Smithsonian.com

From time immemorial, humans have looked in wonder at the cosmos and attempted to express their awe through art. Astronomers, from Ptolemy to Kepler, commented on the great dance of the heavenly spheres and the harmonies of the celestial bodies of Sun, Moon and Earth. Musicians and composers have simultaneously endeavored to compose a soundtrack to this cosmic dance.

Brian May: Rock icon, lead shredder of the infamous glam-rock quartet Queen, hailed as one of the best guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone magazine. But that’s Doctor May to you.

In 2007, May completed the PhD in astrophysics he began 36 years earlier before ditching the ivory tower for a career in rock. He was subsequently named chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University (an honorary role previously held by Cherie Blair, wife of former British prime minister).

But, Dr. May is not the only shining example of a marriage between music and astronomy. Modern acts have taken to expressing their celestial influences.

The moody, contemplative indie act Muse is just one of the latest to be inspired by the skies. The group picked up on the space rock sub-genre of fellow Brit acts David Bowie and Pink Floyd, whose psychedelic synth sounds and slow, drawling melodies spoke to a generation of youth dropping acid and looking at the stars. Muse is now bringing space rock back into vogue by blending the sounds of their predecessors with their own edgy brand of alternative rock.

Dr. May (who wrote several space-themed ditties for Queen including the kooky tale of interstellar travel, “39”) has praised their work and noted the stylistic similarities to Queen. “I like the way they let their madness show through, always a good thing in an artist,” May told the BBC.

Muse’s front man and conspiracy theorist Matt Bellamy scored an entire album based on his fascination with astronomy and obsession with science fiction. The album “Black Holes and Revelations” included an eerie tribute to the immense black holes at the center of galaxies aptly named “Supermassive Black Hole,” and the more light-hearted ballad “Knights of Cydonia” references a region in the northern hemisphere of Mars, home of the infamous “face” optical illusion.

One of Muse’s newest singles, “Neutron Star Collision (Love is Forever),” is a reference to the extremely rare event of two neutron stars spiraling desperately toward one another over the course of millions of years, climaxing in an explosion that can be seen for billions of miles. It is sure to be a big hit with the tweens when it debuts on the soundtrack for the latest in the Twilight saga, Eclipse.

But Muse is not the first pop act, nor the last, to express their fascination by all things Copernican. Lady Gaga’s “Starstruck” features the futuristic sounds of DJ/collaborator Space Cowboy. The Killers “Spaceman” provides a similar sound.

Sam Sparro wrote his contemplative electropop/funk-nouveau hit “Black and Gold” after looking into the night sky one night, feeling lonely and pondering the nature of the universe and the existence of the divine. “I was thinking about where we come from and where we’re going–is there a God? Is He there? And black and gold was the color of the universe,” Sparro told Pop Justice.

The Aquabats’ pop-ska ballad “Martian Girl” speaks to human fascination with extraterrestrial life. The MC Bat Commander, a.k.a. Aquabats front man Christian Jacobs, croons to the object of his affections, a visiting “Martian girl from Planet V” with a taste for human flesh. The song is a reference to a fifth inner planet, Planet V, that some astronomers think may or may not have existed between Mars and the asteroid belt.

Rockers have been expressing cosmic fascinations in their music for decades.

David Bowie asked if there was “Life on Mars?” but his incomprehensible lyrics didn’t seem to have anything to do with space, much less the red planet. However, his magnum opus, “Space Oddity,” a paean to the fictional astronaut Major Tom, is one of the world’s most well-known cultural odes to astronomy. The BBC even played the song during its coverage of the moon landing. “Oddity” is perhaps rivaled only by Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” which lamented that “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.”

A young Neil Peart’s love of science fiction led Rush to produce several songs speculating on the mysteries of the universe, the most popular being Rush’s futuristic heroic epic “2112” which tells the story of inter-galactic conflict 100 years in the future.

And Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova,” which had nothing to do with the actual phenomena of a massive stellar explosion, actually led to the naming of supernova SNLS-03D3bb after the song. When asked in an interview with the Times of London about what his astrological lyrics meant, Noel Gallagher of Oasis replied, “I don’t f***ing know. But are you telling me, when you’ve got 60,000 people singing it, they don’t know what it means? It means something different to every one of them.”

Tomorrow, Part Two will chronicle the influence of astronomy on classical and instrumental pieces.

How well do you know the shape of your hand? (courtesy of flickr user sunshineband)

Here’s an experiment you can try (right now if you’re sitting at a desk or table): take your left hand (or right hand if you’re left-handed) and place it palm towards the floor beneath the table surface. Now place a piece of paper on top where your hand is. Draw 10 dots representing where you think your fingertips end and where the knuckles at the base of each finger or thumb are located. Connect the five knuckle dots and draw lines connecting each knuckle to the fingertip. Compare this drawing to your own hand. Did you get it right?

Chances are, your drawing is very distorted from how your hand is actually shaped. When scientists from University College London tried a similar experiment (their results appeared last week in PNAS), participants drew their hands as being much wider than reality and their fingers much shorter. The Guardian explains:

The brain uses several ways to work out the location of different parts of the body. This includes feedback from muscles and joints and also some sort of internal model of the size and shape of each body part.

“Previously it has been assumed that the brain uses a perfectly accurate model of the body and it’s not mysterious where that might come from,” said [lead researcher Matthew] Longo. … Instead, Longo’s work shows that the brain’s internal models can be hopelessly wrong. The errors could partly be explained because of the way the brain allocates its processing capacity, said Longo. Regions of high sensitivity in the skin, such as the fingertips and the lips, get a correspondingly larger proportion of the brain’s territory.

Longo says that it is likely that we have similar distorted perceptions of other parts of our bodies and that the brain’s ability to do this may be a factor in psychiatric conditions that relate to body image, such as anorexia.

A hole-punch cloud formation above Alabama (credit: NASA)

Look up in the sky near an airport and you might see some unusual cloud formations. The one on the left is called a “hole-punch,” and meteorologists have been speculating on the cause. They suggested that the holes may have been the result of shock waves from jets or warming of the air by jets.

Researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and elsewhere now say that the odd-shaped clouds can be caused by either turboprop or jet aircraft as they pass through a particular type of cloud layer. Their study appears in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

On average, about 7.8 percent of the Earth is covered by midlevel liquid-layer topped stratiform clouds (those are the ones that look like a flat layer of cloud). The liquid is super-cooled, at a temperature below freezing but still in liquid form. When a plane passes nearby, pressure changes from the spinning turboprop or air passing over wings can cool the liquid even further, turning it into ice. That ice becomes the “seed” for precipitation. More water droplets condense and freeze on these seeds, forming snow. If the air below is warm enough, if melts into rain. The same process is also responsible for canal clouds, which are just a long and thin versions of the hole-punch.

The cloud layer needed for this phenomenon is especially common in the Pacific Northwest and western Europe. I’m off to Seattle this weekend; I think I’ll have to check out the skies. (HT: Greg Laden)

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Oil slicks are not rare events (photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Tasha Tully, courtesy flickr user Deepwater Horizon Response)

With oil spilling from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico for nearly two months now, it’s not shocking that there’s plenty of misinformation and wrongful assumptions passing over airwaves and in conversations with friends and colleagues. Here are five myths I’ve heard lately:

Oil spills are rare: There are hundreds of oil spills around the world every year; oil is lost during both extraction from the ground and transport in ships and through pipes. In the United States, there have been more than a dozen spills in the last decade, including one in Utah last week. But it’s easy to ignore here, unless the spill reaches the level of Deepwater Horizon or Exxon Valdez. In Nigeria, a country blessed—or cursed—with vast oil reserves, there are 175 oil spills on average each year. Even if we believe the oil companies’ claim that the frequency of spills has been decreasing, it’s hard to believe them when they say such events are rare.

