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Physics in James Joyce’s Ulysses and physics amongst the penguins

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So James Joyce included some physics in his novel, Ulysses (serialized in The Little Review from March 1918 to December1920 and published as a novel in February 1922)?

That’s not the only surprise. Apparently, penguins perform some interesting feats from a physics perspective. I have two stories about penguin physics with the latest research being published in June 2023.

Let’s start with literature.

James Joyce, Ulysses, and 19th century physics

This article came to my attention in April 2023 but the material is from 2021/22. Thankfully, since it’s a literature topic, timing doesn’t matter quite as much as it does for other topics. From a December 22, 2021 American Institute of Physics news release highlights an intriguing article in The Physics Teacher,

James Joyce’s book “Ulysses” is widely considered a 20th-century literary masterpiece. It also contains a surprising amount of 19th-century classical physics, according to Harry Manos, faculty member at Los Angeles City College.

“Ulysses” chronicles the ordinary life of the protagonist Leopold Bloom over a single day in 1904. In The Physics Teacher, by AIP Publishing, Manos reveals several connections that have not been analyzed before in the Joycean literature between classic physics prevalent during that time and various passages of the book.

“‘Ulysses’ exemplifies what physics students and teachers should realize — namely, physics and literature are not mutually exclusive,” Manos said.

Manos shows how Joyce uses the optics of concave and convex mirrors to metaphorically parallel “Ulysses” with Homer’s “Odyssey,” and how Joyce uses physics to show Bloom’s strengths and weaknesses in science.

…

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Physics in James Joyce’s Ulysses by Harry Manos. The Physics Teacher 60, 6–10 (2022) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0028832 Published online: January 1, 2022

This paper is behind a paywall but there is a freely available abstract

Ulysses by James Joyce (1882–1941) has a surprising amount of 19th-century, classical physics. The physics community is familiar with the name James Joyce mainly through the word “quark” (onomatopoeic for the sound of a duck or seagull), which Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019 – Physics Nobel Prize 1969) sourced from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Ulysses, however, was ranked number one in 1998 on the Modern Library “100 Best Novels” list and is, in whole or in part, in the literature curriculum in university English departments worldwide. The fact that Ulysses contains so much classical physics should not be surprising. Joyce’s friend Eugene Jolas observed: “the range of subjects he [Joyce] enjoyed discussing was a wide one … [including] certain sciences, particularly physics, geometry, and mathematics.” Knowing physics can enhance everyone’s understanding of this novel and enrich its entertainment value. Ulysses exemplifies what physics students (science and non-science majors) and physics teachers should realize, namely, physics and literature are not mutually exclusive.

In addition to the December 22, 2021 American Institute of Physics news release which provides some detail about the physics in Ulysses, there’s Jennifer Ouellette’s April 2, 2023 article for Ars Technica where in addition to the material in the news release, she adds some intriguing information, Note: Links have been removed,

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In Chapter 15 (“Circe”), one of the characters says, “You can call me up by sunphone any old time”—a phrase that also appears in Joyce’s handwritten notes for the chapter. While Manos was unable to trace a specific source for this term, there was a similar device that had been invented some 20 years earlier: Alexander Graham Bell’s photophone, co-invented with his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter.

Unlike the telephone, which relies on electricity, the photophone transmitted sound on a beam of light. Bell’s voice was projected through the instrument to a mirror, causing similar vibrations in the mirror. When he directed sunlight into the mirror, it captured and projected the mirror’s vibrations via reflection, which were then transformed back into sound at the receiving end of the projection. Bell’s device never found immediate application, but it’s arguably the progenitor to modern fiber-optic telecommunications.

There are several other instances of physics (both correct and incorrect/outdated) mentioned in Ulysses, per Manos, including Bloom misunderstanding the science of X-rays; his confusion over parallax; trying to figure out the source of buoyancy in the Dead Sea; ruminating on Archimedes’ “burning glass”; seeing rainbow colors in a water spray; and pondering why he hears the ocean when he places a seashell to his ear. Manos believes introducing literature like Ulysses into physics courses could be a boon for non-majors, as well as encouraging physics and engineering students to learn more about literature.

In fact, Manos notes that an earlier 1995 paper introduced a handy introductory physics problem involving distance, velocity, and time. Ulysses opens with Stephen Dedalus and his roommate, Buck Mulligan, standing at the Martello tower overlooking a bay at Sandy Cove. …

Now onto …

Penguin physics

Two stories, two research teams, and six months separate their papers.

A February 7, 2023 news item on phys.org features work from a team of Japanese scientists studying how penguins turn in the water, Note: A link has been removed,

Penguins constitute a fascinating family of flightless birds, that although somewhat clumsy on land, are extremely talented swimmers. Their incredible maneuverability in water has captivated biologists for decades, with the first hydrodynamic studies on their swimming dating back to the 1970s.

Although a rare few studies have clarified some of the physics behind penguins’ dexterity, most of them have focused on forward swimming rather than turning. While one may argue that existing studies on the turning mechanisms of flying birds could shed some light on this topic, water is 800 hundred times denser than air, and thus the turning mechanisms employed are presumably very different between these media.

In an effort to bridge this knowledge gap, a pair of Japanese scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), including Associate Professor Hiroto Tanaka, recently conducted a study. The main goal of this work, which was published in Journal of Experimental Biology, was to gain a better understanding of the three dimensional (3D) kinematics and hydrodynamic forces that enable penguins to turn underwater.

Penguin Physics: Understanding the Mechanisms of Underwater Turning Maneuvers in Penguins
Credit: Tokyo Institute of Technology

A February 8, 2023 Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) press release, which originated the news item, describes the research in more technical detail,

The researchers recorded two sessions of gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) free swimming in a large water tank at Nagasaki Penguin Aquarium, Japan, using a dozen or more underwater cameras. Then, thanks to a technique called 3D direct linear transformation, they were able to integrate data from all the footage and conduct detailed 3D motion analyses by tracking various points on the penguins’ bodies and wings.

