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February 04 2011
Video: See the First Aerial Footage of an Uncontacted Amazonian Tribe
In the rainforest along the border between Brazil and Peru, an indigenous tribe is ignoring the 21st century and living life the old-fashioned way. Experts believe this “uncontacted tribe” has had no direct contact with mainstream society, but the Brazilian government has known about the tribe for 20 years and routinely flies above the settlement to check on the inhabitants’ well-being.
NOw, the BBC has released the first ever video footage of this tribe, which had previously only been seen in photographs:
The footage was filmed in cooperation with the Brazilian government, and was featured on the BBC’s Human Planet series. It was shot in the summer of 2010 along the Peru-Brazil border using a zoom lens that allowed the crew to film from more than a half-mile away.
The Brazilian government flies over the settlements once a year to check on the tribe. As José Carlos Meirelles, the Indian-affairs specialist who led the video expedition, explains to National Geographic:
“They always get scared when they see an aircraft, but this tribe is used to seeing commercial flights—Boeings and local jets—flying over the region…. I prefer to get them scared once a year—and make sure they are healthy, growing ...
January 05 2011
If Ke$ha Was Into Astrobiology, She Still Wouldn’t Have Made This Video
Need to teach 13-year-old Ke$ha fans about the quest for extraterrestrial life, but worried you won’t capture their attention? Fret no more. Fresh off of YouTube comes a parody of Ke$ha’s song “We R Who We R,” refashioned into an informative and utterly dorky song about astrobiology.
The video credits Jank for the lyrics and video and mrskimful for the music. We applaud the creators for their shout-outs to moons like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus–all promising destinations in the search for microbial life in our solar system. But we have to take exception to the quick, unqualified mention of bacteria that can thrive on arsenic, and the video’s implication that this recent finding stretches scientists’ notions about what kinds of life can exist. Have they not been following the roiling controversy over whether that finding is valid?
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January 03 2011
Curious Polar Bears Best Robot Videographers
Even the best-planned documentaries can go wrong, especially when there are curious polar bears involved.
In this case, the BBC was spying on the polar bears of the Arctic islands of Svalbard for a documentary called “Polar Bear: Spy on The Ice,” but their spy-tactics could have used a bit of help. The cameras were “camouflaged” as icebergs and snow drifts, but that didn’t fool these curious bears, who caught on pretty quickly that snow and ice aren’t supposed to move that quickly.
The cameras worked just fine in in the -40 Fahrenheit weather–it was the bears who ripped the cameras to pieces, destroying about $200,000 worth of equipment. The documentary, directed by John Downer, aired on BBC One on December 29th, but you can see it here at the BBC’s iPlayer (sadly, UK only).
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November 22 2010
New “Symphony of Science” Video—Featuring a Melodious Discover Blogger!
Our favorite autotuned scientists are back at it, with the seventh video in the “Symphony of Science” series. This video focuses on scientific/skeptical thought, explains creator John Boswell:
It is intended to promote scientific reasoning and skepticism in the face of growing amounts of pseudoscientific pursuits, such as Astrology and Homeopathy, and also to promote the scientific worldview as equally enlightening as religion.
Keep your eyes peeled for DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, who makes a few appearances!
If you haven’t seen the earlier iterations, I recommend a trip over to Symphony of Science headquarters to watch some of the previous videos. You can even pick up a seven-inch vinyl of the original “A Glorious Dawn” featuring Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan.
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Video: Youtube.com/melodysheep
October 22 2010
The Guggenheim/YouTube Art Experiment: See Winning Videos Here
In June, the Guggenheim Museum announced a collaborative video contest with none other than YouTube. Yes, you read that right: YouTube, the video website overrun with videos of cats and each tween’s latest shopping spree.
The contest was open to anyone and everyone who has made a video in the last two years. A total of 23,000 videos were submitted and judged by a panel of artists and curators, and the competition’s 25 winners were announced last night. These 25 videos will be on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through the weekend, and all the shortlisted videos will stay online indefinitely. While there was some excitement about the prospects of such a venture, the New York Times isn’t impressed by the final product:
At the time of the announcement, there was much talk about originality and discovery, which sounds rather hollow now, compared with the low quality of the 25 finally selected.
Ouch! When the competition was announced, some feared that it would dumb down the video art world, while others dreamed that it would break the community open to embrace YouTube’s DIY creativity and modern folk art stylings. The critics over at the New York Times seem to think the winning videos did neither, and fell somewhere between sophisticated video art and YouTube folk art:
One way to explain the lackluster quality of the first incarnation of “YouTube Play” is that almost none of the final 25 works, which are being screened in a gallery at the museum this weekend, fit either of those categories…. They seem to occupy a third sphere of slick and pointless professionalism, where too much technique serves relatively skimpy, generic ideas.
