Ryan Schenk

Synynyms

Synynyms is an award-winning tool for visualizing the scientific names of species. You see, most species don’t just have one scientific name, they typically have many, which are sometimes hotly contested! Synynyms graphs the popularity of each these names through (…)

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Breedlight

.heart{ color: #777; } Breedlight is a series of sculptural lamps that I’ve been working on, whose design is dictated by a genome that I created. Breedlight lamps are capable of reproducing with each other, passing on their traits to (…)

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Visualizing Taxonomic Synonyms

You probably knew that species have scientific names that are written in Latin. However, did you know that one organism typically has several of them? And that they are sometimes hotly contested? The following graphics show the usage of all (…)

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Meta Detergent Logo

My coworker made a little app called Meta Detergent. I fell in love with the name, and drew him a little illustration to use as his logo.

Taxatron

As I work with scientific data, I am always seeking different ways of displaying it. Recently, I’ve been trying to create juxtapositions, trying to display scientific data in very “unscientific” ways. I built Taxatron as the ultimate extension of this (…)

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Settlers of Catan Tiles

I created a batch of Settlers of Catan tiles for you! You can download print-resolution versions at my Flickr page. If you would like to edit or remix the tiles, you can also download the original, fully editable Illustrator artwork. (…)

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Blowing in the Wind

I recently entered two pieces into the Falmouth Artist Guild’s April show, Blowing in the Wind. The first piece is a cascade of laser cut felt feathers, called Feather Vane. The second piece is a slightly more conceptual mobile. It’s (…)

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Driving a $0.40 Stepper with Arduino

I recently bought 250 stepper motors (part number 21-02485-03) for a sculpture that I’m working on, for the low price of 40 cents a piece! Even if you don’t buy them in bulk, they are still really cheap. There are (…)

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LigerCat

LigerCat—Literature and Genomics Resource Catalogue—is a Web application that provides a big-picture view of the National Library of Medicine’s Medline database. It allows researchers to browse the metadata of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of biomedical journal articles simultaneously. It (…)

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Washing Laser Cut Felt

I had some of my mobile designs laser cut out of wool felt through Ponoko, a fantastic service that makes laser cutting almost laughably easy. The mobile pieces came out looking great, but there’s two problems. When you laser cut (…)

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