Those nice people at Seed Magazine dropped me a line at the weekend to let me know about a slideshow they have just published featuring seven of the spectacular images from Bernhard Edmaier’s new book Earth on Fire, published by Phaidon. On this evidence the combination of beautiful pictures and serious geology in Earth on Fire is irresistible. So, if you have been racking your brains to think of a suitable Christmas present for, say, a favourite volcano blogger…

Click here for the Earth on Fire slideshow – and there’s a great collection of other slideshows at Seed Magazine, by the way, along with much else.

Origami pattern by Thoki Yenn.

Oldie but goodie from SEED Magazine:

With a few strands of nucleic acids and some ingenious programming, DNA origami is remaking nanotechnology, from drug delivery to chip design.

A smiley face glowed on the March 16, 2006, cover of Nature. “DNA Origami,” read the headline. “Nanoscale Shapes the Easy Way.” Inside, a relatively brief, single-author paper outlined a method for designing shapes made from DNA that would fold up on their own. The smiling prototype and the playful cover line may have been cute. But the changes the paper brought to a number of far-flung fields were nothing short of profound: Tiny, self-assembling structures, with applications in everything from biology to chip design, were now within our grasp.

Three years later, the research sparked by this breakthrough has just begun to bear fruit, as evidenced by a flurry of papers this summer. Caltech’s Paul Rothemund, the author of the Nature paper, and his collaborators at IBM published a way to fasten DNA origami to microchip materials. William Shih at Harvard led a team that developed three-dimensional shapes and curving structures, among many refinements to the technique. And Jørgen Kjems of Denmark’s Aarhus University published a method to build miniature boxes, equipped with multiple locks and molecules that glow red and green. As it turned out, everyone from cell biologists to drug delivery experts to materials scientists had been looking for just such a way to build.

Read full article

Sooner more than later, we’ll all be authors according to this excellent article by SEED magazine.  The idea of universal authorship is becoming very real, very soon because as opposed to the 1400’s when a scribe took a year to produce a bible by hand, we can publish our latest thoughts to Twitter in under a minute.  If the criteria for being published is 100 or more readers, than it is predicted that all of us will be published authors by 2013 through some outlet of new media. Sheesh, everyone’s a critic…

SEED MAGAZINE: “The Gay Animal Kingdom”

“Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection—she’s no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can’t explain the homosexuality that’s been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.”

After taking my midterm this morning in Magazine Editing, I was online and found this at Seed Magazine:

A Writing Revolution

Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow’s.

I emailed it to myself and just got done reading it. I was a little disappointed in the piece. With such a proclamation, I thought the entire article could have been the lead. Definitely made me want more. More information, more analysis. I was ready to discount the entire thing because I didn’t see any source list at the end, but as I read it, I found it under the graphic. In case you missed it, it is here.

As usual, the behind the scenes, methodology and sources in this case, were more interesting than the piece.

One of the questions I asked myself is whether or not someone who uses Twitter one time is a publisher. This got me thinking about libel, and something is considered published if it is read by any third party. By one person besides who is doing the writing and who the writing is about. I also question whether we are really 4 years away from 100% of the world being “published.”  I didn’t find anything about an allowed margin of error.

Seed Magazine is a cool little magazine that is filled with articles spanning from science to the arts. It is mainly science and world news based though, and isn’t honestly a magazine. It’s just a nice site that is trying to gain enough support to be able to release their articles in a magazine. Here is the link.

From the article ‘2009 Will Be a Year of Panic‘ in SEED magazine.

But a delusion that lasts for decades is not a delusion. It’s an institution. And these, our institutions, are what now fail us. People no longer know what they value. They don’t know what to believe. And unfortunately, it’s part of the human condition to believe and invest in things that are demonstrably not true.

“Approximation of the Mind”, by THEVERYMANY (Marc Fornes + Skylar Tibbits) was commissioned by Seed Media Group and The Council on Competitiveness as a gift to Sheryl Handler, CEO of Ab Initio, at The State of Innovation Summit in Washington D.C..

Rapid Prototyping from Harbec Plastics

I already knew that Darwin was greatly inspired by his wife’s ability to play the piano, so this is very interesting to me. Featured in both SEED Magazine and the BBC:

As part of celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, Connecticut’s Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and the UK’s Fitzwilliam Museum—the art museum to which Darwin would escape from college classes at Cambridge, have launched Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts [Get info], a traveling exhibit that properly takes stock of the impact Darwin’s evolutionary theories had on the visual arts. The exhibit moves from Yale to Cambridge on June 16.

