Tag Archives: video

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Productive Nanosystems – The Movie

Most of us are aware that DNA and RNA are the molecular machinery that synthesise proteins and allow the complex reactions of life to take place, but actually visualising the processes is a considerable mental leap.

Most such visualisations rely on visual simplifications that actually present a false impression of the processes involved, but via Eric Drexler we discover the following examples by Drew Berry, which are apparently much truer to the actual processes that occur. Take the seven or so minutes needed to watch this, and you’ll be set up for your daily dose of scientific sensawunda for the rest of the week – biochemistry is incredibly awesome:

Aside from the sheer wow-factor of seeing molecules acting like high-precision machines deep at the cores of our cells, it’s worth bearing in mind that there’s no magic involved, and that we’re constantly getting better at understanding how these processes work.

Which, I expect, is why Drexler is so fascinated by them: once we know how the body’s nanomachines work, we’ll be properly equipped to start building new ones.

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…or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?

Researchers have discovered that the colour red enhances men’s attraction towards women:

the women shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than the exact same women shown with other colors. When wearing red, the woman was also more likely to score an invitation to the prom and to be treated to a more expensive outing.

Apparently this will have implications for dating and product design, but I think that they’ve already been taken on board in these contexts.

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Visible Magnetic Fields

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Magnetic fields are weird, something that’s invisible in and of itself, but nevertheless acts on the other objects. By way of visualising magnetic fields, some boffins from Semiconductor working at NASA Space Laboratory as “artists in residence” – Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt – have created this incredible movie depicting magnetic fields:

There isn’t much explanation as to what this is – how abstract is the representation? From Semiconductor Films:

In Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have taken the magnificent scientific visualisations of the sun and solar winds conducted at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Semiconducted them. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor were artists-in-residence at SSL. Combining their in-house lab culture experience with formidable artistic instincts in sound, animation and programming, they have created a magnetic magnum opus in nuce, a tour de force of a massive invisible force brought down to human scale, and a “very most beautiful thing.”

Well it sure is pretty, but it would be nice if there were some details as to how the effect was created. It reminds me of the “fields” of the drones from Iain M Bank’s billiant Culture series, which use coloured “fields” to convey emotion and also as manipulators.

[story via technovelgy]