CHEM 106

The next time you are in Austin, Texas, make sure to stop by the Art.Science.Gallery. It is a gallery space that focuses on the intersection of art and science and appears extremely relevant to our class. In fact, it is the first gallery in America to show exclusively science-based pieces. The “art gallery and science communication space” is open to those of all ages and backgrounds to communicate with one another and explore- or even take part in- art-science exhibitions in a friendly and welcoming environment.

The founders are interested in the new phenomena of the science-art aesthetic, which bends the boundaries of art and science. They are also interested in science communication training and professional development. They have decided to offer workshops and training courses for scientists who have the responsibility of communicating their works to the public and want to become effective, creative, and engaging public communicators.

The founders of the gallery space argue against the idea that one must be categorized as either a scientist or an artist. They believe that in our contemporary world it is becoming increasingly important to produce multidisciplinary content that is both engaging and accessible to a broad public audience. They decided to create a physical space where artist-scientists can present their works and stimulate conversation. The gallery even has a laboratory that offers accessible classes for those interested in fusing art and science. The founders want to offer an opportunity for the public, including those without scientific backgrounds, to explore scientific concepts that are extremely relevant to everyday life but are not easily accessible outside of college classrooms. Some examples of these labs are a “Hands-on food science class featuring a molecular mixology workshop and Molecul-R kits”, a “Science of Color” lab that explores what it is that “pH indicators, color theory, CMYK printing and Newton’s prism experiments have in common”, a “Crocheting Hyperbolic Space” lab, and a “Mathematics of Perspective Drawing” lab.

I think the two links below do a good job of summarizing what we know about prion proteins.

http://www.emergentuniverse.org/#/proteins

This first link is an interactive website with a creative design. You’ll see that when you place your curser over a note in the margins, more information will appear. I recommend exploring other parts of the site too, starting from the homepage. There are games, music, paintings, and a sad dance video scattered around the site to help explain different scientific concepts.

This second link is a short video, specifically about prions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqhpVpafjmk

http://phys.org/news/2012-02-prion-proteins-powerful-role-survival.html#jCp

Prion proteins don’t just cause scary diseases. They are also “commonly used in yeast to produce beneficial traits,” which “can be passed on to subsequent generations and eventually become ‘hard-wired’ into the genome, contributing to evolutionary change.”

Some proteins in yeast spontaneously misfold, altering their function. This alteration produces new heritable traits in the yeast. Before yeast prions were studied, “prions capable of modifying phenotypes ha[d] never been found in nature.” We’ve learned a lot about the damage that protein misfolding can cause in humans, but in the case of yeast, misfolding can be beneficial if the diverse new traits produced in the process help the yeast survive.

I think the following excerpts from the article are especially interesting:

“[T]he rate at which proteins switch into and out of the prion state increases in response to environmental stress [such as high acidity or the presence of antifungal agents], suggesting that they are part of an inherent survival mechanism that helps yeasts adapt to changes in their surroundings.”

Scientists studying prions in wild yeast found that “approximately 40% of the traits produced by the wild prions proved to beneficial to growth…’How frequently beneficial they are suggests that the prions have already been subject to previous, positive selective events,’ says [Susan] Lindquist. ‘We see them as part of a bet-hedging strategy that allows the yeast to alter their biological properties quickly when their environments turn unfavorable.’   Convinced of the impact prions have had on yeast evolution, Lindquist speculates that these shape-shifting proteins may be ‘remnants of early life,’ from a time when inheritance was predominantly protein-based rather than nucleic-acid based. She also theorizes that prions may play such roles beyond yeast, and her lab intends to take similar approaches in the hunt for prion activity in other organisms.”

Looking back on this class, I now see so many art and science connections. I wanted to take a minute to look at STEM and STEAM. Art and science really do go together. Taking a step back and looking at history, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” shows a clear example. The man, drawn in a perfect circle has his arms and legs outstretched—da Vinci was exemplifying the proportions of the body and depicting them visually through art.

During the economic down turn of 2008, art programs in schools started being cut to save money. Science programs on the other hand were not. This goes back to our discussion at the beginning of the semester about the expectations and stereotypes surrounding each profession. Science was judged to be more useful and thus a good investment whereas art programs were seen to use money that schools just did not have anymore. STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields were seen as better money-making fields and better/more necessary skills than art.

As I’ve struggled some weeks to depict my science artistically, and other weeks to understand the science depicted in art, I’ve realized that the two are really quite similar. They both require deep understanding and knowledge to fully make sense. Often, they require explanations and both are considered to be done by some sort of expert.

