No less an authority than the American Chemical Society (ACS) notes that some people are more attractive to mosquitos than others. If you’ve ever traveled with a group people, it becomes very apparent who’s attractive and who’s not (to mosquitos) as some members get covered in bites while others go virtually unscathed.
(sigh) I’m highly attractive to almost any insect that flies and bites so this July 17, 2023 ACS news release “Why are mosquitos so obsessed with me? (video)” on EurekAlert ‘attracted’ my attention,
Some people are more attractive to mosquitos than others, and new research is starting to show why. This Reactions episode dives into the chemistry of the molecules on our skin that make some of us so much more appealing to these pesky insects. It also reveals which products we can use to try to deter them. https://youtu.be/VYUug72GWB0
Reactions is a video series produced by the American Chemical Society and PBS Digital Studios. Subscribe to Reactions at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions and follow us on Twitter @ACSReactions.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
The video is a little over 9 mins. long and the host (Alex Dainis) speaks from personal experience as she is an ‘attractor’.
It’s a little late since this work was presented at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Spring 2023 meeting but it’s a fascinating approach to the periodic table of elements that features a longstanding interest of mine, data sonification.
A March 26, 2023 news item on phys.org announces the then upcoming presentation abut a musical version of the periodic table of elements,
In chemistry, we have He [helium], Fe [iron] and Ca [calcium]—but what about do, re and mi? Hauntingly beautiful melodies aren’t the first things that come to mind when looking at the periodic table of the elements. However, using a technique called data sonification, a recent college graduate has converted the visible light given off by the elements into audio, creating unique, complex sounds for each one. Today [March 26, 2023], the researcher reports the first step toward an interactive, musical periodic table.
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A March 26, 2023 ACS news release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, provides more detail (the presentation abstract is included),
The researcher will present his results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person March 26–30 [2023], and features more than 10,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics.
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Previously, W. Walker Smith, the project’s sole investigator, took his combined passions of music and chemistry and converted the natural vibrations of molecules into a musical composition. “Then I saw visual representations of the discrete wavelengths of light released by the elements, such as scandium,” says Smith. “They were gorgeous and complex, and I thought, ‘Wow, I really want to turn these into music, too.’”
Elements emit visible light when they are energized. This light is made up of multiple individual wavelengths, or particular colors, with brightness levels that are unique for each element. But on paper, the collections of wavelengths for different elements are hard to tell apart visually, especially for the transition metals, which can have thousands of individual colors, says Smith. Converting the light into sound frequencies could be another way for people to detect the differences between elements.
However, creating sounds for the elements on the periodic table has been done before. For instance, other scientists have assigned the brightest wavelengths to single notes played by the keys on a traditional piano. But this approach reduced the rich variety of wavelengths released by some elements into just a few sounds, explains Smith, who is currently a researcher at Indiana University.
To retain as much of the complexity and nuance of the element spectra as possible, Smith consulted faculty mentors at Indiana University, including David Clemmer, Ph.D., a professor in the chemistry department, and Chi Wang, D.M.A., a professor in the Jacobs School of Music. With their assistance, Smith built a computer code for real-time audio that converted each element’s light data into mixtures of notes. The discrete color wavelengths became individual sine waves whose frequency corresponded to that of the light, and their amplitude matched the brightness of the light.
Early in the research process, Clemmer and Smith discussed the pattern similarities between light and sound vibrations. For instance, within the colors of visible light, violet has almost double the frequency of red, and in music, one doubling of frequency corresponds to an octave. Therefore, visible light can be thought of as an “octave of light.” But this octave of light is at a much higher frequency than the audible range. So, Smith scaled the sine waves’ frequencies down by approximately 10-12, fitting the audio output into a range where human ears are most sensitive to differences in pitch.
Because some elements had hundreds or thousands of frequencies, the code allowed these notes to be generated in real time, forming harmonies and beating patterns as they mixed together. “The result is that the simpler elements, such as hydrogen and helium, sound vaguely like musical chords, but the rest have a more complex collection of sounds,” says Smith. For example, calcium sounds like bells chiming together with a rhythm resulting from how the frequencies interact with each other. Listening to the notes from some other elements reminded Smith of a spooky background noise, similar to music used in cheesy horror movies. He was especially surprised by the element zinc, which despite having a large number of colors, sounded like “an angelic choir singing a major chord with vibrato.”
