IMAGE: Emilie coaching a licker through performance anxiety. Last week, in a former bodega in Alphabet City, food designer Emilie Baltz and smart object designer Carla Diana conducted the second performance of their “Lickestra” — a “musical licking performance” involving conductive ice cream cones, four volunteers, and a pre-recorded soundtrack of peculiar tones and baselines […]

IMAGE: Tracks of a tagged Lesser Black-backed Gull, via the University of Amsterdam’s Bird Tracking System (UvA-BiTS) blog. While analysing the GPS tracks created by 22 Lesser Black-backed Gulls breeding in the port city of Zeebrugge, researchers from the University of Amsterdam accidentally ended up mapping a severe case of snack addiction. The data showed […]

Thanks to the laws of economics and physics, I seem to miss more interesting exhibitions and events than I can attend. Here are two recent misses: one which will, I hope, be accessible as part of a larger exhibition in the future; and one that you can still catch if you’re in London this month. […]

IMAGE: Smithsonian scientists Dolores Piperno (right) and Irene Holst (left) growing teosinte under modern (chamber on the left) and past (chamber on the right) climate conditions. Photo: STRI photographer Sean Mattson. Equipped with only a pair of garden shed-sized, perfectly ordinary-looking glass greenhouses at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, archaeobotanist Dolores Piperno and […]