The Slo Mo Guys specialize in taking everyday occurrences and slowing them down … way down, so that we can see them in a new way. In this clip, they let you see what happens when you talk without a mask, and then with a mask–all in order to demonstrate why a mask helps prevent the transmission of COVID-19, a disease that’s mainly spread when people are exposed to respiratory droplets carrying infectious virus. Around the 4 minute mark, the host is joined by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who offers commentary on the footage.
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The late Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962) definitely loved miniatures, and excelled at their creation, knitting socks on pins, hand rolling real tobacco into tiny cigarettes, and making sure the victims in her realistic murder scene dioramas exhibited the proper degree of rigor mortis and lividity.
Her preoccupation began with the Sherlock Holmes stories she read as a girl.
In the 1930s, the wealthy divorcee used part of a sizable inheritance to endow Harvard University with enough money for the creation of its Department of Legal Medicine.
Its first chairman was her friend, George Burgess Magrath, a medical examiner who had shared his distress that criminals were literally getting away with murder because coroners and police investigators lacked appropriate training for forensic analysis.
The library to which Lee donated a thousand books on the topic was named in his honor.
The homemade dioramas offered a more vivid experience than could be found in any book.
Each Nutshell Study required almost half a year’s work, and cost about the same as a house would have at the time. ($6000 in the 1940s.)
“Luckily, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” Lee remarked. “It gives me the time and money to follow my hobby of scientific crime detection.”
Although Lee had been brought up in a luxurious 13 bedroom home (8 were for servants’ use), the domestic settings of the Nutshell Studies are more modest, reflective of the victims’ circumstances.
She drew inspiration from actual crimes, but had no interest in replicating their actual scenes. The crimes she authored for her little rooms were composites of the ones she had studied, with invented victims and in rooms decorated according to her imagination.
Her intent was to provide investigators with virgin crime scenes to meticulously examine, culling indirect evidence from the painstakingly detailed props she was a stickler for getting right.
Students were provided with a flashlight, a magnifying glass, and witness statements. Her attention to detail ensured that they would use the full ninety minutes they had been allotted analyzing the scene. Their goal was not to crack the case but to carefully document observations on which a case could be built.
The flawlessness of her 1:12 scale renderings also speaks to her determination to be taken seriously in what was then an exclusively male world. (Women now dominate the field of forensic science.)
Nothing was overlooked.
As she wrote to Dr. Alan Moritz, the Department of Legal Medicine’s second chair, in a letter reviewing proposed changes to some early scenes:
I found myself constantly tempted to add more clues and details and am afraid I may get them “gadgety” in the process. I hope you will watch over this and stop me when I go too far. Since you and I have perpetrated these crimes ourselves we are in the unique position of being able to give complete descriptions of them even if there were no witnesses—very much in the manner of the novelist who is able to tell the inmost thoughts of his characters.
It’s no accident that many of the Nutshell Studies’ little corpses are female.
Lee did not want officers to treat victims dismissively because of gender-related assumptions, whether the scenario involved a prostitute whose throat has been cut, or a housewife dead on the floor of her kitchen, the burners of her stove all switched to the on position.
Would you like to test your powers of observation?
Above are the remains of Maggie Wilson, discovered in the Dark Bathroom’s tub by a fellow boarder, Lizzie Miller, who gave the following statement:
I roomed in the same house as Maggie Wilson, but knew her only from we met in the hall. I think she had ‘fits’ [seizures]. A couple of male friends came to see her fairly regularly. On Sunday night, the men were there and there was a lot of drinking going on. Some time after the men left, I heard the water running in the bathroom. I opened the door and found her as you see her.
Grim, eh?
Not nearly as grim as what you’ll find in the Parsonage or the Three-Room Dwelling belonging to shoe factory foreman Robert Judson, his wife, Kate, and their baby, Linda Mae.
The period-accurate mini furnishings and fashions may create a false impression that the Mother of Forensic Science’s Nutshell Studies should be relegated to a museum.
