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Live music is a performance art: an artist’s display can matter just as much as his musical skill. (Remember the early 80s?) But new research by perception researcher Michael Schutz reaffirms the idea that a musician’s on-stage gestures don’t just make for a good show but can actually control the sounds you hear.

“Using the marimba as a test case,” says McMaster University, “researchers found that notes may sound “longer” when accompanied by an extended swing of the arm, or “shorter” when the movement is subtle– even if the note itself is exactly the same.”

During a live musical performance, it’s important to note the difference between “sound” and our “perception of sound,” he explains. Our internal perception of the external world is the final arbiter of the musical experience. So even if the entire audience receives the same auditory information, they will experience it in different ways.

“Ultimately, the literal acoustic information is less important than how it is perceived,” adds Schutz.

Schutz’ work—which adds to a growing body of research on the topic—could also help explain why live music is just that much better: a musician who can harness this sense for performance flare can take an already amazing bit of music and turn it into something more.

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Enjoy, for a moment, the soothing tones and the sound of beating wings in National Geographic‘s quirky mashup of indie rockers Temper Trap and some beautiful footage of one of the world’s greatest mass animal voyages, the annual migration of the monarch butterfly. Each year, says the World Wildlife Fund, monarch butterflies “embark on a marvelous migratory phenomenon.”

They travel between 1,200 and 2,800 miles or more from the United States and Canada to central Mexican forests. There the butterflies hibernate in the mountain forests, where a less extreme climate provides them a better chance to survive.

Relaxed and enthralled with the brilliance of the natural world? Good. Try to hold on that feeling as long as you can, because as the New York Times reports, the spectacle of the monarch migration is crashing: “The number of monarch butterflies that completed an annual migration to their winter home in a Mexican forest sank this year to its lowest level in at least two decades.” In just the past two years, the area of Mexican forest taken up by the monarchs shrank from 7.14 acres to 2.94 acres, both down from an earlier peak of 50 acres. The Associated Press:

It was the third straight year of declines for the orange-and-black butterflies that migrate from the United States and Canada to spend the winter sheltering in mountaintop fir forests in central Mexico. Six of the last seven years have shown drops, and there are now only one-fifteenth as many butterflies as there were in 1997.

The decline in the Monarch population now marks a statistical long-term trend and can no longer be seen as a combination of yearly or seasonal events, the experts said.

The blame for the drop, says the AP and the Times, is being spread around everything from logging to pesticides to habitat destruction to changes in climate. The Times:

Mr. Taylor said a further decline could cross a tipping point at which the insects will be unusually vulnerable to outside events like a Mexican cold snap or more extreme heat that could put them in peril.

“Normally, there’s a surplus of butterflies and even if they take a big hit, they recover,” he said. But if their current 2.94-acre wintering ground drops below 2.5 acres, bouncing back could be difficult.

“This is one of the world’s great migrations,” he said. “It would be a shame to lose it.”

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A map showing increasing (blue) and decreasing (red) plant growth over the past 30 years. Photo: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

The further you get from the equator, the greater difference there is between summer and winter temperatures. It’s not just the cold or the heat that makes the most extreme environments so hostile, but this “seasonality” in the temperature—the range of conditions to which plants and animals living in these areas can be subjected. A thick layer of fat and a heavy coat of fur can keep you warm in winter, but the same insulation can be dangerous if the summer heat is too high.

But, with global climate change, says a new study, that temperature seasonality is going down. And satellite records and other observations from the past 30 years, says NASA, show that this change in temperature seasonality is already affecting plant growth in higher latitudes. Higher temperatures and longer growing season mean that large portions of the Arctic, subarctic and temperate ecosystems are seeing more plant growth than they did in the past.

In practice, that means the Arctic is turning green. NASA:

The Arctic’s greenness is visible on the ground as an increasing abundance of tall shrubs and trees in locations all over the circumpolar Arctic. Greening in the adjacent boreal areas is more pronounced in Eurasia than in North America.

So far, the effect has been only a small shift in vegetation patterns, with plant growth in one location mimicking how it was 30 years ago in a location five degrees latitude to the south. By the end of the century, however, scientists think that the changes will be equivalent to a 20 degree shift. Think Alaska’s capital Juneau, at 58 °North, acting more like Louisville, Kentucky, at 38 °North.

However, rising temperatures aren’t the only thing to take into account, and the other effects of climate change could actually hurt the increasingly lush Arctic.

Researchers note that plant growth in the north may not continue on its current trajectory. The ramifications of an amplified greenhouse effect, such as frequent forest fires, outbreak of pest infestations and summertime droughts, may slow plant growth.

And, if a nice green Arctic sounds like a pleasant consequence of climate change, just try to imagine what a 20 degree shift in climate would do to somewhere further south.

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The Canadian high Arctic, it seems, was once home to a massive, “presumably shaggy” species of camel. Now known as desert specialists, the ancient relatives of modern camels first grew up not in parched sand but in frigid snow. Camels’ ancestors have been traced back to North America some 45 million years ago, and a new fossil find by the the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Natalia Rybczynski and colleagues adds to this case with the nearly one-ton Arctic edition of the humped mammal.

According to Rybczynski in the video above, these humped mammals moved over to Asia on a land bridge across the Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia.

“The fossils, dug up by Rybczynski and her colleagues in recent field seasons, came from a gravel-rich layer of sediments laid down more than 3.4 million years ago,” says Sid Perkins for Science.

The 30 or so bits of bone, none more than 7 centimeters long, have suffered much since they were entombed.

… Considering the proportions of the bone fragments, the camel was a giant, probably about 2.7 meters tall at the shoulder—almost 30% larger than its modern relatives are. The moose-sized mammal likely tipped the scales at 900 kilograms at the end of the summer browsing season but then slimmed down as it drew on fat reserves in its hump to sustain itself through the harsh Arctic winter.

At the time when the camels were stomping around, said Rybczynski, the planet would have been, on average, a few degrees warmer than it is now. But polar amplification, just like today, meant that the Arctic regions would have been 25 to 33 F warmer. That being said, it’s still the Arctic, and it still would have been very cold and very dark.

Based on other fossils found nearby, the camels would have lived in a forest alongside more expected Canadian fauna, including bears and deer and beavers.

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Food tray on the shuttle. Image: NASA

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield has been described as “the International Space Station’s ambassador to the internet.” He’s made videos about nail clipping, hand washing, and adapting to weightlessness. Now, he’s showing you how to make a sandwich.

The Canadian Space Agency describes some of the solutions to the challenges presented by eating in space:

Astronauts consume mostly wet and sticky foods such as oatmeal, scrambled eggs, puddings and stews because they stick to an eating utensil long enough for the astronaut to put into their mouth. Foods like bread are rejected because they produce crumbs that can float around; tortillas, on the other hand, are perfect for eating in freefall. Salt and pepper are also consumed, but the salt must be dissolved into water and the pepper suspended in oil.

The CSA also had a contest for Canadian foods to go into space, bringing along things like Les Canardises Duck Rillettes, SeaChange Candied Wild Smoked Salmon, L.B. Maple Treat Maple Syrup Cream Cookies and Turkey Hill Sugarbush Maple Syrup.

In the United States, NASA has a food lab that researchers foods for space consumption. They test things like how many calories astronauts need, and how to actually package and store them. Last year, they tested some new foods for space missions.

But remember, in space, no one can hear you scream for ice cream.

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