Learn Perfect Pitch

Perfect pitch was once a skill believed to be attainable only by musical prodigies like Mozart or Mariah Carey but, according to new research, it’s possible for any human adult to acquire it. Researchers at the University of Chicago recently worked with 17 college students to train their brains into recognizing distinct music notes by listening to and then recreating them. The subjects were invited …

Ancient Manuscript Reveals Medicine’s Beginnings

When Syriac scholar Dr Gregory Kessel first handled the ancient medicinal manuscript “On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs,” he immediately knew he had encountered it before. Kessel recalled a stray page at a Harvard library that looked eerily similar and, it turns out, it was one of seven missing pages from the influential text. An ensuing international page-hunt provided five more strays leaving …

Quindar: Twin-Pole Sunshade

Quindar is a newly formed musical project between Wilco’s Mikael Jorgensen and art historian James Merle Thomas (currently a postdoc scholar at USC). Their music, which remixes NASA’s audio and video archive, is a creative extension of Thomas’ research, which explores the connections between postwar American avant-garde art and NASA. The title song from their two-track EP “Twin-Pole Sunshade” walks listeners through NASA’s 1973 Skylab …