Shallow water drilling is safe: No drilling is risk-free. Drilling in shallow water may, theoretically, make it easier to fix a spewing well but that may not happen in reality: The worst accidental oil spill currently on the record books, Ixtoc I, occurred in only 160 feet of water. It has eerie similarities to Deepwater Horizon—it occurred in the Gulf as the result of a blowout—and it took nearly 10 months to be capped.

BP/the government/the military can just shut off the oil whenever they want: The magic cutoff switch doesn’t exist. If anything, that switch would have been the blowout preventer, which was the bit that failed and allowed the catastrophe to happen. BP is currently drilling relief wells that they hope will allow them to cap off the original well, but that will not happen until August. That nuclear option that pops into the news every couple of weeks? That isn’t, and shouldn’t be, on the table.

Building barrier islands will protect wetlands: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will soon construct 45 miles of artificial berms off the coast of Louisiana. They are intended to protect Mississippi Delta wetlands. However, dredging the sea floor to create the islands will destroy the creatures that live on an in the seabed. The berms may restrict the flow of water that the wetlands depend on and prevent tides from washing away the oil that is already there. They may redirect the oil to other environmentally sensitive areas. And it is not clear how long the islands will last; they would quickly wash away in a storm.

The Gulf coast will be better than before: Sure, given enough time and some help, the Gulf ecosystem will adapt and recover from the oil spill. But the longer this goes on and the more oil dumped into the sea, the longer that will take. And who knows what we’ll lose permanently?

Pickle juice relieves muscle cramps? Image courtesy of flickr user seantoyer.

Midway across the pool, my calf muscle seized up. I grabbed hold of the lane line, pulled my toes back towards my shin and waited for the charley horse to release.

Unfortunately for me, the experience has become a familiar one. It seems that whenever I’m in the thick of training for a road race (and now my first triathlon) or biking a stage ride, I’m wracked with muscle cramps, the worst of which wake me from a sound sleep at night. For relief, I’ve been told to eat bananas. Bananas are rich in potassium, and muscle cramps are commonly attributed to a sodium and potassium deficiency caused by dehydration. I’ve even tried potassium supplements.

But I was surprised last week when I read on Well, the New York Times health and fitness blog, about the latest recommended remedy—pickle juice. That’s right, the sour brine of your classic Vlasic dills. Apparently, athletic trainers, without scientific proof of the elixir’s powers, have been doling it out to athletes pretty regularly. Some readers of the Well blog posted comments saying that they had swigged pickle juice or other homespun remedies—yellow mustard, apple cider, straight vinegar—to ease cramps before.

A study published in the May issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the official journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, provides the first evidence beyond the anecdotal that pickle juice relieves muscle cramps. In the experiment, volunteers biked 30-minute intervals until they reached a level of mild dehydration, had electrical shocks sent to their big toes and then drank either nothing, water or pickle juice at the first signs of their toes cramping. The results showed that pickle juice relieved a cramp 45 percent faster than drinking nothing and about 37 percent faster than drinking water.

There isn’t a consensus among scientists on the cause of muscle cramps. (Or the slang name for a leg cramp for that matter. It’s called a charley horse, after American baseball player Charley “Old Hoss” Radbourn (1853-1897) who once limped from third to home base with a leg cramp, in North America; pferdekuss, or horse’s kiss, in Germany; and ijsbeen, or ice leg, in the Netherlands.) But this particular finding befuddles experts even more. If the pickle juice alleviates the cramp so soon after intake (about 85 seconds), too soon to have replenished the needed nutrients in the muscles, then it’s possible the juice activates nerve sensors in the throat or stomach that send out signals to the muscles to relax instead. Hopefully, future studies will sort it out.

In the meantime, I guess we can add pickle juice to the slew of recovery-specific cocktails, like Gatorade Recover 03 and Muscle Milk, that seem to spring up at every race.

If it makes it more appetizing, there’s always the Pickle Sickle?