Top Scientific Moments of 2015

There are many great things about working at the Naked Scientists but one of the best has to be getting to go out and do exciting things for the show. For newbie Connie Orbach trying on the Mi.Mu gloves was a definite favourite. Here she is with software designer Adam Stark.

Adam - My name is Adam Stark and I am a software developer and I've been working on the Mi.Mu gloves now for about four years trying to turn all the rich data we get about your hand into music.  At the moment, if you want to make electronic music you're normally presented with a midi keyboard, or some buttons, or nobs, or faders, but they're not very expressive ways of performing electronic music. The thing that's really, really expressive about people, more than anything, is their hands and so we wanted to make a device that catches the expressiveness of your hands and uses that as a controller for making electronic music.

Connie - I feel like the best way to explain this is if you let me have a go.  Is that possible?

Adam - Sure, I'll talk you through it.

Connie - Okay.  Fantastic, what do we need to do first?

Adam - So, the first thing we need to put the gloves on and then we need to calibrate them for your hands because everyone's hands are different.

Connie - The gloves are black, thin and feel very fragile, but actually they're incredibly sturdy and designed specifically to be strong, flexible and unobtrusive.  They're wireless and even fingerless so you can play other instruments whilst you wear them but, most importantly, they're covered in electronics.

Adam - Through your fingers, there are either one or two bend sensors, depending on the finger and this detects the bend of your knuckles.

Connie - Okay.

Adam - So if you just feel the end of your fingers you'll feel something hard there.

Connie - It's like a kind of ribbon running down my fingers and that's a flex ven sensor.

Adam - Yes, that's a ven sensor.  This part here, this little bud on the wrist detects the orientation of your hands - well it's actually of your wrist - so it detects the roll of your wrist, and if you move your wrist up and down or from left to right.

Connie - And that's all of the sensors on the glove?

Adam - So, in terms of the information going into the those are the two things; the bend of your fingers and orientation of your wrist, but we have a couple of pieces of feedback as well.  So we have an LED here which will light up; we can programme that to tell you different things about the software so you really don't have to look at the screen.  And on the wrist here we also have some vibration measures that buzz.  We can also use those to tell you that certain things have happened or not happened.

Connie - After a bit more fiddling to get the gloves in place it was time to configure the software to my hand.

Adam - The first thing I'm going to do; I'm going to press calibrate and you're just going to move your hand open and closed and make sure you're moving all of your fingers including your thumb from fully bend to....

Connie - Okay, so clench them like a fist and then open them back out.

Adam - It's now finding all of the extreme points of your hand and where your hand moves to and what the greatest extent and minimum extent of it is.

Connie - Once the software knew the extent of the movement in my hand we could programme it to gestures.  So Adam got me to make a few different movements, like a fist or a pointed finger, and the software remembered them so it could later match them to particular musical commands.

Adam - So what I've set up here is a way for you to play chords using the gloves.  If you make a fist with your right hand that will play a certain chord and if you let go, it will stop.

Connie - Okay.

Adam - Now if you move it to a different direction, make a fist, it will play a different chord...

Connie - Ah, this is so exciting.  So I'm moving my hand say in front of me, above my head, to the side and down.

Adam - There should be one over this side as well, just to the left.

Connie - To my left as opposed to my right.

Adam - So if you make this one again in front of you.  Now move on your left hand.  So the right hand here is now making a fist.  So on the left hand if you roll your wrist while you make a sound.  You control the tone of it there.

Connie - Wow!  I have so much power in my hands right now.  I had so much fun playing with gloves. I can't imagine what someone with actual musical abilities might be able to do.

Connie - Of course, I was far too distracted to manage an actual interview so sadly the time came when I had to take the gloves off and get back to work.

Adam - We allow you to combine together different movements.  You might say, if I'm making a fist and I'm rolling my wrist from left to right, that particular movement I'm going to connect to a certain musical control perimeter.  So, when I say that, what I mean is we connect it to some piece of music software, maybe it's the volume fade or maybe it's the panning around the room or it's the amount the reverb.

Connie - So there were originally, I guess, a tool for Imogen but you have many other people using these gloves as well.  Is that right?

Adam - That's right.  We realised there was something really, really powerful in these gloves and that every time we gave them to somebody different to put them on, they used them in a completely different way.  We were really interested in how other people might use them and so we've now got about 20 different users around the world and they're using it for all kinds of different things.  We've got film composers, we've got Ariana Grunday who's a sort of pop star, and we've got a charity called Drake Music who work with musicians with disabilities that are barriers to them making music. So they use technology to try and break down those barriers, and we're working with a musician called Chris Halpen and he's been making huge use of the gloves and gigging all over the place. He has cerebral palsy and he's had a journey through dealing with his condition and trying to find ways around his condition to make music, and I think the gloves for him have been somewhat of an emancipation.

