A September 24, 2026 Simon Fraser University (SFU) Café Scientifique email (visible here) announces its Fall 2026 online event lineup,
September 2026
Hello friends!
Welcome to the SFU Café Scientifique Fall 2026 series! We recognize our season is starting later than usual, and we are glad to be on track for our first event in October. Join us for guided explorations of the vast expanse of the Yukon and the nano-scale workings of microscopic machines.
Reserve your spot by registering now for each talk. Zoom links will be sent to registered attendees shortly before each event. You can stop by our website and catch up on past lectures – where you like, when you like.
Yukon Ho! Permafrost, Glacial Lake Yukon, Landscape Evolution and the Yukon Gold Rush
October 27, 2026 5:00 – 6:30 pm Zoom
Yukon ho! Mineral deposits in Canada’s north sparked the Yukon Gold Rush in 1898 and they continue to be important today. Take a journey with SFU Earth Sciences professor Brent Ward to explore how glaciers have shaped the Yukon’s stunning landscape and ecology.
Evolution is an Engineer: Life’s Molecular Machines
November 24, 2026 5:00 – 6:30 pm Zoom
How do living organisms convert energy into motion and work? Evolution has been quietly solving this engineering problem for billions of years with molecular machines. Inside every cell these machines perform tasks with remarkable efficiency, speed, and accuracy. Explore the fascinating world of molecular machines with SFU Physics professor David Sivak.
Join the experts from UBC’s Department of Physics and Astronomy to find out fun facts about everything from the Milky Way to radio waves in this new, accessible science series. All are…
The VPL and the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Department of Physics & Astronomy (PHAS) Outreach are partnering in what they call the VPL Science Discovery Series, Note: Presumably ‘How the Universe Works’ is a subseries.
In celebration of Italy’s 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympics, here’s some Fall 2025 research (suitable anytime of year) into the science of spaghetti and the cooking of a pasta sauce, cacio e pepe.
Why does your spaghetti (especially the gluten-free kind) get mushy?
Associate professor Andrea Scotti explains,
An October 28, 2025 news item on ScienceDaily announced research into spaghetti from Sweden’s Lund University,
Why doesn’t spaghetti fall apart when it’s boiled? According to new scientific findings, the key is gluten. The amount of salt added to the cooking water also plays a surprisingly important part in keeping pasta firm and intact.
Using advanced techniques, researchers examined the internal structure of regular and gluten-free spaghetti – straight off the shelf. The results show that gluten has a crucial role in protecting the structure of pasta during cooking.
“We were able to show that the gluten in regular spaghetti acts as a safety net that preserves the starch. The gluten-free pasta, which contains an artificial matrix, only works optimally under exactly the right cooking conditions – otherwise the structure easily falls apart,” says Andrea Scotti, senior lecturer in physical chemistry at Lund University.
Scotti used both small-angle neutron scattering and X-rays in the research. These methods make it possible to study foods at the microscopic level – down to a billionth of a metre – and link these findings to product characteristics such as texture, shelf life and glycaemic index.
The new study also concludes that the salt in the pasta water plays a role in the end result.
“Our results show that regular pasta has higher tolerance, or better structural resistance, to less optimal cooking conditions such as being cooked for too long or too much salt being added to the water. So, cooking pasta with the right amount of salt is not just a matter of taste – it also affects the microstructure of the pasta and thus the whole dining experience,” says Andrea Scotti.
The researchers now plan to continue their work by studying more types of pasta and different manufacturing conditions, as well as replicating what happens to the pasta once it is in the stomach, to see what effect digestion has on its chemical structure.
“With demand for gluten-free alternatives increasing, we hope that our methods can help develop more durable and nutritious products that stand up to the demands placed on them by both the cooking process and by consumers,” says Andrea Scotti.
The research was conducted together with Judith Houston, lead instrument scientist for the LoKI instrument at the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden, and collaborators from the Institut Laue-Langevin in France and the Diamond Light Source and ISIS Neutron and Muon Source in the UK [United Kingdom].
The UK’s (United Kingdom) Diamond Light Source facility issued a September 5, 2025 press release taking a more technical approach to describing the work,
Want tastier gluten-free spaghetti? Small angle scattering shows you need to follow the instructions.
Using small angle neutron and X-ray scattering, researchers from the European Spallation Source and RWTH Aachen University have compared the nanostructure of gluten-free and normal spaghetti, finding that the kind with gluten is much more forgiving to varied cooking conditions.
Andrea Scotti from RWTH Aachen University, Judith Houston from the European Spallation Source (ESS) have worked with Nathan Cowieson from Diamond’s B21 beamline and Greg Smith from ISIS Neutron and Muon Source as well as collaborators from the Institut Laue Langevin to study the nanostructure of spaghetti. More specifically, they were looking at the different structures created by gluten-free spaghetti, in comparison to gluten-containing spaghetti.
