Ok. . . apparently a new neurological disorder has been linked to the inhalation of aerosolized pig brains. According to the Washington Post,
The 12 sufferers of the neurological illness — most are Hispanic immigrants — all work at or near the “head table” where the animals’ severed heads are processed.
One of the steps in that part of the operation involves removing the pigs’ brains with compressed air forced into the skull through the hole where the spinal cord enters. The brains are then packed and sent to markets in Korea and China as food.
My first thought on seeing the headline was “what kind of mad pigs do we have on our hands?” But this is not a porcine analog of BSE - it’s believed to be an autoimmune condition, induced by exposure to completely benign, healthy brains.
Investigators say there is no reason to suspect that either the brains or the pork cuts were contaminated. Their working hypothesis is that the harvesting technique — known as “blowing brains” on the floor — produces aerosols of brain matter. Once inhaled, the material prompts the immune system to produce antibodies that attack the pig brain compounds, but apparently also attack the body’s own nerve tissue because it is so similar.
If this theory is correct, the ailment — for the moment called “progressive inflammatory neuropathy” — resembles Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune condition that sometimes follows fairly benign infections, particularly those caused by an intestinal bacterium called Campylobacter. In the Minnesota cases, however, there appears to be no germ involved.
Now they’re looking for more cases in other slaughterhouses.
All of this begs the question of why anyone thought ”blowing brains” at the “head table” was a good industrial practice in the first place. And aren’t these workers given masks with sufficient filtration capacity to keep them from inhaling the dead pig? Good grief!
I may abstain from bacon for some time to come. . .
I’ve had the sniffles now for a few days, and as always, I feel self-conscious about where my germs are landing. This little tutorial combats wayward nasally-propelled microbes with the Sneeze-In-Your-Sleeve strategy. Very amusing - and it suggests another possible use for the tentacle arm.
And seriously - don’t sneeze on people. Or your hands. Euw.
(Thanks to my friend Jacob, intrepid microbiologist, for the heads-up on this one.)
Kathryn Spence’s owl sculptures work on several levels at once. This Great Horned Owl is a Lear of birds, ragged but regal. Like an impressionist painting, up close, he’s a bundle of discordant rags - old clothes, bits of recycled cloth - but back away and the illusion of life kicks in. The tilt of his head is pure predator.
The most delicious thing to me is that a recycled cloth owl is cuddly and cozy (mmmm, soft), but also a brutal representation of the biological food chain. His flesh is made of shredded Beanie Babies! Which means he’s just like a real owl - or any carnivore. We’re Nature’s recycling.
There is something primally captivating about the successful reproduction of life in art or technology. The Bowes Silver Swan is a wonderful example, dating back to the 18th century. To the accompaniment of a tinkling music box, the life-size swan moves its head, preens, and appears to catch a silver fish (which is really concealed in its throat) out of the glass “stream” it rests in.
This YouTube video captures the swan in surprisingly good resolution, but even better, it captures the genuine childlike enthusiasm of the rapt museum-goers watching the swan’s performance. Apparently we haven’t been totally jaded by CGI - not yet, at least!
John Bowes bought the Swan for 200 pounds in 1872; the Swan is first recorded in an account from 1773, and was made by, I kid you not, someone named John Joseph Merlin. Normally, the Swan performs once or twice daily at the Bowes Museum, but on Friday, Jan. 25, 2008 it will be taken off display for an expert analysis of its three clockwork mechanisms. It is expected to return to catching fish the following day.
Ironically, real swans eat insects, tadpoles, and vegetation, but not fish, so far as I know.
As I file away the debris of the last year, I realize that I never finished posting about my week in London this summer. It was exhausting, but by no means exhaustive. I feel foolish that I didn’t plan ahead! But I did hit the major highlights: on Sunday I saw the Chelsea Physic Garden with Neurophilosphy’s Moheb. On Tuesday I visited the shiny new Wellcome Collection, right around the corner from University College London. Thursday was Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum. On Friday I dropped by the Royal College of Surgeons, which houses both the Hunterian Museumand the Wellcome Museum of Anatomy and Pathology. (Wellcome’s name is all over the place, because it’s the UK’s largest independent charitable trust funding medical research. I can’t quite determine if they’re richer than HHMI. . . isn’t that the non-profit equivalent of “richer than Croesus”?) I’ve already posted about the Hunterian Museum & Wellcome Museum. Today I want to add some notes about a few other destinations.
