The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a set of wonderful medical animations that they collectively show on their WEHI-TV. You can see animations on DNA structure and function, malaria, colony-stimulating factors, apoptosis and other stuff. If not all of the animations have ended up on youtube just yet, they will sooner rather than later, but I certainly recommend the animations at WEHI if you want high picture quality.

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There is DNA and there is DNA. It’s a common phenomenon for the layman to put a certain amount of mystique into areas he doesn’t comprehend or have great insight into, or they can be twisted into something rather different from the true meaning of the word. I have stumbled upon some really hilarious and interesting forms of DNA, so please let me introduce to you the other DNA:

A Swiss project, visualdna, was launched as part of a final diploma project at the Art University (department of visual communication) of St. Gallen, Switzerland, in order to establish whether there are “cultural differences in creating visual work”, so over 400 designers from all continents were invited to participate and the only indication of when this took place is the copyright year, 2003. The designs were made with the term “choice” in mind and the results are extremely various. An analysis can be read in more detail on the web page and here is one of my favourite entries made by Caisso Emiliano from Argentina:

Then the VisualDNA at Youniverse: “Every day, Youniverse helps 1000s of new people discover their unique VisualDNA” they claim, and “Discover your VisualDNA and get matched to people“. I don’t feel the need to get matched to people, but I am interested in the outcome all the same, so what I did a year ago was to take the quiz and here is a part of who I am:

And finally my PersonalDNA: “Your true self revealed” in a “free, fun, fast and accurate” test. Sounds almost too good to be true, so this is a test I can’t miss to take. The result is even presented in the shape of a chromosome:

The “chromosome” comes with a lengthy analysis of several traits and seems to shoot pretty close, so although the test isn’t as fast to take as indicated it is still worth taking. Who would not want to know their personal DNA really?

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2005, Illustration: The Synapse Revealed
Credit: Graham Johnson, Graham Johnson Medical Media

The American National Science Foundation (NSF) arranges since 2003 an annual, international Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge that accepts entries in five different categories: Photography, Illustration, Informational Graphics, Interactive Media and Non-Interactive Media. The winners are introduced on the challenge web page and some of them are interesting from the medical perspective, too. This years winners will be announced on 26th September.

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Seed magazine printed a Map of science that opened the 2006 Gallery in Nature. The map was made in collaboration by Kevin Boyack, Dick Klavans and Information Esthetics (i|e) founder W. Bradford Paley, and it is now sold out but you can still find the pdf file on i|e. In Nature there was written:

“We begin with all of science all at once, in this conceptual map of 800,000 published papers. The red circles are nodes of papers that cite one another. They are named with a string of phrases that relate to their fields, and are connected with lines of various heaviness and length, depending on the cross-linkages. Pure chemistry is at the end of the right-hand peninsula. Medicine is located roughly at the lower left, and physics is at the top.”

The colour scheme was altered in the second-generation map that is still to be found on i|e (as shown above).

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Foldit is a new computer game for protein folders. I found out about it whilst managing my BOINC account; my computer runs calculations for scientific and medical research programmes – rosetta@home, boincsimap, SETI@home and malariacontrol.net. Rosetta@home is about protein folding, design and docking, and Foldit uses the same program for the human effort.

The game is already popular (i.e. there are many players) and folding is accompanied by both friendly banter and serious discussions in the chat room. I’ve spent some spare time folding and recently there was a deadline for some of the puzzles, meaning I finally get ranked and receive my first “global points”. Folding is tricky, but there is help available 24/7 in the chat room, as players are spread all over the world in their respective time zones. For most people, it is primarily about giving a hand to research, but the game is a bit addictive, as well, and to date there are almost 29 000 activated player profiles. The software, by the way, can be used on most computers (although not on non-intel macs).

The quality of the video is much better if you watch it on the Foldit webpage.

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Tree of Life Web Project is an ambitious project about all organisms on Earth. The species are presented with high-quality pictures and references, making this web page particularly appealing in its conciseness. As I studied microbiology, I used the project as a first introduction and found the phylogenetic relationships between species to be easily understood. The design of the page also makes it easy to browse around without loss of feeling for the hierarchal level. A true nutshell!

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