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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Watch “Degrees of Uncertainty,” an Animated Documentary about Climate Science, Uncertainty & Knowing When to Trust the Experts

in Current Affairs, Data, Science | May 5th, 2021

We should just trust the experts. But wait: to iden­ti­fy true exper­tise requires its own kind of even more spe­cial­ized exper­tise. Besides, experts dis­agree with each oth­er, and over time dis­agree with them­selves as well. This makes it chal­leng­ing indeed for all of us non-experts — and we’re all non-experts in the fields to which we have not ded­i­cat­ed our lives — to under­stand phe­nom­e­na of any com­plex­i­ty. As for grasp­ing cli­mate change, with its enor­mous his­tor­i­cal scale and count­less many vari­ables, might we as well just throw up our hands? Many have done so: Neil Hal­lo­ran, cre­ator of the short doc­u­men­tary Degrees of Uncer­tain­ty above, labels them “cli­mate denial­ists” and “cli­mate defeatists.”

Cli­mate denial­ists choose to believe that man­made cli­mate change isn’t hap­pen­ing, cli­mate defeatists choose to believe that it’s inevitable, and both there­by let them­selves off the hook. Not only do they not have to address the issue, they don’t even have to under­stand it — which itself can seem a fair­ly daunt­ing task, giv­en that sci­en­tists them­selves express no small degree of uncer­tain­ty about cli­mate change’s degree and tra­jec­to­ry. “The only way to learn how sure sci­en­tists are is to dig in a lit­tle and view their work with some healthy skep­ti­cism,” says Hal­lo­ran. This entails devel­op­ing an instinct not for refu­ta­tion, exact­ly, but for exam­in­ing just how the experts arrive at their con­clu­sions and what pit­falls they encounter along the way.

Often, sci­en­tists “don’t know how close they are to the truth, and they’re prone to con­fir­ma­tion bias,” and as any­one pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved in the sci­ences knows full well, they work “under pres­sure to pub­lish note­wor­thy find­ings.” Their pub­li­ca­tions then find their way to a media cul­ture in which, increas­ing­ly, “trust­ing or dis­trust­ing sci­en­tists is becom­ing a mat­ter of polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty.” As he did in his pre­vi­ous doc­u­men­tary The Fall­en of World War II, Hal­lo­ran uses ani­ma­tion and data visu­al­iza­tion to illu­mi­nate his own path to under­stand­ing a glob­al occur­rence whose sheer pro­por­tions make it dif­fi­cult to per­ceive.

This jour­ney takes Hal­lo­ran not just around the globe but back in time, start­ing in the year 19,000 B.C. and end­ing in pro­jec­tions of a future in which ring seas swal­low much of Ams­ter­dam, Mia­mi, and New Orleans. The most impor­tant stop in the mid­dle is the Age of Enlight­en­ment and the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of the 17th through the 19th cen­tu­ry, when sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy rose to promi­nence and brought about  an unprece­dent­ed human flour­ish­ing — with cli­mat­ic con­se­quences that have begun to make them­selves known, albeit not with absolute cer­tain­ty. But as Hal­lo­ran sees it, “uncer­tain­ty, the very thing that clouds our view, also frees us to con­struct pos­si­ble answers.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

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 at Purdue University Create the “Whitest White” Paint Ever Seen: It Reflects 98% of the Sun’s Light

in Science | April 27th, 2021

Xiulin Ruan, a Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing, holds up his lab’s sam­ple of the whitest paint on record. Pur­due University/Jared Pike

Sure­ly, you’ve heard of Vantablack, the high-tech coat­ing invent­ed by UK com­pa­ny Sur­rey NanoSys­tems that absorbs over 99 per­cent of light and makes three-dimen­sion­al objects look like black holes? Aside from its con­tro­ver­sial­ly exclu­sive use by artist Anish Kapoor, the black­est of black paints has so far proven to be most effec­tive in space. “You can imag­ine up in space peo­ple think of it as being real­ly black and dark,” Sur­rey NanoSys­tems chief tech­ni­cal offi­cer Ben Jensen explains. “But actu­al­ly it’s incred­i­bly bright up there because the Sun’s like a huge arc lamp and you’ve got light reflect­ing off the Earth and moon.”

All that sun­light can make cer­tain parts of the world unbear­ably hot for humans, a rapid­ly wors­en­ing phe­nom­e­non thanks to cli­mate change, which has itself been wors­ened by cli­mate con­trol sys­tems used to cool homes, offices, stores, etc. Since the 1970s sci­en­tists have attempt­ed to break the vicious cycle with white paints that can cool build­ings by reflect­ing sun­light from their sur­faces. “Paint­ing build­ings white to reflect sun­light and make them cool­er is com­mon in Greece and oth­er coun­tries,” notes The Wash­ing­ton Post. “Cities like New and Chica­go have pro­grams to paint roofs white to com­bat urban heat.”

