A February 14, 2024 news item on Nanowerk provides some context for the image in the above, Note: A link has been removed,
In a study published in Advanced Materials (“Synergistic Pharmacological Therapy to Modulate Glial Cells in Spinal Cord Injury”), researchers Pietro Veglianese, Valeria Veneruso and Emilia Petillo from Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri IRCCS in collaboration with Filippo Rossi of the Politecnico di Milano have demonstrated that an innovative nanovector (nanogel), which they developed, is able to deliver anti-inflammatory drugs in a targeted manner into glial cells actively involved in the evolution of spinal cord injury, a condition that leads to paraplegia or quadriplegia [also known as tetraplegia].
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A February 20, 2024 Politecnico di Milano press release (also on EurekAlert but published February 14, 2024) which originated the news item, provides a bit more information about the difficulties with current treatments and the advantages of the new approach,
Treatments currently available to modulate the inflammatory response mediated by the component that controls the brain’s internal environment after acute spinal cord injury showed limited efficacy. This is also due to the lack of a therapeutic approach that can selectively act on microglial and astrocytic cells.
The nanovectors developed by Politecnico di Milano, called nanogels, consist of polymers that can bind to specific target molecules. In this case, the nanogels were designed to bind to glial cells, which are crucial in the inflammatory response following acute spinal cord injury. The collaboration between Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri IRCCS and Politecnico di Milano showed that nanogels, loaded with a drug with anti-inflammatory action (rolipram), were able to convert glial cells from a damaging to a protective state, actively contributing to the recovery of injured tissue. Nanogels showed to have a selective effect on glial cells, releasing the drug in a targeted manner, maximising its effect and reducing possible side effects.
“The key to the research was understanding the functional groups that can selectively target nanogels within specific cell populations”, explains Filippo Rossi, professor at the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering ‘Giulio Natta’ at Politecnico di Milano – This makes it possible to optimise drug treatments by reducing unwanted effects”.
“The results of the study”, continues Pietro Veglianese, Head of the Acute Spinal Trauma and Regeneration Unit, Department of Neuroscience at Istituto Mario Negri, “show that nanogels reduced inflammation and improved recovery capacity in animal models with spinal cord injury, partially restoring motor function. These results open the way to new therapeutic possibilities for myelolysis patients. Moreover, this approach may also be beneficial for treating neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, in which inflammation and glial cells play a significant role”.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Synergistic Pharmacological Therapy to Modulate Glial Cells in Spinal Cord Injury by Valeria Veneruso, Emilia Petillo, Fabio Pizzetti, Alessandro Orro, Davide Comolli, Massimiliano De Paola, Antonietta Verrillo, Arianna Baggiolini, Simona Votano, Franca Castiglione, Mattia Sponchioni, Gianluigi Forloni, Filippo Rossi, Pietro Veglianese. Advanced Materials Volume 36, Issue 3 January 18, 2024 2307747 DOOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202307747 First published: 22 November 2023
Unfortunately, there isn’t a punch line but I appreciate the effort to inject a little lightness into the description of a fairly technical achievement, from a February 12, 2024 news item on Nanowerk, Note: A link has been removed,
Electrons carry electrical energy, while vibrational energy is carried by phonons. Understanding how they interact with each other in certain materials, like in a sandwich of two graphene layers, will have implications for future optoelectronic devices.
Electrons carry electrical energy, while vibrational energy is carried by phonons. Understanding how they interact with each other in certain materials, like in a sandwich of two graphene layers, will have implications for future optoelectronic devices. Recent work has revealed that graphene layers twisted relative to each other by a small ‘magic angle’ can act as perfect insulator or superconductor. But the physics of the electron-phonon interactions are a mystery. As part of a worldwide international collaboration, TU/e researcher Klaas-Jan Tielrooij has led a study on electron-phonon interactions in graphene layers. And they have made a startling discovery.
What did the electron say to the phonon between two layers of graphene?
This might sound like the start of a physics meme with a hilarious punchline to follow. But that’s not the case according to Klaas-Jan Tielrooij. He’s an associate professor at the Department of Applied Physics and Science Education at TU/e and the research lead of the new work published in Science Advances.
“We sought to understand how electrons and phonons ‘talk’ to each other within two twisted graphene layers,” says Tielrooij.
Electrons are the well-known charge and energy carriers associated with electricity, while a phonon is linked to the emergence of vibrations between atoms in an atomic crystal.
“Phonons aren’t particles like electrons though, they’re a quasiparticle. Yet, their interaction with electrons in certain materials and how they affect energy loss in electrons has been a mystery for some time,” notes Tielrooij.
But why would it be interesting to learn more about electron-phonon interactions? “These interactions can have a major effect on the electronic and optoelectronic properties of devices, made from materials like graphene, which we are going to see more of in the future.”
Twistronics: Breakthrough of the Year 2018
Tielrooij and his collaborators, who are based around the world in Spain, Germany, Japan, and the US, decided to study electron-phonon interactions in a very particular case – within two layers of graphene where the layers are ever-so-slightly misaligned.
Graphene is a two-dimensional layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice that has several impressive properties such as high electrical conductivity, high flexibility, and high thermal conductivity, and it is also nearly transparent.
Back in 2018, the Physics World Breakthrough of the Year award went to Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and colleagues at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] for their pioneering work on twistronics, where adjacent layers of graphene are rotated very slightly relative to each other to change the electronic properties of the graphene.
Twist and astound!
“Depending on how the layers of graphene are rotated and doped with electrons, contrasting outcomes are possible. For certain dopings, the layers act as an insulator, which prevents the movement of electrons. For other doping, the material behaves as a superconductor – a material with zero resistance that allows the dissipation-less movement of electrons,” says Tielrooij.
