Photo via cymascope.com

In an important breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language, researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water.

The key to this technique is the CymaScope, a new instrument that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially. Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water. The resulting “CymaGlyphs,” as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin ‘picture word.’

Certain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean (dolphins, whales and porpoises) sounds only as graphs of frequency and amplitude. The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin’s natural environment—water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.

Within the field of cetacean research, theory states that dolphins have evolved the ability to translate dimensional information from their echolocation sonic beam. The CymaScope has the ability to visualize dimensional structure within sound. CymaGlyph patterns may resemble what the creatures perceive from their own returning sound beams and from the sound beams of other dolphins.

The team has recognized that sound does not travel in waves, as is popularly believed, but in expanding holographic bubbles and beams. The holographic aspect stems from the physics theory that even a single molecule of air or water carries all the information that describes the qualities and intensity of a given sound. At frequencies audible to humans (20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz) the sound-bubble form dominates; above 20,000 Hertz the shape of sound becomes increasingly beam shaped, similar to a lighthouse beam in appearance.

Reid explained their novel sound imaging technique: “Whenever sound bubbles or beams interact with a membrane, the sound vibrations imprint onto its surface and form a CymaGlyph, a repeatable pattern of energy. The CymaScope employs the surface tension of water as a membrane because water reacts quickly and is able to reveal intricate architectures within the sound form. These fine details can be captured on camera.”

The study of wave phenomena and vibration is called Cymatics, a scientific methodology that demonstrates the vibratory nature of matter and the transformational nature of sound, made popular by Hans Jenny, a medical doctor, scientist and researcher who captured cymatic images.

via Cymascope

Biologist Don Ingber tells SPTNK how cells work collectively with other cells and develop very robust behaviors in very noisy and variable environments through interconnection.

Listen here: Don Ingber – Frequency

Photo of magnetic solar coronal loops via Eureka Alert by TRACE

Musical sounds created by longitudinal vibrations within the Sun’s atmosphere, have been recorded and accurately studied for the first time by experts at the University of Sheffield, shedding light on the Sun’s magnetic atmosphere.

Using state-of-the-art mathematical theory combined with satellite observations, a team of solar physicists from the University have captured the music on tape and revealed the harmonious sounds are caused by the movement of giant magnetic loops in the solar corona -the outermost, mysterious, and least understood layer of the Suns atmosphere. Most importantly, the team studied how this sound is decaying, giving an unprecedented insight into the physics of the solar corona.

High-resolution images taken by a number of satellites show that the solar corona is filled with large banana-shaped magnetic structures known as coronal loops. It is thought that these giant magnetic loops, some of them over a few 100,000 km long, play a fundamental role in governing the physics of the corona and are responsible for huge atmospheric explosions that occur in the atmosphere, known as solar flares.

These giant coronal loops have also been observed to undergo periodic (oscillatory) motion, which can be thought of as someone plucking a guitar string (transversal oscillations) or blowing the wind-pipe instrument (longitudinal oscillations). With the length and thickness of the string fixed, the pitch of the note is determined by the tension of the string and the tone is made up of the harmonics of the modes of oscillation. In this sense, the solar atmosphere is constantly pervaded by the music of the coronal loops.

Video from the Transitional Region and Coronal Explorer, showing eruptions from the solar corona.

via PhysOrg

Photo via flickr by alexkess

The Power of Sound explores our changing soundscape, questions if we are building a society out of tune, suggests the power of vibrational healing and how sound is a bionuturient, and how everything in our vibrational universe is musical.

Featuring: artist Robert Adrian X, sonic architect Bill Buchen, composer and sound artist  Bruce Odland, composer and naturopathic doctor John Beaulieu, Mind/Body Medicine and Energy Medicine expert Dr. Wendy Hurwitz and theoretical physicist Brian Greene. (Brian Greene recorded at Sputnik manTransforms event 2001)

Listen here: The Power of Sound

The Power of Sound is a Mindtrends radio production of the Sputnik Observatory (2006).

