It has been a while since my last post. Mostly I have been busy writing my thesis (finally submitted) but I have also started working on some exciting new projects and collaborations. This is a drawing from the most ambitious one. I prefer not to reveal the details for now. Just give me time…
This post is somehow related to Neurocomic (by the way, did you see the new hand-drawn website?) but also much more than that…
So, the news is that I will be performing some live events in the next few months. The neurocomic team will be armed with microscopes, real brain slices and sketchbooks, and everyone is invited to draw some neurons with me and learn some science along the way. It is kind of an experiment, I hope it will be fun! Oh, if you need more reasons to join us, I also made a giant comic-poster about Cajal for the occasion.
We will try this first with the friends of SUPERLAB on the 20th of February (from 7.30pm) at the Bedroom Bar.
Then we are going to take it to the Barbican Wonder Street Fair for 4 consecutive days: 7-9 April.
Entry is FREE of course. Hope to see you there!
This work has been sitting in my drawer for a while. I’m particularly fond of the subject so I was really looking forward to share it with you. After a long wait the new magazine MISHAMURÉ is finally printed! From the beautiful cover by Saxarts it looks very promising, if you’re around Italy you should go and take a look inside.
Thanks to everyone who came to play with Neurocomic at the first Imperial Fringe night! (it was really fun to draw zombie comics with you kids)
In case you couldn’t make it, here is the science-horror comic we were giving away.
We still have a few copies left so if you want some for your Halloween party let me know.
PS: someone the other night was asking me what happened to Watson and Little Albert after the experiment. Well, here is a more complete (and possibly even more terrifying!) version of the story.
Here is a neuroscience illustration which I realized for the first issue of Ionic Magazine (soon to be published). I’m really looking forward to this amazing project, which asked artists to interpret and illustrate some interesting science articles (the one assigned to me was about opioid receptors, the secret of pleasure and pain).
I will bring this, together with some Neurocomic originals at the Thinking through Drawing exhibition, at Wimbledon College from the 12th to the 14th of September. Come and say “hello”, if you’re around.
NOTE (for the fussy scientists): I’m aware that these are normal poppies, rather than Papaver somniferum but I am taking an artistic licence here, roll with it.
I have started a collaboration with Jared Keller, from the Science Museum. He is going to write a series of 6 short articles about some of the best kept secrets of the museum, and I am going to illustrate each one of them. The first piece is about an amazing automated fire-burglar alarm from 1939.
I am not going to post all the drawings here, so if you want to be updated about old-fashioned science marvels follow me on twitter or read the Science Museum Blog (which is always a good idea, anyway).
As anticipated this blog is into a stall, while all my drawing time goes in to neurocomic these days.
However I won’t miss a good chance to combine art and science: so here is a poster commissioned to me by some friends at the university of Lübeck, who are organizing a workshop on Multi-Scale Modelling with python and GENESIS 3
I hope this manages to make the field of computational neuroscience more aesthetically appealing, and if you’re in to it don’t miss the excellent workshop (3 – 8 September 2012).
Henry Gustav Molaison (who became famous as ‘HM‘ in neuroscience textbooks) was born on February 26, 1926. After a bicycle accident at the age of 7 he suffered from debilitating epilepsy and in 1953 he underwent neuron surgery in an attempt to contain seizures.
Doctors localised HM’s epilepsy in his medio-temporal lobes and removed a large part of the hippocampus in both hemispheres. At the time they had no idea of how crucial these areas are for the normal functioning of the human brain…
Soon after the operation it became clear that something was wrong. HM suffered from severe anterograde amnesia: he was otherwise normal but no longer able to commit events to memory. He would not remember the newspaper he had just read or the people he met a few minutes ago, he was stuck in the present.
For the rest of his life HM was studied intensively, revolutionising the understanding of human memory. He provided broad evidence for the rejection of old theories and the formation of new theories on human memory and the underlying neural structures.
When HM died in 2008, neuroscientists were provided with the most extensively studied brain in history. This anatomical treasure was entrusted to Dr. Jacopo Annese in the University of California, San Diego, who acquired 2041 slices of HM’s brain and made them available to study.
Dr. Annese is the founder of the Brain Observatory, an ambitious project which aims to collect as much information as possible on brain donors, in the hope that one day we will be able to track the connection between the brain structure and our life history.
For more information check out the HM project on the brain observatory website, or listen to Dr. Annese talk at the Wellcome Collection recorded for BBC4 All In The Mind series (which inspired this comic!).
Here is a short comic about the sneaky strategies used by the anti-abortion movement in the UK. It’s written by a friend, based on the excellent investigation from Education for Choice, already published on the Guardian last Summer.
Please read and share:
For evidence based info on abortion visit http://www.efc.org.uk/
In the weekend I visit the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where in the pioneers of science room I find myself literally face-to-face with Dolly the sheep. I take a quick portrait while nearby some girls discuss their false beliefs…
plaster by Peter Summers
Dolly the sheep
(1996 – 2003)
As the first mammal cloned from an adult cell using the process of nuclear transfer, Dolly was an exact genetic replica of her donor mother. Her birth at the Roslin Institute of the university of Edinburgh in 1966 overturned the widely-held belief among developmental biologist that the specialized cells in our bodies are fixed in their roles. Dolly was named after the buxom country and western singer Dolly Parton as she was derived from a mammary gland cell. She was put down at the age of six due to a progressive lung disease, common among sheep.
Dolly Parton