Better known as twisted bilayer graphene, these outcomes occur at the so-called magic angle of misalignment, which is just over one degree of rotation. “The misalignment between the layers is tiny, but the possibility for a superconductor or an insulator is an astounding result.”
How electrons lose energy
For their study, Tielrooij and the team wanted to learn more about how electrons lose energy in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, or MATBG for short.
To achieve this, they used a material consisting of two sheets of monolayer graphene (each 0.3 nanometers thick), placed on top of each other, and misaligned relative to each other by about one degree.
Then using two optoelectronic measurement techniques, the researchers were able to probe the electron-phonon interactions in detail, and they made some staggering discoveries.
“We observed that the energy vanishes very quickly in the MATBG – it occurs on the picosecond timescale, which is one-millionth of one-millionth of a second!” says Tielrooij.
This observation is much faster than for the case of a single layer of graphene, especially at ultracold temperatures (specifically below -73 degrees Celsius). “At these temperatures, it’s very difficult for electrons to lose energy to phonons, yet it happens in the MATBG.”
Why electrons lose energy
So, why are the electrons losing the energy so quickly through interaction with the phonons? Well, it turns out the researchers have uncovered a whole new physical process.
“The strong electron-phonon interaction is a completely new physical process and involves so-called electron-phonon Umklapp scattering,” adds Hiroaki Ishizuka from Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, who developed the theoretical understanding of this process together with Leonid Levitov from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.
Umklapp scattering between phonons is a process that often affects heat transfer in materials, because it enables relatively large amounts of momentum to be transferred between phonons.
“We see the effects of phonon-phonon Umklapp scattering all the time as it affects the ability for (non-metallic) materials at room temperature to conduct heat. Just think of an insulating material on the handle of a pot for example,” says Ishizuka. “However, electron-phonon Umklapp scattering is rare. Here though we have observed for the first time how electrons and phonons interact via Umklapp scattering to dissipate electron energy.”
Challenges solved together
Tielrooij and collaborators may have completed most of the work while he was based in Spain at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), but as Tielrooij notes. “The international collaboration proved pivotal to making this discovery.”
So, how did all the collaborators contribute to the research? Tielrooij: “First, we needed advanced fabrication techniques to make the MATBG samples. But we also needed a deep theoretical understanding of what’s happening in the samples. Added to that, ultrafast optoelectronic measurement setups were required to measure what’s happening in the samples too.”
Tielrooij and the team received the magic-angle twisted samples from Dmitri Efetov’s group at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, who were the first group in Europe able to make such samples and who also performed photomixing measurements, while theoretical work at MIT in the US and at Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan proved crucial to the success of the research.
At ICN2, Tielrooij and his team members Jake Mehew and Alexander Block used cutting-edge equipment particularly time-resolved photovoltage microscopy to perform their measurements of electron-phonon dynamics in the samples.
The future
So, what does the future look like for these materials then? According to Tielrooij, don’t expect anything too soon.
“As the material is only being studied for a few years, we’re still some way from seeing magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene having an impact on society.”
But there is a great deal to be explored about energy loss in the material.
“Future discoveries could have implications for charge transport dynamics, which could have implications for future ultrafast optoelectronics devices,” says Tielrooij. “In particular, they would be very useful at low temperatures, so that makes the material suitable for space and quantum applications.”
The research from Tielrooij and the international team is a real breakthrough when it comes to how electrons and phonons interact with each other.
But we’ll have to wait a little longer to fully understand the consequences of what the electron said to the phonon in the graphene sandwich.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Ultrafast Umklapp-assisted electron-phonon cooling in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene by Jake Dudley Mehew, Rafael Luque Merino, Hiroaki Ishizuka, Alexander Block, Jaime Díez Mérida, Andrés Díez Carlón, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Leonid S. Levitov, Dmitri K. Efetov, and Klaas-Jan Tielrooij. Science Advances 9 Feb 2024 Vol 10, Issue 6 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj1361
De-extinction (also known as resurrection biology) has been mentioned here before (my January 18, 2019 posting). It’s essentially a ‘Jurassic Park’ fantasy that some people want to turn into reality and it seems they are now one step closer where woolly mammoths are concerned.
The breakthrough has to do with Asian elephant stem cells,
Bob Yirka’s March 7, 2024 article for phys.org offers a succinct summary, Note: Links have been removed,
A team of bioengineers at de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences has announced that they created induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) from elephant skin cells. In speaking with the press, officials with the team reported that they are still in the process of writing a paper describing their efforts and plan to post it on the bioRxiv preprint server. Ewen Callaway has published a News article in Nature about the announcement.
Colossal Biosciences(“Colossal”), the world’s first de-extinction company, announces today that their Woolly Mammoth team has achieved a global-first iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells) breakthrough. This milestone advancement was one of the primary early goals of the mammoth project, and supports the feasibility of future multiplex ex utero mammoth gestation.
iPSC cells represent a single cell source that can propagate indefinitely and give rise to every other type of cell in a body. As such, the progress with elephant iPSCs extends far beyond this de-extinction project holding tremendous potential for studying cell development, cell therapy, drug screening, synthetic embryos, in vitro gametogenesis, and the use of iPSCs for nuclear transfer across all species. Invaluable for Colossal’s Woolly Mammoths, these cells can be multiplex-edited and differentiated to study cold adaptation traits like woolly hair growth and fat storage in cellular and organoid models.
“In the past, a multitude of attempts to generate elephant iPSCs have not been fruitful. Elephants are a very special species, and we have only just begun to scratch the surface of their fundamental biology,” shared Eriona Hysolli, Head of Biological Sciences at Colossal Biosciences. “My early work in Dr. George Church’s laboratory had been partially successful with iPSC-like cells that led to the foundation of the cells we have currently developed. And now, using a multi-pronged approach to reprogramming we have the most successful efforts to date. The Colossal mammoth team persisted quite successfully as this progress is invaluable for the future of elephant assisted reproductive technologies, as well as advanced cellular modeling of mammoth phenotypes.”