The link below is to a great TED talk by astronaut, dancer, scientist, doctor, and art collector (among many other impressive titles) Mae Jemison. In her talk, Jemison explains and argues for the teaching of art and science together. Check it out!

http://www.ted.com/talks/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together?language=en

While researching eyesight, I discovered the amazing eyes of the Mantis Shrimp. The mantis shrimp is usually found in tropical waters and is known for its aggressive style of attack. They are predators with an extremely sharp and powerful claw. One of their most formidable traits however, is their amazing eyesight. Their eyes are made up of 10,000 visual units called ommatidia, each one containing a lens and a series of light sensitive cells. In the mantis shrimp each ommatidia row has a particular function like detecting light or color. The incredible sight of the mantis shrimp is much better than a human’s sight, especially their color vision. This is because humans have only three types of color receptors while the mantis shrimp has twelve types. The mantis shrimp also has ultraviolet, infrared, and polarized light vision. Their eyesight helps them to be incredible predators by allowing them to see their prey from many angles. The mantis shrimp’s eyes are on stalks that can rotate up to 70 degrees Therefore, mantis shrimps can use their immense peripheral vision to hunt their prey. Depth perception is also very important to predators and each eye of the mantis shrimp has complete depth perception. This means that if the mantis shrimp were to lose one eye, it would still be able to perceive depth as well as a human with two eyes. Even if it is wounded, it can still hunt prey and survive.

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/07/20/monet_gauguin_using_art_to_make_better_doctors/?page=full

This article is from 2008, but I think the courses described in it are still being used to help medical students improve their diagnostic skills. One course takes med students to the MFA to have them observe and discuss works of art. “After an hour at the museum, the class walked back to Harvard Medical School to apply what they had learned about examining art to diagnosing breathing problems, skin rashes, and neurological disorders.” For example, students “study texture and pattern in Jackson Pollack’s abstract Number 10, and then return to the medical school to study how patterns in patients’ rashes can indicate specific conditions.”

This kind of training has been shown to be effective: “students’ ability to make accurate observations increased 38 percent. When shown artwork and photos of patients, students were more likely to notice features such as a patient’s eyes being asymmetrical or a tiny, healed sore on an index finger. ”

An art observation course is already mandatory for students at Yale Medical School. Art training may become increasingly important, since “several studies show that doctors’ physical exam skills, which include observation and taking a medical history, as well as the hands-on examination, are declining.” This may be due to a over-reliance on diagnostic tests, which are also very expensive and raise the cost of care unnecessarily.

“‘When I’ve been to Africa and the Amazon and there are no CT scans and X-rays and it’s just you and a flashlight and a stethoscope and something to look into the patients’ ears, you have nothing to fall back on other than your clinical skills,’ said Dr. Ronald Silvestri […] In the United States […] doctors turn more quickly to these widely available tests and tend to be very rushed when seeing patients. ‘If you have a 10-minute visit, how good an observer can you be?'”

We all learn in elementary school that the colors of the rainbow are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.  Red, blue, and yellow are the primary colors and orange, green, and purple are the secondary colors.  However, we learned these past few weeks that light’s primary colors are red, blue, and green.  What gives?

Well, back in the day, Isaac Newton split sunlight into a rainbow using a prism.  He labeled the colors he saw as “red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.”  That’s where our other common elementary school rainbow (ROYGBIV) comes from.  Why seven colors?  Newton was really religious/superstitious, and he came in with the preconceived notion that seven was a holy number, so there MUST be seven colors present.  Preconceptions aren’t very good form for a scientist, but given all his contributions to science, we’ll forgive him.

Indigo doesn’t come up nearly as often these days.  If you google why indigo isn’t in the rainbow, you’ll find a lot of people who are very upset that indigo no longer exists, and equally upset people claiming it never existed at all.  Of all the things to be mad about, haha… Let’s be clear that indigo DOES exist – it just isn’t considered a primary or secondary color in any field these days (probably b/c it’s too difficult to distinguish from blue and purple), so no one cares much about it.

So, indigo aside.  Why do artists (and elementary schools everywhere) say the primary colors are red, blue, and yellow when scientists say they’re red, blue, and green?

The answer starts with the difference between additive and subtractive color mixing.  You can add red, green, and blue  light together to get any colors of light.  But pigments, like ink and paint, absorb light – they subtract light instead of adding it.  That means a different system is needed.  However, that system isn’t red, yellow, and blue.  It’s magenta, yellow, and cyan!

First, it’s worth noting that light comes in a spectrum, not a wheel.  The colors between red and blue can only be obtained by red and blue light mixing.  So, magenta pigments are reflecting red and blue light (just like yellow reflects green and red, and cyan reflects blue and green).  Now, when these three “primary” colors are mixed, you can get red, blue, green, and any other color you want.  This is why printers use CMYK ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).

So what does any of this have to with red, blue, and yellow?

The fact of the matter is that red, blue, and yellow are not proper primary colors of either subtractive or additive light.  ROYGBIV (with I or without) was likely conceived before Newton or any other scientific study when some artists noticed you could produce most other colors using red, yellow, and blue.  Their guess wasn’t too far off – red is pretty close to magenta, and blue is pretty close to cyan.  So red, yellow, blue is really the older, erroneous version of magenta, yellow, and cyan.  The rainbow of primary and secondary colors really ought to be red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta.