Surrealist artists claimed Freud, the cubists looked to Einstein, but Charles Darwin’s influence on his 19th century artistic contemporaries has rarely been fully appreciated. Artists of all shades reacted to his revolutionary theories, and this exhibit attempts to capture their range of responses in all sorts of mediums, including paintings, photographs, sketches, and sculptures. Sprinkled amidst 200 works of art are historical collections of natural wonders like beetles, fossils, gems, stuffed birds, and plated flowers. These items give visitors a distinctly visual sense of what artists—and Darwin himself—grappled with during the Victorian era, as academic science began to challenge the subjective nature of romantic art.

Check out the BBC’s audio slideshow featuring some of the pieces of art on display at the exhibit.

SEED Magazine is consistently a great source for ToK fodder and the most recent issue is no exception.  In particular, David Zax writes in The Last Experiment regarding the need to overlap the natural sciences with the human sciences in order to get anything done about climate change.

For all the public’s shortcuts and biases, for all its psychological barriers to action, and for all its points of confusion, one fact remains: Most Americans are, in fact, worried about climate change. “A very large majority of the American public thinks global warming is happening, that it’s a serious problem, and they want somebody to do something about it,” says Leiserowitz. “They just don’t know what that something is.” If natural scientists know what we should be doing, only social scientists can determine how we’ll get it done.

A good ToK student doing a close reading of the article will find connections to relative vs. absolute knowledge, language and emotion.

Isabella Kirkland paints life-size renditions of newly discovered, rare, and possibly not long for this earth species.

From Seed Magazine (and Bioephemera blogger Jessica Palmer):

Throughout my career in biology, I’ve often cited the Australian gastric brooding frog as a marvel of evolutionary adaptation: The mother frog swallows her eggs, develops her tadpoles in her stomach, and regurgitates them at maturity. Discovered in the 1970s, this bizarre frog was unable to adapt to changes in its environment and was known to science for barely a decade before becoming extinct.

Artist Isabella Kirkland’s meticulous oil paintings revisit this bittersweet tension between discovery and loss. Each life-size panel in her ongoing NOVA series includes dozens of species, from mammals and birds to insects and plants, all of which have been discovered by science in the past 20 years. NOVA: Understory (2007) depicts a sunlit paradise filled with 58 of these exotic new species, from the Panay cloudrunner to the sharp-snouted bush frog of Borneo, all reflected in a detailed taxonomic key. Understory is a celebration of biodiversity and a tribute to the enlightening power of science, but there’s a snake in the garden. Several continents’ worth of species appear crammed together, predators beside prey, ominously evoking the untenable concentration of species into dwindling islands of habitat. Kirkland’s previous series, TAXA, memorialized species endangered or driven to extinction by human activities. Understory prompts us to ask, will these species be next?

In many regards, the message of Understory is reminiscent of 17th- and 18th-century cabinets of curiosities, rooms in which European collectors gathered rare and newly discovered specimens, arranging them in beautiful tableaux. Cabinets of curiosities demonstrated the wealth and power of their noble patrons and the successful imposition of taxonomic order on nature, and they served as tools for teaching and study. Just as curiosity cabinets were organized in idiosyncratic but logical ways that reflected the worldviews of their creators, Kirkland’s NOVA series groups together species from diverse geographic regions by habitat in order to emphasize their shared ecological plight. The branching tree at the heart of Understory, which resembles a phylogenetic tree or cladogram, reiterates the themes of order and commonality. And like the naturalists and collectors who filled the original curiosity cabinets hundreds of years ago, Kirkland, a former taxidermist, also traveled the world to study and sketch her subjects.

Read full article at Seed Magazine

Sequences of human DNA aligned with about a dozen other mammals, created as an illustration for Seed Magazine. The data is from the Mammalian Genome Project at the Broad Institute. This is real alignment data, based on a more “functional” tool that browses this data.

Credit: Cauê Rangle

SEED Magazine has a great article regarding creativity—it’s an investigation into the way artists are able to utilize their creative talents on command. They probe this mystery through the use of an fMRI machine to identify which parts of the brain are utilized, and when, during an improvised jazz solo. The goal was to untangle the disparate elements of inspiration:

William James described the creative process as a “seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity.”

