Visionary Archaeoastronomer Shatters Ceiling of Lascaux Scholarship

Image Courtesy of Flickr member JackVersloot

Though we are not exactly into fan websites, this one actually had us contemplating creating one for Dr. Chantal Jègues-Wolkiewiez for [ahem] shattering the cave ceiling of prehistorical scholarship with her skills of keen observation, logic, interdisciplinary thinking, and tenacious data-gathering.

National Geographic’s Naked Science series recently featured the independent archaeologist, ethnoastronomer, and psychologist, Dr. Chantal Jègues-Wolkiewiez and her remarkable research which, to understate it, recontextualizes paleolithic art.

Over a period of 7 years, Jègues-Wolkiewiez visited 130 cave sites featuring paleolithic drawings, recording their solar alignments throughout seasons, and revealing that 122 of the 130 sites had optimal orientations to the solstitial horizons. Her example case “considered a salmon with a curved lower jaw, a characteristic of post-spawned fish. During the winter, the sunlight would fall specifically on this fish, concurrent with the season in which spawning occurs” (from the National Geographic website). Further, Jègues-Wolkiewiez observed that the Lascaux paintings themselves, traditionally thought to be shamanistic representations of hunted animals, actually align with celestial positions essentially revealing a highly sophisticated map of the constellations. Not bad for cave men (or women)…

On her website, Jègues-Wolkiewiez says of her research (translated from French to English):

My researches tend to prove that as well as the Paleolithic works date from 35000 years ago (the Blanchard shelter bone in Sergeac en Dordogne), the works founded in the Vallée des Merveilles show precise and meticulous observations of the solar, lunar and stellar cycles. They reveal unsuspected astronomical knowledge in periods as ancient as the Aurignacienne era. All this knowledge was indispensable for the survival of Occidental Europe’s first habitants. It allowed them, for example, to anticipate season changes with the deriving modifications in their vital environment as animal migration.

However, beyond that, these parietal works, furniture, caves, could reveal the link between the sequence of seasonal celestial cycles and the foundational myths of the Indo-European civilizations, myths that we will find later in ancient Egypt or in Mesopotamia, Greece, Etruria and more.

Thank you, Dr. Jègues-Wolkiewiez, you made our year!

Star of Bethlehem Research Reveals Much

Contemporary representation of the mysterious Star of Bethlehem. Courtesy of Flickr member "hoyasmeg"/James Emery.

“The Christian account of the Star of Bethlehem has been largely unsubstantiated by hard scientific data. Countless astronomers have attempted to offer explanations for the phenomenon, but none have been without flaws and contradictions.” In the forthcoming Cosmos issue of Glimpse (vol 2.4), astronomer Michael R. Molnar proposes a theory, “grounded in both ancient astrological practices and hard science, which validates the plausibility of this spectacular biblical event.” Molnar writes:

Astronomers have suggested many celestial events to account for this sighting, But their ideas run counter to what ancient stargazers would have deemed symbolic of a Judean king’s birth… (M)y examination of the biblical story started instead with efforts to understand celestial symbols on Roman coins.

In the forthcoming Glimpse article, “What the Wise Men Saw in the Sky,” Molnar proposes the exact day, month, and year of the birth of Christ, based on astronomical research and historical research into astronomical, astrological, religious, and socio-political practices during the time of the birth of Christ.

Stay tuned…

Dreaming in Color

Reporter Margaret Talbot takes us along to visit the Maimonides Sleep Arts & Sciences center in Albuquerque to learn about nightmares. Her story begins with a series of case studies detailing patients’ ailments—receptionist Toni, graduate student Yael, flight attendant Joan, widower Ed—are four among many patients who are gripped by quiet terrors once the lights go out. These individuals have all chosen to seek treatment through a fairly new method of clinical dream psychiatry published in 2001 in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Dr. Barry Krakow, the head doctor at Maimonides. Following this treatment method, patients are asked to focus on their nightmares as the source of their problems, contradicting traditional popular Freudian lines of thinking, which names an often traumatic, past, external cause as the nightmare source. Throughout therapy, patients are encouraged to discuss and “rewrite” their nightscapes with a positive twist. The hope is that this positive thinking will trickle into the patient’s dream state and eventually turn nightmares into pleasant dreams.

