The New York Times, November 23, 2004

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Artists and scientists, so the story goes, glare at each other across a cultural divide. The scientist coldly hacks nature into pieces. The artist is unwilling to do the hard work necessary to understand how the world works.

This story is mostly fiction, as the work of the printmaker Joseph Scheer makes abundantly clear.

For the past six years, Mr. Scheer has made pictures of moths. He does not use paint or silk screens to make them. Instead, he has devised a method for placing real moths on a high-resolution digital scanner without crushing them flat.

Continue reading “The Face of Nature Changes as Art and Science Evolve”

In tomorrow’s issue of the New York Times, I have an essay that grew out of a meeting I went to earlier this month on natural history illustrations through the ages. The essay is accompanied by some of the cooler images I saw there, some of which are also included in the web version. Here’s one that wasn’t–one of the first illustrations of the legendary Victoria Regia water lily, so big that a single leaf could support a grown man. I explain in the essay why this picture was the 1854 equivalent of a high-resolution digital scan.

Continue reading “Technology for Nature”

Science, November 19, 2004

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Depending on your point of view, last week’s New York City marathon was a demonstration of athletic excellence or of unparalleled masochism. But according to a report in this week’s issue of Nature, it was also a display of a key innovation in human evolution. University of Utah biomechanics expert Dennis Bramble and Harvard physical anthropologist Daniel Lieberman argue that the human body is exquisitely adapted for endurance running. They marshal evidence that the ability to run long distances emerged 2 million years ago, possibly enabling our ancestors to become better scavengers. If the researchers are right, running goes a long way toward explaining why our bodies are so different from those of other apes.

Continue reading “Faster Than a Hyena? Running May Make Humans Special”