Gonzolabs

You can probably guess who this is.

But can you guess what he’s made of…?
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(For the introduction to this experiment, see the previous post.)

Goal:  Quantitatively describe the “Jenga Effect”, a meme that seems to have popped into existence just 4 years ago and radiated into several new cultural niches.

Results… Continue reading »

Congratulations are in order for Erez Lieberman-Aiden. The paper describing his PhD research, which made the cover of Science last week, was nominated yesterday for Nature’s 2009 Method of the Year contest! And here’s why I think his genome origami-detecting method (known as Hi-C) should win.

Lieberman-Aiden’s method is the one and only method in the running that was originally described in dance form. You might think that I’m joking. But no, here’s the YouTube video of Lieberman-Aiden leading a team of other scientists in a Hi-C dance last year:

What’s crazy is that the dance turned out to work even better as an experiment in the laboratory… A great piling on of awesomeness, after the jump

What is culture made of? Where does it come from, and how does it spread? According to a widely cherished (and by others, hated) idea proposed a surprisingly long time ago by Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976), culture is made of units called memes.

Consider this meme:  The Jenga Effect. It keeps cropping up all over the place, for example in ecology, architecture, economics, computing, and psychology.

I had dinner recently with Leslie Scott, the inventor of Jenga, and we tried to figure out how this meme pandemic broke out. She created the game while living in Africa in the 1970s, just as Dawkins was coining memes. (The name Jenga is the imperative form of the Swahili verb, kjenga, to build.)

The game is wonderfully simple: Players takes turns removing pieces from a stacked tower of blocks and placing them on top, trying to not be the one who causes the inevitable crash. After Scott moved to England, she mass-produced the game, the giant toy company Hasbro began selling it, and Jenga entered the pandemic cultural stream. After the jump: What is the Jenga effect?

In other film festival news (not involving phallus costumes), I had a chat today with Alexis Gambis, the director of the Imagine Science Film Festival, on this week in New York City. If you haven’t heard about ISF yet, that’s probably because it was launched just last year. But it seems poised to become the go-to place for getting your cinema geek fix. (Note: Based on the results of my exhaustive 1-minute investigation, the world’s largest and least-known science film festival seems to be this one in Bangkok.)

Alexis Gambis is an unusual guy. Just last year, he was a cell biologist, finishing his PhD at Rockefeller University in the Steller lab. He’s half-French, half-Venezuelan, grew up in  a French artist colony and went to college in the US. His mother is a filmmaker and his father is a famous painter. When I met Alexis, he was fund-raising for his newly created film festival while running the last of his experiments in the lab. (The weird connection: His lab bench is right down the hall from Rockefeller postdoc Nilay Yapici, with whom I launched the very first “Dance Your PhD” contest in Vienna, Austria.)



Check out the interview, after the jump.

Editor’s note: Readers were intrigued by the cover of this week’s issue of Science: a paper describing the 3-dimensional structure of the human genome. In this post, the lead author on the paper, Erez, finishes his story of the mission to create the Science cover. Read about the beginning of the odyssey in our previous post.

Monday. Jason Ku, origami ninja, wakes up, folds a brown piece of paper into a bowl of cereal and a yellow one into a glass of orange juice. Fortified, he finishes the fold. He rejoins Erik, who folds a black piece of paper into a high-end camera – complete with (foldable) tripod – and takes a picture.

The final product:

The final Science cover, and more pictures, after the jump.

Editor’s note: Readers were intrigued by the cover of this week’s issue of Science: a paper describing the 3-dimensional structure of the human genome. The lead authors on the paper are Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a Harvard Ph.D. student, and Nynke L. Van Berkum, a postdoc at UMass Med School. The team proposed several alternative images for the cover, including an elaborate DNA-origami objet d’art. Erez tells us the story behind the Science cover.

This is the first post in a two-part series. The conclusion to this story can be found here.

The Mission: Design cover art for our paper on genome folding in this week’s Science.

The Collaborators:

Genome Folder Erez Lieberman-Aiden (not shown), and Paper Folders Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine, Brian Chan, and Jason Ku (pictured above doing his best Munch impression).

The day:

2PM. Foldstorming. Everyone is happy, but no one has any idea what to do. I don’t even know enough relevant origami words to make sense on a consistent basis. Jason is amazing: he seems to be able to fold anything almost immediately using only a square sheet of paper. But Brian doesn’t think that the folds are ‘Origami’ enough. I’ve clearly stumbled on some kind of major rift in the philosophy of origami. Can the team hold together despite such vast creative differences?… The rest of our day, after the jump.

To answer the question of whether scientists like Green Porno, I performed this experiment for Science at the Toronto Film Festival. You can see video interviews with scientists and director Isabella Rossellini in my previous Green Porno post.

[Note: We're talking about the Green Porno short films on the Sundance Channel, not the environmentally friendly  sex toys.]

The results suggested that scientists do like Green Porno, a lot. But the sample size was small. We need more data. We need YOU.

Rossellini claims that Green Porno can help biological conservation by inspiring “a sense of wonder” for nature.  But do you think it can have a real impact?

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Please elaborate on your answer by leaving a comment below!

Here is the accompanying video and multimedia for my latest article in Science. Uploading soon: pictures of scientists dressed as reproductive organs of various species.

UPDATE 9/30/09: Now you can share your opinion about Green Porno! Take the poll here.

Part 1: What is Green Porno?

Part 2: Costumes and Credits

A full-length, HD version of the video is also available here.

Enjoyed the video? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below!