Connie - There's a lot of performance involved in wearing these gloves.  You really have to be willing to throw your hands around and play with it, so I guess there's only a certain type of performer that would be happy doing this as well?

Adam - I think that's a really good question.  I'm a guitarist and I play in band where you normally tend to look at your guitar pedals and that kind of thing, and suddenly you're not looking at your guitar pedals, you're looking up at the audience and you're moving your hands around, and it's a very different experience.  Sometimes I really love it and sometimes I feel a bit like a lemon.  It does take a certain personality,  but it does communicate to people better, I think, than almost anything else.

Connie - I'm not sure that I'd feel comfortable flailing my arms around on stage but maybe that's why I'm not a performer.  That, and the whole musical ability thing but, with these gloves, there seems little doubt that technology and creativity are hand in hand.

Here at the Naked Scientists we pride ourselves on bringing you the latest in science news, direct from the horse's mouth and in September we covered a story which gave a whole new angle on the origins of humanity. The discovery of Homo Naledi in South Africa introduced a new species of human ancestor to the world with clues to their culture. Chris Smith spoke to the people who made the discovery Lee Berger, from the University of Witwatersrand, Charles Musiba from the University of Colorado, and, up first, Wisconsin University's John Hawks...

John - If you look at Homo naledi from some distance, they would stand about 1.4 meters high, the size of a small human. They stand upright. They're very thin-looking in build. As you look closer, you'll notice that there are some things wrong about them. Their heads are very small. Their heads are around a third the size of ours in terms of their brain size. Their hips are cast much more like a more primitive hominin, something like Lucy the famous skeleton. Their shoulders are sort of canted upwards in a way that we associate with some of the most primitive hominins. We think that that's probably related to climbing. But it's very clear that when you look at the details, the things that strike us as being so human-like. The feet, they're clearly adapted for walking long distances in the way that humans have, their hands, very human-like through the wrist and the palms. Their thumb is appropriate for humans in its length, but the fingers are very curved and that thumb is immensely powerful, something that we've never seen before in the fossil record. Their teeth, also really quite human-like in their size, in what they look like, they would have been suited for in terms of eating, but they have features in them that we've never seen before in humans or any other kind of hominin.

Chris - Lee, how did you find them in the first place?

Lee - Well, they were found as part of an organised search. I'd actually enlisted a former student of mine, employed him to actually been going underground in the caves just outside of Johannesburg. He in turn enlisted two amateur cavers - Rick Hunter and Steve Tucker. What that led to in mid-September of 2013 was Steve and Rick, entering a very tiny narrow passage, about 20 meters underground. It's about 17.5 centimetres wide, dropping down 12 meters into a chamber where they chanced upon this remarkable discovery.

I saw the first photos on October 1st that led to a 60-person expedition that we launched on November 7th which led to the recovery of this remarkable sample of fossil hominins.

Chris - When you saw that photograph, just describe the scene for us in that situation. What did you see?

Lee - I was at home at night, 9:00 o'clock in the evening, working on some emails and the doorbell rang and there was Pedro on the other side. He said, "You're going to want to let me in." I almost didn't, given that tone. He came in with Steve in tow and they opened up this laptop and there sitting in the middle of this picture - was a man with lesser jawbone with this beautiful teeth that I could immediately tell were from a very primitive or ancient hominin. I cound tell by the shape of them. The next slide was that of a skull or at least half a skull embedded in the dirt of the ground.

Just to say, we don't see fossils like that in Southern Africa. Most of our fossils are embedded in concrete-like rock. These are sitting in dirt loose. The next slide was more bones and I thought I was looking at a skeleton. I was stunned. I've never seen anything like that.

Chris - Charles Musiba who's also a part of the team from the University of Colorado, when you look at those teeth, where did they fit in?

Charles - When you look at those teeth, you realise that they're not modern humans. They have some features transitional between modern humans and some of our earliest ancestor. It's very interesting in that it may be signalling some completely different type of adaptation to maybe a different type of dietary behaviour which may not necessarily be exactly like ours.

Chris - John, given where these specimens were found, how do you account for them being there?

John - You know, this is the thing that occupied us as we were excavating. This is the largest assemblage of bone that we found for early hominins anywhere. We found them together with no animal bones other than a few little fragments. So, there's something very curious about the way that these hominins entered this chamber.

