A Billion Years of Tectonic-Plate Movement in 40 Seconds: A Quick Glimpse of How Our World Took Shape

in History, Science | July 12th, 2021

We all remem­ber learn­ing about tec­ton­ic plates in our school sci­ence class­es. Or at least we do if we went to school in the 1960s or lat­er, that being when the the­o­ry of plate tec­ton­ics — which holds, broad­ly speak­ing, that the Earth­’s sur­face com­pris­es slow­ly mov­ing slabs of rock — gained wide accep­tance. But most every­one alive today will have been taught about Pangea. An impli­ca­tion of Alfred Wegen­er’s the­o­ry of “con­ti­nen­tal drift,” first pro­posed in the 1910s, that the sin­gle gigan­tic land­mass once dom­i­nat­ed the plan­et.

Despite its renown, how­ev­er, Pangea makes only a brief appear­ance in the ani­ma­tion of Earth­’s his­to­ry above. Geo­log­i­cal sci­en­tists now cat­e­go­rize it as just one of sev­er­al “super­con­ti­nents” that plate tec­ton­ics has gath­ered togeth­er and bro­ken up over hun­dreds and hun­dreds of mil­len­nia. Oth­ers include Kenor­land, in exis­tence about 2.6 bil­lion years ago, and Rodinia, 900 mil­lion years ago; Pangea, the most recent of the bunch, came apart around 175 mil­lion years ago. You can see the process in action in the video, which com­press­es a bil­lion years of geo­log­i­cal his­to­ry into a mere 40 sec­onds.

At the speed of 25 mil­lion years per sec­ond, and with out­lines drawn in, the move­ment of Earth­’s tec­ton­ic plates becomes clear­ly under­stand­able — more so, per­haps, than you found it back in school. “On a human timescale, things move in cen­time­ters per year, but as we can see from the ani­ma­tion, the con­ti­nents have been every­where in time,” as Michael Tet­ley, co-author of the paper “Extend­ing full-plate tec­ton­ic mod­els into deep time,” put it to Euronews. Antarc­ti­ca, which “we see as a cold, icy inhos­pitable place today, actu­al­ly was once quite a nice hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion at the equa­tor.”

Cli­mate-change trends sug­gest that we could be vaca­tion­ing in Antarc­ti­ca again before long — a trou­bling devel­op­ment in oth­er ways, of course, not least because it under­scores the imper­ma­nence of Earth­’s cur­rent arrange­ment, the one we know so well. “Our plan­et is unique in the way that it hosts life,” says Diet­mar Müller, anoth­er of the paper’s authors. “But this is only pos­si­ble because geo­log­i­cal process­es, like plate tec­ton­ics, pro­vide a plan­e­tary life-sup­port sys­tem.” Earth won’t always look like it does today, in oth­er words, but it’s thanks to the fact that it does­n’t look like it did a bil­lion years ago that we hap­pen to be here, able to study it at all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Plate Tec­ton­ic Evo­lu­tion of the Earth Over 500 Mil­lion Years: Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Mil­lion Years in the Future

A Map Shows Where Today’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

Paper Ani­ma­tion Tells Curi­ous Sto­ry of How a Mete­o­rol­o­gist The­o­rized Pan­gaea & Con­ti­nen­tal Drift (1910)

What Earth Will Look Like 100 Mil­lion Years from Now

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

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The Acoustics of Stonehenge: Researchers Build a Model to Understand How Sound Reverberated within the Ancient Structure

in History, Science | June 28th, 2021

It’s impos­si­ble to resist a Spinal Tap joke, but the cre­ators of the com­plete scale mod­el of Eng­land’s ancient Druidic struc­ture pic­tured above had seri­ous inten­tions — to under­stand what those inside the cir­cle heard when the stones all stood in their upright “henge” posi­tion. A research team led by acousti­cal engi­neer Trevor Cox con­struct­ed the mod­el at one-twelfth the actu­al size of Stone­henge, the “largest pos­si­ble scale repli­ca that could fit inside an acoustic cham­ber at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sal­ford in Eng­land, where Cox works,” reports Bruce Bow­er at Sci­ence News. The tallest of the stones is only two feet high.