Normal pasta is made up mostly of starch and gluten. Starch forms ball-like structures that expand when the pasta is boiled. Gluten, however, is more of a stringy mesh. It tangles around the balls of starch, preventing them from falling to pieces upon expansion. Gluten-free options need to overcome this problem through other means. Currently, these tend to leave the pasta with a strange chewy texture, for a generally less appealing experience in comparison to gluten-containing options.
Aiming to improve this mouthfeel, these researchers used small angle scattering to investigate the nanostructure of spaghetti. Their X-ray experiments involved comparing spaghetti when it was raw, boiled for a variety of cooking times, and boiled with salt.
They also saw that salt not only effects the taste, but also the structural integrity. Adding salt preserved the structure of the spaghetti, but only when used at the right concentration, and if the pasta was cooked for the right length of time.
For their neutron experiments, the researchers cooked the spaghetti in D2O in one of the ISIS labs, slicing the spaghetti into tiny pieces before it was loaded it into the sample chamber. By using different mixtures of H2O and D2O, they could make samples that each highlighted a different component of interest, with others appearing invisible to the neutron beam. This meant they could separate the effect of cooking on the starches and the gluten.
They found that the starch granules swell upon cooking, and tend to disperse, whereas the gluten proteins become insoluble and coagulate into a network. This has the effect of trapping the starch and retaining the structure of the pasta.
In the gluten-free spaghetti, this network is missing, which means the starch granules can over-swell. This is why gluten-free pasta can fall apart or become sticky during cooking, especially if cooked for longer than the manufacturer’s instructions.
The researchers plan to continue their work, using small angle neutron and X-ray experiments to study pasta varieties of different shapes and manufacturing conditions, as well as replicating what happens to the pasta once it’s inside the stomach and seeing what effect that has on the structure.
The Ig Nobel Prize honors research that first makes people laugh, then makes them think. Its 35th award ceremony possibly also makes people hungry: ISTA [Institute of Science and Technology Austria] physicist Fabrizio Olmeda and colleagues researched the secret of a perfect cacio e pepe pasta sauce. They received the popular award for their findings on Thursday evening [September 18, 2025] in Boston [at Boston University].
ISTA postdoc Fabrizio Olmeda chose statistical physics in the field of complex systems as his research area because it allowed him to apply theoretical physics to a wide range of disciplines, from biology to sociology. “My motivation will always be to investigate phenomena that fascinate me, even if they lie outside my field of expertise, which is the physics of single-cell genomics,” says the newly awarded Ig Nobel Prize winner. “Despite increasing specialization, I believe that even in my usual field of research, it can be beneficial to take some time to explore something unusual. I think this award reflects this idea, because its motto, ‘First laugh, then think,’ can inspire people to take an interest in science.”
Martin Hetzer, president of ISTA, emphasizes this: “A mentor once told me: As long as you’re having fun, you’re doing it right. The Ig Nobel Prize is a wonderful tribute to this credo. At first, the question of how to prepare the perfect Caio e Pepe pasta may sound funny. But real curiosity-driven research brings together creativity, perseverance, precision, and fun. And it always leads to discoveries that have the potential to improve our world a little bit—on a large scale with innovations or on a small scale on our plates.”
What’s simmering in the lab? The recipe for delicious research
And that is the essence of the peer-reviewed study published in the scientific journal Physics of Fluids and now honored with the award: Simply mixing the usual ingredients – Pecorino cheese, pasta water, pepper, and pasta – often results in a lumpy, mozzarella-like sauce. Why? The starch in the pasta water is supposed to help emulsify and stabilize the sauce, but it is rarely enough on its own. When the temperature rises above 65 degrees Celsius, the cheese proteins denature and clump together, causing the mixture to break down.
The researchers found that the key to the perfect sauce is the right amount of starch. Simply stir starch powder (2–3% of the cheese mass) into the water until the water becomes clear and thickens. Now mix this gel with the cheese at a low temperature so that the starch binds with the proteins and prevents lumps. Then season with pepper as usual. Mix the pasta with the sauce in the pan and add a little pasta water if necessary to achieve the right consistency.
Ingredients:
4 g starch (potato or corn starch)
40 ml water (to mix the starch)
160 g Pecorino Romano
240 g pasta (ideally tonnarelli)
Pasta cooking water
Black pepper and salt (to taste)
Also at the VISTA Science Experience Center
The research question about the perfect pasta is just one of countless questions and topics that have been and continue to be pursued at ISTA in Klosterneuburg by outstanding scientists from around 80 countries. Visitors will soon be able to learn about a selection of these topics—including the now award-winning pasta research—at the VISTA Science Experience Center. The center will open in the heart of the ISTA campus with a festival from October 3 to 5, 2025. Admission is free.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Phase behavior of Cacio e Pepe sauce by G. Bartolucci, D. M. Busiello, M. Ciarchi, A. Corticelli, I. Di Terlizzi, F. Olmeda, D. Revignas, V. M. Schimmenti. Physics of Fluids Volume 37 Issue 4 April 2025 044122 (2025) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0255841
This paper is open access.