The prob­lem is “com­mer­cial white paint gets warmer rather than cool­er,” writes Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty. “Paints on the mar­ket that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80%-90% of sun­light and can’t make sur­faces cool­er than their sur­round­ings,” since they absorb ultra­vi­o­let light. That may well change soon, with the inven­tion by a team of Pur­due engi­neers of an as-yet unnamed, patent-pend­ing ultra-white paint that has “pushed the lim­its on how white paint can be.” Those lim­its now fall just slight­ly short of Vantablack on the oth­er side of the spec­trum (or grayscale).

An infrared cam­era shows how a sam­ple of the whitest white paint (the dark pur­ple square in the mid­dle) actu­al­ly cools the board below ambi­ent tem­per­a­ture, some­thing that not even com­mer­cial “heat reject­ing” paints do. Pur­due University/Joseph Peo­ples

Pur­due describes the prop­er­ties of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­pound.

Two fea­tures give the paint its extreme white­ness. One is the paint’s very high con­cen­tra­tion of a chem­i­cal com­pound called bar­i­um sul­fate, which is also used to make pho­to paper and cos­met­ics white.

The sec­ond fea­ture is that the bar­i­um sul­fate par­ti­cles are all dif­fer­ent sizes in the paint. How much each par­ti­cle scat­ters light depends on its size, so a wider range of par­ti­cle sizes allows the paint to scat­ter more of the light spec­trum from the sun.

This for­mu­la “reflects up to 98.1% of sun­light — com­pared with the 95.5%,” of light reflect­ed by a pre­vi­ous com­pound that used cal­ci­um car­bon­ate instead of bar­i­um sul­fite. The less than 3% dif­fer­ence is more sig­nif­i­cant than it might seem.

Xiulin Ruan, pro­fes­sor of mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing, describes the poten­tial of the new reflec­tive coat­ing: “If you were to use this paint to cov­er a roof area of about 1,000 square feet, we esti­mate that you could get a cool­ing pow­er of 10 kilo­watts. That’s more pow­er­ful than the cen­tral air con­di­tion­ers used by most hous­es… If you look at the ener­gy [sav­ings] and cool­ing pow­er this paint can pro­vide, it’s real­ly excit­ing.”

Will there be a pro­pri­etary war between major play­ers in the art world to con­trol it? “Ide­al­ly,” Kait Sanchez writes at The Verge, “any­thing that could be used to improve people’s lives while reduc­ing the ener­gy they use should be free and wide­ly avail­able.” Ide­al­ly.

Learn more about the whitest white paint here and, if you have access, at the researchers’ pub­li­ca­tion in the jour­nal ACS Applied Mate­ri­als & Inter­faces.

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

YIn­Mn Blue, the First Shade of Blue Dis­cov­ered in 200 Years, Is Now Avail­able for Artists

Dis­cov­er Harvard’s Col­lec­tion of 2,500 Pig­ments: Pre­serv­ing the World’s Rare, Won­der­ful Col­ors

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

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

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Buckminster Fuller, Isaac Asimov & Other Futurists Make Predictions About the 21st Century in 1967: What They Got Right & Wrong

in Science, Television | April 13th, 2021

Why both­er with rea­son and evi­dence to make pre­dic­tions when you can put your faith in a chance roll of the dice? These two meth­ods could be said to rep­re­sent the vast­ly diver­gent ways of sci­ence and super­sti­tion, two realms that rarely inter­sect except, per­haps, when it comes to for­tune-telling — or, in the argot of the 20th century’s sooth­say­ers, “Futur­ism,” where pre­dic­tions seem to rely as much on wish­ful think­ing as they do on intu­ition and intel­lect.

In the 1967 short doc­u­men­tary film, The Futur­ists, above, sci­en­tists and vision­ar­ies quite lit­er­al­ly com­bine the sci­en­tif­ic method with ran­dom chance oper­a­tion to make pre­dic­tions about the 21st cen­tu­ry. Host Wal­ter Cronkite explains:

A pan­el of experts has stud­ied a list of pos­si­ble 21st cen­tu­ry devel­op­ments, from per­son­al­i­ty con­trolled drugs to house­hold robots. They have esti­mat­ed the numer­i­cal prob­a­bil­i­ty of each, from zero to 100 per­cent. The twen­ty sided dice are then rolled to sim­u­late these prob­a­bil­i­ties. A use of ran­dom num­bers known as the Monte Car­lo tech­nique, often used in think­tank games. All of this is high­ly spec­u­la­tive.