You can take a look a the 25 finalists and the additional 100 “shortlisted” videos online. In addition to the “Birds on the Wires” video above, here are some of my other favorites from the top 25:
“Bear untitled — DO Edit” is a tragic love story done in 8-bit by Christen Bach:
This video, called “Words,” has made the rounds of the interwebz before, but I think it deserves another mention, in case you haven’t seen it:
This video, called the “The Huber Experiments–Vol 1,” is a great use of high speed video. Who wouldn’t want to play with their food?
And another video that makes great use of technique, “Bathtub IV” by Keith Loutit:
Other videos that have been getting attention in the media include a video interview/spontaneous music video “Die Antwood – Zef side (official)” with South African Rap Trio Die Antwood, “This Aborted Earth: The Quest Begins,” by Michael Banowetz and Noah Sodano, “Noteboek,” created by Dutch video artist Evelien Lohbeck, and “I Met the Walrus,” by Jerry Levitan, Josh Raskin, James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina. ABC News liked a rap-Disney mash-up:
“Wonderland Mafia,” by Lindsay Scoggins of Tampa, Fla., fuses rap and cartoon. The Disney film “Alice in Wonderland” has been mashed-up with the hip-hop of Three 6 Mafia. Scoggins says the video “is meant to illustrate a disjointed amalgamation of the media one encounters in adulthood (versus) childhood.”
And even the New York Times found something it didn’t hate:
Amid all the artifice of the final 25, Lisa Byrne’s documentary short “Taxi III Stand Up and Cry Like a Man” may burn a hole in your heart. The third in a trilogy, it consists of interviews with taxi drivers who survived paramilitary attacks in Northern Ireland during the conflicts of the 1980s and ’90s.
I’m sure I missed some good videos. If you think I’m completely off base with my choice of favorites–or if you think the New York Times is being too cranky by far–tell me about it in the comments.
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Videos: Youtube.com/play
Video: The Physics of How a Wet Dog Shakes
“Many furry mammals engage in oscillatory shaking when wet.” Translation: When a dog comes in from the rain, it engages in a body-twisting, jowl-flapping shake that sprays water over the living room. But exactly what kinds of oscillations are required to make the water droplets scatter? Thankfully a team of curious researchers decided to study the physics of that motion.
In the abstract posted on ArXiv, Andrew Dickerson of the Georgia Institute of Technology and some colleagues explain that they attacked the question via high-speed video and fur-particle tracking:
As you can see from the data in the video, the research raises further questions. Their mathmathical model is based on the idea that surface tension holds the water droplets to the animal’s hair, and that centripetal forces from the shaking have to exceed that surface tension in order to free the water. This implies that smaller animals (or as they might say, animals with a smaller radius) have to shake faster in order to get dry, a prediction borne out by observations of everything from mice to bears. But when the researchers plotted the data on a graph, it didn’t quite conform to their predictions.
Technology Review, where we first saw this story, explains where they may have gone wrong:
Clearly, their model misses some important correction factor. Dickerson and co make one suggestion. In their model, the radius is the distance from the centre of the animal to its skin. Perhaps the fur makes a difference, they say.
The video helpfully declares that no animals were harmed in its making; they were just somewhat dampened.
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Video: Andrew Dickerson et al.
October 08 2010
Digital Retouching Reaches a Whole New Level, and a New Cup Size
Dudes: are you looking to get that Baywatch body without all the pumping of iron? All you need is a little “MovieReshape” and you can be virtually buff! Just don’t let anyone see you in person.
MovieReshape is a program created by Christian Theobalt at the Max Plank Institute in Germany. The program will digitally alter your appearance (including height, weight, and muscle tone) in any movie clip. Women can even get a digital boob job or liposuction to automatically enhance body size and shape on the fly.
Earlier approaches to body manipulation on film required retouching of every frame, a very laborious process when you’re talking about 30 frames per second. But this approach is different–it works from a 3D body plan made from the scans of 120 different men and women of different shapes and sizes, and in many different positions.