“Some of the notes sound out of tune, but Smith has kept true to that in this translation of the elements into music,” says Clemmer. These off-key tones — known musically as microtones — come from frequencies that are found between the keys of a traditional piano. Agreeing, Wang says, “The decisions as to what’s vital to preserve when doing data sonification are both challenging and rewarding. And Smith did a great job making such decisions from a musical standpoint.”
The next step is to turn this technology into a new musical instrument with an exhibit at the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health, and Technology in Bloomington, Indiana. “I want to create an interactive, real-time musical periodic table, which allows both children and adults to select an element and see a display of its visible light spectrum and hear it at the same time,” says Smith. He adds that this sound-based approach has potential value as an alternative teaching method in chemistry classrooms, because it’s inclusive to people with visual impairments and different learning styles.
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Smith acknowledges support and funding from Indiana University’s Department of Chemistry, Center for Electronic and Computer Music, and Center for Rural Engagement; an Indiana University Undergraduate Research grant; the 2022 Annual Project Jumpstart Innovation Competition; and the Indiana University Hutton Honors College Grant Program.
A recorded media briefing on this topic will be posted Monday, March 27 [2023], by 10 a.m. Eastern time at www.acs.org/acsspring2023briefings. Reporters can request access to media briefings during the embargo period by contacting newsroom@acs.org. [The ACS 2023 Spring Meeting media briefings are freely available as of June 12, 2023. The “What do the elements sound like? Media Briefing” runs approximately 11 mins.]
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If you keep going past the news release, you’ll find this presentation abstract,
Title Designing an interactive musical periodic table: sonification of visible element emission spectra
Abstract What does the element helium sound like? What about hydrogen? While these may seem like absurd questions, the process of data sonification can be used to convert the visible spectra of chemical elements into sounds. When stimulated by electricity or heat, elements release distinct wavelengths of light depending on their electron energy levels—a sort of “chemical footprint” unique to every element. These frequencies of light, which we perceive as different colors, can be scaled into the audio range to yield different sonic frequencies, allowing one to hear the different sounds of chemical elements. This research project involved the construction of an interactive musical periodic table, combining musical and visual representations of elemental spectra from high-resolution spectral datasets.
The interactive periodic table was designed using Max/MSP, a programming language that uses digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms to generate real-time audio and visual outputs. This allows all spectral lines of an element to be played simultaneously (as a “chord”) or for individual lines to be played in succession (as a “melody”). This highly interdisciplinary project has applications spanning data analysis, STEAM (STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] + Arts) education, and public science outreach. Sonification of scientific data provides alternative methods of analysis that can expand access of such data to blind and visually impaired people. Sonification can even enhance data analysis via traditional data visualization by providing a supplementary layer of auditory information, and sonification-based learning models have been shown to improve student engagement and understanding of scientific concepts like protein folding.
This program is currently being implemented in several middle and high school music and science classes, as well as a public music/science show titled “The Sound of Molecules” at WonderLab Museum of Science. Future work will focus on designing a free and open-source version of the program that does not require specialized DSP software.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) held its 2022 Spring Meeting from March 20 – 24, 2022 and it seems like a good excuse to feature ice cream.
Adding cellulose nanocrystals prevents the growth of small ice crystals (bottom left) into the large ones (top left) that can make ice cream (right) unpleasantly crunchy. Scale bar = 100 μm. Credit: Tao Wu
A March 20, 2022 news item on phys.org introduces an ice cream presentation given at the meeting on Monday, March 20, 2022,
Ice cream can be a culinary delight, except when it gets unpleasantly crunchy because ice crystals have grown in it. Today, scientists report that a form of cellulose obtained from plants can be added to the tasty treat to stop crystals cold—and the additive works better than currently used ice growth inhibitors in the face of temperature fluctuations. The findings could be extended to the preservation of other frozen foods and perhaps donated organs and tissues
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A March 20, 2022 ACS press release, which originated the news item, provides more details about crunchy ice cream and how it might be avoided,
Freshly made ice cream contains tiny ice crystals. But during storage and transport, the ice melts and regrows. During this recrystallization process, smaller crystals melt, and the water diffuses to join larger ones, causing them to grow, says Tao Wu, Ph.D., the project’s principal investigator. If the ice crystals become bigger than 50 micrometers — or roughly the diameter of a hair — the dessert takes on a grainy, icy texture that reduces consumer appeal, Wu says. “Controlling the formation and growth of ice crystals is thus the key to obtaining high-quality frozen foods.”
