Here’s a treat! A guest post by Dr. Valerie Weiss, a scientist-turned-filmmaker, who will be in Philadelphia on 10/22 to debut her film “Losing Control” (a romantic comedy about a female scientist who wants proof that her boyfriend is “the one.”) I’m planning to attend if you’d like to join me!

It can be tricky when you love two things equally that most people think are opposites. The Science Cheerleaders may know this better than anyone! For me, science and film are those two things. Now that I’ve combined them in LOSING CONTROL, my quirky romantic comedy about a female scientist who wants proof that her boyfriend is “the one”, it is easier to see how they fit together. I fell in love with acting when I was a nine years old, and then fell in love with Biology in tenth grade, and like loving two different boys, the bad-boy (film) and the nice-guy (science), these two loves didn’t seem compatible.

Actually, to me, they were always compatible, but it was nearly impossible to explain it to people, and even harder to explain that I thought I could do them both. For most people, art and science are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how we think. For me, they’ve always been two different approaches to accessing the same thing– how life works. The questions each one asks are what drew me to them in the first place, and the reason I’ve never grown tired of either is the tremendous amount of creativity it takes to do each of them.

The creativity in being an artist is commonly acknowledged, but the creativity in science is often overlooked. In fact, science is just as creative as art. Just believing that there is some order to our extremely varied and wondrous world takes a creative mind. Recognizing central questions and designing experiments to answer them is a creative process. Interpreting data and designing a model for how something works is absolutely creative. For me, science and art have always gone hand-in-hand, and I don’t think I’d be the filmmaker I am today with my specific point-of-view, if I hadn’t been a scientist first. Science and art enrich my experience of each other and the world around me and I am grateful to have both perspectives when telling my stories– being a scientist and a filmmaker has broadened my world rather than narrowing it.

Synopsis of LOSING CONTROL from Philadelphia Film Festival Guide:

Sam (Miranda Kent) is a young scientific genius striving in vain to reproduce the results of a breakthrough experiment she began four
years ago. When her infinitely patient boyfriend Ben (Reid Scott) proposes, Sam”s highly practical mind can”t handle the number of variables that accompany Ben”s offer of marriage and lifelong commitment. When Ben moves to China for a prestigious fellowship, Sam decides to put her love life through a set of trials in order to prove or disprove that Ben is the only one for her. Kent”s performance as an ambitious young woman in her late twenties, unsure of the direction her life is taking, is at once endearing and hilarious. Losing Control”s supporting cast members demonstrate high aptitude for delivery of Weiss”s sharp, witty dialogue. Weiss also proves she possesses a talent for crafting scenes that will encourage almost constant laughter, as Sam”s earnest execution of her romantic research places her in increasingly ridiculous situations. When all parts combine, the result is a highly entertaining independent film with plenty of charm.

Dr. John here… If you’re anything like me, your dancing skills can be summed up by a poorly executed routine performed to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean at about two weddings per year.

The same cannot be said for my friend, Dr. Kiki Jenkins, a marine conservation scientist who was once recruited to be a professional dancer.

Kiki began dancing as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. There as a dance minor, she regularly performed in modern, jazz, and African dance pieces as well as choreographing her own work. Throughout graduate school, Kiki taught and performed with the Dance Arts Studio in Morehead City from 1999-2006. After finishing her PhD, she moved to California in the Bay Area, where she danced for Bonner Odell and was also recruited and joined a local professional dance company.

You can see one of her performances in the video above. “Can’t Give Up Now” was choreographed and performed by Kiki as a farewell to the Dance Arts Studio, where she taught dance throughout graduate school.

As Kiki describes it, “The dance depicts the struggles of pursuing a PhD., the final push to finish writing my thesis, and the sustaining grace of God that carried me through it all.”