This is not the first time acoustic research has been car­ried out on Stone­henge, but pre­vi­ous projects were “all based on what’s there now,” says Cox. “I want­ed to know how it sound­ed in 2200 B.C., when all the stones were in place.” The exper­i­ment required a lot of extrap­o­la­tion from what remains. The con­struc­tion of “Stone­henge Lego” or “Mini­henge,” as the researchers call it, assumes that “Stonehenge’s out­er cir­cle of stand­ing sarsen stones — a type of sil­crete rock found in south­ern Eng­land — had orig­i­nal­ly con­sist­ed of 30 stones.” Today, there are 17 sarsen stones in the out­er cir­cle among the 63 com­plete stones remain­ing.

“Based on an esti­mat­ed total 157 stones placed at the site around 4,200 years ago, the researchers 3‑D print­ed 27 stones of all sizes and shapes,” Bow­er explains. “Then, the team used sil­i­cone molds of those items and plas­ter mixed with oth­er mate­ri­als to re-cre­ate the remain­ing 130 stones. Sim­u­lat­ed stones were con­struct­ed to min­i­mize sound absorp­tion, much like actu­al stones at Stone­henge.” Once Cox and his team had the mod­el com­plet­ed and placed in the acoustic cham­ber, they began exper­i­ment­ing with sound waves and micro­phones, mea­sur­ing impulse respons­es and fre­quen­cy curves.

What were the results of this son­ic Stone­henge recre­ation? “We expect­ed to lose a lot of sound ver­ti­cal­ly, because there’s no roof,” says Cox. Instead, researchers found “thou­sands upon thou­sands of reflec­tions as the sound waves bounced around hor­i­zon­tal­ly.” Par­tic­i­pants in rit­u­al chants or musi­cal cel­e­bra­tions inside the cir­cle would have heard the sound ampli­fied and clar­i­fied, like singing in a tiled bath­room. For those stand­ing out­side the mon­u­ment, or even with­in the out­er cir­cle of stones, the sound would have been muf­fled or damp­ened. Like­wise, the arrange­ment would have damp­ened sound enter­ing the inner cir­cle from out­side.

Indeed, the effect was so pro­nounced that “the place­ment of the stones was capa­ble of ampli­fy­ing the human voice by more than four deci­bels, but pro­duced no echoes,” notes Art­net. This sug­gests that the site’s acoustic prop­er­ties were not acci­den­tal, but designed as part of its essen­tial func­tion for an elite group of par­tic­i­pants, “even though the site’s con­struc­tion would have required a huge amount of man­pow­er.” This is hard­ly dif­fer­ent from oth­er mon­u­men­tal ancient reli­gious struc­tures like pyra­mids and zig­gu­rats, built for roy­al­ty and an elite priest­hood. But it’s only one inter­pre­ta­tion of the structure’s pur­pose.

While Cox and his team do not believe acoustics were the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion for Stonehenge’s design — astro­log­i­cal align­ment seems to have been far more impor­tant — it clear­ly played some role. Oth­er schol­ars have their own hypothe­ses. Research still needs to account for envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors — or why “Stone­henge hums when the wind blows hard,” as musi­col­o­gist Rupert Till points out. Some have spec­u­lat­ed the stones may have been instru­ments, played like a giant xylo­phone, a the­o­ry test­ed in a 2013 study con­duct­ed by researchers from the Roy­al Col­lege of Art, but this, too, remains spec­u­la­tive.

As the great Stone­henge enthu­si­ast Nigel Tufnel once sang, “No one knows who they were, or what they were doing.” But what­ev­er it sound­ed like, Cox and his col­leagues have shown that the best seats were inside the inner cir­cle. Read the research team’s full arti­cle here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Ancient Astron­o­my of Stone­henge Decod­ed

An Artist Vis­its Stone­henge in 1573 and Paints a Charm­ing Water­col­or Paint­ing of the Ancient Ruins

The Spinal Tap Stone­henge Deba­cle

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch an Accurate Reconstruction of the World’s Oldest Computer, the 2,200 Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, from Start to Finish

in Astronomy, History, Science | June 14th, 2021

There’s noth­ing like an ancient mys­tery, espe­cial­ly one as seem­ing­ly insol­u­ble as the ori­gins of “the world’s first com­put­er,” the Antikythera mech­a­nism. Dis­cov­ered off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the cor­rod­ed col­lec­tion of gears and dials seemed fake to sci­en­tists at first because of its inge­nious­ness. It has since been dat­ed to 100 to 150 BC and has inspired decades of research and spec­u­la­tive recon­struc­tion. Yet, no one knows who made it, and more impor­tant­ly, no one knows how it was made.

