Image of the Week: How to Look Inside a Fish

Scientists Sandra Raredon and Lynne Parenti at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History use
x-rays to get an inside look at fishes like these Lookdowns (Selene vomer).
Image courtesy: Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

Scientists use all sorts of visuals to study the natural world, including graphs, maps and photographs. But some of the most beautiful scientific visuals have to be the fish x-rays taken by Sandra Raredon and Lynne Parenti, ichthyologists (scientists who study fish) at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.  Our image of the week is an x-ray showing three lookdowns (Selene vomer), silvery fish with a permanent "scowl" found mainly in warm waters of the western Atlantic.

The Smithsonian's fish collection contains about four million specimens, representing approximately 70 percent of the world's fish diversity, and Raredon and Parenti can study these specimens without having to dissect or otherwise damage them.  Their images help unravel the long history of fish evolution using clues, such as the number of vertebrae and positioning of fins, that are easily visible in x-rays.


LEARN MORE
Learn about how scientists use this technique and what they are learning from it on the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's exhibit page X-Ray Vision: Fish Inside Out.

Browse more of these beautiful x-rays on the NMNH Flickr page.

Learn about how visual data, whether x-rays or topographic maps, help scientists explore all kinds of topics in our module Data: Using Graphs and Visual Data.

Video of the Week: NASA's Perpetual Ocean Proves Data can be Art

Video courtesy: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Who says data have to come in a dry table? The scientists and animators at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) have made a career out of doing just the opposite. Using some of the same software tools employed by Pixar, they create images and animations that bring data sets to life and make them easier to understand--for both the public and the scientific community. Our video of the week, Perpetual Ocean, is one artful example of their work that recently became popular on social media. By synthesizing a numerical model and a slew of different types of data collected between 2005 and 2007, the SVS team has created a beautiful visualization of the "swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents."

Enjoy.  Happy Friday.


LEARN MORE
Read a Q&A with Dr. Horace Mitchell, Director of NASA Scientific Visualization Studio from Mashable

Learn how the process of visualizing data can help scientists interpret it more easily in our module Data: Using Graphs and Visual Data

Darwin Tunes: Scientists Examine How Consumer Choice Can Drive the Evolution of Music from Noise

Image Courtesy: Flickr User all that improbable blue (CC)

Here's an application of evolutionary theory you don't see everyday: the evolution of music by natural, make that public selection.

Researchers from the Department of Life Sciences at the Imperial College of London and the Media Interaction Group at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan joined forces to investigate how consumer preferences--as opposed to directed artistic efforts--can affect the evolution of music.  They set out to answer some very interesting questions, including:  Is it possible to make music without a composer? If so, what kind of music is made? What limits the evolution of music?

Inspired by research on evolution in microbes and studies on how art and music develop and change in response to cultural forces, the team created "Darwin Tunes," a computer-based system for simulating natural selection within a "population" of audio clips. Darwin Tunes is powered by an algorithm that creates "digital genomes"--computer programs, which, when executed, create short loops of sound. Like a biological genome that serves as a blueprint for an organism, each digital genome specifies certain parameters--in this case things like instrumentation and note placement. The algorithm does not receive any melodies, rhythms, or other human-created sounds as inputs, so the music created by Darwin Tunes is truly computer-generated.

Running the algorithm once produces a population of 100 audio loops that go through a number of "life cycles" during the course of the experiment. Which loops get to "reproduce" and which "die off" is determined by the ratings given by a group of nearly 7,000 human listeners who use a five-point scale ranging from "I can't stand it" to "I love it." Those clips that are deemed most pleasing reproduce and those that are hard-on-the-ears go extinct. In evolutionary terms, listener ratings are the "selective pressure" acting on the population.

As with living organisms, the offspring of the audio loops differ from their parents for reasons that also mirror biological evolution.  Each audio loop in the second generation is produced by combining the genomes of two first-generation loops (akin to sexual reproduction in nature). The genomes of the second generation are also modified with new, random musical "genetic material" akin to DNA mutations in nature. Each new generation is again rated by listeners.

By repeating this process a few thousand times, the research team found that clips changed over time--moving from sound that would most aptly be called "noise" to sound that qualified as "music." The difference is easy to hear in the clips below, which contain loops produced initially by Darwin Tunes (generation zero), loops from generation 1,500, and loops from generation 3,000.


Generation Zero

Generation 1500

Generation 3000

As any musician or music lover can tell you, the qualities that make a piece of music appealing are complex. To better understand which traits were being "selected for" in the Darwin Tunes populations, the researchers looked to the emerging field of music information retrieval (MIR) technology. MIR is what allows services like Pandora and iTunes to suggest new music based on the songs already on a user's playlist. Using two MIR algorithms to analyze the various generations of clips (both those that evolved with listener input and controls that were randomly assigned ratings), the researchers identified two specific traits that were changing over time: the presence of chords commonly used in popular music and the complexity of rhythmic patterns in the music.

