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The Spacetime of Fine Art - Issue 61: Coordinates
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This article is part of Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time. Read the introduction here. I recently came across this diagram of time and space: It puts the observer at the intersection of two converging cones of light, one representing the past and the other the future. Physicists use the diagram to think about relativity and spacetime, and to decide whether two events or objects can ever have interacted (they can’t if they’re not in each other’s cone). The diagram also reminds me of the experience of making a painting. I stand at a point in front of the easel. The past meets the present on the tip of my brush, and I glimpse a visual world that seems to be arriving from a future that is just out of sight. I’m not unique in this mindset: Painters have been (...)

What a Russian Smile Means - Issue 61: Coordinates
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When I approach Sofiya Campbell, she regards me and my exuberant smile carefully. It’s only after we shake hands formally that, with a shock of blonde hair lapping at her chin, she returns my smile. I feel some surprise: Russians, as the stereotype goes, don’t smile at strangers. Sofiya—not her real name—is a 41-year-old Russian woman who’s been living in the United States for the past decade. I found her in a Facebook group for Russian expats living in New York City, and she agreed to meet and talk about American and Russian culture and, in particular, smiling. We wait in line for drinks for a few minutes, engaging in the same sort of pleasantries she will spend the next hour explaining her dislike for. At one point, she points toward an arrangement of colorful Italian pastries in the (...)

Composing Your Thoughts - Issue 61 : Coordinates
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1. Unshaven and one bit shortTo death and taxes, Benjamin Franklin’s binary list of life’s certainties, add the expectation that this six-note sequence: 

Will continue with this:

Although we ponder ways to avoid or evade Franklin’s list of unavoidable events, we generally accept this more benign certainty as immutable. To demonstrate, consider this:

The penultimate note of the tune generates such strong and specific anticipation that you are likely finding it difficult to continue reading without resolving the sequence. That anxious pause is key to composition and music’s power. It creates a sense of prophetic certainty that allows musicians to play against expectations by thwarting the expected. The controlled manipulation of certainty and likelihood lurks behind those magical (...)

Scavenging Russia’s Rocket Graveyard Is Dangerous and Profitable - Facts So Romantic
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This might be one of the most remote places on earth, little accessible by road, but its peace is routinely broken by the oldest, largest and busiest spaceport in the world: the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Photograph by Alex Zelenko / WikicommonsThe Altai mountain region of Central Asia is a rugged and remote place. Right in the center of the continental landmass, it forms a crossroads between the Kazakh steppes, the snow forests of Siberia and the arid plains of Mongolia. It’s a landscape of granite, forced up by the inch-a-year collision of the Indian tectonic plate with Asia, then carved out over millions of years by streams of snowmelt. Siberian Ibex wander here along with musk deer feeding on the lichenous rocks and brown bears that follow the retreating snow fields in spring.This might (...)

Climate Change Is Making Plants Behave Like Costco Shoppers - Facts So Romantic
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Not having to endure costs radically changes behavior, in humans and in plants.Photograph by Thomas Hawk / FlickrPlants have their own form of money: carbon dioxide. For decades, our fossil fuel industry has been artificially inflating their currency. What happens to plants during inflation—when CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise?The same thing that happens if you drop money from the sky over Times Square, leaving everyone there with $1,000 in their pockets, says Hope Jahren, a geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo, and author of Lab Girl, a personal memoir of her life in science.* “Some people would save it; some people would run out and buy clothes; some people would gamble it away within 5 minutes,” she told Nautilus editor in chief Michael Segal. Plants face similar (...)

Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness—But Time Just Might Do It - Facts So Romantic
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A city’s pace of life was indeed “significantly related” to the physical, social, and psychological well-being of its inhabitants.Photograph by Neta Bartal / FlickrWhile on vacation in distant locales, people often find that time moves quite differently than in the places they’re used to. In the tropics, we settle into the grooves of “island time” and relax thanks to a more leisurely rhythm. A trip to a big city can leave us exhilarated but also drained by the energetic whir of life there.The different paces of different communities also seem to be connected to other cultural characteristics. Robert Levine and his colleagues have studied the speed of life in cities around the world and across the U.S. In a series of experiments they measured how fast solitary pedestrians in a downtown core (...)