The findings are interesting: before the solo even begins, a pianist was found to have “deactivated” their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is the portion of the brain associated with planning and self-control: “In other words, they were inhibiting their inhibitions, which allowed the musicians to create without worrying about what they were creating.”

The article drives on from there, delving into other aspects of the improvisatory experience. Spikes in medial prefrontal cortex activity, for example, which is an area associated with self-expression (“it lights up, for instance, whenever people tell a story in which they’re the main character”), and premotor cortex activity which is linked to the physical execution of notes. But it’s the first point I find the most interesting: It is a musician’s lack of activity in a particular area—conscious thought—that drives a successful solo before a single note is played.

Creativity, then, may not be a result of the presence of talent, but rather the lack of inhibition. One’s supreme willingness to simply try may be the best kept secret to artistic success.

Along the lines of MSN’s “Spectra” and Andy Biggs “Voyage” this site is also using a color spectrum and fun way of displaying data visually.

http://www.seedmagazine.com/ui09/

In his speech to the NAS, Obama also announced his new President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Obama’s PCAST will be – or at least will start out – significantly smaller than Bush’s, decreasing from 35 members to 20, and will focus on energy and the environment, whereas Bush’s PCAST focused primarily on technology and the economy. So what got cut? Primarily the representatives from industry (Microsoft and Google are still represented). This could be because of the switch in focus (technology to energy and environment), but it seems that it could also signal that Obama *may* be a President more receptive to science than to corporate pressures.

Here’s a great article from SEED Magazine, breaking down Obama’s PCAST in terms of which disciplines its members come from: climate science, energy, basic research, finance, networks and security, and health and medicine.

From Obama’s speech:

“This council represents leaders from many scientific disciplines who will bring a diversity of experience and views…I will charge PCAST with advising me about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation.”

The new cast of PCAST:

Rosina Bierbaum, a widely-recognized expert in climate-change science and ecology, is Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Her PhD is in evolutionary biology and ecology. She served as Associate Director for Environment in OSTP in the Clinton Administration, as well as Acting Director of OSTP in 2000-2001. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Christine Cassel is President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and previously served as Dean of the School of Medicine and Vice President for Medical Affairs at Oregon Health & Science University. A member of the US Institute of Medicine, she is a leading expert in geriatric medicine and quality of care.

Christopher Chyba is Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and International Affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. His scientific work focuses on solar system exploration and his security-related research emphasizes nuclear and biological weapons policy, proliferation, and terrorism. He served on the White House staff from 1993 to 1995 at the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy and was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship (2001) for his work in both planetary science and international security.

S. James Gates Jr. is the John S. Toll Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the first African American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major research university. He has served as a consultant to the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense, and the Educational Testing Service and held appointments at MIT, Harvard, California Institute of Technology and Howard University.

John Holdren is serving as co-chair of PCAST in addition to his duties as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President and Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Prior to this appointment Dr. Holdren was a Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He also served concurrently as Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and as Director of the independent, nonprofit Woods Hole Research Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship.

Shirley Ann Jackson is the President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and former Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1995-1999). She is the University Vice Chairman of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Jackson was the first African American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT and chairs the New York Stock Exchange Regulation Board.

Eric Lander is serving as a co-chair of PCAST. He is the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Professor of Biology at MIT, Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and former member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He was one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project, recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship and is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine.

Richard Levin has served as President of Yale University since 1993 and is a distinguished economist with interests in industrial organization, the patent system, and the competitiveness of American manufacturing industries, including industrial research and development, intellectual property, and productivity. He is a leader in US-China cooperation, in research and education, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Chad Mirkin is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, and Medicine at Northwestern University, as well as Director of Northwestern’s International Institute of Nanotechnology. He is a leading expert on nanotechnology, including nano-scale manufacturing and applications to medicine. Awarded the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology in 2002, he is one of the top-cited researchers in nano-medicine, as well as one of the most widely cited chemists.

Mario Molina is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as Director of the Mario Molina Center for Energy and Environment in Mexico City. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his role in elucidating the threat to the Earth’s ozone layer of chlorofluorocarbon gases. The only Mexican-born Nobel laureate in science, he served on PCAST for both Clinton terms. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.

Ernest J. Moniz is a Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, Director of the Energy Initiative, and Director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at MIT. His research centers on energy technology and policy, including the future of nuclear power, coal, natural gas, and solar energy in a low-carbon world. He served as Under Secretary of the Department of Energy (1997-2001) and Associate Director for Science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1995-1997).

