Indo-Pacific Sailfish by Kate Spencer

Two artists sat side by side at the demo table. Diane T. Sands wrestled with a live turtle who didn't want to pose; Megan Gnekow hovered over her laptop, flipping between "nestcams"–live video streams from birds' nests around the country. At the beginning of the evening, Gnekow found a pair of red-tailed hawk parents feeding their chicks. "What a treat!" she exclaimed, and began to sketch.

Sands and Gnekow were participants in the First Friday Art Tour on May 4th at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History's exhibit "The Art of Nature." Throughout the museum, behind permanent display cases of stuffed foxes and a marine touch pool, the walls were covered with artwork from the California Guild of Natural Science Illustrators.

Allen's Hummingbird by Karen Talbot

The Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History has been hosting an annual science illustration exhibit for twenty-three years. It began as a showcase for the graduating class of the UC Santa Cruz science illustration program, but when that program moved to CSU Monterey Bay, the end-of-year show moved with it. ("Illustrating Nature" is now on display at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History–I'll be reporting next week.)

The Santa Cruz museum switched partners from the university to the California chapter of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. As it turns out, a large proportion of guild members are graduates of the UCSC/CSUMB program. So those artists currently showing at the PG Museum may well be featured in a few years in Santa Cruz.

And future generations of science illustrators could spring from participants in school tours of "The Art of Nature." Deborah McArthur, the Santa Cruz museum's education manager, leads kids on a picture hunt through the exhibit, then lets them experiment with their own mixed media illustration. Science and art instruction go hand in hand.

California Butterfly by Sondra Cohelan

Even as an adult wandering through the show, I found myself learning new things. When a drawing of shiny scarabs caught my eye, I first thought "Ancient Egypt!" then learned that some scarabs are actually native to the southwest US. On another wall, a California gull plowing hungrily through a cloud of flies taught me that a seagull's diet is far more varied than fish and picnic sandwiches.

One painting is particularly poignant: a watercolor of an Indo-Pacific sailfish, commissioned by the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a gift to the director of the Japanese sea museum Aquamarine Fukushima. According to the placard, "The framed original survived the 2011 earthquake/tsunami."

As I left the museum, Sands' turtle was crawling across Gnekow's colored pencil case while Gnekow sketched eagle chicks from Decorah, Iowa. Science illustrators may travel far afield–there were sketchbooks on display from New Zealand and South America–but I appreciated the reminder that natural subjects are everywhere, from the family pet to the internet.

Updated 5/10/12 with artists' links and higher-quality images. Thanks, artists!

Marsh plants (in sketchbook) by Emily Coren (walkaboutem.com)

On Saturday, April 21st, I found myself driving to San Francisco with a dead squid in the trunk. The squid part wasn't unusual, since I'm an educator with Squids4Kids. The unusual part was my destination: the San Franscisco Center for the Book. I've brought squid to classrooms and summer camps for years, but never to a nonprofit foundation for book arts.

"Fugitive" by Michelle Wilson - paper handmade from invasive plants, selectively exposed to light

The occasion was SFCB's annual Earth Day Extravaganza, where I oscillated between fielding questions about squid and exploring the center's current art exhibition, "Left to Chance: In Search of the Accidental Book Art." In honor of the 100th birthday of avant-garde composer John Cage, the pieces all shared an element of luck or randomness. This may sound weird–but it made me think of science. Could Cage's emphasis on making people notice their existing environment, along with pieces in "Left to Chance" that made use of natural accidents like sunlight fading paper, be just another manifestation of the scientist's urge to observe and describe the natural world? Fun fact: Cage himself was an amateur mycologist; his collection of fungi is currently housed at UC Santa Cruz.

Earth Is Awesome, Press and Broadside - photo by Monica LeMaster

Plenty of other people were perusing the artwork, but Saturday's hands-on activities were the real draw. As SFCB co-founder Kathleen Burch said, "People want to get their hands inky." At one classic Vandercook printing press, you could create a broadside in blue ink: EARTH IS AWESOME. Another printed a book cover in green ink with 10 tips for easing up on Earth. At the next table, you added pages and bound the book by hand. (All the matierals were either donated or recycled.)