Why Social Science Needs Evolutionary Theory - Facts So Romantic
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The lack of willingness to view human cognition and behavior as within the purview of evolutionary processes has prevented evolution from being fully integrated into the social science curriculum.Photograph by David Carillet / ShutterstockMy high school biology teacher, Mr. Whittington, put a framed picture of a primate ancestor in the front of his classroom—a place of reverence. In a deeply religious and conservative community in rural America, this was a radical act. Evolution, among the most well-supported scientific theories in human history, was then, and still is, deliberately censored from biological science education. But Whittington taught evolution unapologetically, as “the single best idea anybody ever had,” as the philosopher Dan Dennett described it. Whittington saw me (...)

Why Living in a Poor Neighborhood Can Change Your Biology - Issue 61 : Coordinates
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It was the most ambitious social experiment ever conducted by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. And one of the most surprising. In 1994, HUD randomly assigned 4,600 poor, mostly African-American families in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York to one of three groups. One group received housing vouchers intended to help them move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Another group received vouchers without geographic restrictions. A final control group didn’t receive vouchers at all. Called “Moving to Opportunity,” the study was designed to answer a question that had divided social scientists and policymakers for decades: Did getting people off of welfare and other forms of social assistance depend on changing their social context?TOWN WITHOUT PITY: A (...)

Making Time Machines From Taxi Meters - Issue 61: Coordinates
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This article is part of Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time. Read the introduction here. Growing up in Israel in the 1970s, my household was a place where time and languages were constantly shuffled. Three generations of my family, speaking English, Hebrew, or Arabic, co-mingled and co-existed. Throughout my childhood, we visited two cities weekly, “The City of Gold” (Jerusalem) and “White City” (Tel Aviv). The cities are just 40 miles apart but worlds away. The buildings, monuments, and markets of Jerusalem are a repository of 4,000 years of history, while Tel Aviv is a 20th-century modernist city birthed from the Bauhaus art school. When I was a child, the car ride between those two cities was an excursion, and time seemed to fold in on itself as I moved (...)

We Need to Save Ignorance From AI - Issue 61: Coordinates
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After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service. To date, it is estimated that only 10 percent have taken the opportunity. In 2007, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, asked that he not be given any information about his APOE gene, one allele of which is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Most people tell pollsters that, given the choice, they would prefer not to know the date of their own death—or even the future dates of happy events.Each of these is an example of willful ignorance. Socrates may have made the case that the unexamined life is not worth living, and Hobbes may have argued that curiosity is mankind’s primary (...)

Desert Air Will Give Us Water - Facts So Romantic
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A partial solution to the problem of punishing droughts may be to snatch water from the air, Dune-style.Photograph by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center / FlickrLast year, after a punishing four-year drought, California lifted emergency water-scarcity measures in all but four counties. Residents could sigh in relief but not without resignation. “This drought emergency is over, but the next drought could be around the corner,” California Governor Jerry Brown said at the time. “Conservation must remain a way of life.”He’s right. In April, a study in Nature Climate Change, based on climate model simulations, concluded that a 25 percent to 100 percent “increase in extreme dry-to-wet precipitation events is projected” for the rest of this century, “despite only modest changes in mean (...)

Evidence Found for a New Fundamental Particle - Facts So Romantic
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Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.An experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago has detected far more electron neutrinos than predicted—a possible harbinger of a revolutionary new elementary particle called the sterile neutrino.Photograph of nside the MiniBooNE tank, photodetectors capture the light created when a neutrino interacts with an atomic nucleus, by Reidar Hahn / FermilabPhysicists are both thrilled and baffled by a new report from a neutrino experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. The MiniBooNE experiment has detected far more neutrinos of a particular type than expected, a finding that is most easily explained by the existence of a new elementary particle: a “sterile” neutrino that’s even (...)

Larry David and the Game Theory of Anonymous Donations - Facts So Romantic
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What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty, is that it’s “hard to reconcile with standard evolutionary accounts of pro-social behavior.”Photograph by David Hume Kennerly / GettyIn a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode from 2007, Larry David and his wife Cheryl and their friends attend a ceremony to celebrate his public donation to the National Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental advocacy group. Little does he know that the actor Ted Danson, his arch-frenemy, also donated money, but anonymously. “Now it looks like I just did mine for the credit as opposed to Mr. Wonderful Anonymous,” David tells Cheryl. David feels upstaged, as if his public donation has been transformed from a generous gesture to (...)