Craig Mundie is Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft Corporation. He has 39 years of experience in the computer industry, beginning as a developer of operating systems. Dr. Mundie co-founded and served as CEO of Alliant Computer Systems.

William Press is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, has wide-ranging expertise in computer science, astrophysics, and international security. A member of the US National Academy of Sciences, he previously served as Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1998 to 2004. He is a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Harvard University and a former member of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1982-1998).

Maxine Savitz is retired general manager of Technology Partnerships at Honeywell, Inc and has more than 30 years of experience managing research, development and implementation programs for the public and private sectors, including in the aerospace, transportation, and industrial sectors. From 1979 to 1983 she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Conservation in the US Department of Energy. She currently serves as vice-president of the National Academy of Engineering.

Barbara Schaal is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St Louis. She is a renowned plant geneticist who has used molecular genetics to understand the evolution and ecology of plants, ranging from the US Midwest to the tropics. Dr Schaal serves as Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences, the first woman ever elected to that role.

Eric Schmidt is Chairman and CEO of Google Inc. and a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. Before joining Google, Dr. Schmidt served as Chief Technology Officer for Sun Microsystems and later as CEO of Novell Inc.

Daniel Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also Director of the Harvard University-wide Center for Environment. He was trained as a marine geochemist and has employed a variety of methods to study the carbon cycle and climate over a wide range of Earth’s history. Awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 2000, he has recently been working on technological approaches to mitigating future climate change.

David E. Shaw is the chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, where he leads an interdisciplinary research group in the field of computational biochemistry. He is the founder of D. E. Shaw & Co., an investment and technology development firm. Dr. Shaw is a former member of PCAST under President Clinton and a member of the executive committee of the Council on Competitiveness, where he co-chairs the steering committee for the Council’s federally funded High-Performance Computing Initiative. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies.

Harold Varmus is the President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and co-chair of PCAST. Dr. Varmus served as the Director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999 and in 1989 was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering studies of the genetic basis of cancer. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine and recipient of the National Medal of Science.

Ahmed Zewail is Professor of Chemistry and Physics at Caltech and Director of the Physical Biology Center. Dr. Zewail was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 for his pioneering work that allowed observation of exceedingly rapid molecular transformations. He is an Egyptian-American, widely respected not only for his science but also for his efforts in the Middle East as a voice of reason. Dr. Zewail is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and postage stamps have been issued to honor his contributions to science and humanity.

By Andrea F. Pagliai

According to his job description, Greg Boustead is in charge of the online stuff. However—that is a lot to be said. As the Digital Senior Editor for Seed Magazine, Boustead, in addition to writing his own pieces, oversees the writers who create the content that will appear online. Seed Magazine is a bi-monthly science and culture magazine that appears both in print and online. Boustead’s charge includes finding graphics and images to accompany the stories that appear on the website, SeedMagazine.com, and making the website accessible and user friendly. The magazine prints 180,000 copies every two months, but the online website gets about 1.5 million hits a month, including ScienceBlogs.com.

Seed Magazine is best described as a science and culture magazine that strives to report on science for scientists – and regular people. It combines the scientific with the artistic to create a compatible magazine for the researcher and the general consumer. The magazine uses dynamic graphics, graphs, drawings, photos, and illustrations that prevent the content from coming off dry and boring. It’s science made user friendly by art.

Seed Magazine Cover, August 2007 (vol. 11)

The magazine’s aesthetic is reminiscent of a notebook that discusses ideas, emerging research, and a league of articles in the form of essays, bios, and more traditional scientific synopsis. The goal of both the online and print magazine is to make and put out content that appeals to readers and keeps them coming back for more: having a sustainable readership is the main goal.

The writing style of the magazine is reminiscent of The New Yorker meets Technology Review meets Nature News. It is academic and hinted with a liberal leaning. The magazine knows who its readers are and is in the business of giving them what they want. Articles range from 400 to 6,000 words, so they are not get-in, get-out type of stories.

The online magazine includes most of the articles from the print version, but also contains some pieces that are more lax and straightforward. There are 12-14 people working in the digital department and they all interact with each other and work together to make the magazine work.

Boustead describes the team as a collaborative unit, regardless of rank or seniority. Boustead didn’t start out as a Journalist. He went to school for psychology and theory, with a strong science background. For this reason, he was always attracted to Seed Magazine.

