Original Fritz Kahn Posters and Key Booklet, Sotheby's Vintage Posters Auction, May 13

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Morbid Anatomy reader Gotthold is a long time collector of Fritz Kahn books and posters. He is currently selling two of his original posters (as pictured above) along with a "key booklet" as part of Sotheby's May 13 Vintage Posters Auction.

I asked Gotthold to tell me and the Morbid Anatomy readership a bit about this special collection he is actioning off in the hopes of helping it find a proper and loving home; here is his response:

Dear Morbid Anatomy readers:

I have been a keen reader of this blog since I discovered it about a year ago when searching for information on anatomical posters I bought for use in an art project.

My personal artistic fascination with death, pornography, science and religion has taken me on a strange and fascinating journey over the past year through the cavernous bookshop cellars of Vienna, the seedy sex shops of London’s Soho, and the wonderful Morbid Anatomy blog in search of new materials and ideas. In my search for materials to use for my work, I spend a seemingly senseless amount of time and money looking for rare, obscure, and interesting materials to use and take inspiration from. It was on one of these escapades when visiting Vienna that I first stumbled upon the wonderful works of Fritz Kahn whose unique mechanical anatomy illustrations have earned much attention on this very blog (recent posts here, here, and here).

Since this initial discovery, I have managed to amass an extensive collection of Fritz Kahn's books, all featuring his wonderful illustrations, and have also had the luck to acquire a few original posters, including the famed ‘Der Mensch als Industriepalast’ or 'Man as Industrial Palace' of 1926 as seen above, top; you can found out more about that piece here.

Conducting more commercially oriented research around these works, I stumbled upon Morbid Anatomy for the first time to read a post on a Christies ‘Anatomy as Art’ auction in New York where this poster sold for some $3,500. The financially conscious side of myself forced me to reluctantly get in touch with Christies in London regarding a sale. I was informed by their experts there was no specialist auction coming up anytime soon but that I could still consign the poster to a ‘Vintage Posters’ auction in May. I chose to sell the two posters and a ‘key’ booklet together as a lot; I still believe this is extremely unique, given that the key booklet acts as an index to the numerical and alphabetical indicators on the poster without which it is difficult to fully comprehend the intended meaning of the illustrations.

The marketing around this auction has been weak, and there isn’t much explanation of the uniqueness of the key booklet or even an image of the second poster in the lot (as seen above, bottom). When I looked at the other posters for sale at this the auction I realized that my item is out of place and I doubt that it will strike the right chord with the bidders.

I have still however decided to proceed with the auction, not in the least because I need the proceeds of this sale to help further my artistic pursuits. I therefore implore anyone who knows relevant collectors to spread the word about the auction, and encourage anyone who’s interested to bid on these items as they are impeccable (the nice thing about Christies auctions is that anyone can place bids from anywhere in the world online). You can see the lot on the auction website by clicking here.

So please, any and all of you medical art aficionados out there, check out (and bid on!) Gotthold's Sotheby's lot on May 13th; you can find out more about the lot by clicking here and more about the auction by clicking here. And yes, online/remote bidding is very much a possibility! Also, please feel free to forward this post to any interested parties!

If you are interested in learning more about Fritz Kahn and seeing more of his incredible work, I highly recommend the beautiful, lavishly illustrated book Fritz Kahn: Man Machine / Maschine Mensch, which comes complete with a frame-worthy poster-sized reproduction of ‘Der Mensch als Industriepalast’ ('Man as Industrial Palace'). Good stuff!

Which journals do you have in your RSS? | Gene Expression

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I don’t subscribe to Science or Nature’s RSS feeds because I assume if there’s something of interest to me, I’ll hear about it when it comes out. But I do subscribe to the RSS feeds of more obscure journals of interest (e.g., THe American Journal of Human Genetics). What journals do you subscribe to which don’t have such a higher profile?

The real Pandora, and two mooning brothers | Bad Astronomy

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Cassini continues making loop-de-loops around Saturn, returning tens of thousands of way cool pictures. Like this one:

cassini_epimetheus_pandora

From 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) away — 3 times as far as the Moon is from the Earth — Cassini spied this pretty scene. It shows, obviously, Saturn’s rings to the right. The very thin ring extending to the left is the F-ring; it’s very faint and wasn’t even discovered until 1979, when Pioneer 11 passed the planet.