The derivation of mouse iPSCs pioneered by Shinya Yamanaka in 2006 paved the way for using a 4-factor protocol to derive human, horse, pig, cattle, rabbit, monkey, ape, big cats, rhino and even avian species iPSCs among many more. While the medium where the cells grew required some tweaking depending on the species, it was surprising to observe how close to universal the reprogramming protocol was across species. Yet, elephant iPSCs still remained elusive.
“Elephants might get the “hardest to reprogram” prize, but learning how to do it anyway will help many other studies, especially on endangered species. This milestone gives us insights into developmental biology and the balance between senescence and cancer. It opens the door for obtaining gametes and other cell types without surgery on precious animals. It opens the door to establishing connections between genes and traits for both modern and extinct relatives – including resistance to environmental extremes and pathogens. This collaboration has been a true pleasure and a colossal accelerant for our challenging project,” shared Colossal co-founder and renowned Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church [emphasis mine].
Using chemical-based induction media first, followed by addition of transcription factors Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, Myc +/- Nanog and Lin28, and p53 pathway suppression, the team has achieved the most successful reprogramming of elephant iPSCs yet. The approach differs from other more standard reprogramming protocols for other species due in part to the complexities of the TP53 pathway in elephants as their genome contains up to 19 copies of TP53 retrogenes. TP53 is a core gene utilized by the cell to carefully regulate its growth so as not to become cancerous. Additionally, reprogramming, which in itself is quite long and inefficient for higher mammal species, takes longer for elephants. But, the successful iPSC cells now express multiple core pluripotency factors and are able to differentiate into the three germ layers that have the potential to give rise to each cell type in the body.
These newly reprogrammed iPSC cells have been validated through immunostaining, PCR of pluripotency and differentiation markers, transcriptomics analysis, embryoid bodies and teratoma formation. This work will be published in Bioarxiv with a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal in progress. It is not the end of the elephant reprogramming journey, but this announcement marks the first successful steps. The mammoth stem cell team with team lead Evan Appleton are now focused on further maturing these cells, and pursuing additional iPSC generation strategies that have so far also been successful. This work will be shared in follow-up publications.
“We are most excited to use the cells we have developed to grow elephant gametes in a dish. While elephants have been a challenging species, this has been an incredibly unique opportunity with so much to learn and share now and in the near future,” shared team lead Evan Appleton.
“We knew when we set out on the Woolly Mammoth de-extinction project that it would be challenging but we’ve always had the best team on the planet focused on the task at hand,” stated co-founder and CEO of Colossal, Ben Lamm. “This is a momentous step, with numerous applications, that we are proud to share with the scientific community. Each step brings us closer to our long term goals of bringing back this iconic species.”
The team is also working to establish a mechanism that can explain why elephant cell reprogramming has been challenging. Doing so is critical to deriving iPSCs faster, achieving more advanced tri-lineage differentiation, particularly in vitro gametogenesis, which is crucial to test the full potential of the iPSCs. Once the iPSCs can be used to establish a model for synthetic elephant embryos, it will also be integral to understanding the long and complex elephant (and by association mammoth) development and gestation cycle. This will be critical to Colossals’ re-wilding efforts which rely heavily on leveraging ex utero development for species preservation and restoration. All of these scientific developments hold extension possibilities across the field of developmental biology which have ramifications far beyond the current Colossal projects.
ABOUT COLOSSAL
Colossal was founded by emerging technology and software entrepreneur Ben Lamm and world-renowned geneticist and serial biotech entrepreneur George Church, Ph.D., and is the first to apply CRISPR technology for the purposes of species de-extinction. Colossal creates innovative technologies for species restoration, critically endangered species protection and the repopulation of critical ecosystems that support the continuation of life on Earth. Colossal is accepting humanity’s duty to restore Earth to a healthier state, while also solving for the future economies and biological necessities of the human condition through cutting-edge science and technologies.
This April 24, 2024 Black Girls Do Engineer (BGDE) news release popped up in my email with an abbreviation I haven’t seen in a while, HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities),
Black Girls Do Engineer recently signed an Education Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the [US] National Security Agency in an effort to continue playing a key role in developing science and technology talent for possible national security challenges.
The National Security Agency (NSA) partners with select universities and nonprofit organizations as part of the Agency’s Minority Serving Institution (MSI) Hacking 4 Intelligence (H4I) program. It is a program where the U.S. Government and industry partners, collaborate to solve national security problems. The program engages HBCU students and college bound students studying STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] disciplines. Black Girls Do Engineer, a 501c3 nonprofit organization that provides access, education and resources to Black students K-12 in STEM was selected to participate because of its stellar reputation in hosting cohorts of students through various STEM subjects including co-ed HBCU and High School programs, utilizing Microsoft technology to do so.
The NSA’s collaborative H4I program is for students to have the opportunity to cultivate essential skills by deconstructing and analyzing NSA and Microsoft problem sets, all while collaborating and networking with government and industry partners. Students will form interdisciplinary teams and work to solve real-world NSA and Microsoft problem sets. At the end of a 12-week cohort, students exit the program with a minimum viable product ready for deployment.
“This partnership with NSA will allow our program to provide our cybersecurity resources and curriculum to Higher Education institutions through our developed BGDE digital infrastructure enhanced by Microsoft tools,” states Kara Branch the Founder and CEO of Black Girls Do Engineer.
