550 Million Years of Human Evolution in an Illustrated Flipbook

Graph­ic artist Juri­an Moller cre­at­ed a flip­book that lets you watch 550 mil­lion years of human evo­lu­tion unfold in a mat­ter of sec­onds. He writes: “This flip­book goes back in time and shows you the evo­lu­tion of the gen­er­a­tions in both a per­son­al and sci­en­tif­ic way. The dif­fer­ences between the gen­er­a­tions on each page are very dif­fi­cult to see, but the long, con­tin­u­ous ances­tral line goes right back to our very ori­gins.”

The action is on full dis­play above. Below, watch the same flip­book in an ani­mat­ed form. Pur­chase the book in var­i­ous for­mats at Moller’s site here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Nev­er a First Human Being

Neurons as Art: See Beautiful Anatomy Drawings by the Father of Neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Art depends on pop­u­lar judg­ments about the uni­verse, and is nour­ished by the lim­it­ed expanse of sen­ti­ment. . . . In con­trast, sci­ence was bare­ly touched upon by the ancients, and is as free from the incon­sis­ten­cies of fash­ion as it is from the fick­le stan­dards of taste. . . . And let me stress that this con­quest of ideas is not sub­ject to fluc­tu­a­tions of opin­ion, to the silence of envy, or to the caprices of fash­ion that today repu­di­ate and detest what yes­ter­day was praised as sub­lime.

- San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal

The above draw­ing is the sort of sub­lime ren­der­ing that attracts throngs of vis­i­tors to the world’s great mod­ern art muse­ums, but that’s not the sort of renown the artist, Nobel Prize-win­ning father of mod­ern neu­ro­science San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal (1852 ‑1934), active­ly sought.

Or rather, he might have back before his father, a pro­fes­sor of anato­my, coerced his wild young son into trans­fer­ring from a provin­cial art acad­e­my to the med­ical school where he him­self was employed.

After a stint as an army med­ical offi­cer, the artist-turned-anatomist con­cen­trat­ed on inflam­ma­tion, cholera, and epithe­lial cells before zero­ing in on his true muse—the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem.

At the time, retic­u­lar the­o­ry, which held that every­thing in the ner­vous sys­tem was part of a sin­gle con­tin­u­ous net­work, pre­vailed.

Ramón y Cajal was able to dis­prove this wide­ly held belief by using Gol­gi stains to sup­port the exis­tence of indi­vid­ual ner­vous cells—neurons—that, while not phys­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed, com­mu­ni­cat­ed with each oth­er through a sys­tem of axons, den­drites, and synaps­es.

He called upon both his artis­tic and med­ical train­ing in doc­u­ment­ing what he observed through his micro­scope. His metic­u­lous free­hand draw­ings are far more accu­rate than any­thing that could be pro­duced by the micro­scop­ic-image pho­to­graph­ic tools avail­able at the time.

His pre­ci­sion was such that his illus­tra­tions con­tin­ue to be pub­lished in med­ical text­books. Fur­ther research has con­firmed many of his sup­po­si­tions.

As art crit­ic Rober­ta Smith writes in The New York Times, the draw­ings are “fair­ly hard-nosed fact if you know your sci­ence”:

If you don’t, they are deep pools of sug­ges­tive motifs into which the imag­i­na­tion can dive. Their lines, forms and var­i­ous tex­tures of stip­pling, dash­es and faint pen­cil cir­cles would be the envy of any mod­ern artist. That they con­nect with Sur­re­al­ist draw­ing, bio­mor­phic abstrac­tion and exquis­ite doo­dling is only the half of it.

