'The Cosmonaut' shows a hero's fall to Earth

The 1960s space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was much more than a battle of technology. It was a human drama. Two of the most compelling characters were Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, and his best friend and fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, the first human to die in space flight.

As NPR summed it up: “In 1967, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn't back out because he didn't want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.”

Emory film major Nikoloz Kevkhishvili, from the country of Georgia, chose this story for his entry in this year’s Campus Movie Fest (CMF). His short film “The Cosmonaut” (see above) recently debuted on campus with the other Emory entrants. “The Cosmonaut” won the Paladin Society’s Courageous Spirit award for breaking the norm, and also awards for best soundtrack and best drama.

CMF, which began at Emory 11 years ago, has grown into the world’s largest student film festival. The top films from the 2011-2012 competition will be shown at the CMF Grand Finale this June in Hollywood.

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Novelists, neuroscientists trade mental notes

By Carol Clark

No one can predict where the conversation will go when novelist Salman Rushdie talks about the creative process with Seana Coulson, a cognitive scientist who studies language with multiple meanings. But when two bright minds come together to explore a deep mystery from entirely different angles, you can expect sparks.

“Metaphors and the Mind” is a day-long symposium at Emory on Thursday, March 8, bringing together writers and neuroscientists to exchange their thoughts on language, creativity and the brain.

“We hope that everyone, both the scientists and the writers, will leave the symposium with new ideas about experiments they’d like to try,” says Laura Otis, an Emory professor of English, who organized the symposium with Krish Sathian, a neurologist at Emory's School of Medicine. “We each have different kinds of knowledge, and we want to see how combining them can lead to new ways of looking at things.”

Emory creative writing professors Rushdie, Jim Grimsley and Joseph Skibell will converse with three leading neuroscientists: Coulson from UC San Diego, Anjan Chatterjee from the University of Pennsylvania and David Kemmerer from Purdue. The symposium is hosted by Emory’s Center for Mind, Brain and Culture and the Laney Graduate School’s New Thinkers, New Leaders Program. It’s free and open to the public. Click here for more details.

The event grew out of a graduate seminar, “Images, Metaphors and the Brain,” that Otis teaches with Sathian. Students from neuroscience, psychology anthropology, religion, English and comparative literature are enrolled.

“We have amazing conversations,” says Otis, who researches how scientific and literary thinking coincide and foster each other’s growth.

The seminar explores everything from Sathian’s research on how the brain puts together visual imagery and touch sensations to English professor Patricia Cahill’s work on the theater and the sense of touch in early modern England.

Bringing together students from a range of specialties gives them glimpses of how different minds work. “Occasionally someone will use just one word to express a complex thought, and then just assume that everyone else gets their meaning, but often that isn’t the case,” Otis says.



Otis bridges the complexities of science and the humanities more easily than most. She was part way through a PhD in neuroscience when she realized that she didn’t want to be a scientist. “I loved studying how something binds to a cell, and a cell opens and things start pouring in or out,” she recalls. “I’m fascinated by the biology underlying memory, identity and communication.”

She could function okay in a lab environment, and was good at many of the technical tasks, but she didn’t enjoy the collaborative atmosphere. “It just didn’t feel right. I’m a loner, I work best on my own,” she says.

Otis had always loved language. “I was trying to beat down my passion,” she says, “because I thought that studying literature was selfish, and wouldn’t help humanity the way that science can.”

She eventually reached a breaking point, becoming so unhappy that she couldn’t continue on the path to neuroscience. Then she found her niche in a PhD program in comparative literature at Cornell. Otis’ interests and passions combined to put her at the vanguard of a growing movement to bring together the experiences of artists and the findings of neuroscience.

“You can learn things from science, and you can learn things from storytelling and other forms of art. Now we are putting the two together,” Otis says. “It’s a fertile field of new ideas about the mind.”

Above photo of books by iStockphoto.com.