Black Girls Do Engineer‘s licensed STEM curriculum is committed to excellence in cyber defense education and research. Some of its programs include cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data science and a host of technical training. Higher education programs include their design Badge A Thon event offered for college students.
“This collaboration will allow our national impact to reach new heights with higher education students,” concludes Kara Branch, Founder and CEO of Black Girls Do Engineer.
About Black Girls Do Engineer As the fastest growing nationwide program for Black girls in STEM., BGDE has been dubbed “The Ivy League of Nonprofits.” The program is application-based and offers full-time membership-based STEM camps and workshops to Black girls in grades K through 12, with mentorship and individual workshops offered to college students up through age 21. The program currently has a 100% college acceptance rate and 100% job placement rate among its members. Since its launch in 2019, BGDE has served 4,000 girls though its program. The nonprofit has also helped secure its members $44,000 in STEM-related college scholarships.
BGDE futuristic programs of study include: A.I., Energy, Audio/Visual, Aerospace, Engineering, Medical, Robotics and Coding. Mentoring includes: College Prep, Financial Literacy, Upskilling, and Mentorship from professionals working in these fields offering real life experience.
I wandered onto the BGDE website and found this, (click on About and select Our Program from the dropdown menu),
Given the organization’s focus on futuristic programs, I find the use of a tree to illustrate their range a little amusing. I was also impressed because I’ve had contact, a few times, with people whose children are no longer satisfied with the fun science outreach programmes but are too young for some of the more challenging programmes available for high schoolers and/or aren’t fortunate enough to have connections to researchers who are will to help/mentor an interested young person. Brava for not leaving any gaps!
Also, congratulations on the partnership with the US National Security Agency!
The CBSN will be holding its Black Excellence Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine and Health (BE-STEMM) conference from July 30 – August 1, 2024 in Ottawa, Ontario.
It’s a little late but there’s still time to respond to the call for abstract submissions in English or French for the upcoming 3rd annual conference, Note: There is a discrepancy between the July 30,2024 date on the poster (above) and the conference’s start date on the submission page, See the explanation below the submission information,
Abstract submission is open from March 20, 2024 through May 4, 2024. More information & Conference Registration will be shared in April!
La soumission des résumés est ouverte du 20 mars 2024 au 4 mai 2024.Plus d’informations et l’inscription à la conférence seront partagées en avril !
Please share this invitation with your networks/ Merci de partager cette invitation avec vos réseaux(pdf): EN /FR
The Canadian Black Scientists Network / Réseau Canadien des Scientifiques Noirs invite tous les participants de l’écosystème canadien de recherche et d’innovation à BESTEMM 2024, la Conférence nationale pour l’excellence des Noirs en sciences, technologies, ingénierie, mathématiques, médecine et santé.
The Canadian Black Scientists Network / Réseau Canadien des Scientifiques Noirs Invites all participants in the Canadian Research & Innovation Ecosystem to BESTEMM 2024, the National Conference for Black Excellence in Science Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine and Health.
Now in its third year, BE-STEMM 2024 will bring together leading minds, talents, and innovators to share their ground-breaking research, and to work with Allies to dismantle barriers to Black success in STEMM.
Held as a successful online event in 2022 and 2023, BE-STEMM 2024 will be hosted in person for the first time this year, at the National Library & Public Archives Canada, with key events shared online, including a closing ceremony on Emancipation Day. BE-STEMM 2024 is a unique opportunity for Community members, policy-makers, and employers to connect with Black professionals in STEMM research & innovation.
The program will include:
Keynote talks Contributed (Platform) talks Lightning Talk Sessions Poster Sessions Career Fair Networking receptions A Public Panel Discussion Science Fair Project Displays Awards and prizes
BE-STEMM 2024 conference date discrepancy
After a little detective work (I used a search engine), I found this page on the CBSN website which offers information that explains the discrepancy,
I have posted about this April 30, 2024 event on Zoom previously (see my January 16, 2024 post) so this constitutes a reminder. From an April 23, 2024 Simon Fraser University (SFU) Café Scientifique announcement (received via email),
SFU CAFÉ SCIENTIFIQUE: Overtraining and the Everyday Athlete
Tuesday, April 30 [2024], 5:00 – 6:30 pm over Zoom
What happens when we train too hard, don’t take enough time to recover, or underfuel while exercising? Join SFU Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology professor Alexandra Coates for a discussion about overtraining and and how it affects both elite and “everyday athletes.”
Joint SFU and Science Rendezvous May 11, 2024 events
From an April 23, 2024 Simon Fraser University (SFU) Café Scientifique announcement (received via email),
Science Rendezvous and International Astronomy Day returns IN-PERSON on Saturday, May 11 [2024], at SFU Burnaby with fun for the entire family. Peep through our telescope at the Trottier Observatory, dissect a digital cadaver, have fun with our Superconducting train, learn more about forensic science, create your own LED card and so much more!
Science Rendezvous is now the largest science festival in Canada. (The Canadian government has funded national science events off and on with the Science Odyssey being the most recent iteration. As happens from time to time, whichever agency is organizing the government’s national event either loses funding or can’t commit resources to the event. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [NSERC] announced its withdrawal as the organizing agency with the 2023 iteration of the event.)
You can find more events more May 11, 2024 Science Rendezvous events across Canada here. So far this year, they have events in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland & Labrador, Northwest Territories, Ontario, and Québec.
Given that it was Earth Day yesterday (April 22, 2024), this seems like a good second act. From an April 18, 2024 news item on phys.org,
A geo-environmental scientist from Japan has composed a string quartet using sonified climate data. The 6-minute-long composition—titled “String Quartet No. 1 “Polar Energy Budget”—is based on over 30 years of satellite-collected climate data from the Arctic and Antarctic and aims to garner attention on how climate is driven by the input and output of energy at the poles.