The draw­ings’ prag­mat­ic titles cer­tain­ly take on a poet­ic qual­i­ty when one con­sid­ers the con­text of their cre­ation:

Axon of Purk­in­je neu­rons in the cere­bel­lum of a drowned man

The hip­pocam­pus of a man three hours after death

Glial cells of the cere­bral cor­tex of a child

His spec­i­mens were not lim­it­ed to the human world:

Reti­na of lizard

The olfac­to­ry bulb of the dog

In his book Advice for a Young Inves­ti­gator, Ramón y Cajal took a holis­tic view of the rela­tion­ship between sci­ence and the arts:

The inves­ti­ga­tor ought to pos­sess an artis­tic tem­pera­ment that impels him to search for and admire the num­ber, beau­ty, and har­mo­ny of things; and—in the strug­gle for life that ideas cre­ate in our minds—a sound crit­i­cal judg­ment that is able to reject the rash impuls­es of day­dreams in favor of those thoughts most faith­ful­ly embrac­ing objec­tive real­i­ty.

Explore more of Ramón y Cajal’s cel­lu­lar draw­ings in Beau­ti­ful Brain: The Draw­ings of San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal, the com­pan­ion book to a recent trav­el­ing exhi­bi­tion of his work. Or immerse your­self at the neur­al lev­el by order­ing a repro­duc­tion on a beach tow­el, yoga mat, cell phone case, show­er cur­tain, or oth­er neces­si­ty on Sci­ence Source.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

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

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City April 15 for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

An Animated History of Dogs, Inspired by Keith Haring

That quiv­er­ing teacup Chi­huahua…

The long-suf­fer­ing Labrador whose child-friend­ly rep­u­ta­tion has led to a life­time of ear tug­ging and tail pulling…

The wheez­ing French bull­dog, whose own­er has out­fit­ted with a full wardrobe of hood­ies, tutus, rain slick­ers, and paja­mas

All descend­ed from wolves.

As anthro­pol­o­gist and sci­ence edu­ca­tor David Ian Howe explains in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son, A Brief His­to­ry of Dogs, above, at first glance, can­is lupus seemed an unlike­ly choice for man’s best friend.

For one thing, the two were in direct com­pe­ti­tion for elk, rein­deer, bison, and oth­er tasty prey wan­der­ing Eura­sia dur­ing the Pleis­tocene Epoch.

Though both hunt­ed in groups, run­ning their prey to the point of exhaus­tion, only one roast­ed their kills, cre­at­ing tan­ta­liz­ing aro­mas that drew bold­er wolves ever-clos­er to the human camps.

The ones who will­ing­ly dialed down their wolfish­ness, mak­ing them­selves use­ful as com­pan­ions, secu­ri­ty guards and hunt­ing bud­dies, were reward­ed come sup­per­time. Even­tu­al­ly, this mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial tail wag­ging became full on domes­ti­ca­tion, the first such ani­mal to come under the human yoke.

The intense focus on pure­breds did­n’t real­ly become a thing until the Vic­to­ri­ans began host­ing dog shows. The push to iden­ti­fy and pro­mote breed-spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics often came at a cost to the ani­mals’ well­be­ing, as Neil Pem­ber­ton and Michael Wor­boys point out in BBC His­to­ry Mag­a­zine:

…the improve­ment of breeds towards ‘per­fec­tion’ was con­tro­ver­sial. While there was approval for the greater reg­u­lar­i­ty of type, many fanciers com­plained that stan­dards were being set on arbi­trary, large­ly aes­thet­ic grounds by enthu­si­asts in spe­cial­ist clubs, with­out con­cern for util­i­ty or the health of the ani­mal. This meant that breeds were chang­ing, and not always for the bet­ter. For exam­ple, the mod­ern St Bernard was said to be a beau­ti­ful ani­mal, but would be use­less in Alpine res­cue work.

Cat-fanciers, rest assured that the oppo­si­tion received fair and equal cov­er­age in a feline-cen­tric TED-Ed les­son, pub­lished ear­li­er this year.

And while we applaud TED-Ed for spark­ing our curios­i­ty with its “Brief His­to­ry of” series, cov­er­ing top­ics as far rang­ing as cheese, numer­i­cal sys­tems, goths, video games, and tea, sure­ly we are not the only ones won­der­ing why the late artist Kei­th Har­ing isn’t thanked or name checked in the cred­its?

Every canine-shaped image in this ani­ma­tion is clear­ly descend­ed from his icon­ic bark­ing dog.