I had the opportunity get to know Kiki when we were both Science and Technology Policy Fellows with the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 2007-2009. I had a chance to ask Kiki a few questions about what motivated her to pursue a career in science and how she was able to integrate both dancing and science into her life. Stay tuned for more…

I recently had a chance to see my favorite citizen science-loving indie rock band, DeVille, perform live in Washington DC. I had so much fun that I even put together this video, which includes an inspirational interview with lead guitarist, Ian Graham. Check it out if you can spare three minutes for non-stop fun and rockin’ power-pop music.

For more info, make sure to check out Deville’s website. Gooooooooooo DeVille!

The other night, I was watching one of my favorite local bands, Deville, perform at a cozy DC music venue when I noticed something familiar about guitarist, Ian Graham. That’s right — the famed Science Cheerleader t-shirt!  Those things are like gold around here.

Well, I “just so happened to have my HD video camera”, so expect to get the full story on how this up-and-coming band is embracing the spirit of citizen science.

John-the-Tourist writes:

In my attempt to keep up with high-energy physics news, I read the online publication, “Symmetry Breaking“.  “Symmetry Breaking” had an article with an fascinating set of photos of a sculpture (Quantum Man II, below). Based on your viewing angle, the sculpture would either appear solid or would melt away into an almost ethereal nothingness.  “Quantum Man II”  is a representation of the wave-particle duality of nature and is the work of artist and scientist Julian Voss-Andreae, of Portland, Oregon.

Julian has an interesting history:  During the 1990s he was a physicist and he participated in an experiment that showed the wave-particle duality of the largest object to date, the C₆₀ “buckyball”.  In the 2000s, Julian changed careers and is now crafting sculptures, many of which are based on scientific topics.   Several of Julian’s pieces are part of the “Worlds Within Worlds” exhibit, showing through April 16, 2010 at the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland (approximately 10 miles northeast of Washington D.C.).

I asked Julian for an interview, and he graciously accepted and answered my questions.  Note – In the following interview, [SC] = “Science Cheerleader” and [JVA] = “Julian Voss-Andreae.”

[SC]: While growing up, was your first “love” art, science or were you interested in both?

[JVA]:  My first love was in a way both art and science; it was my LEGO blocks. I would spend hours building stuff with them. At that time, form strictly followed function for me. I would make very functional toys like cars with motors and 4-wheel steering or vehicles that carried a detachable folded up bridge on their back. As an older kid I had hobbies in both fields, pottery for example in art or electronics as a more science-based hobby.  I also had a really cool chemistry lab in my room which I started assembling as a child. By the time I was about fifteen I had collected hundreds of chemicals. During those years I also got obsessed with computer programming which aimed mostly at creating cool visual effects. But in all my interests, including the scientific ones, I was always driven more by the sensual and aesthetic experience than by an interest in purely intellectual understanding.

[SC]:  According to your bio you were drawn to study physics due to its philosophical implications.  Which philosophical implications intrigued you?

[JVA]: As a young kid my aunt always gave me a certain popular science journal which I loved to read. Almost every issue had pictures of melting clocks and of Einsteins with crazy hairdo and his tongue sticking out and I was fascinated by the articles that came with those illustrations; partly because I found them completely unimaginable. Later I realized that Einstein’s theory of relativity is actually not nearly as challenging to our everyday assumptions about reality as quantum physics. When I started studying at the university I first took some philosophy classes and it was in such a class that I came across Roger Penrose’s fabulous book “The Emperor’s New Mind”. That book really made me want to study quantum physics because I wanted to see how far I can get in really understanding those problems. Penrose does a beautiful job in pointing out the deep problems that stem from the fact that our intuitions are not made to deal with the quantum world.

[SC]:  In your paper “Towards Quantum Sculpture”, you mention that the probabilistic nature of the quantum world gives hope to the concept of “free will”.  Could you elaborate?