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Fueling the dream of travel to the stars

Interstellar travel is a fantasy of many children, and believe it or not, the ambition of some scientists. Photo from 2008 Maker Faire by Jim Merithew/Wired.com.

Human space technology may be limited, but human dreams are not. Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz was among the ex-astronauts, engineers, artists, theologians, students and science-fiction writers who celebrated that paradox during the 100 Year Starship Study (100YSS) conference last fall in Orlando.

Think robots in space, nuclear fission, solar-powered sails. These are just a few of the ideas being bandied about for making interstellar travel a reality.

In a report on the conference for a recent issue of Physics World, Perkowitz describes what it was like to be immersed in “humanity’s adventurous, stubborn, mad and glorious aspiration to reach the stars.” Following is an eScienceCommons interview, about the dreamers and doers pushing at our horizons.

eScienceCommons: Who is behind the 100YSS and the conference?

Sidney Perkowitz: It was organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense. DARPA is famous for being willing to sponsor off-the-wall ideas, because you never know where basic research will take you. Supposedly, they’ve looked into things like telepathy and telekinesis, pure science-fiction stuff. But DARPA points out that research into space travel has brought advancements in technologies with civilian applications, like robotics, batteries and new materials. DARPA doesn’t necessarily believe that someone will build a starship, but the effort to do so could provide some useful spin-offs.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour'srobotic arm hovers over Earth's horizon, before a starburst from the Sun. Photo by NASA.

eSC: What kind of people attended the starship conference?

Perkowitz: All kinds. Mae Jemison was there. She is a former NASA astronaut and the first black woman to travel in space. Among the many things she’s involved with is a program encouraging young people to go into science.

I met another scientist, a Georgia Tech graduate interested in founding a company to sweep up all the human-made space debris floating around the Earth. And I heard a talk by an Iranian woman who had come up with the money to become one of the few civilians to go into space. She said that once you’ve done that, you never think about Earth in the same way.

There were a couple of visual artists there, who felt they would be inspired by hearing more about space travel, and a lot of science fiction writers. A theologian at the conference gave an interesting talk about space travel being a kind of spiritual expansion, like going beyond the roof of a cathedral. Another theologian made a complicated argument about the nature of evil and redemption, and how they might apply to life on other planets.

The ideas of some people at the conference were completely off the wall, but who knows? You should always have some visionaries around. Some of them will be wrong, but some of them will be right.

An artist's impression of how common planets are around the stars in the Milky Way. Art by European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser.

eSC: How realistic is it that we could ever reach even one of the closest stars to the sun, more than 4 light years away?

Perkowitz: I don’t think it’s going to happen soon. The distances are so great, I’m not sure that technology will ever match them. But I believe that we should keep trying, just like we should keep trying to cure cancer. I think the dream of interstellar travel is important to the human race.

Unmanned space probes armed with telescopes and other instruments have allowed us to learn more about the solar system during the last 20 years than we have during the previous 2,000 years. The discovery of exo-planets has changed our whole conception of the universe. We used to think there were nine planets, then eight because they demoted Pluto. The latest findings suggest that there are actually more planets in our galaxy than stars. That’s phenomenal, and it opens up the possibility of extraterrestrial life by a factor of millions.

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Female bonobos play up homosexual bonds

Ella Davies writes in BBC Nature:

“Female bonobos ‘advertise’ their homosexual activity to important audiences, say scientists.

“Researchers studying communication among the apes found that females made the most noise during sex if the 'alpha female' was nearby. Low-ranking females that were invited to have sex with high-ranking females would also call to tell other group members about the bond.

“Experts suggest females communicate the encounters to boost their status.

“The species Pan paniscus are referred to as the ‘erotic’ or ‘promiscuous apes’ because they regularly engage in sexual contact with both their own and the opposite sex.

“’[Sex] is used to reduce stress and competition, develop affiliations, express and test social relationships and for reconciling conflicts and consoling victims in distress,’ explained Dr Zanna Clay, from Emory University in Atlanta, who has been studying vocalisations in the species for five years.”

