Innehållsförteckning för Issue 10 från NatureVolve

Bright lights and migrating birds (below) © Erin Jackson. All rights reserved. For birds like this Baltimore oriole, migration can be a perilous journey. Alongside threats like exhaustion, predators, and starvation, they must also brave challenges posed by humans. Light pollution attracts and disorients birds, leading them to hazardous obstacles like buildings, while constant human activity causes noise and loss of important stopover areas. In this digital painting, a Baltimore oriole flies through the night sky, awash with light from the city below. About Erin Jackson is a MSc of biology student at Carleton University. She is currently modelling how light pollution and human population density affect the types of sites different bird species choose to migrate through. For her undergrad in neuroscience and biology, she studied the role of…

It might have been a dead end, had I not responded to #AcademicTwitter posts here and there. I was relatively new to the field of science communication, and I knew no one personally who pursued this area. Rewinding, life was either STEM or not STEM. However, with a passion to share, I ended up communicating science without even knowing I was doing something called “science communication.” Looking for ways to attract an audience, I found hashtags on Twitter useful when I posted my new scicomm YouTube video. Particularly, the #AcademicTwitter and #sciencecommunication tags were most relevant, and that sent me down the rabbit hole of this endeavor... © Stem First! Gen. All rights reserved. The pandemic was also another reason why I spent my summer hanging around the internet and…

Life looks pretty cool up close (below)Image taken by Olina Søyland BruScale bar = 10 μm. © Olina Søyland Bru. All rights reserved. LifeUnderTheMicroscope is an Instagram account bridging science and art, spoken with a language and visual expression that aims to catch people’s interest. It simply shows people what stuff looks like up close under a microscope, with a description of what they see and a fun fact to make them more curious about our wonderful world. About Olina Søyland Bru is a creative and aspiring biologist from Norway. With a background in communications and a newfound love for biology, Olina has a desire to inspire people to appreciate the world around us more. With the belief that we all would take better care of this planet if we…

Katrina Vera Wong is an artist, writer and editor. Learning from literature, botany, herbaria, and ikebana, she makes flowers called Frankenflora — imagined hybrids that are pieced together from parts of dried or pressed plants. Her Frankenflora have been exhibited in Vancouver, BC, at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, Science World, and the VIVO Media Arts Centre. Artwork Frankenflora mugungdea © 2021 Katrina Vera Wong. All rights reserved. F. mugungdea — imagined for hostile, acidic, and hot environments — was created as a tribute to Asian women. Its form is based on Hibiscus syriacus (or mugunghwa), which is highly tolerant of air pollution, heat, humidity, and drought, and prefers slightly acidic soil. It’s made from parts of the following plants: • Oncidium sp. reminiscent of the dancers of Ceylon (Sri Lanka).…

Chevrons are a type of wedge-shaped sediment deposit, that can be seen on coastlines and continental interiors. They were originally reported by scholars as large, V-shaped, sub-linear to parabolic landforms seen in south west Egypt and islands of the Bahamas. These bed forms are most commonly described to be parabolic generated dunes, with most being sculpted by the wind. Yet, the origins of these structures have been widely debated among researchers. We speak with sedimentologist Lucas Vimpere about his team’s investigation of how chevrons form, armed with his geological and outdoor skills. Photo by N. Del Piero. All rights reserved. Q & A - Lucas Vimpere Please tell us about your background and current PhD studies I started my studies at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department of the University…

Winter can get grim in the heights of Scotland. To make power supply more reliable, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) wanted to understand more about ice formation on its power lines. A tailored solution by OTT HydroMet monitors the microclimate surrounding the power pylons and automatically sends alerts when the lines are about to freeze. Now, it faces its second winter season. Overhead transmission lines are the cheapest and most common way to provide electric energy from one place to another. Being exposed to wind and weather, the metal conductors are prone to elongation causing the lines to sag. Low hanging lines can be a significant safety risk, especially if they span roads. Power suppliers have to ensure they reduce the power capacity or even shut down power transmission…

Light is fascinating. The splitting of light through a prism demonstrates its variety of wavelengths and constituent colours. Natural light can be transformed into polarized light, for example, by passing it through a special film that acts like a filter. Types of filters called polarizers can be fitted to optical equipment like microscopes. Birefringence is clearly seen under the microscope in the geology lab as students look at geological thin sections, but the bright, mosaic of colours seen is often mistakenly called ‘interference colours’, yet interference has little to do with this process, as Professor Aaron Slepkov tells us. Birefringence colour effects are due to the polarization of the light being altered through particular materials. © Aaron Slepkov. © All rights reserved Q & A - Aaron Slepkov Firstly, please…

