“The work of art must be harmoniously integrated into the [Tuileries] garden and take into account [any] site constraints”
The Tuileries Gardens near the Louvre. Source: Kris Atomic/The Art Newspaper.
The French government announced plans to create a memorial to victims of slavery in the Tuileries Gardens close to the Louvre Museum. The Paris-based black advocacy group, the Representative council of France’s Black Associations (CRAN) welcomed the move. Louis-Georges Tin, the association’s honourary president, said that “the artist chosen must be of African descent”, the Art Newspaper reports.
In 2016, then president François Hollande said a slavery memorial and museum would be created in Paris. The construction of the museum is not discussed now, but plans for the monument are going to be implemented.
On April 27, 2018, the 170th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in French colonies, president Emmanuel Macron said in a statement: “The [proposed] foundation will put slavery back into the long history of France, from the first French colonial empire to the present day.” In May last year, Macron confirmed that a slavery memorial would be built in Paris.
The Louvre officials will be responsible for the project management. A steering committee will comprise figures “in the field of slavery commemoration… and also in contemporary art and the conservation of historical monuments”, as well as City of Paris representatives. The work will be owned by the state and will be added to the national collection.
CRAN has prepared a report calling to create a new museum. The report will be submitted to Paris’s new mayor after the coming election (the second round is scheduled for June 28).
France’s Ministry of Culture says that “the work of art must be harmoniously integrated into the garden and take into account [any] site constraints”. The winning artist will be announced early 2021 with the work scheduled for completion by the end of next year. The application deadline is September 1.
Scientists have generated an exotic form of matter in the unique microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station and are using it to explore the quantum world, a new study finds.
There are four states of matter common in everyday life — gases, liquids, solids, and plasmas. However, there is also a fifth state of matter — Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), which scientists first created in the lab 25 years ago. When a group of atoms is cooled to near absolute zero, the atoms begin to clump together, behaving as if they were one big “super-atom.”
Bose-Einstein condensates straddle the boundary between the everyday world, governed by classical physics, and the microscopic world, which follows the rules of quantum mechanics. In the world of quantum mechanics, a particle can behave as if it were spinning in two opposite directions at the same time, or as if it existed in two or more locations simultaneously. Because they follow some of these quantum behaviors, Bose-Einstein condensates may offer scientists key clues into the workings of quantum mechanics, potentially helping to solve mysteries such as how to create a “theory of everything” that could explain the workings of the cosmos from the smallest to largest scales.
Scientists now routinely create Bose-Einstein condensates in hundreds of labs across the world. However, one limitation that stands in the way of this research is gravity. These “super-atoms” are extraordinarily fragile and the setups used to create them are incredibly delicate, so the pull of gravity felt on Earth can disrupt both, making it challenging to learn much about them.
As such, researchers developed the Cold Atom Lab, which can generate Bose-Einstein condensates in the microgravity found in orbit aboard the space station. Launched in 2018, the Cold Atom Lab is small and requires only a relatively small amount of energy so it meets the specific constraints aboard the space station. While the equipment originally needed to create Bose-Einstein condensates on Earth can take up an entire lab, the Cold Atom Lab takes up only about 14 cubic feet (0.4 cubic meters) and altogether requires an average of 510 watts of power.
Using the Cold Atom Lab, researchers in a new study found that they could increase the amount of time they can analyze these condensates after the traps confining the material is switched off to more than one second. In comparison, on Earth, scientists would only have hundredths of a single second for the same task.
In addition, in microgravity, the scientists found that they needed weaker forces to trap the condensates. This, in turn, means that they could create the condensates at lower temperatures. And, at these temperatures, exotic quantum effects would become increasingly pronounced.
So far with this study, the researchers have created Bose-Einstein condensates using rubidium atoms. Eventually, they also aim to add potassium atoms to investigate what happens when two condensates mix, the study’s senior author Robert Thompson, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told Space.com. Additionally, scientists now seek to use the Cold Atom Lab to create spherical Bose-Einstein condensates, which can only be created in space, Thompson added.