“The dis­tance between this device’s com­plex­i­ty and oth­ers made at the same time is infi­nite,” says Adam Woj­cik, a mate­ri­als sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don. “Frankly, there is noth­ing like it that has ever been found. It’s out of this world.”

The expres­sion should not make us think of ancient aliens — the Antikythera mech­a­nism con­tains more than enough evi­dence of human lim­i­ta­tion, show­ing a geo­cen­tric mod­el of the cos­mos with the only five plan­ets its mak­er would have known.

The 2,000-plus year-old device con­tin­ues to reveal its secrets, includ­ing hid­den inscrip­tions found dur­ing CT scans of the object, as Smith­son­ian report­ed in 2015. The mech­a­nism is “sim­i­lar in size to a man­tel clock, and bits of wood found on the frag­ments sug­gest it was housed in a wood­en case. Like a clock, the case would’ve had a large cir­cu­lar face with rotat­ing hands. There was a knob or han­dle on the side, for wind­ing the mech­a­nism for­ward or back­ward. And as the knob turned, trains of inter­lock­ing gear­wheels drove at least sev­en hands at var­i­ous speeds. Instead of hours and min­utes, the hands dis­played celes­tial time.”

If the Antikythera mech­a­nism is a “celes­tial clock,” who bet­ter to design and build its recon­struc­tion than a clock­mak­er? That is exact­ly what we see in the videos above, cre­at­ed for the clock­mak­ing YouTube chan­nel Click­spring. Using the best sci­en­tif­ic mod­el of the mech­a­nism to date — pub­lished this year by Dr. Tony Freeth and col­leagues of the Antikythera Mech­a­nism Research Project — Click­spring shows how the device might have fit togeth­er and makes edu­cat­ed guess­es about the right place­ment of its dozens of small parts.

You can see a pre­view of the Antikythera recon­struc­tion project at the top, watch the full project above, and see indi­vid­ual episodes show­cas­ing dif­fer­ent phas­es of con­struc­tion on YouTube. The mod­el “con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence,” Freeth writes, “and match­es the descrip­tions in the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself.” What no one can fig­ure out, how­ev­er, is just how the ancient Greek arti­sans who made it shaped pre­ci­sion met­al parts with­out lath­es and oth­er mod­ern tools of the machine-mak­ers trade. Researchers, and clock­mak­ers, may have pieced togeth­er the Antikythera puz­zle, but the mys­tery of how it came into exis­tence at all remains unsolved.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Researchers Devel­op a Dig­i­tal Mod­el of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, “the World’s First Com­put­er”

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Wikipedia’s Surprising Power in Shaping Science: A New MIT Shows How Wikipedia Shapes Scientific Research

in Science, Wikipedia | June 14th, 2021

If you were in high school or col­lege when Wikipedia emerged, you’ll remem­ber how stren­u­ous­ly we were cau­tioned against using such an “unre­li­able source” for our assign­ments. If you went on to a career in sci­ence, how­ev­er, you now know how impor­tant a role Wikipedia plays in even pro­fes­sion­al research. It may thus sur­prise you to learn that stu­dents still get more or less the same warn­ing about what, two decades lat­er, has become the largest ency­clo­pe­dia and fifth most-vis­it­ed web site in the world. “Many of us use Wikipedia as a source of infor­ma­tion when we want a quick expla­na­tion of some­thing,” say MIT’s cita­tion guide­lines. “How­ev­er, Wikipedia or oth­er wikis, col­lab­o­ra­tive infor­ma­tion sites con­tributed to by a vari­ety of peo­ple, are not con­sid­ered reli­able sources for aca­d­e­m­ic cita­tion.”

That quo­ta­tion appears, some­what iron­i­cal­ly, in a recent MIT research paper called “Sci­ence is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evi­dence From a Ran­dom­ized Con­trol Tri­al.” Its authors, Neil C. Thomp­son from MIT and Dou­glas Han­ley from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh, use both “Big Data” and exper­i­men­tal approach­es to sup­port their claim that “incor­po­rat­ing ideas into a Wikipedia arti­cle leads to those ideas being used more in the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture.”

Test­ing the exis­tence of an under­ly­ing causal rela­tion­ship, they “com­mis­sioned sub­ject mat­ter experts to cre­ate new Wikipedia arti­cles on sci­en­tif­ic top­ics not cov­ered in Wikipedia.” Half of these arti­cles were added to Wikipedia, and half retained as a con­trol group. “Review­ing the rel­e­vant jour­nal arti­cles pub­lished lat­er, they find that “the word-usage pat­terns from the treat­ment group show up more in the prose in the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture than do those from the con­trol group.”

