Art
A 19th-Century Glass Menagerie of Sea Creatures Gets a Retrospective
Melting glass over a flame, the 19th-century Czech father-and-son team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka replicated in fragile detail specimens of the natural world.
Science
Art
How the Space Race Altered Art in the Americas
Space exploration and the science fiction imagination of alien encounters out in the stars reached their peak of optimistic possibility between the 1940s and 1970s, culminating with the first moon landing in 1969.
Art
Painting a Kangaroo When You've Never Seen One
To show animals of distant locales to the public in centuries before photography, artists were sometimes enlisted to recreate exotic fauna through secondhand descriptions or some scrap of skin or skeleton.
Art
A Film Portrait of the "Doomsday Vault" that Guards Our Agricultural Biodiversity
On a Norwegian island 810 miles south of the North Pole is a safety net for an agricultural crisis.
News
British Scientists Find Trove of Animal Mummies with No Bones
It sounds like the beginnings of a detective tale: researchers in the UK recently scanned 300 animal mummies from Egypt only to discover that a full third held no bodies.
Art
A Project that Lets You Control Music with Your Mind
With new technology comes new opportunities to augment our reality, and two art projects now on view in Brooklyn experiment with our interaction with sound through electronic devices.
Art
The Scientist Who Shot His Photos with a Gun and Inspired Futurism
The phased movement of Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" (1912) and the frenetic action embodied in Futurism were both inspired by the 19th-century photography of scientist Étienne-Jules Marey.
Art
An Opera Filmed at the Largest Particle Physics Lab in the World
A movie set amongst the machines of CERN, the world's largest particle physics facility, considers how both art and science strive to understand the universe, and what it is to be human.
Art
Recording the Insect Ecology of a Prison Reclaimed by Nature
Cell 25 in Block 9 of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary is now a cabinet of curiosities representing the animal life of this stabilized ruin.
Art
The Men Who Manufacture Scientific Doubt
Merchants of Doubt, the latest documentary film by director Robert Kenner (Food, Inc., among others) uses a magician's sleight of hand as an allegory for the conning of the American public by a handful of corporate lobbyists and public-relations mercenaries.
Art
Our View from the Cosmic Shore: Early Modern Interpretations of Celestial Events
When Milton was writing Paradise Lost in the 17th century, a comet grazed through the sky, inspiring the English poet to describe how Satan "stood Unterrified, and like a comet burn'd."
News
The Chemistry of Why van Gogh Reds Are Going White
Vincent van Gogh's reds have been turning white, but the exact reason why has remained unclear.