Beginning a journey into documentary work from a young age, Brass Rabbit combined a love for photography with story telling about the true lives of those who are often overlooked by popular media. Taking an unbiased approach has been an underyling value during this work, resulting photographs and dialogues that have been exhibited in galleries in the US and beyond. Brass Rabbit’s latest project The Greyscale Economics Project openly shares stories and details about those working in non-traditional economies. The pandemic brought various challenges to not only the artist, but the subjects being interviewed, we find out why here. © Brass Rabbit. All rights reserved. Q & A - Brass Rabbit How did you first get into documentary photography? I had the privilege of being introduced to photography by my…

Organic microfossil of Palynodinium grallator (below) Image taken by Sandy McLachlan. Scale bar = 10 μm. © Sandy McLachlan. All rights reserved. Organic microfossils of Palynodinium grallator, preserved resting cysts of a taxon belonging to a group of extinct dinoflagellate phytoplankton, reached their acme in the fossil record 66 million years ago. This species’ Cretaceous crescendo is used to demarcate the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary in marine settings throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The specimen featured here was recovered from the sedimentary rocks of the Oyster Bay Formation, which overlies strata of the Upper Cretaceous Nanaimo Group along eastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. It was among the microfossils which enabled the recent discovery of the first K–Pg event record in the northeast Pacific. About Sandy McLachlan is an invertebrate paleontologist and…

Professor Trevor Cox founded Inventive Podcast from the University of Salford where he specialises in acoustic engineering. Through the podcast, he interviews engineers from diverse backgrounds, emphasising the impact of engineers on the world. By bringing talented writers into the podcast, fact and fiction are intertwined so that engineering can be made more accessible to the public. Trevor shares with us some of the amazing guests that have been interviewed so far, and discusses the importance of engaging the public in engineering, to make this fascinating field more accessible and to demonstrate its hidden value to the world. © University of Salford. All rights reserved Q & A - Trevor Cox Please introduce your background and expertise in acoustic engineering. I’m Professor of Acoustics Engineering at the University of Salford…

Jan van IJken is a filmmaker and photographer from Leiden, the Netherlands, working at the interface of art and science. His work is about the secrets of nature, microscopy, embryology and human-animal relationships. At present, he is mainly working autonomously on long-term projects. As a photographer, he developed a strong eye for natural light, composition and detail. Find out more Website: www.janvanijken.com Artwork Planktonium – Short film (15min) and photo series about the unseen world of microscopic plankton. (above) © Jan van IJken 2021 - Planktonium. All rights reserved. Chaoborus (phantom midge larva), zooplankton. Sample taken from a freshwater environment in the Netherlands. The photo was made by image stacking; combining many photos with different focal points to create one sharp image.…

While working as a biotechnology research scientist, Lorenzo Li Greci was inspired to start creating artwork out of his own lignin based dyes. Lignin is a key component making up plant material, and so, is biodegradable. This contrasts with the largely petroleum based plastic products we see all around us today. Lignin offers untapped potential for a world that is shifting to a sustainable future. His background in genetics and optics inspires his art project, where he creates new colours using lignin - a key component of plant material. He experiments with this new palette of colours to see how they adapt on materials such as canvas and clay, in order to make new visual experiences to share with the world, as we can see in the following pages. ©…

Uli Ap is a London-based trans-disciplinary artist with a background in fine art, new media art, architecture, fiction writing and journalism, who critically investigates technology and its relationship with society and science. Ap creates disorienting interactive installations, where virtual and physical experiences merge and alter participants’ mental states, spatial and immersive video-audio environments to transfer physical experiences through digital realms, destabilising performances to question a post-human condition, and AI–VR–BCI-Robotics situations. Winner of Best Short: Audience Award - Yellow Alienation No.1 by Uli Ap, New York Short Film Festival, 2021. Uli Ap lives and works all over the globe. Extensive exhibitions and residencies include the British School in Rome, International Artist-in-Residence Programme in Aso Japan, the Kim Fielding Award for experimental arts and ‘Artificial Intelligence of Virtual Reality’ featuring the ‘Brain…

In the very first week after a dynamic brush fire broke out in October 2019 near the Getty Center in Los Angeles, more than one hundred videos were uploaded to YouTube. News, opinions, testimonies, explanatory videos, and even gaming videos spread like wildfire on YouTube, competing for an audience. Some of these videos suggested that the fire would destroy one of the most important and iconic art institutions in California, the Getty Center, after which the fire was named, even though the Getty was never actually at risk. This manifold material mirrors how different communication cultures share the most influential online video platform, YouTube, as well as specific aesthetics and narratives related to the medium itself and the very topic of a California brush fire. The present article focuses on…