[JVA]:  Quantum physics provides us with a detailed statistical knowledge describing exactly the behavior of many events but it does not predict the outcome of the individual event. We can, for example, calculate the pattern of light that falls on a photo paper very accurately but if we dim the light down and look at the spots caused by single particles of light, the photons, quantum physics doesn’t predict where each photon will be detected. After a hundred years of quantum physics we now know that this is not a shortcoming of the theory but a fundamental aspect of reality. The single event turns out to be not determined by anything. It is truly random. Now, if we look at the concept of free will in a pre-quantum, Newtonian world view there is simply no space for that. Everything is caused by something, everything is deterministic. Yes, there is certainly chaos (in a mathematical sense of the word) and things like the butterfly effect, but we are still essentially puppets on a string in this world view, because everything is predestined. With the fall of the absolute reign of causality this looks different though and we can have hope that this freedom of will we seem to possess is not just an illusion of ours.

[SC]:  You and I both admire Linus Pauling (he was a sort of hero of mine in my teen years).  How did your sculpture “Alpha Helix” (below right) come to end up in Dr. Pauling’s front yard?

[JVA]:  He was a very cool scientist and an extraordinary human being. He started out doing quantum mechanics with
its founders in Europe, which he, as one of the first people, applied to chemistry. Then he went all the way over biomolecules to human health and to the health of society as a whole. I am a big fan of him as well. And I noticed around 2002 that I kept making those “alpha helix” sculptures based on the geometry of a very common spiral motif found in proteins that was postulated first by Pauling. And I made some of those pieces from Douglas firs, the Oregon state tree. When I realized that Pauling was born and raised in Portland and that there is absolutely nothing here to commemorate him, I thought this was a shame since he is certainly one of the most important sons of this city. After all, he is the only person to ever win two unshared Nobel Prizes. So my idea was to create some sort of a monument for him, namely an alpha helix out of a bronze cast Douglas fir. I typed “Pauling memorial” into Google and found that some people had proposed a building in his honor. I visited the architect who had drawn the sketches and was referred to Terry Bristol, who is best known in Portland for organizing a very successful series of science lectures. I met Terry, we had a long talk about physics and philosophy, and he wanted me to create an outdoor sculpture for the Linus Pauling Center located at Pauling’s former childhood home. Pauling had his first laboratory as a child in the basement of that house on Hawthorne Boulevard in SE Portland. The plan to do it in bronze turned out to be difficult and I came up with the idea to use a steel beam instead.

[SC]:  Many of your commissions are from scientists or scientific organizations.  Would you like your work to expand beyond this audience?

[JVA]:  Yes, I would very much like to do expand beyond the science circles. I do have a few collectors without a strong affinity to science but it is not easy to reach this kind of audience. One reason my work appeals foremost to scientists is that my works tend to have underlying concepts with an actual meaning and scientists can appreciate them for what they are. In the art world, the situation is different: A critical mass of art world endorsement is needed that most collectors dare to ‘invest’ in an artist. The ‘aura’ of the art, i.e. at what venues the artist exhibits and who talks about him or her is all-critical and in my opinion frequently rated much higher than the work itself. But I am still interested in getting more into the traditional art world circles because I feel that is where my work ultimately belongs.

[SC]:  What messages would you like your work to convey to a larger audience?

[JVA]:  My main message is simple. I have a deep feeling of awe when I behold nature. That can be a landscape or humans, or how an animal moves, but it can also be phenomena we see only through the instruments and theories of science. My first goal is to share and convey this feeling I have.

[SC]:  The Oregon Public Television video showed you experimenting with balloons and resin; this caused me to think of the speculated space-time “foam” at the Planck length.   Did you have a particular theme in mind as you were exploring the balloon and resin method?