In truth, their abundance of detail remains so effective that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore continues to use 18 of them in training seminars to help homicide investigators “convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”
Much of the world got to know Carl Sagan through Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the thirteen-part PBS series on the nature of the universe — and the intensity of Sagan’s own passion to discover that nature. First aired in 1980, it would become the most widely watched series in the history of American public television. But it’s not as if Sagan had been languishing in obscurity before: he’d been publishing popular books since the early 1970s, and 1977’s The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence won him a Pulitzer Prize. When Cosmos made its impact, some viewers may even have remembered its host from a series of similarly themed broadcasts a decade earlier, The Violent Universe.
Produced by the BBC in 1969 and broadcast just three months before the Apollo 11 moon landing, The Violent Universe (viewable above) explains in five parts a range of discoveries made during the then-recent “revolution in astronomy,” including infrared galaxies, neutrinos, pulsars and quasars, red giants and white dwarfs.
In so doing it includes footage taken in observatories not just across the Earth — England, Puerto Rico, Holland, Californa — but high above it in orbit and even deep inside it, beneath the badlands of South Dakota. One installment pays a visit to Kōchi, the rural Japanese prefectural capital where guitarist-astronomer Tsutomu Seki makes his home — and his small home observatory, where he had worked to co-discover Comet Ikeya–Seki just four years before.
All of this international material — or rather interstellar material — is anchored in the studio by television journalist Robert MacNeil, later of PBS’ The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, and a certain professor of astronomy at Cornell University by the name of Carl Sagan. Despite exuding a more deliberate seriousness than he would in Cosmos, the young Sagan nevertheless explains the astronomical and astrophysical concepts at hand with a clarity and vigor that would have made them immediately clear to television audiences of half a century ago, and indeed still makes them clear to the Youtube audiences of today. Apart, perhaps, from its Twilight Zone-style theme music The Violent Universe has in its visual elements aged more gracefully than the 70s series that made Sagan into a science icon. And how many other other public-television documentaries about the universe include poetry recitations from Richard Burton?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
The Long Island feline residents volunteered—or more accurately, were volunteered—by their human companions to participate in a domestic cat movement study as part of the international Cat Tracker project.
Each beast was outfitted with a GPS tracker-enhanced harness, which they wore for a week.
(Many cat owners will find that alone something of an achievement.)
Scientists were particularly interested to learn the degree of mayhem these cherished pets were visiting on surrounding wildlife in their off hours.
Anyone who’s been left a present of a freshly murdered baby bunny, mole, or wingless bat can probably guess.
It’s a considerable amount, though by and large the domesticated participants stuck close to home, rarely traveling more than two football fields away from the comforts of their own yards. The impulse to keep the food bowl within easy range confines their hunting activities to a fairly tight area. Woe to the field mice who set up shop there.
Their movements also revealed the peril they put themselves in, crossing highways, roads, and parking lots. Researcher Heidy Kikillus, who tracked cats in New Zealand, reported that a number of her group’s subjects wound up in a fatal encounter with a vehicle.
Generally speaking, gender, age, and geography play a part in how far a cat roams, with males, younger animals, and country dwellers covering more ground. Unsurprisingly, those who have not been neutered or spayed tend to have a freer range too.
“Without the motivations of food and sex, most cats seem content to be homebodies,” zoologist Roland Kays, one of the US Project leaders, noted.
Beware the fake quotation. They have become so ubiquitous they often appear in books and speeches by politicians and their family members, not that anyone seems to care much. But most of us feel a measure of shame at being duped, as Katharine Rose did when she found herself moved by a letter supposedly written by Albert Einstein to his daughter, Lieserl, “regarding the ‘universal force’ of love.” The letter is a “beautiful read,” and it’s a fake. But many admirers of Einstein were eager to believe it.
Why? Like other famous figures to whom spurious words are attributed, Einstein isn’t just well-known, he is revered, a celebrity, and celebrities are people we feel we know intimately. (A common defense for fake-quote-sharing goes: “Well, if he didn’t say it, then it’s exactly the kind of thing he would say.”) Discussing the theft of Einstein’s brain after his death, Ross Anderson at Aeon observes that “an ordinary person can live and die privately, but a genius—and his grey matter—belongs to the world.” We might add, “and so do the intimate details of his private life.”
