Play your genes

Ever wondered what your favourite gene would sound like if it was a melody? Well here’s a website where you can find out. 

Basically what it does is take the DNA sequence, convert it to amino acids, and assign each amino acid to a musical note (with some modifications to make it more musical, described here).  There is also a complicated way of assigning rhythm. 

Gene2music is the brainchild of Rie Takahashi, Jeffrey Miller, and Frank Pettit at UCLA.

X-ray as art

Nick Veasey likes to X-ray things.  Big things, like buses and jumbo jets, and small things like leaves and feathers.  And then he turns them into fantastic art pieces.

This video from www.ted.com has some great images, so I thought I’d share it with you – who’d have thought X-ray could be so artistic?

Toiling over 14-inch sheets of X-ray film in a hangar in Kent, photographer Nick Veasey has revealed the shadowy interiors of objects as diverse as vacuum tubes, bulldozers, jet airliners — even fresh cadavers. By his own estimates, he’s photographed thousands of everyday items, often arranging them into tableaux that are at the same time familiar and luminously alien. They reveal surprising details and prove that items have an inner beauty.