While we can’t explain the omis­sion, we can direct read­ers toward Jon Nelson’s great analy­sis of Haring’s rela­tion­ship with dogs in Get Leashed:

They’re sym­bol­ic of unan­swered ques­tions, preva­lent in the 80s: “Can I do this?” “Is this right?” “What are you doing?” “What is hap­pen­ing?” Dogs stand by peo­ple, bark­ing or danc­ing along, some­times in pre­car­i­ous sce­nar­ios, even involved in some of Haring’s explic­it­ly sex­u­al work. Dogs are nei­ther approv­ing nor dis­ap­prov­ing of what peo­ple do in the images; their mouth angle is neu­tral or even hap­py. In some cas­es, human bod­ies wear a dog’s head, pos­si­bly stat­ing that we know only our own enjoy­ment, unaware, like a dog, of life’s next stage or the con­se­quences of our actions.

Vis­it Eth­no­cynol­o­gy, David Ian Howe’s Insta­gram page about the ancient rela­tion­ship between humans and dogs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Dis­cov­er David Lynch’s Bizarre & Min­i­mal­ist Com­ic Strip, The Angri­est Dog in the World (1983–1992)

Pho­tos of Famous Writ­ers (and Rock­ers) with their Dogs

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City April 15 for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Behold an Anatomically Correct Replica of the Human Brain, Knitted by a Psychiatrist

Our brains dic­tate our every move.

They’re the ones who spur us to study hard, so we can make some­thing of our­selves, in order to bet­ter our com­mu­ni­ties.

They name our babies, choose our clothes, decide what we’re hun­gry for.

They make and break laws, orga­nize protests, frit­ter away hours on social media, and give us the green light to binge watch a bunch of dumb shows when we could be read­ing War and Peace.

They also plant the seeds for Fitz­car­ral­do-like cre­ative endeav­ors that take over our lives and gen­er­ate lit­tle to no income.

We may describe such endeav­ors as a labor of love, into which we’ve poured our entire heart and soul, but think for a sec­ond.

Who’s real­ly respon­si­ble here?

The heart, that mus­cu­lar fist-sized Valen­tine, con­tent to just pump-pump-pump its way through life, lub-dub, lub-dub, from cra­dle to grave?

Or the brain, a crafty Iago of an organ, pos­ses­sor of bil­lions of neu­rons, com­plex, con­tra­dic­to­ry, a mys­tery we’re far from unrav­el­ing?

Psy­chi­a­trist Dr. Karen Nor­berg’s brain has steered her to study such heavy duty sub­jects as the day­care effect, the rise in youth sui­cide, and the risk of pre­scrib­ing selec­tive sero­tonin reup­take inhibitors as a treat­ment for depres­sion.

On a lighter note, it also told her to devote nine months to knit­ting an anatom­i­cal­ly cor­rect repli­ca of the human brain.

(Twelve, if you count three months of research before cast­ing on.)

How did her brain con­vince her to embark on this mad­cap assign­ment?

Easy. It arranged for her to be in the mid­dle of a more pro­sa­ic knit­ting project, then goosed her into notic­ing how the ruf­fles of that project resem­bled the wrin­kles of the cere­bral cor­tex.

Coin­ci­dence?

Not like­ly. Espe­cial­ly when one of the cere­bral cor­tex’s most impor­tant duties is deci­sion mak­ing.

As she explained in an inter­view with The Tele­graph, brain devel­op­ment is not unlike the growth of a knit­ted piece:

You can see very nat­u­ral­ly how the ‘rip­pling’ effect of the cere­bral cor­tex emerges from prop­er­ties that prob­a­bly have to do with nerve cell growth. In the case of knit­ting, the effect is cre­at­ed by increas­ing the num­ber of stitch­es in each row.

Dr. Norberg—who, yes, has on occa­sion referred to her project as a labor of love—told Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can that such a mas­sive crafty under­tak­ing appealed to her sense of humor because “it seemed so ridicu­lous and would be an enor­mous­ly com­pli­cat­ed, absurd­ly ambi­tious thing to do.”

