Miniatures

Last August, researchers at Rome University produced tiny portraits of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin by modifying E. coli cells to respond to light patterns. Bacteria that received more light would swim faster, so over time they tended to concentrate in the darker parts of a negative image.

Lead author Giacomo Frangipane said in a statement, “Much like pedestrians who slow down their walking speed when they encounter a crowd, or cars that are stuck in traffic, swimming bacteria will spend more time in slower regions than in faster ones.”

Using the same technique, they created a (tiny) version of the Mona Lisa.

| Science & Math

Drawing Customers

Seoul’s Drawing Cafe is styled like a two-dimensional cartoon. Inspired by the Korean television show W, in which characters move between the real world and a fantasy world inside a webtoon, the café has designed its furniture, walls, floors, mugs, dishes, and cutlery to look like flat line drawings.

More on the café’s Instagram page.

| Art · Oddities

Breaking

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edmund_Hillary_and_Tenzing_Norgay.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The ninth British expedition to Everest brought along a journalist, James Morris of the London Times. To avoid losing a scoop to other journalists who might intercept their wire messages, Morris and the editors worked out a series of code phrases with secret meanings:

Snow conditions bad: Everest climbed
Wind still troublesome: Attempt abandoned
South Col untenable: Band
Lhotse Face impossible: Bourdillon
Ridge camp untenable: Evans
Withdrawal to West Basin: Gregory
Advanced base abandoned: Hillary
Camp 5 abandoned: Hunt
Camp 6 abandoned: Lowe
Camp 7 abandoned: Noyce
Awaiting improvement: Tenzing
Further news follows: Ward

On May 30, 1953, Morris gave a seemingly innocuous message to a Sherpa runner: Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement. On June 2, on an inside page under the headline “Everest Conquered,” the Times reported that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit on May 29. With that the Times won historic credit for breaking the story; it fell to the Daily Express to follow up with front-page coverage.

(From Paul Lunde, ed., The Book of Codes, 2009.)

| History

A Fashion Puzzle

http://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/files/2016/05/Censor-Manual-WW2.pdf

According to a British censorship manual from World War II (PDF, page 14), this sketch, published in a wartime newspaper, contained a secret message, ostensibly hidden in Morse code in the arrangement of dots and lines on the women’s dresses. The message is “Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly,” or, in the German original, “Massive Feindverstärkungen werden stündlich erwartet.”

A second message is hidden in the signature, written in a French shorthand. In English this read “Before Arras”; in German it was probably “Vor Arras.”

Unfortunately, the manual doesn’t explain the method by which these messages were hidden, and to date no one has been able to re-establish it. Where are these messages to be found in the image? Encryption expert Klaus Schmeh writes, “So far, I could neither find the morse message nor the shorthand message. I even went to the British Archive in London to look at the original document and to take high resolution photographs. It didn’t help.”

On his blog, Schmeh presents one of these high-resolution images, as well as a second mystery from the same manual. See the comments on that post for some suggestions from his readers.

| History

Geography

Brad Taylor offered this baseball puzzle in the October 2001 issue of MIT Technology Review:

The Red Sox beat the Orioles 9 to 4 in 17 innings. Where was the game played?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Unwholesome

Prove that if n is a positive integer greater than 1, then

\displaystyle 1 + \frac{1}{2} + \frac{1}{3} + \dots + \frac{1}{n}

is not an integer.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Growing Room

corbusier spiral

How can an art gallery accommodate a growing collection? In 1931 Le Corbusier proposed a Musée à croissance illimitée that would grow like a snail’s shell, coiling in a rectangular spiral as needs required and as funds became available.

“The means of orienting one’s self in the museum is provided by the rooms at half-height which form a ‘swastika,'” he explained. “Every time a visitor, in the course of his wanderings, finds himself under a lowered ceiling he will see, on one side, an exit to the garden, and on the opposite side, the way to the central hall. The Museum can be developed to a considerable length without the square spiral becoming a labyrinth.”

He presented the idea as a museum for Philippeville in North Africa in 1939, in a town planning project for Saint-Dié in 1945, and in a competition design to reconstruct the center of Berlin in 1958, but it was never realized.

(From Ulrich Conrads and Hans G. Sperlich, The Architecture of Fantasy, 1962.)

| Art

Multimedia

alexander nevsky sequence diagram

For his 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein worked so closely with composer Sergei Prokofiev that individual shots in the climactic “battle on the ice” were timed to correspond to the length of musical phrases.

Their collaboration during editing to marry music and imagery set the modern standard for filmmakers; Valery Gergiev, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, called Prokofiev’s score “the best ever composed for the cinema.”

| Art