One fix would be to copy nature’s solution: “Some fish, insects and plants can survive in sub-zero temperatures because they produce antifreeze proteins that fight the growth of ice crystals,” Wu says. But antifreeze proteins are costlier than gold and limited in supply, so they’re not practical to add to ice cream. Polysaccharides such as guar gum or locust bean gum are used instead. “But these stabilizers are not very effective,” Wu notes. “Their performance is influenced by many factors, including storage temperature and time, and the composition and concentration of other ingredients. This means they sometimes work in one product but not in another.” In addition, their mechanism of action is uncertain. Wu wanted to clarify how they work and develop better alternatives.
Although Wu didn’t use antifreeze proteins in the study, he drew inspiration from them. These proteins are amphiphilic, meaning they have a hydrophilic surface with an affinity for water, as well as a hydrophobic surface that repels water. Wu knew that nano-sized crystals of cellulose are also amphiphilic, so he figured it was worth checking if they could stop ice crystal growth in ice cream. These cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) are extracted from the plant cell walls of agricultural and forestry byproducts, so they are inexpensive, abundant and renewable.
In a model ice cream — a 25% sucrose solution — the CNCs initially had no effect, says Min Li, a graduate student in Wu’s lab at the University of Tennessee. Though still small, ice crystals were the same size whether CNCs were present or not. But after the model ice cream was stored for a few hours, the researchers found that the CNCs completely shut down the growth of ice crystals, while the crystals continued to enlarge in the untreated model ice cream.
The team’s tests also revealed that the cellulose inhibits ice recrystallization through surface adsorption. CNCs, like antifreeze proteins, appear to stick to the surfaces of ice crystals, preventing them from drawing together and fusing. “This completely contradicted the existing belief that stabilizers inhibit ice recrystallization by increasing viscosity, which was thought to slow diffusion of water molecules,” adds Li, who will present the work at the meeting.
In their latest study, the scientists found that CNCs are more protective than current stabilizers when ice cream is exposed to fluctuating temperatures, such as when the treat is stored in the supermarket and then taken home. The team also discovered the additive can slow the melting of ice crystals, so it could be used to produce slow-melting ice cream. Other labs have shown the stabilizer is nontoxic at the levels needed in food, Wu notes, but the additive would require review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
With further research, CNCs could be used to protect the quality of other foods — such as frozen dough and fish — or perhaps to preserve cells, tissues and organs in biomedicine, Wu says. “At present, a heart must be transplanted within a few hours after being removed from a donor,” he explains. “But this time limit could be eliminated if we could inhibit the growth of ice crystals when the heart is kept at low temperatures.”
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Interesting to see that this research into ice cream crystals could lead to new techniques for organ transplants.
I was expecting a news release mentioning some of the smaller scales at which scientists work, e.g., micro, nano, pico, femto, etc. That was not the case.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is producing a new, biweekly science podcast called Tiny Matters, which is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Head to ACS’ website or your favorite platform and subscribe.
The first episode drops today. Hosts Sam Jones, Ph.D., and Deboki Chakravarti, Ph.D., chat with experts about the ancient beasts that went extinct 65 million years ago, but whose remains still captivate us today — dinosaurs. Scientists around the world regularly discover new fossils, and that helps piece together the mystery of what dinosaurs and other extinct creatures were like. That information doesn’t just inspire movies like “Jurassic Park”; it also helps researchers predict Earth’s future and could even lead to more sustainable technology.
Tiny Matters is a science podcast about things small in size but big in impact. Every other Wednesday, the hosts will uncover little stuff that makes big stuff possible. Upcoming episodes will find them answering questions such as “How does our brain form memories?”, “Why haven’t we terraformed Mars yet?” and “Why isn’t there a vaccine for HIV?” Tune in!
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
I was not expecting dinosaurs and fossils. So, I listened.
First, it’s not that easy to define what a fossil is. (I had no idea this was a problem.) And, the hosts interview a scientist who studies what happens to fossils at the molecular level, which in this case means DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and proteins. it;s a field known as molecular taphonomy.
I found the programme fascinating (scientists think dinosaurs were feathered; they mention evolutionary photonics and structural colour). This despite the fact I’m not very interested in dinosaurs or fossils. Bravo to the hosts for keeping it interesting and light while providing lots of technical information.
(I imagine that the excessive perkiness and multiple declarations that something or other is cool are a consequence of nerves when recording the first episode in a brand new podcast series.)
Getting back to the strengths, the hosts (Jones and Chakravarti) have taken some very technical material and found a way to describe it without patronizing the listener or making it impossible to understand.
For people who prefer to read, there’s a transcript of the first episode here. The scientists interviewed in the “Dinosaur Fossils: Inspiring Jurassic Park and helping us predict Earth’s future” episode were Caitlin Colleary, a paleontologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (Ohio), Emma Dunne, a paleobiologist at University of Birmingham (England), and Vinod Saranathan, a physicist and evolutionary biologist at Yale-NUS [National University of Singapore] College in Singapore.
Happy Italian Research in the World Day! Each year since 2018 this has been celebrated on the day that Leonardo da Vinci was born over 500 years ago on April 15. It’s also the start of World Creativity and Innovation Week (WCIW), April 15 – 21, 2021 with over 80 countries (Italy, The Gambia, Mauritius, Belarus, Iceland, US, Syria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Denmark, etc.) celebrating. By the way, April 21, 2021 is the United Nations’ World Creativity and Innovation Day. Now, onto some of the latest research, coming from Italy, on art conservation.
There’s graffiti and there’s graffiti as Michele Baglioni points out in an April 13, 2021 American Chemical Society (ACS) press conference (Rescuing street art from vandals’ graffiti) held during the ACS Spring 2021 Meeting being held online April 5-30, 2021.
From Los Angeles and the Lower East Side of New York City to Paris and Penang, street art by famous and not-so-famous artists adorns highways, roads and alleys. In addition to creating social statements, works of beauty and tourist attractions, street art sometimes attracts vandals who add their unwanted graffiti, which is hard to remove without destroying the underlying painting. Now, researchers report novel, environmentally friendly techniques that quickly and safely remove over-paintings on street art.
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A new eco-friendly method can remove the graffiti that this person is about to spray on the street art behind them.
Credit: FOTOKITA/Shutterstock.com
An April 13, 2021 ACS news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides details about this latest work and how it fits into the field of art conservation,
“For decades, we have focused on cleaning or restoring classical artworks that used paints designed to last centuries,” says Piero Baglioni, Ph.D., the project’s principal investigator. “In contrast, modern art and street art, as well as the coatings and graffiti applied on top, use materials that were never intended to stand the test of time.”
Research fellow Michele Baglioni, Ph.D., (no relation to Piero Baglioni) and coworkers built on their colleagues’ work and designed a nanostructured fluid, based on nontoxic solvents and surfactants, loaded in highly retentive hydrogels that very slowly release cleaning agents to just the top layer — a few microns in depth. The undesired top layer is removed in seconds to minutes, with no damage or alteration to the original painting.
Street art and overlying graffiti usually contain one or more of three classes of paint binders — acrylic, vinyl or alkyd polymers. Because these paints are similar in composition, removing the top layer frequently damages the underlying layer. Until now, the only way to remove unwanted graffiti was by using chemical cleaners or mechanical action such as scraping or sand blasting. These traditional methods are hard to control and often damaged the original art.
“We have to know exactly what is going on at the surface of the paintings if we want to design cleaners,” explains Michele Baglioni, who is at the University of Florence (Italy). “In some respects, the chemistry is simple — we are using known surfactants, solvents and polymers. The challenge is combining them in the right way to get all the properties we need.”
Michele Baglioni and coworkers used Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to characterize the binders, fillers and pigments in the three classes of paints. After screening for suitable low-toxicity, “green” solvents and biodegradable surfactants, he used small angle X-ray scattering analyses to study the behavior of four alkyl carbonate solvents and a biodegradable nonionic surfactant in water.
The final step was formulating the nanostructured cleaning combination. The system that worked well also included 2-butanol and a readily biodegradable alkyl glycoside hydrotrope as co-solvents/co-surfactants. Hydrotropes are water-soluble, surface-active compounds used at low levels that allow more concentrated formulations of surfactants to be developed. The system was then loaded into highly retentive hydrogels and tested for its ability to remove overpaintings on laboratory mockups using selected paints in all possible combinations.
After dozens of tests, which helped determine how long the gel should be applied and removed without damaging the underlying painting, he tested the gels on a real piece of street art in Florence, successfully removing graffiti without affecting the original work.
“This is the first systematic study on the selective and controlled removal of modern paints from paints with similar chemical composition,” Michele Baglioni says. The hydrogels can also be used for the removal of top coatings on modern art that were originally intended to preserve the paintings but have turned out to be damaging. The hydrogels will become available commercially from CSGI Solutions for Conservation of Cultural Heritage, a company founded by Piero Baglioni and others. CSGI, the Center for Colloid and Surface Science, is a university consortium mainly funded through programs of the European Union.
And, there was this after the end of the news release,
Markus Buehler and his musical spider webs are making news again.