For anyone who wants to know more about the 2025 ig Nobels, there’s (1) a September, 18, 2025 article by Jennifer Ouellette for Ars Technica,
Does alcohol enhance one’s foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.
Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.
Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.
Without further ado, here are the winners of the 2025 Ig Nobel prizes.
…
There’s also (2) this undated posting on Improbable Science, which provides videos of the event and more, as well as, a list of in person events continuing right into January 2026 in Tokyo and a request,
…
We Ask for Your Help: Donate to the Ig!
As per unfortunate tradition, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is funded on a thread of a shoestring. If you or your organization would like to help the Ig thrive, please donate to the Ig!
The Vancouver Public Library (VPL) has an upcoming talk in its How the Universe Works series, from the VPL event page, Note: Some of this notice has been reformatted,
How the Universe Works: The Physics of Car Racing Thursday, February 12, 2026 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm Central Library 350 West Georgia St. Vancouver British Columbia V6B 6B1
February: The Physics of Car Racing
While car racing can appear to the general public as a parade of cars driving around tracks in circles, race car drivers operating their cars at the limit are on a razor’s edge – balancing and adjusting the behaviour of the car with a variety of techniques that are foreign to the average road driver. Using simple physics we’ll take a beginner’s look at race car driving and the techniques used to minimize lap time, as well as the design differences between road cars and race cars, and the changes that grassroots motor sports enthusiasts must make to convert their road cars into high performance race vehicles.
Presenter: Andre Marziali
Registration Required
…
The VPL is partnering with the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Department of Physics & Astronomy Outreach in what hey call the VPL Science Discovery Series, Note: Presumably ‘How the Universe Works’ is a subseries.
UBC does offer a bit more information about the speaker, Andre Marziali, on this webpage,
…
Andre Marziali, P.Eng. [professional engineer], is the director of the Engineering Physics program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and founder and chief scientific officer of Boreal Genomics. Marziali co-invented the concept of using synchronous mobility perturbations to create divergent velocity fields for selective focusing of nucleic acids. Today, Boreal Genomics continues to develop breakthrough technology for non-invasive, real-time detection and monitoring of tumor mutations.
Marziali received his Bachelor of Applied Science in engineering physics from UBC and his PhD in physics from Stanford University.
Andre also loves driving Ferrari’s in his spare time.
Two events on the same day. albeit thousands of kilometres apart, and both of them have a ‘physics’ flavour.
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) October 22, 2025 event
Usually, the Perimeter Institute announces that tickets will be available at a specific time for an event being held two or more weeks later.Tthis one is coming up next week (Wednesday, October 22, 2025) and tickets are already available, from an October 15, 2025 PI announcement (received via email),
100 Years of Quantum: Perspectives on its Past, Present, and Future
Wednesday, October 22, [2025] at 6:45 pm ET
Join us to mark 100 years since a revolutionary idea changed physics forever.
In July 1925, on the island of Helgoland, Werner Heisenberg made a breakthrough that gave rise to modern quantum theory. A century later, physicists are still exploring what it truly means.
This public event celebrates the quantum centenary with a panel discussion bringing together experts in the history and philosophy of physics and researchers studying quantum foundations, to discuss the past, present, and future of quantum theory. The diverse perspectives of the panellists promise a dynamic and engaging exploration of the most profound and the most puzzling topics in physics today.
Don’t miss out! Free tickets to attend this event in person are available now.
Starts on Wednesday, October 22 [2025] · 6:45pm 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 Atrium will be open for ticket holders, with researchers available to answer science questions until the talk begins.
6:45 p.m. – 6:45 p.m.
Doors Close
Theater doors close to ensure all guests have enough time to enter and be seated by our ushers.
7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Public Talk
The talk will begin at 7:00 PM, offering a live stream for virtual attendees. This will include a full presentation in the Theatre as well as a Q&A session.
8:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Atrium (Optional)
After the talk, head to the Atrium to mingle with other attendees and meet the speaker.
I’m Adam Becker. I’m a journalist, author, and erstwhile astrophysicist.
My new book, More Everything Forever, is about the terrible plans that tech billionaires have for the future and why they don’t work. Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by fantastical technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs. These are wildly implausible and profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. These futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.
…
My first book, What is Real?, is about the unfinished quest for the meaning of quantum physics. The New York Times liked that one too; they called it “a thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science.” If you want a taste of what that book is like, check out this interactive essay based on the book, about the strangest result in all of quantum physics. Errata for the book are here.
…
The full title of Becker’s latest book (published April 2025) is “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity” and the full title for his 2018 book is “What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Physics.”
