Artist's rendition of Ardipithecus ramidus. (credit: J.H. Matternes)

Yesterday saw a blizzard of media surrounding the Ardipithecus paper published in the October 2nd issue of Science. A quick Google search reveals more than 600 articles published on the subject since yesterday morning.

If you don’t know already know, Ardipithecus (affectionately known as Ardi by some) is a hominid fossil discovered in Ethiopia some 15 years ago. However, the buzz is not about the fossil discovery itself, but rather the insight that Ardi is an early ancestor of humans–something that wasn’t entirely clear until now. This revelation is making scientists rewrite the book on early hominid history and also their vision of the last common ancestor we shared with chimps, more than four million years ago.

Somewhat reminiscent of the American Natural History Museum’s “missing link” campaign back in May, Ardi also has its own primetime cable television special that airs October 11th on the Discovery Channel. But if you just can’t wait, there is already a wealth of multimedia on-line to quench your Ardi thirst.

For example, Science magazine has produced its own interview video which features Tim White, one of the  directors of the Ardi project.  The video composition and lighting aren’t pretty but the interviewees give a good overview of where Ardi fits into the evolutionary tree–and the sound quality is fantastic.

The New York Times has a basic slideshow with vibrant images of the original Ardi dig. These photos make one appreciate the lengths that paleontological researchers go to in order to find preserved fossils. The Ethiopian desert appears both austerely beautiful, yet inhospitable to any kind of physical activity beyond breathing.

The Discovery Channel website has an interactive multimedia Ardi extravaganza created in Adobe’s Flash program. While I can appreciate the time and effort that went into a project like this,  I’m not keen on the layout or the interface.  In addition, the internet is primarily about connections and a self-contained Flash project like this is essentially a walled garden.

Finally, Science Friday, the popular NPR call-in show will feature paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, who will discuss how Ardi impacts our understanding of human evolution. If you can’t catch it live on NPR, you can grab the podcast via the official site or from Apple’s itunes.

Have you found any cool Ardi-related multimedia? If so, post your links below, or email me at erolson@scienceofthetimes.com.

Within every cell of our bodies is a chaotic symphony of molecular and chemical interactions that are difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye.  Scientists rely on experimental ’snapshots’ to give them an idea of what’s happening at the microscopic level. Then they work backwards, reconstructing a sequence of events from these rather abstract clues.

The field of biomedical animation helps us to visualize what can never be observed by the naked eye.  Animators  take the scientist’s mental model of events and render out a real-time 3D visual representation. With the advent of cheaper and faster computers, biomedical animators are producing startlingly life-like animations that rival those found in Hollywood movies (often with a soundtrack to match). Below are three beautiful examples that caught my eye.

Which biomedical animations have caught your eye? Post your favorites in the comments.

Also check out:

Scitimes Video: How the Flu Virus Jumps Species (my own attempt at 2D biomedical animation)

TRANSCRIPT:

Only a subway ride away from Manhattan, Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is located on a sandy atoll in the middle of Jamaica Bay, Queens. It is a small sanctuary for both aquatic birds and turtles.

As you cross over a bridge on the way to the sanctuary, you get the feeling that the subway has magically transformed itself into a boat. The water sits only a few feet below the bottom of the train.

Although technically still in New York City limits, the train drops you in a neighborhood that evokes the feeling of a small beach town. The streets are packed tightly with small, simply-constructed houses.

The first sign that you are near a refuge are the broken clam shells that litter the nearby parking lots. Seagulls drop the shells from on-high, seeking to extract the sweet clam meat from inside.

A newly renovated nature center, operated by the National Park Service greets you at the entrance to a two-mile long trail.

The trail circles around a giant brackish pond that is the home to hundreds of seabirds including swans, Canadian geese, snow geese, seagulls, egrets and various kinds of ducks.

Songbirds find refuge here as well. Take a moment to listen.

Nesting Canadian geese step out to greet you but hiss a warning that you’d better stand back–this is their turf.

Divided from the trail by tall thickets of vines and bushes, a sandy shell-strewn beach beckons for hot and weary feet.

However, this beach is off limits. It’s used as a breeding ground for the endangered diamond-back terrapin turtle.

In this dry environment, succulent plants and even small cactuses  emerge from the sandy soil.

Vegetation on other parts of this little atoll can be dense, as the plants fight for the precious rays of the sun.

The vines of the invasive Oriental Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) don’t fight fair. They strangle the other plants in their skyward quest.

In the middle of a flat, marshy, expanse full of debris, park service employs have constructed a nesting platform for ospreys–also known as seahawks.

If you look closely, you can just barely make out something stirring in the nest.

After taking a short hiatus from writing after graduation from the  SHERP program at NYU,  I’m ready to launch this blog properly.

What sort of blog is this going to be you might ask? What the heck is a collision of science, journalism and technology? Well, I’m not exactly sure either. But science, journalism and especially journalism fueled by technology (i.e. multi-media journalism) are passions of mine.  So any given post might be about journalism…or science…or science journalism… or the technology of science…or journalism technology…I think you get the picture.

To start things off, I’d like to share an amazing resource that I found today when looking for images to use in the header of this blog.  It’s a “cost and royalty-free” symbol library created by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

The library holds over 1500 custom-made “vector” graphics (graphics that can be scaled without loss of quality). The aim of the project is to allow  scientists and environmentalists without art skills to access a library of high-quality symbols for presentations.

This looks like a valuable resource for anyone interested in communicating science in a visual way…including journalists.