Wellcome Collection
The Wellcome collection has thee exhibit galleries - a changing exhibition downstairs, and two upstairs galleries which feature artifacts from Wellcome’s personal collection and contemporary science-influenced art. The current exhibition is “Sleeping and Dreaming,” but during my visit it was “The Heart,” interleaving medical illustrations and models of great historical significance (art/texts by da Vinci, Harvey, and Galen; varnished wood anatomical tables; a wax model of a dissected, Venus-like torso; etc.) with popular portrayals of the heart as seat of love & soul. Here’s the exhibition summary:
The heart, widely understood as the place where life begins and ends, has always featured as a potent symbol in our religions, myths and rituals. Modern medical science has taught us that much of the power and influence traditionally attributed to the heart actually lies in the brain. Nevertheless we remain reluctant to let go of the notion - deeply rooted in everyday language and imagery - that the heart is the home of our emotions and of our true character.
This exhibition looked at the evolution of our understanding of what the heart is, what it does and what it means. Concentrating primarily on Western medicine and culture, it brought together objects and images from the histories of both science and art, as well as from everyday life.
It followed the development of our anatomical knowledge of the heart, but also considered its far-reaching cultural and symbolic significance. Why is it that the pump that circulates our blood is so intimately bound up with the way we discuss our emotional and moral lives, and so central to the question of the relationship between body and soul?
It’s an interesting question, and the answer is by no means obvious. Now that everyone knows the brain is where “love” resides, why do we still return to the heart as the symbol of deep emotion? The brain isn’t very romantic in appearance, but neither is the heart - it’s actually quite a gruesome and unattractive organ, wrapped in a nasty tough membranous sac and swaddled in fat (it’s really horrifying how much fat is packed around the hearts of even individuals of normal weight). The exhibit successfully explored that contradiction, without ever getting too esoteric. While you can no longer see it in person, and unfortunately photography was not allowed, you can view selected images on line here.
Other feature of the Wellcome collection included a selection of biomedicine-inspired art, including giant wax insect models (vectors that transmit malaria), glass models of viroids, and provocative pieces like John Isaacs’ “I can’t help the way I feel” (below). These were intermixed with the educational - a bound set of volumes representing the human genome, interactive computer games - and, in the next room over, the voyeuristically bizarre - chastity belts, vintage fetishes, and prosthetic limbs from Sir Henry Wellcome’s personal collection. Something for everyone!
Wax models of malaria vectors
Wellcome Collection
I can’t help the way I feel (2003)
John Isaacs “In this work lies an interest in a possibility of the emotional landscape of the body becoming manifest in its surface. Visually, the way in which the flesh grows, erupts, and engulfs the body can be seen as a metaphor of the way in which we become incapacitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and over which we have little control. The body also appears to be suffering from some kind of malignancy, as in cancer, but for me, the image of the figure, coupled with the title, leads one into an open contemplation of the plight of the individual.” - John Isaacs
HIV Virus Sculpture (2004)
Luke Jerram “This sculpture was created in response to the constant bombardment by coloured images we receive through the media. Many of these images are designed to communicate fear. The artificial coloring of images also affects what we think a virus looks like.” - Luke Jerram
Additional destinations
Unfortunately, squeezing even half of London’s museums into a week-long visit is impossible. And if you’re a devotee of biological specimens and medical history, the places you’d like to see are probably not in your guidebook, because most people think they’re “icky.” So here are a few insights I gained on my trip and would like to share.
First, be aware that many museums are closed Mondays. Most are open only between 10 and 5; you might want to eschew lunch to maximize your viewing time, or eat on the run. The Tube goes almost everywhere you’ll need, so buy an Oyster card; a week’s pass for zones 1-2, which can be coded onto your Oyster card, is probably a good idea as well. But the Tube is slow, especially on weekends, so plan ahead - you don’t want to waste an hour of that precious 10-5 window in transit from Holborn to Chelsea!
Natural History Museum, London
The British Museum: Mummies, Lindow Man. Be prepared: the Egyptian exhibits are noisy and busy, especially on the weekend. Lindow man, on the other hand, is totally neglected, probably because he looks like a dried up omelet. When you become homicidal towards tour groups, seek him out in the corner of room 50.