When Bad Things Happen in Slow Motion - Issue 61: Coordinates
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Nothing focuses the mind like a moment of peril. John Hockenberry, the heavily-decorated journalist and commentator, had one of those nearly four decades ago. Yet it has never left him, and it always plays out in his memory, as he puts it, “in super slo-mo.” “About 38 years ago, I was on a road in Pennsylvania. I was sleeping in the back of a car. I woke up. The driver of the car was also asleep,” Hockenberry recounted from his wheelchair in early June at this year’s World Science Festival in New York as he opened up a panel discussion on time perception.“ The car was veering off the road. The passenger next to her reached over very slowly, it seemed, grabbed the wheel, and pulled that wheel as hard as she could … and the car veers to the right. And very slowly we hit the guardrail, the car (...)

What Time Feels Like When You’re Improvising - Issue 61 : Coordinates
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This article is part of Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time. Read the introduction here. Don’t look at the clock! Now tell me: How much time has passed since you first logged on to your computer today? Time may be a property of physics, but it is also a property of the mind, which ultimately makes it a product of the brain. Time measures out and shapes our lives, and how we live our lives in turn affects how we perceive the passage of time. Your sense of time is malleable and subjective—it changes in response to changing contexts and input, and it can be distorted when the brain is damaged, or affected by drugs, disease, sleep deprivation, or naturally altered states of consciousness. However, a new set of neuroscience research findings suggests that losing (...)

The Larger the Theater, the Faster the Music - Issue 61: Coordinates
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This article is part of Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time. Read the introduction here.How is composing music of a given meter similar to painting flowing water? In this conversation between the composer and musician Philip Glass and the painter Fredericka Foster, two artists set out to tackle this question, before flowing into questions of memory, physics, and death. Glass and Foster met in the late 1990s through their mutual interest in Buddhism. They shared a teacher, Gelek Rimpoche, and attended yearly meditation retreats together in Ann Arbor, Michigan. When I invited them to have a conversation about time, they both responded with great interest and curiosity. How better to reflect, they said, on a decades-long relationship that had been sparked by (...)

A New View of Time - Issue 61 : Coordinates
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This article introduces Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time.When Lee Smolin’s book Time Reborn was re-launched to great fanfare at my home in 2015, it accelerated a discussion he and I had been having for years: What if we gathered together a group of creative, broad-thinking artists and scientists whose perspectives on time were directly reflected in their work? What an extraordinary opportunity that would be—to journey down the path of time hand-in-hand with people whose work has literally changed the way we see and hear things. So that’s what we did. Lee’s remarkable ability to think about time in a both a fundamental and historical context, and to communicate his ideas to a broad audience, informed our choice of writers and the direction we gave them. My own (...)

30 Weirdly Fascinating Health and Body Facts - Facts So Romantic
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The camera doesn’t often linger on all the severed heads in Game of Thrones. But if it did, might we see some sign of awareness—at least for a few seconds? A human head doesn’t lose consciousness until after about four seconds, post-decapitation. That’s resiliency of a kind. And the acid in your stomach? Strong enough to dissolve razorblades. It’s not a stretch to imagine that, if the torture-loving Northerner Ramsay Bolton knew this, he’d make use of it. Two facts down, 28 more to go. How many are there that you already know? Illustration by VapesterEllie Summers is a Graphic Designer at The Website Group, a UK based Digital Agency specializing in pay monthly business web design, SEO and Social Media Marketing.Brian Gallagher is the editor of Facts So Romantic, the Nautilus blog. Follow him (...)

To Persuade Someone, Look Emotional - Facts So Romantic
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David Pizarro and his colleagues argue that emotional expression functions as a signal to others that you’ve incorporated feelings into your moral decision. Without that signal, an audience might get the impression that you haven’t experienced any feeling at all—a possibility most people find pretty disturbing.Photograph by ArtFamily / ShutterstockAsked at the start of the final 1988 presidential debate whether he would support the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered, Michael Dukakis, a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, quickly and coolly said no. It was a surprising, deeply personal, and arguably inappropriate question, but in demonstrating an unwavering commitment to his principles, Dukakis had handled it well. Or so he thought. “The reporters sensed it instantly,” (...)

