Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Dreamachine preview: A drug-free hallucinogenic trip

    A mind-bending light and sound extravaganza is coming to a town near you, and it could help unravel the mysteries of the brain

    Humans

    23 March 2022

    By Carissa Wong
    Dreamachine’s light and sound show can produce intense hallucinations and a sense of calmBrenna Duncan
    Dreamachine
    Jennifer Crook
    Unboxed FestivalAdvertisement
    IN THE late 1950s, when altered states of consciousness were all the rage, the artist Brion Gysin invented a drug-free route to psychedelic euphoria. His Dreamachine – a spinning cylinder that shines flashing lights onto a viewer’s closed eyes – was intended as a shortcut to spiritual enlightenment for the masses.
    Now, art producer Jennifer Crook has revisited Gysin’s invention as a sci-art multimedia experience. The aim is to produce a communal head trip that will not only expand visitors’ experience, but also probe the depths of human consciousness.
    Crook got the idea for the project after having a transcendent experience while at a gig by electronic music artist Jon Hopkins. She went on to enlist Hopkins to provide the soundtrack to the updated Dreamachine, which will be touring the UK as part of the Unboxed Festival.
    At the centre of the installation are vivid hallucinations created by the brain in response to specific sensory inputs. In the 1950s, the pioneering neuroscientist Grey Walter discovered that dreamlike hallucinations could be induced by lights flashing on closed eyelids at 8 to 12 hertz, the same frequency as the oscillations of “alpha” brainwaves when we are relaxed and wakeful with our eyes closed. Normally, when we open our eyes, these alpha waves are disrupted by visual inputs. Flashing lights at alpha wave frequencies on closed eyelids stimulates the optic nerve, but provides little visual information, and the brain responds by generating hallucinations.
    Because of this, the Dreamachine can produce kaleidoscopic visions and a sense of calm. These hallucinations may also reveal a lot about the way the brain works. As part of the project, neuroscientists Anil Seth and David Schwartzman at the University of Sussex, UK, Dreamachine‘s light and sound show can produce intense hallucinations and a sense of calm are collecting the experiences of visitors, which they hope to use as a window into the workings of the brain. Seth is among the many scientists who believe that hallucinations are part of the way that our brains generate our conscious experience of the world.
    One major question concerns perceptual diversity – how varied or similar our internal mental experiences may be. We know that we all see the world in different ways, but science can’t yet explain how and why. In an attempt to investigate this, an optional survey will ask participants to log their visual experiences using colour palettes, animations and shape selections.
    Other questions will address the emotional aspects of the experience, which can be intense. Hopkins’s music alone, when played through 360-degree speakers around the audience, can give an eerie feeling of stepping out of time and into a state of being that usually comes with a meditative state.
    As well as the physical exhibition, an online census will capture perceptual diversity from millions of people around the world, while a schools programme will be rolled out around the UK. Through activities and resources, children will be encouraged to ask questions about how they perceive the world and to explore how this differs from the experiences of others. The research team’s resident philosopher, Fiona Macpherson, says the goal is to show them how, in our differences, we are all connected.
    This aim brings Dreamachine back to the ideals of its inventor, who hoped to give people the experience of being catapulted into a higher level of consciousness. Crook’s new vision is even more ambitious: to explore the depths of the human brain while realising the variation in our inner worlds and celebrating neurodiversity.
    Dreamachine will tour London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh from May to September. Sign up for free tickets at dreammachine.world.

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  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    Here’s the best timeline yet for the Milky Way’s big events

    A new analysis of nearly a quarter million stars puts firm ages on the most momentous pages from our galaxy’s life story.

    Far grander than most of its neighbors, the Milky Way arose long ago, as lesser galaxies smashed together. Its thick disk — a pancake-shaped population of old stars — originated remarkably soon after the Big Bang and well before most of the stellar halo that envelops the galaxy’s disk, astronomers report March 23 in Nature.

    “We are now able to provide a very clear timeline of what happened in the earliest time of our Milky Way,” says astronomer Maosheng Xiang.

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    He and Hans-Walter Rix, both at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, studied almost 250,000 subgiants — stars that are growing larger and cooler after using up the hydrogen fuel at their centers. The temperatures and luminosities of these stars reveal their ages, letting the researchers track how different epochs in galactic history spawned stars with different chemical compositions and orbits around the Milky Way’s center.

