Photographs from this month’s Perseid meteor shower from the International Space Station follow a long tradition of science and art blurring boundaries between each other. As curator Susan Dackerman argues in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, the catalog for Harvard Art Museums’ exhibition opening September 6, art and science often have a close relationship with only vaguely definable boundaries.
The new film The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s novel of the same name, has been a box office success but has also been met with some thought-provoking criticism. A review in RD Magazine claims that the plot suggests black women need white women to give them a voice, while
Most people are unlikely to associate science and religion with a man who is best known for painting melting clocks, who threw buckets of paint on nude models, and who kept detailed records of his dreams. Yet for the bulk of his career, those two subjects influenced much of Salvador
When James Frazer Stirling won the Good Housing Competition prize in 1963 for his architectural design, the Daily Mail ran the outraged headline, “Frankly, do you think this is WORTH A PRIZE?” The reader’s answer was obviously supposed to be “no,” especially when confronted with the article’s comment that the
If the perfect crime is one that never gets discovered, then the perfect spy is one whose identity is never revealed. Edward Bancroft came close to becoming the latter: a century passed before the public realized that he had engaged in espionage. Many Americans do not even recognize Bancroft’s name,
Google famously used “Don’t be evil” as their (informal) corporate slogan during the last decade. Recently though, the company has faced more and more accusations that it mimics any other giant, greedy corporation, from its making privacy difficult on Google+ to preventing customers from using competitive operating systems. Whether or
In 1996, sculptor Ron Mueck presented the world with a very different version of Pinocchio per the request of—of all people—his mother-in-law. Mueck’s statue depicts the marionette post-human transformation and gives the line “I’m a real boy!” entirely new meaning. As with all the sculptures in Ron Mueck, by National Gallery of Victoria curator David Hurlston, the figure’s realism is simultaneously astonishing and unsettling.
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Europe took a very long time to get used to the spud, according to John Reader in Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. The Bible never mentions potatoes, so European clergymen in the 1700s banned the consumption of the suspiciously anonymous tuber. Doctors in the previous century