While these two features are clearly important, the researchers conclude that there are many other musical factors in the evolution of these clips and that additional experiments using a wider variety of MRI algorithms would be interesting. The results of the study appear in today's early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You can listen to and rate clips by visiting the Darwin Tunes website.

For more about evolution and natural selection, browse our modules on Adaptation and Charles Darwin (and don't miss Part 2 or Part 3!).


Want to read more about the science of music? Check out the research conducted by the Pattern Analysis and Intelligent Systems Research Group at the University of Bristol. Their work to develop a mathematical equation that can predict hit songs was presented in December 2011 at the 4th International Workshop on Machine Learning and Music. Visit their Score a Hit website or download the short paper that appeared in the conference proceedings.

Image of the Week: Deep Sea Life Under Pressure

Image Courtesy: NOAA Ocean Explorer and Kevin Raskoff, California State University, Monterey Bay. (CC)

This stunning red deep sea jellyfish from the genus Crossota was photographed during the "Hidden Ocean Expedition" in 2005. That summer, a team of scientists from the United States, Canada, China and Russia embarked on a journey to explore the frigid depths of the Canada Basin, one of the deepest parts of the Arctic Ocean. This jelly, our image of the week, is just one of the many beautiful, bizarre, and mysterious creatures that inhabit the deep sea.

To many scientists, the deep sea (generally defined as below 200 meters) is the Earth's last frontier, and it remains one of the least explored places on our planet. In human history, 12 people have walked on the moon but only three have ever been to the deepest part of the ocean--an area called Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. And we know relatively little about the lifeforms that call the deep sea home. Which species live there? How do their ecosystems function? Physiologically, how do they withstand the extreme high pressure?

This week's issue of Science News features several scientists who are coming up with inventive ways to answer these questions, including a contraption called the Abyss Box. Check out Susan Gaidos' feature story Defying Depth to learn more.

For more images of incredible deep sea creatures, browse NOAA's Aliens from the Deep gallery.

3 Simple Steps to Celebrate STEM and National Poetry Month

April was designated National Poetry Month in 1996.
Image courtesy: American Academy of Poets

Today marks the last day of National Poetry Month (NPM) 2012. Each spring since it was created by the American Academy of Poets in 1996, NPM has offered an opportunity for people to "band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture."

On the surface, science and poetry may seem like polar opposites and the poet and the scientist like two different breeds. But the two realms have a deeply entwined past, and there are some interesting similarities. Both poetry and science require keen observation skills and precision in word choice. Both are outlets for exploring and describing the world around us. And both have elements of creativity and inspiration. (More on this in our module Creativity in Science.)

Even in modern society, where we tend to specialize in a particular field of study and professional practice, there have been notable scientist-poet crossovers, as well as poets who have written beautifully about science. Among the many examples are:

• Lewis Thomas, the "poet-philosopher of medicine" and former president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who wrote popular essays (eventually compiled into two best-selling books) and poetry about cells, disease, medicine, and evolution;
• Chemistry Nobel laureate, Roald Hoffmann, who pens poetry and plays tackling a variety of scientific and nonscientific topics; and
• Philip Appleman, one of the world's leading experts on Charles Darwin, who is well known for his celebrated volumes of poetry illustrating Darwin's life and theories.

While the official NPM celebration is wrapping up, there's no reason to stop exploring the connections between science and poetry--on your own or in the classroom. Here are three simple steps to get you started:

1) Draw inspiration from some accomplished science and nature poets using resources from The Poetry Foundation and the American Academy of Poets. For starters, try:

Ten Poems to Get You Through Science Class This Year (we're not crazy about the title given to this collection, but the selected poems from across several generations and scientific disciplines can certainly inspire before, after, or during science class)

The Sciences Sing a Lullabye  by Albert Goldbarth

Darwin’s Bestiary  by Philip Appleman

Haiku Journey by Kimberly Blaeser


2) Try your hand at writing a science poem. We suggest beginning with the short, powerful haiku form, which the Poetry Foundation describes as:

A Japanese verse form of three unrhyming lines in five, seven, and five syllables. It creates a single, memorable image, as in these lines by Kobayashi Issa, translated by Jane Hirshfield:

        On a branch
        floating downriver
        a cricket, singing.
(In translating from Japanese to English, Hirshfield compresses the number of syllables.)

Developing a talent for writing haiku, like any form of art (or science), takes effort, thought, and practice. Capturing a moment is difficult enough, let alone distilling it down to 17 syllables. But beginners in all fields must start somewhere, and the short, flexible form of a haiku can be less intimidating than penning a sonnet, a ballad, or a even a limerick. And whether it's your first attempt or your 400th, haiku is always a great work-out for the creative muscles.


3) Share your poem. Swap haikus with a colleague, classmate, or friend. And please inspire others by posting it in the comments section here or on our Facebook page. To break the ice, I've posted a couple of my own attempts below. I'm sure you can do much better, so get writing!

Happy National Poetry Month!