I’m not sure how else to describe these animated videos on tumor angiogenesis, the formation of blood vessels leading to a tumor. The biotechnology company Amgen put the stunning mini-site together to explain new approaches to Cancer treatment.
While the animation and interface are wonderful, the site doesn’t do a great job explaining what’s actually going on, at least not for a general audience. In fact, the caliber of the animation actually makes it harder to absorb any details. Show me beautiful imagery set to soothing space music, and it’s nearly impossible not to tune out a British narrator spouting 10-syllable terminology.
How do you explain something that’s invisible? Making it visible seems obvious in retrospect, but I’ve never seen any representation of electromagnetic fields remotely like this before:
This is the work of of Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor Films, commissioned for Britain’s Channel 4. The shapes are based on actual electromagnetic activity:
The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF [very low frequency] audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons .
Over the past few years, I’ve run into several articles and email forwards presenting a hypothetical village of 100 as a stand-in for the entire world population. For example, “if the world population were a village of 100 people, 61 people would be Asian, 15 would be malnourished, 20 would be overweight, etc.” Apparently this idea dates back to a 1990 piece by Dartmouth professor Donella Meadows. Snopes cautions that some versions in circulation are inaccurate.
The posters are sharp, but the metaphors within a metaphor are a little mind-bending (“if the human population were a village of 100 people, which comprised slices of a pizza…”). Is it too obvious of me to picture posters showing the hypothetical villagers themselves?
Prezi, “the zooming editor for stunning presentations,” came out of private beta this week. The tool lets you lay out an entire presentation as one giant graphic and zoom into the details as you go. The general idea is to illustrate the relationships among different points based on their positions relative to each other. This video paints the picture pretty clearly:
The editor tools are a little hard to handle at first, but the site includes decent tutorials. With the free version of the editor, you get access to the Web application version of the editor, you can save 100MB worth of presentations on Prezi’s servers, and you can download anything you make. All presentations are branded with the Prezi logo. For €39 a year, you can scrap the Prezi logo and stretch out with 500 MB of space. The €119-a-year Pro license gives you an editor you can use offline and 2GB of space.
This presentation approach could spark some excellent explanations. It would be ideal for walking through a complex process that includes repeated steps, for example. Meanwhile, Scott McCloud and others are eyeing it for its Web comics potential.
Why shell out $34,000 a year when you can load up on Harvard learnin’ for free? So far, the new site Academic Earth has videos of thousands of lectures, including entire courses, from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. Meanwhile, YouTube has debuted their own college lecture channel, YouTube EDU.
This type of animation is a welcome bridge between scientists and the rest of us. From the article:
An unexpected side effect of Berry’s work has been that when laypeople view the animations, they intuitively grasp the cutting-edge science. Berry says, with some amazement, “The more hard-core it is, and the more complicated visually it is, the more people respond.” Seeing the cell’s activities conveys something fundamental to viewers, something that Berry sees in his mind as he digests the journal articles that contribute to each animation.
What I’d love to see now is a biological video game series.