“In the past, our major insights into the inner workings of nature have come from particle accelerators and astronomical observatories; in the future, I believe precision measurements using cold atoms will play an increasingly important role,” Thompson said.
The scientists detailed in the June 11 issue of the journal Nature.
According to a new study in The Astrophysical Journal, there could be dozens of intelligent alien civilizations hiding in our galaxy, all capable of communicating.
“There should be at least a few dozen active civilizations in our Galaxy under the assumption that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on other planets, as on Earth,” Christopher Conselice, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
“The idea is looking at evolution, but on a cosmic scale,” he added.
The researchers say the numbers suggest there are a number of technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.
“In the strong criteria, whereby a metal content equal to that of the Sun is needed (the Sun is relatively speaking quite metal rich), we calculate that there should be around 36 active civilizations in our Galaxy,” Tom Westby, first author and assistant professor at the University of Nottingham, said in the statement.
Previous estimations have been based on educated guesses and opinions — something that can cause numbers to “vary quite substantially,” according to Westby. But the astronomers say their estimation takes the latest research into account.
“Our new study simplifies these assumptions using new data, giving us a solid estimate of the number of civilizations in our Galaxy,” Westby added.
Hidden in the cool research is a major bummer: the average alien civilization would be 17,000 light-years away. It’s also possible that all other intelligent civilizations already kicked the bucket a long time ago.
But finding them could give us important clues about our own humanity as well.
“If we find that intelligent life is common then this would reveal that our civilization could exist for much longer than a few hundred years, alternatively if we find that there are no active civilizations in our Galaxy it is a bad sign for our own long-term existence,” Conselice said.
“By searching for extraterrestrial intelligent life — even if we find nothing — we are discovering our own future and fate,” he added.
As we enter another week of pandemic lockdown, scientists are working to understand the toll extended isolation takes on our minds and bodies.
The medical effects of loneliness are difficult to measure — especially because loneliness is a subjective experience that varies wildly from person to person. But semantics aside, a clear trend is emerging, CNET reports, and it’s not great.
Extended loneliness can have serious psychological impacts, like exacerbated depression, anxiety, and increased irritability, according to 2018 research posted in the journal The Lancet. But the impacts extend far beyond psychological health.
“It’s very distressing when we are not a part of a group,” Brigham Young University psychologist and neuroscientist Julianne Holt-Lundstad told CNET. “We have to deal with our environment entirely on our own, without the help of others, which puts our brain in a state of alert, but that also signals the rest of our body to be in a state of alert.”
Loneliness has been linked to all sorts of medical problems, like cognitive decline in old age, cancer, and heart disease, CNET reports. Though the causal relationship between loneliness and disease is poorly understood, there seems to be a genetic mechanism, potentially triggered by prolonged loneliness, that increases the risk of those diseases.
“The subjective experience has to be translated somehow in the brain into biology, and so that’s [what] we’re looking at now,” Turhan Canli, an integrative neuroscientist at Stony Brook University, told CNET.
“… on this day 805 years ago, England’s King John put his seal to the Magna Carta. The historic document established the foundations of parliamentary democracy, human rights and the supremacy of law for rebellious English Barons demanding freedom and legal due process.
“The clause at the heart of the Great Charter states that no free man should be seized or imprisoned or stripped of his rights or outlawed or exiled except by the judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel barons, it laid the foundations for the current British–and later, American– legal and constitutional system, with three of the 60 clauses still in force today. The U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantees that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”, a phrase that was derived directly from Magna Carta. (1215).”
