Like a pane of glass :)

 

To this beetle, water's like a pane of glass.

Being quite small, insects can have a very different relationship with the water-air interface than larger animals do. Surface tension allows for insects like water striders to skate along the top of still waters, for example. But new research reveals an unusual way to tread along this boundary: from the underside. 

A water-dwelling beetle can scuttle upside-down along the underside of the water’s surface, as if the water were a solid pane of glass, researchers report June 28 in Ethology. It’s the first detailed documentation of a beetle moving in this manner, which is known only in precious few animal groups.

Minute moss beetles (one pictured) can reportedly walk along the underside of the water’s surface, a rare ability in the animal kingdom. UDO SCHMIDT/FLICKR (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Remember ... its just the beginning ...

Well, first it was the Southwest, now, it's the Northwest as both regions have experienced heat waves beyond belief, courtesy ... Global Warming.

A blistering heat wave obliterated high temperature records in Oregon and Washington over the weekend, ratcheting up risks for deaths and fires, and underscoring the dangers of climate change.

Portland, Oregon’s biggest city, hit a sweltering all-time high of 112 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday at its international airport, the National Weather Service said. That broke a record of 108 F set just a day earlier. 

Both days topped the previous record of 107 F, reached in 1981 and 1965.

The temperature in Salem, Oregon’s capital, soared to 113 F yesterday, smashing a record of 108 F hit in 1941 and 1927.

And this.

Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Shatters Temperature Records

Cliff divers line up along the Clackamas River at High Rocks Park on Sunday in Gladstone, Ore., near Portland. Record breaking temperatures lingered over the Northwest during a historic heatwave.Credit...Nathan Howard/Getty Images

A heat dome has enveloped the Pacific Northwest, driving temperatures to extreme levels — with temperatures well above 100 degrees — and creating dangerous conditions in a part of the country unaccustomed to oppressive summer weather or air-conditioning.

One of the hottest cities in the region on Monday was Salem, Ore., about 45 miles southwest of Portland, where it reached 117 degrees in the afternoon, a record for the city, the National Weather Service said.

At Portland International Airport in Oregon, it reached 115 degrees on Monday, after it had reached 112 degrees on Sunday. The high on Monday in Portland was the highest temperature ever recorded there since historical records began in 1940, the National Weather Service said.

The average high temperature for this time of year at the airport is about 73 degrees, said forecasters.

Remember ... its just the beginning.

Addendum: Ground temps were even worse.

Ground temperatures were on another level in the Pacific Northwest this week.

Image: European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-3

The air temperatures during the region's record heat wave were bad enough. The ground temperatures will make you want to curl into the fetal position.

Air temperatures during record-setting heat wave in the Pacific Northwest were bad enough. But the ground was on a whole other level.

Stunning new satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3 satellite shows ground temperatures reached as high as 145 degrees Fahrenheit (63 degrees Celsius) in Wenatchee, Washington. Apparently even the Earth we stand on isn’t safe from the climate crisis.

Any questions?

Venus, no, Jupiter, yes ... potentially

Venus is hot right now, with three missions expected to launch to the planet in the late 2020s. NASA/JPL-Caltec

Seems Venus is way too dry to sustain life if research by planetary scientists proves out to be true while Jupiter is a different story indeed.

The clouds of Venus have captivated Earthlings for decades. They form a dazzling mirror that obscures the planet's surface and, in the 1950s, one Israeli scholar even speculated that the clouds may hide a world teeming with insect life capable of enduring the extreme heat. 

When Russia's Venera spacecraft took images of the surface in 1975, there were no insects to be found. Venus is a desolate hellscape, the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect that has sent temperatures on the ground soaring to well over 850 degrees Fahrenheit -- hot enough to melt lead. But in the clouds, more temperate climes await any would-be alien lifeforms. 

Up in the atmosphere, life might just find a way.