In oth­er words, Wikipedia does indeed appear to shape sci­ence — or as Whar­ton pro­fes­sor Ethan Mol­lick put it on Twit­ter, “The secret heart of acad­e­mia is… Wikipedia.” Expand­ing on the idea, he added that “Wikipedia is used like a review arti­cle,” which sur­veys the cur­rent state of a par­tic­u­lar sci­en­tif­ic field. “Review arti­cles are extreme­ly influ­en­tial on the direc­tion of sci­en­tif­ic research, and while Wikipedia arti­cles are gen­er­al­ly less influ­en­tial, there are more of them, they are more up-to-date, and they are free.” That last point — and the implied con­trast to tra­di­tion­al, sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals with their often shock­ing­ly high sub­scrip­tion fees — becomes a key point in Thomp­son and Han­ley’s advo­ca­cy for pub­lic repos­i­to­ries of knowl­edge in gen­er­al, with their pow­er to gal­va­nize research across the whole world. The pow­er of open cul­ture is con­sid­er­able; the pow­er of open sci­ence, per­haps even more so.

You can read Han­ley and Thomp­son’s study on the pow­er of Wikipedia free online: “Sci­ence is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evi­dence From a Ran­dom­ized Con­trol Tri­al.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Wikipedia: A Web Site That Turns Every Wikipedia Edit Into Ambi­ent Music in Real Time

NASA’s New Online Archive Puts a Wealth of Free Sci­ence Arti­cles Online

Roy­al Soci­ety Opens Online Archive; Puts 60,000 Papers Online

Free Online Cours­es: The Sci­ences

200 Free Text­books: A Meta Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Scientists Create an Interactive Map of the 13 Emotions Evoked by Music: Joy, Sadness, Desire, Annoyance, and More

in Music, Neuroscience, Science | June 10th, 2021

Most of our playlists today are filled with music about emo­tions: usu­al­ly love, of course, but also excite­ment, defi­ance, anger, dev­as­ta­tion, and a host of oth­ers besides. We lis­ten to these songs in order to appre­ci­ate the musi­cian­ship that went into them, but also to indulge in their emo­tions for our­selves. As for what exact­ly evokes these feel­ings with­in us, lyrics only do part of the job, and per­haps a small part at that. In search of a more rig­or­ous con­cep­tion of which son­ic qual­i­ties trig­ger which emo­tions in lis­ten­ers — and a mea­sure­ment of how many kinds of emo­tions music can trig­ger — sci­en­tists at UC Berke­ley have con­duct­ed a cross-cul­tur­al research project and used the data to make an inter­ac­tive lis­ten­ing map.

The study’s cre­ators, a group includ­ing psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Dacher Kelt­ner (found­ing direc­tor of the Greater Good Sci­ence Cen­ter) and neu­ro­science doc­tor­al stu­dent Alan Cowen, “sur­veyed more than 2,500 peo­ple in the Unit­ed States and Chi­na about their emo­tion­al respons­es to these and thou­sands of oth­er songs from gen­res includ­ing rock, folk, jazz, clas­si­cal, march­ing band, exper­i­men­tal and heavy met­al.” So writes Berkley News’ Yas­min Anwar, who sum­ma­rizes the broad­er find­ings as fol­lows: “The sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of music across cul­tures can be mapped with­in at least 13 over­ar­ch­ing feel­ings: Amuse­ment, joy, eroti­cism, beau­ty, relax­ation, sad­ness, dreami­ness, tri­umph, anx­i­ety, scari­ness, annoy­ance, defi­ance, and feel­ing pumped up.”

Many lis­ten­er respons­es can’t have been ter­ri­bly sur­pris­ing. “Vivaldi’s ‘Four Sea­sons’ made peo­ple feel ener­gized. The Clash’s ‘Rock the Cas­bah’ pumped them up. Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Togeth­er’ evoked sen­su­al­i­ty and Israel (Iz) Kamakawiwoʻole’s ‘Some­where over the Rain­bow’ elicit­ed joy.

Mean­while, heavy met­al was wide­ly viewed as defi­ant and, just as its com­pos­er intend­ed, the show­er scene score from the movie Psy­cho trig­gered fear.” The cul­tur­al influ­ence of Hitch­cock, one might object, has by now tran­scend­ed all bound­aries, but accord­ing to the study even Chi­nese clas­si­cal music gets the same basic emo­tions across to Chi­nese and non-Chi­nese lis­ten­ers alike.