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This is a little longer video than I usually like to embed here at 6 mins. 29 secs. and it is one of the more aesthetically pleasing I’ve heard,
An April 18, 2024 Cell Press press release, which originated the news item, describes the data sonification work and its application to art/science projects, Note: A link has been removed,
“I strongly hope that this manuscript marks a significant turning point, transitioning from an era where only scientists handle data to one where artists can freely leverage data to craft their works,” writes author and composer Hiroto Nagai, a geo-environmental scientist at Rissho University.
Scientist-composer Hiroto Nagai asserts that music, as opposed to sound, evokes an emotional response and posits that “musification” (as opposed to sonification) of data requires some intervention by the composer to build tension and add dynamics. For this reason, Nagai was more liberal in adding a “human touch” compared to previous data-based musical compositions, aiming to meld sonification with traditional music composition.
“As a fundamental principle in music composition, it is necessary to combine temporal sequences from tension-building to resolution in various scales, from harmonic progressions to entire movements,” Nagai writes. “So far, there haven’t been published attempts and open discussion on sonification-based music composition, nor attempts to demonstrate the methodology required to intentionally affect the audience’s emotions with an artistic piece.”
To do this, he first used a program to sonify environmental data by assigning sounds to different data values. The publicly available data was collected from four polar locations between 1982 and 2022: an ice-core drilling site in the Greenland ice sheet, a satellite station in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, and two Japanese-owned research stations in the Antarctic (Showa Station and Dome Fuji Station). For each of the sites, Nagai used data on monthly measurements of short- and longwave radiation, precipitation, surface temperature, and cloud thickness.
In the next step, he transformed this collection of sounds into a musical composition to be played by two violins, a viola, and a cello. This process involved many steps, including manipulating the pitch of different datapoints and assigning sections of data to the different instruments, overlaying passages created from different data, and introducing musical playing techniques such as pizzicato and staccato. Nagai also intervened in more artistic ways by introducing rhythm, deliberately removing certain sounds, and introducing handwritten (non-data derived) parts into the composition.
The quartet’s premiere live performance was shared at Waseda University in Tokyo in March 2023 followed by a panel discussion. A filmed performance of the piece by PRT Quartet, a Japanese professional string quartet, was also released on YouTube in March 2023.
“Upon listening, my initial reaction was like, ‘What is this?’ It felt like a typical contemporary piece,” said Haruka Sakuma, the professional violinist who performed 2nd violin. “The flow of the music was a bit hard to memorize quickly, and it was quite challenging at first.”
Nagai says that, in contrast to graphical representations of data, music elicits emotion before intellectual curiosity and suggests that using graphical and music representations of data in conjunction might be even more powerful.
“It grabs the audiences’ attention forcefully, while graphical representations require active and conscious recognition instead,” Nagai writes. “This reveals the potential for outreach in the Earth sciences through music.”
The Guggenheim’s Earth Day celebrations feature artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña’s “The Quipu of Encounters” series. Here’s an example,
For anyone unfamiliar with a quipu, here’s a description from the Quipu Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
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A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used quipu for collecting data and keeping records, for monitoring tax obligations, for collecting census records, for calendrical information, and for military organization.[2] The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base-ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or thousands of cords.[3] The configuration of the quipu has been “compared to string mops”.[4] Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps sturdier, base to which the color-coded cords could be attached.[5] A relatively small number have survived.
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Recently (and relevantly to Vicuña’s project), I came across a suggestion that quipu weren’t used for numerical storage only, from Silvia Ferrara’s March 8, 2022 article “How The Inca Used Knots To Tell Stories” for LitHub,
…
Because quipu aren’t limited to numbers. A third of these knotted necklaces are narrative. It’s hard even to imagine that a story could be told using a series of colored knots that represent numbers, but it is so. Names, places, genealogies, songs—all are recited like so many zip codes, credit-card numbers, telephone numbers, yellow, green, and blue numbers. Because numbers, for the Inca, speak not only of quantity but of quality. I know, it’s not easy to grasp, but let your imagination run free a little.
The knots are 3D, so they have form, direction, relative position, color, thickness, multiple configurations. Each element carries a different meaning: far from the body, close to the body—these distances affect what quantity is recorded. A three-dimensional Sudoku. Multivalent, multi-referential, and yet at the same time precise. According to Spanish accounts from the mid-16th century, quipu were on par with the Old World’s most complex scripts. One Jesuit missionary tells of an Inca woman who brought him a quipu bearing her entire life story. In knots. Incredible.
Indeed, the details of how this could have been possible are lost to us, since we don’t have the legend that reveals the links among these elements (dimension, thickness, color, number, direction, etc.) and their precise meaning. We’re in need of a decoder, an Inca Rosetta stone to unveil the correlations. …
On April 22, Earth Day, join us online for poetry in response to the climate crisis.
“entwine / the betwixt,” writes artist and activist Cecilia Vicuña in her poem “Three Fragments of Instan.” We are interconnected in our struggle for environmental justice. Together, we seek ways to convey the reality of our current global climate emergency. The Academy of American Poets invites a community of poets to write a new collaborative poem—a choral braid of voices—presented at Poets.org on Earth Day, along with a video recording of their contributions.
Over the past six months, representatives from various arts and community organizations, along with artists, poets, writers, and musicians, participated in a series of workshops led by artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña at the Wassaic Project and the Guggenheim Museum. Conceived by Vicuña as part of her ongoing “Quipu of Encounters” series, the workshops used ritual and communion as a means to propose ways of being and acting, as individuals and within collectives, in response to the current climate crisis. Among the many themes that emerged were tools and strategies that the cultural sector might use to inspire action in others.
Explore below how our partners will be applying learnings from these workshops through public offerings with a focus on climate justice, sustainability, ecology, and Indigenous practices.