Caption: Cross-sectional images (shown in different colors) of a spider web were combined into this 3D image and translated into music. Credit: Isabelle Su and Markus Buehler
The image (so pretty) you see in the above comes from a Markus Buehler presentation that was made at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting. ACS Spring 2021 being held online April 5-30, 2021. The image was also shown during a press conference which the ACS has made available for public viewing. More about that later in this posting.
Spiders are master builders, expertly weaving strands of silk into intricate 3D webs that serve as the spider’s home and hunting ground. If humans could enter the spider’s world, they could learn about web construction, arachnid behavior and more. Today, scientists report that they have translated the structure of a web into music, which could have applications ranging from better 3D printers to cross-species communication and otherworldly musical compositions.
The researchers will present their results today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2021 is being held online April 5-30 [2021]. Live sessions will be hosted April 5-16, and on-demand and networking content will continue through April 30 [2021]. The meeting features nearly 9,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics.
“The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings,” says Markus Buehler, Ph.D., the project’s principal investigator, who is presenting the work. “They don’t see very well, so they sense their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies.” Such vibrations occur, for example, when the spider stretches a silk strand during construction, or when the wind or a trapped fly moves the web.
Buehler, who has long been interested in music, wondered if he could extract rhythms and melodies of non-human origin from natural materials, such as spider webs. “Webs could be a new source for musical inspiration that is very different from the usual human experience,” he says. In addition, by experiencing a web through hearing as well as vision, Buehler and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), together with collaborator Tomás Saraceno at Studio Tomás Saraceno, hoped to gain new insights into the 3D architecture and construction of webs.
With these goals in mind, the researchers scanned a natural spider web with a laser to capture 2D cross-sections and then used computer algorithms to reconstruct the web’s 3D network. The team assigned different frequencies of sound to strands of the web, creating “notes” that they combined in patterns based on the web’s 3D structure to generate melodies. The researchers then created a harp-like instrument and played the spider web music in several live performances around the world.
The team also made a virtual reality setup that allowed people to visually and audibly “enter” the web. “The virtual reality environment is really intriguing because your ears are going to pick up structural features that you might see but not immediately recognize,” Buehler says. “By hearing it and seeing it at the same time, you can really start to understand the environment the spider lives in.”
To gain insights into how spiders build webs, the researchers scanned a web during the construction process, transforming each stage into music with different sounds. “The sounds our harp-like instrument makes change during the process, reflecting the way the spider builds the web,” Buehler says. “So, we can explore the temporal sequence of how the web is being constructed in audible form.” This step-by-step knowledge of how a spider builds a web could help in devising “spider-mimicking” 3D printers that build complex microelectronics. “The spider’s way of ‘printing’ the web is remarkable because no support material is used, as is often needed in current 3D printing methods,” he says.
In other experiments, the researchers explored how the sound of a web changes as it’s exposed to different mechanical forces, such as stretching. “In the virtual reality environment, we can begin to pull the web apart, and when we do that, the tension of the strings and the sound they produce change. At some point, the strands break, and they make a snapping sound,” Buehler says.
The team is also interested in learning how to communicate with spiders in their own language. They recorded web vibrations produced when spiders performed different activities, such as building a web, communicating with other spiders or sending courtship signals. Although the frequencies sounded similar to the human ear, a machine learning algorithm correctly classified the sounds into the different activities. “Now we’re trying to generate synthetic signals to basically speak the language of the spider,” Buehler says. “If we expose them to certain patterns of rhythms or vibrations, can we affect what they do, and can we begin to communicate with them? Those are really exciting ideas.”
You can go here for the April 12, 2021 ‘Making music from spider webs’ ACS press conference’ it runs about 30 mins. and you will hear some ‘spider music’ played.
Getting back to the image and spider webs in general, we are most familiar with orb webs (in the part of Canada where I from if nowhere else), which look like spirals and are 2D. There are several other types of webs some of which are 3D, like tangle webs, also known as cobwebs, funnel webs and more. See this March 18, 2020 article “9 Types of Spider Webs: Identification + Pictures & Spiders” by Zach David on Beyond the Treat for more about spiders and their webs. If you have the time, I recommend reading it.
I’ve been following Buehler’s spider web/music work for close to ten years now; the latest previous posting is an October 23, 2019 posting where you’ll find a link to an application that makes music from proteins (spider webs are made up of proteins; scroll down about 30% of the way; it’s in the 2nd to last line of the quoted text about the embedded video).