Armed with these data, the researchers then established a mathematical 3D body model of the penguins. This model covered the orientation and angles of the body, the different positions and motions of the wings during each stroke, the associated kinematic parameters and hydrodynamic forces, and various turning metrics. Through statistical analyses and comparisons with the experimental data, the researchers validated the model and gained insight into the role of the wings and other body movements during turning.

The main findings of the study were related to how penguins generate centripetal force to assist their turns. They achieve this, in part, is by maintaining outward banking, which means that they tilt their bodies such that their belly faces inward. In powered turns—those in which the penguin flaps its wings—the majority of changes in direction occur during the upstroke, whereas the forward thrust occurs during the downstroke. In addition, it turns out that penguins flap their wings with a certain asymmetry during powered turns. “We found contralateral differences in wing motion; the wing on the inside of the turn becomes more elevated during the upstroke than the other,” explains Assoc. Prof. Tanaka, “Quasi-steady calculations of wing forces confirmed that this asymmetry in wing motion with the outward banking contributes to the generation of centripetal force during the upstroke. In the following downstroke, the inside wing generates thrust and counter yaw torque to brake the turning.”

Overall, these findings contribute to a greater understanding of how penguins turn when swimming, which is relevant from both biological and engineering standpoints. However, Assoc. Prof. Tanaka remarks that these findings bring but one piece to the puzzle: “The mechanisms of various other maneuvers in penguins, such as rapid acceleration, pitch up and down, and jumping out of the water, are still unknown. Our study serves as the basis for further understanding of more complex maneuvers.”

Let us hope future research helps fully clarify how penguins achieve their mesmerizing aquatic prowess!

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Kinematic and hydrodynamic analyses of turning manoeuvres in penguins: body banking and wing upstroke generate centripetal force by Natsuki Harada and Hiroto Tanaka. J Exp Biol (2022) 225 (24): jeb244124. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.244124 Published online December 22, 2022

This paper is open access.

Penguins are the fastest swimming birds and this team published a paper about their propulsion six months after the ‘turning’ team according to a June 20, 2023 news item on phys.org,

Penguins aren’t just cute: they’re also speedy. Gentoo penguins are the fastest swimming birds in the world, and that ability comes from their unique and sophisticated wings.

Researchers from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang [KMITL or KMIT Ladkrabang; Thailand] developed a model to explore the forces and flow structures created by penguin wings underwater. They determined that wing feathering is the main factor for generating thrust. Their findings have been published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

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An American Institute of Physics June 20, 2022 news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides further explanation of how penguins are able to achieve their swimming speed,

Penguin wings, aka flippers, bear some resemblance to airplane wings covered with scaly feathers. To maximize efficiency underwater instead of in the air, penguin wings are shorter and flatter than those of flying birds.

The animals can adjust swimming posture by active wing feathering (changing the angle of their wings to reduce resistance), pitching, and flapping. Their dense, short feathers can also lock air between the skin and water to reduce friction and turbulence.

“Penguins’ superior swimming ability to start/brake, accelerate/decelerate, and turn swiftly is due to their freely waving wings. They allow penguins to propel and maneuver in the water and maintain balance on land,” said author Prasert Prapamonthon. “Our research team is always curious about sophisticated creatures in nature that would be beneficial to mankind.”

The hydrodynamic model takes in information about the flapping and feathering of the wings, including amplitude, frequency, and direction, and the fluid parameters, such as velocity and viscosity. Using the immersed boundary method, it solves for the motion of the wing and the thrust, lift, and lateral forces.

To establish the movement of wings across species, researchers use the ratio of wing flapping speed to forward speed. This value avoids any differences between air and water. Additionally, the authors define an angle of thrust, determined by the angle of the wings. Both of these parameters have a significant impact on the penguin’s thrust.

“We proposed the concept of angle of thrust, which explains why finned wings generate thrust: Thrust is primarily determined by the angle of attack and the relative angle of the wings to the forward direction,” said Prapamonthon. “The angle of thrust is an important concept in studying the mechanism of thrust generated by flapping motion and will be useful for designing mechanical wing motion.”

These findings can guide the design of aquatic vehicles by quickly estimating propulsion performance without high experimental or computational costs.

In the future, the team plans to examine a more realistic 3D penguin model. They will incorporate different wing properties and motion, such as starting, braking, turning, and jumping in and out of water.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Hydrodynamic performance of a penguin wing: Effect of feathering and flapping by Hao Zhanzhou (郝占宙), Yin Bo (银波), Prasert Prapamonthon, Yang Guowei (杨国). Physics of Fluids 35 (6), 061907 (2023) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0147776 Published online: June 20, 2023

This paper is open access.

Canada, quantum technology, and a public relations campaign?

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Stephanie Simmons’ October 31, 2022 essay on quantum technology and Canada for The Conversation (h/t Nov.1.22 news item on phys.org) was a bit startling—not due to the content—but for the chosen communications vehicle. It’s the kind of piece i expect to find in the Globe and Mail or the National Post not The Conversation, which aspires to present in depth, accessible academic research and informed news stories (or so I thought). (See The Conversation (website) Wikipedia entry for more.)

Simmons (who is an academic) seems to have ‘written’ a run-of-the-mill public relations piece (with a good and accessible description of quantum encryption and its future importance) about Canada and quantum technology aimed at influencing government policy makers while using some magic words (Note: Links have been removed),

Canada is a world leader in developing quantum technologies and is well-positioned to secure its place in the emerging quantum industry.

Quantum technologies are new and emerging technologies based on the unique properties of quantum mechanics — the science that deals with the physical properties of nature on an atomic and subatomic level.

