After nearly a decade, an interdisciplinary collaboration to model a 3D spider web leads to many surprising results
Aug 2021, phys.org
Rare hyperdisciplinary amalgam of art, music, science, and spider webs.
This article is as long as it is crazy; I tried to cut a few pieces here. It's written by a Anya Ventura for MIT, and is a massive case study on how to do interdisciplinary work, very inspiring:
First, the arachnophilic artist Tomàs Saraceno came to MIT in 2012 as the inaugural Center for Art, Science, & Technology (CAST) visiting artist; then materials scientist Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, had been studying orb webs for years, and had long been interested in the intersection of materials and music.
Using an approach to mathematics called category theory, he showed how natural hierarchical materials like spider silk exhibit properties comparable to various forms of music, in terms of their hierarchical structure and function. Soon, a collaboration was born. A computer model and simulation of the data generated by Saraceno's spider web scans could not only accurately visualize the web but replicate its internal structure, gaining precise information about every single silk thread.
Over the years, Buehler and Saraceno refined the three-dimensional models, using increasingly advanced imaging and simulation techniques. In the near decade that followed, with the support of CAST, their model of the spiderweb has led to an enormous array of undertakings, both together and with their respective labs: a digital web archive, a virtual reality simulation, live musical performances and "cosmic jam" sessions with spiders and their webs, multiple peer-reviewed scientific research papers on the spiderweb's structural and mechanical properties, sonifications of spider silk proteins, 3D-printed spider silk, and an app for citizen arachnophiles that launched the 2019 Venice Biennale, among other projects.
Arachnophilia Research Laboratory
"Tomàs always had this dream of a collective instrument based on the spiderweb," says Ziporyn, composer, clarinetist and faculty director of CAST. "It was a kind of cosmic drum circle, as he conceived it."
Saraceno's studio was a freewheeling ensemble of designers, architects, anthropologists, biologists, engineers, art historians, curators, and musicians. "It had a crazy sort of Andy Warhol Factory meets Eastern European startup vibe," says Ziporyn.
via MIT: Isabelle Su et al, In situ three-dimensional spider web construction and mechanics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2101296118
Image credit: Hybrid solitary social semi-social musical instrument Apus, built by one Nephila clavipes-six days- a small commuity of Stegudyphus duffori-four months-and six cyrtophora citricola sipiderlings-two weeks, Tomas Saraceno, 2015 [
link]
What was really the secret behind Van Gogh's success?
Sep 2021, phys.org
This is about "hot streaks" - they found that hot streaks are a pendulum of exploration and exploitation, which should be familiar in other network effects, like foraging.
Too much exploitation of what you've already learned, and your stuff gets old. Yet, too much exploration into new and interesting things, and you're wasting time.
They give the example of Vincent Can Gogh studying diverse styles of art or diverse subject matter, and then switching to a zoomed-in area where they take what they've learned and execute something novel. Before 1888, he was all over the place, but between then and 1890, he did Starry Night and the Sunflowers, some of his most famous work.
They used 800,000 images from museums and galleries covering 2,128 artists; 79,000 films on IMDB by 4,337 directors. 20,040 scientists' career histories using Web of Science and Google Scholar. Hot streaks were measured using auction price, IMDB ratings and academic paper citations. Once they identified hot streaks, they looked 4 years before and after to see what happened around that time, what were their patterns of exploration and exploitation. They found that hot streaks last about 5 years.
via Northwestern University: Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25477-8
DronePaint - A human-swarm interaction system for environment exploration and artistic painting
Sep 2021, phys.org
A more intuitive approach for controlling robot swarms. Just what we asked for.
Also, the image is long-exposure light painting.
They made a system for human-swarm interactions that allows users to directly control the movements of a team of drones in complex environments. It recognizes human gestures and adapts the drones' trajectories accordingly. It could simplify the operation of drones on behalf of both expert and non-expert users.
It's that simple -- they've designed a way to allow you to control swarms of drones with pre-programmed hand gestures, or any kind of gestures, and eventually just the thoughts of gestures.
"In the future we are also planning to devise systems to read imagined hand gestures from posterior parietal cortex (PPC), using BMI,"
-Dzmitry Tsetserukou, Professor, Ph.D., Head of Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory at Skoltech
via Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia Valerii Serpiva, DronePaint: Swarm light painting with DNN-based gesture recognition (2021). arXiv:2107.11288v1 [cs.RO], arxiv.org/abs/2107.11288
Genesis Uses A Record 3,281 Drones To Create A Magical Light Show In China, 2021
Genesis company deployed 3281 flashing drones in the night sky, breaking the previous world record.
Banksy's Love is in the Bin sells for record £16m
Oct 2021, BBC News
We already know about how Banksy programmed his art to self-destruct at the sound of the auction hammer, but I haven't heard it be described like this until now:
"Unexpected piece of performance art"
Also, "Our work was inspired by several previously developed systems that integrated drones in art, like DroneGraffiti and BitDrones," Serpiva said.
People listen to streamed music during specific blocks of time
Nov 2021, phys.org
- People who listen to streamed music on online services tend to do so during the same specific blocks of time each day—though there is more variation on the weekends
- Volume lower first thing in the morning, and then turned it up as their morning went on
- Tempo of the music people were listening to was slow during the day but then picked up at night, eventually morphing into music fit for dancing
via Aarhus University and The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg: Ole Adrian Heggli et al, Diurnal fluctuations in musical preference, Royal Society Open Science (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.210885
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| Dali Key On The Plate |
Sleep technique improves creative thinking
Dec 2021, phys.org
The key on the plate trick works.
Also, this in-between brain-state, typically called hypnopompic or hypnogogic, is referred to here as N1, and as opposed to REM or deep sleep.
via Sorbonne Université: Célia Lacaux et al, Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj5866
Neural network can distinguish the characteristic brush strokes of individual painters
Dec 2021, phys.org
Could help authorities identify forgeries better.
It's different because it looks at the topography of the brushstrokes, the 3-D part of the painting., which should make sense, because adding another dimension multiplies the data. This network is 95% accurate using only a brushstroke the size of a single bristle.
via the Materials for Opto/Electronics Research and Education at Case Western Reserve University: F. Ji et al, Discerning the painter's hand: machine learning on surface topography, Heritage Science (2021). DOI: 10.1186/s40494-021-00618-w
Analysis of Japanese and English folk songs finds cross-cultural regularities in music evolution
Feb 2022, phys.org
They first defined folk songs as those that have been transmitted orally from one generation to the next. Then they tracked insertions and deletions to songs over time:
- Insertions or deletions were more common than substitutions
- The impact on the songs from such insertions and deletions was more profound in the Japanese songs
- Changes to notes that played a major role in the folk songs over time were less likely to occur than those that played a more minor role, regardless of language
via Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Japan; School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford; Department of Musicology, Tokyo University of the Arts; Centre for Ecology & Conservation, University of Exeter; School of Psychology, University of Auckland, New Zealand: Patrick E. Savage et al, Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural regularities of musical evolution, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.039
