Zheng Lab enters the YouTube Top 10

Last June we made a list of the YouTube science/math song videos that had been seen by the most viewers. That list has been rendered obsolete by the release of Bad Project, the grad student nightmare set to music by Hui Zheng's lab at the Baylor College of Medicine. New rankings are below; let us know if we're missing any "platinum" songs. Note that #3, #5, #8, and #9 on the current list all belong to John Boswell's Symphony of Science.

1. Waking Up Is Hard To Do. 8,186,590 views as of 1-31-11. (4,566,200 views as of 6-16-10.)
2. Large Hadron Rap. 6,347,199 views as of 1-31-11. (5,888,305 views as of 6-16-10.)
3. A Glorious Dawn. 5,165,197 views as of 1-31-11. (3,824,241 views as of 6-16-11.)
4. The Elements. 1,992,228 views as of 1-31-11. (1,329,187 views as of 6-16-10.)
5. We Are All Connected. 2,927,577 views as of 1-31-11. (1,967,245 views as of 6-16-10.)
6. Chemical Love. 1,595,210 views as of 1-31-11. (961,327 views as of 6-16-10.)
7. Bad Project. 1,506,819 views as of 1-31-11. (Didn't exist as of 6-16-10.)
8. The Poetry Of Reality. 1,311,977 views as of 1-31-11.
9. Our Place In The Cosmos. 1,112,445 views as of 1-31-11.
10. Diagnosis Wenckebach. 1,134,013 views as of 1-31-11. (1,012,912 views as of 6-16-10.)
11. I Will Derive. 1,096,814 views as of 1-31-11. (883,882 views as of 6-16-10.)

Another variation on the art/science fusion theme

Most examples of science-inspired art that we've highlighted on this blog consist of individual scientists doing something artistic or individual artists making art about science. A neat article from the University of Washington highlights something a bit different: an exhibit of 36 artists, ALL of whom worked with scientists to create weather-related pieces.

Seattle artist Scott Schuldt worked with [UW atmospheric scientist Celia] Bitz, whose climate research focuses on the Arctic. Schuldt, who quit an engineering career in 2005 to concentrate on art, and Bitz created "The Melt," beadwork on a canvas anorak modeled after those worn by early Arctic explorers and based on Inuit designs. The anorak was sized to fit Bitz and the beadwork represents various aspects of her work in the Arctic.

"For me, the inspiration comes in seeing the focused and very important work that Cecilia is engaged in. It's just fascinating stuff," Schuldt said. "Scientists wear their work on their sleeves, so to speak, so it wasn't that big of an artistic jump to clothe a scientist in her own work."

...Such collaborations between artists and scientists can be beneficial to both, Bitz believes, but it also gives the viewer a different way of perceiving science.

"Visualizing science through art offers a way to communicate science on a different level than most of us experience from lectures or textbooks," she said. "Through art, scientists can share the beauty that inspires us along our journey to understand the natural world."

Science song of the week: arsenic-using bacteria revisited

Back on December 9th, we mentioned the controversial Science paper on a bacterium that can supposedly substitute arsenic for phosphorus in the structure of its DNA. The most relevant freely available song that I could find at the time was a DNA Replication Song that reviewed the structure of DNA.... But now there is at least one song that directly addresses the Wolfe-Simon paper: "GFAJ-1 Arsenic Blues" by Adrian Ebsary.



We at Sing About Science and Math have no official position on the correctness of the original research or this particular response to it (which seems mostly critical of the publicity blitz rather than the research itself). However, we do think that singing about the primary literature has great potential for increasing the public's awareness of this literature.

More interesting stuff from Adrian is coming soon at ScienceSounds.com (currently under construction).

Science + Art: more than the sum of the parts?

From physicist Chad Orzel's links dump comes a New York Times article of interest to fans of art/science fusion: "An infusion of science where the arts reign." The "Citizen Science" program basically immerses non-science majors in hands-on science work, but with some room for creative expression at the end....

While there is no final grade, there is a final project, and Ms. Batkin and six classmates came up with an idea that is pure Bard: a dance performance that illustrates how an influenza vaccine works. Students assumed the roles of the antigen, B cell, T cell and antibodies.

