Shady as Hell

City trees can offset neighborhood heat islands, researcher says
Apr 2019, phys.org

That's a crazy idea.
Here's another one - municipal land use regulations can require shade trees on the West side of any building. If every single building in the United States had a tree shading its west side, reducing the temperature by about ten degrees F for a few hours on every hot day, how much energy in air conditioning would be saved?

Simulacra City

Meet N.J.'s newest downtown, designed for kids and adults with special needs
Aug 2019, nj.com

Here's an urban design story you don't hear too much. It looks like a typical downtown, with stores and sidewalks, but it's indoors. It used to be a warehouse in Livingston, New Jersey, but now it's kind of like a Disney village.

It's got normal stores and full time workers and patrons from the community, but with jobs prioritized for people sensitive to dynamic social interactions - there's just enough but not too much people buzzing around. And so they get to be gently immersed in everyday activities, to build up their people skills.

With the metabolizing gray blob of abandoned strip malls that sprawls over New Jersey, there's plenty of room for a few more of these.

Music Science

Dubstep artist Skrillex could protect against mosquito bites
Aug 2019, BBC News

Mosquitos use low frequencies to have sex, or to find mates. Something about bass drops and mosquito sex. When you interfere, or add noise to this frequency, it can entrain them, or hypnotize them, because they are so sensitive to it. They get hypnotized and don't sting as much.

Why music makes us feel, according to AI
Nov 2019, phys.org

Contrast made this one part of the brain light up a lot, like a change in loudness, or introduction of a new instrument. "Dynamic variability".

In fact, for each new instrument, there was a spike in palm sweat (aka galvanic skin response).

But the most stimulating moments happened from heightened complexity; as you add more instruments and as you approach crescendo, you experience the whole autonomic response on at the highest level.

And emotional response?

"That award goes to the raised 7th note of the minor scale. The study found the note F# in a song in the G minor key positively correlated with high sadness ratings.
-A Multimodal View into Music's Effect on Human Neural, Physiological, and Emotional Experience

image source: Jason Mowry, Black and Green Music Equalizer

Post Script
Chimpanzees spontaneously dance to music
Dec 2019, phys.org

"dance-like music" (?)

Rachmaninoff the most innovative composer according to network science
Feb 2020, phys.org

Comparing Western and Chinese classical music using deep learning algorithms
Mar 2020, phys.org

"While previous music studies mainly use models based on music, we were curious about whether a model trained on general soundscape can be used for analyzing music and how they are different for Chinese and Western classical music," Fan explained. "Therefore, we tried using two models built on general sound: a sound event detection model and a soundscape emotion recognition model."
...
The researchers also observed that their deep learning classifier recognized soundscape recordings as Chinese classical music. This suggests that soundscape recordings typically share more similarities with Chinese classical music than with Western classical music.

Mozart may reduce seizure frequency in people with epilepsy

June 2020, phys.org

aka the new CBD

Seeing is Believing

A new approach to discover visual patterns in art collections
Mar 2019, phys.org

A little bit of art history - prior to the van Meegeren Forgeries in the 1940's, art historians and art authenticators would perform their forensics thus: stand in front of the painting, and if you feel it, if it moves you, then it's real.

Artificial Life and The Designer Microbe

Artificial life form given 'synthetic DNA'
May 2019, BBC News

It's a form of E. coli that's been "written from scratch". In other words, every gene it has was altered. And yet it's alive.
Also, it has a name - Syn61.
Welcome.

image source: flowvis.org

Note:
The article points out that "The approach is more cautious than that used by bio-entrepreneur, Craig Venter, whose microbial replicant based on the tiny organism Mycoplasma genitalium was presented to the world in 2010.

Keeping Up with the Hertzbergs

How do you know your diamond isn't fake?
July 2019, BBC News

Being that it's not that hard to grow diamonds in a lab anymore, customers need new ways to tell whether their diamonds are real or not.

Identification codes can now be etched with lasers beneath the surface so it can't be tampered with, and small-scale diamond mines can use blockchain to prove they're not being tampered along the way to the customer.

Bottom line though, it's getting harder and harder to justify the diamond trade overall when you can just make them in a lab. Like the meatburgers made without meat - once you can no longer tell the difference, does it matter?

image source: The Z machine, the largest X-ray generator in the world, is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. No idea what this has to do with diamonds, but it looks cool. Also, it rains diamonds on other planets.

Light Hype, Crystal Prediction, and Cerebral Diamonoids

Energy-free superfast computing invented by scientists using light pulses
May 2019, phys.org

Researchers demonstrate all-optical neural network for deep learning
Sep 2019, phys.org

Researchers teleport information within a diamond
June 2019, phys.org

Diamonds in your devices - Powering the next generation of energy storage
Dec 2019, phys.org

Boron-doped nanodiamond to be specific.

Crystal with a twist - scientists grow spiraling new material
Jun 2019, phys.org

"No one expected 2-D materials to grow in such a way. It's like a surprise gift," said Jie Yao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley.

"While the shape of the crystals may resemble that of DNA, whose helical structure is critical to its job of carrying genetic information, their underlying structure is actually quite different. Unlike "organic" DNA, which is primarily built of familiar atoms like carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, these "inorganic" crystals are built of more far-flung elements of the periodic table, in this case, sulfur and germanium. And while organic molecules often take all sorts of zany shapes, due to unique properties of their primary component, carbon, inorganic molecules tend more toward the straight and narrow."

Cyborg organoids offer rare view into early stages of development
Aug 2019, phys.org

"If we can develop nanoelectronics that are so flexible, stretchable, and soft that they can grow together with developing tissue through their natural development process, the embedded sensors can measure the entire activity of this developmental process," said Jia Liu, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS and senior author of the study. "

Brain waves detected in mini-brains grown in a dish
Sep 2019, phys.org

World first as artificial neurons developed to cure chronic diseases
Dec 2019, phys.org

Optimal solid state neurons, Nature Communications (2019).
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13177-3 

***
We will all live inside diamonds.
Optical intelligentities in neuromorphic cerebral organoid diamonds, to be specific.

***

Scientists create a 'crystal within a crystal' for new electronic devices
Dec 2019, phys.org

Storing data in everyday objects
Dec 2019, phys.org

A method for marking products with a DNA "barcode" embedded in miniscule glass beads -- These nanobeads are used in industry as tracers for geological tests or as markers for high-quality food products, thus distinguishing them from counterfeits using a relatively short barcode consisting of a 100-bit code. This technology has now been commercialized by ETH spin-off Haelixa. 

They call the storage-form "DNA of Things" 

"All other known forms of storage have a fixed geometry: A hard drive has to look like a hard drive, a CD like a CD. You can't change the form without losing information," Erlich says. "DNA is currently the only data storage medium that can also exist as a liquid, which allows us to insert it into objects of any shape." 

A further application of the technology would be to conceal information in everyday objects, a technique experts refer to as steganography. 

Grass, Erlich and their colleagues used the technology to store a short film about this archive (1.4 megabytes) in glass beads, which they then poured into the lenses of ordinary glasses. "It would be no problem to take a pair of glasses like this through airport security and thus transport information from one place to another undetected," Erlich says. In theory, it should be possible to hide the glass beads in any plastic objects that do not reach too high a temperature during the manufacturing process.

Substance found in fossil fuels can transform into pure diamond
Mar 2020, phy.org