Indeed. The glimpse we get of the future — of our present, as it were — is very opti­mistic, “and so very, very wrong,” writes Bil­ly Ingram at TV Par­ty — at least in some respects. “Sad­ly, those past futur­ists for­got to fac­tor in human greed and the refash­ion­ing of Amer­i­cans’ way to be less com­mu­nal and more self-cen­tered.” The very medi­um on which the doc­u­men­tary appeared helped to cen­ter self­ish­ness as a car­di­nal Amer­i­can virtue.

Yet in 1967, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment still required major net­works to run edu­ca­tion­al con­tent, even if “net­work exec­u­tives under­stood these pro­grams would end up at the bot­tom of the Nielsen rat­ings.” Hence, The Futur­ists, which aired on prime­time on CBS “when the 3 net­works would occa­sion­al­ly pre­empt pop­u­lar pro­grams with a news feature/documentary.” Despite low expec­ta­tions at the time, the short film now proves to be a fas­ci­nat­ing doc­u­ment.

The rolls of the dice with which it opens are not, it turns out, a “crap game,” but a “seri­ous game at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh,” Cronkite tells us before intro­duc­ing the august pan­el of experts. We see a num­ber of sce­nar­ios pre­dict­ed for the com­ing cen­tu­ry. These include the vague “increased impor­tance of human con­cerns,” sci-fi “teach­ing by direct record­ing on the brain,” and omi­nous “tac­ti­cal behav­ior con­trol devices.”

Buck­min­ster Fuller even pre­dicts bod­i­ly tele­por­ta­tion by radio waves, some­thing like the tech­nol­o­gy then fea­tured in a brand-new TV show, Star Trek, but not sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly prob­a­ble in any sense, either then or now. Nonethe­less, there is sur­pris­ing pre­science in The Futur­ists, as its open­ing pan­el of futur­is­tic experts announces their con­clu­sions:

We wind up with a world which has the fol­low­ing fea­tures: fer­til­i­ty con­trol, 100-year lifes­pan, con­trolled ther­mal nuclear pow­er, con­tin­ued automa­tion, genet­ic con­trol, man-machine sym­bio­sis, house­hold robots, wide­band com­mu­ni­ca­tions, opin­ion con­trol, and con­tin­ued orga­ni­za­tion.

Appar­ent­ly, in 1967, all the Futur­ists worth talk­ing to — or so it seemed to the film’s pro­duc­er McGraw Hill — were men. Theirs was the only per­spec­tive offered to home view­ers and to the stu­dents who saw this film in schools across the coun­try. Those men include not only Fuller, who gives his full inter­view at 14:30, but also fre­quent mak­er of accu­rate futur­is­tic pre­dic­tions Isaac Asi­mov, who appears at the 20:50 mark. Aside from the exclu­sion of 50% of the pop­u­la­tion’s per­spec­tive, and an over­ly rosy view of human nature, how­ev­er, The Futur­ists is often an uncan­ni­ly accu­rate vision of life as we now know it — or at least one far more accu­rate than most 21st cen­tu­ry futurisms of the past.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Pre­dict­ing the Future

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

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Explore a New Archive of 2,200 Historical Wildlife Illustrations (1916–1965): Courtesy of The Wildlife Conservation Society

in Art, Nature, Science | March 24th, 2021

Between the 1910s and the 1960s, a nature-lover with a sure artis­tic hand and a yen to see the world could have done much worse than sign­ing on with the Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety. Dur­ing those decades, when the WCS was known as the New York Zoo­log­i­cal Soci­ety, its “Depart­ment of Trop­i­cal Research (DTR), led by William Beebe, con­duct­ed dozens of eco­log­i­cal expe­di­tions across trop­i­cal ter­res­tri­al and marine locales,” says the orga­ni­za­tion’s web site. This long-term project brought togeth­er both sci­en­tists and artists, who “par­tic­i­pat­ed in field work and col­lab­o­rat­ed close­ly with DTR sci­en­tists to cre­ate their illus­tra­tions.”

Now the fruits of those artis­tic-sci­en­tif­ic labors have come avail­able in a free online archive con­tain­ing “just over 2,200 dig­i­tized col­or and black-and-white illus­tra­tions of liv­ing and non-liv­ing spec­i­mens cre­at­ed by DTR field artists between 1916 and 1953.”

Their sub­jects include “mam­mals, birds, rep­tiles, amphib­ians, fish, insects, marine inver­te­brates, plants, and fun­gi,” all orig­i­nal­ly found in places like “British Guiana (now Guyana), the Galá­pa­gos Islands, the Hud­son Canyon, Bermu­da, the Gulf of Mex­i­co and the East­ern Pacif­ic Ocean, Venezuela, and Trinidad.”

