18th century microscopes from the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris
Intertwining medicine and the humanities.
Questions? Comments?
Care to submit something?
March 17, 2013
March 16, 2013
"I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too."
— Tertius Lydgate - George Eliot’s Middlemarch
March 13, 2013
"Charles Darwin regarded his grandfather’s and his father’s medicine as a blend of moral sympathy and empirical observation. It is this mixed character of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century medicine that nourished extensive discussion of “man’s place in nature” from both the moral and the scientific point of view. Of course, the moral and the scientific were not in Charles’s grandfather’s day so neatly separated. What we would now call science was encompassed within “natural philosophy,” and those natural philosophers interested in the human - that is, for the most part, the physicians - frequently contemplated the moral alongside the material. The word “scientist,” defining a student of the material world as distinct from a”philosopher,” a lover of wisdom, was not coined until 1834, and the men hashing out that distinction still included those whom we would now call humanists, like the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the philosopher of science Whilliam Whewell."
— Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain - Janice McLarren Caldwell
February 22, 2013
Grizzly Bear - Gun Shy
Video submitted by ArtsyYak
August 30, 2012
(Source: justalittleexploration, via cranquis)
July 11, 2012
"I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it."
—
Robert M. Sapolsky (via wonderwanderpolarbear)
Hmm. Seems that some people prefer to keep their old mysteries instead of solving them and discovering new ones - often embedded in the old ones!
(via realcleverscience)
(Source: magnificent--desolation, via thescienceofreality)
July 7, 2012
Am I the only one who cringes when atheism and science are used interchangeably?
Especially when ‘logic & reasoning’ come into the discussion. Science and atheism are two different things, even if they may have some parallels. I’m sure all science enthusiasts aren’t all atheists, and I’m sure atheists don’t all support science 100%.
I understand the correlation, and will be the first person to support ‘logic & reasoning’, but come on now.
Reblogging because no one seems to be getting this lately.
Personally, I don’t think science and atheism are the same thing, either. You can have faith in a religion, and still believe in science. There are also tons of science and mathematics in the Holy Bible and Qur’an, believe it or not.
June 30, 2012
"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world."
— Louis Pasteur
June 11, 2012
May 11, 2012
Medical experiments on chimpanzees can be invasive, involving injections, blood samples and liver biopsies. But some say it’s the only way to advance medicine.
In recent years, Japan, Europe and the U.K. have all ended the practice. The U.S. and Gabon are the only two nations to continue using chimpz for medical research.
Are there ever instances in which the scientific value of research should offset the moral cost of working with chimps? What are your thoughts on this?
Followers, what say you?
May 9, 2012
Hey this is neat.
May 2, 2012
Babies Addicted to Painkillers
On average, one baby is born in the United States each hour addicted to opiates — a class of drugs ranging from heroin to prescription painkillers.
April 30, 2012
Gina Glover, a photographer with a degree in Human Genetics, is the creator of these amazing works of art. “Chromosomal Stripy Socks” won the Medical Research Council/Novartis/Daily Telegraph Visions of Science award and appeared on the cover of Nature.
If you are interested in science photography or the intersection of art and science I highly recommend reading the interview!
(via thescienceblog)
April 29, 2012
Winner Art of Neuroscience 2012
Martijn Steenwijk is this year’s winner of the Art of Neuroscience competition, organized by the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. Click on the link to watch his movie.
Gallery shows four honorable mentions.
(via thescienceblog)
April 23, 2012
Lungs ≡ Trees
Above is a resin cast of a lung. Notice its fractal nature - how it displays self similarity at smaller and smaller scales. You might also notice how this structure is quite ‘tree-like’. Why are they so similar?
Well actually, both lungs and trees want to maximise the surface area of their functional components while constrained to some maximum volume. For lungs this strict constraint is the size of the thorax, but for trees is more relaxed and is to do with the mass they can achieve through photosynthesis and mineral uptake and density of trees around them.
Interestingly, nature has solved both these mathematical problems of optimisation using the mathematical solution of fractals. This is a great example of complexity and universality. Complex structures such as trees and lungs emerge from very simple mathematical rules, laws and constraints. The result is some kind of universality to the structures that we humans see and assume to be very different, though they are fundamentally the same.
Check out this animation I made of a simple fractal construct being transformed into a ‘tree-like’ (or ‘lung-like’!) structure.
(via thescienceblog)
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