Read the whole article in BBC Nature.

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Immerse yourself in a 'warm pond' of music

An artist's rendering of a young planet, similar to how Earth may have been 3.5 billion years ago. NASA/JPL CalTech/R. Hurt

By Carol Clark

Take musicians and their instruments, chemists and their research, a composer and his computers and random acts of audience participation. Gather these ingredients into an otherworldly, “warm pond” atmosphere and stir. No one knows what the final result will be of “First Life,” a multi-media imagining of the chemical origins of life by Steve Everett, Emory professor of music and a composer.

“We know that the performance will be a unique experience, but beyond that, this piece is full of unknowns, which is what I really like about it,” Everett says.

“First Life” debuts on Sunday, March 4, at 7 pm in Emory's Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. The composition was supported by the Center for Chemical Evolution, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. Scientists from Emory and Georgia Tech are leading the center’s efforts to answer one of the most intriguing questions in science: How did life begin? How could molecules from the chemical inventory of early Earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, have self-assembled into new molecular entities, eventually leading to the building blocks of life?

Video below shows a computer simulation of molecular assembly produced by Martha Grover's lab. We added the sound of a crowd assembling in a concert hall.



“Molecules aren’t static. They’re vibrating, just like sound,” Everett says. “That’s one reason that music is an ideal way to create metaphors for this research.”

Everett, a former math major, who relies heavily on computer engineering for many of his musical compositions, began work on “First Life” by cracking open biochemistry books. He also talked extensively with the Center of Chemical Evolution’s Martha Grover, a chemist and bio-molecular engineer at Georgia Tech.

“A biological organism has the ability to respond to its environment and learn from its past experiences,” Grover says, “while human-designed systems are typically more rigid and thus less ‘intelligent.’”

Grover is developing probability models for certain chemical bonds, and combinations of those bonds, that could happen under certain conditions.

Joseph Haydn's musical handwriting, from the original copy of Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser.

Music also relies on probability formulas, Everett says. Joseph Haydn, for example, produced more than 100 symphonies, and much of his music has a similar sound, because he composed using a rule-based system. Each piece was a variation on those rules.

“Composers embed logical, organic patterns into the music,” Everett says. “Listeners respond to these patterns on a cognitive level, and they may experience a sense of beauty and the sublime, or even discord, because of them.”

Through a process known as computer sonification, Everett turned Grover’s models for chemical assembly into sounds. He then limited the resulting random pitches to a few musical scales, to create pieces to be played by the Vega String Quartet.

One of the pieces in “First Life” is titled “Methane, Ammonia, Hydrogen, Water.” The different chemicals are represented by different sounds played loudly, then softly, with little order. “But whenever the composition goes into a mezzo forte, they start to lock into a repeating rhythm,” Everett says. “They don’t quite make it, though, and they go off into chaos again.”

Watch a video, below, of conversation between musician Steve Everett and biochemist Marth Grover.


The music from each of the stringed instruments will stream live into a computer synthesizer during the performance. Everett will control the synthesizer, and combine the resulting sounds with percussion and live audio-visual displays. Actual research from the Center for Chemical Evolution will also be narrated by Grover and David Lynn, chair of chemistry at Emory and another key scientist at the center.

The audience will also play a role in the performance of “First Life,” although Everett is withholding details to ensure as much spontaneity as possible for the event.

The sonic interpretations of the chemical research will be mixing with the brain chemistry of listeners. Each person present may have an entirely different reaction, and some reactions may not be entirely positive.

“I’m interested in exploring new potential reactions to sound,” Everett says. “Science isn’t trying to be pleasant and enjoyable, it’s trying to answer questions by exploring the unknown. I hope that the audience will walk away with a lot of questions, but also the desire to learn more about the research at the Center for Chemical Evolution, and why it’s so important.”

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