Still, all respectable art, even or per­haps espe­cial­ly an abstract one such as music, leaves plen­ty of room for per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion. You can check your own emo­tion­al respons­es against those of the Berke­ley sur­vey’s respon­dents with its inter­ac­tive lis­ten­ing map. Just roll your cur­sor over any of point on its emo­tion­al ter­ri­to­ries, and you’ll hear a short clip of the song lis­ten­ers placed there. On the penin­su­la of cat­e­go­ry H, “erot­ic, desirous,” you’ll hear Chris Isaak, Wham!, and a great many sax­o­phon­ists; down in the nether­lands of cat­e­go­ry G, “ener­giz­ing, pump-up,” Rick Ast­ley’s immor­tal­ized “Nev­er Gonna Give You Up” and Alien Ant Far­m’s nov­el­ty cov­er of “Smooth Crim­i­nal.” Anwar also notes that “The Shape of You,” Ed Sheeran’s inescapable hit, “sparks joy” — but if I have to hear it one more time at the gym, I can assure you my own emo­tion­al response won’t be quite so pos­i­tive.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Daniel Lev­itin Shows How Musi­cians Com­mu­ni­cate Emo­tion

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Get Per­fect­ly Visu­al­ized as an Emo­tion­al Roller Coast­er Ride

The Ther­a­peu­tic Ben­e­fits of Ambi­ent Music: Sci­ence Shows How It Eas­es Chron­ic Anx­i­ety, Phys­i­cal Pain, and ICU-Relat­ed Trau­ma

Neu­rosym­pho­ny: A High-Res­o­lu­tion Look into the Brain, Set to the Music of Brain Waves

An Inter­ac­tive Map of the 2,000+ Sounds Humans Use to Com­mu­ni­cate With­out Words: Grunts, Sobs, Sighs, Laughs & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Behold the Astronomicum Caesareum, “Perhaps the Most Beautiful Scientific Book Ever Printed” (1540)

in Art, Books, Science | May 27th, 2021

Art, sci­ence, and mag­ic seem to have been rarely far apart dur­ing the Renais­sance, as evi­denced by the elab­o­rate 1540 Astro­nom­icum Cae­sareum — or “Emperor’s Astron­o­my” — seen here. “The most sump­tu­ous of all Renais­sance instruc­tive man­u­als, ” the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art notes, the book was cre­at­ed over a peri­od of 8 years by Petrus Api­anus, also known as Api­an, an astron­o­my pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ingol­stadt. Mod­ern-day astronomer Owen Gin­gerich, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, calls it “the most spec­tac­u­lar con­tri­bu­tion of the book-maker’s art to six­teenth-cen­tu­ry sci­ence.”

Apian’s book was main­ly designed for what is now con­sid­ered pseu­do­science. “The main con­tem­po­rary use of the book would have been to cast horo­scopes,” Robert Bat­teridge writes at the Nation­al Library of Scot­land. Api­an used as exam­ples the birth­days of his patrons: Holy Roman Emper­or Charles V and his broth­er Fer­di­nand I. But the Astro­nom­icum Cae­sareum did more than cal­cu­late the future.

Despite the fact that the geo­cen­tric mod­el on which Api­an based his sys­tem “would begin to be over­tak­en just 3 years after the book’s pub­li­ca­tion,” he accu­rate­ly described five comets, includ­ing what would come to be called Halley’s Comet.

Api­an also “observed that a comet’s tail always points away from the sun,” Fine Books and Col­lec­tions writes, “a dis­cov­ery for which he is cred­it­ed.” He used his book “to cal­cu­late eclipses,” notes Gin­gerich in an intro­duc­tion, includ­ing a par­tial lunar eclipse in the year of Charles’ birth. And, “in a pio­neer­ing use of astro­nom­i­cal chronol­o­gy, he takes up the cir­cum­stances of sev­er­al his­tor­i­cal eclipses.” These dis­cus­sions are accom­pa­nied by “sev­er­al mov­able devices” called volvelles, designed “for an assort­ment of chrono­log­i­cal and astro­log­i­cal inquiries.”