Here is a video (2 mins. 17 secs.) of a spider web music performance that Buehler placed on YouTube,
Feb 3, 2021
Markus J. Buehler
Spider’s Canvas/Arachonodrone show excerpt at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, on November 2018. Video by MIT CAST. More videos can be found on www.arachnodrone.com. The performance was commissioned by Studio Tomás Saraceno (STS), in the context of Saraceno’s carte blanche exhibition, ON AIR. Spider’s Canvas/Arachnodrone was performed by Isabelle Su and Ian Hattwick on the spider web instrument, Evan Ziporyn on the EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), and Christine Southworth on the guitar and EBow (Electronic Bow)
Spider’s Canvas / Arachnodrone is inspired by the multifaceted work of artist Tomas Saraceno, specifically his work using multiple species of spiders to make sculptural webs. Different species make very different types of webs, ranging not just in size but in design and functionality. Tomas’ own web sculptures are in essence collaborations with the spiders themselves, placing them sequentially over time in the same space, so that the complex, 3-dimensional sculptural web that results is in fact built by several spiders, working together.
Meanwhile, back among the humans at MIT, Isabelle Su, a Course 1 doctoral student in civil engineering, has been focusing on analyzing the structure of single-species spider webs, specifically the ‘tent webs’ of the cyrtophora citricola, a tropical spider of particular interest to her, Tomas, and Professor Markus Buehler. Tomas gave the department a cyrtophora spider, the department gave the spider a space (a small terrarium without glass), and she in turn built a beautiful and complex web. Isabelle then scanned it in 3D and made a virtual model. At the suggestion of Evan Ziporyn and Eran Egozy, she then ported the model into Unity, a VR/game making program, where a ‘player’ can move through it in numerous ways. Evan & Christine Southworth then worked with her on ‘sonifying’ the web and turning it into an interactive virtual instrument, effectively turning the web into a 1700-string resonating instrument, based on the proportional length of each individual piece of silk and their proximity to one another. As we move through the web (currently just with a computer trackpad, but eventually in a VR environment), we create a ‘sonic biome’: complex ‘just intonation’ chords that come in and out of earshot according to which of her strings we are closest to. That part was all done in MAX/MSP, a very flexible high level audio programming environment, which was connected with the virtual environment in Unity. Our new colleague Ian Hattwick joined the team focusing on sound design and spatialization, building an interface that allowed him the sonically ‘sculpt’ the sculpture in real time, changing amplitude, resonance, and other factors. During this performance at Palais de Tokyo, Isabelle toured the web – that’s what the viewer sees – while Ian adjusted sounds, so in essence they were together “playing the web.” Isabelle provides a space (the virtual web) and a specific location within it (by driving through), which is what the viewer sees, from multiple angles, on the 3 scrims. The location has certain acoustic potentialities, and Ian occupies them sonically, just as a real human performer does in a real acoustic space. A rough analogy might be something like wandering through a gothic cathedral or a resonant cave, using your voice or an instrument at different volumes and on different pitches to find sonorous resonances, echoes, etc. Meanwhile, Evan and Christine are improvising with the web instrument, building on Ian’s sound, with Evan on EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument) and Christine on electric guitar with EBow.
For the visuals, Southworth wanted to create the illusion that the performers were actually inside the web. We built a structure covered in sharkstooth scrim, with 3 projectors projecting in and through from 3 sides. Southworth created images using her photographs of local Lexington, MA spider webs mixed with slides of the scan of the web at MIT, and then mixed those images with the projection of the game, creating an interactive replica of Saraceno’s multi-species webs.
If you listen to the press conference, you will hear Buehler talk about practical applications for this work in materials science.
It seems that this new technique for creating wearable electronics will be more like getting a permanent tattoo where the circuits are applied directly to your skin as opposed to being like a temporary tattoo where the circuits are printed onto a substrate and then applied to then, worn on your skin.
Caption: On-body sensors, such as electrodes and temperature sensors, were directly printed and sintered on the skin surface. Credit: Adapted from ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2020, DOI: 10.1021/acsami.0c11479
Wearable electronics are getting smaller, more comfortable and increasingly capable of interfacing with the human body. To achieve a truly seamless integration, electronics could someday be printed directly on people’s skin. As a step toward this goal, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have safely placed wearable circuits directly onto the surface of human skin to monitor health indicators, such as temperature, blood oxygen, heart rate and blood pressure.
