Spiders are largely blind but experience the world through vibrations in their webs, which they detect with their legs. Now MIT materials scientist Markus Buehler has created a musical impression of that experience. His team made three-dimensional maps of the webs of tropical tent-web spiders, identified the vibrating frequency of each thread, and converted these frequencies into ranges that humans can hear. Threads that are closer to the spider sound louder in the recording.

“The spider web can be viewed as an extension of the body of the spider, in that it lives within it, but also uses it as a sensor,” Buehler told New Scientist. “When you go into the virtual reality world and you dive inside the web, being able to hear what’s going on allows you to understand what you see.”

(Thanks, Colin.)

Leonardo noted that studies of shadow appeal to the same geometric laws as those of perspective — “in matters perspectival, a light source is no different from the eye [… since] the visual ray is similar to the shadowy ray in terms of speed and converging lines.” Just as perspective considers a scene as regarded from a particular point of view, a shadow is a record of what “the lamp cannot see.”

Philosopher Roberto Casati writes, “This is a strong analogy. There is shadow where the light cannot see. Indeed, shadow is exactly what the light source cannot see. A lamp sees only the things that it illuminates; objects in shadow are behind lighted objects that screen the shadow from the lamp’s perspective. For this same reason, when we examine a shadow, we discover the profile of things from the point of view of the lamp. … Shadow allows us to see a point of view other than our own without even getting up from our seats.”

(From Casati’s Shadows, 2000, via Marko Uršič, Shadows of Being: Four Philosophical Essays, 2019.)

Russian photographer Lev Fedoseyev captured this drone footage on March 24 on the Kola Peninsula in the Arctic Circle.

When threatened, a herd of reindeer runs in a circle, making it hard for a predator to target any individual. The fawns are at the center.

On Aug. 2, 1980, a bomb exploded in the main railway station in Bologna, killing 85 people and wounding 200. The blast broke a large clock on the outside wall of the building. It was repaired and continued to run for 16 years, but the image of the clock with its hands fixed at 10:25 became a symbol of the event, and when it stopped working in 1996 its hands were set permanently to that time to commemorate the tragedy.

In 2009 psychologist Stefania de Vito and her colleagues surveyed 180 people who worked at the station or used the trains regularly. Of 173 who knew that the clock is now stopped, 92 percent said that it had always been broken. 79 percent, including all 21 railway employees surveyed, claimed to have seen it set always to 10:25. Of 56 citizens who regularly took part in the official annual commemoration, only 6 remembered correctly that the clock had been working in the past.

“These data indicate that individual memory distortions shared by a large group of people develop into collective false memories,” de Vito writes. In this case, the clock’s symbolic importance “acted as suggestive information and obscured the real experience of seeing the clock working, either as a misleading cue at retrieval or as catalysis for a semantic representation drawn from weak encoding.”

(Stefania de Vito, Roberto Cubelli, and Sergio Della Sala, “Collective Representations Elicit Widespread Individual False Memories,” Cortex 45:5 [2009], 686-687.)