That’s the point at which many people’s brains would give them per­mis­sion to stop, but Dr. Nor­berg and her brain per­sist­ed, push­ing past the hypo­thet­i­cal, cre­at­ing col­or­ful indi­vid­ual struc­tures that were even­tu­al­ly sewn into two cud­dly hemi­spheres that can be joined with a zip­per.

(She also let slip that her brain—by which she means the knit­ted one, though the obser­va­tion cer­tain­ly holds true for the one in her head—is female, due to its robust cor­pus cal­lo­sum, the “tough body” whose mil­lions of fibers pro­mote com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­nec­tion.)

via The Tele­graph

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Mas­sive, Knit­ted Tapes­try of the Galaxy: Soft­ware Engi­neer Hacks a Knit­ting Machine & Cre­ates a Star Map Fea­tur­ing 88 Con­stel­la­tions

Jazz Musi­cian Plays Acoustic Gui­tar While Under­go­ing Brain Surgery, Help­ing Doc­tors Mon­i­tor Their Progress

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this April. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Women’s Hidden Contributions to Modern Genetics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Footnotes

It’s too easy, when our his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge is lim­it­ed, to mis­take effects for caus­es, to fall for just-so sto­ries that nat­u­ral­ize and per­pet­u­ate inequal­i­ty. Many of us may have only recent­ly learned, for exam­ple, that the moon land­ing would not have been pos­si­ble with­out math­e­mati­cian Kather­ine John­son and her Hid­den Fig­ures col­leagues, or that the Hub­ble tele­scope would not have been pos­si­ble with­out astronomer Nan­cy G. Roman (now immor­tal­ized in LEGO). Pri­or to this knowl­edge, we might have been led to believe that women had lit­tle to do with humankind’s first leaps into out­er space, to the sur­face of the moon, and beyond.

Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Mar­garet Rossiter has called this phe­nom­e­non “the Matil­da effect,” after an 1893 essay by suf­frag­ist Matil­da Joslyn Gage. Rossiter spent years try­ing to counter the dom­i­nant nar­ra­tives that leave out women in sci­ence with a mul­ti-vol­ume schol­ar­ly his­to­ry. Counter-nar­ra­tives like hers now appear reg­u­lar­ly online. And pop­u­lar media like the book, then film, Hid­den Fig­ures have inspired oth­er aca­d­e­mics to drill into the his­to­ry of their fields, find the women who have been ignored, and try to under­stand the how and why.

When Brown University’s Emil­ia Huer­ta-Sánchez and San Fran­cis­co State University’s Rori Rohlfs saw Hid­den Fig­ures, they decid­ed to research their spe­cial­iza­tion, the­o­ret­i­cal pop­u­la­tion genet­ics. It may not be as glam­orous as space trav­el, and their research may not become a Hol­ly­wood film or LEGO set, but the results they unearthed are rev­e­la­to­ry and impor­tant. Dur­ing the 1970s, for exam­ple, “a piv­otal time for the field of pop­u­la­tion genet­ics,” notes Ed Yong at The Atlantic, the two researchers and their team of under­grad­u­ates found that “women account­ed for 59 per­cent of acknowl­edged pro­gram­mers, but just 7 per­cent of actu­al authors.”

Those women were sci­en­tists doing “cru­cial work,” writes Yong. One pro­gram­mer, Mar­garet Wu, cre­at­ed a sta­tis­ti­cal tool still reg­u­lar­ly used to cal­cu­late opti­mal genet­ic diver­si­ty. Her mod­el appeared in a 1975 paper and is now known as the Wat­ter­son esti­ma­tor, after the “one and only” named author, G.A. Wat­ter­son. “The paper has been cit­ed 3,400 times.” Today, “if a sci­en­tist did all the pro­gram­ming for a study, she would expect to be list­ed as an author.” But the prac­tice only began to change in the 1980s, when “pro­gram­ming began chang­ing from a ‘pink col­lar’ job, done large­ly by low-paid women, to the male-dom­i­nat­ed pro­fes­sion it remains today.”

