Discover, June 1, 1993

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A deaf woman is talking to me on the phone. Her name is Joanne Syrja, and she is explaining to me how her hearing deteriorated over time. She was never able to hear high frequencies, she says, and as the years went by, that ceiling of sound descended until she could hear nothing at all. But she can now hear me.

The questions I ask her are transformed into pulses of electricity that travel over telephone lines and are changed back into waves of sound at her receiver. Then a microphone sitting in her ear transforms my voice once again into electricity.

Continue reading “Making Senses” →

Discover, May 1, 1993

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You are what you eat, and Eric Iverson’s artificial-life program eats Bach (or Gillespie, or Abdul). Then it spits out a new piece of music.

Ever since Pythagoras made numerical sense of octaves, fifths, and fourths, mathematicians have been stumbling onto hidden patterns in music. Over the centuries a few people have even tried to act on those discoveries and compose music mathematically. Nowadays that means using computers. One popular method is to generate notes randomly and then sort through them with an artificial-intelligence program–a set of general rules embodying the programmer’s vision of what makes music musical.

Continue reading “Metamusic” →

Discover, May 1, 1993

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Two and a half billion years hence, long after we are gone, Earth will lose its water, and the hardiest organisms will succumb to the sun.

Five billion years from now the sun will balloon into a red giant star and destroy Earth like a mote of dust in a blowtorch. By the time it does, though, our planet won’t be much to cry over. It will have spent its last 2 billion years not as a blue gem of life but as a dry, overheated ball of stone, like Venus.

Continue reading “A Vision of the End” →

Discover, February 1, 1993

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Without electricity we would perish. We could learn to do without the flow of electrons that power VCRs and food processors, but the currents inside our bodies are vital. The brain needs electricity to issue its commands from neuron to neuron. When these signals reach a muscle, they set up a wave of electrical excitation in the fibers, which in turn triggers the chemical reactions that make the fibers contract or relax. The most important muscle is the heart; it shudders under a wave of electricity about once each second.

Continue reading “The Body Electric” →

Discover, January 31, 1993

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Last April a bat-eared alien appeared on the television news. Its name was Blue Devil, and it was the first aye-aye–one of the rarest primates in the world–ever to be born in captivity.

The nocturnal Madagascar native was probably seen by more people than all the other aye-ayes in history combined. Aye-ayes are so hard to track that they have barely been studied, and conservationists are hard-pressed to estimate their total population. It’s just as well that aye-ayes are so elusive: on Madagascar they are often killed by their human neighbors, who consider the bushy-tailed mammals bad luck.

Continue reading “Four E’s and a P” →