Lindow Man: not terribly photogenic, is he?
British Library “Treasures” (Ritblat Gallery) - Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, letter from Darwin to Wallace, various herbal and medical manuscripts. Alas, no photography allowed - but go to the website, they have some lovely images there.
University College London: Pure randomness, in that collegiate what-shall-we-stick-in-our-glass-cabinets? sense. But it’s right around the corner from the Wellcome Galleries, so why not pay your respects to the Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham (his skeleton, dressed in his clothes, with a wax head, sitting in what appears to be an antique telephone booth). So wierd.
The Chelsea Physic Garden: Second-oldest apothecaries’ garden in England (oldest is at Oxford). Snag a tour guide for the best experience, since the map and labels don’t do much good. Then seek out the small glass cases of medical oddities in the back of the gift shop. The garden is only open in the afternoon, on certain days, so you’ll have to plan around it, but it’s extraordinarily peaceful (especially after the British Museum). And the walk through Chelsea is lovely.
Vintage drug paraphernalia? Chelsea Physic Garden
The Wellcome Library (same location as the Wellcome collection, but slightly different hours): You need to come prepared, knowing what you want to view. Research in advance! I didn’t! Damn!
Untitled (zebras) 2006
charcoal on paper
Julie Comnick
Yesterday I dropped by Julie Comnick’s new show at the Flashpoint Gallery in DC (Jan 4 - Feb 9). I say “dropped by” because, despite her obvious technical skill, my attention was fully engaged for only about five minutes. It’s a solid show, but it didn’t provoke me to the kind of reconsideration & reflection I demand from art on a scientific theme.
Here’s the press release:
In According To Their Kind, Julie Comnick’s exhibition of large-scale charcoal drawings, the artist explores issues of selective breeding and the human impact on the course of evolution. The installation at the Gallery at Flashpoint is comprised of five distinct series of drawings: quotations from the story of Noah’s Ark, depictions of animals paired and bound for breeding, tethered boats (arks), excerpts from modern reproductive medicine and magnifications of in vitro fertilization procedures. The juxtaposition of these images asks the viewer to consider several unsettling trends in contemporary society. While animals are selectively bred in captivity to revitalize endangered populations, humans are able to pre-select the genetic makeup of their children.
Did you catch all that? This show was, despite the small exhibition space, really five shows in one. All of the pieces are “untitled,” and they were so disparate it was difficult for me to take in the entire show as curated.
The grouping that flows best is the series of thirteen small framed drawings depicting the stages of an embryo created by in vitro fertilization. The broad strokes of charcoal suited this series remarkably well. That really is how an embryo looks through a light microscope: black and white, smudgy and grainy, against a stark white field. The careless tumbling of the round embryo from corner to corner of the field throughout the series of drawings successfully conveyed both the unpredictable randomness of development - will this embryo implant, or fail? - and a sort of playful geometric abstraction. I think they’re lovely, and at only $250 apiece, quite the steal.
However, Comnick seems intent on pushing not just the aesthetics of the embryo, but the ethics of it. And here’s where things get messier. The embryo drawings alternate with oversized reproductions of passages from various fertility manuals (example: “Third Party Reproduction: A Guide for Patients“) or the Bible, and with still larger renderings of zoo animals being bred in captivity. The effect of these juxtapositions, to me, was confusing. What, aside from human agency, is the common thread here?
Juxtaposing the passages about Noah’s ark with the portraits of endangered animals makes sense, perhaps, since the population of endangered animals in captivity comprises a sort of genetic ark; but these animals were being bred in the traditional way, not through IVF or biotechnology. I’m hardly an expert, but the restraints and tethers appeared similar to those used to breed common domesticated animals, such as horses; there was nothing exotic going on - except that once you mix restraints, including blindfolds, with apparently unwilling participants - and in the drawing of the lions, a snapping whip - you enter rather fraught territory. The animals were by no means anthropomorphized, but the context forced certain comparisons between human and animal reproduction that I’m not sure were intended!