The two moons are Pandora (the flying saucer-shaped one) on the left, and Epimetheus on the right. Usually, in pictures like this, perspective is a problem; one moon is much farther away than the other, so your sense of scale gets a bit bollixed. But in this case, both moons are about the same distance from Cassini! Pandora is about 114 x 84 x 63 km (68 x 50 x 38 miles) in size, and Epimetheus is a bit heftier at about 144 x 108 x 98 km (86 x 64 x 58 miles). In this shot, the rings are in the background relative to the moons, and Pandora is just a hair closer to Cassini than Epimetheus.

I was surprised that they appeared so close together, so I did some checking. Pandora orbits Saturn at a distance of about 141,700 km (85,000 miles), and Epimetheus orbits at 151,400 km (91,000 miles). So really, they never get any closer than 10,000 km (6000 miles) to each other. Since they do look pretty cozy in this image, there really is a little perspective going on, since Epimetheus must be a few thousand kilometers farther away. That’s only a trifle compared to the more than 1 million km distance Cassini was from the pair when it took this shot, though. What this means is that if you compare the sizes of the two moons you get a good idea of their relative diameters, but their positions relative to Saturn are a little messed up due to perspective. Got it?

Once I got the orbital distance of the moons, I was curious how long it takes them to orbit Saturn. Turns out, it only takes about 15 hours for Pandora and about 17 hours for Epimetheus! So both moons are screaming around the planet at speeds of roughly 60,000 kph (36,000 mph), far faster than even low Earth satellites move. That’s because Saturn is a lot more massive than the Earth, and has far more gravity. It yanks much harder on those moons, whipping them around at greater speeds.

There’s more, too. Pandora is one of the shepherd moons of the F-ring, helping it maintain its shape. It shares an orbit (more or less) with the moon Prometheus. As it happens, Epimetheus shares an orbit (more or less) with the moon Janus.

Now follow along here: in mythology, Epimetheus and Prometheus were very close brothers. Their names means hindsight and foresight, respectively. Prometheus gave us fire and civilization, and had his liver pecked out by birds every night for his sins against the gods. Epimetheus was supposed to give mankind positive traits, but was a bit of an absent-minded goofball, and he ran out of raw materials before he got to us. For this, the gods gave him the "gift" of Pandora, whom he married.

Well, that’s not fair! Being smart and clever and helpful gets your organs ripped out of you, and being an idiot with no eye for the future gets you rewarded*.

Of course, in reality, Epimetheus’s wife shares an orbit with his brother. That’s gotta hurt.

Sigh. I think I prefer the confusion of the actual Prometheus and Epimetheus to the confusion of their mythical namesakes. Reality may not always be fair, but at least (to borrow a phrase from George Hrab) it’s fair in its unfairness.

* Feel free to extrapolate this myth to science and politics, if you wish.

Related posts:

Watch Saturn’s shadow dancing

Cassini eavesdrops on orbit-swapping moons

Saturnian eclipse


Why the Ozone Hole Prompted Global Action—and Why Climate Change Hasn’t | 80beats

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Ozone2009Twenty-five years ago this month, British scientists announced their discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica. That bolt from the blue spurred perhaps the best-coordinated international response to an environmental crisis to date. Now, scientists can’t help but wonder: Why didn’t the same thing happen with climate change?

Looking back on the ozone problem: Even before the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer—that blanket of three-oxygen “ozone” molecules that protect us from much of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation—researchers worried about pollutants destroying those highly reactive molecules. The British scientists’ 1985 announcement confirmed that daunting reality.

Technically a substantial thinning of the ozone layer, the ozone “hole” has been opening every spring since the 1970s, the scientists reported. Their data, collected at the Halley Research Station in Antarctica, suggested that CFCs were to blame. That’s because atmospheric conditions during the cold, dark, Antarctic winters were building stockpiles of CFCs over the South Pole [National Geographic].

But only two years later, in 1987, the United Nations approved the Montreal Protocol against the use of CFCs, and it took effect in 1989. Today the ozone hole still opens up—and it’s still large—because problematic pollutants like chlorine linger for decades. Thus, the ozone layer may not return to its former fullness until the late 21st century, but quick international action did stabilize the problem.

Given that success, the British scientists couldn’t help but look back on the anniversary of their discovery and ponder the vast difference between the global response to the ozone hole and the lingering hostility and uncertainty that keeps climate negotiations stuck in neutral. Writing in this week’s edition of the journal Nature (where the team published the original study in 1985), ozone hole co-discoverer Jonathan Shanklin notes that his find presented a clear danger, with clear solutions:

The public was keen to see action: the evidence was strong and clear; the hole sounded threatening; and there was a link between thinning ozone and cancer. And the public did not feel bullied or threatened — no one was telling them to radically change their way of life. There was a problem, and something could be done about it. By contrast, the evidence for man-made climate change is less clear-cut to the average person. And people are given the impression that civilization will collapse unless they abandon cars and radically change their lives in other difficult ways. Not surprisingly, there is confusion and resistance [Nature].