The mar­gin­al­iza­tion of female pro­gram­mers dur­ing some of the field’s most pro­duc­tive years—their rel­e­ga­tion to lit­er­al foot­notes in history—has cre­at­ed the impres­sion, as Huer­ta- Sánchez, Rohlfs, and their co-authors write, that “this research was con­duct­ed by a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of inde­pen­dent indi­vid­ual sci­en­tists near­ly all of whom were men.” See a sum­ma­ry of the authors’ find­ings in the video above. To obtain their results, they combed through every issue of the jour­nal The­o­ret­i­cal Pop­u­la­tion Biol­o­gy—near­ly 900 papers—then pulled out “every name in the acknowl­edg­ments, worked out whether they did any pro­gram­ming, and deduced their gen­ders where pos­si­ble.”

The study, pub­lished in the lat­est issue of Genet­ics does not com­pre­hen­sive­ly sur­vey the entire field, nor does it defin­i­tive­ly show that every pro­gram­mer who con­tributed to a paper did so sub­stan­tive­ly enough to war­rant author­ship. But it does not need to do these things. The dis­par­i­ties between named authors and mar­gin­al­ly acknowl­edged sci­en­tif­ic labor­ers in a major jour­nal in the field calls for an expla­na­tion beyond selec­tion bias or chance. The expla­na­tion of sys­temic bias not only has the ben­e­fit of being well-sup­port­ed by a huge aggre­gate of data across the sci­ences, but it also presents us with a sit­u­a­tion that can be changed when the prob­lems are wide­ly seen and acknowl­edged.

The study’s results “dis­pel the mis­con­cep­tion that women weren’t par­tic­i­pat­ing in sci­ence,” the researchers point out in their video, and they sug­gest that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of women in genet­ics weren’t giv­en the cred­it they deserved. Huer­ta- Sánchez and Rohlfs walk their talk. The under­grad­u­ate researchers who worked on “Illu­mi­nat­ing Wom­en’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tion to His­tor­i­cal The­o­ret­i­cal Pop­u­la­tion Genet­ics” are all named as authors in the paper, so that their con­tri­bu­tions to writ­ing a new his­to­ry of their field can be rec­og­nized.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Women Philoso­phers: A New Web Site Presents the Con­tri­bu­tions of Women Philoso­phers, from Ancient to Mod­ern

Hen­ri­et­ta Lacks Gets Immor­tal­ized in a Por­trait: It’s Now on Dis­play at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery

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

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

The inter­net has become an essen­tial back up sys­tem for thou­sands of pieces of his­tor­i­cal art, sci­ence, and lit­er­a­ture, and also for a spe­cial­ized kind of text incor­po­rat­ing them all in degrees: the illus­trat­ed nat­ur­al sci­ence book, from the gold­en ages of book illus­tra­tion and philo­soph­i­cal nat­u­ral­ism in Europe and the Amer­i­c­as. We’ve seen some fine dig­i­tal repro­duc­tions of the illus­trat­ed Nomen­cla­ture of Col­ors by Abra­ham Got­t­lob Wern­er, for example—a book that accom­pa­nied Dar­win on his Bea­gle voy­age.

The same source has also brought us a won­der­ful­ly illus­trat­ed, influ­en­tial 1847 edi­tion of Euclid’s Ele­ments, with a sem­a­phore-like design that col­or-codes and delin­eates each axiom. And we’ve seen Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s 1903 Col­or Prob­lems: a Prac­ti­cal Man­u­al for the Lay Stu­dent of Col­or come online (and back in print), a study whose ideas would lat­er show up in the work of mod­ern min­i­mal­ists like Josef Albers.

Above and below, you can see just a frac­tion of the illus­tra­tions from anoth­er exam­ple of a remark­able illus­trat­ed sci­en­tif­ic book, also by a woman on the edge of being for­got­ten: Nan­cy Anne Kings­bury Woll­stonecraft’s 1826 Spec­i­mens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba.