    “There’s just an incredible amount of information here,” says Rosemary Wyse, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the study. “We really want to understand how our galaxy came to be the way it is,” she says. “When were the chemical elements of which we are made created?”

    Xiang and Rix discovered that the Milky Way’s thick disk got its start about 13 billion years ago. That’s just 800 million years after the universe’s birth. The thick disk, which measures 6,000 light-years from top to bottom in the sun’s vicinity, kept forming stars for a long time, until about 8 billion years ago.

    During this period, the thick disk’s iron content shot up 30-fold as exploding stars enriched its star-forming gas, the team found. At the dawn of the thick disk era, a newborn star had only a tenth as much iron, relative to hydrogen, as the sun; by the end, 5 billion years later, a thick disk star was three times richer in iron than the sun.

    Xiang and Rix also found a tight relation between a thick disk star’s age and iron content. This means gas was thoroughly mixed throughout the thick disk: As time went on, newborn stars inherited steadily higher amounts of iron, no matter whether the stars formed close to or far from the galactic center.

    But that’s not all that was happening. As other researchers reported in 2018, another galaxy once hit our own, giving the Milky Way most of the stars in its halo, which engulfs the disk (SN: 11/1/18). Halo stars have little iron.

    The new work revises the date of this great galactic encounter: “We found that the merger happened 11 billion years ago,” Xiang says, a billion years earlier than thought. As the intruder’s gas crashed into the Milky Way’s gas, it triggered the creation of so many new stars that our galaxy’s star formation rate reached a record high 11 billion years ago.

    The merger also splashed some thick disk stars up into the halo, which Xiang and Rix identified from the stars’ higher iron abundances. These “splash” stars, the researchers found, are at least 11 billion years old, confirming the date of the merger.

    The thick disk ran out of gas 8 billion years ago and stopped making stars. Fresh gas around the Milky Way then settled into a thinner disk, which has given birth to stars ever since — including the 4.6-billion-year-old sun and most of its stellar neighbors. The thin disk is about 2,000 light-years thick in our part of the galaxy.

    “The Milky Way has been quite quiet for the last 8 billion years,” Xiang says, experiencing no further encounters with big galaxies. That makes it different from most of its peers.

    If the thick disk really existed 13 billion years ago, Xiang says, then the new James Webb Space Telescope (SN: 1/24/22) may discern similar disks in galaxies 13 billion light-years from Earth — portraits of the Milky Way as a young galaxy. More

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    in Humans

    How language evolved: A new idea suggests it’s all just a game

    Our mastery of language presents many mysteries, not least where grammar comes from and how children learn to speak so effortlessly. Now researchers argue that it all makes sense if you think of language as a game of charades

    Humans

    23 March 2022

    By Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater
    Harriet noble
    IN THE early afternoon of 16 January 1769, HMS Endeavour dropped anchor in the Bay of Good Success on Tierra del Fuego. When Captain James Cook and his crew came ashore, they were met by a group of Indigenous people, probably Haush hunter-gatherers. Two of Cook’s party advanced. Soon, two of the Haush also stepped forward, displayed small sticks and threw them aside. Cook’s men interpreted this as an indication of peaceful intentions. They were right: the groups were soon exchanging gifts and sharing food. With no common language and inhabiting utterly different worlds, they could nonetheless communicate through a high-stakes game of cross-cultural charades.
    Most of us have faced our own communication challenges, perhaps resorting to pointing and gesturing when abroad. And yet in daily life, we rarely give language a second thought – never mind its many perplexing mysteries. How can noises convey meaning? Where do the complex layers of linguistic patterns come from? How come children learn language so easily, whereas chimpanzees can scarcely learn it at all?
    We believe these questions have remained unanswered because scientists have been looking at language all wrong. A growing body of research undermines prevailing ideas that humans possess an innate language ability somehow wired into our brains, encoding grammatical rules. In our new book, The Language Game, we argue that language isn’t about rules at all. As Cook’s encounter illustrates, it is about improvisation, freedom and the desire to be understood, constrained only by our imaginations. This radical idea helps to explain those long-standing mysteries about language – as well as how language evolved and why it makes humans special.
    For … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Levitating plastic beads mimic the physics of spinning asteroids

    Some asteroids can barely hold it together.