Belkin Art Gallery (University of British Columbia [UBC] in Vancouver, Canada)
There are more events but my interest was this one, from an October 16, 2025 Belkin Art Gallery announcement (received via email) and available online here,
Conversation [Uncanny slippages: Time and transformation] with Bronwen Tate and Adele Ruosi
Wednesday, October 22 [2025] at noon
For this noon-hour conversation in the gallery, Bronwen Tate (School of Creative Writing) and Adele Ruosi (Department of Physics and Astronomy) will speak to Uncanny Slippages: Time and Transformation, bringing physics and poetic form together, addressing themes of materiality, structure, rhythm and metaphor—inviting reflection on scale, pattern and the felt experience of space and matter as they resonate with Akhavan’s practice [Abbas Akhavan: One Hundred Years exhibition, September 5 – December 7, 2025]. This talk is part of a series of noon-hour conversations at the Belkin where UBC scholars discuss productive intersections of their own work and the current exhibition, followed by a discussion that includes the audience.
Be sure to pick up a copy of Bronwen Tate’s text, “The Window and the Bridge.” As part of Akhavan’s work LOOP, local writers were invited to contribute a text using the word “loop” as a catalyst; Tate’s writing will be available only until the end of October [2025].
…
Bronwen Tate’s text, “The Window and the Bridge” is available at the Belkin (either in the exhibit area or at the front desk).
The latest Quantum Studio artist-in-residence, Nadia Lichtig, has recently been announced in the University of British Columbia’s (Vancouver, Canada) Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery October 7, 2025 newsletter (also received via email),
ARS SCIENTIA – BRIDGING ART AND SCIENCE AT UBC
Building on exhibitions like The Beautiful Brain and Drift, the Ars Scientia research project connects artists with physicists to explore the intersections between the disciplines of art and science. A collaboration between the Belkin, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, with project support from the Institut Français du Canada and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, we’re pleased to share news of Ars Scientia‘s latest initiatives.
Quantum Studio Artist Residency with Nadia Lichtig
We are happy to welcome French-German artist Nadia Lichtig as this year’s Quantum Studio Artist-in-Residence, a collaboration between the Institut Français du Canada and UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute and the Belkin through Quantum Studio, which is part of the larger West-West residency program supported by Institut Français du Canada. Nadia Lichtig’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between pictorial and musical composition. Her works emerge from a continuous process of translation, where each medium reconfigures the other. She creates immersive installations, shaped by multilingualism, embodied listening and the notion of the “ghost image.” Her work unfolds across both artistic and musical scenes, in France and internationally, under her own name or various pseudonyms. Nadia Lichtig’s one-month residency (October 8 to November 7 [2025]) will conclude with a presentation of her research – a score and live performance – in the final week of her residency, details to follow!
Brains, Poems, AI and Forensics: Inside Ars Scientia’s Prize for Artful Science Writing
This past academic year, we invited UBC students to contribute an essay exploring the profound and often catalyzing connections between the two fields of art and science. We are pleased to share the winning essay by Dalmar Yusuf, alongside writing by three distinguished runners-up, Ever Roberts, Robin Lei and Wendy Yang! Their writing offered fresh insights, compelling examples and bold reflections on how creative and scientific thinking can inform and enrich one another.
Since its launch, the Quantum Studio residency has been made possible through a vital partnership between the French Consulate and UBC’s leading arts and science institutions. The program supports meaningful collaboration between artists and researchers across quantum physics, quantum computing, materials science, and beyond—creating a fertile space for cross-disciplinary inquiry.
Nadia Lichtig’s work bridges pictorial and musical forms through a process of continuous translation—her installations imbue painting with sound, visual imagery with sonic texture, and engage concepts like multilingualism, embodied listening, and the “ghost image.” During her residency, she will produce Event Horizon, a monumental painting paired with a sound composition inspired by quantum theory and the philosophy of Karen Barad. Developed through dialogue with the QMI research community, the piece aims to probe the fragile thresholds between visibility and disappearance, memory and perception, presence and absence.
Although specific collaborations remain to be shaped once Nadia arrives, researchers, students, and artists interested in exploring possibilities are warmly invited to engage with her during the residency. As in previous editions, these spontaneous encounters often yield rich creative and intellectual fruit.
Public programming—including artist talks and open discussions—will be organized throughout her stay. These will offer glimpses into the evolving creative process and foster connections between disciplines.