Photo via flickr by esagor

Researchers at Northern Arizona University (NAU) think they may have found an environmentally safe and readily available weapon against the tree-eating armies of bark beetles that have chewed through millions of acres of West’s pine forests, leaving behind dead tress and the risk of wildfires.

A research assistant suggested using sounds to aggravate the beetles. They tried Queen and Guns N’ Roses and played snippets of radio talker Rush Limbaugh backward. None produced the desired results. Then, the beetles were exposed to digitally altered recordings of their own calls, the sounds they make to attract or repel other beetles. The response was immediate.

The beetles stopped mating or burrowing. Some fled, helter-skelter. Some violently attacked each other. Most important, they stopped chewing away at the pine tree, suggesting that the scientists may have discovered a sort of sonic bullet that could help slow the beetles’ destructive march.

“Our interest is to use acoustic sounds that make beetles uncomfortable and not want to be in that environment,” said NAU forest entomologist Richard Hofstetter, who led the experiment nicknamed, without apology, “beetle mania.”

Bark beetles have killed nearly 80 million ponderosa, piñon and lodgepole pines in Arizona and New Mexico and tens of millions more across the West over the past decade. Years of punishing drought left the trees unable to protect themselves against the attacks, which carve ugly scars into forests, weaken the surrounding ecosystem and heighten wildfire danger.

The lab hopes to find more funding to continue its research into acoustic pest control. Scientists think it won’t be long before they can take the experiment into the field.

Photo via flickr by Ghost of Kuji

Researchers at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, announced they had made an earthbound analogue of a black hole. Not to worry: Instead of a superdense object from which no light can escape, their more docile version merely prevents sound waves from getting out.

Constructing a sonic black hole was first proposed by Canadian physicist William Unruh nearly 30 years ago, but the Israeli team was the first to successfully create one. They cooled 100,000 rubidium atoms to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero and used a laser to create a void in this tiny cloud. As the atoms, attracted to the breach, zipped across it at more than four times the speed of sound, they gave rise to a black hole effect. Under such conditions, no sound wave could travel against the flow of the racing fluid. “It’s like trying to swim upstream in a river whose current is faster than you,” says team member Jeff Steinhauer. The boundary between the subsonic and supersonic flows mimics a black hole’s event horizon, the point of no return.

The discovery could potentially provide a way to test Stephen Hawking’s prediction that a real black hole should slowly evaporate as it emits radiation generated in the quantum turmoil at its event horizon. A sonic black hole ought to act in the same way by releasing phonons, or packets of sound energy. Finding phonons would provide strong evidence that “black holes ain’t so black.”

via Discover Magazine

Photo via Soundwalk

KILL THE EGO began as a song, as an epic 40-minute-long poem composed of 10 years of sound recordings captured in New York by Soundwalk between 1998 and 2008. The fragmented memories of poets and dominatrixes, of pimps and prophets, of visionaries and lost children – the gamut of stories from the street: of the most obscure corners, of underground unrest, intimate and universal biographies of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx – Soundwalk has captured and woven together the sounds, conversations, and songs of urbanity. This soundtrack of New York City has been represented visually onscreen by the artist Rostarr, who used the sound recordings as a launch for an art series documented by directors Jim Helton and Ron Patane. Inspired by the technique used in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece “Le mystère Picasso”, the directors sought to give life to the creative process and gave birth to the aural and visual work that is the film KILL THE EGO.