    Rather than solid lumps of rock, ‘rubble pile’ asteroids are loose collections of material, which can split apart as they rotate (SN: 3/16/20). To understand the inner workings of such asteroids, one team of scientists turned to levitating plastic beads. The beads clump together, forming collections that can spin and break up, physicist Melody Lim of the University of Chicago reported March 15 at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Chicago.

    It’s an elegant dance that mimics the physics of asteroid formation, which happens too slowly to observe in real-life space rocks. “These ‘tabletop asteroids’ compress phenomena that take place over kilometers [and] over hundreds of thousands of years to just centimeters and seconds in the lab,” Lim said. The results are also reported in a paper accepted in Physical Review X.

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    Lim and colleagues used sound waves to levitate the plastic beads, which arranged themselves into two-dimensional clumps. Acoustic forces attract the beads to one another, mimicking the gravitational attraction between bits of debris in space. Separate clumps then coalesced similarly to how asteroids are thought to glom onto one another to grow.

    [embedded content]
    Levitated by sound waves, plastic beads, which are about 150 micrometers across, clump together into a loosely bound 2-D conglomeration (shown at 1/50th the original speed). When spun too fast, one such structure deforms then splits apart (shown at 1/70th the original speed).

    When the experimenters gave the structures a spin using the sound waves, the clumps changed shape above a certain speed, becoming elongated. That could help scientists understand why ‘rubble pile’ asteroids, can have odd structures, such as the ‘spinning tops’ formed by asteroids Bennu and Ryugu (SN: 12/18/18).

    Eventually, the fast-spinning clumps broke apart. This observation could help explain why asteroids are typically seen to spin up to a certain rate, but not beyond: Speed demons get split up. More

  • 75 Shares159 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    NASA’s exoplanet count surges past 5,000

    It’s official: The number of planets known beyond our solar system has just passed 5,000.

    The exoplanet census surpassed this milestone with a recent batch of 60 confirmed exoplanets. These additional worlds were found in data from NASA’s now-defunct K2 mission, the “second life” of the prolific Kepler space telescope, and confirmed with new observations, researchers report March 4 at arXiv.org.

    As of March 21, these finds put NASA’s official tally of exoplanets at 5,005.

    It’s been 30 years since scientists discovered the first planets orbiting another star — an unlikely pair of small worlds huddled around a pulsar (SN: 1/11/92). Today, exoplanets are so common that astronomers expect most stars host at least one (SN: 1/11/12), says astronomer Aurora Kesseli of Caltech.

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    “One of the most exciting things that I think has happened in the last 30 years is that we’ve really started to be able to fill out the diversity of exoplanets,” Kesseli says

    Some look like Jupiter, some look — perhaps — like Earth and some look like nothing familiar. The 5,005 confirmed exoplanets include nearly 1,500 giant gassy planets, roughly 200 that are small and rocky and almost 1,600 “super-Earths,” which are larger than our solar system’s rocky planets and smaller than Neptune (SN: 8/11/15).

    Astronomers can’t say much about those worlds beyond diameters, masses and densities. But several projects, like the James Webb Space Telescope, are working on that, Kesseli says (SN: 1/24/22). “Not only are we going to find tons and tons more exoplanets, but we’re also going to start to be able to actually characterize the planets,” she says.

    And the search is far from over. NASA’s newest exoplanet hunter, the TESS mission, has confirmed more than 200 planets, with thousands more yet to verify, Kesseli says (SN: 12/2/21). Ongoing searches from ground-based telescopes keep adding to the count as well.