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For more on the Magna Carta, click here and here. Also note that Former President Obama, in his Madiba Lecture two ears ago, emphasized that the Magna Carta, along with the US Constitution and other such documents, belongs to all humanity…
| Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Sydney School of Psychology and Brain & Mind Centre1,237 wordsRead time: approx. 6 mins
Imagine looking into the mirror and not recognising the face that greets you. What might it be like to sit in a room full of visitors each claiming to know you well, yet you have no knowledge of who they are. Consider the experience of asking to go home, only to be told repeatedly that this unfamiliar building is your home and has been for many years…
How much of who we are is shaped by memory? Scientists, philosophers, artists, poets, and musicians alike have all grappled with the notion of the self – that seemingly immutable and enduring sense of who we are, steadfast in the face of life’s many vicissitudes. Within the field of cognitive neuroscience, we have yet to find a universal definition of what the self does and does not encapsulate, or how we might go about operationalising and measuring this nebulous construct. It is clear that there is no single entity that we can label “the self” and certainly no neat neural substrate that we can pinpoint in the brain as supporting this construct. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that the self is intimately connected to memory.
Humans possess an innate proclivity to derive meaning, stability, and continuity from our personal or autobiographical experiences. As we navigate different periods of growth and change, we distil meaning from these life-changing events and incorporate them into our view of who we are as an individual. This contributes to our sense of morality, our preferences, our ambitions, and our conception of who we might become in the future. The central role of memory in shaping our view of ourselves has led many to suggest that the converse relationship must also hold, whereby memory loss necessarily erodes the self.
It is clear that there is no single entity that we can label “the self” and certainly no neat neural substrate that we can pinpoint in the brain as supporting this construct.
Loss of memory is one of the canonical symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. In early stages of the disease, an anterograde memory loss predominates, whereby the individual is unable to form new memories. This can manifest in the person being unable to follow conversations, to remember recent experiences, misplacing items, or forgetting where they parked the car. Gradually, as the disease advances, retrograde amnesia becomes pronounced, whereby the memories acquired prior to the onset of dementia are affected. It has been argued that, in the absence of supportive memories related to oneself, we cease to have a unified or coherent self-concept. Where dementia is concerned, this has given rise to a slew of pejorative terms implying a lack of agency, unbecoming, or erosion of the self. The individual is viewed as frozen in time, unable to make sense of their surroundings, and relegated to the background in many areas of their life.
Yet, memory is not completely eradicated, and many residual and self-defining memories persist in dementia. These islands of memory often stem from childhood and early adulthood; those critical time periods in which we carve out our sense of identity and place in the world. What results is a profound discontinuity between the individual’s own view of themselves, their roles, social relationships, and even physical appearance, with that of their family, spouse, or carer.
This collision between the inner experience of the individual and their current external surroundings was first impressed on me by my grandmother, Molly, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at age 80. Prior to receiving a formal diagnosis, she displayed a keen awareness that something was not quite right, often complaining of a “muzzy head”, but masked this well by staying busy and clinging to routine. On the surface, the mismatch between my grandmother’s sense of who she was a person and her immediate environment resulted in innocuous and repetitive conversations, sometimes humorous as she bemoaned the fact that no one ever came to visit her, especially not the local priest. We passed many afternoons politely listening to the same stories from my grandmother’s past, not realising that these preserved narratives served an important purpose, grounding my grandmother to something familiar in the midst of an increasingly confusing reality.
Humans possess an innate proclivity to derive meaning, stability, and continuity from our personal or autobiographical experiences.
As the disease progressed, her insight into her impairments dissipated, and it became clear that she could no longer live independently. Now living in a nursing home, she became increasingly distressed – wandering the corridors, searching for my long-deceased grandfather Mal, and pleading to go home. The initial reaction for most people is to reorient the person with dementia, to correct them and attempt to align their viewpoint with our own. We swiftly realised the error of our ways and soon learned to stand in my grandmother’s shoes. When viewed from her perspective and her current conception of self, her behaviours and actions made quite a lot of sense. Her conceptual knowledge of events from her early adulthood was remarkably intact. In fact, when we asked her how she might get home, she relayed the exact route that she would walk, including all street names and people’s houses, to get back to her home on St. John’s Road.
