Art
Elephant Water Clock Among 25,000 Pages of Medieval Arabic Scientific Manuscripts
A new online portal created by the British Library and Qatar Foundation features 25,000 pages of medieval Arabic manuscripts centered on the history of science.
Science
Art
Will Our Future Be Biologically Designed?
On October 28, Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), hosted “Synthetic Aesthetics: New Frontiers in Contemporary Design,” an evening of presentations and discussion about the field of synthetic biology.
Books
Lunar Mountains and Divine Spheres: 1,000 Years of Illustrating Outer Space
In a new book called Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, published this month by Abrams, Michael Benson examines over a thousand years of mapping the great beyond.
Art
Natural History Watercolors by a 19th-Century Convict
In the most hellish penal colony of Tasmania, a convict named William Buelow Gould painted beautiful watercolors of the sea creatures that washed up on the shores.
Books
The Romance of Science in Victorian Natural History Bookbindings
The Victorian fascination with natural history combined with affordable book publishing led to some comely titles in elegant binding.
Art
An Artist's Ark Meets Its Fate on Lake Superior
DULUTH, Minn. — It was a magnificent sight when it first launched. Floating 20 feet from shore, Sean Connaughty’s “Ark of the Anthropocene” seemed to glow on the dark waves of Lake Superior, drawing on real science, Biblical narrative, and science fiction all at once.
Art
NASA Explores the Potential of Origami in Space
The future of space flight may be founded on the traditions of art.
Art
A Travel Bureau for a Trip to the Moon
Extraplanetary travel has seemed tantalizingly close ever since the first moon landing over 45 years ago. Alas, we're no closer to spending our summer holidays riding rovers on the lunar craters, and even with the advent of private space travel like Virgin Galactic and SpaceX it's astronomically una
Art
The Renaissance Anatomist Who Celebrated the Beauty of Flayed Flesh
When it was published in 1543, Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica changed anatomical study with its elegant illustrations of the interior of the human body.
Art
Portraying the Monstrous Elegance of Parasites with Tintypes
Tapeworms, leeches, lice, bedbugs, fleas, and ticks — the litany of Marcus DeSieno's photographic subjects is enough to cause a few paranoid itches
Art
Early High-Speed Photographs Offer Incredible Details of Motion
Back in the 1930s, an electrical engineer from Nebraska, working at MIT, developed the first "strobe" flash for photography, changing the way motion is documented.
Art
Humanizing a Historic Brain Collection
A curious thing about medical collections is how dehumanizing they can be.