Photo via flickr by Ben Scicluna

Quantum vibration theory of smell is gaining credibility. Physicist Marshall Stoneham at the University College London is putting scientist Luca Turin’s controversial theory to the test. In Turin’s model, receptors are cued by the vibrational frequency of the odor molecule. This differs strongly from the leading theory, which supposes that the shape of the odor molecule allows it to fit like a key into the appropriate lock-like receptor. But while the shape theory is the one most accepted by scientists, it has not been proven. Shape still has a role in Turin’s model, however, being part of what determines the molecule’s overall vibrational frequency. Using quantum mechanics, says Turin’s model, an electron “tunnels” through the odor molecule, distorting its electrical field. Stoneham’s study supposed that an odor molecule sits between an electron donor and an electron receptor, while the electron “tunnels” its way to the receptor, thus activating it. The detailed structure of the receptors is unknown, but the calculations made by Stoneham and his colleagues came out favoring Turin’s mechanism.

via Air Sense

In a conversation with Sputnik Observatory, biophysicist Luca Turin explains the theory and history of smell as vibration:

0:00:35:00
Q: Please explain your theory that smell is vibrational.

It’s actually not my idea, I wish I could say it was, but it was first proposed by a remarkable man named Malcolm Dyson in the ‘30s. He was a very brilliant chemist, and among other things he is responsible for a lot of the notation that we describe molecules with. He devised a way of naming molecules, but that was only a side activity of his. His main thing was just straight-up chemistry. But he was also interested in how we smell, and he was the first guy to suggest that maybe what we smell in molecules is their vibrations. In 1929 and in the ‘30s when he put it forward it was politely received, I would say, rather than enthusiastically. And nothing very much happened. The idea just died a death and was revised in the ‘60s by a very remarkable man called Robert Wright, and then died again in the ‘70s.

My version of it is new and improved and it is the third incarnation of this idea. The biggest difficulty was in imagining a way in which proteins, normal components of living things, could do the job. And that’s what I have done. So mechanism was everything, and that’s my contribution to the story – figuring out a way in which organisms could detect the vibrations of molecules.

0:02:46:00
Q: And how do organisms detect vibrations of molecules?

Well, you see, the wrong assumption that was always made was that there was only one way to do spectroscopy and that was optical – you shine light of a particular frequency, infrared light of a particular frequency, at a molecule, and if the molecule absorbs the light it means the molecule has that particular frequency of vibration. And so optical equipment and infrared is hard to imagine in biology, people just thought it was rubbish. But it turns out there is another way of doing spectroscopy which is electronic. Essentially, solid-state device. And it lends itself very nicely to being a tiny size of a protein. It’s an intrinsically nanotechnological thing, this electronic spectroscopy. And that was discovered in the ‘60s, and the people who discovered it, strangely enough, John Lamb and Bob Jacklovich at Ford Motor Company, the first thing that came to their mind, and I must say that I admire them for that, was that it had to do with smell.

They discovered this electronic way of doing spectroscopy and they thought, “Maybe this is how we smell?” And what do they do? They went down the corridor and asked a chemist, “What do you think?” And the guy said, “Nah, it’s all molecular shape.” And they gave up. When they told me that, I was stunned. Because if they had only realized that Robert Wright, at the same time, was proposing that smell was due to vibration, all it would have taken was one phone call from Detroit to Vancouver and the whole field would have been completely different.

Hearing is clearly vibration. Hearing is vibration, as it says in all the ads for speakers, from 20 to 20,000 Hz. Actually, at my age 16,000 would be pushing it. And, of course, color vision is vibrations of light. The fact that smell is vibration as well, I should say, is attractive if you have a philosophical frame of mind. “Oh, it’s all wonderful harmony of nature, everything is vibration.” I personally think that it could be attractive and still be wrong. So that’s not an argument in its favor. Ultimately, it could be that it could be something else. Nature does what it likes and doesn’t care about whether Goethe would like it. But how’s it changing the industry? The answer is, “It is going to.”

Photo via flickr by cyborgsuzy

“What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” That was The Edge Annual Question—2009 posed by the legendary John Brockman, Editor and Publisher of the Edge Foundation established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club, whose informal membership includes some of the most interesting minds in the world. The following answer, “Radiotelepathy”, was shared by physicist Freeman Dyson.