Then why do we keep using the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple system?  I have two theories.  One: Habit.  It’s been around a lot longer, so it’s easier to just stick with it.  Two: There’s this thing in color theory called “split complementary colors.”  Complementary colors are those that are opposite on the color wheel.  People like them because they are very high contrast together.  A split complementary color scheme doesn’t use the exact opposites, but instead uses colors just to the left and right of the opposite color.  This way there is still a high level of contrast, but not quite as high, making the color scheme appealing and easier on the eyes.

My working theory is that the artist’s color wheel is just off enough from the subtractive color wheel that an artist’s complements are actually split complements, and are therefore more appealing for us to look at.

One of the more popular artist’s complement pairs is blue and orange (lots of sports teams use this combo).  You can see here that blue and orange would be split complements on the “real” color wheel.  The funny thing is that blue and yellow, which are “real” complements, are considered split complements by artists.  This combination is also extremely popular (lots of other sports teams use these colors).

In short, I suspect that we find the complements/split complements on both color wheels appealing because of a combination of physics and psychology.  The “real” complements are actually opposite of each other, but we’re used to seeing ROYGBIV, so those color relationships have been ingrained in us as well.  As in Prof. Conway’s lecture, when it comes to color, it seems our brain’s perception matters just as much as the actual physics occurring…

Hope everyone enjoys all these colorful diagrams as much as I do 🙂

In 2013 the UN proclaimed that 2015 would be the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies, or IYL for short. By doing so, the UN has reinforced the necessity of light; it is vital to not only human life but to our earth in general. The opening ceremony was held in Paris from the 19th to 20th of January, just the first of a long series of events across the world. Light has played a developing role in 21st century science, revolutionizing our take on a vast array of issues ranging from energy issues to agricultural issues, from health issues to education issues. It is thus a link between economic, cultural, and political aspects of our ever-globalizing contemporary world. As the chairman of the IYL 2015 Steering Committee has stated, “An International Year of Light is a tremendous opportunity to ensure that international policymakers and stakeholders are made aware of the problem-solving potential of light technology. We now have a unique opportunity to raise global awareness of this.”

On the website www.2015.org there is a page on “why light matters”. On this page one can learn about photonics, which is the science of detecting, controlling and generating photons. According to the description of photonics, the 21st century will depend on photonics to the same extent that the 20th century depended on electronics. I did not realized how large of an effect photonic technology has on the world economy but apparently from 2005 to 2011 growth in the photonics industry more than doubled that of the worldwide gross domestic product. The current global market is 300 billion euros and is expected to rise to 600 billion euros by 2020.

The reason that this industry has been so successful is because photonics is used in producing products that are considered necessities in today’s modern world. From the site, I learned about fiber optics. The use of light in fiber optics has entirely transformed the way in which people interact and communicate; fiber optics are most commonly used in telecommunications. Optical fibers are fibers made from silica; they are flexible, transparent, and extremely thin. They are extremely useful in contrast to wire cables. Optical fibers are able to allow transmission at high bandwidths over long distances, are unaffected by electromagnetic interference, and provide less loss than metal wires when signals pass through them. In addition to communication, optical fibers are also used for remote sensing; this is often found in security systems. Optical fibers can be modified so that the property to measure modulates intensity, polarization, wavelength, phase, or transit time of light in the fibers- thus they can be used to measure qualities such as strain, pressure, and temperature. Thanks to Charles K. Kao who in the 1960s discovered fiber optics as a medium for telecommunication, modern communication and globalization has flourished.

Dogs have only two kinds of cones in their retinas, whereas humans have three. As the video above explains, the lack of a third kind of cone does not mean that dogs see in only black and white. They can also register yellow and blue, but not red. Dogs can also distinguish between different shades of yellow, blue, and grey.

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Thinking about Professor Conway’s suggestion that color vision is useful to us, because it allows us to notice changes in skin color caused by sickness (or injury or other medical problems), I’ve compiled a short list of some sicknesses that noticeably affect skin color.

-jaundice (causes yellow skin and eyes). This condition is common in newborns.

-carotenemia (causes orange skin). This condition is considered harmless, but it can be mistaken for jaundice.

-cyanosis (causes blue skin). Indicates decreased oxygen in the blood.

-vitiligo (causes blanched skin due to destruction of melanin-producing cells).

After learning so much interesting facts about color, I wanted to learn more about color blind. I first started out by testing for color blind in this website. http://enchroma.com/test/instructions/ And it told me that I have normal color vision. Then I wondered what causes color blind. I found out people with normal color vision can see about 1 million distinct shades of color. For someone with color blindness, they can only see a much reduced amount of color hues: they can see about 5-10% of the color gamut, with the loss mainly oriented along the red-green axis. This is why people who are colorblind need to take another task while getting their license, since green and red are extremely important colors for drivers. Very interestingly, males are more likely to have color blindness than women. Color blindness is an X-linked recessive trait: 35% of females are carriers of the gene mutation, causing it to be expressed in about 8% males.

People who are color blind can only see shades of color and will definitely find difficulty in living. But they don’t have to give up! Two university of Washington researchers have partnered with a biotech firm on a possible cure for colorblindness. This article was released two days ago (!!) and they are planning to move to human trials within one to two years and seek FDA approval for treatment!