Ann Druyen on the Space episode

July 21, 2008

Joel Bedford/flickr

Here at Radiolab we’ve been known to tinker with sound… cutting music, ambi, and big ideas all together to get the point across in the most fun, interesting and understandable way. It’s not your typical public radio interview. Recently, we decided to check in with some of the guests on past episodes to see what they thought. Were they over-edited? Mis-represented? Did they love the show? Hate it?

In the Space episode Ann Druyan, widow of Carl Sagan, told us a story about the Voyager expedition, true love, and golden record that travels through space.

Listen to part of the episode here:

Here’s what Ann Druyan thought of it! (She’s speaking with intern Linda Evarts):

Comments[3]

Posted by Radiolab under: Listenables

Laughing or Weeping?

July 18, 2008

image courtesy of Cabinet Magazine

The excellent Brooklyn-based quarterly Cabinet dedicated its Spring ‘05 issue to laughter. You’re just going to have to buy a copy, because only a very small portion is available online…including this fine essay by Chris Turner on the fluid boundary between laughing and crying:

“Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there is no difference in the motion of the features,” Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his posthumously published Treatise on Painting, “either in the eyes, mouth or cheeks.” With the difference between the physical expression of emotions so subtle, artists had a challenge on their hands: How to differentially depict, in the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the “frantic joy of a Bacchante and the grief of a Mary Magdalene”?

To do so, artists relied on a staged iconography of expression and posture, codified in handbooks such as Charles Le Brun’s A Method to Learn to Design the Passions (1667), in which Le Brun adapted Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1649) into a visual lexicon of twenty-four emotions. Here, a menacing portrayal of the laughing face immediately precedes the illustration of a crumpled, crying one, almost as if the expressions were modulations of one another, but with certain differences artificially accentuated, especially in relation to the ruffling of the brow. Thus Le Brun created a stylized, histrionic vocabulary of the passions easily recognizable as tragic or comic on both canvas and stage.

Comment

Posted by Elizabeth Giddens under: The Centrifuge

Chest pains? Quick!! Pull my finger!!

July 16, 2008

wikicommons

Hydrogen sulfide stinks, but you knew that already, didn’t you. Hydrogen sulfide is flammable, but you probably knew that too (and I won’t ask how). But did you know hydrogen sulfide lowers blood pressure? and might protect the body from injury?

As little as 10 parts per million of hydrogen sulfide can irritate your eyes. 1000 ppm can kill you almost instantly. But some scientists like John Wallace of the University of Calgary say it also possesses some protective properties as low doses can stimulate gastric ulcer healing. It even protects mouse hearts from artificially induced heart attack says David Lefer of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Of course, how all this works is a bit harder to squeeze out (sorry..) and some say it could be that the gas soothes the perturbed mitochondria in the cells, effectively dodging the trigger to self-destruct.

But the key to the little stink bomb’s success might have to do with Sleep. Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has found that it can induce a sort of suspended animation:

Exposed to 80 ppm of hydrogen sulfide, mice enter into what we call a “hibernation-like” state, where their core temperature can be reduced as much as 11 degrees and their metabolic rate as judged by carbon dioxide production and oxygen consumption drops 10-fold. We’ve kept the animals in this state for 6 hours and they recover completely.

He and others in the field note that hydrogen sulfide and other mechanisms to alter the metabolic rate might make it possible to slow down the clock for trauma victims and preserve human organs for transplant. But nothing’s FDA approved.. so you don’t need to plug your nose at the ER just yet.

Comments[1]

Posted by Justin Paul under: Mouse in amaze | The Centrifuge