YEAR OF LIGHT/ANNEE DE LA LUMIERE
UNESCO has declared 2015 to be the International Year of Light - many events have taken place already, and quite a few are still to be held around the globe - so there is certainly something going on...
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NEW LINKS/NOUVEAUX LIENS
I am adding today two links to admirable and useful sites dedicated to Darwin and his co-discoverer of evolution, Wallace. They will be a useful addition to the complete works of Buffon that are also...
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MATHEMATICAL OBJECTS/OBJETS MATHEMATIQUES
On Monday, I visited a very small but fascinating exhibition in the Science Library on the Campus in Dijon. They have on display some mathematical models dating back to the nineteenth century,...
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MARIE THARP
Marie Tharp (1920-2006) worked as a geologist at the Lamont Geological Laboratory at Columbia. From the late 1940s she transferred onto paper data from sonars equipping ships exploring the Atlantic,...
View ArticleSPACE SATELLITES TIMELAPSE/VUE EN ACCELERE DES SATELLITES
Timelapses have become quite common on the Net - whether it's some proud parent photographing a child for several years, or the evolution of future or past landscapes, they have an incredible appeal :...
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GRAVITATIONAL WAVES/ONDES GRAVITATIONNELLES
I am not going in this post to try and explain what gravitational waves are and how they were discovered. I am totally incapable of doing that. The news bulletins have been busy doing precisely that,...
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ON THE SPOT/SUR LE VIF
"Sur le vif" - "on the spot", or "in action" - is the title of a conference dedicated to anthropological drawings and photographs from 1900 to 1950. It is organised by Camille Joseph and Anaïs...
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ANATOMICAL ART/ART ANATOMIQUE
Two interesting discoveries of artists working in their field with anatomical plates at the back of their minds.Deux découvertes intéressantes d'artistes oeuvrant dans leurs domaines avec les planches...
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BUFFON'S GAZEBO/LA GLORIETTE DE BUFFON
The Jardin des Plantes in Paris is appealing to the public to donate money to renovate a metal structure constructed in the eighteenth century under the supervision of Buffon and with metal from his...
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SCIENTIFIC POP-UP BOOKS/LIVRES SCIENTIFIQUES ANIMES
My attention has been drawn recently to scientific pop-up books, whose aim is obviously to make the readers experiment the concrete side of science, by allowing them a kind of hands-on experience....
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A NEW EVOLUTIONARY TREE/UN NOUVEL ARBRE DE L'EVOLUTION
Scientists at Berkeley have re-designed the evolutionary tree, taking account of the huge number of bacteria recently discovered and of genome sequencing. This gives an elegant graph, that opens like a...
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HAECKEL'S EMBRYOS/LES EMBRYONS DE HAECKEL
Nick Hopwood, who teaches history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, has recently published Haeckel's Embryos - Images, Evolution and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 1015) devoted to the...
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GLASS MODELS - FRAGILE LEGACY/MODELES EN VERRE - UN FRAGILE PATRIMOINE
There is a Museum of Glass in the state of New York, in Corning. It hosts at the moment a wonderful exhibition about glass models made in the nineteenth century in Germany by a father-and-son team....
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EYE FOR DETAIL/LE SOUCI DU DETAIL
Florike Egmond has announced the publication of her new book, due to come out in October, with the publishers Reaktion Books, London. Entitled An Eye for Detail it combines visual history and the...
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MAREY AND CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY/MAREY ET LA CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHIE
Etienne Jules Marey (1830-1904) is going to be the subject of a day's conference on Wednesday, September 7th, at the University of Burgundy, The exact title is Art and Science of Movement in Marey's...
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CYANOTYPES AND ANNA ATKINS/LES CYANOTYPES ET ANNA ATKINS
Cyanotypes are contact photography - and they go back all the way to the nineteenth century. They were invented by British astronomer John Herschel in 1842. The process is the following: you prepare a...
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GLEN WOLFF
I'm re-reading the books by Jerry Dennis, It' Raining Frogs and Fishes and The Bird in the Waterfall. They are natural history books popularising scientific facts you about the seasons, the wonders of...
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CHILDREN AND ANIMALS/ENFANTS ET ANIMAUX
I am pleased to announce that Valérie Chansigaud has published a new book, which has just come out, entitled Enfant et Nature, à travers trois siècles d'oeuvres pour la jeunesse (Delachaux et Niestlé)....
View ArticleILLUSTRATING MEDICAL SCIENCES/ILLUSTRATEURS DANS LES SCIENCES MEDICALES
A conference is going to be held on November 18th in Paris about medical illustrators from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Organised by Jean-François Vincent (Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé,...
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STRANGE ANIMALS/D'ETRANGES ANIMAUX
An interesting book on cryptozoology came out at the end of September. Written by Benoît Grison and published by Delachaux et Niestlé, it is entitled Du Yéti au Calmar Géant, le Bestiaire énigmatique...
View ArticleONLINE COURSE ON MAREY/COURS EN LIGNE SUR MAREY
A MOOC (in French) has been created about Marey and the link to register to follow it is here. It will start on November 3, and will end on December 16th. There will be 6 sessions over the 6 weeks, and...
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EYE FOR DETAIL (2) /LE SOUCI DU DETAIL (2)
Florike Egmond's book is finally out. I presented her project in this post, but her book seems to have suffered some setbacks, and it is now out with Reaktion books, distributed by the University of...
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MAPPING SKI RESORTS/PLANS DE STATIONS DE SKI/
Pierre Novat was an artist who designed numerous maps of ski resorts for tourists, tracing the ski runs, sometimes cheating a bit on the representation. My attention was drawn to his work by Xavier de...
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CLOUD ATLAS/ATLAS DES NUAGES
Cloud Atlas is a novel, written in 2004, by British writer David Mitchell. It was later turned into a film. But already in 1896 an international atlas of clouds was published in a trilingual edition...
View ArticleSCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATION ON FRANCE CULTURE/ILLUSTRATION SCIENTIFIQUE A FRANCE...
Yesterday, France Culture's scientific programme, La Méthode scientifique, devoted an hour to scientific illustration. Valérie Chansigaudwas one of the guests, along with Bernard Darras from Paris I...
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