[JVA]:  I came to that idea by thinking of a natural way to connect dots in space. I started out writing my own
algorithm for this which turned out to be trickier than I had thought. Then I contacted an old physics professor of mine and asked him about some irregular lattices he had used in his research which I still remembered from my student days. He pointed me into the direction of so-called Voronoi cells and from there it was only a small step to the structure of foam. He was actually studying quantum chromodynamics, the dynamics of quarks. He did his calculations on random lattices instead of the regular grid to avoid computational artifacts. After I had gone into a dead end with modeling foam on the computer, I decided to create a real foam-like system by using water balloons as bubbles and filling the gaps in between the balloons with a hardening liquid. At the end I pop the balloons and I am left with the cellular structure of foam. I have made several trial objects and one cast bronze piece in that technique. I later called the bronze piece “The Universe” (above, left). This sculpture was actually directly inspired by the hypothesized smallest cells of space and time you were mentioning in your question. In fact, its initial title even was “The Cellular Structure of Space and Time”.

[SC]:  You contributed to the ground-breaking experiment in 1999 that showed the wave-particle duality of the largest object (C₆₀ “Buckyball”) to date.  What did this experiment tell us about the borderline between the classical and quantum worlds?

[JVA]:  Essentially it tells us that there is no such borderline between the quantum world and the world of classical physics. This divide is a man-made concept, (or, to be more accurate, it was Niels Bohr-made); it is an artificial separation. In principle, we can see quantum effects on every scale, not only in the microscopic realm. That we don’t usually see them and that it is very difficult to perform such an experiment even though the 1-nanometer buckyball is still quite small compared to us, has to do with the fact that larger systems are much harder to separate completely from the environment.

[Editors Note - An article just recently published proposes using optical levitation to separate objects from their noisy environment, thus possibly allowing quantum experiments on objects with millions of atoms.]

[SC]:  Your work tends to deal with the very small.  Might you sculpt works based on the very large (e.g., cosmological scale)?

[JVA]:  I have been thinking about the stars in the night sky and I have made pieces that allude to that imagery. But larger than that? I am not sure. I did call that piece I mentioned above “The Universe” though… I guess the cosmological scale is just too mind-boggling to me. I just read a book about the possibility that we have not just one Universe, but an infinite amount of Universes. I prefer small things for now. Maybe later!

[SC]:  At “Science Cheerleader”, we like to have fun.  Which of your sculptures do you consider the most whimsical?

[JVA]:  You know, that is actually a tough question for me. In my culture, ‘Kunst’ – fine art – is something very serious – well, you know, I am from Germany. Not that art is necessarily all that depressing where I come from, but it tends to be seen as something profound, something concerned with deep questions. When I went to Art College in the US I was surprised that Americans generally don’t seem to feel like that. Fine art can easily be whimsical, even comical here. So even though humor and silliness are important to me in my personal life, there is really no space for that in my art. But there is a sculpture I made a few years ago that might qualify as ‘whimsical’: It is a piece of square lumber my dog chewed up. It looks really neat since he was balancing it in his snout which gave the stick sort of a narrow, almost regular waist. Right before he broke it, I took it away, lacquered it and made a metal stand for it. A fellow art student suggested the title “Monument to Chomp” (above, right) playing off Duchamp’s name and it is still called like that. The piece is actually included in my current “Quantum Objects” exhibition in Washington DC.

[SC]:  Your work explores the intersection of science and art.  Might you one day explore the intersection between, say, science and cheerleading?

[JVA]:  I find cheerleading actually quite fascinating. I find it certainly much more entertaining than the sports usually following it. It is impressive from a performance point of view and also interesting to me because it is all about conveying excitement, the very essence of any art. I am not sure though if I will one day directly reference it somehow in my work… But it would probably be really fun to take space-time measurements of cheerleading moves and turn them into a sculpture or other kind image.

Sculpture image credits:  Julian Voss-Andreae

From John-the-Tourist:

Looking for that perfect holiday gift for the science cheerleader in your life?  Having a hard time finding it? I had that problem a couple of years ago, then I saw a blurb in the print version of Discover magazine titled “Micrograph Chic” which showed a pair of absolutely stunning earrings – the colors were vibrant and the pattern was beautifully abstract. The reason for the cool colors and impressive pattern was that the earrings were a photomicrograph of crystallized brain chemicals (dopamine, serotonin, etc), which was photographed through polarized light and then magnified about 600 times. Unfortunately, the Discover article didn’t include a URL, and my Google Search at the time didn’t come up with anything.  Sadly, I had to buy my wife some lame present like a frying pan.

