Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Douglas Quenqua’

Olfactory Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 21, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Here is an artist who addresses the sense of smell — and not only with lily-of-the-valley fragrance or the sea or brewing coffee.

Douglas Quenqua writes in the Science section of the NY Times that Belgian artist Peter De Cupere uses pretty much everything that has an odor.

“Peter De Cupere’s ‘Tree Virus’ sculpture wasn’t much to look at: a dead, black tree rooted in a craggy white ball suspended over a dirt pit, all of it covered by a plastic igloo. Built on a college campus in the Netherlands in 2008, the whole thing might have been leftover scenery from a Tim Burton film if it weren’t for the outrageous smell.

‘Inside the igloo, a heady mix of peppermint and black pepper saturated the air. It flooded the nose and stung the eyes. Most visitors cried; many ran away. Others seemed to enjoy it, laughing through the tears. Such is the strange power of olfactory art.

“ ‘When you walk into an installation with scent, you cannot hide. Your body starts to react,’ said Mr. De Cupere. … He is just one of several contemporary artists using odor to create art that delivers an intensely personal, emotional and sometimes physical experience. …

“Smell has an unfair advantage over the other senses when it comes to eliciting a response, researchers say. ‘There is a unique and directly intimate connection between where smell is processed in the brain and where memory is stored,” said Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown University and the author of The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. …

“Just as Proust’s madeleines opened a floodgate to childhood memories, scents can recall different feelings depending on how a person first encountered them.”

More here.

Photo: Peter De Cupere
Peter De Cupere’s “Tree Virus” sculpture, which causes many visitors to cry.

Read Full Post »

Three Blind Rats

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 30, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Douglas Quenqua recently wrote in the NY Times about a study with rats that could someday lead to aids for the blind.

“Blind rats with a sensor and compass attached to their brains were able to navigate a maze as successfully as sighted rats, researchers found.

“Researchers at the University of Tokyo wanted to test whether a mammal could use allocentric sense — the awareness of one’s body relative to its environment — to replace vision. The scientists attached a geomagnetic sensor and digital compass to the visual cortices of rats with their eyes sewn shut.

“When the rats moved their heads, the sensors generated electrical impulses to tell them which direction they were facing. The rats were then trained to find pellets in various mazes.

“Within a few days, the blind rats were able to navigate the mazes as well as rats that could see. The two groups of rodents relied on similar navigation strategies. The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, could help lead to devices that help blind people independently navigate their surroundings.

“ ‘The most plausible application is to attach a geomagnetic sensor to a cane so that the blind can know the direction via tactile signals such as vibration,’ Yuji Ikegaya, a pharmacologist and co-author of the study, wrote in an email.” More here.

I couldn’t find a picture of three rats together although there were lots of drawings of three blind mice. I started thinking, Do children even know nursery rhymes anymore? I wonder what they would make of Jack, for example, who fell down “and broke his crown” and “went to bed to mend his head with vinegar and brown paper.” I know a couple kids who would have a lot of questions about that medical treatment.

Perhaps we should make a concerted effort to teach these rhymes before they are lost completely. After all, they are part of our culture, one of our many cultures.

Photo: redorbit

Read Full Post »

Plants Can Hear Predators

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 8, 2014| 5 Comments »

Did you know that plants can protect themselves from predators?

Writes Douglas Quenqua at the NY Times, “It has long been known that some plants can respond to sound. But why would a plant evolve the ability to hear? Now researchers are reporting that one reason may be to defend itself against predators.

“To see whether predator noises would affect plants, two University of Missouri researchers exposed one set of plants to a recording of caterpillars eating leaves, and kept another set of plants in silence. Later, when caterpillars fed on the plants, the set that had been exposed to the eating noises produced more of a caterpillar-repelling chemical. …

“Plants exposed to other vibrations, like the sound of wind or different insects, did not produce more of the chemical, suggesting they could tell the difference between predator noises and atmospheric ones. The researchers published their work in the journal Oecologia.” More here.

I have an idea. How about farmers, instead of using genetically modified seed to protect plants, just pump recordings of crunching predators into their fields so that the plants could protect themselves?

As they say where I work, “More research is needed.”

The NY Times posted this Pieris Silhouette video by mubondlsc
Can you hear the crunching of the caterpillar?

Read Full Post »

%d bloggers like this: