Early speech recognition sure came with a lot of probes

Hello, friends!

Whoo! Bank holiday weekend! And this week we have some suggestions on how to spend it, including tracking down stags (of the beetle variety), seeking a rare cloud, and creating hundreds of vortices with a common garden flower.

On the lecture slate this week we’re going all the way back to the early Universe, zooming past the icy satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, and arriving home just in time to ruminate on the art and science of digestion.

What will you discover this week?

This week’s kicks

Monday 27 May

🦌 🪲 STAAAAAG: This bank holiday Monday consider stalking some stag beetles, which are out and on the prowl at this time of year. Find them in woodlands, hedgerows, or in urban parks with lots of dead wood. They’re mostly active around twilight, often when it’s a bit balmy.

🍽️ The ones around the Thames Valley are some of the biggest in the world – they can reach up to 7.5 cm long. How big they get depends on how much they’ve eaten as a larva, which is how they spend most of their life.

🍆 They start leaving their underground lairs around mid-May, and after mating and laying their eggs, head to the dead wood pile in the sky.

📼 Scroll down this write-up by the Natural History Museum to watch one of the stags in crazy, bumbling flight on a street in Putney, and check out this video for a proper close up of one in Richmond Park. (Also enjoy the excellent commentary by one of the children.)

Tuesday 28 May

🚀 Live launch: ESA’s EarthCARE mission is set to launch on Tuesday night, its goal to find out more about the role of clouds and aerosols in heating and cooling Earth’s atmosphere. Tune in around half 10pm to watch it lift off from California in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Wednesday 29 May

💥 First light: revealing the early Universe, hybrid event held by Conway Hall, 19.00, free: Astronomy professor and Sky At Night face Chris Lintott talks about what the cosmic microwave background – the oldest light in the Universe – has taught us, including what it can tell us about conditions at the dawn of time.

Thursday 30 May

🥶 Discoveries at the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, hybrid event held by the Royal Society, 18.30, free: Professor Michele Dougherty discusses what we learnt from Cassini, which for 13 years delivered some stunning intel about Saturn and its moons, and what we hope to learn with ESA’s Juice mission, due to reach Jupiter in 2031.

📻 Listen to your gut, hybrid event held by the Wellcome Collection, 19.00, free: Health lecturer Elsa Richardson, food writer (and Bake Off finalist) Ruby Tandoh, artist Jenna Sutela and historian Subhadra Das share their perspectives on the art, science and history of digestion, inspired by Richardson’s new book Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut.

Friday 31 May

🌬️ Blow a dandelion clock, marvel at fluid dynamics: If you happen upon a dandelion clock (Taraxacum officinale) flower this week and give it a blow (how could you not?), freeing hundreds of seeds and watching them dance off on the breeze, give a thought to what’s keeping them aloft.

🪂 Research in 2018 found that just above the parachute-like structure holding the seed (called a pappus), there’s a vortex creating a bubble of low pressure which keeps it in flight, sometimes for kilometres.

Saturday 1 June

💡They made what?, 1968: This speech recognition patent published in Science News. This invasive-looking piece of apparatus (is that five different probes in that guy’s face?) measures the wearer’s lip and face movements and air velocity through the mouth and nose to interpret speech.

Sunday 2 June

☁️ Look out for an elusive cloud: The nights are getting shorter so there is less stargazing to be done, but keep looking up as it’s peak noctilucent cloud season until July.

🌌 Noctilucent clouds are wispy, glowing, silvery clouds that appear in the late evening or early morning sky. They’re made up of suspended ice-coated dust particles that are illuminated by the Sun when it’s below the horizon.

🧭 They’re pretty rare, not to mention unpredictable, but for the best chance of spotting them if they do appear, look up an hour or so after sunset or before sunrise somewhere you’ll get a good clear view of a lot of sky. Evening cloud hunters, look west. Morning sky gazers, look northeast.

We need answers

Last week I asked:

The answer is… coffee. (As it so often is.)

Until next week...

In 1903, a demonstration of a new technology at the Royal Institution was disrupted when this message was received:

“There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily...”

What now common occurrence was this disruption an early example of?

Answer comes next week. See you then! x