Gonzolabs

Gave a talk with dance at TEDxBrussels last night. I’m still feeling high from the standing ovation:

The winners have been announced!

It’s on! Enter the contest HERE.

Sorting out the legal paperwork to get our new sponsor, TEDxBrussels, delayed the 2011 launch, but it was worth it. The winner gets a free trip to Belgium in November!

The deadline is 10 October 2011… So get dancing!

Check out the Science Hall of Fame!

…Chemistry!

You can read all about the results of the 2010 Dance Your Ph.D. contest here in Science.

With just 6 days to go until the deadline, now the Ph.D. dances are coming in. The latest is a geophysics dance by Dan King about magma. For music, he used seismic data transformed to be audible to the human ear. Awesome.

It helps to read his explanation of the dance.

Now I know how an NSF administrator feels. With just one week to go before the 1-September deadline for the “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest, most of the scientists who are working on their dances still haven’t submitted. But that’s just how science gets done: Always last-minute. It seems to be in our DNA.

Two more dances just came in. An economic modeling of the phosphorous cycle under different agricultural regimes, and a study of transcranial magnetic stimulation as a treatment for spinal chord injury.

At last, the biologists have stepped up. Geomicrobiologist Betsy Swanner dances her Ph.D. about iron-metabolizing bacteria deep inside rocks.

You have to follow those dancers pretty carefully to make sense of the biochemistry.

Does anyone procrastinate more than scientists? They even procrastinate on their procrastinations! There’s still a month before the deadline on this contest, and like any grant or article deadline, everyone is waiting for the 11th hour to submit.

Thank goodness for physicists. They’re proactive about fun. Here’s another physics Ph.D. dance, this one by Wendy Crone.

Breaking up is indeed hard to do… and explain.

We’ve got another Ph.D. dance in the running: The Isotope Square Dance, by geologist Anna Henderson.

That is definitely the most convincing dead plant I’ve seen in a long time…