Using off-the-shelf software the team then identifies the person to be manipulated, and tweaks parameters like height, waist girth, leg length, muscularity, and breast girth. Check out a video explanation (with some creepy demonstrations) after the jump:
One use of this software is obviously to make actors’ bodies even more unattainable–or to help them out, so they don’t have to gain or loose weight for a role. New Scientist suggests an alternate use for the program:
It could also be a cost-saver for advertising companies. Because standards of beauty vary across cultures, it is the norm to shoot several adverts for a single product. With the new software, firms could make one film and tweak the model’s dimensions to suit different countries.
The program isn’t perfect yet: the person being manipulated needs to be free of other objects around them. Also, the greater the manipulation, the greater the distortion around the person is. The team screened reactions from 15 people and they said the distortion wasn’t distracting, but judge for yourself in the video above.
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Image: Jain, et.al(pdf), to be presented at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2010.
Paint + Sound Waves + High Speed Cameras = Mind-Boggling Beauty
Who would think a printer would inspire such beautiful art?
A collaboration between the ad company Dentsu London, Canon printers, and photographer/biochemist Linden Gledhill created these “sound sculptures” which use high speed cameras to catch tiny droplets of paint as they splatter under the force of sound waves. The resulting videos were used in an ad that celebrates Canon printers’ color quality, but honestly, who cares what they’re selling when the images are so pretty.
Gledhill gets extreme detail in his shots through his use of an ultra-high speed camera–the Canon 5D Mark II, which takes up to 5,000 frames per second–along with a Canon EF 100mm Macro IS USM lens to get intense, up-close detail. He previously used the paint splatter sculpture technique in his “Water Figures” series, he said on Dentsu’s Flickr page:
I, like many people, find Water Figures almost compulsive viewing. They appeal to people in many ways because they represent a fusion of science, technology, natural chaos and art. Every image is unique and can be appreciated in all of these ways. For the scientist, who is interested in fluid dynamic or chaos theory, they capture the behavior of fluids in motion.
Hit the jump for more info and a video about the creative process.
To make the paint dance, he carefully lays out his paint droplets on a balloon stretched over a speaker. And while it looks like the droplets are dancing, Gledhill is actually only playing one tone at a time. To change up the action of the paint, he changes the instrument, frequency and volume of the tone, he explains:
Pure smooth notes create long tentacle like forms, whereas sharp complex high volume notes give rise to detached droplets which resemble planets.
Only about one in 10 of the pictures he takes are perfect enough to make the cut. Check out a video of the process below to learn more about how they made the magic happen, and read Gledhill’s blog post for more details.
In his other life, Gledhill is a biochemist at GlaxoSmithKline, where he works on diabetes and cancer drug development. In his spare time he likes to take close-up pictures of insects, plants and fungi, and as he told Dentsu London, he loves what he does:
I’m completely enchanted by the physical world around me and obsessed by its natural beauty. My career in science has magnified this feeling of awe. For me, photography is a way to capture this physical beauty and to pass this feeling on to others.
For more pictures and (much more oh-so-gorgeous) video visit Dentsu London’s Flickr page.
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DISCOVER: Plain Ol’ Paint Goes Hi-Tech
All Images: Dentsu London
October 05 2010
Climate Change Activists’ Head-Exploding Ad May Have Gone a Bit Far
Warning: Some viewers might find the video below disturbing and graphic.
In a move that some are calling a misguided publicity stunt, the environmental activist group 10:10 Climate Change Campaign produced and released a gory and disturbing short film, similar to Plane Stupid’s “Polar Bear” video (warning: also gory), to promote the climate change action day scheduled for October 10, 2010 (or 10/10/10).
In the video above, people who don’t pledge themselves to 10:10’s cause (including school children and Gillian Anderson) are exploded into red, chunky goo with the press of a button. It was released last week and has resulted in a media backlash, including Sony’s retraction of support of the cause. It even inspired a cartoon.
Not only does the video offend and disgust, but the New York Times’s Dot Earth Blog summarized another main problem with the video–the dark shadow the negative publicity has spread over the entirety of the climate change debate:
If the goal had been to convince people that environmental campaigners have lost their minds and to provide red meat (literally) to shock radio hosts and pundits fighting curbs on greenhouse gases, it worked like a charm. Of course the goal might have been buzz more than efficacy. Too often these days, that’s the online norm. They succeeded on that front. I, among many others, am forced to write about it. Congratulations.
The Guardian (a supporter of 10:10’s) says the ad campaign was a joke that the public just didn’t get. In the original blog post about the video, they talked to 10:10 founder Franny Armstrong:
But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: “Because we have got about four years to stabilize global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”
“We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change,” she adds.