Medieval volvelles were first intro­duced by artist and writer Ramón Llull in 1274. A “cousin of the astro­labe,” Get­ty writes, the devices con­sist of “lay­ered cir­cles of parch­ment… held togeth­er at the cen­ter by a tie.” They were con­sid­ered “a form of ‘arti­fi­cial mem­o­ry,’” called by Lund University’s Lars Gis­lén “a kind of paper com­put­er.” Api­an was a spe­cial­ist of the form, pub­lish­ing sev­er­al books con­tain­ing volvelles from his own Ingol­stadt print­ing press. The Astro­nom­icum Cae­sareum became the pin­na­cle of such sci­en­tif­ic art, using its hand-col­ored paper devices to sim­u­late the move­ments of the astro­labe. “The great vol­ume grew and changed in the course of the print­ing,” Gin­gerich writes, “even­tu­al­ly com­pris­ing fifty-five leaves, of which twen­ty-one con­tain mov­ing parts.”

Api­an was reward­ed hand­some­ly for his work. “Emper­or Charles V grant­ed the pro­fes­sor a new coat of arms,” and “the right to appoint poets lau­re­ate and to pro­nounce as legit­i­mate chil­dren born out of wed­lock.” He was also appoint­ed court math­e­mati­cian, and copies of his extra­or­di­nary book lived on in the col­lec­tions of Euro­pean aris­to­crats for cen­turies, “a tri­umph of the printer’s art,” writes Gin­gerich, and an astron­o­my, and astrol­o­gy, “fit for an emper­or.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

16th Cen­tu­ry Book­wheels, the E‑Readers of the Renais­sance, Get Brought to Life by 21st Cen­tu­ry Design­ers

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

160,000+ Medieval Man­u­scripts Online: Where to Find Them

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Cicadas Return After 17 Years: Stunning Footage of the Brood X Cicadas

in Biology, Environment, Nature, Science | May 17th, 2021

Sing, fly, mate, die.

The peri­od­i­cal cicadas in Brood X are emerg­ing from under­ground, where they have spent the last 17 years as nymphs. They are mak­ing the final climb of their lives, intent on escap­ing their cara­paces in order to make more cicadas. And as always they are doing it en masse.

Once free, they must quick­ly get the hang of their brand new wings, and make for the trees, where the males will sing (some say scream) in a bid for females with whom to mate.

The preg­nant females drill cav­i­ties into nar­row branch­es to receive their eggs.

By the time the lar­va emerge, some six weeks lat­er, their moth­ers and fathers are long dead.

Instinct pro­pels these babies to drop to the ground and bur­row in, thus begin­ning anoth­er 17 year cycle, a process Samuel Orr, a time lapse pho­tog­ra­ph­er and film­mak­er spe­cial­iz­ing in nature doc­u­men­tary, doc­u­ments in macro close up in Return of the Cicadas, above.

His adven­tures with Brood X date to their last emer­gence in 2004, when he was a stu­dent at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty, work­ing in a lab with a pro­fes­sor whose area of exper­tise was cicadas.

While wait­ing around for Brood X’s next appear­ance, he trav­eled around the coun­try and as far as Aus­tralia, gath­er­ing over 200 hours of footage of oth­er peri­od­i­cal cicadas for an hour long, Kick­starter-fund­ed film that aired on PBS in 2012.

Brood X has a way of ensur­ing that we humans will also observe a 17 year cycle, at least those of us who live in the states the Great East­ern Brood calls home.

Some cel­e­brate with com­mem­o­ra­tive merch. This year, that means face masks as well as an ever bur­geon­ing assort­ment of t‑shirts, mugs, and oth­er para­pher­na­lia.

Also new this year, Cica­da Safari, ento­mol­o­gist Dr. Gene Kritsky’s smart­phone app for cit­i­zen sci­en­tists eager to help map the 2021 emer­gence with pho­tos and loca­tion.

There are some among us who com­plain about the males’ lusty cho­rus, which can rival garbage dis­pos­als, lawn mow­ers, and jack­ham­mers in terms of deci­bels.

Those con­cerned with the planet’s health can use the data from this and past emer­gences to dis­cuss the impact of cli­mate change and defor­esta­tion. Brood X is list­ed as “Near Threat­ened” on the Inter­na­tion­al Union for Con­ser­va­tion of Nature’s Red List.

Some of us are moved to write poet­ry and songs, though we don’t always get the species right — wit­ness Ogden Nash’s Locust-Lovers, Atten­tion! (1936) and Bob Dylan’s Day of the Locusts (1970).