It was in Trinidad and Toba­go that Beebe estab­lished his first eco­log­i­cal research sta­tion in 1916 — and where his long life and career came to an end more than 45 years lat­er. “Although Beebe’s name is unfa­mil­iar to most today, he was a celebri­ty sci­en­tist in his time,” says the WCS’ about page. “The DTR’s expe­di­tions were cov­ered by the pop­u­lar press, Beebe’s accounts were best­sellers, and he and the DTR staff pub­lished hun­dreds of arti­cles for both sci­en­tists and the gen­er­al pub­lic.” Pub­lished in not just spe­cial­ist media but Nation­al Geo­graph­ic and The New York Times, their illus­tra­tions cap­tured the col­or and move­ment of the nat­ur­al realm with a detail and vivid­ness that pho­tog­ra­phy could­n’t.

“Rang­ing from depic­tions of sin­gle spec­i­mens to com­plex nar­ra­tive images that show where and how ani­mals lived,” these images are avail­able in geo­graph­i­cal­ly and chrono­log­i­cal­ly orga­nized col­lec­tions at the WCS’ online archive. As many as pos­si­ble are cred­it­ed to their artists — Isabel Coop­er, Toshio Asae­da, George Alan Swan­son, Frances Waite Gib­son, and oth­ers — which ensures that this wealth of nature illus­tra­tions will do its part to not just renew inter­est in Bee­be’s life and work but gen­er­ate inter­est in those who entered into this adven­tur­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion with him. But then, Beebe him­self artic­u­lat­ed best what we can learn from appre­ci­at­ing these works of sci­en­tif­ic art: “All about us, nature puts on the most thrilling adven­ture sto­ries ever cre­at­ed, but we have to use our eyes.”

Enter the WCS archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

The Metic­u­lous, Ele­gant Illus­tra­tions of the Nature Observed in England’s Coun­try­side

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Behold an Inter­ac­tive Online Edi­tion of Eliz­a­beth Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants (1868)

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

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

in Astronomy, History, Science | March 18th, 2021

What’s the world’s old­est com­put­er? If you answered the 5‑ton, room-sized IBM Mark I, it’s a good guess, but you’d be off by a cou­ple thou­sand years or so. The first known com­put­er may have been a hand­held device, a lit­tle larg­er than the aver­age tablet. It was also hand-pow­ered and had a lim­it­ed, but nonethe­less remark­able, func­tion: it fol­lowed the Meton­ic cycle, “the 235-month pat­tern that ancient astronomers used to pre­dict eclipses,” writes Rob­by Berman at Big Think.

The ancient arti­fact known as the Antikythera mech­a­nism — named for the Greek Island under which it was dis­cov­ered — turned up in 1900. It took anoth­er three-quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry before the secrets of what first appeared as a “cor­rod­ed lump” revealed a device of some kind dat­ing from 150 to 100 BC. “By 2009, mod­ern imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy had iden­ti­fied all 30 of the Antikythera mechanism’s gears, and a vir­tu­al mod­el of it was released,” as we not­ed in an ear­li­er post.

The device could pre­dict the posi­tions of the plan­ets (or at least those the Greeks knew of: Mer­cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Sat­urn), as well as the sun, moon, and eclipses. It placed Earth at the cen­ter of the uni­verse. Researchers study­ing the Antikythera mech­a­nism under­stood that much. But they couldn’t quite under­stand exact­ly how it worked, since only about a third of the com­plex mech­a­nism has sur­vived.

Image by Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don

Now, it appears that researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don have fig­ured it out, debut­ing a new com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports. “Ours is the first mod­el that con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence and match­es the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself,” lead author Tony Freeth tells The Engi­neer. In the video above, you can learn about the his­to­ry of the mech­a­nism and its redis­cov­ery in the 20th cen­tu­ry, and see a detailed expla­na­tion of Freeth and his team’s dis­cov­er­ies.

“About the size of a large dic­tio­nary,” the arti­fact has proven to be the “most com­plex piece of engi­neer­ing from the ancient world” the video informs us. Hav­ing built a 3D mod­el, the researchers next intend to build a repli­ca of the device. If they can do so with “mod­ern machin­ery,” writes Guardian sci­ence edi­tor Ian Sam­ple, “they aim to do the same with tech­niques from antiq­ui­ty” — no small task con­sid­er­ing that it’s “unclear how the ancient Greeks would have man­u­fac­tured such com­po­nents” with­out the use of a lathe, a tool they prob­a­bly did not pos­sess.

Image by Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don

The mech­a­nism will still hold its secrets even if the UCL team’s mod­el works. Why was it made, what was it used for? Were there oth­er such devices? Hope­ful­ly, we won’t have to wait anoth­er sev­er­al decades to learn the answers. Read the team’s Sci­en­tif­ic Reports arti­cle here. 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

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

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

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

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