For over twenty years the Oregon State Psychiatric Hospital stored the cremated remains of patients in copper containers. Photographer David Maisel found them, and shows the beautiful — and bizarre — chemical reactions that took place as the canisters corroded in his exhibit, "Library of Dust." Produced by Sarah Lilley.

AARON is the world’s first cybernetic artist: an artificially intelligent system that composes its own paintings. Incredibly, the system is the work of one man, Harold Cohen, who had no background in computing when he began the effort. 

Everywhere we go, we leave a trail of personal information — in the stray hairs that land on park benches, or saliva on the edges of coffee cups. And artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg may be collecting that information, whether you like it or not. Using equipment and procedures now easily available, she extracts the DNA from strangers’ hair or fingernail clippings, and uses it to makes life-like models of people’s faces — people she’s never met or seen. She calls the project Stranger Visions.

Bringing extinct animals back has usually been left to the world of science fiction. But a group of biologists is attempting it in the real world. The organization Revive & Restore, a project of the Long Now Foundation, held a day-long TEDx conference on de-extinction at the National Geographic Society. This is not quack science; some of the research involves Harvard University, UC Santa Cruz, and Wake Forest University, among other institutions. Painter Isabella Kirkland, who is also a...

A Louisiana physician (and amateur filmmaker) teamed up with a cinematographer to invent a system that they say improves the quality and reliability of photos used in medical records — using some basic Hollywood technology.  

If just reading the word “drone” makes you nervous, you’re not alone. Americans have been uneasy – fascinated but nervous – ever since unmanned aerial vehicles entered our consciousness about a decade ago. We talked to some artists who are exploring how we think and feel about UAVs, from “Stealthware” burqas and hoodies that make the wearer invisible to surveillance, to drones that dance instead of spying.

Neuroscience is a vast field. Here’s how Greg Dunn describes it: “It’s as if in New York, there’s like a little neighborhood for electro-physiologists, there’s a little neighborhood for the behaviorists and for the cellular specialist. It’s quite a labyrinth.” When he was studying in grad school, Dunn’s neighborhood of neuroscience was epigenetics. “It’s how your body learns,” he says. For example, if a skinny person gains 100 pounds — will their future offspring be prone to obesity? Or if...

Take a look at Laurie Frick’s artwork, made up of colorful wooden blocks mounted to the gallery wall, and the first thing you think of is a childhood playroom strewn with building blocks. But Frick’s artwork is actually a complex response to the growing trend of self-tracking. She takes data collected by tracking her daily activity and turns it into hand-crafted visualizations in materials like wood and leather. Frick calls her art "data selfies" — abstract self-portraits that reveal volumes...

The LEGO brick as we know it was released in 1958. But it wasn’t until 20 years later that the company made its first minifigure, or “minifig.” It was a little modular man with a yellow face: just two dots for eyes and a black curve for a smile. But the humble minifigure populated the LEGO world and gave it heart. It was a very smart move. LEGO has since made a fortune creating Star Wars and Harry Potter sets. There are now hundreds of different minifigures. But one thing has not changed....

Synthetic biology sounds like a field inaccessible to the layperson, but Kurt Andersen has been seeing these ideas play out in pop culture for decades. Screenwriters are fond of two basic archetypes. First, there's the lone scientist –– Dr. Frankenstein meets Dr. Moreau –– who has been exiled from the scientific community because his or her ideas are "too extreme." Then there's the other archetype –– the loyal scientist who works within a corporation and has an ethical blind spot to the...

Actor Steven Kearney reads excerpts from Greg Bear's 1985 novel Blood Music. Bear was one of the first sci-fi authors to delve deep into the possibilities of synthetic biology. In this section, a biologist named Michael Bernard is infected with a killer virus that has wiped out most of North America. The virus is made up of tiny biological computers called “noocytes,” where were intended to improve the human body — giving it routine maintenance and maximizing human potential. Instead, it...

We usually praise art for sparking a conversation and even making us uncomfortable — but does that mean anything bio-artists do is totally cool?

