Would you be interested in hearing spider songs? MIT researchers have created haunting (albeit confused and jumbled) music out of spider webs; they created 3D scans of the webs and assigned different notes to different strands and made the melody based on how spiders constructed the webs over time. The researchers are looking into the possibility of influencing spiders’ behavior using the music, as they sense the world primarily through their webs’ vibrations. Read full article here
Education
Overcoming Bias
Kai Cheng’s professor had a brilliant scheme. In his first lecture, he promised that each lecture would feature a “Lie of the Day”. But why? It made his students more attentive and analytical, poring over every detail of his lecture and making sense of why things were true. It was such a powerful teaching method that his students digested his most technical lectures quite easily because they tried so hard to catch his lie. The kicker? There was no lie in that first lecture; he had lied about that too! Read full article here
Merv
August 17, 2022
