Some scribbles dismissed in the 1920s by the then-director of the Victoria & Albert Museum as “irrelevant notes and diagrams in red chalk” were recently revealed to represent Leonardo da Vinci’s first record of the laws of friction.
art and science
Posted inArt
An Artist and Amateur Scientist Who Painted Animal Camouflage and Angels
Before coming across an unusually calligraphic painting of a mountain, Williams College Museum of Art Curator Kevin Murphy considered the turn-of-the-century artist Abbott Handerson Thayer “a one slide guy,” a man known for portraits of placid angels, who in an art history class might get one mention and then be forgotten.
Posted inArt
A Nuclear Warning Designed to Last 10,000 Years
Consider a wanderer 10,000 years in the future discovering a strange construction of granite thorns in the New Mexico desert, their points weathered by centuries, their shadows stretching at sinister angles.
Posted inBooks
Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Butterfly Illustrations
At the end of Vladimir Nabokov’s poem “Pale Fire,” he describes how “White butterflies turn lavender as they / Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway / The phantom of my little daughter’s swing.”
Posted inArt
Airships and Reanimated Corpses from the Pages of Early Science Fiction
WASHINGTON, DC — Science fiction rose to prominence in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when authors like H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Mary Shelley imagined the extraordinary possibilities of advances in technology and exploration.
Posted inArt
The First Photographs of Lightning Crackle with Electric Chaos
In the 1880s, William Nicholson Jennings set out to prove the diversity and unpredictability of lightning’s path, capturing the electric light with his plate camera.
Posted inBooks
The Relics of Victorian Natural History in Eye-Popping Stereoscope
Natural history storerooms are a bit like drowned Noah’s Arks, with specimens from every realm of the animal world posthumously preserved.
Posted inArt
Butterfly Ovaries and Cockroach Stomachs: Microphotographs as Art
If it hadn’t been for Carl Strüwe, a German graphic designer and self-taught photographer, the world may have never come to appreciate the unlikely beauty of a cockroach’s stomach.
Posted inArt
Illustrated Dolphins and Vampire Squid from the Dawn of Ocean Exploration
In the 16th century, Pierre Belon published one of the earliest scientific depictions of a dolphin: a woodcut with finely hatched skin and pointed teeth.
Posted inArt
An Interactive Map of a Midcentury Botanist’s Amazonian Trips
Richard Evans Schultes took peyote with the Kiowa in Oklahoma in the 1930s, was the first scientist invited to a hallucinogenic yagé ceremony in the Amazon’s Sibundoy Valley in the 1940s, and inadvertently helped launch the psychedelic era of the 1960s.
Posted inIn Brief
Damien Hirst’s Pickled Animals May Have Leaked Carcinogenic Fumes [UPDATED]
Damien’s Hirst’s formaldehyde-filled installations don’t just ooze money and pretension — some may also leak potentially dangerous gas.
Posted inPerformance
An Opera of Love Songs to Science
“Maybe there’s a physicist sitting right beside you, who can explain this better than we do, but we’re in the business of art, so we’ll make a metaphor,” sings Hai-Ting Chinn in Science Fair: An Opera With Experiments.