In the future, we’ll see quantum technology transforming computing, communications, cryptography and much more. They will be incredibly powerful, offering capabilities that reach beyond today’s technologies.

The potential impact of these technologies on the Canadian economy [emphasis mine] will be transformative: the National Research Council of Canada has identified quantum technology as a $142 billion opportunity that could employ 229,000 Canadians by 2040 [emphasis mine].

Canada could gain far-reaching economic and social benefits from the rapidly developing quantum industry, but it must act now to secure them — before someone else [emphasis mine] delivers the first large-scale quantum computer, which will likely be sooner than expected.

…

This is standard stuff, any professional business writer, after a little research, could have pulled the article together. But, it’s Stephanie Simmons whose academic titles (Associate Professor, SFU and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Silicon Quantum Technologies, Simon Fraser University) and position as founder and Chief Quantum Officer of Photonic, Inc. give her comments added weight. (For an academic, this is an unusual writing style [perhaps Simmons had some help?] and it better belongs in the newspapers I’ve previously cited.)

Simmons, having stoked a little anxiety with “it [Canada] must act now to secure them [economic and social benefits] — before someone else delivers the first large-scale quantum computer, which will likely be sooner than expected,” gets to her main points, from the October 31, 2022 essay,

To maintain its leadership, Canada needs to move beyond research and development and accelerate a quantum ecosystem that includes a strong talent pipeline, businesses supported by supply chains and governments and industry involvement. There are a few things Canada can do to drive this leadership:

Continue to fund quantum research: … The Canadian government has invested more than $1 billion since 2005 in quantum research and will likely announce a national quantum strategy soon [emphasis mine]. Canada must continue funding quantum research or risk losing its talent base and current competitive advantage. [Note: Canada has announced a national quantum strategy in both the 2021 and 2022 federal budgets See more under the ‘Don’t we already have a national quantum strategy? subhead]

Build our talent pipeline with more open immigration: …

Be our own best customers: Canadian companies are leading the way, but they need support [emphasis mine; by support, does she mean money?]. Quantum Industry Canada boasts of more than 30 member companies. Vancouver is home to the pioneering D-Wave and Photonic Inc., …

As noted in a previous post (July 26, 2022 titled “Quantum Mechanics & Gravity conference [August 15 – 19, 2022] launches Vancouver (Canada)-based Quantum Gravity Institute and more”), all of this enthusiasm tends to come down to money, as in, ‘We will make money which will somehow benefit you but, first, we need more money from you’. As for the exhortation to loosen up immigration, that sounds like an attempt to exacerbate ‘brain drain’, i.e., lure people from other countries to settle in Canada. As a country whose brains were drained in the 1960s, 70s, etc., it should be noted those drives were deeply resented here and I expect that we will become objects of resentment should we resort to the same tactics although I thought we already had.

Same anxieties, same solution

Simmons concludes with a cautionary tale, from the October 31, 2022 essay, Note: Links have been removed,

Canada has an opportunity to break out of its pattern of inventing transformative technology, but not reaping the rewards. This is what happened with the invention of the transistor.

The first transistor patent was actually filed in Canada by Canadian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, 20 years before the Bell Labs demonstration. Canada was also one of the places where Alexander Graham Bell worked to develop and patent the telephone.

Despite this, the transistor was commercialized in the U.S. and led to the country’s US$63 billion semiconductor industry. Bell commercialized the telephone through The Bell Telephone Company, which eventually became AT&T.

Canada is poised to make even greater contributions to quantum technology. Much existing technology has been invented here in Canada — including quantum cryptography, which was co-invented by University of Montreal professor Gilles Brassard. Instead of repeating its past mistakes, Canada should act now to secure the success of the quantum technology industry.

I bought into this narrative too. It’s compelling and generally accepted (in short, it’s a part of Canadian culture) but somebody who’s smarter about business and economics than I am pointed out that Canada has a good standard of living and has had that standard for many years despite decades of worry over our ‘inability’ to commercialize our discoveries. Following on that thought, what’s so bad about our situation? Are we behind because we don’t have a huge semiconductor industry? I don’t know but perhaps we need to question this narrative a little more closely. Where some people see loss, others might see agility, inventiveness, and the ability to keep capitalizing on early stage technology, over and over again.

What I haven’t yet seen discussed as a problem is a Canadian culture that encourages technology entrepreneurs to create startups with the intention of selling them to a big US (or other country) corporation. I’m most familiar with the situation in the province of British Columbia where a 2003 British Columbia Techmap (developed by the accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers [PWC]) provides a genealogy which stretched from the 1890s to 2003. The number of technology companies acquired by foreign corporations is astonishing. Our technology has been bought—over and over, since the 1890s.

(I believe there were three editions of the British Columbia Techmap: 1997, 2003 and 2012. PWC seems to have discontinued publication and the 2012 online edition is no longer available. For the curious, there’s a June 15, 2012 announcement, which provides a little information about and interesting facts from the 2012 digital edition.)

This ‘startup and sell’ story holds true at the national level as well. We have some large technology companies but none of them compare to these: Huawei (China), Ali Baba (China), Intel (US), Apple (US), Siemens (Germany), Sanofi (France; technically a pharmaceutical but heavily invested in technology), etc.

So, is this “… inventing transformative technology, but not reaping the rewards …” really a problem when Canadians live well? If so, we need to change our entrepreneurial and business culture.

Don’t we already have a national quantum strategy?

It’s a little puzzling to see Simmons appear to be arguing for a national quantum strategy given this (from my July 26, 2022 posting),

A National Quantum Strategy was first announced in the 2021 Canadian federal budget and reannounced in the 2022 federal budget (see my April 19, 2022 posting for a few more budget details).. Or, you may find this National Quantum Strategy Consultations: What We Heard Report more informative. There’s also a webpage for general information about the National Quantum Strategy.

As evidence of action, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) announced new grant programmes made possible by the National Quantum Strategy in a March 15, 2022 news release,

Quantum science and innovation are giving rise to promising advances in communications, computing, materials, sensing, health care, navigation and other key areas. The Government of Canada is committed to helping shape the future of quantum technology by supporting Canada’s quantum sector and establishing leadership in this emerging and transformative domain.

Today [March 15, 2022], the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, is announcing an investment of $137.9 million through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s (NSERC) Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) grants and Alliance grants. These grants are an important next step in advancing the National Quantum Strategy and will reinforce Canada’s research strengths in quantum science while also helping to develop a talent pipeline to support the growth of a strong quantum community.

…

it gets even more puzzling when you know that Simmons is part of a Canadian Council of Academies (CCA) expert panel (announced in May 2022) to produce a report on Quantum Technologies,

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Budget 2021 included a National Quantum Strategy [emphasis mine] to amplify Canada’s strength in quantum research, grow quantum-ready technologies, and solidify Canada’s global leadership in this area. A comprehensive exploration of the capabilities and potential vulnerabilities of these technologies will help to inform their future deployment across the society and the economy.

This assessment will examine the impacts, opportunities, and challenges quantum technologies present for industry, governments, and people in Canada. [emphases mine]

The Sponsor:

National Research Council Canada and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada [emphasis mine]

…

It’s possible someone else wrote the essay, someone who doesn’t know about the strategy or Simmons’ involvement in a CCA report on how to address the issues highlighted in her October 31, 2022 essay. It’s also possible that Simmons is trying to emphasize the need for a commercialization strategy for quantum technologies.

Given that the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) was asked to produce what looks like a comprehensive national strategy including commercialization, I prefer the second possibility.

*ETA December 29, 2022 1020 hours PT: On a purely speculative note, I just noticed involvement from a US PR agency in this project, from my “Bank of Canada and Multiverse Computing model complex networks & cryptocurrencies with quantum computing” July 25, 2022 posting,

As for the company that produced the news release, HKA Marketing Communications, based in Southern California, they claim this “Specialists in Quantum Tech PR: #1 agency in this space” on their homepage.

Simmons is on the CCA’s Quantum Technologies’ expert panel along with Eric Santor, Advisor to the Governor, Bank of Canada. HKA’s involvement would certainly explain why the writer didn’t know there’s already a National Quantum Strategy and not know about Simmons’ membership in the expert panel. As I noted, this is pure speculation; I have no proof.*

At any rate, there may be another problem, our national quantum dilemma may be due to difficulties within the Canadian quantum community.

A fractious Canadian quantum community

I commented on the competitiveness within the quantum technologies community in my May 4, 2021 posting about the federal 2021 budget, “While the folks in the quantum world are more obviously competitive … ,” i.e., they are strikingly public in comparison to the genomic and artificial intelligence communities. Scroll down to the ‘National Quantum Strategy’ subhead in the May 4, 2021 posting for an example.

It can also be seen in my July 26, 2022 posting about the Vancouver (Canada) launch of the Quantum Gravity Institute where I noted the lack of Canadian physicists (not one from the CCA expert panel, the Perimeter Institute, or TRIUMF; Canada’s particle accelerator centre, or the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo) in the speaker list and the prominent role wealthy men who’ve taken up quantum science as a hobby played in its founding. BTW, it seems two Canadian physicists (in addition to Philip Stamp; all from the University of British Columbia) were added to the speaker list and D-Wave Systems was added to the institute’s/conference’s webpage sponsorship list (scroll down about 70% of the way) after I posted.

Hopefully the quantum science/research community will pull together, in public, at least.

Who is the audience?

Getting back to Simmons’ piece on The Conversation, her essay, especially one that appears to be part of a public relations campaign, can appeal to more than one audience. The trick, as all (script, news, business, public relations, science, etc.) writers will tell you, is to write for one audience. As counter-intuitive as that trick may seem, it works.

Canadian policy makers should already know that the federal government has announced a national quantum strategy in two different budgets. Additionally, affected scientists should already know about the national strategy, such as it is. Clearly, children are not the intended audience. Perhaps it’s intended for a business audience but the specific business case is quite weak and, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere, the ‘failure’ to take advantage of early developments is a well worn science business trope which ignores a Canadian business model focused on developing emerging technology then, selling it.

This leaves a ‘general’ audience as the only one left and that audience doesn’t tend to read The Conversation website. Here’s the description of the publisher from its Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,

The Conversation is a network of not-for-profit media outlets publishing news stories and research reports online, with accompanying expert opinion and analysis.[1][2] Articles are written by academics and researchers [emphasis mine]under a free Creative Commons license, allowing reuse without modification.[3][2] Its model has been described as explanatory journalism.[4][5][6] [emphasis mine] Except in “exceptional circumstances”, it only publishes articles by “academics employed by, or otherwise formally connected to, accredited institutions, including universities and accredited research bodies”.[7]: 8 

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Simmons’ piece is not so much explanatory as it is a plea for a policy on a website that newspapers use for free, pre-edited, and proofed content.

I imagine the hope was that a Canadian national newspaper such as the Globe & Mail and/or the National Post would republish it. That hope was realized when the National Post and, unexpectedly, a local paper, the Winnipeg Free Press, both republished it on November 1, 2022.

To sum up, it’s not clear to me what the goal for this piece was. Government policy makers don’t need it, the business case is not sufficiently supported, children are not going to care, and affected scientists are already aware of the situation. (Scientists who will be not affected by a national quantum policy will have their own agendas.) As for a member of the general audience, am I supposed to do something … other than care, that is?

The meaning of a banana

It is an odd piece which may or may not be part of a larger public relations campaign.

As a standalone piece, it reiterates the age old message regarding Canadian technology (“we don’t do a good job of commercializing our technology) to no great avail. As part of a strategy, it seems to be a misfire since we already have a national quantum strategy and Simmons is working on an expert panel that should be delivering the kind of policy she’s requesting.

In the end, all that can be said for certain is that Stephanie Simmons’ October 31, 2022 essay on quantum technology and Canada was published in The Conversation then republished elsewhere.

As Freud may or may not have said, “Sometimes a banana is just a banana.”

Digital aromas? And a potpourri of ‘scents and sensibility’

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Mmm… smelly books. Illustration by Dorothy Woodend.[downloaded from https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2020/11/19/Smell-More-Important-Than-Ever/]

I don’t get to post about scent as often as I would like, although I have some pretty interesting items here, those links to follow towards of this post).

Digital aromas

This Nov. 11, 2020 Weizmann Institute of Science press release (also on EurekAlert published on Nov. 19, 2020) from Israel gladdened me,

Fragrances – promising mystery, intrigue and forbidden thrills – are blended by master perfumers, their recipes kept secret. In a new study on the sense of smell, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers have managed to strip much of the mystery from even complex blends of odorants, not by uncovering their secret ingredients, but by recording and mapping how they are perceived. The scientists can now predict how any complex odorant will smell from its molecular structure alone. This study may not only revolutionize the closed world of perfumery, but eventually lead to the ability to digitize and reproduce smells on command. The proposed framework for odors, created by neurobiologists, computer scientists, and a master-perfumer, and funded by a European initiative [NanoSmell] for Future Emerging Technologies (FET-OPEN), was published in Nature.

“The challenge of plotting smells in an organized and logical manner was first proposed by Alexander Graham Bell [emphasis mine] over 100 years ago,” says Prof. Noam Sobel of the Institute’s Neurobiology Department. Bell threw down the gauntlet: “We have very many different kinds of smells, all the way from the odor of violets [emphasis mine] and roses up to asafoetida. But until you can measure their likenesses and differences you can have no science of odor.” This challenge had remained unresolved until now.

This century-old challenge indeed highlighted the difficulty in fitting odors into a logical system: There are millions of odor receptors in our noses, consisting hundreds of different subtypes, each shaped to detect particular molecular features. Our brains potentially perceive millions of smells in which these single molecules are mixed and blended at varying intensities. Thus, mapping this information has been a challenge. But Sobel and his colleagues, led by graduate student Aharon Ravia and Dr. Kobi Snitz, found there is an underlying order to odors. They reached this conclusion by adopting Bell’s concept – namely to describe not the smells themselves, but rather the relationships between smells as they are perceived.

In a series of experiments, the team presented volunteer participants with pairs of smells and asked them to rate these smells on how similar the two seemed to one another, ranking the pairs on a similarity scale ranging from “identical” to “extremely different.” In the initial experiment, the team created 14 aromatic blends, each made of about 10 molecular components, and presented them two at a time to nearly 200 volunteers, so that by the end of the experiment each volunteer had evaluated 95 pairs.

To translate the resulting database of thousands of reported perceptual similarity ratings into a useful layout, the team refined a physicochemical measure they had previously developed. In this calculation, each odorant is represented by a single vector that combines 21 physical measures (polarity, molecular weight, etc.). To compare two odorants, each represented by a vector, the angle between the vectors is taken to reflect the perceptual similarity between them. A pair of odorants with a low angle distance between them are predicted similar, those with high angle distance between them are predicted different.

To test this model, the team first applied it to data collected by others, primarily a large study in odor discrimination by Bushdid [C. Bushdid] and colleagues from the lab of Prof. Leslie Vosshall at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. The Weizmann team found that their model and measurements accurately predicted the Bushdid results: Odorants with low angle distance between them were hard to discriminate; odors with high angle distance between them were easy to discriminate. Encouraged by the model accurately predicting data collected by others, the team continued to test for themselves.

The team concocted new scents and invited a fresh group of volunteers to smell them, again using their method to predict how this set of participants would rate the pairs – at first 14 new blends and then, in the next experiment, 100 blends. The model performed exceptionally well. In fact, the results were in the same ballpark as those for color perception – sensory information that is grounded in well-defined parameters. This was especially surprising considering each individual likely has a unique complement of smell receptor subtypes, which can vary by as much as 30% across individuals.

Because the “smell map,” [emphasis mine] or “metric” predicts the similarity of any two odorants, it can also be used to predict how an odorant will ultimately smell. For example, any novel odorant that is within 0.05 radians or less from banana will smell exactly like banana. As the novel odorant gains distance from banana, it will smell banana-ish, and beyond a certain distance, it will stop resembling banana.

The team is now developing a web-based tool. This set of tools not only predicts how a novel odorant will smell, but can also synthesize odorants by design. For example, one can take any perfume with a known set of ingredients, and using the map and metric, generate a new perfume with no components in common with the original perfume, but with exactly the same smell. Such creations in color vision, namely non-overlapping spectral compositions that generate the same perceived color, are called color metamers, and here the team generated olfactory metamers.

The study’s findings are a significant step toward realizing a vision of Prof. David Harel of the Computer and Applied Mathematics Department, who also serves as Vice President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and who was a co-author of the study: Enabling computers to digitize and reproduce smells. In addition, of course, to being able to add realistic flower or sea aromas to your vacation pictures on social media, giving computers the ability to interpret odors in the way that humans do could have an impact on environmental monitoring and the biomedical and food industries, to name a few. Still, master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, who is also a co-author of the study, remarks that he is not concerned for his profession just yet.

Sobel concludes: “100 years ago, Alexander Graham Bell posed a challenge. We have now answered it: The distance between rose and violet is 0.202 radians (they are remotely similar), the distance between violet and asafoetida is 0.5 radians (they are very different), and the difference between rose and asafoetida is 0.565 radians (they are even more different). We have converted odor percepts into numbers, and this should indeed advance the science of odor.”