…
All about Nadia Lichtig
If you click on the READ MORE… link in the newsletter, you’ll be directed to the Quantum Studio Artist Residency 2025: Nadia Lichtig webpage where you’ll see Nadia Lichtig (right side of screen) and can click on a second READ MORE instruction to find more detail about her work,
Nadia Lichtig is an artist currently living in the South of France. In her multilayered work, voice is transposed into various media including painting, print, sculpture, photography, performance, soundscape and song—each medium approached not as a field to be mastered, but as a source of possibilities to question our ability to decipher the present. Visual and aural aspects entangle in her performances. Lichtig studied linguistics at the LMU Munich in Germany and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France with Jean-Luc Vilmouth, where she graduated with honours in 2001, before assisting Mike Kelley in Los Angeles the same year. She is currently pursuing a PhD in artistic research. Lichtig taught at the Shrishti School of Art and Technology, Bangalore, India as a visiting professor in 2006, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Valence in 2007 and is professor of Fine Arts at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-arts of Montpellier (MOCO-ESBA), France since 2009. She has collaborated with musicians who are also visual artists, such as Bertrand Georges (Audible), Christian Bouyjou (Popopfalse), Nicolu (La Chatte), Nina Canal (Ut) and Michael Moorley (The dead C). Lichtig worked and works under several group names and pseudonyms (until 2009: EchoparK, Falseparklocation, Skrietch, Ghosttrap and Nanana).
Nadia Lichtig is a French-German artist, based in Montpellier, France.
She is the new recipient of the Arts & Sciences residency program “Quantum Studio, Vancouver” a program created by the French Institute of Canada in 2023, in partnership with the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (QMI) and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
Nadia Lichtig succeeds Caroline Delétoille (2024) and Javiera Tejerina Risso (2023). The artist will be in residence in Vancouver from October 8 to November 7 2025.
Nadia Lichtig is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between pictorial and musical composition. Her works emerge from a continuous process of translation, where each medium reconfigures the other. She creates immersive installations, shaped by multilingualism, embodied listening, and the notion of the “ghost image.” Her work unfolds across both artistic and musical scenes, in France and internationally, under her own name or various pseudonyms. She also teaches at MO.CO. ESBA in Montpellier and is currently pursuing a PhD in artistic research.
Special note: Lichtig’s work was last here in Vancouver as part of the Drift exhibition at the Belkin Gallery.
Not quite related (mushroom music)
The talk of music, visual art, physics, and “… a continuous process of translation, where each medium reconfigures the other” reminded me of Tarun Nayar (Modern Biology) and his work as described in my May 27, 2022 posting “The sound of the mushroom,” where he sonifies data he collects from mushrooms and other plants,
…
A May 13, 2022 article by Philip Drost for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) As It Happens radio programme highlights the “From funky fungi to melodious mangos, this artist makes music out of nature” segment of the show, Note: Links have been removed,
At the intersection of biology and electronic music, you can find Tarun Nayar plugging his synthesizer equipment into mushrooms and other forms of plant life, hoping to capture their invisible bioelectric rhythms and build them into tranquil soundscapes.
“What I’m really doing is trying to stimulate joy and wonder and create these little sketches or vignettes using the plants themselves, so I like to think of it as definitely a collaboration,” Nayar told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.
Nayar is an electronic musician and former biologist in Vancouver who uses his TikTok account and Youtube page, Modern Biology, to show off his serenading spores. And his videos have millions of views.
To make his fungi sing, Nayar uses little jumper cables to connect the vegetation with his synthesizer and measure their biological energy, or bioelectricity, which has an effect on the notes.
“The mushroom is contributing the pitch changes and the rhythm, and the synthesizer, which I have the mushroom plugged into, is contributing the timbre or the quality of the sound,” Nayar said.
…
I have a Modern Biology update, which takes the music to an unexpected place, from a June 23, 2025 article by Barb Sligl for MONTECRISTO magazine, (Vancouver, Canada-based)
In the cocoon-like interior of the restaurant Burdock & Co, [emphasis mine] headphone-clad diners focus intently on the plates before them. Forks pause midair between bites as people don’t just taste, they also listen to the food. I watch the gleam of neon-illuminated earcups—like blips on an amplifier—and tune in to the warbles emitting from a DJ setup, where a tangle of cables is plugged into a Buddha’s hand citron.
Behind the deck is Tarun Nayar, the Vancouver-based musician known as Modern Biology. He’s performing here for the first of a new series of Taste Sound dinners. Tonight, the theme is “Citrus-Scented Rain Under a Snow Moon,” a sensory meld of electronic and organic that’s a collaboration between Nayar and Andrea Carlson, the chef-owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant.
As I sample each dish, Nayar plays ambient music that is textural, moody, atmospheric—a trippy translation of the plant ingredients’ bioelectricity. The Buddha’s hand is murmuring. The Japanese sudachi fruit [a citrus found in Japan] is singing. Kind of. Nayar is channelling their fluctuations of energy—via electrodes and clips attached to the fruit—into a sonic composition at the intersection of music and biology.
The latent life force of the diminutive sudachi sphere is literally amplified in Nayar’s interpretation of its electrical currents. And its yuzu-like flavour intensifies in my mouth. This link between the senses goes back to the memory-inducing smell and taste famously wrought by Proust’s madeleine taken with tea, but recent research reveals that sound also affects taste. The work of Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist and author of Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, shows how different frequencies and volume influence taste—findings demonstrated tonight by Nayar and the sudachi’s twang and tang.