This study of Cuban plant life might nev­er have seen the light of day were it not for the new online edi­tion from the HathiTrust dig­i­tal library, “by way of Cor­nell University’s Library Divi­sion of Rare and Man­u­script Col­lec­tions,” notes Atlas Obscu­ra. The book is notable for more than its obscu­ri­ty, how­ev­er. It is, says schol­ar of Cuban his­to­ry and cul­ture Emilio Cue­to, “the most impor­tant cor­pus of plant illus­tra­tions in Cuba’s colo­nial his­to­ry.” Its author first began work when she moved to the island after her hus­band, Charles Woll­stonecraft (broth­er of Mary and uncle of Mary Shel­ley) died in 1817.

She began doc­u­ment­ing the plant life in the region of Matan­zas through the 1820s. That research became Spec­i­mens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba, a metic­u­lous study, full of Wollstonecraft’s vibrant, strik­ing water­col­ors. After mak­ing sev­er­al attempts at pub­li­ca­tion, she died in 1828, and the man­u­script nev­er appeared in pub­lic. Now, almost two cen­turies lat­er, all three vol­umes are avail­able to read online and down­load in PDF. They had been dor­mant at the Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Library, and few peo­ple knew very much about them. Cue­to, the schol­ar most famil­iar with the man­u­scrip­t’s place in his­to­ry, had him­self searched for it for 20 years before find­ing it hid­den away at Cor­nell in 2018.

Now it is freely avail­able to any­one and every­one online, part of an expand­ing, shared online archive of fas­ci­nat­ing works by non-pro­fes­sion­al sci­en­tists and math­e­mati­cians whose work was painstak­ing­ly inter­pret­ed by artists for the ben­e­fit of a lay read­er­ship. In the case of Woll­stonecraft, as with Goethe and many oth­er con­tem­po­rary schol­ar-artists, we have the two in one. View and down­load her 220-page work, with its 121 illus­trat­ed plates at the HathiTrust Dig­i­tal Library.

via Cor­nell/Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Vision­ary 115-Year-Old Col­or The­o­ry Man­u­al Returns to Print: Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s Col­or Prob­lems

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

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

Wagashi: Peruse a Dig­i­tized, Cen­turies-Old Cat­a­logue of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Can­dies

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

Explore an Interactive Version of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mural That Documents the Evolution of Birds Over 375 Million Years

Now, this avian Vat­i­can also has its own Michelan­ge­lo.

Audubon Mag­a­zine

And the Class of Aves has its very own avian Pan­tone chart, cre­at­ed by sci­ence illus­tra­tor Jane Kim in ser­vice of her 2,500 square-foot Wall of Birds mur­al at Cor­nell University’s Lab of Ornithol­o­gy.

The cus­tom chart’s fifty-one col­ors com­prise about 90 per­cent of the fin­ished work. A palette of thir­teen Gold­en Flu­id Acrylics sup­plied the jew­el-toned accents so thrilling to bird­watch­ers.

Along the way, Kim absorbed a tremen­dous amount of infor­ma­tion about the how and why of bird feath­er col­oration:

The iri­des­cence on the neck and back of the Superb Star­ling comes not from pig­ment,

but from struc­tur­al col­or. The starling’s out­er feath­ers are con­struct­ed in a way

that refracts light like myr­i­ad prisms, mak­ing the bird appear to shim­mer. The epony­mous

col­or­ing of the Lilac-breast­ed Roller results from a dif­fer­ent kind of struc­tur­al

col­or, cre­at­ed when woven microstruc­tures in the feath­ers, called barbs and bar­bules,

reflect only the short­er wave­lengths of light like blue and vio­let.

The pri­ma­ry col­ors that lend their name to the Red-and-yel­low Bar­bet are

derived from a class of pig­ments called carotenoids that the bird absorbs in its diet.