The letters are real, and they are “spicy,” as YouTuber Tibees shows us in the video at the top. No awkward private expression is safe: we begin with letters Einstein wrote to his high school girlfriend, Marie Winteler, including a breakup letter at 3:13. The excerpts here are all timestamped on the video’s YouTube page, with helpful summaries like “Einstein’s mom trying to break them up” (them being Albert and Mileva), “Einstein having an affair with his cousin Elsa,” “Breaking up with Elsa,” and “Getting back with Elsa.”
Elsa, you may know, was Einstein’s second wife, in addition to being his cousin, and the cause of his separation and divorce from Mileva, to whom he had professed undying devotion. In the interest of fully invading the genius’s privacy, we have, above, some readings of his harsh “divorce letters” to Mileva, with hits like “Separation,” “Proposing divorce,” and “Court proceedings.” Love may or may not be a “universal force”—we do not, sadly, have Einstein’s thoughts on the matter—but we do know he found it a troublingly chaotic, unpredictable one.
If Richard Feynman had only ever published his work in theoretical physics, his name would still be known far and wide. As it is, Feynman remains famous more than thirty years after his death in large part for the way he engaged with the public. From his popular textbook The Feynman Lectures on Physics (which you can read free online here) to his bestselling conversational essay collections like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman to the classes he taught at Cornell (now available online) to his demonstration of what went wrong with the Space Shuttle Challenger, he kept in conversation all his life with humanity outside the realm of professional science. This explains, in part, why Feynman became what Bill Gates calls, in the video above, “the best teacher I never had.”
Gates points to Feynman’s lecture series “The Character of Physical Law,” previously featured here on Open Culture, as “a great example of how he could explain things in a fun and interesting way to everyone. And he was very funny.”
That sense of humor complemented a sense of rigor: “Dr. Feynman used a tough process on himself, where if he didn’t really understand something, he would push himself,” asking questions like “Do I understand this boundary case?” and “Do I understand why we don’t do it this other way?” Such an effort to find the gaps in and failures of one’s own understanding may sound familiar, fundamental as it is to Feynman’s “notebook” technique of learning that we’ve posted about morethanonce before.
You only know how well you understand something when you explain it to someone else; many of us realize this, but Feynman lived it. The depth of his own understanding allowed him never to be boring: “Feynman made science so fascinating,” Gates says, “He reminded us how much fun it is,” and in so doing emphasized that “everybody can have a pretty full understanding. He’s such a joyful example of how we’d all like to learn and think about things.” Though the term “science communicator” wasn’t in wide use during Feynman’s lifetime, he played the role to near-perfection. And in the kind of materials highlighted here, he continues to convey not just knowledge but, as he liked to put it, the pleasure of finding things out.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
What if I said the problem with STEM education is that it doesn’t include nearly enough art? For one thing, I would only echo what STEAM proponents have said for years. This doesn’t only mean that students should study the arts with the same seriousness as they do the sciences. But that science should be taught through the arts, as it was in the 19th century when Naturalists relied on fine art illustration.
Maybe increasing complexity demands charts and graphs, but there are reasons other than hip antiquarianism to cherish 19th century scientific art, and to aim for something close to its high aesthetic standards. Humans seem to find nature far more awe-inspiring when it’s mediated by painting, poetry, narrative, music, fine art photography, etc. We want to be emotionally moved by science. As such, few guides to the natural world have elevated their subjects as highly as British & Exotic Mineralogy, a multivolume reference work for… well, rocks, to put it vulgarly, published between 1802 and 1817.
During these years, “notable naturalist, illustrator, and mineralogist James Sowerby drew intricate pictures of minerals in an effort to illustrate the topographic mineralogy of Great Britain and minerals not yet known to it,” writes Nicholas Rougeux. “These illustrations were some of the finest on the subject and are still considered by some to be to this day.” Though he was surely compensated for his work, Sowerby’s detailed drawings come across as labors of devotion.