I emphasized Alexander Graham Bell and the ‘smell map’ because I thought they were interesting and violets because they will be mentioned again later in this post.

Meanwhile, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper (the proposed framework for odors),

A measure of smell enables the creation of olfactory metamers by Aharon Ravia, Kobi Snitz, Danielle Honigstein, Maya Finkel, Rotem Zirler, Ofer Perl, Lavi Secundo, Christophe Laudamiel, David Harel & Noam Sobel. Nature volume 588, pages 118–123 (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2891-7 Published online: 11 November 2020 Journal Issue Date: 03 December 2020

This paper is behind a paywall.

Smelling like an old book

Some folks are missing the smell of bookstores and according to Dorothy Woodend’s Nov. 19, 2020 article for The Tyee, that longing has resulted in a perfume (Note: Links have been removed),

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The news that Powell’s Books, Portland’s (Oregon, US) beloved bookstore, had released a signature scent was greeted with bemusement by some, confusion by others. But to me it made perfect scents. (Err, sense.) If you love something, I mean really love it, you love the way it smells.

Old books have a distinctive peppery aroma that draws bibliophiles like bears to honey. Some people are very specific about their book smells, preferring vintage Penguin paperbacks from the mid to late 1960s. Those orange spines aged like fine wine.

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Powell’s created the scent after people complained about missing the smell of the store during lockdown. It got me thinking about how identity is often bound up with smell and, more widely, how smells belong to cultural, even historic moments.

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Olfactory obsolescence can have weird side effects … . Memories of one’s grandfather smelling like pipe tobacco are pretty much now only a literary conceit. But pipe smoke isn’t the only dinosaur smell that is going extinct. Even in my lifetime, I remember the particular aroma of baseball cards and chalk dust.

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Remember violets? Here’s more about Powell’s Unisex Fragrance (from Powell’s purchase webpage),

Notes:
• Wood
• Violet
• Biblichor

Description:
Like the crimson rhododendrons in Rebecca, the heady fragrance of old paper creates an atmosphere ripe with mood and possibility. Invoking a labyrinth of books; secret libraries; ancient scrolls; and cognac swilled by philosopher-kings, Powell’s by Powell’s delivers the wearer to a place of wonder, discovery, and magic heretofore only known in literature.

How to wear:
This scent contains the lives of countless heroes and heroines. Apply to the pulse points when seeking sensory succor or a brush with immortality.

Details:
• 1 ounce
• Glass bottle
• Limited-edition item available while supplies last

Shipping details:
Powell’s Unisex Fragrance ships separately and only in the contiguous United States [emphasis mine]. Special shipping rates apply.

Links: oPhone and heritage smells

Some years I was quite intrigued by the oPhone (scent by telephone) and wrote these: For the smell of it, a Feb. 14, 2014 posting, and Smelling Paris in New York (update on the oPhone), a June 18, 2014 posting. I haven’t found any updates about oPhone in my brief searches on the web.

There was a previous NANOSMELL (sigh, these projects have various approaches to capitalization) posting: Scented video games: a nanotechnology project in Europe published here in a May 27, 2016 posting.

More recently on the smell front, there was this May 22, 2017 posting, Preserving heritage smells (scents). FYI, the authors of the 2017 paper are part of the Odeuropa project described in the next subsection.

Context: NanoSmell and Odeuropa

Science funding is intimately linked to science policy. Examination of science funding can be useful for understanding some of the contrasts between how science is conducted in different jurisdictions, e.g., Europe and Canada.

Before launching into the two ‘scent’ projects, NanoSmell and Odeuropa, I’m offering a brief description of one of the European Union’s (EU) most comprehensive and substantive (many, many Euros) science funding initiatives.The latest iteration of this initiative has funded and is funding both NanoSmell and Odeuropa.

Horizon Europe

The initiative has gone under different names: Framework Programmes 1-7, then in 2014, it was called Horizon 2020 with its end date part of its name. The latest initiative, Horizon Europe is destined to start in 2021 and end in 2027.

The most recent Horizon Europe budget information I’ve been able to find is in this Nov. 10, 2020 article by Éanna Kelly and Goda Naujokaitytė for ScienceBusiness.net,

EU governments and the European Parliament on Tuesday [Nov. 10, 2020] afternoon announced an extra €4 billion will be added to the EU’s 2021-2027 research budget, following one-and-a-half days of intense negotiations in Brussels.

The deal, which still requires a final nod from parliament and member states, puts Brussels closer to implementing its gigantic €1.8 trillion budget and COVID-19 recovery package. [emphasis mine]

In all, a series of EU programmes gained an additional €15 billion. Among them, the student exchange programme Erasmus+ went up by €2.2 billion, health spending in EU4Health by €3.4 billion, and the InvestEU programme got an additional €1 billion.

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Parliamentarians have been fighting to reverse cuts [emphasis mine] made to science and other investment programmes since July [2020], when EU leaders settled on €80.9 billion (at 2018 prices) for Horizon Europe, significantly less than €94.4 billion proposed by the European Commission.

“I am really proud that we fought – all six of us as a team,” said van Overtveldt [Johan Van Overtveldt, Belgian MEP {member of European Parliament} on the budget committee], pointing to the other budget MEPs who headed talks with the German Presidency of the Council. “You can take the term ‘fight’ literally. We had to fight for what we got.”

“We are all very proud of what we achieved, not for the parliament’s pride but in the interest of European citizens short-term and long-term,” van Overveldt said.

One of the most visible campaigners for science in the Parliament, MEP Christian Ehler, spokesman on Horizon Europe for the European Peoples’ Party, called the deal “a victory for researchers, scientists and citizens alike.” [emphasis mine]

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The challenge now for negotiators will be to figure out how to divide extra funds [emphasis mine] within Horizon Europe fairly, with officials attached to public-private partnerships, the European Research Council, the new research missions, and the European Innovation Council all baying for more cash.