After the citrus soundscape at Burdock & Co, I meet Nayar in the Bloedel Conservatory, where he’s planning a live recording that includes the renowned Vancouver jazz multi-keyboardist Chris Gestrin. We sit on a bench amid the lush, teeming life and cacophony—including a pair of green-winged macaws perched behind us. Their squawks and trills punctuate our conversation as my glasses fog up in the humid environment of 500 plant varieties that include rare cycads and a corpse flower.
…
The biosonification device used to do this is akin to a modified polygraph machine, Nayar says. “It’s like a Grade 6 science project. It’s not crazy science like splitting atoms,” but it’s also on the frontier of fascinating research in botany and mycology. He cites SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) and Michael Levin (a leading researcher in the “cognitive glue” of bioelectricity), as well as John Cage and Brian Eno (pioneers of generative music) and Sam Cusumano (an engineer and the creator of the first commercial biosonification device in 2012). Even a century ago, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, who Nayar calls India’s Einstein, laid the groundwork for plant neurobiology and invented instruments to detect plant signals.
Educated as a biologist himself, Nayar moved to Vancouver about 25 years ago to pursue a master’s degree in oceanography. But his career morphed into professional music from performing as a DJ to co-founding the popular band Delhi 2 Dublin and playing high-profile venues including Glastonbury and Burning Man. Now biosonification has reconnected Nayar to his academic roots. “It’s kind of a dream come true,” he says. “I can approach it as an artist, but I understand the science.”
…
… Through immersive events—from the botanically themed Taste Sound dinner at Burdock & Co to a Mushroom Church performance in the historic De Duif church in Amsterdam—he prods humans to commune with plants. He’s brought together people in parks on “field trips” and in concerts from Berlin to Bangalore and performed at Art Basel Miami and the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm.
Three UBC/Belkin Gallery art/science events are being highlighted here. Only the first one is ‘made-in-Vancouver’.
I covered the Quantum Studio artist-in-residency of Caroline Delétoille in some detail in my October 7, 2024 posting. I have news about her then upcoming artist talk, along with more information about the Quantum Studio artist-in-residence programme.
Drift
This show was originally developed bythe Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and SNOLAB (science facility located deep underground in the operational Vale Creighton nickel mine), both in Ontario. The exhibition along with the Ars Scientia initiative were highlighted in my September 6, 2021 posting.
The Beautiful Brain
This was not simply an exhibition, it was part of a series of events in Vancouver being hosted by the neuroscience community. Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s ‘beautiful brain’ show, developed by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota with the Instituto Cajal, remains on of my favourites; it’s mentioned here in my September 11, 2017 posting and, again, in my May 9, 2018 posting as it made its way from New York to Boston’s Harvard University.
Finally, I look forward to getting details about Lichtig’s presentation of her research (a score and live performance) in the final week of her residency sometime between November 1 – 7, 2025.
I don’t often get a chance to mention superstar authors such as George RR Martin here but it does happen when science fiction authors and physics are concerned.
Caption: A coordinate system for the polar model of the Wild Cards system and an example of the viral vector trajectories. Credit: Ian Tregillis
Many science fiction authors try to incorporate scientific principles into their work, but Ian Tregillis, who is a contributing author of the Wild Cards book series when he’s not working as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, took it one step further: He derived a formula to describe the dynamics of the fictional universe’s viral system.
In independent research published in the American Journal of Physics, from AIP Publishing, Tregillis and George R.R. Martin derive a formula for viral behavior in the Wild Cards universe.
Wild Cards is a science fiction series written by a collection of authors and edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass. Sitting at over 30 volumes, the books are about an alien virus called the Wild Card that mutates human DNA. Martin is credited as a co-author of the paper, making it his first peer-reviewed physics publication.
The idea to explore the science behind the fictional virus came from a series of blog posts on the Wild Cards website.
“Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope estimates, but then I went off the deep end. Eventually I suggested, only half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write a genuine physics paper than another blog post,” Tregillis said. “Being a theoretician, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model might tidy up the canon.”
The formula he derived is a Lagrangian formulation, which considers the different ways a system can evolve. It’s also a fundamental physics principle, which also makes the fictional example a powerful teaching tool.
Tregillis shared that deriving this physical model was a fun but open-ended puzzle. After some trial and error of models based on fractals or thermodynamic analogies, he and Martin settled on the Lagrangian approach.
“We translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete dynamical system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of outcomes,” he said.
While the Wild Card virus can be modeled by physics, Tregillis emphasized that it isn’t a hard-and-fast rule in the canon.