Looking at these images, are we supposed to be disturbed by the violence of the breeding methods? Are we supposed to make the obvious connection to human reproduction? It seemed so to me. What relevance might such a visceral response have to evaluating our stance on biotechnologies like IVF? Would a response informed by these emotions be a valid entry to reconsidering a controversial subject, or a mere gut reaction? I think it’s relatively simple to create art depicting unfamiliar and disturbing aspects of biology - the science which is, after all, most intimate with sex and death. It’s harder to turn the unfamiliar and disturbing into something new, something that implies an unexpected conclusion, or asks a pointed question. Time and again I see art related to biotechnology which doesn’t ask intelligent, well-formulated questions. Perhaps it’s because I’m a biologist, but I don’t think a tossed salad of controversial ideas - IVF, evolution, extinction, selection, sex, religion - creates an effective debate in the mind of the viewer.
The gallery press release suggests that the pieces are united by the impact of human agency on evolution. But is that accurate? Given the rarity of IVF, it seems unlikely to alter human evolution. One of the reproduced passages describes selecting sperm in order to predispose the gender of the embryo one way or the other, and it’s true that egg donors are often chosen for superficial characteristics (we’ve all seen the ads in campus newspapers offering thousands of dollars for the ova of tall, blond, athletic overachievers). But IVF as currently practiced is by no means going to shift the human phenotypic norm towards blond overachievers. Even if you fear human reproduction might eventually reach a Gattaca-like state of draconian genetic selection, that’s a different scenario than last-ditch efforts to sustain endangered species. We’re not endangered; that’s not why we do IVF. And revitalized populations of zebras and lions would, ideally, show a minimal phenotypic stamp of our interference; that’s the point. We’re trying to counter genetic bottlenecks caused by our species - not caused by natural selection. Breeding dogs or horses to phenotypic extremes seems a more apt analogy for the Gattaca scenario. I could go on, but my point is that these are such complex and disparate issues, interleaving them seems artificially simplistic, and maybe a bit inflammatory.
I suppose one could argue that many gallery-goers never think about IVF or evolution or the ethics of selective breeding, so a show like this at least jars them into considering science in a new context. But is that good? Isn’t the linkage of IVF with a struggling pair of breeding zebras a strange linkage to plant? I certainly don’t expect art to be educational, easy, or explicit. . . so perhaps my expectations of this show are unfair. Comnick has the right to create whatever associations she wishes, and she owes no explanation to me. Yet as a scientist, I prefer shows that provoke the public to ask coherent questions - not leap to associations that may or may not be representative of the real science. And somehow I can’t go into a gallery and pretend I’m not a scientist. That may well be my failing, not Comnick’s.
Ah well. Funnily enough, the most disconcerting aspect of the entire show for me was the inclusion, among all the biological, sexual imagery, of boats. Sailing boats. Yes, I suppose they’re arks, and they’re tethered, and they’re paired - but come on! Although I have the utmost respect for the technical skills of the artist (how does one execute a drawing 100 inches tall without wrinkling the paper or smudging the charcoal?) I’d like a little less of it next time, please.
I used to have a pet hooded rat, which is why I think the giant rat recently discovered in Indonesia is actually kinda cute. Plus, it’s almost as large as my cat! It would be hilarious to get them together.
You know, I hope the rat is sedated in this photo, and not dead. Hmm.
Reader/medical student Niall Hamilton, photographer of microorganisms, sent me this oh-so-seasonal Christmas petri dish:
Niall says, “the black is a yeast species often found around bathroom sinks, and the snow is another yeast species (a pretty unremarkable environmental one).”
Looking at this, I can almost smell the LB. Nothing like a festive Christmas in the warm room!
This reminds me of the time I gave petri plates to my beginning biology students, with instructions to expose the plates to their fingers, doorknobs, pens, etc, then put them in the classroom incubator. Usually this assignment yields nasty yellow and white microorganisms, some hairy fungus, and a satisfying “euw, gross.” But the next morning, I was horrified to find neon-colored slime on many of the plates - bright red, hot pink, even orange! I was envisioning MRSA and looking around for antibacterial hand soap, when I found a plate with iridescent glittery colonies. Ack! It turned out that my female students had decided to test their lip glosses.
I’m not the only one who liked Nicole Natri’s latest work. Check out the gallery poster for her solo show at Jr. Konsthallen, in Sweden, starting today. Congratulations, Nicole!