Around Town
Earth Month activities from our partners
Whitney Museum of American Art
Open Studio
Saturday, April 20
11 am
Families with kids of all ages are invited to make works of art using natural pigments found in soil and plants inspired by Whitney Biennial artist Dala Nasser.
Various branches of the Brooklyn Public Library will present programming during Earth Month, offering opportunities for folks of all ages to connect across themes of environmentalism, crafting, storytelling, and community.
Join a practicing artist for an outdoor workshop of art making, material experimentation, and play, offered in partnership with Common Ground Farm in the Hudson Valley. Designed for all ages, Saturday Studio is a family-friendly program that is most suitable for children ages five and up.
Join Our Climate and GrowNYC for a two-part series where we will come together to explore the boundless possibilities of a sustainable and equitable future for New York City through transformative policies, collective action, and joy.
Using techniques learned by the Beauty Turner Academy, a program hosted and facilitated by the National Public Housing Museum, GrowNYC’s Gardens at NYCHA program will engage various NYCHA residents in sharing their ethos for community work through Oral History as Art, highlighting environmental programming currently happening in their communities, and commemorating their stories for those seeking active and tangible change in NYCHA communities and beyond. The project will eventually result in a public film screening. GrowNYC is honored to uplift their collaborative partnership with photographer and writer J Owens, who uses words and images to explore the human experience and paint extraordinary pictures of ordinary places.
You can find out more about Earth Day here. If you scroll down there’s a worldwide map with Earth Day 2024 events marked on it. Yes, mostly featuring events in the US and Europe but other parts of the world are also represented.
I believe this is an April (?) 2024 newsletter and it’s definitely from Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI). Received via email, I was able to find this online copy (Note: I’m not sure how long this copy will remain online) and am excerpting a few items for inclusion here,
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The current state of theoretical physics
Join the latest episode of Conversations at Perimeter as Neil Turok [director of the Perimeter Institute, 2008 – 2019] delves into the intriguing topic of the simplicity of nature.
Free tickets to attend the event in person will be available on Monday, April 22, at 9:00 AM EDT. Live-stream will also be available on the PI YouTube channel.
Hydrogen to Higgs Boson: Particle Physics at the Large Hadron Collider
Explore particle physics with Dr. Clara Nellist at the Perimeter Institute on May 8, as she discusses CERN’s groundbreaking research.
Date and time
Starts on Wednesday, May 8 [2024] · 6pm EDT
Location
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics 31 Caroline Street North Waterloo, ON N2L 2Y5 …
Agenda
6:00 p.m.
Doors Open
Perimeter’s main floor will be open for ticket holders, with scientists available to answer science questions until the show begins.
7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Public Lecture
The public lecture will begin at 7:00pm, including a live stream for virtual attendees. This will include a full presentation as well as a Q&A session.
8:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Post-Event Discussion
Following the lecture, discussion will continue in the atrium, where you can ask questions to the presenter as well as other researchers in the crowd.
About this event
About the Speaker:
Dr Clara Nellist – Particle Physicist and Science Communicator, is currently working at CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] on the ATLAS experiment, with research focusing on top quarks and searching for dark matter with machine learning. Learn more about her work on her Instagram here.
About the Event:
Registration to attend the event in person will be available on Monday, April 22 at 9:00 AM EDT.
Tickets for this event are 100% free. [emphasis mine] As always, our public lectures are live-streamed in real-time on our YouTube channel – available here: https://www.youtube.com/@PIOutreach
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The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed (or as close to confirmed as scientists will get) in 2012 (see my July 4, 2012 posting “Tears of joy as physicists announce they’re pretty sure they found the Higgs Boson” for an account of the event. Peter Higgs and and François Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
If you are planning to attend the lecture in person, free tickets will be made available on Monday, April 22, at 9:00 AM EDT. Go here and, remember, these tickets go quickly.
Every once in a while I get an email from a lawyer (Gale P. Eston) in New York City who specializes in the art and business communities. How I got on her list is a mystery to me but her missives are always interesting. The latest one was a little difficult to understand until I looked at the Venice Biennale website and saw the theme for this year’s exhibition,
Biennale Arte 2024: Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere
The 60th International Art Exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, will be open from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November at the Giardini and Arsenale venues.
The 60th International Art Exhibition, titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, will open to the public from Saturday April 20 to Sunday November 24, 2024, at the Giardini and the Arsenale; it will be curated by Adriano Pedrosa and organised by La Biennale di Venezia. The pre-opening will take place on April 17, 18 and 19; the awards ceremony and inauguration will be held on 20 April 2024.
Since 2021, La Biennale di Venezia launched a plan to reconsider all of its activities in light of recognized and consolidated principles of environmental sustainability. For the year 2024, the goal is to extend the achievement of “carbon neutrality” certification, which was obtained in 2023 for La Biennale’s scheduled activities: the 80th Venice International Film Festival, the Theatre, Music and Dance Festivals and, in particular, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition which was the first major Exhibition in this discipline to test in the field a tangible process for achieving carbon neutrality – while furthermore itself reflecting upon the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation
The Exhibition will take place in the Central Pavilion (Giardini) and in the Arsenale, and it will present two sections: the Nucleo Contemporaneo and the Nucleo Storico.
As a guiding principle, the Biennale Arte 2024 has favored artists who have never participated in the International Exhibition—though a number of them may have been featured in a National Pavilion, a Collateral Event, or in a past edition of the International Exhibition. Special attention is being given to outdoor projects, both in the Arsenale and in the Giardini, where a performance program is being planned with events during the pre-opening and closing weekend of the 60th Exhibition.
Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the title of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, is drawn from a series of works started in 2004 by the Paris-born and Palermo-based Claire Fontaine collective. The works consist of neon sculptures in different colours that render in a growing number of languages the words “Foreigners Everywhere”. The phrase comes, in turn, from the name of a Turin collective who fought racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s.
«The expression Stranieri Ovunque – explains Adriano Pedrosa – has several meanings. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners— they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.»
«The Italian straniero, the Portuguese estrangeiro, the French étranger, and the Spanish extranjero, are all etymologically connected to the strano, the estranho, the étrange, the extraño, respectively, which is precisely the stranger. Sigmund Freud’s Das Unheimliche comes to mind—The Uncanny in English, which in Portuguese has indeed been translated as “o estranho”– the strange that is also familiar, within, deep down side. According to the American Heritage and the Oxford Dictionaries, the first meaning of the word “queer” is precisely “strange”, and thus the Exhibition unfolds and focuses on the production of other related subjects: the queer artist, who has moved within different sexualities and genders, often being persecuted or outlawed; the outsider artist, who is located at the margins of the art world, much like the self-taught artist, the folk artist and the artista popular; the indigenous artist, frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land. The productions of these four subjects are the interest of this Biennale, constituting the Nucleo Contemporaneo.»
«Indigenous artists have an emblematic presence and their work greets the public in the Central Pavilion, where the Mahku collective from Brazil will paint a monumental mural on the building’s façade, and in the Corderie, where the Maataho collective from Aotearoa/New Zealand will present a large-scale installation in the first room. Queer artists appear throughout the exhibition, and are also the subject of a large section in the Corderie, and one devoted to queer abstraction in the Central Pavilion.»
The Nucleo Contemporaneo will feature a special section in the Corderie devoted to the Disobedience Archive, a project by Marco Scotini, which since 2005 has been developing a video archive focusing on the relationships between artistic practices and activism. In the Exhibition, the presentation of the Disobedience Archive is designed by Juliana Ziebell, who also worked in the exhibition architecture of the entire International Exhibition. This section is divided into two main parts especially conceived for our framework: Diaspora activism and Gender Disobedience. The Disobedience Archive will include works by 39 artists and collectives made between 1975 and 2023.»
«The Nucleo Storico gathering works from 20th century Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Much has been written about global modernisms and modernisms in the Global South, and a number of rooms will feature works from these territories, much like an essay, a draft, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism. We are all too familiar with the histories of modernism in Euroamerica, yet the modernisms in the Global South remain largely unknown. […]. European modernism itself travelled far beyond Europe throughout the 20th century, often intertwined with colonialism, and many artists in the Global South traveled to Europe to be exposed to it […].»
In the Central Pavilion three rooms are planned for the Nucleo Storico: one room is titled Portraits, one Abstractionsand the third one is devoted to the the worldwide Italian artistic diaspora in the 20thcentury.
«The double-room named Portraits, includes works from 112 artists, mostly paintings but also works on paper and sculpture, spanning the years of 1905 and 1990. […] The theme of the human figure has been explored in countless different ways by artists in the Global South, reflecting on the crisis of representation around the that very figure that marked much of the art in 20th century art. In the Global South, many artists were in touch with European modernism, through travels, studies or books, yet they bring in their own highly personal and powerful reflections and contributions to their works […]. The room devoted to Abstractions includes 37 artists: most of them are being exhibited together for the first time, and we will learn from these unforeseen juxtapositions in the flesh, which will then hopefully point towards new connections, associations, and parallels much beyond the rather straightforward categories that I have proposed. […]»
Artists from Singapore and Korea have been brought into this section, given that at the time they were part of the so-called Third World. In a similar manner, Selwyn Wilson and Sandy Adsett, from Aotearoa/New Zealand, have been brought into this Nucleo Storico as they are historical Maori artists.
«[…] A third room in the Nucleo Storico is dedicated to the worldwide Italian artistic diaspora in the 20thcentury: Italian artists who travelled and moved abroad developing their careers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as in the rest of Europe and the United States, becoming embedded in local cultures—and who often played significant roles in the development of the narratives of modernism beyond Italy. This room will feature works by 40 artists who are first or second generations Italians, exhibited in Lina Bo Bardi’s glass easel display system (Bo Bardi herself an Italian who moved to Brazil, and who won the 2021 Biennale Architettura’s Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Memoriam).»
«Two quite different but related elements have emerged – underlines Pedrosa – rather organically in the research and have been developed, appearing as leitmotivs throughout the International Exhibition. The first one is textiles, which have been explored by many artists in the show in multiple, from key historical figures in the Nucleo Storico, to many artists in the Nucleo Contemporaneo. […] These works reveal an interest in craft, tradition, and the handmade, and in techniques that were at times considered other or foreign, outsider or strange in the larger field of fine arts. […] A second motif is artists—artists related by blood, many of them Indigenous. […] Again tradition plays an important role here: the transmission of knowledge and practices from father or mother to son or daughter or among siblings and relatives.»
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There’s a lot more about this huge art exhibition on the Venice Biennale website but this is enough to give you a sense of the size and scope and how the work Eston describes fits into the 2024 exhibition theme.
Gale P. Eston‘s April 12, 2024 email announced an exhibition she curated and which is being held on site during the 2024 Venice Biennale (Note 1: I’ve published too late for the opening reception but there’s more to Eston’s curation than a reception; Note 2: There is an art/science aspect to the work from artist China Blue),
Hospitality in the Pluriverse, curated by Gale Elston during the 60th edition of the Venice Biennial from April 16 to May 4, 2024.