“RADIOTELEPATHY”, THE DIRECT COMMUNICATION OF FEELINGS AND THOUGHT FROM BRAIN TO BRAIN
Since I am 85, I cannot expect to see any big changes in science during my life-time. I beg permission to change the question to make it more interesting. What will change everything?  What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect your grandchildren to see?

I assume that some of my grandchildren will be alive for the next 80 years, long enough for neurology to become the dominant game-changing science. I expect that genetics and molecular biology will be dominant for the next fifty years, and after that neurology will have its turn. Neurology will change the game of human life drastically, as soon as we develop the tools to observe and direct the activities of a human brain in detail from the outside.

The essential facts which will make detailed observation or control of a brain possible are the following. Microwave signals travel easily through brain tissue for a few centimeters. The attenuation is small enough, so that signals can be transmitted from the inside and detected on the outside. Small microwave transmitters and receivers have bandwidths of the order of gigahertz, while neurons have bandwidths of the order of kilohertz. A single microwave transmitter inside a brain has enough bandwidth to transmit to the outside the activity of a million neurons. A system of 10^5 tiny transmitters inside a brain with 10^5 receivers outside could observe in detail the activity of an entire human brain with 10^11 neurons. A system of 10^5 transmitters outside with 10^5 receivers inside could control in detail the activity of 10^11 neurons. The microwave signals could be encoded so that each of the 10^11 neurons would be identified by the code of the signal that it transmits or receives.

These physical tools would make possible the practice of “Radiotelepathy”, the direct communication of feelings and thoughts from brain to brain. The ancient myth of telepathy, induced by occult and spooky action-at-a-distance, would be replaced by a prosaic kind of telepathy induced by physical tools. To make radiotelepathy possible, we have only to invent two new technologies, first the direct conversion of neural signals into radio signals and vice versa, and second the placement of microscopic radio transmitters and receivers within the tissue of a living brain. I do not have any idea of the way these inventions will be achieved, but I expect them to emerge from the rapid progress of neurology before the twenty-first century is over.

It is easy to imagine radiotelepathy as a powerful instrument of social change, used either for good or for evil purposes. It could be a basis for mutual understanding and peaceful cooperation of humans all over the planet. Or it could be a basis for tyrannical oppression and enforced hatred between one communal society and another. All that we can say for certain is that the opportunities for human experience and understanding would be radically enlarged. A society bonded together by radiotelepathy would be experiencing human life in a totally new way. It will be our grandchildren’s task to work out the rules of the game, so that the effects of radiotelepathy remain constructive rather than destructive. It is not too soon for them to begin thinking about the responsibilities that they will inherit. The first rule of the game, which should not be too difficult to translate into law, is that every individual should be guaranteed the ability to switch off radio communication at any time, with or without cause. When the technology of communication becomes more and more intrusive, privacy must be preserved as a basic human right.

Another set of opportunities and responsibilities will arise when radiotelepathy is extended from humans to other animal species. We will then experience directly the joy of a bird flying or a wolf-pack hunting, the pain of a deer hunted or an elephant starved. We will feel in our own flesh the community of life to which we belong.  I cannot help hoping that the sharing of our brains with our fellow-creatures will make us better stewards of our planet.

via Edge Foundation

The term “radio head” definitely has a brand new meaning. For further exploration and discovery:
-Sputnik Observatory theme on the Twenty One Senses
-Sputnik Observatory theme on Interspecies Communication

Ideas are energy.
Your brain is a satellite.
Out there is your mind.
—Sputnik Observatory

Photo via flickr by teo_ladodicivideo

The Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs advisory committee of the FDA has voted to recommend DaTSCAN, (Ioflupane I 123 Injection). If approved, GE Healthcare’s DaTSCAN™ will be the first radiopharmaceutical agent available to detect DaT (dopamine transporter) distribution within the brain. The proposed indication for DaTSCAN™ is for the visualization by single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging in patients presenting symptoms or signs of dopaminergic neurodegeneration.

via Reuters