And then, in the back room, you could print a squid.

If you're not familiar with gyotaku, the phrase "squid printing" may conjure peculiar images. Is the squid run through a press? Cut into letter type? Actually, it just sits on a table while visitors line up to roll ink over it. Once the squid has been thoroughly inked and its arms and tentacles artistically arranged, you drop a large piece of paper on top and press it down. Peel the paper off, and you've got a squid print.

Squid Printing - photo by Monica LeMaster

Printmaker Julie Whitcomb has been the activity's catalyst. Last year she drove to the Squids4Kids lab and picked up the specimen herself. This year I joined the fun solely in my capacity as a science nerd; I have very limited experience with printing. I babbled about ecology while SFCB volunteers guided visitors through the printing process–which included hand-cut stamps to label major parts of the squid's anatomy.

Like all the other visitors, I walked out at the end of the day with a broadside, a book, and a squid print. But I had one more goodie in my bag: when all the printing was done, I had extracted the squid's statoliths, tiny ear bones that can tell us how old the squid was.

It's my favorite kind of day when science, education, and art all hold hands.

Rio Forty Degrees - Camila Donatti (ecologist) - Hopkins Art Show 2010

A painting of a cherry tree in full blossom adorns one wall. On a table beneath it, ceramic fingers reach from a blue-glazed ceramic basket. Opposite these hangs an intricately decorated guitar.

Cake - Carolyn Tepolt (invasive species biologist) - Hopkins Art Show 2010

The third annual Hopkins Marine Station Amateur Art Show was held this past weekend in Monterey, California. Hopkins is Stanford University's marine biology satellite campus, next door to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, home to a tight-knit community of ocean-obsessed weirdos. (I've been one.) The overlap between colleagues, roommates, and friends is so thorough that you tend to share grocery lists and pipette tips with the same people. It’s hard to stop talking about science, even at bars.

"I thought an art party would really foster conversations outside of this normal routine," says Jason Ladner, who did his graduate work on coral genetics at Hopkins. Around year four, he got sick of thinking about science all the time and found an escape in art. "I figured there were probably other people that could use a similar escape"–and in 2010 the first Amateur Art Show and Garden Party was born. Ladner wrote in his invitation, "This is a very low-key event where the term 'amateur' is stressed and the term 'art' is very loosely interpreted." It was a hit.

Tiger - Ana Sofia Guerra (undergraduate working on fish parasites) - Hopkins Art Show 2012

At the party's third incarnation on April 14, 2012, scientists mingled over cups of sangria and reveled in their conversational freedom. Ladner has moved on to post-doctoral work and this party was hosted at the home of Judit Pungor, a graduate student studying octopus vision. One partygoer observed with wonder that very little of the art has a scientific theme. In addition to the guitar and the slightly disturbing ceramics, displays included hand-sewn clothing and a rainbow knitted blanket.

But not all scientists can suppress their nerdiness just because they're making art. Squid student Hannah Rosen (yes, she's in my old lab) painted an octopus tap dancing, with a squid on the piano. When asked, "Why not a tap-dancing squid and a piano-playing octopus?" Rosen answered, "The idea of a tap-dancing octopus just spoke to me."

But the airy certainty of an artist's statement quickly devolved into a scientific assessment of habitat and behavior. Since octopuses can crawl on land but squid can't, the octopus is the logical choice for the tap-dancer.

Tap-Dancing Octopus - Hannah Rosen - Hopkins Art Show 2012

As if that weren't enough, Jupiter hangs in the night sky behind the theatrical cephalopods. "Are they on Europa?" I asked Rosen. She confirmed that, indeed, the scene takes place on Jupiter's frozen ocean moon.

Art by scientists, it turns out, can be everything that art by non-scientists can be: whimsical or solemn, accessible or obscure, technical or conceptual. And scientists are just as surprised as anyone to find that out. The best thing that you hear at these parties, over and over again, is: "I didn't even know she did that!"

Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers (1889)

Most admirers of van Gogh's iconic "Sunflower" paintings gaze upon the golden inflorescences without any awareness of the scientific conundrum they pose. But researchers from the University of Georgia have finally cracked the case with a paper published in PLoS Genetics.