Joe Farman, another co-author of the original ozone paper, was much more candid in his assessment of climate science, given in an interview with the BBC this week.

He criticised politicians for failing to lead on issues like climate change – it was “damned stupid” to keep increasing emissions of CO2 when we know it is a warming gas, he said. But, in a nod to climate sceptics, he also blamed the scientific establishment for failing to take specific criticisms of detailed climate science seriously enough [BBC News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Hole Story
80beats: Today’s Biggest Threat to the Ozone Layer: Laughing Gas
80beats: Ozone Hole + Global Warming = More Ice Here, Less Ice There

Image: NASA, the hole in 2009


COE

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Somebody sent me a question about extraction of sulphur from a material that is black and ressemble to coal.

I have seach the web to find the right defenition for the word " COE ", but did not find it.

Is someone can help me?

Even the person, living in Connecticut who asked me the que

Gear Pump Lubrication

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Can a Internal gear pump be lubricated by the pumped fluid? I know about an external gear pump can be selected in accordance with the bearing feature (internal or external) depends on the fluid type, but this criterium is also applicable to internal gear pumps?

I hope you may help me

Will Blockbuster Remain Lackluster?

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Blockbuster is a movie and video game rental chain with over 9,000 stores worldwide. The first store opened in Dallas, Texas in 1985. Blockbuster's business model was based on buying a movie for a large, flat fee and then renting the movie over and over again. Blockbuster's large selection of

Redstone Explosion Turns Fatal

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2 dead after explosion at Ala. Army base, AP

"Two contract workers died after being injured in an explosion while removing a propellant from rockets at Redstone Arsenal, where the Army conducts missile and weapons research. The public affairs office at the post in Huntsville said the two died Wednesday night after being flown to the burn unit at UAB Hospital in Birmingham. Base officials said Thursday the names of the workers would be released later. Both worked for a Redstone contractor, Amtech Corp., and were injured in an explosion at 8:45 a.m. Wednesday while removing ammonium perchlorate from rockets at a test site. The Army described the chemical as an oxidizer used in solid rocket propellant."

Guest Post: Caleb Scharf on the Shadow Biosphere | Cosmic Variance

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Caleb ScharfWe’ve been talking about life quite a bit here recently at Cosmic Variance, and it’s always fun to talk about areas in which one has absolutely no professional expertise. But it’s also fun to bring in experts, which is why we’re happy to welcome Caleb Scharf as a guest blogger. Caleb is Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University, author of a textbook on the subject, an recently jumped into blogging. In this post he reminds us that we’re still learning a lot about the forms of life right here on Earth — knowledge that will be invaluable as we search for it elsewhere.

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It’s a real privilege to be able to write a guest blog for Cosmic Variance and to take a little side trip from my regular postings to Life, Unbounded – the science of origins.

The modern search for life in the universe encompasses everything from exoplanets and astrochemistry to geophysics and paleontology. Underlying and motivating the investigations in these fields – collectively labeled astrobiology – there are some fundamental assumptions, but do they make sense?

In recent weeks one might be forgiven for thinking that a shadowy biosphere surrounds us, aliens are poised to dismantle civilization, and that time traveling species are flitting in and out of view like barflies on a Saturday night. It’s a little disconcerting, does the Kool Aid have something special in it this Spring?

Unfortunately I think that all of these headline grabbing items miss the real story of what life is, here on Earth and potentially further afield. The idea of ‘shadow biospheres’ or multiple origins of terrestrial life sounds intriguing, and certainly helps bring focus to the fact that we can be very blinkered in our outlook. It also steers attention away from a more interesting and demonstrably real point.

microbes In the past couple of decades we have found a shadow biosphere, except that far from lurking in the cracks it turns out to be the biggest, most critical, biosphere on the planet. An astonishing 99.9% of life on Earth cannot be coerced to grow in a lab, and so we have overlooked it. Microbial life – single-celled bacteria and our ancient cousins the Archaea – is not just the stuff under your fingernails, it is what makes multi-cellular life like us function, and it helps govern the grand chemical cycles of our planet, from the continents to the oceans to the atmosphere. Such organisms have, over three to four billion years, evolved into an eye popping array of microscopic machines, the ultimate nano-bots. They can extract energy and raw materials from, it seems, almost any environment. A particularly good example is Desulforudis audaxviator – discovered 2.8 km down in a South African gold mine in a pocket of isolated water. Little audaxviator lives all alone when the vast majority of microbial life is utterly reliant on colonial symbiosis. It earns a living by mopping up the molecular detritus left after radioactive decay in the uranium rich rocks dissociates water and bicarbonates. That’s a very, very neat trick.

