Month: December 2016

Space Grain

[Image: A micrometeorite, photographed by Donald Brownlee, University of Washington].

A paper published last month in Geology reported “the discovery of significant numbers (500) of large micrometeorites (>100 μm) from rooftops in urban areas”—or “cosmic dust grains,” in the words of New Scientist, that have been “found on city rooftops for the first time.”

Although the samples were “collected primarily from roof gutters in Norway,” according to the original paper, their presence there “demonstrates that, contrary to current belief, micrometeorites can be collected from urban environments.” That is, the dust of ruined cosmic objects can be found intermixed with autumn leaves, cigarette butts, and brake pad dust, perhaps even accumulating on your bedroom window sill.

[Image: Gorgeous photograph of a micrometeorite by Matej Pašák].

Of course, it has long been possible to sample urban areas for micrometeorites, so this is not entirely new.

What’s fascinating, nonetheless, is that these micrometeorites are most likely to have arrived on Earth within the past six years, the study points out, but their size is notably larger than the average sample of micrometeorites from the recent geological record, indicating “variations in the extraterrestrial dust flux” on the scale of 800,000 years.

As New Scientist points out, this means that larger cosmic shifts can be deduced from the size and shape of these grains:

The differences [in size] may be linked to changes in the orbits of planets such as the Earth and Mars over millions of years, [researcher Matthew Genge] says. Resulting gravitational disturbances may have influenced the trajectory of the particles as they hurtled through space. This in turn would have an effect on the speed at which they slam into the Earth’s atmosphere and heat up.

“This find is important because if we are to look at fossil cosmic dust collected from ancient rocks to reconstruct a geological history of our solar system, then we need to understand how this dust is changed by the continuous pull of the planets,” Genge says.

Something’s changing in our local cosmic-dust environment, in other words, and evidence of this shift is slowly collecting on our roofs and sidewalks, accumulating in our gutters and sills.

(Conceptually related: War Sand).

The Silence of the Bells

[Image: Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

Citing lack of new business and a changing marketplace, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry has put itself up for sale, the Financial Times reports.

“We are just commencing work on a new peal of bells for St Albans after 43 years of negotiation,” company owner Alan Hughes is quoted as saying. “That’s an example of the timescale we are working on—at least 10 years between order and delivery is normal.”

[Image: The beautiful, gleaming interior of a newly tuned church bell; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

However, the Financial Times adds, “the business has faced two other structural challenges. Bells, unlike modern devices, are made to last centuries. The other weakness of the company is that Whitechapel’s main customer, the Church of England, is in decline with congregations in the UK halving in the past 40 years.”

Check out BLDGBLOG’s visit to the Foundry back in 2012.

Piscine Virtual Reality

[Image: From “Putting the Fish in the Fish Tank: Immersive VR for Animal Behavior Experiments” by Sachit Butail, Amanda Chicoli, and Derek A. Paley].

I’ve had this story bookmarked for the past four years, and a tweet this morning finally gave me an excuse to write about it.

Back in 2012, we read, researchers at Harvard University found a way to fool a paralyzed fish into thinking it was navigating a virtual spatial environment. They then studied its brain during this trip that went nowhere—this virtual, unmoving navigation—in order to understand the “neuronal dynamics” of spatial perception.

As Noah Gray wrote at the time, deliberately highlighting the study’s unnerving surreality, “Paralyzed fish navigates virtual environment while we watch its brain.” Gray then compared it to The Matrix.

The paper itself explains that, when “paralyzed animals interact fictively with a virtual environment,” it results in what are called “fictive swims.”

To study motor adaptation, we used a closed-loop paradigm and simulated a one-dimensional environment in which the fish is swept backwards by a virtual water flow, a motion that the fish was able to compensate for by swimming forwards, as in the optomotor response. In the fictive virtual-reality setup, this corresponds to a whole-field visual stimulus that is moving forwards but that can be momentarily accelerated backwards by a fictive swim of the fish, so that the fish can stabilize its virtual location over time. Remarkably, paralyzed larval zebrafish behaved readily in this closed-loop paradigm, showing similar behavior to freely swimming fish that are exposed to whole-field motion, and were not noticeably compromised by the absence of vestibular, proprioceptive and somatosensory feedback that accompanies unrestrained swimming.

Imagine being that fish; imagine realizing that the spatial environment you think you’re moving through is actually some sort of induced landscape put there purely for the sake of studying your neural reaction to it.

