Link roundup for March, 2020

The big news about poster sessions this month is that... there are not going to be very many of them any time soon.

Conference after conference has been cancelled in response to the threat of COVID-19. Even those that are still a few months away have pulled the plug rather than face the uncertainty.

So far, some of the largest meetings in fall, and some conferences in summer, are still pressing forward, but this could be “the year without a conference” worldwide.

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So what else is there to do but make infographics about social distancing?

From Dani Rabiotti.

From Niall McCann.

From Stefany.

From Alena Ebeling-Schuld. Hat tip to Gaius Augustus.

From Milton Tan.

From aedecost. Hat tip to Fran Officialdegui.

From Huw Griffiths.

Also from Huw Griffiths.

Huw Griffiths is just a busy, busy man.

Huw Griffiths: the greatest hits compilation. 

From Ikea Israel. Hat tip to Amy Spiro and Prachee Avasthi.

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Chloe Christenson shows sarcastic fringehead papercraft that could very easily be adapted to a poster!

Because Twitter sucks at letting you download video, you’ll either have to view the tweet or settle for these screen grabs:

Hat tip to Echo Rivera, who rightly points out this sort of thing could be incorporated onto posters a lot more often.

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The genome engineering company Sythego has short post on how to make an effective scientific poster. And at least in late January, they were offering a chance to pick up a free poster tube!

This is one of the cooler and more useful bits of conference swag I’ve seen in a while! Hat tip to Meenakshi Prabhune.

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This image of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a wonderful visualization of the invisible threat to us.

Anna-Maria Meister asked a great question about how that visual was made.

(A)nyone know the story behind the #covid19 representation? Especially the one with the red spikes? It’s a thing of beauty, and I wonder what the aesthetic choices behind it are, and why and how they translate between cultures.

Robin Wolfe Scheffler found an article with the creators of the illustration, Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins. Robin pulled this great quote:

“We used color and contrast to help distinguish the structures, provide emphasis and help enhance emotional response in order to demonstrate the gravity of the virus and the situation.”

It’s great to have these kind of thoughtful individuals making these images.

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Rosamund Pike plays Marie Curie in a new biopic, Radioactive.

The Nature podcast has an interview with her that is quite interesting, and touches on the importance and difficulty of making science visual. At 3:30 in the interview, Lizzy Gibney asks why Pike learned about the science for the role.

Well, I knew I couldn’t play Marie Curie unless I had some inkling of what was going on in her brain, outside of the lines of the script. You know, science isn't necessarily, as probably your listeners know, the most visually seductive subject for a film – as are many very interesting pursuits. Thinking is one of the hardest things to convey cinematically. It’s not like there’s a huge lot of drama in the lead-up to their discoveries. There’s drama afterwards, but the actual having of an idea, having of a position, all the things you try before you hit on the right solution, all of that is not essentially cinematic. So we have to create beauty out of it, and interest.

I have to know the practical application of how they might have measured, how they might have distilled, evaporated, done any of the procedures they did in the journey to isolating these elements. As well as one the spectrometer. Exactly what those readings showed, and how, when you saw the little graph, that a certain piece of uranium ore had a higher quantity of this unknown element. I had to be able to look at these readings with knowledge and accuracy, because you know, the film camera is in your eye. They're close ups. They're seeing the activity of your brain. I had to be able to look like my brain was processing – and it’s more exciting if your brain is processing accurate information. It's not just thinking about what you’re going to have for breakfast. It's obviously more enticing and exciting.

(Emphasis added.)