science

“Portrait of Elliot”: Painting of brain cyst stars at neuroscience conference

At Museum London on February 20th, a painting of a glowing brain is displayed on an easel. The stylized MRI brain scan, from the back-of-the-head view, is aflame in yellows and reds that form a hazy halo around a starburst of highlighter-green brain fluid. Folds of pale coral-coloured grey matter coalesce into cranial nerves bordered by a streaming blue-violet neck. In the right hemisphere drifts a ghostly cyst.  The piece is called “Portrait of Elliot”, painted by artist Natasha Beaudoin. It is based on a real MRI scan of her boyfriend, Elliot Tomlinson, who was diagnosed with an arachnoid cyst. …

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“Come with me inside a black hole”: A talk by physicist Carlo Rovelli

“They’re remarkable objects… I hope I can tell you something more about their strangeness and their beauty,” says physicist Carlo Rovelli of black holes on January 30th at Western University’s Conron Hall, for the 2025 Duncanson Lecture. Behind him beams a photo of Sagittarius A* — a black hole 26 million kilometers wide in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, 26,000 light years from Earth (1 light year is about 9.4 x 1012  kilometers). The photo — the average of thousands of photos taken from a telescope — shows a hazy orange-yellow ring of fluctuating brightness circling a dark…

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