Modern dance inspired by science

By at 3:00 pm Monday, Apr 26

There's a couple of very cool things going on with this dance routine. First off, it's based on the principles of fluid dynamics—physical laws that predict the movement of liquids and gases.*

Second, the dance you're watching was recorded live. That means all the nifty "70s Sesame Street"-style tracer effects on dancer Hope Goldman's body, and the visual elements tracked to her movements, weren't added in later. Instead, Goldman and visual artist/programmer Andrew Moffat used "infrared lighting and a custom-modded, $40 webcam along with custom software running on the GPU."

This dance was Goldman's master's thesis for her program at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Great work!

*Awesome fact that I always forget isn't necessarily common knowledge: The gases that make up Earth's atmosphere and the air you breathe are fluidsbehave like liquids. So fluid dynamics doesn't just affect things like oil running through a pipeline—it also governs how hot air from your furnace flows through your house, and how weather patterns move around the globe. (Screwed up the wording there at first, with my layperson's tendency to get "fluid" and "liquid" mixed up. Sorry about that.)

(Via Ferris Jabr)

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Maggie Koerth-Baker

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum

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