I just finished Carlo Rovelli’s “Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity” (✭✭✭✭✫)
What dinner will look like in the next 100 years. [bonappetit.com]
It seems folks are starting to love brown noise. “The “brown” in brown noise is not a color, but a reference to sound that mimics Brownian motion, the movement pollen makes in water, identified by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827. In essence, brown noise is the familiar, staticky sound of white noise (that is, all the audible frequencies simultaneously) but with the low frequency notes augmented and the less pleasant high frequency notes turned down, counteracting the human ear’s natural tendency to hear higher frequencies louder.” [theguardian.com]
↪ FWIW, brown noise is what I’ve used for the last decade when I want to concentrate or isolate (and don’t want to use some sort of music to help me with that sort of thing). There are a million and one apps for this, but I’ve been using Dark Noise since it came out a few years ago.
Turns out stressed plants make audible sounds that can be heard many feet away, and they don’t air their grievances randomly but rather make specific complaints that match up with the type of stress they’re under, including thirst and risk of decapitation. Humans can’t hear the sounds, but other animals can, and so it may be the case that plants can listen in on their neighbors’ drama. [nytimes.com]
↪ Props have to be given for the article title: “This Is What It Sounds Like When Plants Cry.” A comma would have done wonders here, but it’s great besides.
A new study argues the way in which humans store memories is key to making human intelligence more superior to that of animals. “The lack of pattern separation in memory coding is a key difference compared to other species, which has profound implications that could explain cognitive abilities uniquely developed in humans, such as our power of generalization and creative thought.” [neurosciencenews.com]
