Chinese photographer Shuchang Dong has beaten thousands of amateur and professional photographers from around the world to win the 2021 Astronomy Photographer of the Year. The award – now in its 13th year – is run by the UK’s Royal Observatory Greenwich in association with insurer Liberty Specialty Markets and BBC Sky at Night Magazine. Dong’s image – The Golden Ring – depicts the annular solar eclipse that occurred on 21 June 2020 and was taken in Ali in Tibet using a Fujifilm XT-4 camera.
As well as winning the £10,000 top prize, Dong’s image will be on display along with other selected pictures at an exhibition at the observatory that opened on 18 September. The competition received over 4500 entries from 75 countries. You can find the other entries here.
From photography to dance, the artist Geraldine Cox has teamed-up with physicists at the UK’s Imperial College and professional dancers to create Elemental Dances, which is a series of six educational videos that explore the nature of atoms and molecules through dance. Aimed at children age 7–11, the videos are 20–30 min long and each one begins with a physicist giving a brief explanation of a physical phenomenon such as Brownian motion. Then the children are encouraged to explore the motion involved in the effect by dancing. Other topics covered include atomic spectra and the vibrations and rotations of a water molecule.
The videos (see trailer above) have already been used in some primary schools and teacher Paul Tyler says, “The content is very well explained and the range of scientists delivering the explanations is brilliant. Dance is such a clever way of letting children explore the different concepts and it is wonderfully delivered by the dancers.”
You can watch all the videos here.
Earlier this year, Cox was a guest on the Physics World Weekly podcast and talked about how she draws on her background in physics to create pieces inspired by the patterns of nature.
Art sometimes involves creating an illusion, be it visual or in sound. But did you know that there are illusions that fool our sense of touch? Researchers in Switzerland have shown that our tactile perception of the frequency at which a surface is vibrating can be altered by changing the amplitude of the vibration.
Vibrational metamerism
Human subjects were asked to compare two vibrations and say which is at the higher frequency. Daniel Huber and colleagues found that their ability to do so was affected by the relative amplitudes of the two vibrations. Indeed, they found that at certain amplitudes, the subjects believed that vibrations at two different frequencies were at the same frequency – an effect called metamerism. The team performed the same experiment with mice as subjects and saw similar results.
Huber and colleagues say that their observations could be useful for creating music for people who have trouble hearing and rely on feeling vibrations. Indeed, the team now plans to work with deaf volunteers and musicians to explore that avenue. Their research is described in Nature Communications.