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"Science Bugs celebrates local ecology and research by exploring insects using three kinds of representation.
Tim Lethbridge’s photography captures moments of insects “in the field,” giving us a glimpse into their lives and ecological roles.
Dustin Angell’s studio-like photographic portraits offer an intimate view of specimens from scientific collections, highlighting the structures of their bodies and the scientific research related to them.
Dr. Mark Deyrup’s scientific drawings of insects reveal the defining traits of species, and show how entomologists need standardized and highly detailed depictions of insects.
Through these three artists, Science Bugs gives viewers a look at an important part of ecology as well as the methods of how insects are studied."Archbold Biological Field Station provided the insect specimens.
"Culture and the arts are essential means by which all people explain their experience, shape their identity and imagine the future. In their constancy and their variety, culture and the arts allow us to explore our individual humanity, and to see our society whole. People need the arts to make sense of their lives, to know who they are. But our democracy needs the arts, too. The arts animate civil society. They stretch our imagination. They increase our compassion for others by providing creative ways for us to understand and deal with differences. The arts protect and enrich the liberty, the human dignity and the public discourse that are at the heart of a healthy democracy."=================
"Focusing on grantmaking in the United States, the report aims to characterize the nature of support from both private and public sectors. It examines how various grantmakers think about social change in the context of agency goals and what outcomes they are looking for through their support. The report looks at the types of activities and projects that are being funded as well as grantmaking strategies and structures. It documents obstacles and opportunities for greater support, considering both funders who are and are not supporting this work."
...I was showing them a book form, a pleated structure that sort of rotated around on itself, and this guy stood up and said, ‘That’s it!’ He had been working on something called an autophagosome, which has a double cell membrane and rotates around on itself during cellular division.” (...it’s like a temporary garbage truck that delivers cell waste to a lysosome, so that waste can be broken down) “He’d been trying for years to to visually depict how it moves. He could see it in his head, but couldn’t get it as a flat image to show his students. My book form moved the way forward.”
"Scientific thinking is almost synonymous with recognizing and forming patterns. Every hypothesis and theory is the discovery of a pattern within some set of observations. For this reason, artists, choreographers, and musicians, whose works invariably invent and play with patterns, have a great deal to teach scientists (Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 1999).
The father of the famous physicist Richard Feynman clearly understood this connection. He introduced his son to patterning games very much like those taught at such art schools as the Bauhaus when the boy was still a toddler. One of those games involved colored tiles like those used to make mosaics. Feynman senior would start a pattern and see whether Richard could finish it. Soon the boy was making up his own patterns and yet another pattern was set in motion (Feynman, 1988). As an adult, Richard Feynman discovered many new patterns in physics, which later won him a Nobel Prize.
Ned Seeman, one of the founders of the new science of nanotechnology (the making of functional objects out of molecule-sized materials), was similarly inspired by M. C. Escher’s patterns. Stumped by a problem concerning ways to make cubic structures out of DNA, Seeman realized that an Escher print that pictured a school of fish-like creatures swimming in three dimensions provided the solution (Nadrian Seeman, n.d.). Seeman now studies artists’ patterns explicitly for their insights into the processes of making structures (Seeman,in press).
Other scientists have also looked to the work of artists—or used their expressive forms—to hunt for clues to hidden patterns. Physicists, for instance, have worked with choreographers to illuminate the movement patterns of electrons; microbiologists have squaredanced their way through the processes of gene regulation. Some educators have likewise used creative movement in the science classroom. Witness Zafra Lerman’s work teaching chemistry through dance and theater."