“Good storytelling is about characters: their wants, needs, obstacles, challenges, and how they interact with their world,” Tregillis said. “The fictional virus is really just an excuse to justify the world of Wild Cards, the characters who inhabit it, and the plot lines that spin out from their actions.”
One other thing, Wild Cards, a current television programme which has nothing to do with George RR Martin or physics, stars Vanessa Morgan and Giacomo Gianniotti in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) production about a con artist and a police officer solving crimes toghether can be seen here.
Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU; US) have challenged the findings in recent research that was highlighted here in a December 16, 2024 posting “van Gogh’s sky is alive with real-world physics.”
An April 1, 2025 news item (not an April Fool’s joke) on phys.org announces a conclusion that contradicts the original findings,
The Dutch master Vincent van Gogh may have painted one of Western history’s most enduring works, but “The Starry Night” is not a masterpiece of flow physics—despite recent attention to its captivating swirls, according to researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Washington [state not district].
…
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain [downloaded from https://phys.org/news/2025-04-vincent-van-gogh-starry-night.html].
The post-Impressionist artist painted the work (often referred to simply as “Starry Night”) in June 1889, and its depiction of a pre-sunrise sky and village was inspired in part by the view from van Gogh’s asylum room in southern France. The painting is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Last year, a paper published in the September issue of Physics of Fluids – “Hidden Turbulence in van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’” – received considerable notice by positing that the eddies, or swirls, painted by van Gogh adhere to Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulent flow, which explains how air and water swirls move in a somewhat chaotic pattern. “[van Gogh] was able to reproduce not only the size of whirls/eddies, but also their relative distance and intensity in his painting,” the paper read.
However, those conclusions are unfounded, according to Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Ph.D., the Inez Caudill Eminent Professor in VCU’s Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, and James J. Riley, Ph.D., the inaugural Paccar Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington. Their report – “Is There Hidden Turbulence in Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’?” – appears in the latest issue of Journal of Turbulence.
This must have been some high school physics class. A November 5, 2024 news item on ScienceDaily explains how physics topological insulators and dance intersected for three classes,
Science can be difficult to explain to the public. In fact, any subfield of science can be difficult to explain to another scientist who studies in a different area. Explaining a theoretical science concept to high school students requires a new way of thinking altogether.
This is precisely what researchers at the University of California San Diego did when they orchestrated a dance with high school students at Orange Glen High School in Escondido as a way to explain topological insulators.
The experiment, led by former graduate student Matthew Du and UC San Diego Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Joel Yuen-Zhou, was published in Science Advances.
“I think the concept is simple,” stated Yuen-Zhou. “But the math is much harder. We wanted to show that these complex ideas in theoretical and experimental physics and chemistry are actually not as impossible to understand as you might initially think.”
Topological insulators are a relatively new type of quantum material that has insulating properties on the inside, but have conductive properties on the outside. To use a Southern California staple, if a topological insulator was a burrito, the filling would be insulating and the tortilla would be conducting.
Since topological insulators are able to withstand some disorder and deformation, they can be synthesized and used under conditions where imperfections can arise. For this reason, they hold promise in the areas of quantum computing and lasers, and in creating more efficient electronics.
To bring these quantum materials to life, the researchers made a dance floor (topological insulator) by creating a grid with pieces of blue and red tape. Then to choreograph the dance, Du created a series of rules that governed how individual dancers moved.
These rules are based on what is known as a Hamiltonian in quantum mechanics. Electrons obey rules given by a Hamiltonian, which represents the total energy of a quantum system, including kinetic and potential energy. The Hamiltonian encodes the interactions of the electron in the potential energy of the material.
Each dancer (electron) had a pair of flags and was given a number that corresponded to a movement:
1 = wave flags with arms pointing up
0 = stand still
-1 = wave flags with arms pointing down
Subsequent moves were based on what a neighboring dancer did and the color of the tape on the floor. A dancer would mimic a neighbor with blue tape, but do the opposite of a neighbor with red tape. Individual mistakes or dancers leaving the floor didn’t disrupt the overall dance, exhibiting the robustness of topological insulators.
In addition to topology, Yuen-Zhou’s lab also studies chemical processes and photonics, and it was in thinking of light waves that they realized the movement of a group of people also resembled a wave. This gave Yuen-Zhou the idea of using dance to explain a complex topic like topological insulators. Implementing this idea seemed like a fun challenge to Du, who is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago and takes salsa lessons in his free time.
Du, who comes from a family of educators and is committed to scientific outreach, says the project gave him an appreciation for being able to distill science into its simplest elements.
“We wanted to demystify these concepts in a way that was unconventional and fun,” he stated. “Hopefully, the students were able to see that science can be made understandable and enjoyable by relating it to everyday life.”