At least, that was one hypothesis. It can happen on Earth... so why not elsewhere? Last year, the idea that microbes might call the atmosphere of Venus home was bolstered by a study that claimed to have discovered elevated levels of phosphine -- an unstable gas associated with biological activity -- in the cloud deck of our sister planet. That spawned the theory that microbes in the clouds could be producing the gas.

As scientists untangled the phosphine signal, though, the possibility that it was a sign of life in Venus' clouds looked less and less likely. 

On Monday, the likelihood of a drifting community of microbes in the clouds took another blow.

In a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers rule out the possibility of life -- as we know it -- existing in the Venusian clouds. The clouds are uninhabitable.

Why? Because ...

Any potential microbe floating through the Venus clouds would find itself in an extremely hostile environment. About 30 to 44 miles above the surface, up in the clouds, it's more dry than the Earth's most expansive subtropical desert: the Sahara.

"The Venus clouds are a whole order of magnitude more dry than the Sahara," said Hallsworth, noting that the Sahara has around 0.25 water activity, while the clouds of Venus come in at just 0.004 water activity. That figure for Venus  is simply far too extreme to support any life we know of. 

"The most dry-tolerant microbe on Earth wouldn't stand a chance in Venus," Hallsworth said. 

Venus is magnitudes more dry than the Sahara, the third-driest desert on Earth. Florian Kaiser/Getty

But Jupiter's a different story.

The gas giant Jupiter looms over all the planets that orbit the sun. It's monstrous and, like Venus, it's famous for its clouds. When the research team analyzed water activity in Jupiter's atmosphere, they found it was at a high enough level to permit habitation by microbes.

"We absolutely hadn't expected that," said Hallsworth. 

Using readings from NASA's Galileo probe, which launched in 1989 and released a probe into the gas giant's atmosphere in 1995, the team revealed somewhere beneath Jupiter's roiling, swirling face, there are conditions permissible for life. 

The water activity within Jupiter's roiling clouds are permissible for life. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Image processing by Kevin M. Gill

Arthur C. Clarke talked about life finding a way on Jupiter in 2010 Odyssey Two

A whole new chapter of evolution, as alien as that which he had glimpsed on Europa, was opening before him. There were jet-propelled torpedoes like the squids of the terrestrial oceans, hunting and devouring the huge gasbags. But the balloons were no defenseless; some of them fought back with electric thunderbolts and with clawed tentacles like kilometer-long chainsaws.

There were even stranger shapes, exploiting almost every possibility of geometry -- bizarre, translucent kites, tetrahedra, spheres, polyhedra, tangles of twisted ribbons... The gigantic plankton of the Jovian atmosphere, they were designed to float like gossamer in the uprising currents, until they had lived long enough to reproduce; then they would be swept down into the depths to be carbonized and recycled in a new generation.

Clarke may be right after all.

A probe to Jovian clouds would be cool without question. :)

Questions, questions

 Have said this for years ...

In 18 of the incidents, "unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics" were observed, including the ability to "remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion."

Despite the intriguing sightings, U.S. intelligence analysts could only explain one of the sightings, which was a large balloon deflating.

Colonel John B. Alexander, who developed an interagency task force to explore UFOs while in the U.S. Army in the 1980s, said that if the phenomena are extraterrestrial, they are likely far beyond what humans are capable of understanding with our current faculties.

"Whatever this is, it is more complex than we can possibly imagine," Alexander told Fox News. "We're not at the point of even asking the right questions, much less expecting simple answers."

Questions, questions indeed.

Limits of knowledge rev XX

Blue indigo

Night for Day

Open window

Stone wall

Solitude

 Emergence

All these pix show aspects of the great invisible whether it be Night for Day or the infrared driven images of Solitude and Blue Indigo as our eyes cannot see reality in a light spectrum outside of the tiny subset of what we see without the aid of tech. 

The visible light spectrum is the segment of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can view. More simply, this range of wavelengths is called visible light. Typically, the human eye can detect wavelengths from 380 to 700 nanometers.