Inevitably, there will be arti­cles about eat­ing them. It’s true that they’re a hyper­local source of sus­tain­able pro­tein, albeit one that’s rarely on the menu. (The Ononda­ga Nation cel­e­brates — and cer­e­mo­ni­al­ly sam­ples — Brood VII every 17 years, cred­it­ing the insects with sav­ing their ances­tors from star­va­tion after the Con­ti­nen­tal Army destroyed their vil­lages and food sources in 1779.)

Human nature is such that we can’t help but reflect on the twists and turns our lives have tak­en over the last 17 years.

A woman in Mary­land planned a cica­da themed wed­ding to coin­cide with Brood X’s 1987 emer­gence, hav­ing been born two emer­gences before, and grad­u­at­ed from Bryn Mawr dur­ing the 1970 emer­gence, as 50 miles away, Bob Dylan was hav­ing his fate­ful encounter on the cam­pus of Prince­ton.

Most of us will find that our mile­stones have been a bit more acci­den­tal in nature.

Brood X’s emer­gence also serves as a lens through which to view 17 years in the life of our coun­try. The Onion took this to the edge sev­er­al years ago with an arti­cle from the point of view of Brood II, but it’ll be hard to top the 17-year chunk of recent his­to­ry Brood X and the humans who have been liv­ing atop them since 2004 will have to digest.

Speak­ing of his­to­ry, Brood X Mania has been around much longer than any of us have been alive, and prob­a­bly pre­dates a Philadel­phia pastor’s descrip­tion of the 1715 emer­gence in his jour­nal (though we’ll give him FIRST!!! since no ear­li­er accounts have sur­faced).

Pri­or to the Inter­net, ento­mol­o­gist Charles L. Marlatt’s The Peri­od­i­cal Cica­da: An Account of Cica­da Sep­ten­dec­im, Its Nat­ur­al Ene­mies and the Means of Pre­vent­ing Its Injury (1907) was the go to source for all things cica­da relat­ed, and it remains a fas­ci­nat­ing read.

In addi­tion to lots of nit­ty grit­ty on the insects’ anato­my, habits, diet, and habi­tat, he quotes lib­er­al­ly from oth­er cica­da experts, from both his own era and before. The anec­do­tal evi­dence sug­gests our obses­sion is far from new.

These days, any­one armed with a smart­phone can make a record­ing of Brood X’s cacoph­o­ny, but back then, experts in the field were tasked with try­ing to cap­ture it in print.

Pro­fes­sor Charles Valen­tine Riley com­pared the sound ear­ly in the sea­son, when the first males were emerg­ing to the “whistling of a train pass­ing through a short tun­nel” and also, “the croak­ing of cer­tain frogs.” (For those need­ing help with pro­nun­ci­a­tion, he ren­dered it pho­net­i­cal­ly as “Pha-r-r-r-aoh.”)

Pro­fes­sor Asa Fitch’s described high sea­son in New York state, when a max­i­mum of males sing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly:

tsh-e-e-E-E-E-E-e-ou, uttered con­tin­u­ous­ly and pro­longed to a quar­ter or half minute in length, the mid­dle note deaf­en­ing­ly shrill, loud and pierc­ing to the ear

Mar­latt him­self wor­ried, pre­ma­ture­ly but not with­out rea­son, that the march of civ­i­liza­tion would bring about extinc­tion by over-clear­ing the dense­ly wood­ed areas that are essen­tial to the cicadas’ repro­duc­tive rit­u­als while offer­ing a bit of pro­tec­tion from preda­tors.

Dr. Samuel P. Hil­dreth of Mari­et­ta, Ohio not­ed in 1830 that “hogs eat them in pref­er­ence to any oth­er food” and that birds were such fans “that very few birds were seen around our gar­dens dur­ing their con­tin­u­ance and our cher­ries, etc, remained unmo­lest­ed.”

Dr. Leland Oss­ian Howard was erro­neous­ly cred­it­ed with con­duct­ing “the first exper­i­ments of cica­da as an arti­cle of human food” in ear­ly sum­mer 1885. Mar­latt repro­duces the account of an eye­wit­ness who seemed to fan­cy them­selves a bit of a restau­rant crit­ic:

With the aid of the Doctor’s cook, he had pre­pared a plain stew, a milk stew, and a broil. The Cicadae were col­lect­ed just as they emerged from pupae and were thrown into cold water, in which they remained overnight. They were cooked the next morn­ing, and served at break­fast time. They impart­ed a dis­tinct and not unpleas­ant fla­vor to the stew, but they were not at all palat­able them­selves, as they were reduced to noth­ing but bits of flab­by skin. The broil lacked sub­stance. The most palat­able method of cook­ing is to fry in bat­ter, when they remind one of shrimps. They will nev­er prove a del­i­ca­cy.

