You have a mouth with a bunch of tissue in it and manipulate your tongue, lips, throat, and other pieces so that somehow words come out. A lot of variables figure in, which can make the whole process of talking a complex process. Neil Thapen makes it more understandable with a fun simulator he calls Pink Trombone. Turn your sound on, and click and drag any of the words to see how voice changes when you modulate parts of the mouth.
Tags: simulation, talking
The Year that Music Died from Polygraph is an animated timeline that shows the Billboard top 5 songs since 1956, all the while playing the top song during a given week.
The visualization itself is fairly straightforward, but I like how everything shifts so smoothly. Artist thumbnails move up and down matching their position on the music chart, the number one songs play without sounding jerky, and a counter on the right keeps track of total weeks at number one per artist. [via Waxy]
Eleanor Lutz made some trading cards — for viruses.
To make the 3D animations I used UCSF Chimera, a free molecular modeling program. When scientists discover a new protein structure they upload it to the worldwide Protein Data Bank. Each entry is assigned a unique ID number, which you can use to call up the structure in programs like Chimera or PyMol.
Tags: virus