As for the stone wall, this image indirectly shows the passage of time with the oldest at the bottom and the latest at the top. As for Open Window & Emergence, darkness invokes mystery even in the bright of day.

To yours truly, the limits of knowledge resides everywhere, even in the commonplace as depicted in the pictures seen above. :)

Seeing from afar

The scientists identified 1,715 star systems where alien observers could have discovered Earth in the past 5,000 years by watching it ‘transit’ across the face of the sun. Photograph: c/o Cornell

Seeing from afar applies here when aliens are checking us out from their perspective and not ours.

To whit.

For centuries, Earthlings have gazed at the heavens and wondered about life among the stars. But as humans hunted for little green men, the extraterrestrials might have been watching us back.

In new research, astronomers have drawn up a shortlist of nearby star systems where any inquisitive inhabitants on orbiting planets would be well placed to spot life on Earth.

The scientists identified 1,715 star systems in our cosmic neighborhood where alien observers could have discovered Earth in the past 5,000 years by watching it “transit” across the face of the sun.

Contact applies here does it not?

Great book, terrific movie without question. 

No words needed ...

 

Land Surface Temperature in the Arctic, June 2021: Copernicus Sentinel

No words needed ...

If you have been thinking that this year’s summer is quite bad, spare a thought for the poor souls in the Arctic. Surface temperatures near Verkhojansk peaked at 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) on June 20. The Arctic circle is known for its snow caps and sub-zero temperatures. 

The temperatures were recorded by the Copernicus Sentinel 3A and 3B satellites. The Copernicus program is run by the European Space Agency and monitoring land, ocean, and atmospheric conditions using radar and multi-spectral imaging. Each Sentinel mission consists of two constellation satellites to ensure coverage and robustness of data. 

Thinking yellow & L'Étranger

A touch of yellow

Life finds a way ... always

Black Eyed Susan

Buttercup

When taking these pix, yours truly indirectly thinks of Camus & L'Étranger... 

Comme si cette rage aveugle m'avait lavé, me débarrasse de l'espoir ; pour la première fois, dans cette nuit pleine de signes et d'étoiles, je m'ouvrais à la bienveillante indifférence du monde.

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the benign indifference of the world.

The Sentinel

The Copernicus Sentinel-6 Poseidon-4 dual-frequency (C- and Ku-band) radar altimeter uses an innovative interleaved mode that has improved performance compared to previous satellite altimeter designs. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

Monitoring sea level rise goes prime time with the Copernicus Sentinel.

Following liftoff last November and more than six months spent carefully calibrating the most advanced mission dedicated to measuring sea-level rise, Copernicus Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich is now operational – meaning that its data are available to climate researchers, ocean-weather forecasts and other data users.

Why it's important.

Sea-level rise is a key indicator of climate change so accurately monitoring the changing height of the sea surface over decades is essential for climate science, for policy-making and, ultimately, for protecting the lives of those in low-lying regions at risk.

Improvement of Sentinel-6 significant wave height with respect to Jason-3. Over the last six months Copernicus Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich has been orbiting in tandem with current altimetry reference mission, Jason-3, so that the satellites have the same ‘view’ of the ocean. Establishing the differences between Sentinel-6 and Jason-3 is important if stability in the sea-level rise time series from satellite altimetry is to be maintained. The plot shows the standard deviation of the significant wave height over ocean for different significant wave heights for a full 10-day cycle of Copernicus Sentinel-6 and Jason-3 using low-resolution mode data. Significant wave height is defined as the upper-third of wave height for a given sample of sea state. The plot highlights the improved (lower) significant wave height noise from Copernicus Sentinel-6 compared to Jason-3. The background bar chart shows the percentage number of data points as a function of the significant wave height (0.1 m binning). Credit: CLS

Sightings

 Yet another random walk. :)

Says it all ...

