Acoustics: Visualizing whale calls as art

NewScientist (science magazine, UK) has a fascinating set of images from Mark Fischer, who uses artistically manipulated wavelet transforms of the calls of marine mammals to create stunning artwork.
Enjoy!

Acoustics: Listenging to nature

Using microphones to capture the sounds made by animals in their habitat, minus humans and their man-made sounds. These sounds are known as the "biophony" and are used to sense the quality and character of the animals' habitat. Wired has the story.

Author's comment: It's a good thing that animals don't have privacy rights in the USA (yet!), or these scientists would be in jail for unlawful surveillance activities!

(Via Cross-Spectrum Acoustics)

Optics: "Look Mom, no lens!"

Similar to a child demonstrating how he can ride a bicycle without using his hands, now we have scientists taking pictures without a lens.

Upon reflection, it was a predictable next step. First we had the major advance of refocusing out-of-focus images by, in essence, building a correction lens, all in software. This is what allowed NASA (the USA space agency) to correct some of the Hubble Space Telescope images after it was put into orbit with an out-of-focus optical chain.

But it one can simulate a lens well enough to correct an image, even if imperfectly, why not replace the real lens with a simulated one and focus the unfocused image received by the (lens-less) sensor? That is what the team at Argonne National Laboratory (Illinois, USA) is working on. Of course, simulations are rarely, if ever, as good as the real thing in all aspects, but if for their particular problem (X-ray imaging) the simulated lens is better than their real one, then they will have improved the imaging system and advanced the state of the art yet again.

Miscellaneous: More links

Working for a living interferes with blogging - Responsibility is such a cruel mistress.

As you can probably figure out from the intro, I have to give you my sincerest apologies, but work is leaving no time for thoughtful comments or analysis, so here are the links to the raw material that I hoped to turn into interesting posts:

Talk to the machine (Strategy Page)

Listening in with the council's lie detectors (Times Online; hat tip to A.F.)

Music Special: Five great auditory illusions (New Scientist)

Astronomy Technology Brings Nanoparticle Probes Into Sharper Focus (Science Daily)

Wanted: RAM's help in solving crimes (New Scientist) (a YouTube video explaining the attack can be found here)

Snakes Locate Prey Through Vibration Waves (Science Daily)

The 'non-lethal' flashlight (New Scientist Blogs)

Car Camera Recorder Pro: Video of Everything in Your Car's Path (TechnoRide)

Abuse of Auto-Tune (Cross Spectrum)

Justice Grants will Fund Research at CU-Denver (Business Journal)

FBI wants palm prints, eye scans, tattoos (CNN)

Enjoy! I hope to be back with more in-depth blogging soon.

Brain Science: Train your brain for multi-tasking

As reported by John Tierney of the New York Times (center-left news media, USA), researchers at Wake Forest University and University of North Carolina Greensboro (both in the USA), there may be something to the "Train your brain" fad, at least if you are musical conductor:

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to map the brains of musical conductors and non-musicians who tried to distinguish musical tones while also being shown visual images. The scans showed that non-musicians had to turn off more of their visual sense than the conductors did in order to focus on the task. One of the researchers, Dr. Hodges, director of the Music Research Institute at UNC-Greensboro, says there are two possible interpretations of the results:

One is that the brains of musicians are wired this way, and that’s why they became musicians. The other is that they train their brains for rewiring. Because conductors have to be able to hear a bad note, then identify who did it, perhaps they rewire their brains to combine their visual and auditory senses. An experienced conductor has trained day after day, year after year, to let their brains pick up various signals from their senses.

The article is quite good and highly worth reading through.

Human Auditory System: Hearing the Aurora

Damn Interesting has an article about reports of people "hearing" the Aurora Borealis.  Different explanations are presented but the author leans toward something called electrophonic hearing, which is the phenomena where electromagnetic fields stimulate the auditory nerves and thereby create the sensation of sound in human subjects.

Linguistics: Genetic component to tonal and atonal languages?

The Economist magazine (UK, center-left economics and news magazine) has an article on a statistical analysis by Dan Deidiu and Robert Ladd of the University of Edinburgh that shows a correlation between genetics and speaking a tonal or atonal language.

Aside: A tonal language is one where the pitch (tone) used when pronouncing a word changes its meaning.

Finding a correlation in itself is not surprising as most Asian languages are tonal. Where this study might lead, when combined with work by others, is to uncovering which came first - genetic differences that led to the development of tonal/atonal languages or language differences that became tied to genetics.

Brain science: Clues to roots of synaesthesia

The Economist (UK weekly news and economics magazine; liberal in the classic sense) has an article on a recent study by Romke Rouw and Steven Scholte of the University of Amsterdam into the biological mechanisms behind one form of the medical condition synaesthesia the causes one to see numbers and letters in color (or colour, as the British spell it).

Human Visual System: Everything you know about the genetics of eye color is wrong

It turns out that the explanation behind what color (or colors, in rare cases) your eyes are is a lot more complicated than what I learned in school.

(Hat tip: GeekPress)

How many megapixels do our eyes have?

BBC Focus Magazine has a regular Q&A section, which, unfortunately, they do not publish on the Internet. The March 2007 edition has a reader's question - "How many megapixels do our eyes have?"

Their answer approaches the question from multiple angles. I won't quote the entire response here, but some of the interesting "factoids" are:

• comparing the number of sensing elements - the eye has 5 million cones (the color receptors) and 100 million rods (the monochrome contrast receptors) which give a human the equivalent of two 105MP (MegaPixel) video cameras (because we have two eyes).
• comparing spatial resolution over the eye's field of view - we have the equivalent of 576MP.

(Source: BBC Focus Magazine)