Buttercup taken at Tilden Park in Berkeley, California by Calibas

Orchid taken by Alex Tievsky SaveThePoint

The puzzle begins with the fact that all flowers are either radially or bilaterally symmetrical. A buttercup is an example of radial symmetry; it looks the same no matter how you rotate it. An orchid, on the other hand, has bilateral symmetry, like a human face–the left and right sides look the same, but you can tell whether it's right side up or upside down.

Here's the sneaky thing: a lot of seemingly radially symmetrical flowers are actually clusters of tiny bilaterally symmetrical flowers, or florets. In fact, this is true of one of the biggest flower families, Asteraceae, which includes such familiar friends as dandelions, daisies and, yes, sunflowers.

Then the sunflower makes things extra complicated by building its cluster out of two kinds of florets: bilaterally symmetrical ray florets, and radially symmetrical disk florets. This may sound confusing, but it's obvious as soon as you look for it: the classic sunflower is a ring of petals (ray florets) surrounding a big disk that will become filled with seeds (fertilized disk florets). The ray florets are infertile–they're just there to help attract pollinators.

Now at last we can consider van Gogh, and his double-flowered sunflowers. They're mutants.

A double-flowered mutant has no true disk florets, only concentric rings of ray florets–a profusion of petals. Consequently, the plant loses a lot of its fertility. You might wonder, can the opposite occur? Indeed, in tubular-rayed mutants ray florets are replaced with radialized, fertile disk florets.

Mark Chapman and his colleagues have just discovered that one particular gene, called HaCYC2c, causes both mutations. If HaCYC2c is over-expressed, it creates double-flowered van Goghs. If the gene's function is lost, however, you get tubular-rayed flowers.

I particularly love this study because at least the first part of their methods is totally accessible to anyone who's studied Mendelian crosses in high school biology. See:

Okay, maybe it's a bit tricky. If you want to puzzle it out but you're rusty on Mendel, here's a primer.

Of course, you don't need to understand Mendelian crosses–or the super-sophisticated genetic mapping that Chapman et al. use later–to appreciate van Gogh's art. Nor do you need to be an Impressionist fan to appreciate sunflower genetics.

But I think we can all appreciate that it's not often a famous painting is included in Figure 1 of a scientific paper.

Figure 1. Entire inflorescences (A, C, E) and individual florets (B, D, F) from wildtype (A, B), double-flowered (C, D) and tubular (E, F) sunflower individuals. Florets are arranged left to right from the inner florets to the outer florets. (G) “Sunflowers (Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers)” by Vincent van Gogh (1888) with double-flowered heads pointed out with arrows. Panel G was obtained from Steve Dorrington on flickr (available at http://flic.kr/p/8SsPYb) and is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License.

Illuminated Initial N, Spanish, 1290-1310, on view at the Getty

I had a fantastic middle school history teacher named Mr. Saunders. One day, after we had been learning about illuminated manuscripts, Mr. Saunders gave us a class period of complete silence–except for a tape of Gregorian chants–to create our own.

We didn't have any gold leaf, so our manuscripts were not technically "illuminated," merely illustrated. But it was one of my favorite classes, and I've been fond of the art form ever since. So when I was in LA this weekend and noticed that the Getty was showing a new illuminated manuscript exhibit, I had to check it out.

Initial I of the Bible illuminated by Thomas Ingmire

Okay, I realize that the Getty is in Southern California, and here I am on a Northern California blog, but I have an excuse: the only work in the exhibit that wasn't centuries old belonged to San Francisco master calligrapher Thomas Ingmire! Did you know we had a master calligrapher? Neither did I!

Ingmire had created a series of pages to demonstrate all the steps of the illumination process. The artist first paints glue over the areas to be illuminated, then sticks gold leaf to the glue and brushes any extra leaf away. At this point, though, the gold is dull matte and the page can hardly be called illuminated. How to make it glossy?

Initial I, Italian, 1250-1262, on view at the Getty

Gloss, or shine, or illumination–whatever you want to call it–comes from specular reflection, the same thing that makes a mirror work. When a surface is very smooth at the microscopic level, all the light rays hitting it are reflected at the same angle. A mirror has almost perfect specular reflection, because it's almost perfectly smooth. But if the surface has microscopic bumps and ridges, they reflect light rays in all different directions, leading to diffuse reflection–a matte surface.

