A few weeks ago we talked with surgeon Paul Ruggieri, about his book Confessions of a Surgeon. Last year, Chris Adrian and Siddhartha Mukherjee were among our favorite guests on Science Friday. (Mukherjee’s book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer won the 2011 Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction.)

This winter there’s a new collection of doctors’ works you can bring to the waiting room with you. Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction And Nonfiction by Doctors includes 16 essays by doctors (including Sacks and Gawande), and is edited by physician and writer Leah Kaminsky (who also wrote one of the essays). Ethan Canin’s “We Are Nighttime Travelers,” a look at aging and love, brought me to tears. (OK, I was reading it on a bus on the New Jersey Turnpike, but still….)

Image courtesy of Bryan William Jones, The University of Utah, Moran Eye Center. See slideshow below for full caption.

This week Science magazine unveiled the winners of the 2011 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge (sponsored by the AAAS and the NSF). The award “honors recipients who use visual media to promote the understanding of scientific research.” That sounds a bit dry, until you realize we’re talking about stained mouse eye slices, or a really, really close-up shot of baby cucumber skin. (Those images took first place and honorable mention, respectively, for photography.)

A selection of the winners is shown below. You can see all the winning entries here.

Musician Wade Ward and Alan Lomax (right) listening to playback, Galax, Virginia, 1959. Photo by Shirley Collins, courtesy of The Association for Cultural Equity.

Over his 70-year career, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax amassed thousands of sound recordings, piles of photographs, miles of film, and hours of videotape documenting traditional music and musicians from around the world. From his New York Times obituary (he died in 2002):

‘Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. “It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom,” he once said.’

Lomax imagined a “global jukebox” where music and other recordings could be collected and easily shared, long before iTunes, or even the internet, existed. The items he collected are now housed at the American Folklife Center, where they’re being digitized, moving that jukebox dream further along.

Lomax’s personal recordings from 1947 on have been digitized and are available here. This week, to coincide with what would have been his 97th birthday, the Global Jukebox label is releasing The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center. It features 16 tracks, collected between 1947-1982, including “Joe Turner” by Ed Young and Hobart Smith (below).

Lomax’s music legacy extends beyond Earth; he served as consultant to Carl Sagan for the audio collection that accompanied the 1977 Voyager space probe. For more on Alan Lomax, including an excerpt from his FBI file, check out the Association for Cultural Equity.

Detail of fasciated black-eyed Susan, by Amy Davis Roth.

Not all mutants are of the too-much-radiation, giant-reptile-takes-over-the-world variety. Artist Amy Davis Roth, of Mad Art Lab, photographed these black-eyed Susans growing in a California backyard. The flowers are exhibiting fasciation, or abnormal growth of the meristem of the plant. Fasciation can be caused by a mutation, a hormone imbalance, or environmental factors including viruses and  bacteria, according to Tim Smith of the Missouri Department of Conservation. See more of Ms. Roth’s photos here. And learn more about fasciation here.

“My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.”

William Gibson is often touted as the science fiction writer who predicted the Internet. And while it may be true that in Neuromancer, his first novel, he invented the term ‘cyberspace’ to describe a digital location inside a computer network, his foresight extended well beyond that catch phrase. His writing is not only about what not yet is, but what ‘used to be’ will look like, when ‘not yet’ becomes ‘now.’ He does not stop at our inventions, but asks what our logic machines will allow us to do, and what changes they will impose.

Gibson’s latest book Distrust That Particular Flavor is a collection of his non-fiction articles on several topics, most of which revolve around technology–where it’s been, where it may go, but most importantly, how it will change us. Nowhere, it seems to Gibson, is the interaction between silicon and sapien more pronounced than in Japan, a place which he writes “seem[s] to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the timeline.” In the essay “Modern Boys and Mobile Girls,” he explains both the reason for Japan’s quick adoption of technology, and his fascination with the island nation.

And while he mostly covers the positive things that technology can bring us, his essay “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” explores how it can also be used to control us. (That article, Gibson writes, got the magazine Wired banned in Singapore.) Gibson also has a great answer to the enduring scifi question in an article titled, “Will We Have Computer Chips in our Heads?”

It’s hard to compare Distrust That Particular Flavor with Neuromancer, or any of Gibson’s other works, but it’s interesting to see how an accomplished science fiction writer views the passage of real time in terms of people and their creations.