The latest generation of wearable electronics for health monitoring combines soft on-body sensors with flexible printed circuit boards (FPCBs) for signal readout and wireless transmission to health care workers. However, before the sensor is attached to the body, it must be printed or lithographed onto a carrier material, which can involve sophisticated fabrication approaches. To simplify the process and improve the performance of the devices, Peng He, Weiwei Zhao, Huanyu Cheng and colleagues wanted to develop a room-temperature method to sinter metal nanoparticles onto paper or fabric for FPCBs and directly onto human skin for on-body sensors. Sintering — the process of fusing metal or other particles together — usually requires heat, which wouldn’t be suitable for attaching circuits directly to skin.
The researchers designed an electronic health monitoring system that consisted of sensor circuits printed directly on the back of a human hand, as well as a paper-based FPCB attached to the inside of a shirt sleeve. To make the FPCB part of the system, the researchers coated a piece of paper with a novel sintering aid and used an inkjet printer with silver nanoparticle ink to print circuits onto the coating. As solvent evaporated from the ink, the silver nanoparticles sintered at room temperature to form circuits. A commercially available chip was added to wirelessly transmit the data, and the resulting FPCB was attached to a volunteer’s sleeve. The team used the same process to sinter circuits on the volunteer’s hand, except printing was done with a polymer stamp. As a proof of concept, the researchers made a full electronic health monitoring system that sensed temperature, humidity, blood oxygen, heart rate, blood pressure and electrophysiological signals and analyzed its performance. The signals obtained by these sensors were comparable to or better than those measured by conventional commercial devices.
The 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table of Elements has occasioned its own International Year as declared by the United Nations (UN) and, hopefully, a revival of the ‘elements cupcake’ craze which seems to have had its heyday in 2011/12. (I wrote about the cupcakes here in a March 21, 2012 posting ‘Periodic table of cupcakes, a new subculture?‘)
As for IYPT 2019, let’s get started with Mark Lorch’s (professor of Science, Communication, and Chemistry at the University of Hull) January 2, 2019 essay for The Conversation (h/t phys.org), Note: Links have been removed,
The periodic table stares down from the walls of just about every chemistry lab. The credit for its creation generally goes to Dimitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist who in 1869 wrote out the known elements (of which there were 63 at the time) on cards and then arranged them in columns and rows according to their chemical and physical properties. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of this pivotal moment in science, the UN has proclaimed 2019 to be the International year of the Periodic Table
But the periodic table didn’t actually start with Mendeleev. Many had tinkered with arranging the elements. Decades before, chemist John Dalton tried to create a table as well as some rather interesting symbols for the elements (they didn’t catch on). And just a few years before Mendeleev sat down with his deck of homemade cards, John Newlands also created a table sorting the elements by their properties.
Mendeleev’s genius was in what he left out of his table. He recognised that certain elements were missing, yet to be discovered. So where Dalton, Newlands and others had laid out what was known, Mendeleev left space for the unknown. Even more amazingly, he accurately predicted the properties of the missing elements. …
November 14, 2018 | Today the registration opened for the launch of the 2019 International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements (IYPT2019). This Opening Ceremomy will take place on Tuesday the 29th of January 2019 from 10 a.m. till 7 p.m. in Paris, France at the UNESCO House. It promises to be an exciting day with inspiring speakers and exhibitions.
International Year of the Periodic Table The United Nations General Assembly during its 74th Plenary Meeting proclaimed 2019 as the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. The IYPT2019 was adopted by the UNESCO General Conference at its 39th Session (39 C/decision 60) to highlight the contributions of chemistry and other basic sciences to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The IYPT2019 is an IUPAC initiative and administered by a Management Committee consisting of representatives of the initiating organizations, UNESCO and a number of other supporting international organizations.
The founding partners of IYPT2019 are the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the European Chemical Society (EuChemS), the International Science Council (ISC), the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST).
I checked and registration still seems to be open. Plus, they have listings for the events taking place all over the world.
On other fronts, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has a dedicated page for the IYPT 2019, which includes, amonst other things, a section on the Latest News,
As for what Canadians might be doing, I have contacted the Chemical Institute of Canada [CIC], (an umbrella organization representing the Canadian Society for Chemistry [CSC]; the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering [CSChE]; and the Canadian Society for Chemical Technology [CSCT]) and they’re busily preparing to highlight the 2019 IYPT according to one of Peter Mirtchev, one of the organizers (Conference Technical Programs Officer) for the 102nd Canadian Chemistry conference,
… at the 2019 Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition (CCCE2019), we will organize an event called Chemistry Across the Periodic Table, whereby we will highlight a single element from every abstract submitted. We’re printing the highlighted elements on the name badges of our attendees in the hope of facilitating conversation and networking throughout the conference.