Twenty or thirty years ago we barely understood that such life existed on this planet. Now we are beginning to see that the longevity of our biosphere owes itself to precisely this crowd of ‘shadowy’ organisms. A truly wonderful paper was published a couple of years ago in which Falkowski, Fenchel and Delong laid out the big picture for life on Earth. In essence, they argue that single-celled microbial life is the manifestation of an even deeper truth; the core planetary gene set. This is the set of recipes for metabolism, or how to harvest a planet for energy, and we all rely on them. The result of billions of years of natural selection, these genes are widely dispersed across the microbial biosphere. This is true to such an extent that should 99% of life be wiped out by an asteroid collision, supervolcano, or dirty telephone receiver, the information for the molecular machinery that drives all organisms will be safely preserved in the surviving 1%. The living world does not end, it just reboots. Because of this, carbon-based life is a far more robust phenomenon than we could have ever imagined. It is the ultimate, Google-like, cloud computer.

Still though, isn’t this also a blinkered view of what might constitute life? Well, sure, but there’s another fact to consider. When we look out into the universe we find that the chemistry of our life – carbon based molecular structures – is not just occasional, it’s ubiquitous. Carbon is a fabulous player; simple molecules, rings, chains, polymers, sheets, crystals, and great clumps of sooty particles abound. Some is produced directly from the huge outflows of cooling gas from old stars, much forms in the thick nebulae and proto-stellar cocoons that eventually give rise to planets. Thousands of recognizable organic molecules, including amino acids, are found in the treacly mix of some meteorites – the remains of our own ancient solar system. This is a chemical bonanza that must have played a role in setting the stage on the young planet Earth. If this is blinkered then stick a blindfold on me.

So life on Earth is tough and tenacious, and the building blocks are everywhere. Is this enough reason to think that a similar blueprint exists in other places across the universe? Well, it’s definitely motivation to go looking, and to go looking for the kind of exotica that we already know, rather than inventing new ones. Is this reason enough to think that ‘intelligent’ life exists somewhere else? That’s a tough call. Life on Earth did remarkably well for the past 3.5 billion years without us around, I don’t think there is anything that indicates we are more than an evolutionary oddity (albeit an incredible one). It’s a big universe though, with plenty of room for oddities, even if they turn out to be extremely familiar.


Evolution, With Dope Rhymes and a Funky Hip-Hop Beat | Discoblog

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Perhaps you've wished, while paging through a heavy textbook on evolutionary biology, that learning the subject could be a little more like an Eminem concert? If so, rush over to a New York theater where the rapper Baba Brinkman is ready to fill your brain with his one-man show, "The Rap Guide to Evolution."
The project began when Brinkman got a call from evolutionary biologist Mark Pallen, who asked him to compose a rap in honor of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. Says Brinkman: "All winter I sent him copies of my rap lyrics, and he came back with corrections, which means my hip-hop show is peer reviewed." Here's a segment of his show: Olivia Judson, who praised the show in The New York Times, says she suspects this is "the only hip-hop show to talk of mitochondria, genetic drift, sexual selection or memes." She continues:
[Brinkman] is a man on a mission to spread the word about evolution — how it works, what it means for our view of the world, and why it is something to be celebrated rather than feared. Brinkman is performing his show through Saturday, May 8th at the Bleeker Street Theatre in New York City. If you can't make it ...


Herschel Reveals the Hidden Side of Star Birth

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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

The first scientific results from ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory are revealing previously hidden details of star formation. New images show thousands of distant galaxies furiously building stars and beautiful star-forming clouds draped a

Driving to Devon Island Across Sea Ice

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Mars Institute team to complete Arctic sea-ice drive along fabled Northwest Passage to reach "Mars on Earth"

"An international team led by Mars Institute scientist Dr. Pascal Lee will depart the Arctic community of Resolute Bay today aboard the Moon-1 Humvee Rover on a sea-ice crossing expedition. The team is headed for the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station (HMPRS) on Devon Island, High Arctic, a remote outpost dedicated to space exploration on the world's largest uninhabited island. The Moon-1 is an experimental vehicle simulating future pressurized rovers that will one day allow humans to explore long distances on the Moon and Mars. Last year, the scientists completed a record-setting 494 km drive on sea-ice in the Moon-1 along the fabled Northwest Passage between Kugluktuk and Cambridge Bay, Nunavut."