Anatomy and Art

So, this is going to have to be one of those brief posts today, but I did want to point your attention at an interesting new 3D animation out there on the human brain in orgasm.  This is neat for a number of reasons.  For one, it’s about sex, always a popular topic.  For another, it’s about brains, and lets face it, brains are awesome. People love brains almost as much as they love sex.  And lastly, the team working on this decided to start with women as their test subjects.  Health studies have long been criticized for focusing on male anatomy and often neglecting women’s health, or at best, later coming to it as an afterthought. Well, this time the data starts with the ladies.

Here is the video. And for those of you looking closely, that’s over 80 regions of the brain lighting up. The brightest yellow you see signifies the greatest use of oxygen in that area (which is how activity is being measured here). Reds signify activity but at lower levels.

The video was only just presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week, and has not yet been peer reviewed for publication.  More information on this can be found here at Time Healthland, or here at the NY Daily News, or you can go directly to the video’s initial appearance on The Visual MD’s website.

Just a quick bit here, but I noticed that Scientific American ran an article on a recent Brain-Art competition.

The link is here.

I think my favorite is this one called Rebrain by Robert Toro.  It is both visually striking and also works to solve a problem.  Apparently he has maximized the amount of visible cortex tissue without distorting it, thus allowing students and the like to recognize regions while still seeing this tissue.

I can’t say as I’ve spent enough time studying brains to fully appreciate the new view, but I am a fan of finding new ways to present material for added clarity.  So kudos to Robert Toro for doing just that.

I also appreciate Micheal Madore’s collaboration with Isabel Dziobek on the amygdala in autism.

You can read more about these and the other top entries and winners at Scientific American.

So, last night I posted an example of a Flash interactive that I thought was cool.  Tonight I thought I’d go ahead and post the wireframes and screen flows I’ve been working on.  I *think* I’m doing this right.

First, the screenflow chart…

And once I had the screenflow down, I moved on to the wireframes.  Now as I understand it, these are drawings meant to express the layout of your interactive without the distraction of color.  The idea is to look at screen placement, and to create a map for the work to come.

In my case, I have come up with three images.  The first is a layout for how my welcome page will look.

The second is what the game would like like when the visitor first arrives at it, before anything has been clicked or moved.

And then the last image is a layout for how the individual pop-up windows will be handled.

Well, here’s hoping I’m on the right track with this!  And remember, if any of these images are too fuzzy to read the text from, you can always click on them which in this case will make them bigger, but always seems to make them clearer regardless of any resizing I’ve done.