There's no evidence that these bones were ever altered or chewed on by carnivores. It's clearly not some sort of predator that's dragged them into this cave. There's no signs of it at all. We've looked at the sediments within the chamber where we find them and we can show that those sediments originated within the chamber. They don't have grains that have come from the external environment and in fact, the nearby chambers don't have grains that have come the external environment.

We look at that and we think it's very likely that the entrance to the chamber in the past was always pitch black and isolated from the outside environment. That explains why other creatures besides the hominins were not able to reach the chamber and it creates a problem in that, Homo naledi has to have been able to access the entrance of this and reach it inside with bodies.

Chris - So, you're saying that these pretty primitive, small-brained individuals must have been intentionally depositing either themselves or their dead or dying in this chamber and then they remained in-situ for you to find potentially up to 2.5 million years later.

John - What we were working on in here is a bed that's full of hominin bone and that includes articulated elements like complete hands and feet, things that would've been disarticulated rapidly if the bodies had not entered this chamber hole. We have got them in a situation where they could not have been washed in, where there's no evidence that there's a catastrophe that's happened to them, where they clearly entered the chamber over some period of time - we don't know how long, but not instantaneously.

We can in other words, exclude the things that seem simple like some sort of catastrophic event, some sort of flood, some sort of predator that's a death trap that had them fall in. we're left with the explanation that Homo naledi itself must have been intentionally depositing bodies at the entrance of this chamber or into the chamber itself.

In August Graihagh Jackson did a whole hour on everyone's favourite planet-not-a-planet, Pluto and as part of that show she wanted to look into the cloud of dust that Pluto is part of - the Kuiper Belt. Scott Thomas was kind enough to show her around the skies at the Institute of Astronomy.

Scott - The real claim to fame for this telescope was that it nearly discovered the planet Neptune.

Graihagh - Nearly?

Scott - Yes, nearly. So, the story goes that John Couch Adams who was a famous astronomer who worked here at the observatory. He was an undergraduate at Cambridge. At that time, the planet Uranus had been known and there were irregularities in its orbits. So, it wasn't moving in a way that people thought it should. The obvious explanation for this was that there was something out past this orbit that was speeding it up and slowing it down. And John Couch Adams got wind of this idea. He spent his entire summer holidays just trying to calculate the position of this planet.

Graihagh - And they lost.

Scott - Yes. Unfortunately, the French, they took their calculations, they opened up the telescope and I think within an hour, they'd found it. They were both lucky and they had slightly better maps, I think.

Graihagh - So to me, it kind of looks like scaffolding where it's some elaborate scaffolding on a slant. Where is the actual telescope?

Scott - The actual telescope the bit right in middle there and you can see the eyepiece down the bottom and then at the top, we have a very sophisticated lens cap, which at the moment also includes a plastic bag to keep it dry.

Graihagh - So, you say the lens is at the bottom. So does that mean you lie on the floor to look through it.

Scott - Yes, you do. So, there's a big observer's chair here which is a sort of wooden structure that extends out to the side of the room and it rolls around.

Graihagh - Do you get a duvet as well, and a pillow?

Scott - I've often wondered about this because I can imagine in the middle of winter, it must be freezing and the middle of winter is the best time to observe. So, I imagine you'd wear some pretty heavy duty clothing. I think you should go and sit down. I'll open up the slit.

Graihagh - Wow! So, the whole roof is moving and with it, the slit is moving around to meet my every need.

Scott - You adjust the focus just by pulling this bit in and out. It really is very difficult to stress just how much easier it is doing this on a modern telescope. I'll be honest with you. I have no idea what I'm looking at at the moment.

Graihagh - We need a star chart.

Scott - We're do need a star chart. Anyway, that's sitting nicely in the frame there.

Graihagh - I can't see anything.

Scott - The cloud is coming!

Graihagh - No!

Scott - You might still be able to something.

Graihagh - Maybe I'm just blind. So other than the lack of star shots and obviously a bit of luck, these objects are extremely difficult to see. So, what about things beyond Neptune and let's say, Uranus, how are you supposed to see them?

Scott - With a telescope this big, it's very difficult and in fact, what a lot of people don't realise is just how small these things are and how dim they are. So, to spot these things, you need a very large telescope, you need a very high resolution camera. The tricky bit actually can often be - you need a long what we call an integration time. So, doing astronomy is kind of like trying to catch raindrops in a bucket where the raindrops are the photons, the raindrops are the light. You can make your bucket bigger which is using a bigger telescope or you can leave the bucket outside for longer, and that's the integration time. That's the time that you look at something. So, this means that while we can get really gorgeous pictures of things like other galaxies that we know stay very still in the sky, an object that's moving or an object that's faint that we're not really sure what we're looking for can be a lot harder.