Few artists have embraced bio-hacking as much as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. They’re a husband and wife team who run SymboticA, a lab for biological art at the University of Western Australia. Their first big buzzed-about project in 2004 was a "victimless" leather jacket, which was so small, Catts jokes it would only be suitable for a mouse. But it was created out of living cells from human and mouse DNA. When the piece was shown at MoMA in New York, the jacket grew too quickly, clogging up...

The innovations that are happening in synthetic biology will change life on Earth. But most of the decision-makers in the field are at large research institutions and corporations. In the past few years, there’s been a growing movement around the world working to democratize biotech and put these high tech tools into the hands of bio-hackers, artists, hobbyists –– and now public radio reporters. Reporter Julia Wetherell took a three-day crash course in designing life at Genspace, the world’s...

We all know the Thomas Edison line: genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. But there are those who don't seem to perspire at all. Their extraordinary gifts seem to come from no where. We often call those people savants. And some neuroscientists are trying to understand where their talents come from.

Frances Arnold is a biochemical engineer at Cal Tech working on one part of the energy crisis. In a process called “directed evolution,” Arnold’s team is altering the genetic codes of bacteria to evolve a strain of organisms than can digest grass and excrete biofuel.

More than 25 years ago, the largest audience ever for a TV movie tuned to ABC to watch a simulated nuclear holocaust. “The Day After” focused on a group of survivors in the heartland of Kansas. Studio 360's Derek John grew up nearby. He asks his 9th grade science teacher why she made him watch the program.

EEG — electroencephalography — is almost a century old, and it’s creeping out of the research lab and the neurologist’s office. Headsets embedded with electrodes to read electrical activity in the brain are commercially available, and designers are using that information for all sorts of purposes. On the one hand, experimental wheelchairs can now be guided by brainwaves; videogame companies, inevitably, are exploring game control without a joystick.   Exciting as that may be, Henry...

"Dark matter" has been in the news again lately as scientists in Switzerland have begun mapping what they believe is its prevalence across the universe. But they're not the only ones focused on identifying and describing it. French artist Abdelkader Benchamma has been making intricate drawings of cosmic phenomena for a while now, and his obsession with dark matter reaches its zenith in an installation on view for the next 12 months at The Drawing Center in New York City.

Nearly a decade after the human genome was decoded, scientists are only now beginning to understand its implications. One of the leading thinkers in this field is the biotech entrepreneur Gregory Stock. A biophysicist by training, his 2002 book Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future makes the case that full-scale genetic engineering is on the way — whether we like it or not. And, Stock believes, if the US doesn’t lead the way in developing those advances, other nations will....

To make art, a computer first needs to understand what art is.  A group of computer scientists at Brigham Young University is attempting this by feeding their program images by the thousands and describing those images. Digital Artist Communicating Intent (she goes by DARCI) recognizes about 2,000 adjectives so far, including terms like peaceful, scary, and dark. The goal is to teach DARCI to pick out those visual qualities in artwork — and ultimately, to write algorithms modeling creativity...

What makes a hit? A catchy hook? A good beat? Even the experts can’t really explain what the recipe is. “You can check off all of those checkboxes,” says Keith Caulfield, an associate director at Billboard, “but it doesn’t necessarily mean that song is going to become a hit. Because otherwise everyone would have a hit single and we’d all be incredibly wealthy, and it doesn’t work that way.” 

Vart (it rhymes with fart) is software engineer Jenn Schiffer’s experiment in teaching herself, and others, more about art by coding. She decides on a way to replicate or elaborate on an artist’s work in Javascript, and writes about the process and the artist. Using her program, you can generate works similar to “Composition No. 10,” and tweak the size and nature of the grids, as well as the colors. After that, she moved on to another Javascript art project: this one focused on the surrealist...

Charles Limb is a professor of otolaryngology at Johns Hopkins Medicine who has a sideline in brain research; he’s also on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. He wants to know what happens in our brains when we play piano. Simple: stick a musician in an fMRI machine, and see what happens.

Big Data — and how we use it — is changing the way we understand our culture and history. Research scientists Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean Baptiste Michel (Uncharted: Big Data as Lens on Human Culture) teamed up with Google to create the (highly addictive) Ngram Viewer: it sifts through millions of digitized books and charts the frequency with which words have been used. Aiden and Michel call their method of combing through text to map cultural trends “culturomics.” “It’s like genomics but...