So the gold leaf has to be smoothed by rubbing it with something hard, traditionally bone. You may already be familiar with this technique, called burnishing, if you were unlucky enough to have a boring history teacher and spent the class period smoothing gum wrappers with your thumbnail.

I was not a gum-chewing child–but I was an amateur calligrapher, in addition to being infatuated with illuminated manuscripts. After looking at Ingmire's series at the Getty, I thought, "Maybe I'll try this when I get home!" Then I read up on working with gold leaf–and decided to write about it instead.

Crabfish - Sandra Yagi

Have you heard of the Poisonous Fiddlerfrog, whose tadpoles grow up into crabs? Or the Hummingshrew, who eats flies as well as nectar?

These animals aren't real, so you'd only know about them if you've seen Voyage Through a Hidden World. This collaboration between artist Sandra Yagi and writer Julie Benbow is currently on display at The Bone Room Presents in Berkeley. Yagi's hybrid creatures are paired with Benbow's journal entries, written from the perspective of fictional 18th century explorer Lady Lavinia.

Rhinobeetle - Sandra Yagi

Many members of the beautiful bestiary are puns incarnate. Real rhino beetles are large and oddly shaped, but Yagi's Rhinobeetle has the head of a literal rhinoceros. Leafy seadragons in our world are marine fish; the ones on Yagi's canvas crawl on reptilian limbs.

Yagi has always been fascinated by science. "I'd go to Body Worlds and take my sketchbook," she says. "I collect anatomy books." The artist is also lucky to have a personal fact-checker: "My partner works in medicine, so she'll tell me if I get anything wrong."

But aren't all hybrids "getting it wrong" in a spectacular way? In "Zonkeys are Pretty Much My Favorite Animal" (July 31, 2007 Outside), Jon Cohen points out that hybrids "strain credulity–even when they're staring you in the face." They flout the organized structure we've set up to understand nature. And yet real hybrids are more common, and possibly more important to evolution, than most of us realize. Have you ever heard of blynxes? Pizzlies? Humanzees?

But real-world hybrids are always produced by crosses between similar species. Remember the classification scheme you probably had to memorize in high school biology, with humans as an example:

Hummingshrew - Sandra Yagi

Kingdom (Animalia)
Phylum (Chordata)
Class (Mammalia)
Order (Primate)
Family (Hominidae)
Genus (Homo)
Species (sapiens)

A bobcat (Lynx rufus) and a lynx (Lynx lynx) belong to the same genus, and they can make a baby blynx. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and grizzlies (Ursus arctos) are also congeners, and can join forces to create a pizzly.

Hummingbirds and shrews, by contrast, belong to entirely separate classes, and frogs and crabs to separate phyla. Anatomical and chemical differences between these pairs are too extreme to allow hybridization.

So fiddlerfrogs and hummingshrews remain confined to our imaginations. Disappointment, or relief? Your choice!

In fact, we all do.

If you've ever spent any time in hospitals, you know they can be anxious, painful places. Gardens offset this intrinsic stress with the calm of nature, whether experienced in person, through a window, or just in pictures. It may sound subjective, but the benefits–from lowering blood pressure to easing brain fatigue–are anything but.

Nature improves the lives of patients and doctors, the sick and the healthy, and even people who have nothing to do with hospitals. Consider the case of Costa Rica.

Costa Rica flowers by DoctorWho via Flickr

According to the World Database of Happiness, from 2000-2009 Costa Ricans reported the highest life satisfaction of any nationality on the planet. Recent research presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science suggests that this small Central American country owes its happiness to two factors: human capital, the strength of social support, and natural capital, the quality of the natural environment and people’s access to it.

Any biologist can tell you that Costa Rica is overflowing with natural capital. Rainforests and reefs thick with life make it one of the world's ecological meccas. How could you not be happy, living somewhere that beautiful?

Then again, another key to happiness is appreciating what we already have. From the wild loneliness of Big Sur to the rolling gold of wine country, there's plenty of natural beauty in the Bay Area to call our own.

