Engineers at Cornell University presented work on smartphone-based medicine at CLEO: 2013 last month, the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics. Their creation is an external device that connects to a smartphone and can be used to diagnose Kaposi’s sarcoma and a slew of other serious conditions....
I’ve described in an earlier post what our current logo looks like and what all three images actually are. But we also have some specimens around of ancestral forms. Like any brand identity, the design process involved a lot of back-and-forth and extensive prototyping before the decision was made to commit to one version. This was all before my time, so I thought it was very cool to see documentation of those steps.
First, here’s a neat jumping-off point created by Aine McDonnell, the talented designer who developed our brand. It’s a collection of colour swatches derived from living organisms. This was a brainstorming technique to get some direction before there was a clear idea of what the logo itself would look like. The final colours are pretty close to shades found in the lower two options.
Being a fan of science fact is a lot like being a fan of science fiction: every once in a while, a team of writers decides to obliterate your personal canon, seemingly because they hate you and want you to suffer. Actually that’s mostly just...
It wasn’t planned this way, but the Talk Science logo has become a sort of test (a fun one, we hope). Pretty much everyone can identify what’s in the first circle. Far fewer can tell at a glance what the second one contains (only one person has gotten it right the first time). And I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone name the item in the third circle right away, although occasionally someone comes close.
Circle 1
This is, of course, a cephalopod. An octopus, to be specific. Octopuses (that is how we pluralize it here) are a nearly endless source of weird biology facts. They have three hearts and no skeleton, and their brains are widely distributed throughout their extremely compressible bodies. And they’re smart. There’s debate about precisely how smart and in what ways, but their behaviour demonstrates remarkable adaptability and complexity.
Don Sapatkin has a really interesting piece up at philly.com right now. It chronicles the origin of the “patient zero” narrative. If you’re not familiar, the story is that all known cases of HIV in the United States can be traced back to a single, unusually promiscuous individual, a flight attendant from Canada named Gaetan Dugas. While a lot of people have known this to be bunk basically since it was published, many others seem to believe it. I first encountered it on a message board where it was posted as an interesting factoid.
What Sapatkin's article reveals is that the entire “Patient Zero” story was a calculated PR strategy by HIV researchers and public health officials who had become desperate to bring the disease into the public eye. According to the people quoted in the article, it worked. According to others, the effect on Dugas was ruinous, and his treatment utterly inhumane.