Let’s think about food. In addi­tion to the taste and nutri­tion of the food, each meal is a spe­cial expe­ri­ence with diver­si­ty depend­ing on the peo­ple you are eat­ing with, the atmos­phere of the restau­rant, the weath­er, and many oth­er fac­tors. In order to bring this kind of enjoy­ment to sleep, we pro­pose an “adven­ture in com­fort” in which the cat decides where to sleep each night, away from the fixed bed­room and bed. This project is sim­i­lar to going out to eat with a good friend at a restau­rant, where the cat guides you to sleep.

She notes that tra­di­tion­al beds have an immo­bil­i­ty owing to “their phys­i­cal weight and cul­tur­al con­cepts such as direc­tion.”

This sug­gests that her work could be of some ben­e­fit to humans in decid­ed­ly less fan­ci­ful, invol­un­tary sit­u­a­tions, whose lack of hous­ing leads them to sleep in unpre­dictable, and inhos­pitable loca­tions.

Naka­hashi’s time in the green sleep­ing bag inspired her to cre­ate the below mod­el of a more flex­i­ble bed, using a polypropy­lene bag, rice and nylon film.

We have cre­at­ed a pro­to­type of a dou­ble-lay­ered inflat­able bed that has a pouch struc­ture that inflates with air and a jam­ming struc­ture that becomes hard when air is com­pressed. The pouch side soft­ly receives the body when inflat­ed. The jam­ming side becomes hard when the air is removed, and can be firm­ly fixed in an even space. The air is designed to move back and forth between the two lay­ers, so that when not in use, the whole thing can be rolled up soft­ly for stor­age. 

It’s hard to imag­ine the pres­ence of a pussy­cat doing much to ame­lio­rate the anx­i­ety of those forced to flee their famil­iar beds with lit­tle warn­ing, but we can see how Nakahashi’s design might bring a degree of phys­i­cal relief when sleep­ing in sub­way sta­tions, base­ment cor­ners, and oth­er har­row­ing loca­tions.

Via Spoon & Toma­go

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A 110-Year-Old Book Illus­trat­ed with Pho­tos of Kit­tens & Cats Taught Kids How to Read

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

GPS Track­ing Reveals the Secret Lives of Out­door Cats

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The New Herbal: A Masterpiece of Renaissance Botanical Illustrations Gets Republished in a Beautiful 900-Page Book

in Art, Biology, Books, History | February 24th, 2022

We’ve all have heard of the fuch­sia, a flower (or genus of flow­er­ing plant) native to Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca but now grown far and wide. Though even the least botan­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate among us know it, we may have occa­sion­al trou­ble spelling its name. The key is to remem­ber who the fuch­sia was named for: Leon­hart Fuchs, a Ger­man physi­cian and botanist of the six­teenth cen­tu­ry. More than 450 years after his death, Fuchs is remem­bered as not just the name­sake of a flower, but as the author of an enor­mous book detail­ing the vari­eties of plants and their med­i­c­i­nal uses. His was a land­mark achieve­ment in the form known as the herbal, exam­ples of which we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture from ninth- and eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry Eng­land.

But De His­to­ria Stir­pi­um Com­men­tarii Insignes, as this work was known upon its ini­tial 1542 pub­li­ca­tion in Latin, has worn uncom­mon­ly well through the ages. Or rather, Fuchs’ per­son­al, hand-col­ored orig­i­nal has, com­ing down to us in 2022 as the source for Taschen’s The New Herbal. “A mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance botany and pub­lish­ing,” accord­ing to the pub­lish­er, the book includes “over 500 illus­tra­tions, includ­ing the first visu­al record of New World plant types such as maize, cac­tus, and tobac­co.”

Buy­ers also have their choice of Eng­lish, Ger­man, and French edi­tions, each with its own trans­la­tions of Fuchs’ “essays describ­ing the plants’ fea­tures, ori­gins, and med­i­c­i­nal pow­ers.” (You can also read a Dutch ver­sion of the orig­i­nal online at Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty Library Spe­cial Col­lec­tions.)

Nat­u­ral­ly, some of the infor­ma­tion con­tained in these near­ly five-cen­tu­ry-old sci­en­tif­ic writ­ings will be a bit dat­ed at this point, but the appeal of the illus­tra­tions has nev­er dimmed. “Fuchs pre­sent­ed each plant with metic­u­lous wood­cut illus­tra­tions, refin­ing the abil­i­ty for swift species iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and set­ting new stan­dards for accu­ra­cy and qual­i­ty in botan­i­cal pub­li­ca­tions.” Over 500 of them go into the book: “Weigh­ing more than 10 pounds,” writes Colos­sal’s Grace Ebert, “the near­ly 900-page vol­ume is an ode to Fuchs’ research and the field of Renais­sance botany, detail­ing plants like the leafy gar­den bal­sam and root-cov­ered man­drake.”

Taschen’s repro­duc­tions of these works of botan­i­cal art look to do jus­tice to Leon­hart Fuchs’ lega­cy, espe­cial­ly in the bril­liance of their col­ors. It’s enough to rein­force the assump­tion that the man has received trib­ute not just through fuch­sia the flower but fuch­sia the col­or as well. But such a dual con­nec­tion turns out to be in doubt: the col­or’s name derives from rosani­line hydrochlo­ride, also known as fuch­sine, orig­i­nal­ly a trade name applied by its man­u­fac­tur­er Renard frères et Franc. The name fus­chine, in turn, derives from fuchs, the Ger­man trans­la­tion of renard. The New Herbal is, of course, a work of botany rather than lin­guis­tics, but it should nev­er­the­less stim­u­late in its behold­ers an aware­ness of the inter­con­nec­tion of knowl­edge that fired up the Renais­sance mind.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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