In tomorrow’s world, cities may rise into the clouds, dive beneath oceans, or float among the stars—join us as we journey through these radical urban frontiers.
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Imagine you are playing the guitar—each pluck of a string creates a sound wave that vibrates and interacts with other waves. Now shrink that idea down to a small single molecule, and instead of sound waves, picture vibrations that carry heat.
A team of engineers and materials scientists at the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder has recently discovered that these tiny thermal vibrations, otherwise known as phonons, can interfere with each other just like musical notes—either amplifying or canceling each other, depending on how a molecule is “strung” together.
The research is published in the journal Nature Materials.
Wouldn’t it be great if music creators had someone to brainstorm with, help them when they’re stuck, and explore different musical directions together? Researchers at KAIST and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed AI technology similar to a fellow songwriter who helps create music.
The work is published in Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
The system developed by Professor Sung-Ju Lee’s research team, Amuse, is an AI-based system that converts various forms of inspiration such as text, images, and audio into harmonic structures (chord progressions) to support composition.
*GUEST BIO:* Janna Levin is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist specializing in black holes, cosmology of extra dimensions, topology of the universe, and gravitational waves.
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It’s hard to interpret the strange results of quantum mechanics, though many have tried. Interpretations range from the outlandish—like the multiple universes of Many Worlds, to the almost mundane, like the very mechanical Pilot Wave Theory. But perhaps we’re converging on an answer, because some are arguing that these two interpretations are really the same thing.
A research team led by Waterloo Engineering has developed a faster, cheaper way to create large-scale, three-dimensional (3D) computer models of urban areas, technology that could impact fields including urban planning, architectural design and filmmaking.
The triangle is a small instrument made of a metal rod bent into a triangle shape that is open at one corner. While small, its sound is distinct, with multiple overtones and nonharmonic resonance. But what causes the surprisingly powerful sound?
“The triangle instrument produces enchanting and beautiful tones, raising deep and profound questions about the connection between music and physics,” author Risako Tanigawa said. “Optical sound measurement has only been applied to limited subjects until now. By observing the sound field of a triangle for the first time, we captured phenomena not previously explored through microphone observations.”
In a paper published in JASA Express Letters, Tanigawa and colleagues at NTT Corporation and Waseda University in Japan captured sound fields around musical triangles.
Our research found that the phenomenon arises when the part of the brain which detects familiarity de-synchronises with reality. Déjà vu is the signal which alerts you to this weirdness: it is a type of “fact checking” for the memory system.
But repetition can do something even more uncanny and unusual. The opposite of déjà vu is “jamais vu”, when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way. In our recent research, which has just won an Ig Nobel award for literature, we investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon.
Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown. Musicians have it momentarily – losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disorientated or seeing it with “new eyes”
In the dim light of the lab, friends, family, and strangers watched the image of a pianist playing for them, the pianist’s fingers projected onto the moving keys of a real grand piano that filled the space with music.
Watching the ghostly musicians, faces and bodies blurred at their edges, several listeners shared one strong but strange conviction: “feeling someone’s presence” while “also knowing that I am the only one in the room.”
“It’s tough to explain,” another listener said. “It felt like they were in the room with me, but at the same time, not.”
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