Relating to color, the article makes note of a study conducted in China by University of California Riverside professor Eric Schwitzgebel and two chinese colleagues Changbing Huang and Yifeng Zhou who confront the question of whether people dream in color, “Most Americans now claim that they dream in color. So did most people who asked themselves that question before the early twentieth century, including Aristotle, Descartes and Freud. But in the middle of the twentieth century most people began reporting that they dreamed in black-and-white.” In Schwitzgebel, Huang and Zhou’s findings individuals who watched color images on television or in film were more apt to dream in colors, “‘dreams may be neither colored nor black and white, leaving the colors of most of their objects unspecified, as novels do. Perhaps it takes time and energy to fill in all the colors in a richly detailed scene, with the result that most of our dream imagery is fairly sketchy.’” Regardless. Dream on.

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Image by Flickr member Delphine

Written by Angie Mah

The Blues Gotcha – stumbling upon the “perfect” blue

Chemists at Oregon State University (OSU) unexpectedly discovered a new, highly-durable, blue pigment this month — what may, in fact, be the “perfect blue.” OSU issued a statement: “Through much of recorded human history, people around the world have sought inorganic compounds that could be used to paint things blue, often with limited success…Cobalt blue, developed in France in the early 1800s, can be carcinogenic. Prussian blue can release cyanide. Other blue pigments are not stable when exposed to heat or acidic conditions.”

The OSU chemists combined manganese oxide (which appears black), with novel electronic compounds at the temperature of around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, solid crystals formed which contained manganese ions that absorbed only red and green wavelengths, leaving a blue light reflection.

After the manganese containing oxide cooled, the new blue color remained. White yttrium oxide and pale yellow idium oxide were added to stabilize the crystal structure after cooling—if the yttrium oxide and pale yellow idium oxide were not added to stabilize the crystal structure after cooling, the blue color would disappear or fade. Collaborating on the work were researchers in the Materials Department at the University of California/Santa Barbara. To read more about the discovery that would have made artist Yves Klein jealous, see the OSU press announcement.

And, in tribute of this new blue tone, please enjoy this song, “Good Morning Blues” by the American Folk singer Huddle William Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly.

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The image to the left was taken by Oregon State University Milton Harris Professor of Materials Science, Mas Subramanian.

Written by Angie Mah

Simultaneous Realities

Looking at the images above, can you make out a meaning?

In his TED talk lecture special for CNN, R. Beau Lotto explains why your mind seems to “fill in” the blank where the appropriate letters might be to make sense of an otherwise meaningless mix of words.

Humans understand and process what pertains to them. “If you remember anything in this next eighteen minutes, remember this: that the light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything.” R. Beau Lotto uses visual examples to illustrate his point that what a person sees, finds patterns in and attributes importance to, is not based on a constant—a person is continually re-definining her/his perspective of normality in order to make sense of the world. Lotto concludes his lecture in the spirit of celebrating uncertainty which he believes is the potential for understanding.

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Images above are screenshots from R. Beau Lotto’s TED Talk Tuesdays lecture for CNN.com

Written by Angie Mah

Glimpse Recommends: Margaret Livingstone – “What Art Can Tell Us About the Brain”

This evening Glimpse Journal invites you to join The Dynamic Media Institute (DMI), Boston Media Makers and MassArt Professional and Continuing Education in attending Media Tech Tonic Lecture #11: “What Art Can Tell Us About the Brain”, presented by Dr. Margaret Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology at the Harvard Medical School and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University.