Ten years from now, experimental architecture-induction labs pop up at universities around the world, where people sit, strapped into odd-looking chairs, appearing to be asleep. They are navigating labyrinths, a scientist whispers to you, trying not to disturb them. You look around the room and see books full of mazes spread across a table, six-foot-tall full-color holograms of the human brain, and dozens of HD computer screens flashing with graphs of neural stimulation. They are walking through invisible buildings, she says.

[Image: From “Putting the Fish in the Fish Tank: Immersive VR for Animal Behavior Experiments” by Sachit Butail, Amanda Chicoli, and Derek A. Paley].

In any case, the fish-in-virtual-reality setup was apparently something of a trend in 2012, because there was also a paper published that year called “Putting the Fish in the Fish Tank: Immersive VR for Animal Behavior Experiments,” this time by researchers at the University of Maryland. Their goal was to “startle” fish using virtual reality:

We describe a virtual-reality framework for investigating startle-response behavior in fish. Using real-time three dimensional tracking, we generate looming stimuli at a specific location on a computer screen, such that the shape and size of the looming stimuli change according to the fish’s perspective and location in the tank.

As they point out, virtual reality can be a fantastic tool for studying spatial perception. VR, they write, “provides a novel opportunity for high-output biological data collection and allows for the manipulation of sensory feedback. Virtual reality paradigms have been harnessed as an experimental tool to study spatial navigation and memory in rats, flight control in flies and balance studies in humans.”

But why stop at fish? Why stop at fish tanks? Why not whole virtual landscapes and ecosystems?

Imagine a lost bear running around a forest somewhere, slipping between birch trees and wildflowers, the sun a blinding light that stabs down through branches in disorienting flares. There are jagged rocks and dew-covered moss everywhere. But it’s not a forest. The bear looks around. There are no other animals, and there haven’t been for days. Perhaps not for years. It can’t remember. It can’t remember how it got there. It can’t remember where to go.

It’s actually stuck in a kind of ursine Truman Show: an induced forest of virtual spatial stimuli. And the bear isn’t running at all; it’s strapped down inside an MRI machine in Baltimore. Its brain is being watched—as its brain watches the well-rendered polygons of these artificial rocks and trees.

(Fish tank story spotted via Clive Thompson. Vaguely related: The Subterranean Machine Dreams of a Paralyzed Youth in Los Angeles).

The Totality That Remains Invisible

[Image: Alice Aycock, “Project for Elevation with Obstructed Sight Lines” (1972)].

A few years ago, my wife and I went out to hike Breakneck Ridge when there was still a bunch of snow on the ground. It’s not, in and of itself, a hugely challenging hike, but between being ill-prepared for the slippery terrain, including a short opening scramble up snow-covered rocks, we found ourselves looking forward to the final vertical stretch before we could loop back down again to the road.

What was interesting, however, was that, from our point of view, each hill appeared to be the final one—until we got to the top of it and saw another one waiting there. Then it happened all over again: what appeared to be the final hill was actually just obstructing our view of the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and, next thing we knew, there were something like seven or eight different individual upward hikes, each hidden from view by the one leading up to it.

In 1972, earthworks artist Alice Aycock proposed a new, never-built work called “Project for Elevation with Obstructed Sight Lines.” It was part of a larger group, Aycock’s Six Semi-Architectural Projects, exhibited in 1973.

“Elevation with Obstructed Sight Lines” was meant to be a sculpted mound of earth, shaped for its optical effects.

[Image: Alice Aycock, “Project for Elevation with Obstructed Sight Lines” (1972), courtesy White Columns].

“Only one side of the resulting structure can be climbed,” Aycock wrote in her brief instructions for realizing the conceptual project. “All other side slopes are steep enough to deter climbing. The elevation of each successive climbing slope is determined by the sight lines of a 6 ft. observer so that only as the observer completes the ascent of a given slope does the next slope become visible.”

The piece obviously lends itself quite well to Kafka-esque metaphors—this structure that deliberately hides itself from view, never once perceptible in its totality but, instead, always revealing more of itself the further you go.

However, it also interestingly weds conceptual land art with hiking—that is, with embodied outdoor athleticism, rather than detached aesthetic contemplation—implying that, perhaps, trail design is an under-appreciated venue for potential conceptual art projects, where a terrain’s symbolic power only becomes clear to those engaged with hiking it.

(Aycock’s project spotted via Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974).