These are the same com­pounds that turn flamin­gos’ feath­ers pink. As a mem­ber of

the fam­i­ly Musophagi­dae, the Hartlaub’s Tura­co dis­plays pig­men­ta­tion unique in the

bird world. Birds have no green pig­men­ta­tion; in most cas­es, ver­dant plumage is a

com­bi­na­tion of yel­low carotenoids and blue struc­tur­al col­or. Tura­cos are an excep­tion,

dis­play­ing a green, cop­per-based pig­ment called tura­coverdin that they absorb

in their her­biv­o­rous diet. The flash of red on the Hartlaub’s under­wings comes from

turacin, anoth­er cop­per-based pig­ment unique to the fam­i­ly.

 

Kim also boned up on her sub­jects’ mat­ing rit­u­als, dietary habits, song styles, and male/female dif­fer­ences pri­or to inscrib­ing the 270 life-size, life­like birds onto the lab’s largest wall.

She exam­ined spec­i­mens from the cen­ter’s col­lec­tion and reviewed cen­turies’ worth of field obser­va­tions.

(The sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish nat­u­ral­ist John Ray dis­missed the horn­bill fam­i­ly as hav­ing a “foul look,” a colo­nial­ism that ruf­fled Kim’s own feath­ers some­what. In retal­i­a­tion, she dubbed the Great Horn­bill, “the Cyra­no of the Jun­gle” owing to his “tequi­la-sun­rise-hued facial phal­lus,” and select­ed him as the cov­er boy for her book about the mur­al.)

Research and pre­lim­i­nary sketch­ing con­sumed an entire year, after which it took 17 months to inscribe 270 life-size creatures—some long extinct—onto the lab’s main wall. The birds are set against a greyscale map of the world, and while many are depict­ed in flight, every one save the Wan­der­ing Alba­tross has a foot touch­ing its con­ti­nent of ori­gin.

Those who can’t vis­it the Wall of Birds (offi­cial title: From So Sim­ple a Begin­ning) in per­son, can log some dig­i­tal bird­watch­ing using a spec­tac­u­lar inter­ac­tive web-based ver­sion of the mur­al that pro­vides plen­ty of infor­ma­tion about each spec­i­men, some of it lit­er­ary. (The afore­men­tioned Alba­tross’ entry con­tains a pass­ing ref­er­ence to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.)

Explore the Wall of Birds’ inter­ac­tive fea­tures here.

You can down­load a free chap­ter of The Wall of Birds: One Plan­et, 243 Fam­i­lies, 375 Mil­lion Years by sub­scrib­ing to Kim’s mail­ing list here.

Via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cor­nell Will Give You the Answer

Mod­ernist Bird­hous­es Inspired by Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright and Joseph Eich­ler

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City Feb­ru­ary 11 for The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Strange Dancing Plague of 1518: When Hundreds of People in France Could Not Stop Dancing for Months

If you find your­self think­ing you aren’t a vic­tim of fash­ion, maybe take anoth­er look. Yes, we can con­scious­ly train our­selves to resist trends through force of habit. We can declare our pref­er­ences and stand on prin­ci­ple. But we aren’t con­scious­ly aware of what’s hap­pen­ing in the hid­den turn­ings of our brains. Maybe what we call the uncon­scious has more con­trol over us than we would like to think.

Inex­plic­a­ble episodes of mass obses­sion and com­pul­sion serve as dis­qui­et­ing exam­ples. Mass pan­ics and delu­sions tend to occur, argues author John Waller, “in peo­ple who are under extreme psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress, and who believe in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of spir­it pos­ses­sion. All of these con­di­tions were sat­is­fied in Stras­bourg in 1518,” the year the Danc­ing Plague came to the town in Alsace—an invol­un­tary com­mu­nal dance fes­ti­val with dead­ly out­comes.

The event began with one per­son, as you’ll learn in the almost jaun­ty ani­mat­ed BBC video below, a woman known as Frau Trof­fea. One day she began danc­ing in the street. Peo­ple came out of their hous­es and gawked, laughed, and clapped. Then she didn’t stop. She “con­tin­ued to dance, with­out rest­ing, morn­ing, after­noon, and night for six whole days.” Then her neigh­bors joined in. With­in a month, 400 peo­ple were “danc­ing relent­less­ly with­out music or song.”