Since I’m a cool science guy (and don’t want to get smacked on the head with another frying pan), I tried another Google search this year and I hit the jackpot!  The earrings are the handiwork of Amy Sweetman, a psychologist with a passion for jewelry design.  On her website DopomineJewelry.com you can find necklaces, cuff links, bracelets, key chains and (of course) earrings.  Not only can you get brain chemicals, but you can get photomicrographs of brain altering chemicals such as the ever popular “caffeine” and a wide assortment of cocktails.

Amy and I shared a few emails about her interest in science and what she’s doing to merge science and art; here’s what she wrote…

I read about the Science Cheerleader and was very impressed.  Darlene has definitely been added to my list of admirable figures.  If possible, I would love to meet with her the next time she visits Los Angeles.  I am sure we could find a lot to talk about, and I look forward to help support her efforts.

Like Darlene, I was also captain of my high school cheerleading team, so I can definitely relate to her spirit.  Also, I worked as a cocktail waitress to fund my college education.  At the age of 22, I obtained my Masters degree and was very fortunate to land a full time position as a professor of psychology at a local community college.  My specialization is Biological Psychology which attempts to analyze behavior and its correlation to brain and nervous system processes.  Additionally, I have a couple of businesses that are science related and fit right in with the Science Cheerleader’s mission of “making science Sexy”.  My company is named Dopamine Jewelry, and it showcases microscopic photographs of behavior altering chemicals.  The line features pictures of neurotransmitters, hormones, and caffeine.  However, I also decided to utilize my bar related experience and knowledge to include cocktails and wine as well.  The jewelry not only illuminates the beauty of science, but is also educational.  Each item comes with two informational cards: one that tells about the chemical; the second explains the microscopic photography process.    The line has been featured in Discover Magazine and is sold in museums across the nation.

I do a number of fundraisers for local schools, and I find it very rewarding educating people about the various brain chemicals and their affect on behavior.  I have recently launched a new line simply called “Science”.  This jewelry line features the molecular structure of my best selling images, which are caffeine, dopamine, and serotonin.   The line also includes a beautiful science symbol (atom with orbiting electrons) with gemstones that I think would be perfect for the science cheerleader.  Other designs in the line feature magnifying glass jewelry.   I have also manufactured Christmas ornaments of the molecular structures.  My design aim for this particular line was to create something that is science based, sleek, beautiful and sexy without being geeky – like the science cheerleader herself.

One of my greatest contributions of educating the public about science is through the “Brain Bee.”  The Brain Bee is part of the National Brain Awareness initiative that seeks to educate the general population about neuroscience research.  High School students study a booklet created by the Society for Neuroscience and then competes to determine who has the most brain science knowledge.  I established the first Los Angeles Brain Bee last year.  Up until then, there were no local brain bees on the west coast of the United States.  I completely organized and funded this event and was able to take the winner and her father to compete in the National event held at the University of Maryland.  This year, I am making improvements to the Brain Bee by working with UCLA and USC Neurosurgeons. These doctors will be giving talks and conducting tours of their neuroscience labs.  Very exciting!

Another future goal is to create a Brain Art Exhibit which will feature a variety of art that illustrates the beauty of scientific phenomenon.

I truly admire what the Science Cheerleader is doing, and please convey to Darlene that she can count on me to be part of her squad!

John-the-Tourist again:  I’ve purchased a beta-endorphin necklace for my wife.  If I got her another frying pan, I’d need a shot of beta-endorphin to manage the pain of my re-flattened head.  May your heads retain some curvature and may you have a wonderful holiday season!

P.S. – If you still need a few other gift ideas, don’t forget soft and cuddly sub-atomic particles, giant stuffed microbes and (of course) our very own Science Cheerleader T-shirts.

Image credit:  Amy Sweetman