"We’re using rubber bands and bubbles to show the B cell alerting the T cell that there’s a foreign invader," Ms. Batkin said. "I’m narrating the process, but I am also the antibody at the end."

This sort of reminds me of a course at my alma mater, Williams College, taught by Professor of Mathematics Edward Burger. In "Exploring Creativity," students are challenged to convey core concepts of one discipline using the tools of another discipline. For example, as discussed in this Alumni Review article, students might be asked, "What is the fourth dimension? Write a two-sentence definition and then create an artistic representation of a four-dimensional object or of four-dimensional space."

What these courses and Wendy Silk's "Earth, Water, Science and Song" seem to have in common is a sense that there is meaning and value in the challenge of creatively expressing scientific and mathematical concepts. Arts-related assignments are given not because the students can't handle more traditional "hard-core" assignments, but because science and math can and should inspire singing and dancing and drawing.

You'll love this week's featured science song, thanks to dopamine

"Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says."

Thus begins Malcom Ritter's article (Study: Love music? Thank a substance in your brain) summarizing a study just published in Nature Neuroscience (Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music by Valorie Salimpoor et al.).

To complete the dopamine/music pleasure circuit, how about listening to a song about this particular neurotransmitter (as well as its cousin norepinephrine)? "Chemical Love" by Charlie McDonnell is sure to fire up those striatal neurons!

Billy Joel, Adjunct Professor of Fishery Sciences

Thanks to Prof. Kira Wennstrom of Shoreline Community College for pointing us to this super-cool activity: Downeaster Alexa: A Fishery Story (PDF file).

It was created in 1991 through a National Science Foundation grant to an Ohio State University team led by Victor J. Mayer and Rosanne W. Fortner. Its in-depth consideration of the lyrics of the Billy Joel song "The Downeaster 'Alexa'" (embedded below), and its connection of those lyrics to relevant data, offer a strong rebuke to anyone tempted to dismiss educational uses of science songs as superficial or frivolous.

Science song of the week: Tevatron requiem

Tuesday's Nature News announced, "Tevatron faces final curtain."

After much debate, officials at the US Department of Energy's Office of Science revealed this week that they have decided not to extend funding for the Tevatron, the proton–antiproton collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, by an additional three years. The decision means that the first glimpse of the long-predicted Higgs particle, thought to endow other particles with mass, will probably be achieved by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland.

Below is the YouTube video for "Particle Business" by rapper funky49 (a.k.a. Steven Rush). It does a nice job conveying that CERN's LHC and Fermilab's Tevatron have been in a high-stakes race to find evidence of the Higgs particle:

Tevatron, OG atom smasher
say hello to CERN’s party crasher, the
new "Lord of the Rings" LHC, hear me, this
be competitive collaboration baby...
rock stars of physics, particle business
smash matter, antimatter and witness
quarks, bottom to top they don’t stop
"where the Higgs at?" yo that’s their mark
where the Higgs at? where the Higgs at?
where the Higgs at?

One more "year-in-review" song, and then on to 2011 in earnest!

The Scientist has published several compilations of the year's top biology papers, including a top 7 in biochemistry and a top 5 for all of biology, both ranked by the Faculty of 1000. The key advances included two prized crystal structures: complex I of the bacterial electron transport chain, and the two subunits of the yeast ribosome. The most pertinent song I found was "The Structural Biology Rap" by Zach Powers (a.k.a. The Science Rapper), which gives an overview of pertinent techniques including protein expression and crystallography.

Sonification: transforming data into sounds

NPR reports on Lily Asquith's attempts to analyze LHC data by converting them into sounds in "Particle Pings: Sounds of the Large Hadron Collider."

[Asquith] thought about a heart monitor in a hospital; it turns the electrical data from your heart into sound.

"You don't have to watch the monitor because you can hear it without making any effort," she says. "Just a steady beep — you can quite easily detect if it starts going quicker or if it stops even for a second."

She wondered what would happen if she used music composition software to turn data from the collider into sound....

What she got isn't quite music, but sounds that are more out of this world — bells, beeps and clangs.

Right now, Asquith says, the sounds don't tell scientists very much. But she hopes that in the future, it could help them understand the data in new ways.

She says that in certain situations, it's much easier to use your ears than your eyes, particularly with something that's changing over time. Collider data do that.