The Opening Reception will be held April 16th, 2024 from 5-7 pm
HOSPITALITY IN THE PLURIVERSE
JEREMY DENNIS
ANITA GLESTA
ANN MCCOY
WARREN NEIDICH
ILONA RICH
Corte de Ca’ Sarasina, Castello 1199, Venezia, IT, 30122
April 16 to May 4, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: April 16, 5 to 7 PM
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 PM
Performances by CHINA BLUE curated by Elga Wimmer
April 16, 18 and 19 at 6 PM
RAINER GANAHL, Requiem, performed April 17 at 6 PM
This exhibition includes five artists who explore the political, historical, aesthetical, physical, and epistemological dimensions of hospitality and its’ conflicts. Based upon the analysis of Jacques Derrida, in his Of Hospitality, this exhibition scrutinizes the reaction of the host to alterity or otherness.
Each artist examines various questions surrounding the encounter of a foreigner and their host sovereign using a variety of media such as painting, photography, sculpture, and animation.
In discussion with Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition Foreigners Everywhere, the exhibition Hospitality in the Pluriverse understands the complexity of immigration and begs the question of what hospitality is and when and how should it be extended to the stranger, the foreigner, the “other”.
On the one hand the devastating effects of global inequality, climate change (climate refugees) and the political pressures created have led to mass migration and political and chaos. In opposition, the richness of the contributions of the other in the form of cultural and epistemological multiplicity is invaluable.
Jeremy Dennis, First Nation artist and Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY, uses staging and computer assisted techniques to create unusual color photographs which portray indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. His photographs challenge how indigenous people have been presented in film in America Westerns as well as empowering them through the use of a haunting Zombie trope establishing the power of ancestral knowledge as a means of resistance.
Ann McCoy, a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor-at- Large for the Brooklyn Rail includes a new drawing from her recent Guggenheim Fellowship exploring the fairy tale of a wolf in her father’s silver, gold and tungsten mill. The fairy tale is based on an historic site of many Irish immigrant workers’ deaths and expresses the tragedy using Jungian and alchemical references.
Warren Neidich’s work Pluriverse* engages with the concept of cognitive justice. As Bonaventure de Sousa Santos has said there can be no social justice without cognitive justice. Cognitive which includes the right of different traditions of knowledge and the cultural practices they are engaged with to co-exist without duress. Especially relevant for us here are those forms of knowledge that have evolved in the so-called enlightened global North, Indigenous Knowledges and those in the subaltern global South and Asia. Pluriverse is an expression that is inclusive of these diverse epistemologies. We don’t want to live in a normative, homogeneous Universe but rather a heterogeneous and multiplicitous Pluriverse.*
Anita Glesta, depicts the non-human foreigner (a corona virus moving through the body like a bug or a butterfly) set to a soundtrack from Hildegard von Bingen, the abbess and composer from the medieval ages. Glesta’s video was developed on a Fellowship with The ARC Laureate Felt Experience & Empathy Lab to research how anxiety affects our nervous system. As an extension of the pandemic series her animations invite the viewer to experience how humans process fear and anxiety in their bodies.
Spanish artist Ilona Rich work continues the theme of what it is to be a foreigner on a psychological level. Her colorful sculptures describe a dystopian view of the commonplace and the everyday.
Her work shows us a person who feels like a stranger in their own skin, anxious, precarious, not normative. Her dogs have two heads and the many feet of a centipede. Her sculpture Wheel of Fortune will be displayed which posits that fate is contingent on chance and our roles as host or foreigner are subject to rapid unexpected change.
The exhibition offers a dizzying study of alterity, on the biological (Glesta), the social (Dennis), the historical (McCoy), cognitive (Neidich) and personal levels (Rich).The viewer will come away with an expanded and enriched view of what it means to be a foreigner and asks what contingencies, if any, should accompany hospitality.
— Gale Elston
China Blue, Saturn Walk: Embodying Listening during the 2024 Venice Biennial with (Re)Create [emphasis mine]
Project Space Venice, curated by Elga Wimmer.
US/Canadian artist China Blue creates art performances that give a physical expression to sound based on her interest in connecting through art and science.
For her 2024 Venice exhibition, Saturn Walk: Embodying Listening by China Blue, performers and visitors walk in a labyrinth to a composition created by her and Lance Massey. This is a work based on the sonics in Saturn’s rings that China Blue and Dr. Seth Horowitz discovered as a result of a grant from NASA to explore Saturn’s rings.
In Saturn Walk: Embodying Listening for the (Re)Create Project Space Venice, the artist invites viewers to experience the sound walk following the dance performance. The dancers include Andrea Nann and Jennifer Dahl, Canada, and Laura Coloman, UK. A trace of China Blue’s performance, an artwork, Celestial Pearls, based on 16 of Saturn’s 100+ moons, will remain on view at (Re)Create Project Space Venice.
Austrian artist Rainer Ganahl performs his work, Requiem in memoriam for Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
It seems like you might need the full seven months to fully appreciate the work on display at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
WIN is pleased to host a Summer School on Sustainable Nanotechnology at UWaterloo on June 19 – 21, 2024.
This Summer School is open to Undergraduate Students in STEM across Canada .
The WIN Summer School will offer lab and facilities tours in the QNC, and in-class lectures by WIN members, senior PhD students and post-doctoral fellows.
Open to undergraduate students across Canada in STEM!
Topic areas:
* Smart & Functional Materials * Connected Devices * Next Generation Energy Systems * Therapeutics & Theranostics
Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre (QNC) University of Waterloo 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1
Notification of Acceptance
April 2024
Application requirements
Canadian Ungeraduate Student in STEM Completed their first year of undergraduate studies
Application Details
Please fill out the Application form and include: CV 1-page Research Statement Broad research interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology Alignment of your research interest with UN Sustainable Development Goals Your career goals to accomplish your research interests
Other Details
Successful candidates will be provided: On-campus housing free of cost All meals An honorarium of $500 to cover full/partial travel costs