Jonathan Holt DESMA 9

          Space has captivated the minds and cultures of humans for seemingly as long as humans have been on this planet. Alongside that captivation, art has been a field that has supported and aided the conceptualization and exploration of space. Even centuries ago, as Victoria Vesna pointed out in her lecture, civilizations such as the Romans used art and culture to explain space. For example, in the case of the Romans, each planet within our solar system was named after a god or goddess. Beyond the naming of the planets, however, Romans utilized art to diagram and map the night sky. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this can be seen in Ptolemy’s map of the solar system. This map was one of the first maps of each planet's orbit that predicted each planet's location based upon date and time.  Ptolemy's Model of the Solar System (from University of Oregon ) Centuries after the work of Roman astronomers and the many that followed them, modern...

    Nanotechnology goes beyond what most humans believe they can comprehend. As put by Jim Gimzewksi and Victoria Vesna in their piece on nanotechnology, “When working on this kind of scale, we immediately reach the limits of rational human experience, and the imaginary takes over.” The scale that nanotechnology operates on is far beyond what we can see (nanotech is on a scale of 1-100 nanometers, and a human hair is typically 80,000 nanometers), yet it has great potential for impacting our lives in many different ways, especially in the fields of art and science. Blue Morpho Wings (from Web Exhibits )      Take the beautiful wings of the Morpho Butterflies for example. The amazing blue color that we see on the wings of the butterfly leads us to believe that the wings are blue themselves, yet the blue color is actually produced by light interacting with nanostructures on the wings of the butterflies. The nanostructures diffract incoming light and cause som...

    After researching neuroscience this week, it became evident that the worlds of neuroscience and art are interconnected. One of the specific fields of neuroscience that I took interest in this week was the connection between art, the brain, and LSD. LSD was first experimented with in the early 1950s, where it was famously studied as a treatment for various mental disorders, including illnesses such as alcoholism. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s LSD continued to grow in the world of psychiatric medicine, and through 1965 over 40,000 patients were prescribed LSD to treat alcoholism, schizophrenia, and psychopathy.  1950's Housewife Describes her LSD Experience during a Study (from ABC News )      However, the early hope for LSD to become the next big drug treatment in neuroscience ended when the drug was banned in the US in 1968. Following the ban, LSD took existence only off the official and legal medical market. Only recently has the emergence of new...

    At the time of its release, the futuristic world portrayed in the movie Gattaca seemed like a dystopian reality, yet after participating in the Gattaca watch party this week and doing my own research, I found that may not be the case anymore. The science fiction film centers heavily around the subject of the human genome, discrimination based upon genetics, and gene editing of human embryos. These topics, which may have seemed far-fetched in 1997, have become very much real-life topics and issues in modern society.  Gattaca Scene Where the Parents Choose the Genetics of Vincent's Brother (from Youtube)      The main character in Gattaca , Vincent Freeman, is a human who was conceived and born naturally like the vast majority of humans now, yet in the world of Gattaca that is not the case. Most humans in the movie were made through reproductive technologies that harness eugenics to create humans with the most desirable genes that set them up for ...

       As the world of biotech has evolved and grown over the last century, it has become very intertwined with the arts. Scientists working with genomes and DNA of living creatures have been able to create some of the most advanced and unique experiments, and in doing so have also unlocked a whole new realm for the arts. One of these experiments/art pieces, which has been both praised and scrutinized by the public, is the famous rabbit Alba created by Eduardo Kac. Alba is an albino rabbit that was genetically modified to glow fluorescent green.      Alba the Bunny (from New Scientist)           To create Alba, scientists took a protein that originates in a certain glow in dark Jellyfish and inserted the gene into a fertilized rabbit egg, which grew up to be Alba. Once Alba developed into a fully grown rabbit, the glow-in-the-dark gene had replicated and made it into every cell in Alba causing the rabbit to glow brigh...

  Event 1: Why Maize Should Be Capitalized by Alvaro Azcarraga      Two weeks ago I attended a lecture by Alvaro Azcarraga, where he talked about many subjects related to farming and horticulture, ranging from the historical and cultural impacts of Maize to the diverse plant life that lives on its own very streets. Azcarraga started his lecture by speaking about Maize and why it should be ‘capitalized.’ He did not mean in economic terms, and actually stressed that there is a big difference between the cultural aspects of Maize and the economic side of the crop, which should be referred to as corn. The importance of Maize was made clear by Alvaro, who showed how the plant has above-ground roots that can sequester nitrogen from the environment. Not only is Maize unique in this aspect, but a disease that harms Maize called Ustilago Maydis that creates tumor growths on Maize has been studied and found to help scientists in understanding tumorous growths. According to Al...