Insects represent over 2/3 of all known organisms and play a vital role in our ecosystem – they pollinate flowers, reintroduce nutrients into the soil, make honey, beeswax, silk, and other useful products. Needless to say, our Earth would be a far more inhospitable place without them.
Aakash Nihalani is the Brooklyn-based street artist who created these imaginative geometric installations using only tape and cardboard. If you’ve ever thought you needed a lot of money or studio space to create art, use Aakash’s work as a shining example of the creative possibilities that are all around you.
Asked whether he gets bothered by authorities, Nihalani said, “I’ve asked cops and maintenance staff to wait for me to take a quick photo before they start taking it down, and most have let me.”
UPDATE 3/19/2014: The video appears to be back up!
UPDATE 1/27/2014: SORRY, this video appears to have been deleted by the owners…
Check out this visually stunning short which portrays the “process” of ideation and creation. If you’ve ever struggled to find the perfect solution to your creative projects, you might relate to the barrage of incoherent ideas that rise to the surface of your brain.
Watching this felt very familiar, but admittedly, I only feel this way when I am forced to create. A lot of my inspiration comes naturally in the shower or late at night when I’m trying to sleep. However, any sort of deadline will send me into the frantic mental state characterized here.
The video was made by the design team, Pluto, using a combination of RED footage, computer generated images, Mograph, and sound design.
“As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.” – Santiago Ramón y Cajal
I have always found inspiration at the intersection of art and science — believing that each field can be strengthened by the other. Art can grow from science, and science can grow from art. Perhaps no other person in history characterizes this concept stronger than Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Born to an anatomy teacher in 1852 in a small city in northern Spain, Ramón y Cajal went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology & Medicine in 1906 together with the Italian, Camillo Golgi, “in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system.”
left: Cajal Legacy Instituto Cajal (CSIC), Madrid | right: Courtesy Thomas Deerink and Mark Ellisman (NCMIR, UCSD)
Ramón y Cajal became famous for his finely detailed drawings of neuroanatomy that changed our understanding of how the nervous system is connected. In his time, neuroscientists believed that the entire nervous system formed a giant “reticulum,” or web of fibers that linked together in one big structure. Cajal, however, determined that nerve cells were not continuous, but separated, providing definitive evidence for what would later be known as the “neuron doctrine.”
Cajal always had a predilection for art. He was an avid painter, artist, and gymnast, yet all of these activities were actively discouraged by his father. Nonetheless, Cajal developed his artistic skills and applied his talents to drawing the architecture of the nervous system. “Realizing that I had discovered a rich field, I proceeded to take advantage of it, dedicating myself to work, no longer merely with earnestness but with fury,” he wrote inRecollections of My Life. “In proportion as new facts appeared in my preparations, ideas boiled up and jostled each other in my mind.”
Cajal published more than 100 articles in French and Spanish scientific periodicals during his career, focusing on the fine structure of the nervous system and especially of the brain and spinal cord, but he also studied muscles and other tissues in the field of general pathology. As you may notice in the images here, Cajal had a tremendous eye for detail.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s research led to our understanding that nerve impulses, or action potentials, jump from cell to cell in the brain. These impulses are what make up all of our thoughts, experiences, memories, and emotions, the fundamental concepts which make us human, and is the reason he is so revered in the field of neuroscience.
Cajal is an inspiring figure and a perfect example of a scientist who flourished through artistic expression. If you want further reading about Santiago Ramón y Cajal, I suggest this quick read, which includes a lot of sage advice for anyone interested in science:
This incredible pristine brain specimen is fresh out of Anatomy class at the University of Utah. You can even hear the bone saws humming along in the background! The brain has just been removed from an autopsy of a cancer patient who donated his/her body to science.
As Dr. Suzanne Stensaas points out in the video, the take home message is that human brain is extremely soft and squishy. So wear your helmet!
Entomology is the scientific study of insects. With over 1.3 million described species, the field is overwhelmingly complex.