We leave you with the thoughts of Dr Gideon B. Smith of Bal­ti­more, whose attempt to cap­ture a mer­cu­r­ial month turns bit­ter­sweet, and all too relat­able:

The music or song pro­duced by the myr­i­ads of these insects in a warm day from about the 25th of May to the mid­dle of June is won­der­ful. It is not deaf­en­ing, as many describe it; even at its height it does not inter­rupt con­ver­sa­tion. It seems like an atmos­phere of wild, monot­o­nous sound, in which all oth­er sounds float with per­fect dis­tinct­ness. After a day or two this music becomes tire­some and dole­ful, and to many very dis­agree­able. To me, it was oth­er­wise, and when I heard the last note on the 25th of June the melan­choly reflec­tion occurred. Shall I live to hear it yet again?

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Sounds of the For­est: A Free Audio Archive Gath­ers the Sounds of Forests from All Over the World

Tune Into Tree.fm: An Online Radio Sta­tion That Streams the Sooth­ing Sounds of Forests from Around the World

How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Doc­u­men­taries: Meet the Artists Who Cre­ate the Sounds of Fish, Spi­ders, Orang­utans, Mush­rooms & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Wel­come back, Brood X Over­lords! Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks Get Digitized: Where to Read the Renaissance Man’s Manuscripts Online

in Archives, Art, History, Science | May 13th, 2021

From the hand of Leonar­do da Vin­ci came the Mona Lisa and The Last Sup­per, among oth­er art objects of intense rev­er­ence and even wor­ship. But to under­stand the mind of Leonar­do da Vin­ci, one must immerse one­self in his note­books. Total­ing some 13,000 pages of notes and draw­ings, they record some­thing of every aspect of the Renais­sance man’s intel­lec­tu­al and dai­ly life: stud­ies for art­works, designs for ele­gant build­ings and fan­tas­ti­cal machines, obser­va­tions of the world around him, lists of his gro­ceries and his debtors. Intend­ing their even­tu­al pub­li­ca­tion, Leonar­do left his note­books to his pupil Francesco Melzi, by the time of whose own death half a cen­tu­ry lat­er lit­tle had been done with them.

Absent a prop­er stew­ard, Leonar­do’s note­books scat­tered across the world. Six cen­turies lat­er, their sur­viv­ing pages con­sti­tute a series of codices in the pos­ses­sion of such enti­ties as the Bib­liote­ca Ambrosiana, the British Muse­um, the Insti­tut de France, and Bill Gates.

In recent years, they and their col­lab­o­rat­ing orga­ni­za­tions have made efforts to open Leonar­do’s note­books to the world, dig­i­tiz­ing them, trans­lat­ing them, and orga­niz­ing them for con­ve­nient brows­ing on the web. Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the Codex Arun­del as made avail­able to the pub­lic by the British Library, Codex Atlanti­cus by the Visu­al Agency, and the three-part Codex Forster by the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um.

Oth­er col­lec­tions of Leonar­do’s note­books made avail­able to view online include the Madrid Codices at the Bib­liote­ca Nacional de España, the Codex Trivulzianus at the Archi­vo Stori­co Civi­co e Bib­liote­ca Trivulziana, and the Codex on the Flight of Birds at the Smith­son­ian Nation­al Air and Space Muse­um. (Pub­lished as a stand­alone book, his Trea­tise on Paint­ing is avail­able to down­load at Project Guten­berg.) Even so, many of the pages Leonar­do wrote haven’t yet made it to the inter­net, and even when they do, gen­er­a­tions of inter­pre­tive work — well beyond revers­ing his “mir­ror writ­ing” — will sure­ly remain. Much as human­i­ty is only now putting some of his inven­tions to the test, the full pub­li­ca­tion of his note­books remains a work in progress. Leonar­do him­self would sure­ly under­stand: after all, one can’t cul­ti­vate a mind like his with­out patience.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ele­gant Math­e­mat­ics of Vit­ru­vian Man, Leonar­do da Vinci’s Most Famous Draw­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (1482)

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490) Is Much Cool­er Than Yours

Why Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Write Back­wards? A Look Into the Ulti­mate Renais­sance Man’s “Mir­ror Writ­ing”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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