Braces Have Made Snoring a Modern Health Problem - Facts So Romantic
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Over the ages our teeth and our tongue have become ever more crowded by the shrinking of the human jaw. Not only is this an aesthetic disaster, but it compromises our breathing, which in turn can disrupt sleep. And there, our problems really begin.Photograph by Lisa S. / ShutterstockThe apotheosis of my five-year orthodontic torment was a sad admission from the orthodontist: After thousands of dollars invested in what felt like medieval technology, my braces had not only failed to ameliorate a complex situation but created a new problem for which, even today, there is no solution. I won’t say it keeps me up at night, but my husband’s snoring often does—and it turns out the braces he wore as a child may be to blame for that.Suffering for the perfect smile has long been de riguer in (...)

The True Story of Medical Books Bound in Human Skin - Facts So Romantic
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Human skin books are the rare artifacts that prove that the practice of making leather goods from human skin is more than just a ghoulish legend.Photograph by voodoo willyIn 1868, on a hot, midsummer day, 28-year-old Mary Lynch was admitted to the Philadelphia Almshouse and Hospital, the city hospital for the poor, better known as “Old Blockley.” Lynch had tuberculosis, which was soon to be compounded by the parasitic infection trichinosis. She didn’t recover, dying in Ward 27 the following year, weighing just 60 pounds. The physician who performed her autopsy, John Stockton Hough, had an interest in rare and obscure books, and he was looking to rebind a trio of anatomical texts on human reproduction. So, he removed a section of skin from Lynch’s thigh, tanned it into leather in the (...)

Drums, Lies, and Audiotape - Issue 60: Searches
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My wife Ingrid and I had been in Aburi, Ghana for just over a week when our host, Kwame Obeng, informed me that I’d be joining the royal drummers for a performance at the chief’s palace the following afternoon, in celebration of an important holy day. It’s not as if I was unprepared. I’d first met Obeng three years earlier, when he came to Toronto to coach a drumming troupe made up of Ghanaian immigrants and a lone Westerner (myself). We became close: Obeng called me mi nua, or “my brother,” in Twi, the language of his ethnic group, the Akan. And when his visa expired after a year, he invited me to continue studying with him back home in Aburi, a small town nestled in the verdant Akuapem Hills. Two years later, I took him up on his invitation. And now it was time to show him what I could (...)

How to Talk About Vaccines on Television - Issue 60: Searches
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In 2008, John Porter, a Washington, D.C. lawyer and former Republican member of Congress, stood in front of a group of scientists at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and urged them to make their cases to the media and to the people. “America needs you,” Porter said, “fighting for science.” At the time, the number of science articles in American newspapers had shrunk dramatically. Science on television also suffered. CNN dismissed its entire science, space, environment, and technology unit. According to a National Science Foundation report, network nightly news programs from 2000 to 2012 devoted less than 2 percent of air time to science, space, and technology, and less than 1 percent to biotechnology and basic medical research. Nonetheless, (...)

Does Theranos Mark the Peak of the Silicon Valley Bubble? - Issue 60: Searches
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Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. The term is instructive. It suggests not only that hugely successful startups are rare, but also that there’s something unreal about them. There’s no recent Valley startup that satisfies both dimensions better than Theranos. Founded by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, who went on to become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, it raised nearly a billion dollars from investors and was valued at $10 billion at its peak. It claimed to have developed technology that dramatically increased the affordability, convenience, and speed of blood testing. It partnered with Safeway and Walgreens, which together spent hundreds of millions of dollars building in-store clinics that (...)

The Psychological Challenges of Just Getting to Mars - Facts So Romantic
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Though space may be the quintessential I.C.E. environment, Musk appears to be aiming to make trips to Mars—aspirationally scheduled to commence in 2024—as far away from I.C.E.-y as possible.Photograph by NASALife outside Earth has its own Hobbesian description: isolated, confined, and extreme—or I.C.E. “Space is the quintessential ICE environment,” according to a new paper, published in American Psychologist. Space includes inhospitable planets like Mars, whose arresting vistas, canyons, and mountains beckon. But only humans sealed inside cumbersome suits, trained to weather such nerve-racking circumstances, can explore them. Just getting to Mars, says Lauren Blackwell Landon, the paper’s lead author and a behavioral performance researcher at NASA, presents a major challenge. “The (...)