Aurora, Feb. 2011, Fairbanks, AK. Credit Eric Straley.

This week, we’ll talk about solar storms with David Hathaway, a solar astronomer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, and Doug Biesecker, a physicist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. They’ll tell us about recent activity on the sun, and how it could affect power grids, cell phone service, and (as we’ve already seen) the night sky here on Earth.

A large solar flare can spit a magnetic cloud far out into the solar system. According to Hathaway, if that cloud hits Earth’s magnetic bubble, it can send electrons streaming down Earth’s magnetic field lines into the polar atmosphere where they strike oxygen and nitrogen atoms; those atoms then glow with different colors depending on the altitude. After a large flare this past weekend, many skywatchers in the northern parts of the globe reported stunning aurorae, worth braving the cold for. Some of them even sent us their photos–thanks!

You can post your photos of auroras past and present on our flickr page, or click below to see what other listeners have sent in. (And check out the forecast for upcoming aurora-watching possibilities here.)

Don’t believe me? There’s plenty of proof in the new, 800-plus page book, Arthropod Brains: Evolution, Functional Elegance, and Historical Significance by Nicholas James Strausfeld (Harvard University Press, 2012). The book looks at the structure of arthropod brains, their similarity to mammalian brains, and tells the stories of the scientists who worked (and are still working) to figure it all out.

Strausfeld, a professor and Director of the Center for Insect Science at the University of Arizona, spans centuries telling the history of arthropod neuroanatomical discovery, beginning with the insect studies of the 17th century microscopist Robert Hooke. Hundreds of images, including drawings from the notebooks of the French naturalist Dujardin and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, described as the “founder of the neuron doctrine,” accompany the text. But for me, the highlights of the book are those beautiful slices of brain. Here’s a sampling of images, below.

Second optic chiasma between the medulla and lobula in the shore crab Hemigrapsus oregonensis. Collaboration between Nicholas James Strausfeld and Gabriella Wolf, courtesy of Nicholas James Strausfeld.

From studies of the wandering spider Cupiennius salei. Courtesy of Nicholas James Strausfeld.

Above: The hemiellipsoid body of the land hermit crab Coenobita clypeatus. Panels A-D illustrate Glgi-impregnated neurons in areas indicated in the top panel. Courtesy of Nicholas James Strausfeld.

Jacket: The central brain of a fully-grown crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) immunostained with antisera raised against various cellular components and neuropeptides to demonstrate the prominent mid-line neuropil of the “central body,” a feature evolved to various degrees in all arthropods. The preparation and confocal micrograph were made in the author’s laboratory by Gabriella Wolf, Department of Neuroscience, University of Arizona. Courtesy of Nicholas James Strausfeld.

Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the flare, shown here in teal as that is the color typically used to show light in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, a wavelength in which it is easy to view solar flares. The flare began at 10:38 PM ET on Jan. 22, peaked at 10:59 PM and ended at 11:34 PM. Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA

This week we’ll be talking about the sun, and how what happens there can change our night sky. Intense solar storms can amp up the northern lights. After a particularly big flare this past weekend (pictured on the left) the Associated Press reported on Tuesday that “even experienced stargazers were stunned by the intensity of the aurora borealis that swept across the night sky in northern Scandinavia after the biggest solar flare in six years.”

Did you get to see the northern lights? Have a picture you’d like to share? Post it on our flickr stream, and check back here later to see the shots.

Below are the winning photographs–the ones that got the most “likes” on our Facebook page. (There was a three way tie for 5th place, hence the seven winners. And if you were lucky enough to have more than one photo posted, we only let you win once.) We’ve also included a couple staff picks. Winners will get a Science Friday pocket protector.  Congratulations–and thanks for warming up our winter!

First Place:

Northern cardinal, by Bonnie L. Bowen.

Second Place:

Shore of Lake Superior in Tufte, MN, by Susie Johnson.

Third Place:

Hoarfrost, by Chuck Sutherland.

Fourth Place:

Taken near South Bend, IN, by Rick Goltowski.

Tied For Fifth Place:

White Christmas falls, by Dan Varns.

Ice, from Nick D. in Delaware.

Frozen fountain, by Aaron Haney.

Staff Picks:

Snowy squirrel, by Ray Yeager.

By park ranger Rachel Murray.

Delicately frosted sugar plum cabbages, by Caroline V. Doering