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Where art, design and crystallography converge. ATOMIC radio brings you stories from the long relationship between the arts and the science of X-ray crystallography. X-ray crystallography, which is 100 years old this year, is a science that reveals the invisible, the tiny atomic structures of molecules and crystals – and it has been quietly influencing art and design for decades. Each episode spotlights a different piece of art or design prompted by the science of atoms, featuring interviews ...
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X-ray crystallography has the power to reveal the most fundamental structures of matter, but there is a lot that the science can’t see. This episode explores the ways in which crystallography – and much art – traffics in shadows and blind spots. We feature a sculpture partially composed of light by the artist Conrad Shawcross and hear from the arti…
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Atomic Radio Episode 5: Inside a molecule of a whale
28:06
28:06
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This episode is about dramatically magnified molecules – specifically, it’s about molecular forms that have been translated into architectures that dwarf the human body. We hear from cultural historian Celeste Olalquiaga on the ruin of a helical mall in Caracas, Venezuela, and the historian of science Soraya de Chadarevian illuminates the fantastic…
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X-ray crystallography has long had a reputation for being a scientific field with a significant number of female practitioners, especially in the first half of the twentieth century when it was rare to find women in any scientific discipline. This episode looks at how ideas of ‘women’s work’ did – and did not – affect the lives of crystallography’s…
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Atomic Radio Episode 3: To Break Into Pieces
29:03
29:03
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This episode explores the ways in which breaking something into pieces can help to understand it, from the story of crystallographer Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction photograph that revealed the DNA double helix, to artist and academic Lina Hakim on what breaking toys apart has in common with crystallography, and the work of composer Margaret …
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In this episode we look in on the love affair between the science of atoms and fiction – from crystallographers’ most inventive models of the invisible sub-microscopic world to the atomic dramas chronicled in artist Tacita Dean’s film The Structure of Ice. We hear from Science Museum curator Boris Jardin, an expert not only on crystallography model…
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Today the borders between the arts and sciences are becoming more porous. Some artists and designers are even leaving behind their studios for laboratories where they are collaborating with scientists. In this episode we venture into the mysterious borderland between these two worlds, encountering the techniques used by crystallographers to shed li…
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