The Nov/Dec issue of Seed features an interesting article by Jonah Lehrer on science and art. It’s a short read, but it touches on most of the big issues at that intersection, primarily through the lens of neurobiology.
I haven’t read Jonah’s new book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and I’m probably not going to get around to it for a while, if the half-dozen half-read books around my apartment are any indication (News flash: Machiavelli and Stephen Pinker are vying with John McPhee for the top of the heap)! I’m going to assume that the scanty arguments in the article are fleshed out further in the book, which is getting good reviews. But I have some quibbles.
The point of the article is solid: art can, and should, inform science, and both are necessary to answer “the deepest questions” of human experience. My first response was, well, duh. But I understand that to a lot of people, this isn’t necessarily intuitive. Science is so well-defined, and art is so, you know, fuzzy!
Jonah plays into that cliche:
. . . this rigorous science had no need for Jamesian vagueness. It wanted to purge itself of anything that couldn’t be measured. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.
But artists continued creating their complex simulations of consciousness. They never gave up on the ineffable, or detoured around experience because it was too difficult. They plunged straight into the pandemonium.
I like “plunged straight into the pandemonium”: what a great description of the human mind in all its messy, noisy glory (that goes equally for an EEG, a whole-genome association study, or a Pollock). But what’s up with this anthropomorphizing of “science”? And later in the article: “Neuroscience, of course, believes it has no inherent limitations.” I don’t know; I haven’t spoken with Neuroscience lately - but I bet Jonah hasn’t either.
Neither science nor its moody teenage spawn neuroscience can want or believe anything - that’s just fuzzy language. It wouldn’t be a big deal, except that it’s also one way in which creationists and others denigrate science: by insinuating that science is an entity with an implicit, inextricable agenda to devalue the entire non-scientific realm (including both art and faith). Just as we have a responsibility to use the word “theory” carefully, because we know its weight, we must consistently distinguish the process of science from the agendas and prejudices of the flawed human beings who practice it.
I know no neuroscientists (say that three times fast) who claim neuroscience is without limitations. Personally, I believe human understanding in its entirety has fundamental, biological constraints - and at least for the foreseeable future, the practical power of neuroscience is thus constrained as well. Jonah asserts that art can extend our understanding past those constraints, through metaphor and analogy - a point I made myself in a short essay last spring, and one I fully agree with. Einstein’s thought experiments were brilliant launching points for his science. But to me, art isn’t part of science. Art may help us decide where to point our scientific searchlight, but it’s just a first step - the intuition that sets the detective on the right path, not the evidence, and definitely not the crime lab.
That’s where I begin to disagree with the message of this article - I don’t think that art is necessary for the practice of good science. I think art complements science in the human experience, and inspires humans who do science. According to the article, “We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process. . . it’s time for the dialogue between our two cultures to become a standard part of the scientific method.” I think that’s a huge overstatement. I used to teach the scientific method, and I’m not sure where I’d put “art” in the flowchart. At the beginning, I suppose, as an inspiration for hypothesis formation - alongside other inspirations like nature, dreams, falling apples, or finding only one sock in the dryer. When it comes to informing science, is art really privileged over other aspects of the complex human experience?
When Jonah says, “the arts are an incredibly rich data set,” he’s absolutely right. And he’s right that artists discovered and exploited many of the basic principles of our visual systems:
As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki notes, “Artists [painters] are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them.” Monet’s haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock resonate precisely because they excite some peculiar circuit of cells in the visual cortex. These painters reverse-engineered the brain, discovering the laws of seeing in order to captivate the eye.
But if you “reverse-engineer” something, doesn’t that imply you understand its mechanism? To claim artists understand the visual system because they can harness its rules to good effect. . . that’s a big leap. Good cooks aren’t often able to explain chemistry, and athletes don’t necessarily understand either physics or physiology.
Even if art can be defined as a process of investigation, for the creator and the viewer, the discoveries it yields are inarticulate, unquantifiable, irreducible - that’s why we have art in the first place. Just try to get all the people in a gallery to agree on what they see in an abstract painting, much less why they feel about it as they do. Scientists like Zeki and Ramachandran study the effects artistic elements have on the brain, but they don’t embed their results in yet another piece of art.