Since things can change, I suggest that you keep an eye on the CCCE 2019 website to track the progress of their plans. I’m sure they hope to organize more 2019 IYPT celebratory moments at the conference, which will be held in Québec City, Québec from Monday, June 3, 2019 to Friday, June 7, 2019. You might also want to keep an eye on the Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC} and its affiliated organizations for other 2019 IYPT events in Canada.
It takes a while (i.e., you have to read the abstract for the paper) to get to the nanoscale part of the story. In the meantime, here are the broad brushstrokes (as it were) from a group of researchers in Hungary, from an Oct. 11, 2017 American Chemical Society (ACS) news release (also on EurekAlert),
Gold has long been valued for its luxurious glitter and hue, and threads of the gleaming metal have graced clothing and tapestries for centuries. Determining how artisans accomplished these adornments in the distant past can help scientists restore, preserve and date artifacts, but solutions to these puzzles have been elusive. Now scientists, reporting in ACS’ journal Analytical Chemistry, have revealed that medieval artisans used a gilding technology that has endured for centuries.
Researchers can learn a lot about vanished cultures from objects left behind. But one detail that has escaped understanding has been the manufacturing method of gold-coated silver threads found in textiles from the Middle Ages. Four decades of intensive research yielded some clues, but the findings have been very limited. Study of the materials has been hindered by their extremely small size: A single metal thread is sometimes only as thick as a human hair, and the thickness of its gold coating is a hundredth of that. Tamás G. Weiszburg, Katalin Gherdán and colleagues set out to fill this gap.
Using a suite of lab techniques, the researchers examined medieval gilded silver threads, and silver and gold strips produced during and after the Middle Ages. The items come from European cultures spanning the 13th to 17th centuries. The researchers characterized the chemistry of the silver thread, its gold coating, the interactions between the two and the shape of metal strips’ edges. To characterize the threads and strips, the researchers combined high-resolution scanning electron microscopy, electron back-scattered diffraction with energy-dispersive electron probe microanalysis and other analytical methods. Though previous studies indicated that these tiny objects were manufactured by a mercury-based method in fashion at that time, the new results suggest that the threads were gilded exclusively by using an ancient method that survived for a millennium. The goldsmiths simply heated and hammered the silver sheets and the gold foil together, and then cut them into strips. It was also possible to determine whether scissor- or knife-like tools were used for cutting. The results also show that this process was used widely in the region well into the 17th century.
Caption: A new study unravels how medieval artisans embellished textiles with gold. Credit: The American Chemical Society
Finally, here’s the abstract with the information about the nanoscale elements (link to paper follows abstract),
Although gilt silver threads were widely used for decorating historical textiles, their manufacturing techniques have been elusive for centuries. Contemporary written sources give only limited, sometimes ambiguous information, and detailed cross-sectional study of the microscale soft noble metal objects has been hindered by sample preparation. In this work, to give a thorough characterization of historical gilt silver threads, nano- and microscale textural, chemical, and structural data on cross sections, prepared by focused ion beam milling, were collected, using various electron-optical methods (high-resolution scanning electron microscopy (SEM), wavelength-dispersive electron probe microanalysis (EPMA), electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) combined with energy-dispersive electron probe microanalysis (EDX), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) combined with EDX, and micro-Raman spectroscopy. The thickness of the gold coating varied between 70–400 nm [emphasis mine]. Data reveal nano- and microscale metallurgy-related, gilding-related and corrosion-related inhomogeneities in the silver base. These inhomogeneities account for the limitations of surface analysis when tracking gilding methods of historical metal threads, and explain why chemical information has to be connected to 3D texture on submicrometre scale. The geometry and chemical composition (lack of mercury, copper) of the gold/silver interface prove that the ancient gilding technology was diffusion bonding. The observed differences in the copper content of the silver base of the different thread types suggest intentional technological choice. Among the examined textiles of different ages (13th–17th centuries) and provenances narrow technological variation has been found.
One final comment, if you read the abstract, you’ll see how many technologies the researchers needed to use to examine the textiles. How did medieval artisans create nanoscale and microscale gilding when they couldn’t see it? I realize there are now some optical microscopes that can provide a view of the nanoscale but presumably those artisans of the Middle Ages did not have access to that kind of equipment. So, how did they create those textiles with the technology of the day?
The American Chemical Society (ACS) has invited people to vote on which chocolate, milk or dark, (h/t Feb. 7, 2017 ACS news release on EurekAlert) is the best. But first, here’s a video featuring the chocolate showdown,
You can go here to vote in the comments. Team Dark or Team Milk? The results will be announced on Valentine’s Day.
