intricate

Detroit-born Zeena Parkins is best known as a maverick harp player, who has worked with everyone from Björk to Yoko Ono, Courtney Love to John Zorn. This album, however, foregrounds her role as a composer and conceptualist rather than as a musician. It continues something that started as a commission by Merce Cunningham’s dance studio in 2008, when Parkins devised a spartan, visual score to guide improvisers, based on lace patterns, a concept that she has been exploring ever since.skip past newsletter promotionGet music…

Nepo babies are all the rage, but few families have a business as niche as the McFerrins. Jazz vocalist Bobby is best known as the singer of Don’t Worry, Be Happy, the first a cappella song to top the US charts. More than three decades later, his daughter Madison picked up the baton, releasing two vocal-only EPs that looped and layered her voice into a faintly retro melange of soul and R&B.The artwork for I Hope You Can Forgive MeIt’s fair to say that the younger McFerrin’s work is significantly less grating than the…

Scientists are getting their first look with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s powerful resolution at how the formation of young stars influences the evolution of nearby galaxies. Webb MIRI image of NGC 7496, cropped and digitally enhanced. Credit: Science: NASA, ESA, CSA, Janice Lee (NOIRLab), Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)Young stars’ impact on galaxy evolution explored with PHANGS programThe saying goes, ‘From a tiny acorn grows the mighty oak.’ This is accurate not just here on Earth, but in our solar…

Nearly 60 years ago computer scientist Ruth Weiss of Bell Labs published a pioneering algorithm to turn three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional drawings from any angle. But she ran into a problem with depicting outlines—an issue that has remained a computational geometry riddle for decades. With the ubiquity of computer animation today, this “hidden line problem” is now even more pressing. The trickiest part of rendering a 3-D model in 2-D, a crucial step in computer animation, is the deceptively simple matter of…

The European Space Agency's (ESA) BepiColombo mission successfully completed its second flyby of Mercury, capturing 56 intricate images in the process, according to the agency. The joint project developed by the ESA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is tasked with examining the least explored planet in the inner solar system. During its closest approach to Mercury on June 23, the probe was around 200 km above the surface, capturing close-up images of the planet using its three onboard monitoring cameras.“We…

Scientists have created striking images using retired telescopes that feature intricate details on cosmic dust and clouds, which fill the space between stars, planets, and other celestial bodies. In order to create images of the cosmic dust and clouds, researchers have relied on data from various retired missions to capture the images of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), Triangulum galaxy (M33), and Magellanic clouds.The images, released by NASA, were taken using the European Space Agency (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, which…

When most people think of 3D printing, they likely picture a relatively chunky object being built from the bottom up, one layer at a time. A new technique, however, allows much more intricate items to be produced – and it does so by changing the color of laser light.Currently being developed by a team at Stanford University, the process is a variation on what is known as volumetric 3D printing.Putting it simply, that type of printing involves shining beams or patterns of light through the transparent top and sides of a…