Twelve finalists in the annual Dance Your Phd Contest have been selected from 31 entries. The contest is a way for PhD candidates to find a different perspective on their research, and see if they can get the point across through the medium of interpretive dance. It's also a nice way to get overloaded grad students a little stress relief and exercise.
Previous winners of the competition chose the twelve finalists. From here, the judging will be done by a panel of artists and scientists, but there's also a "viewer's choice" poll in which you can participate at Science magazine. Videos of all the finalists are posted there, illustrating these dissertations (the first one is shown above):
1.) Sperm competition between brothers and female choice
2.) Identifying Novel Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Neural Control of Food Intake and its Interaction with Chronic Stress
3.) Understanding the Role of MYCN in Neuroblastoma using a Systems Biology Approach
4.) Focal adhesion kinase as a cellular transducer
5.) Biophysical characterization of transmembrane peptides using Fluorescence
6.) Inferring transcriptional regulation on the promoter level and its applications to diseases
7.) Generation and Manipulation of multiphoton quantum states of light
8.) The Search for Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of Black Hole Binary Systems in Data from the LIGO and Virgo Detectors
9.) Multi-Axial Fatigue for Predicting Life of Mechanical Components
10.) Sleep loss in a social world
11.) Motility and Relational Mobility of the Baka in North-Eastern Gabon
12.) Investigation of the behavioral processes and neurobiological substrates involved in the motivation for voluntary wheel running in the rat
The Dance Your PhD Contest was launched in 2007. You can see last year's dances here. -via Boing Boing
Yeah, I'm going to pass on that one.