Rather than just printing them on postcards or tote bags (though he does sell posters), Rougeux has done for Sowerby’s minerals what he had previously done for other classic textbooks and taxonomies from the past, such as the 200-year-old Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours and Euclid’s Elements from 1847. Digitizing the 718 illustrations on one sprawling interactive page allows him to retain their educational value: click on any individual mineral and you’ll bring up an enlarged image followed by excerpts from the text.
You have never seen such rocks as these, no matter how many uncut gems you’ve held in your hand. Because these illustrations turn them into something else—crystalline palaces, alien organs, petrified explosions, moldy loaves of bread… all the many shapes that time can take in rock form. They aren’t all beautiful rocks, but they are each beautifully-rendered with lines that might remind us of the most skilled comic artists, who are perhaps some of the last inheritors of this kind of graphic style. Sowerby himself illustrated several other scientific works, including series on biology, mycology, and a color system of his own devising.
“We feel much pleasure in presenting our friends with a figure and account of the most perfect and rare specimen yet found of this substance,” begins the text accompanying Hydrargillite, above, which resembles a small, misshapen moon or asteroid. Rougeux also takes quite a bit of pleasure in his work of recovering these reference books and making them beautifully useful once again for 21st century readers. You can read his detailed account of the original illustrations and his adaptation of them for use on the webhere.
While appreciating the finer points of color, line, and composition in Rougeux’s tapestry of vintage mineral illustrations, you might just inadvertently expand your knowledge and appreciation of mineralogy. You can also read the entire British & Exotic Mineralogy, if you’ve got the time and inclination, at the Internet Archive.
Ever had a friend who cannot bring themselves suspend disbelief? It’s not a moral failing, but it can be a tedious quality in situations like, say, the movies, or the cinema, or whatever you call it when you’ve paid your day’s wages for a giant tub of carcinogenic popcorn and a three-hour distraction. (These days, maybe, an overpriced streaming new release and Grubhub.) Who doesn’t love a big-screen science fiction epic—science be damned? Who wants to listen to the seatmate who mutters “oh, come on!,” “no way!,” “well, actually, that’s scientifically impossible”? You know they never passed intro to physics….
Dominic Walliman, on the other hand, is a physicist. And he is not the kind of person to ruin a movie by going on about how goofy its scientific ideas sound, though he’s likely to express appreciation for films that get it right. He doesn’t get bent out of shape by artistic license and can appreciate, for example, the creative use of visual effects in Interstellar to represent a black hole, which would otherwise appear onscreen as, well, a black hole. “I’m okay with bad physics in movies,” he says, “because the job of a movie isn’t to be a science documentary, the goal of a movie is to tell an interesting story.”
Even so, if you sit him down and ask him to talk specifically about science in movies, as a friend does in the video above, he’ll tell you what he thinks, and you’ll want to listen to him (after the movie’s over) because he actually knows what he’s talking about. Over the years, Walliman has mapped various domains of science, like chemistry, computer science, biology, mathematics, physics, and his own field, quantum physics. His visual explanations make the relationships between difficult concepts clear and easy to follow. In this video, he comments on some of your favorite science fiction and fantasy films (standouts include the first Batman and Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons) in ways that are equally illuminating.
Big winners for relative accuracy, in Walliman’s opinion, are no surprise. They include Gravity, Contact (written by Carl Sagan), even a clip from the incredibly smart Futurama. It is soon apparent that the use of a folded piece of paper to represent spacetime through a wormhole has “become a bit of a cliché,” although a helpful-enough visual aid. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is “boring” (with apologies), a judgment that might disqualify Walliman as a film critic, in many people’s opinion, but does not tarnish his scientific reputation.
One of the biggest science-in-film fails: 2009’s Star Trek, whose villains have discovered a substance called “red matter.” A single drop can destroy an entire planet, and the idiots seem to have enough onboard their ship to take out the universe with one careless oopsie. Walliman is maybe not qualified to weigh in on the paleobiology of Jurassic Park, but Jeff Goldblum’s explanation of chaos theory fits within his purview. “So, this is not a good description of chaos theory,” he says, “at all.” It is, however, a fabulous plot device.
If you’re interested in more engagingly accessible, non-cinema-related, surveys of scientific ideas, visit any one of Walliman’s many Domain of Science videos here.
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