    “There’s tons of exoplanets out there,” Kesseli says, “and even more waiting to be discovered.” More

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    in Humans

    How to perform the culinary technique of spherification at home

    By Sam Wong
    Zhanna Tretiakova/Alamy
    IF YOU eat at fancy places, you may have encountered orbs of sauce or puree, held inside a membrane, that burst in your mouth. Making them involves a little chemistry, but it can be done at home.
    Now a staple of modernist cuisine, the spherification technique was patented in 1942 by food scientist William Peschardt and later popularised by chef Ferran Adrià at El Bulli restaurant in north-east Spain in the 2000s.
    To try it, you need two special ingredients that can be ordered online. One is a salt called sodium alginate, which comes from brown algae. Alginate is formed … More

  • 150 Shares189 Views

    in Humans

    Don't miss: The chance to get life lessons from plants and fungi

    Read
    Don’t Trust Your Gut says data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. You probably know less than you think about how to be healthy and happy. So, it may be time to ignore your instincts and try self-help by data. Out on 9 June.
    Ingela Ihrman
    Visit
    Rooted Beings can teach us a lot about how to connect with each other, according to this exhibition on plants and fungi. Work from the botanical archives will be shown alongside new art at London’s Wellcome Collection from 24 March.Advertisement

    Read
    The Flight of the Aphrodite is a thrilling new sci-fiction novel from S. J. Morden about an eventful mission to Jupiter’s moons. Ship and crew are already at breaking point and then it seems they have uninvited company.

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    in Humans

    Last Exit Space review: An unusual take on the race to colonise space

    Rudolph Herzog’s documentary swerves the usual space experts to give an unexpected view of humanity’s efforts to live among the stars, says Simon Ings

    Humans

    16 March 2022

    By Simon Ings

    Interstellar travel will need human ingenuity, and a lot of patienceDiscovery Inc.
    Last Exit: Space
    Rudolph Herzog
    Discovery+Advertisement

    HOW will people copulate in space? How much antimatter would it take to get to Proxima Centauri b? How much skin would each of us need if we could somehow bioengineer humans to photosynthesise? These are just some of the challenges examined by documentary-maker Rudolph Herzog in Last Exit: Space, a peculiar dash through humanity’s ambition to colonise space.
    A traditional documentary might look for answers via the press offices of the European Space Agency or NASA. Not so Rudolph Herzog, whose father, fellow film-maker Werner Herzog, narrated and executive-produced this film. Instead, the film zooms in on those who are dedicated to solving the conundrums of space travel, one challenge at a time.
    The result is a charming, yet unfocused and slightly odd, take on space exploration. In Denmark, we meet volunteers at the non-profit organisation Copenhagen Suborbitals who are crowdfunding to build a full-size rocket to send the world’s first amateur astronaut into space.
    Meanwhile, in the Negev desert in Israel, citizen scientists from the Austrian Space Forum are putting a not-too-sophisticated-looking Mars spacesuit through its paces.
    “The possible future living conditions on Mars are compared to working in an Amazon fulfilment centre”
    As well as looking at the technical barriers to moving off-planet, the film ponders whether it is a good idea in the first place. Among the naysayers is space anthropologist Taylor Genovese, who compares the possible future living conditions on Mars to working in an Amazon fulfilment centre. Judith Lapierre, the sole female crew member of the Sphinx-99 isolation experiment in the late 1990s, describes how this study in close-proximity living ended with her alleging sexual harassment against another crew member. It does beg the question, if we can’t get along on Earth, what chance do we have in space?
    These issues will only grow with more extreme distances travelled. Interstellar travel will require a ship capable of supporting entire generations of humans. Lapierre’s testimony, says Werner Herzog’s narration, suggests that any such mission will be plagued with “strife, crime and depravity”.
    In that case, we might be better off staying put. This, surprisingly, is the advice of a cleric from the Valley of the Dawn community in Planaltina, Brazil, who believe they receive energies from visiting extraterrestrials from the Capella star system. These apparently advise against interstellar travel, which I’m sure NASA would be interested to hear.
    Last Exit: Space suffers from its wide-eyed, catch-all approach to the subject; I found the lack of critical analysis frustrating. We are regaled with tales of “the human pioneering spirit”, as though humans were destined to explore and become somewhat less than human when not exploring. This is an opinion not established fact. Many human cultures have made a great success of staying put. Set in false opposition to this are an astonishing assortment of dystopian fantasies: space corporations will control our water! Space corporations will control our air!
    Astronaut Mike Foale and astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz provide the documentary with small but penetrating moments of reason. Space is an additional field of human endeavour, they point out, not an escape route from a wrecked home planet. “Do we need to seek our destiny among the stars?”, asks the documentary early on. Let’s hope not.

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