I’m taking a topical detour today to highlight some of the fun blogging (including some science) happening around the May blogathon. Jennifer Fink over at Blogging ‘Bout Boys posted about a Minnesota case where a judge has required that a 13-year old boy undergo chemotherapy. Talk about a heart-wrenching case and it’s not clear cut,…
It’s Havidol— the cure for all that ails modern society! Though it looks like a real ad, it’s actually Justine Cooper‘s art, a whole campaign that’s a fascinating commentary on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Yes, we all want to feel our best, and we’d love it if a pill could do that for us. Justine spoke…
Last night I realized how long it’s been since I last folded a paper crane. The documentary, Between the Folds, allows origami to explode into this beautiful world of artistic creations and amazing patterns and complexity driven by algorithms– sequences of mathematical instructions– ranging from simple to astronomically complex. The funny thing is that on…
Like other double reeds, the rackett produced by this instrument probably decreases as the player’s skill increases. When I was working on my article about carbon fiber instruments, I traded emails with a researcher in musical acoustics in Australia. He saw my blog post about Papalini’s bass clarinet and said: If you’re interested in low…
My most recent story (my first for Scientific American) combined all the elements of what I love about my work– the chance to meet interesting people, learn and experience new things, and allow my eclectic interests to co-mingle, at least for a little while. In other words, this former chamber musician got to flex my…
Watching the Inauguration on TV today, this former chamber musician and band geek had to give a shout out for the John Williams piece performed by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, pianist Gabriela Montero and clarinetist Anthony McGill. I performed in chamber groups on both flute and piano during my high school piano recitals.…
The late period of Vincent van Gogh’s art screams harmonies of color, but his earlier work was decidedly dark. I wrote a kids’ piece last fall about how chemistry and art history came together to decode a woman’s face lurking below the surface on one of the artist’s sunny South-of-France paintings. The x-ray technique is…