Stunning paintings of butterflies by two Australian teenage sisters, from an era when women had no formal artistic or scientific opportunity, which sparked one of the most heartening triumphs of conservation and rewilding a century after their death. Meet Harriet and Helena Scott.
75 years ago today, the Atomic Bomb. And then, The Bomb and the General – Umberto Eco’s extraordinary vintage semiotic children’s book drawing on this catastrophe of human nature to reflect on peace and environmental wakefulness
Vintage science face masks, featuring centuries-old astronomical art and natural history illustration, benefiting The Nature Conservancy and the endeavor to build NYC’s most democratic temple of cosmic perspective – the city’s first public observatory.
On Bloomsday, rare and stunning illustrations for Ulysses by Italian artist Mimmo Paladino.
100 years ago, the German polar researcher, geophysicist, and climate scientist Alfred Wegener coined the word Pangea to describe the ancient supercontinent that formed 335 million years ago as part of his revolutionary theory of continental drift, for which he was derided for decades before it became the pillar of our geologic understanding of our own planet.
Italian artist and architect Massimo Pietrobon performs a terrestrial spacetime warp to map modern-day country territories onto the supercontinent 175 million years after it began breaking up – a pleasantly disquieting reminder that we live in a world of ephemeral realities, imaginary and negotiated, mapped onto a physical world that is just as ephemeral on the appropriate timescale.
(via Kottke)
Stunning 19th-century illustrations of otherworldly marine creatures from the world’s first scientific effort to bring public awareness and awe to the Great Barrier Reef.
Exactly 410 years after Galileo drew the first topographical map of the Moon, radicalizing humanity with the revelation that our satellite is not a perfectly smooth orb of ethereal matter but as solid and rugged as the Earth — not a heavenly body but a material one — here comes the first complete geologic map of the Moon, reminiscent of a Joan Miró painting: a collaboration between the United States Geological Survey, NASA, and the Lunar Planetary Institute.
Singularity – poet Marie Howe’s stirring ode to our cosmic belonging and the meaning of home, inspired by Stephen Hawking and composed for The Universe in Verse, in an animated short film by Salt Project. Poem text, context, and related wonders here.
The Universe in Verse 2020 – poems celebrating the science, splendor, and wonder of nature, featuring readings, reflections, and music by Rebecca Solnit, Patti Smith, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Rosanne Cash, Roxane Gay, Tim Ferriss, Elizabeth Gilbert, Eve Ensler, Alison Bechdel, Brian Greene, Krista Tippett, and other seekers of truth, makers of beauty, and cartographers of meaning. Tune in.
Excellent primer on the chemistry behind the common sense of washing your hands – why it’s your best defense against coronavirus, how that defense actually works biochemically, and why you aren’t really safe unless you do it for at least 20 seconds. Bonus points if you do it with minimal stress – here is pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg on the science of how stress impacts your susceptibility to disease.
(HT Kottke)
The Spirit of the Woods – the world’s first encyclopedia of trees, composed and gorgeously illustrated by poet and painter Rebecca Hey, in an era when hardly any women were published authors.
Elizabeth Blackwell is 29. The year is 1736. Her husband is in debtor’s prison and she has a small child to feed at home. What does she do? She turns desperation into inspiration, learning botany and painting an exquisite encyclopedia of medicinal plants: A Curious Herbal.
Self-taught astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy has created this arrestingly vivid portrait of the Moon from more than 100,000 images he took through his telescope from his backyard in Sacramento – a glorious redemption of the original meaning of amateur, “lover of.” How far we’ve come from the first surviving photograph of the Moon, to say nothing of the world’s first map of the Moon and Galileo’s reality-radicalizing perspectival drawings, in the mere blink of cosmic time since.
via Kottke
Wilson Bentley’s Snowflakes – 140 years ago this month, a teenage farm-boy with a sensitive curiosity about the world, a microscope, a camera, and a fiercely supportive mother awakened humanity to the art and science of snow with his pioneering photomicroscopy of ice crystals.