Recognising the person within, the care staff supported my grandmother to embrace her memories on the wards as a nurse by accompanying them on the morning and afternoon tea rounds and “assisting” in the kitchen. The change in her demeanour was palpable. She had always possessed a strong work ethic, and nothing pleased her more to receive a knock on the door and being told it was time to “do the rounds”. Watching my grandmother bid me a hasty farewell to attend to her duties was far preferable to her pulling out her suitcase and begging me to take her home. Her sense of agency and purpose remained, and that defining sense of helping and caring remained ever present. In recognising her desire to help, and her desperate need for a purpose, the care staff adapted the current environment to meet my grandmother in her past.
If the self is something unified or integrated, does this mean that the self itself is fragmented or less cohesive when memory begins to fail?
If the self is something unified or integrated, does this mean that the self itself is fragmented or less cohesive when memory begins to fail? While memory is inextricably bound to our sense of who we are, it is clear that we are more than just a repository of events. My grandmother remained “Molly” in many ways – her determined nature, her strong faith, and her wicked sense of humour all persisted, as did her musical tastes and sweet tooth. Our interpersonal connections, however, changed. At best, my grandmother saw me perhaps as her daughter, again an appropriate assumption to make for someone whose self is based on their middle adulthood years. At worst, I was a friendly young woman who she enjoyed chatting to and walking with. Our shared history was no longer shared, and inevitably our relationship drifted into new territory.
As her language deteriorated, we would sit in companionable silence holding hands; connected by an intimacy and understanding that transcended those memories now lost to the disease. Near the very end, my grandmother surprised me by offering me 50p for “bus money”. She was, without question, still herself.
“Time says ‘Let there be,’” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote shortly before her death in her splendid “Hymn to Time,” saluting the invisible dimension that pervades and encompasses the whole of life: “the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance.”
But what does time say of the time before there was anything to let be, the time before being?
“The concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe,” Stephen Hawking wrote in his groundbreaking 1988 book A Brief History of Time (public library) — a work of such far-reaching and lasting impact that it awakened the popular imagination to the fundamental physics of reality and, thirty years later, inspired one of the most beautiful and poignant poems of all time.
In the foreword to the final edition of the book published in his lifetime, Hawking quoted Richard Feynman’s exultation at how fortunate we are to live in an age when we are still discovering the fundamental laws of nature. Inevitably, this means we are still understanding the nature of time. As we come closer and closer to accepting that the universe might be not infinite but finite, and that Einstein’s relativity, as revolutionary as it was, has important limitations, the notion that time began at the Big Bang singularity has begun to dissolve into something more complex — and more thrilling: We might say that in the beginning of time, there was no time; but we might equally say that in the beginning of time, there was only time. (Borges touched the poetic truth behind and before the scientific fact in his exquisite refutation of time.)
In this invigorating PBS segment, New York-based Australian astrophysicist Matt O’Dowd delves into the science and splendor of when time actually began and what that illuminates about the nature of a universe which contains everything we know, including the mind that does the knowing, yet one which we are still getting to know:
In this next segment, O’Dowd considers the possibilities, as presently understood, of what might have happened before the Big Bang:
RockNewmanShow Jane Elliott, known worldwide for her “Blue Eyes Brown Eyes” exercise, is an internationally known educator, anti-racism activist and feminist. In response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, the day after it occurred the then 3rd grade teacher Jane Elliott created the “Blue Eyes Brown Eyes” exercise that has brought her international acclaim and notoriety for her courageous stand in 1968 to created an eye-color based exercise that for the duration of the exercise made white children the victims of the racism that is so pervasive in American society. A stand at the time that also brought with it family shame and death threats. Learn about this courageous educator in her own words on this episode of The Rock Newman Show.
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The Tuileries Gardens near the Louvre. Source: Kris Atomic/The Art Newspaper.
The velocity-distribution data for gaseous rubidium atoms which confirmed the discovery of the Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995.(Image: © NIST/JILA/CU-Boulder)