Big Sur Poppies by Ed Yourdon via Flickr

But the Bay Area is also home to some fierce workaholics. And hospitals don't have a monopoly on anxiety and stress.

So here's an idea: If you spend all day (and sometimes night) in an office, put some nature on the wall. Researcher Roger Ulrich and his colleagues discovered that heart surgery patients who saw a nature scene of trees and water were less anxious and actually experienced less pain than patients who saw blank walls or abstract pictures. Maybe it's time to take down that Mondrian–or at least supplement with a Monet.

Perhaps even better than Monet (who reminds some of us uncomfortably of high school art history) is the abundance of contemporary local talent. One Bay Area artist, Ellen Joseph, explicitly bases her healing paintings on Ulrich's research. Her murals cover the walls of Kaiser Pediatrics in Hayward and Fremont with colorful trees, birds, and even monkeys.

No need to travel all the way to Costa Rica!

Kaiser Pediatrics Mural by Ellen Joseph

xkcd

The peculiar sensibility this comic describes is not the sole province of scientists. Meet artist Phil Ross and his slime molds.

Ross's film Leviathans is on display at the Vast and Undetectable exhibit in the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. The gallery isn't large–you can see it all in half an hour–but it's fun.

While we sat on a wooden bench in front of Leviathans, listening to ambient music and watching the gentle expansion of a veined yellow monster, my husband asked, "What are slime molds exactly?"

"Fungi," I answered without thinking, because hey, they're mold, right? Wrong! Slime molds are not true molds, and therefore not fungi, although scientists once thought they were. In fact, slime molds are close cousins to amoebas.

Leviathans features the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, nicknamed the "many-headed slime." P. polycephalum is one of the most popular slime molds, in part because it’s extremely easy to grow, even for artists. Ross notes that his pets enjoyed "oatmeal, this one kind of organic Korean pasta, and an Italian brand of alphabet soup letters."

Physarum polycephalum. Photo by Phil Ross.

P. polycephalum is also the poster child for plasmodial slime molds. An individual slime mold of a plasmodial species is just one enormous cell with a whole lot of nuclei jostling around inside–which is hard to believe when you see the creature's complex network of veins.

Human veins are made of many cells. So how can you build veins inside a single cell?

The slime mold constructs its veins out of proteins called actin and myosin and fills them with cytosol (basic cell fluid). By rhythmically pumping cytosol through its veins in one direction, the slime mold can expand and move toward food, a more pleasant environment, or anything else that strikes its fancy. This kind of movement is called cytoplasmic shuttle streaming, and a bit of Google Scholar searching will inform you that scientists are not totally sure how it works.

But the mysteries of their movement and their fondness for breakfast cereal aren't the only tricks up the slime molds' veins. They can plan cities! Grow bio-computers! Re-define intelligence! Or at least they might be able to inform human efforts in these directions. Who knows what will come of it all?

One thing's for sure–slime molds will always be beautiful.

Hat tip to Symbiartic for linking Vast and Undetectable!

Plant Modifications poster by Kandis Elliot. Click on the image for a larger size.

Kandis Elliot didn’t think she’d make art her profession. “When I was in high school and thinking of a career, we were told back then that you can't make a living as an artist and if you're smart enough you go into the sciences,” said Elliot. She was smart enough- and interested enough- in the sciences to graduate from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in biology and Masters in zoology. “In all these courses I drew like crazy without letting too many people see these drawings,” she recalls.

But art drew her back and after her advanced degree Elliot returned to school, this time in a technical college program in commercial art. Shortly after that, the perfect opportunity came knocking. “I was out about a month when four people, four or five people called me up the same day and said, ‘The botany artist is leaving, go apply for a position,’" Elliot says. The position was as staff artist for the University of Wisconsin’s Botany department, one of the best in the country.

Elliot was strong on science and gifted in art, but she also had another card up her sleeve, “I knew back in 1988 there was this new thing called Apple Computer where you could draw a perfect square. You didn't need a right angle. You could draw a perfect circle, you didn't need a compass. And I said, ‘Surely you want to do this kind of work on a computer.’ And they said, ‘Alright, let's try it.’"

Kandis Elliot's poster "Introduction to Fungi". Click on the image for a larger size.

