Tag: science
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In pictures: Objects designed for pigs
Popcorn Piñata Pig Kerplunk Melon Mines House of Many Doors Fruit Machine Apple Barrel This is part of CARNEVALE, a collaborative art-science project that explores animal welfare questions and the enthusiasm of pigs for investigative play. Click to see…
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INN I DE DYPE SKOGERS FAVN
Epigenetic Memory in the Spruce Tree Foresti covers 37% of Norway’s combined area, almost half of which is made up by the tree species called Norway spruce. The rest consists of mostly pine and birch. It is therefore only natural that spruce forests should feature so heavily on black metal album covers and lyrics. The…
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Things She Doesn’t Know
When she was growing up, Lily kept a list of things that she didn’t know. She was big on lists then – she liked knowing the top ten most valuable beanie babies, or the five most destructive earthquakes in history. She liked knowing things, and she liked not knowing things, and she wanted to keep…
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Popular Astronomy
Agnes Mary Clerke (1842-1907) was not a practical astronomer, but wrote a number of important books and articles that explained existing astronomical research to the general public. Winter, the ghosts of fuchsias sigh; in the frost, the fox chews mouse-tails. I step in each of my father’s foot-prints as we carry the telescope…
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LEAD
If, as Rebecca Solnit has argued, “science is how capitalism knows the world”, then it should not be surprising that, as new auction records are broken seemingly every week, it is to technology that the business of authentication must increasingly turn. The studied perusal of the expert is no longer enough; now it is the…
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Furry Attractions: Polar Bears in the Zoo
In the western hemisphere, polar bears have lived in our midst since the Middle Ages, a result of our fascination with these charismatic carnivores. Already in 1252, Henry III of England kept a muzzled and chained polar bear, which was allowed to catch fish and frolic about in the Thames. The first unequivocally identifiable polar…
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Darwin’s Polar Bear
Many people may be aware that the beaks of Galápagos “finches” (in fact, the islands’ mockingbirds) helped Charles Darwin to develop his ideas about evolution. But few people realize that the polar bear too, informed his grand theory. Letting his fancy run wild, in On the Origin of Species, the man used to thinking in…
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Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection
Karl Reich’s 1913 recording of a nightingale – among the world’s earliest extant recordings of bird song – feels like a bottled metaphor for modernity. Trapped in shellac, this sweet twittering turned stand-in for nature, poetry and sex all at once, becomes a ghost of its living and mythical self, haunting us with questions of…
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Extinction and the Image
Animals. The non-human kind. They are everywhere in an increasingly virtual world and more often not there in reality. Our eyes and minds seem instinctively to search out and recognise animal forms. Whether we experience a physical encounter or one mediated through the image, animals are insistent to us in their familiarity. So too in…
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Open Call: Wolf Crossing
In Finland there is a line around the city: susiraja, the wolf border. Within is law and order: shopping malls and social security. Beyond the susiraja lie the wilds and the wolves – just 200 at the last count. Who will howl in the forests when the last wolf departs? The susiraja may be inviolable…
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Being a Beast
Mankind has celebrated a close connection with the animal kingdom since our Stone Age ancestors dressed in furs and painted bison on cave walls. Mythology abounds with tales of creatures which are half-man, half-beast, from werewolves to centaurs. In the transition from hunter-gatherers to city dwellers, we have gradually lost touch with the land, becoming…