Cheata Se

Before this week’s lectures, I have always thought that nanotechnology is a newly innovated branch of technology, perhaps even more recent than biotechnology. However, as Professor Gimzewski stated, nanotechnology has appeared long before scientists could truly comprehend the workings and characteristics of atoms (2012).  Lycurgus Cup One of the earliest examples of nanotechnology could be found in the Lycurgus cup, which dated from the late Roman civilization. According to the British Museum, Lycurgus cup is a drinking cup that portrays various scenes of King Lycurgus’s death (2017). Undoubtedly, the Romans wanted the cup to be an artistic piece or memorabilia for the next generation. However, its color-changing properties intrigue the scientists. The cup appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind (Merali, 2013). After scrutinizing the cup’s broken fragments under a microscope, the researchers found that the glass is filled with tiny nan

The Event Poster  On May 18th, I went to Professor Jenny Reardon’s “Post-Genomic Condition: Justice, Knowledge, Life After the Genome” lecture at UCLA. She mainly focused on the issues of racial identity, justice, equality and democracy that are embedded within the science field.   She started her presentation by explaining the basics of the human genome and how there are approximately 3 millions nucleotide base pairs that made up our DNA (Reardon, 2018). Then she discussed what it means to “sequence” the human genome. By determining the order of the base pairs, we can observe the variations between species, as well as within species, at the genomic levels (Howard, 2016).  How Not to Talk about Race The Human Genome Project (HGP) that is responsible for this study found that there was no gene for race (NHGRI, 2016). People around the world all share the same gene regardless of their skin color. The only difference is the amount of pigment molecules that contain in our

A few weeks ago, we learned that medical technologies owed their origins to the artists’ obsession with the human body and their anatomical illustrations (Vesna, 2012). Therefore, it is not surprising to learn that our current understandings of the brain should also emerge from the arts.  Training Your Brain One of the fascinating things I learned this week is that we can train our brains to perceive and think differently or even to resist certain compulsions. In his lecture, Professor Cohen discusses the effect of wearing the inverted glasses. In the first few days, the participants would feel nauseous, but after a while, they would all get used to it. What really interesting is that when the project ended and the participants took off the glasses, their brain would adapt right away and they would not experience any difference in perception (Cohen, 2012). It is like our minds can be permanently rewired and used to store all of the complex remapping (Morin, 2017). If this

From this week’s lectures, I learned for the first time that there is such thing as bioart, which refers to a contemporary form of art that uses scientific methods and biotechnology to explore living systems as artistic subjects (Yetisen et al., 2015). While it is interesting and thought-provoking to learn, I find bioart to be a little bit unsettling, specifically regarding the extent that some artists would go for the sake of aesthetic and arts.  Live Bicyclus anynana butterfly with modified wing pattern. In her project, Marta de Menezes modified the wing patterns of live butterflies as her medium of artistic expression (Vesna, 2012). She wanted to make a statement that despite the distinct physical differences, we all are more alike than we realized (Reinert, 2004). However, the experiment left permanent holes in the butterflies’ wings, thus reducing the butterflies’ lifespan (Vesna, 2012).  I just do not think that biomanipulation is acceptable for artistic purposes. A

For my second event, I went to see the Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World exhibition at the Getty Center. The show displays mostly classical artifacts and sculptures, all of which are either inspired by the Greeks, Romans or Egyptians that dated all the way to the Bronze Age. In a way, I think this exhibition also demonstrates the artistic interplay between these cultures.  A Magical Text For centuries, historians and anthropologists have tried very hard to discover more antiquities and relics that could help shed more light on the life of the Classical World for it is crucial to learn from the past and use that knowledge to improve our society (Livy, 1998). However, there has always been a stronger emphasis on the Egyptians specifically for not only they were the oldest civilization in the world, but also for their advanced technology, architecture and medical knowledge (Vuillemot, 2015). Mummy of Herakleides One of the objects that most fascinated me is t