The idea of using computers appealed to the scientists, but Elliot had never actually used one. So she went to the campus computer center, held up a hundred dollar bill, offering it to anyone who could teach her how to use an Apple. That investment paid off in a position she held for over two decades. As the botany artist, she created charts and graphs for countless scientific publications and perfected the art of digital painting. Starting with less-than-perfect images taken by scientists in the field, or dried, pressed plant samples, Elliot’s job was to transform them into striking, painterly objects that could hold a student’s attention.

“It makes your eye dwell on the picture a little bit longer,” says Elliot, “I guess the only way I can describe it is that the paintings say, ‘Look at me.’”

After years spent shining the spotlight on nature’s botanical beauty, Kandis Elliot retired from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. But not before receiving one of the highest honors in her profession. A poster titled “Introduction to Fungi” won the 2010 prize for information graphics in the National Science Foundation’s International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. Mushrooms capped a brilliant career.

Anyone who recognizes the man in this sketch can contact either the Summit County Medical Examiner's Office at 330-643-2101 or Detective Sgt. Greg Feketik from the Twinsburg Police Department at 330-963-6221 or 330-425-1234.

The Twinsburg John Doe case is an especially tough one, and the Summit County Police Department and the Medical Examiner’s office need help identifying this man.  No dental records have been found that match his teeth.  I hope my facial reconstruction will jog someone’s memory, and that he will be recognized.

Background for Twinsburg Case

The remains of a young adult male were found behind a small factory in Twinsburg, Ohio in 1982.  The bones and body parts had been cut up and wrapped in plastic garbage bags and buried. It was believed the man had been dead several years when the remains were discovered.  There have never been any leads in the case.

Lawrence Angel, of the Smithsonian Institution, was the first physical anthropologist to examine the bones.  He determined the victim was an African American man in his early 20s to mid-30s. He was about 5 feet, 5 inches tall with a slight but muscular build.

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer of Bath Township was questioned as a possible suspect for two days in 1991 by investigators from Bath Township Police Department and the Summit County sheriff.

Preparing the skull

Photograph of Twinsburg, Ohio John Doe skull with tissue depth markers.

The Twinsburg John Doe skeleton was only partial, and the skull was badly damaged on the forehead, nose, back of the head and both mastoid processes (lumps of bone near the ear).  It looked like the bones had been injured.  Imagining that someone may have died a violent death is very troubling, but this should not influence you to make the subject look ‘sad’ in your facial reconstruction.  The people who knew this man probably knew a young, energetic person and shared happier times with him.

I had to reconstruct the bridge of the nose.  Luckily some of the surrounding bone was undamaged, so it was possible to estimate the slope of the nasal bones.  The bridge of the nose is where tissue depth marker #4 is glued, so it’s important to reconstruct the anatomy here.

Except for one molar tooth the mandible was missing.  A new mandible had to be reconstructed, one that fit well with the upper teeth and the region of the temporomandibular joints (TMJs).  Tissue depth markers #7 – 10 and 18, 20 and 21 are on the mandible.

Twinsburg, Ohio John Doe skull (profile)

I measured, on the John Doe skull, how wide the mandible would have been and then found one just that wide (an adult, African American male) from the Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection and roughed out a clay copy, using some of the dimensions from the actual bony mandible, and the width of the TMJ region of the John Doe skull.  I inserted the real molar tooth that was found at the crime scene into its proper place in the clay mandible. 

A colleague, Anne Sanford, made a plaster cast of some anterior mandibular teeth from an adult male in the Osteological Collection, and I embedded these into the clay mandible so that they articulated with the upper teeth of John Doe in the way they would in a normal dentition (no marked overbite or underbite).  Unless we have evidence to the contrary, we always make the guess that the individual was ‘normal’.  If the proportions (evident in the skull) are reflected in the features the artist creates, this should produce a likeness that friends and relatives will recognize.  You would never want to make extra big ears, or really bushy eyebrows, or an elaborate hairstyle (unless there was some evidence for them) because this would be distracting.

It’s been more than 30 years since this man died.  I dearly hope that by sharing this information, and the images of his face, someone will recognize him and we can finally determine his identity.