Graihagh - The stuff beyond Pluto then, what is it and if it so dark and doesn't reflect much light, and it's really hard to see, how did we discover it in the first place?

Scott - So, the Kuiper belt is - well, you know the asteroid belt, right?

Graihagh - Yeah, the group of icy blocks beyond Mars.

Scott - Exactly. So, the Kuiper belt is the edge of the Solar System version of that, just like the asteroid belt is made up of all these chunks of rock that never really made it to form a planet. The Kuiper belt is the stuff beyond Neptune that never really made it to form a planet. So, as for the question of I guess, how do we know whether the stuff is out there, dwarf planets like Pluto, these planets, we can see. Unfortunately, you can only see them with a bigger telescope than this one obviously which is why a lot of them were discovered until relatively recently. Smaller objects are trickier but we do have some information there because even if they're very small and very faint, one of the really interesting things about Kuiper belt is that sometimes things fall inwards from it.

Graihagh - Fall inwards?

Scott - I'm sure you'll be aware that there are some very famous comets, for example, Haley's comet. Comets like this that have - they're called short period comets - they're thought to come from the Kuiper belt.

Graihagh - How did it suddenly go from an object to becoming a comet?

Scott - One of the really interesting things about all the stuff out there beyond Pluto is that because it was formed when the Solar System was coalescing and was in its infancy, it never necessarily had the chance to settle down into stable orbits. So, a lot of the stuff that happens out there can be quite chaotic. Perhaps you get a big object passing through that perturbs these things and sends them swinging in towards the centre of the Solar System. Perhaps something happened early in the Solar System's formation that sent these things out on very long elliptical orbits and perhaps this is why we see them coming past every so often.

This summer we did a whole show on computer programming in front of a live audience in Cambridge. Other than being more than a little stressful for just about everyone involved, it was also huge fun. It was particularly great when Kat got to explore her musical interests with Sam Aaron, the man behind Soni Pi; a programme that can be used to code music.

Sam -  I mean, we've just heard about how important it is to get people to code. In my opinion, it's not just about getting people to be professional programmers but also use code to express themselves. In the same way we write and read, we write diaries, we write poems, we could also use code in the same way to express ourselves in really exciting new ways. And so, Sonic Pi is software which allows you to write code, basic words, press a special magic button and hear amazing sounds.

Kat - As a musician, I'm really excited by this and I know a lot of computer musicians, they're using programs like Ableton and things like that that cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds to make music and often, I play with them. So, how is this different? Why did you make this? I mean, I downloaded it earlier for free.

Sam - Absolutely. So, you heard Eben earlier talking about lowering the barrier to entry. I mean, part of the deal about the Raspberry Pi, it's extremely affordable. And so, the software I've written is also extremely affordable. It's entirely free. And so, the idea is, if you don't have any money, it doesn't matter. You can use the software. Also, it runs on all computers. It runs on a Raspberry Pi, but also runs on a Windows or a Mac. So, if you already have a computer, use that, but if you don't, then get one of these Raspberry Pis because they're really wicked fun.

Kat - Now, is this just a way of basically tricking kids and tricking even adults into doing a bit of coding or is it actually genuinely a musical tool? Could you make musical compositions that would stand up on this?

Sam - I mean, is writing poetry tricking kids into grammar? Right? Clearly not, right? So, this is not tricking people into making code.

Kat - Maybe a little bit.

Sam - Code is an amazing expressive form and it's just shown people that potential. And yes, Sonic Pi is a new musical instrument that you can use today to perform in nightclubs and venues to make music and it's a lot of fun.

Kat - Right. Well, enough talking about it. Let's see it. So, we've got a computer screen up. We got a little Raspberry Pi sort of naked circuit boards sitting there. And on the screen, I can see just some lines and lines, and lines of code. They look like words, sleep, bit, crusher, soul, sustain. What is this?

Sam - Yes. So, I'm showing you here one of the examples. So, when you start up Sonic Pi, you have a help system. The help system contains a bunch of examples. This is one of the pre-canned examples just to show you what you can do with the system. So, shall we hear it?

Kat - Yeah. Let's play something.

Sam - Let's give it a go.

(music)

Sam - So we're getting some of that dance music. This is all generated in real time on the Raspberry Pi using lots of fancy mathematics to make the sounds. The synthesisers are all real time generated. So, this little Raspberry Pi is an extremely capable machine, it's able to do this. So, I use the same system to perform on stage at night clubs.