Full list of authors: Matthew Du, Juan B. Pérez-Sánchez, Jorge A. Campos-Gonzalez-Angulo, Arghadip Koner, Federico Mellini, Sindhana Pannir-Sivajothi, Yong Rui Poh, Kai Schwennicke, Kunyang Sun, Stephan van den Wildenberg, Alec Barron and Joel Yuen-Zhou (all UC San Diego); and Dylan Karzen (Orange Glen High School).
This research was supported by an National Science Foundation CAREER grant (CHE 1654732).
Here’s what it looked like,
Snapshots showing dancers on the edge of the topological insulator moving in a clockwise direction. Courtesy of University of California at San Diego
You may find this helps you to understand what’s happening in the pictures,
Before getting to a link and citation for the paper, here’s the paper’s abstract,
Topological insulators are insulators in the bulk but feature chiral energy propagation along the boundary. This property is topological in nature and therefore robust to disorder. Originally discovered in electronic materials, topologically protected boundary transport has since been observed in many other physical systems. Thus, it is natural to ask whether this phenomenon finds relevance in a broader context. We choreograph a dance in which a group of humans, arranged on a square grid, behave as a topological insulator. The dance features unidirectional flow of movement through dancers on the lattice edge. This effect persists when people are removed from the dance floor. Our work extends the applicability of wave physics to dance. [emphasis mine]
I wonder if we’re going to see some ‘wave physics’ inspired dance performances.
Finally, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Chiral edge waves in a dance-based human topological insulator by Matthew Du, Juan B. Pérez-Sánchez, Jorge A. Campos-Gonzalez-Angulo, Arghadip Koner, Federico Mellini, Sindhana Pannir-Sivajothi, Yong Rui Poh, Kai Schwennicke, Kunyang Sun, Stephan van den Wildenberg, Dylan Karzen, Alec Barron, and Joel Yuen-Zhou. Science Advances 28 Aug 2024 Vol 10, Issue 35 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh7810
This November 5, 2024 news item on phys.org takes a while before revealing how science is involved in the research,
Physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) have investigated to which extent a piece of music can evoke expectations about its progression. They were able to determine differences in how far compositions of different composers can be anticipated. In total, the scientists quantitatively analyzed more than 550 pieces from classical and jazz music.
It is common knowledge that music can evoke emotions. But how do these emotions arise and how does meaning emerge in music? Almost 70 years ago, music philosopher Leonard Meyer suggested that both are due to an interplay between expectation and surprise.
In the course of evolution, it was crucial for humans to be able to make new predictions based on past experiences. This is how we can also form expectations and predictions about the progression of music based on what we have heard. According to Meyer, emotions and meaning in music arise from the interplay of expectations and their fulfillment or (temporary) non-fulfillment.
A team of scientists led by Theo Geisel at the MPI-DS and the University of Göttingen have asked themselves whether these philosophical concepts can be quantified empirically using modern methods of data science. …
… In a paper published recently in Nature Communications, they used time series analysis to infer the autocorrelation function of musical pitch sequences; it measures how similar a tone sequence is to previous sequences. This results in a kind of “memory” of the piece of music. If this memory decreases only slowly with time difference, the time series is easier to anticipate; if it vanishes rapidly, the time series offers more variation and surprises.
In total, the researchers Theo Geisel and Corentin Nelias analyzed more than 450 jazz improvisations and 99 classical compositions in this way, including multi-movement symphonies and sonatas. They found that the autocorrelation function of pitches initially decreases very slowly with the time difference. This expresses a high similarity and possibility to anticipate musical sequences. However, they found that there is a time limit, after which this similarity and predictability ends relatively abruptly. For larger time differences, the autocorrelation function and memory are both negligible.
Of particular interest here are the values of the transition times of the pieces where the more predictable behavior changes into a completely unpredictable and uncorrelated behavior. Depending on the composition or improvisation, the scientists found transition times ranging from a few quarter notes to about 100 quarter notes. Jazz improvisations typically had shorter transition times than many classical compositions, and therefore were usually less predictable. Differences could also be observed between different composers. For example, the researchers found transition times between five and twelve quarter notes in various compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, while the transition times in various compositions by Mozart ranged from eight to 22 quarter notes. This implies that the anticipation and expectation of the musical progression tends to last longer in Mozart’s compositions than in Bach’s compositions, which offer more variability and surprises.
For Theo Geisel, the initiator and head of this research project, this also explains a very personal observation from his high school days: “In my youth, I shocked my music teacher and conductor of our school orchestra by saying that I often couldn’t show much enthusiasm for Mozart’s compositions,” he says. “With the transition times between highly correlated and uncorrelated behavior, we have now found a quantitative measure for the variability of music pieces, which helps me to understand why I liked Bach more than Mozart.”
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Stochastic properties of musical time series by Corentin Nelias & Theo Geisel. Nature Communications volume 15, Article number: 9280 (2024) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-53155-y Published: 28 October 2024
This paper is open access.
There was a Theodor Geisel who in the US and Canada was better known as Dr. Seuss.
