Neatorama

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• What the COVID Vaccine Does to Your Body
• The Lindbergh Kidnapping and a Media Revolution
• The First Animal To Ask An Existential Question
• The Mystery of Beethoven's Metronome
• Freeze Frame
• Scientists Investigate Radio Beam from the Direction of a Nearby Star

What the COVID Vaccine Does to Your Body Posted: 03 Jan 2021 03:07 AM PST You've heard about the revolutionary MRNA technology that makes the COVID vaccines different from traditional vaccines. However, if you're like me, you've never had someone explain it to you in terms that only require a high school understanding of science. The guys from AsapSCIENCE are quite good at doing just that. -via Digg

The Lindbergh Kidnapping and a Media Revolution Posted: 03 Jan 2021 03:07 AM PST When Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped and killed in 1932, news media covered the story extensively. Newspapers, radio, and newsreels gave us details from the crime to the ransom to the arrest and conviction of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. While many books have been written about the kidnapping, Tom Doherty focuses on the journalism around it in his book Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century. Doherty gives us an overview of the ways the kidnapping changed how news outlets cover crimes and how we consume those stories.   One of the things that happens at the trial, which is sort of true forever on, is the forensic evidence becomes fascinating to people. You don't have shootouts or dramatic confrontations. There are no fingerprints, there's no gun. Nobody can really place Hauptmann at the crime scene.   So, you've got to follow the forensic trail. And what you have is this sort of relentless accumulation of forensic detail, which together leads unmistakably to Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Things like ransom money bank records, handwriting analysis, analysis of the wood grain of a ladder. People are obsessed with these details. They are reading three thousand words a day in The New York Times on the case.   This is something you see in the true crime genre today with these 15-part series that lead you through every little nook and cranny of the investigation. Some of that starts with the Lindbergh case. There are other ways the Lindbergh case changed news media, which you can read at BrandeisNOW. -via Strange Company

The First Animal To Ask An Existential Question Posted: 02 Jan 2021 08:41 PM PST Alex the African grey parrot was the subject of Dr. Irene Pepperberg's research into animal psychology. With the help of Alex, Dr. Pepperberg has shown the capabilities of birds through various exercises in cognition. Alex is also the first ever animal to have an 'existential crisis' or alternatively, the first to ask an existential question, as My Modern Met details:  By the time of his death in 2007, Alex had amassed a variety of skills generally thought beyond animal reasoning. He had proven that some birds' intelligence is even on par with that of dolphins and primates—typically considered to be some of the world's smartest animals. [...] One of Alex's most impressive moments was when he asked an existential question about his own appearance. He had been presented with a mirror, and—after observing himself for a moment—he asked, "What color?" He then learned the word "gray"—the color of his feathers—after having it taught to him six times. Image via My Modern Met

The Mystery of Beethoven's Metronome Posted: 02 Jan 2021 07:32 AM PST Orchestra conductors all over the world present the music of Beethoven, but even when they are trying hard to reproduce his original work, they almost always slow down the tempo of his written directions. Why did Beethoven want his music played so fast? Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was one of the first composers to start using a metronome, a device patented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in 1815. At that time, he started to edit his works with numerical marks with metronome indications. Doubts about the validity of these marks date back to the 19th century and during the 20th century many musicological analyses were carried out, some of which already pointed to the hypothesis that the metronome was broken, an assumption that could never be verified. In any case, most orchestra conductors have omitted these marks as they consider them to be too fast (Romanticism), whereas since the 1980s, other conductors (Historicism) have used them to play Beethoven. However, music critics and the public described these concerts as frantic and even unpleasant. A few years ago, scientists posited the theory that Beethoven's metronome might have been broken -or even sabotaged. However, new research says it's possible that the composer suffered from early adopter syndrome, before usage standards were commonly agreed upon. Read about the research into Beethoven's metronome use, and the conclusions so far at EurekAlert! -via Strange Company (Image credit: Mutatis mutandis)

Freeze Frame Posted: 02 Jan 2021 07:31 AM PST Belgian animator Soetkin Verstegenused ice for her experimental stop-motion film Freeze Frame. There's ice cubes, ice spheres, ice sculpture, ice as background, ice as water, and melting ice. You can imagine she had to work quickly to take stills of each scene! The result is hypnotic, and kind of cold. -via Nag on the Lake

Scientists Investigate Radio Beam from the Direction of a Nearby Star Posted: 02 Jan 2021 07:31 AM PST Astronomers scanning the skies for signals at the Parkes telescope in Australia picked up an unusual radio beam last spring. They've been analyzing it since then, and have not yet found a terrestrial source to attribute it to. The Guardian has more. The latest "signal" is likely to have a mundane explanation too, but the direction of the narrow beam, around 980MHz, and an apparent shift in its frequency said to be consistent with the movement of a planet have added to the tantalising nature of the finding. Scientists are now preparing a paper on the beam, named BLC1, for Breakthrough Listen, the project to search for evidence of life in space, the Guardian understands. The beam that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star 4.2 light years from Earth, has not been spotted since the initial observation, according to an individual in the astronomy community who requested anonymity because the work is ongoing. "It is the first serious candidate since the 'Wow! signal'," they said. The "Wow! signal" was a short-lived narrowband radio signal picked up during a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or Seti, by the Big Ear Radio Observatory in Ohio in 1977. The unusual signal, which gained its name after astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote "Wow!" next to the data, unleashed a wave of excitement, though Ehman cautioned about drawing "vast conclusions from half-vast data". Cute. The search for the source of the radio wave continues, and before you consider it proof of intelligent alien life, Phil Plait has a broader explanation and some cautionary words at Bad Astronomy.  -via Metafilter (Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser/CC BY 4.0)

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