10:10 Climate Change Campaign is a project to inspire people to cut their carbon emissions by 10 percent in a year, by taking on home improvement projects or changing their lifestyle. The group issued an official apology on Monday (10/4), along with this statement to the Guardian on Saturday (10/2) :
“With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines while making people laugh,” said Lizzie Gillet, 10:10 global campaign director. “We were therefore delighted when Richard Curtis agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and 10:10 would like to apologize to everybody who was offended by the film.”
For more reactions to the film, visit the New York Times’s Dot Earth blog.
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September 17 2010
Scientist Dance Styles: Glee Episode, Spanish Whodunnit, Internet Love Orgy
In its third year, the Dance Your PhD contest is proving that maybe, just maybe, scientists can dance. From the contest’s website:
The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You take a deep breath and launch into the explanation. People’s eyes begin to glaze over…
At times like these, don’t you wish you could just turn to the nearest computer and show people an online video of your Ph.D. thesis interpreted in dance form?
Sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the competition has announced the judges-chosen finalists, chosen from the 45 entries in four science sections–and now the viewers get to choose their favorite from among them. Each finalist gets $500, and the crowd favorite gets an additional $500. The winner will be announced on October 19th, so go watch the finalists and get your vote in.
The chemistry category’s finalist, “Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment,” is danced by Maureen McKeague and company with an accompanying pop soundtrack worthy of its own Glee episode. Stay tuned for an amusing interpretation of Taq polymerase doing its thing to “Safety Dance” at the 1:58 mark.
The physics finalist, Steven Lade and company, do a trippy interpretive dance of vesicle transport in his video, “Directed transport without net bias in physics and biology,” which seems to be a bit more “interpretive” than “dance,” but is still pretty rocking.
The biology finalist, “The influence of previous experiences on visual awareness,” is danced by Maartje C. de Jong and colleages. The Netherlands must really know their telemundo, cause I couldn’t tell if I was watching a PhD dance or a Spanish crime drama.
The social sciences finalist, Anne Goldenberg and company, gives a more artistic interpretation of her PhD, “The negotiation of contributions to public wikis.” Especially wonderful are the depiction of a flame war at the 1:40 mark and the wiki-love orgy at the end.
Watch the finalists and vote for your favorite one here, or read more about this mad-dancing-scientist project.
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Image: Flickr/Emanuele Rosso
June 16 2010
The OK Go Video: Playing With the Speed of Time
OK Go strikes again.
Their last video memorably featured a Rube Goldberg machine that filled a two-floor warehouse and took four minutes to complete its sequence of wonder and mayhem. This time, the tech-happy band recruited Jeff Lieberman and Eric Gunther–artists, musicians, and all-around interesting guys–to direct the video.
Together, the team warped time. Check out the video, and read below for some details about the project from Lieberman.
From Lieberman:
“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.”
“We also made a special friend in the process. Her name is Orange Bill and she’s a goose. You will agree that she clearly has a future in music videos.”
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June 14 2010
Guggenheim & YouTube: The High Art/Low Art Mashup Is Complete
The Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan may seem the ultimate arbiter of contemporary art success, with space on its rotunda walls reserved for the world’s buzziest artists. But this October the museum will showcase 25 videos made not by famous or even up-and-coming artists. Instead, the museum is preparing to welcome the unknowns–from YouTube.
The museum and the video site are pairing up on a project they call YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. Participants can submit videos (one per person) created within the last two years, until the July 31 deadline.
As one might expect from a collaboration with a site that features both dancing birds and baby delivery how-tos, the competition has few entry restrictions. The hope, as described in a promotional video, is to tap the truly “new” and “to reach the widest possible audience, inviting each and every individual with access to the Internet to submit a video for consideration.”
From the countless entries that are sure to come, the museum will whittle the submissions down to 200 of the most promising and then an expert panel will narrow these down to the final 20 to 25 for display. Within that selection there will be no winners or runners-up, the museum says, because the aim is to present a sampling of the most exciting work.
Some might fear giving the high art throne to videos that routinely refashion other creative works, and Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Foundation, recognizes such skepticism. She told The New York Times:
“If this is all the Guggenheim did, it would be a problem,” Ms. Spector said. “There are many layers to our programming. And we can’t say at this point that this won’t spawn ongoing relationships with people we discover through this process. One can only hope that it will.”
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Bad Astronomy: Art + science + NYC = Science Fair
80beats: Tattoo-Removing Lasers Also Remove Grime From Classic Works of Art
Image: flickr / boobooo
May 05 2010
Video: Google Chrome Is Faster Than a Speeding Potato
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