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To sum up, in July 2020, legislators settled on the figure of €80.9 billion for science funding over the seven year period of 2021 – 2027 to administered by Horizon Europe. After fighting €4 billion was added for a total of €84.9 billion in research funding over the next seven years.

This is fascinating to me; I don’t recall ever seeing any mention of Canadian legislators arguing over how much money should be allocated to research in articles about the Canadian budget. The usual approach is treat the announcement as a fait accompli and a matter for celebration or intense criticism.

Smell of money?

All this talk of budgets and heritage smells has me thinking about the ‘smell of money’. What happens as money or currency becomes virtual rather than actual? And, what happened to the smell of Canadian money which is now made of plastic?

I haven’t found any answers to those questions but I did find an interesting June 14, 2012 article by Sarah Gardner for Marketplace.org titled, Sniffing out what money smells like. The focus is on money made of cotton and linen. One other note, this is not the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Marketplace television programme. This is a US programme from American Public Media (from the Markeplace.org FAQs webpage).

Now onto the funding for European smell research.

NanoSmell

The Israeli researchers’ work was funded by Horizon 2020’s NanoSmell project which ran from Sept. 1, 2015 – August 31, 2019 and this was their objective (from the CORDIS NanoSmell project page),

“Despite years of promise, an odor-emitting component in devices such as televisions, phones, computers and more has yet to be developed. Two major obstacles in the way of such development are poor understanding of the olfactory code (the link between odorant structure, neural activity, and odor perception), and technical inability to emit odors in a reversible manner. Here we propose a novel multidisciplinary path to solving this basic scientific question (the code), and in doing so generate a solution to the technical limitation (controlled odor emission). The Bachelet lab will design DNA strands that assume a 3D structure that will specifically bind to a single type of olfactory receptor and induce signal transduction. These DNA-based “”artificial odorants”” will be tagged with a nanoparticle that changes their conformation in response to an external electromagnetic field. Thus, we will have in hand an artificial odorant that is remotely switchable. The Hansson lab will use tissue culture cells expressing insect olfactory receptors, functional imaging, and behavioral tests to validate the function and selectivity of these switchable odorants in insects. The Carleton lab will use imaging in order to investigate the patterns of neural activity induced by these artificial odorants in rodents. The Sobel lab will apply these artificial odorants to the human olfactory system, [emphasis mine] and measure perception and neural activity following switching the artificial smell on and off. Finally, given a potential role for olfactory receptors in skin, the Del Rio lab will test the efficacy of these artificial odorants in promoting wound healing. At the basic science level, this approach may allow solving the combinatorial code of olfaction. At the technology level, beyond novel pharmacology, we will provide proof-of-concept for countless novel applications ranging from insect pest-control to odor-controlled environments and odor-emitting devices such as televisions, phones, and computers.” [emphasis mine]

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Unfortunately, I can’t find anything on the NanoSmell Project Results page with links to any proof-of-concept publications or pilot projects for the applications mentioned. Mind you, I wouldn’t have recognized the Israeli team’s A measure of smell enables the creation of olfactory metamers as a ‘smell map’.

Odeuropa

Remember the ‘heritage smells’ 2017 posting? The research paper listed there has two authors, both of whom form one of the groups (University College London; scroll down) associated with Odeuropa’s Horizon 2020 project announced in a Nov. 17, 2020 posting by the project lead, Inger Leemans on the Odeuropa website (Note: A link has been removed),

The Odeuropa consortium is very proud to announce that it has been awarded a €2.8M grant from the EU Horizon 2020 programme for the project, “ODEUROPA: Negotiating Olfactory and Sensory Experiences in Cultural Heritage Practice and Research”.Smell is an urgent topic which is fast gaining attention in different communities. Amongst the questions the Odeuropa project will focus on are: what are the key scents, fragrant spaces, and olfactory practices that have shaped our cultures? How can we extract sensory data from large-scale digital text and image collections? How can we represent smell in all its facets in a database? How should we safeguard our olfactory heritage? And — why should we? …

The project bundles an array of academic expertise from across many disciplines—history, art history, computational linguistics, computer vision, semantic web, museology, heritage science, and chemistry, with further expertise from cultural heritage institutes, intangible heritage organisations, policy makers, and the creative and fragrance industries.

I’m glad to see this interest in scent, heritage, communication, and more. Perhaps one day we’ll see similar interest here in Canada. Subtle does not mean unimportant, eh?

Google Science Fair (encouraging the new generation of scientists) opened Jan. 30, 2013

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Here’s a little information about the recently opened 2013 Google Science Fair for students around the world, aged 13 – 18, from the Jan. 30, 2013 posting on the official Google blog,

At age 16, Louis Braille invented an alphabet for the blind. When she was 13, Ada Lovelace became fascinated with math and went on to write the first computer program. And at 18, Alexander Graham Bell started experimenting with sound and went on to invent the telephone. Throughout history many great scientists developed their curiosity for science at an early age and went on to make groundbreaking discoveries that changed the way we live.

Today, we’re launching the third annual Google Science Fair in partnership with CERN, the LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American to find the next generation of scientists and engineers. We’re inviting students ages 13-18 to participate in the largest online science competition and submit their ideas to change the world.

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For the past two years, thousands of students from more than 90 countries have submitted research projects that address some of the most challenging problems we face today. Previous winners tackled issues such as the early diagnosis of breast cancer, improving the experience of listening to music for people with hearing loss and cataloguing the ecosystem found in water. This year we hope to once again inspire scientific exploration among young people and receive even more entries for our third competition.