We might expect that town lead­ers in this late-Medieval peri­od would have declared it a mass pos­ses­sion event and com­menced with exor­cisms or witch burn­ings. Instead, it was said to be a nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non. Draw­ing on humoral the­o­ry, “local physi­cians blamed it on ‘hot blood,’” History.com’s Evan Andrews writes. They “sug­gest­ed the afflict­ed sim­ply gyrate the fever away. A stage was con­struct­ed and pro­fes­sion­al dancers were brought in. The town even hired a band to pro­vide back­ing music.”

Soon, how­ev­er, bloody and exhaust­ed, peo­ple began dying from strokes and heart attacks. The danc­ing went on for months. It was not a fad. No one was enjoy­ing them­selves. On the con­trary, Waller writes, “con­tem­po­raries were cer­tain that the afflict­ed did not want to dance and the dancers them­selves, when they could, expressed their mis­ery and need for help.” This con­tra­dicts sug­ges­tions they were will­ing mem­bers of a cult, and paints an even dark­er pic­ture of the event.

Cer­tain psy­cho­nauts might see in the 1518 Danc­ing Plague a shared uncon­scious, work­ing some­thing out while drag­ging the poor Stras­bour­gians along behind it. Oth­er, more or less plau­si­ble expla­na­tions have includ­ed ergo­tism, or poi­son­ing “from a psy­chotrop­ic mould that grows on stalks of rye.” How­ev­er, Waller points out, ergot “typ­i­cal­ly cuts off blood sup­ply to the extrem­i­ties mak­ing coor­di­nat­ed move­ment very dif­fi­cult.”

He sug­gests the danc­ing mania came about through the meet­ing of two pri­or con­di­tions: “The city’s poor were suf­fer­ing from severe famine and dis­ease,” and many peo­ple in the region believed they could obtain good health by danc­ing before a stat­ue of Saint Vitus. They also believed, he writes, that “St. Vitus… had the pow­er to take over their minds and inflict a ter­ri­ble, com­pul­sive dance. Once these high­ly vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple began to antic­i­pate the St. Vitus curse they increased the like­li­hood that they’d enter the trance state.”

The mys­tery can­not be defin­i­tive­ly solved, but it does seem that what Waller calls “fer­vent super­nat­u­ral­ism” played a key role, as it has in many mass hys­te­rias, includ­ing “ten such con­ta­gions which had bro­ken out along the Rhine and Moselle rivers since 1374,” as the Pub­lic Domain Review notes. Fur­ther up, see a 1642 engrav­ing based on a 1564 draw­ing by Peter Breughel of anoth­er danc­ing epi­dem­ic which occurred that year in Molen­beek. The 17th cen­tu­ry Ger­man engrav­ing above of a danc­ing epi­dem­ic in a church­yard fea­tures a man hold­ing a sev­ered arm.

We see mass pan­ics and delu­sions around the world, for rea­sons that are rarely clear to schol­ars, psy­chi­a­trists, his­to­ri­ans, anthro­pol­o­gists, and physi­cians dur­ing or after the fact. What is med­ical­ly known as Saint Vitus dance, or Sydenham’s Chorea, has rec­og­nized phys­i­cal caus­es like rheumat­ic fever and occurs in a spe­cif­ic sub­set of the pop­u­la­tion. The his­tor­i­cal Saint Vitus Dance, or Danc­ing Plague, how­ev­er, affect­ed peo­ple indis­crim­i­nate­ly and seems to have been a phe­nom­e­non of mass sug­ges­tion, like many oth­er social-psy­cho­log­i­cal events around the world.

Episodes of epi­dem­ic manias relat­ed to out­mod­ed super­nat­ur­al beliefs can seem espe­cial­ly bizarre, but the mass psy­chol­o­gy of 21st cen­tu­ry west­ern cul­ture includes many episodes of social con­ta­gion and com­pul­sion no less strange, and per­haps no less wide­spread or dead­ly, espe­cial­ly dur­ing times of extreme stress.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

A Free Yale Course on Medieval His­to­ry: 700 Years in 22 Lec­tures

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

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