The Seed Media Group also links to one of the biggest collections of science blogs out there. In between ScienceBlogs.com and SeedMagazine.com, the company brings in about 1.5 million hits a month.

Around a year ago I posted a link to stories in the Harvard Gazette and from ABC News about the antropological argument that humans were, literally, born to run. We survived the hyenas, lions, and other scavengers of the African plane more than 2-3 million years ago by being able to outrun them — not with pure speed (cheetahs: 1, humans: 0), but over long distances, say some researchers.

Four-legged animals can move like missiles, but tall, two-legged creatures move like pogo sticks. To be fast and steady, you need a head that oscillates up and down, but doesn’t pitch back and forth or bobble from side to side. The nuchal ligament is one of several features that allowed early humans to run with steady heads held high.

There are some skeptics, however, to the theory that endurance running among early humans is the “missing link” in tracing our evolution. One researcher notes, “Early female humans likely did not participate in long hunts, but stayed behind to care for the young. If this is the case, why would women also have evolved to be good long-distance runners”

And just because we can run long distances does not necessarily mean we evolved specifically because of this ability.

Yet as we toast tonight to the nearly 25,000 runners who participated in the 113th Boston Marathon on Monday, it seems fitting to revisit the topic of running and its role in human evolution.

And thanks to a new study on our toes (!), “the endurance running hypothesis may have legs.” From this fantastic article in SEED Magazine:

A handful of scientists think ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors. Over time, the survival of the swift-footed shaped the anatomy of modern humans, giving us a body that is difficult to explain absent a marathoning past.

Our toes, for instance, are shorter and stubbier than those of nearly all other primates, including chimpanzees, a trait that has long been attributed to our committed bipedalism. But a study published in the March 1 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, by anthropologists Daniel Lieberman and Campbell Rolian, provides evidence that short toes make human feet exquisitely suited to substantial amounts of running. In tests where 15 subjects ran and walked on pressure-sensitive treadmills, Lieberman and Rolian found that toe length had no effect on walking. Yet when the subjects were running, an increase in toe length of just 20 percent doubled the amount of mechanical work, meaning that the longer-toed subjects required more metabolic energy, and each footfall produced more shock.

Read the entire article, “The Running Man, Revisited” by Maywa Montenegro here.

I’m hitting the trails to get in touch with my inner Encino Man.

play, think…
J.R. Atwood

The interactive display of the magazine’s content is artful and innovative.  More importantly, much of the clickable content directs you to subscribe to the magazine or sign up for premium content.

Two questions important to the evolution of social creativity.

1)  What makes real-life interactions so compelling?

Daniel Goleman (Author of Emotional Intelligence): “During a conversation, mirror neurons in our brain replicate what’s going on in the other’s brain. When having a moment of real rapport- our physiology’s (heart rate, BPs, etc) connect. It’s almost like two birds dancing together.”

When this happens, there’s no need to ponder, reflect, worry about   offending someone, the conversation just ‘flows’. Creativity and joy multiply.

2) Can this neurological calibration happen even when two people are only connected  online?

That’s our job to find out, but what’s clear is that enriching the online experience by providing the right platforms, tools, and license to go wild IS transforming what’s being created.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a fascinating condition in which inputs to one sensory pathway - such as music or shapes - produce sensations in a different sensory modality. As technology used in social media evolves, it might just become possible to achieve a temporary synesthesia. Through purely an online interaction, there might come about a way to gauge tone, excitement, etc, similar to the way we do in face-to-face communication. This would mean the birth of ‘virtual mirror neurons’, and enable a virtual connection between people that is as rich as a real one.

Probability and timeframe? Slim & distant. Implications for creativity? Infinite & thrilling.

I found this great video experiement today.

“A video experiment in scale, condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute.”

It really gives you a different perspective, one that’s not quite so “me” (humans) centered.

Click on image to go to the video.

by Claire L Evans

Added benefit: I discovered Seed magazine.

Very cool site. “Science is culture” is the tag line from their home page.

Looks definitely worth exploring some more.

http://seedmagazine.com/news/2009/02/the_evolution_of_life_in_60_se.php

One of the coolest videos I’ve seen in awhile.  On this time scale, it’s amazing how quickly life developed as compared to the formation of the rest of the Universe (relatively speaking, less than a second).  Via www.seedmagazine.com

]]>