Kat - That is incredible. It's kind of pumping. We're all like, "Come on. Hands on the air people!"

Sam - They're going wild.

Kat - Reach for the lasers.

Sam - Calm down people! Calm down!

Kat - Never thought I'd say on the radio. So, what have we got going on here? So it's making drums and synths and all sorts of things.

Sam - Absolutely. So, shall I show you how to get started?

Kat - Okay, let's have a go. Let's make a tune, banging tune.

Sam - So, the first word to learn in Sonic Pi is the word play because we're playing a note, but also playing. We're having fun, right? So I write the word 'play' and then I choose a number to play. Let's choose 80. We hear a little beep. That's it. That's your first programme. How easy is that to write?

Kat - Yeah, that was, even I, I think. As the kind of notes, a paper musician could do that

Sam - So, once you write your first programme, the next thing is how to change these things. So now, we can change this number 80 because numbers can go up and down. Notes can also go up and down. So, if I chose a lower number like 60, you get a low note, right?

Kat - Yes. It's much lower, okay.

Sam - If I'd said 90 I'd get a higher note, right? So, done. So now, we can play all the notes we can imagine then we need a way to make a melody. So, if I play note 60 then I need to have a way of saying, "Well, wait for a bit. Let's sleep for a second and then play another note. Play 65, say and then let's sleep for half a second and play 72." So this way, we're able to play different notes and make a little melody, right?

Kat - I like that.

Sam - At this point, with these two commands, 'play' and 'sleep', we can play pretty much all western notation. So, if you take any Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven with two commands, you can reproduce those things. It's not slamming beats yet, but we've already done classical music.

Kat - Okay. Can we make it a bit more funky? Can we get it kind of going?

Sam - So, the next thing we do is once you got playing, we need some programming structures to help us to manipulate this stuff. So, I've invented something called the live loop. A live loop is just a thing which can loop. So, let's play a sample loop Amen which is Amen Break.

Kat - Is that the Amen Break? Very well known.

Sam - Sleep for the one length of that sample.

Kat - That's what drum and bass is made of fans.

Sam - And now we've got this loop going around, but whilst it's playing, I can now change the rate, say to be half, and now, we got it half and I can bring it back up to 1 again. I'm just changing one number here. Let's go reverse, minus one. Let's add some bass and then let's add some slicer to slice the volume in and out. So, I just choose where to start the slicer, where to end it. And so, just by adding a simple piece of code on top of another simple piece of code.

Kat - I think we've got a number one hit here already. I mean, it's fairly boring and repetitive, but there you go.

Sam - That's what dance music is.

Kat - Exactly.

Sam - You have to be able to dance to it. So, you say it's fairly boring and repetitive, but we've only got 9 lines of code here.

Kat - How long would it take someone like me to actually make a tune, a kind of a song with a beginning, a middle, an end, some structure?

Sam - It depends on how complicated the tune would be. I went to a school in New Castle, Benton Park Primary School where they have a Sonic Pi Orchestra and they've been teaching themselves, the kids have been teaching themselves. And the primary school kids have been teaching their local teachers how to do the stuff. This is 10-year olds. Okay, so you just need some time and some creativity and some fun and some patience. In a few days, you can get the basics down and then depending on how much time you want to put into it, in the same if you want to learn a violin, how much practice you put into it, you can get to do some wicked things pretty quickly.

Kat - Is there transferable skills from learning to write these kind of stuff?

Sam - Absolutely! This system is written in the same language that Twitter was originally written in.

Kat - And that's boring and repetitive.

Sam - Using exactly the same structures as Twitter was originally written in. All the UK government work is all written in the same language. This language called Ruby.

Kat - Also boring and repetitive.

Sam - Absolutely transferable. But code is not boring. It can be repetitive, but the computer does the repetition, not you.

Kat - So, we're going to have a little bit of time now. I want you to show me what you can do because you play in night clubs, don't you? You've played this stuff out and people do dance to it.

Sam - Absolutely, yes. So, let's choose one of the examples in a way to start. So, this is an example called ("Tilburg")(music playing). So, this is going and so, I've got my basic tune around. It's very hard to play that. I can't fully hear myself. Normally, these beats are bashing out. So, I can turn the randomization off.

Kat - I do like my house music and this sounds pretty good.

Sam - It's nice, yeah. I start and stop it. Sorry, I made a mistake. So, you can make mistakes all the time. It's totally fine. So turn off bits, turn of the bass drum and then get the rhythm going again, and then drop a kick in again. Now, off we go. So, all I'm doing there is editing some very simple lines to make that happen.