Dr. Margaret Livingstone is the eleventh guest speaker of the twelve part Fall 2009 Media Tech Tonic lecture series. Her work attempts to explain in scientific terms the sequence of events that occur between a persons’ brain and sensory motors when s/he views a beautiful (or grotesque) work of art. Providing popular masterpiece examples like Picasso, Mattise and DaVinci, Livingstone proposes to unravel the mystique of the “pull”—though you might call it “beauty”—that certain aesthetics have, “I will explore how the segregation of color and luminance processing are the basis for why some Impressionist paintings seem to shimmer, why some op art paintings seem to move, some principles of Matisse’s use of color, and how the Impressionists painted ‘air’”. Livinstone will also cover topics from her recently published work Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing.

Please register for this free lecture at: http://mediatechtonic.org/.

MediaTechTonic #11
“What Art Can Tell Us About the Brain”
Dr. Margaret Linvingstone
Room 406, Kennedy Building
Massachusetts College of Art and Design
621 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115

Keep your eyelids open for Glimpse Journal’s reflections on the event afterwards.

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Left Image: Picasso Drawing With Light (1949) by Gjon Mili. Hosted by today and tomorrow. Upper-right Image: by Flickr Member MikeBlogs.

Written by Angie Mah

Field Trip to The Harvard Museum of Natural History

The Language of Color curated by Hopi Hoekstra will be on exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History from now until May 2010. Be sure to check out Glimpse Journal’s conversation with Dr. Hoekstra in the Nov. 2009 Color Issue (to be released in the next week).

To view the video above please visit: The Language of Color. This video is provided by Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Your Brain on E

e-words by Angie Mah
e-image courtesy of Flickr member: brain_blogger

Well, E-Books.

It’s no longer contestable, computers and handheld reading devices like smart-phones are altering the way that we read by the millisecond.

Last Saturday at the Boston Book Festival, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue hosted a talk titled, “The Future of Reading: Books Without Pages?”  Guest speakers from Google, Sony, Interread, and Pixel Qi joined an auditorium packed with curious audience members at the Boston Public Library Rabb Lecture Hall to discuss with the public strategies these companies are undertaking to digitize essentially all of the world’s readable resources into one enormous database. Their collective hope for the future of reading: to make materials readily accessible to a large number of people at the fastest rate possible—at once an appealing and all-over frightening notion.  But for a moment forget about productivity and usefulness, and dwell on this article published by the New York Times in early October which delves into the question of whether or not humans even like e-reading and the ways that e-reading is rapidly affecting and shaping the way people are remembering, learning, and understanding written material and visual representations.

Try this memory exercise out for size.

The image above is from Charles Bell (1774-1842): The Anatomy of the Brain, Explained in a Series of Engravings. London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees (etc.), 1802.

Red on Yellow Kills a Fellow

“Red on yellow, kill a fellow; red on black, friend of Jack”

Be happy you learned this little ditty before a foray into the Southern woodland regions of North America. This saying originated in North America as a way to distinguish the venomous coral snake–recognizable by its red, yellow, and black banded skin–from nonvemonous look-a-likes. There are only two species of coral snake found in North America, the eastern coral snake, or harlequin snake (Micrurus Fulvius) and the Arizona coral snake (Micruroides euryxanthus). “Red on yellow” refers to the red and yellow striped bands that run down the the snake’s body. Variations of the phrase include, “Red on Yellow Kills a Fellow, Red on Black, Venom Lack,” and “Red on yellow kills a fellow; red on black, pat it on the back.” Unfortunately the saying’s usefulness wanes outside of North America, where in regions like India, the coral snakes have different color and band patterns on their skin. The image above is of the charlatan coral snake, the scarlet king snake (Lampropeltis Triangulum Elapsoides).

Image by Flickr Member: Pierson Hill

Glimpse Journal Recommends: WAR TOYS/TOY WARS

Glimpse Journal contributor Mary Ting (China Vision 2.2) is pleased to present the work of James Wong and Robert Visani in her newly curated show War Toys/Toy Wars. The show will be up from Oct.9th – Nov. 6th, 2009 at Gallery 456, Chinese American Arts Council (CAAC), 456 Broadway, 3fl, New York, NY 10013. For more information please visit the CAAC website.