In this essay, Jonah seems to argue that because art is irreducibly contradictory, like the human mind, art is therefore necessary to help science unpack the mind. I guess it’s the principle that “like dissolves like”? I’m not sure that’s what he really means to say; I think he was hobbled by the brevity of the assignment. But it was a nice read, and it did have a highly entertaining moment:
Every theoretical physics department should support an artist-in-residence. Too often, modern physics seems remote and irrelevant, its suppositions so strange they’re meaningless. The arts can help us reattach physics to the world we experience.
Plug “modern art” in for “modern physics”. The sentence works even better now! Ha. Expecting modern art, which most people don’t get in the first place, to make science more comprehensible is like . . . expecting a child’s balloon to steer a dirigible! (OK, I have no idea what that sentence means. I was trying to expand my limited understanding of reality through metaphor, and went fatally awry.)
So what place does art have in science? It enhances creativity. It helps us see things with new eyes - prompting us to ask new questions or resolve intractable problems. In the quantitatively inclined, it maintains a healthy left-brain/right-brain balance: most scientists I know are either artists or musicians (I may have a biased data set). And because art vaults right over jargon and equations, it’s the best tool we have for sharing complex scientific concepts with nonspecialists, or for “re-phrasing” what we know, so we can consider it from a new angle.
Consider this recent Nature Chemical Biology article by David Goodsell (Nov 2007), from which the lovely image at the top of the post is taken. Goodsell emphasizes the power of art as a scientific tool:
Pictures are powerful: they radically shape how we think about the subjects that we study. Think of Jane Richardson’s ribbon diagrams, and the way they have shaped our thinking about proteins. The clear and compelling nature of these ribbon diagrams spawned an entire discipline of folding classification and taxonomy. . .
The picture at the top of this post, with the orange spheres, depicts a current model of phagocytosis. It’s a sort of pictorial hypothesis that is incredibly helpful to focus thinking, but - obviously - it’s not true until the structures shown are verified. But is that so obvious? Goodsell’s article also makes the point that
Pictures can be dangerous as well. A clever artist can make even the most preposterous hypothesis seem familiar and plausible. This is doubly difficult with molecular imagery, given that so much of it is computer generated, based more or less on underlying experimental data. Completely believable images can be created for real molecular structures, as well as purely fictional constructs, and unless the sources are reported in the caption, it may be difficult to separate the real ones from the fakes.
Goodsell offers the following quiz: one of these three molecules is completely imaginary -a fictitious structure for a fictitious molecule. One is based on real structural data, for a real molecule. And one is a fictitious structure for a real molecule. Can you tell the difference?
Obvious? maybe not (I found this article via Biocurious, where the answer, and many guesses, are posted). #3, the DNA cube, is a fictitious structure - but a real (though synthetic) molecule; #1, a nanotube synthase, is the one that’s entirely made up. #2, the rotary motor, is the real structure.
Fiction is a perfectly valid component of art. But fiction in science - once it is known to be fiction - is abhorrent. Scientific/medical art is fascinating precisely because there is powerful tension between the scientific, didactic role of a specimen, supposed to be a purely accurate and objective representation of Nature, and the imaginative realm in which the artist casts it.
Just look at my last post on Delvaux, or indeed, most of the art I’ve discussed on this blog. Even in the simplest botanical print, or inventory of a wonder cabinet, the artist always “frames” the science - it can’t be helped! Choice of medium, choice of angle, choice of context - all of these are choices. The line between representation and story-telling is very fuzzy indeed, and the distinction is hardly science. But then, one shouldn’t expect it to be.
FYI: I couldn’t find the Seed article quoted here online. If you’re interested, it might be worth finding a copy of Seed in your local bookstore - that is, if you’re in a city. You know if YOUR bookstore carries this sort of thing. I couldn’t even find a copy of the New Yorker where I used to live, much less Seed: Science is Culture! If you can’t find a copy, consider subscribing: it’s worth it just for the design.
Livet et al. 2007. Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system. Nature.
No, that’s not a winter scarf knitted from rainbow yarn. It’s a glowing mouse brain - the Brainbow paper is finally out! I was going to write this up, but the heck with it - just go read what Shelly wrote at Retrospectacle. She’s succinctly covered all the important points, with a nice science/art tie-in to boot.