Here’s some key information for this year’s Science Fair:

  • Students can enter the Science Fair in 13 languages.
  • The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2013 at 11:59 pm PDT.
  • In June, we’ll recognize 90 regional finalists (30 from the Americas, 30 from Asia Pacific and 30 from Europe/Middle East/Africa).
  • Judges will then select the top 15 finalists, who will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. for our live, final event on September 23, 2013.
  • At the finals, a panel of distinguished international judges consisting of renowned scientists and tech innovators will select top winners in each age category (13-14, 15-16, 17-18). One will be selected as the Grand Prize winner.

Nick Summers in a Jan. 30, 2013 posting for TheNextWeb describes the prizes,

The grand prize also includes a Google scholarship worth $50,000, which can be used to further the students’ education in any way they like, digital access to Scientific American and a grant worth $10,000 for the students’ school, a hands-on experience at either CERN, LEGO or Google, as well as a Mindstorms LEGO set signed by CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp himself.

It’s an incredible prize, although there will also be a handful of age category winners, who will receive a slightly smaller, but no less impressive reward that includes a $25,000 Google scholarship, as well as the aforementioned custom LEGO set, hands-on experience and digital access to Scientific American for their school.

There is also a second prize from the journal, Scientific American, from the Jan. 30, 2013 press release on Nature,

Today marks the launch of the second annual $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair. The Scientific American Science in Action award honors a project that can make a practical difference by addressing an environmental, health or resources challenge. …

“Kids are born scientists and have wonderful ideas about how to make the world a better place,” said Scientific American editor in chief Mariette DiChristina. “We are thrilled to once again sponsor the Scientific American Science in Action award as part of the Google Science Fair to recognize their great projects.”

The finalists and winner of the Scientific American Science in Action award will be drawn from the entry pool of the Google Science Fair by a committee of esteemed judges. In addition to the $50,000 cash prize, the winner will receive one year of mentoring to help realize the goal of her or his project and will be recognized at the 2013 Google Science Fair finalist event in September. More information is available at www.ScientificAmerican.com/science-in-action and www.google.com/sciencefair.

The winning project in 2012 was a Unique Simplified Hydroponic Method, developed by two 14-year-old boys, Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela, both from Swaziland. Shongwe and Mahlalela were also finalists in the 13-to-14-year-old age category at the overall Google Science Fair.

The deadline for entries is April 30, 2012 at 11:59 pm PDT. Good luck!

Photo-acoustic alarms for poison gas

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Alexander Graham Bell discovered the photoacoustic effect which researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory are attempting to exploit for the purpose of sensing poison gases. From the Aug. 14, 2012 news item on ScienceDaily,

To warn of chemical attacks and help save lives, it’s vital to quickly determine if even trace levels of potentially deadly chemicals — such as the nerve gas sarin and other odorless, colorless agents — are present. U.S. Army researchers have developed a new chemical sensor that can simultaneously identify a potentially limitless numbers of agents, in real time.

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The new system is based on a phenomenon known as the photoacoustic effect, which was discovered by Alexander Graham Bell, in which the absorption of light by materials generates characteristic acoustic waves. By using a laser and very sensitive microphones — in a technique called laser photoacoustic spectroscopy (LPAS) — vanishingly low concentrations of gases, at parts per billion or even parts per trillion levels, can be detected. The drawback of traditional LPAS systems, however, is that they can identify only one chemical at a time.

Here’s how the researchers dealt with the limitation of being able to identify only one chemical at a time (from the news item),

[Kristan Gurton, an experimental physicist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Md] “As I started looking into the chemical/biological detection problem, it became apparent that multiple LPAS absorption measurements — representing an ‘absorption spectrum’ — might provide the added information required in any detection and identification scheme.”

To create such a multi-wavelength LPAS system, Gurton, along with co-authors Melvin Felton and Richard Tober of the ARL, designed a sensor known as a photoacoustic cell. This hollow, cylindrical device holds the gas being sampled and contains microphones that can listen for the characteristic signal when light is applied to the sample.

In this experiment, the researchers used a specialized cell that allows different gases to flow through the device for testing. As the vapor of five nerve agent mimics was flowed in, three laser beams, each modulated at a different frequency in the acoustic range, were propagated through the cell.

“A portion of the laser power is absorbed, usually via molecular transitions, and this absorption results in localized heating of the gas,” Gurton explains. Molecular transitions occur when the electrons in a molecule are excited from one energy level to a higher energy level. “Since gas dissipates thermal energy fairly quickly, the modulated laser results in a rapid heat/cooling cycle that produces a faint acoustic wave,” which is picked up by the microphone. Each laser in the system will produce a single tone, so, for example, six laser sources have six possible tones. “Different agents will affect the relative ‘loudness’ of each tone,” he says, “so for one gas, some tones will be louder than others, and it is these differences that allow for species identification.”

The signals produced by each laser were separated using multiple “lock-in” amplifiers — which can extract signals from noisy environments — each tuned for a specific laser frequency. Then, by comparing the results to a database of absorption information for a range of chemical species, the system identified each of the five gases.

Because it is optically based, the method allows for instant identification of agents, as long as the signal-to-noise ratio, which depends on both laser power and the concentration of the compound being measured, is sufficiently high, and the material in question is in the database.

But they still need to invent a device before they can take this process out of the laboratory,

Before a device based on the technique could be used in the field, Gurton says, a quantum cascade (QC) laser array with at least six “well-chosen” mid-infrared (MidIR) laser wavelengths would need to be available.

Here’s the citation for the article, which is behind a paywall,

Kristan P. Gurton, Melvin Felton, and Richard Tober. Selective real-time detection of gaseous nerve agent simulants using multiwavelength photoacoustics. Opt. Lett., 37, 3474-3476 (2012) [link]

There are more details in the ScienceDaily news item or you can check out the Aug. 14, 2012 (?) news release from the Optical Society of America.

I wonder what this research sounds like, unfortunately they didn’t include any audio files with the news release from the Optics Society of America or the news item on ScienceDaily.