Illustration: Sam Rodriguez

Glen Gould, the electrified and connected recluse, is my favorite pianist. Intense, passionate, intellectual and equipped with technique to the 9s, his take on Bach, Beethoven and Scriabin remains forever timeless.

J.S.Bach "The Goldberg Variations" [ Glenn Gould ] (1955)

"No supreme pianist has ever given of his heart and mind so overwhelmingly while showing himself so sparingly,” said Gould's close friend, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Says it all indeed.

Random Walk XX

A short clip ranging from water to flowers in yet another random walk taken by yours truly. :)

Altogether now ...

Migrating cranes near Straussfurt, Germany. Climate change and biodiversity are “more deeply intertwined than originally thought,” one of the leaders of the new report said.Credit...Jens Meyer/Associated Press

Biodiversity and climate change are two sides of the same coin and both must be addressed simultaneously if we are to save ourselves from a dark future of our own making. Rewild the world as per David Attenborough is the first thing to do now as without the natural world and its inherent link to biodiversity, civilization, as we know it, will be gone in a flash. 

Some environmental solutions are win-win, helping to rein in global warming and protecting biodiversity, too. But others address one crisis at the expense of the other. Growing trees on grasslands, for example, can destroy the plant and animal life of a rich ecosystem, even if the new trees ultimately suck up carbon.

What to do?

Unless the world stops treating climate change and biodiversity collapse as separate issues, neither problem can be addressed effectively, according to a report issued Thursday by researchers from two leading international scientific panels.

Everything's connected including GW and biodiversity

Young mangrove trees on the outskirts of Ziguinchor, the main town in the Casamance region of Senegal. Credit...John Wessels/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The two groups have operated largely in their own silos. But their subjects are connected by something elemental, literally: carbon itself.

The same element that makes up heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and soot is also a fundamental building block of the natural world. It helps form the very tissue of plants and animals on earth. It’s stored in forests, wetlands, grasslands and on the ocean floor. In fact, land and water ecosystems are already stashing away half of human-generated emissions.

Another connection between climate and biodiversity: People have created emergencies on both fronts by using the planet’s resources in unsustainable ways.

Time to shape up, right?

 

The Alien ... Earth style :)

Morays are Earth's version of the Alien as seen by the clip above. Awesome without question. :)

All bony fishes — those with skeletons made mostly of bone, rather than cartilage — have pharyngeal jaws in addition to their main jaws. Pharyngeal jaws lie behind the pharynx, or throat. They are smaller than the jaws in fishes' mouths and are used for gripping and piercing or crushing food, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. 

But unlike most fishes' pharyngeal jaws, those in moray eels "are highly mobile" and can spring past the throat and into the morays' mouths, said Rita Mehta, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Long muscles pull morays' pharyngeal jaws forward to grasp prey and then slide it down their throats. (Image credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation (after Rita Mehta, UC Davis))

Our homegrown alien indeed. :)

Draught 101

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor·Conditions during the first week of June.

Anybody buying a house in AZ is nuts.

An intense drought is gripping the American West. Extreme conditions are more widespread than at any point in at least 20 years, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the government’s official drought-tracking service.

And the hottest months of summer are still to come.

The same applies to FL.

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor

Any questions?

It's getting worse ...

A temperature "misery index" shows peak levels across the Southwest (orange and yellow), and the upper air flow shows how the jet stream is being pushed north, away from the heat dome parked over the Four Corners region. (Earth.nullschool.net)

By the numbers: In Death Valley, Calif., which holds the distinction of having recorded the hottest temperature on Earth, the June high-temperature record of 129°F is likely to be threatened Wednesday and Thursday. Death Valley hit 124°F on Tuesday.

The average temperature there for this time of year is about 110°F.

Several noteworthy records were tied or fell on Tuesday, including:

• 107°F in Salt Lake City, tying the city’s all-time record for anytime of the year and beating its previous record for hottest temperature in June, which had stood at 106°F.
• Billings, Montana also tied its all-time hottest temperature on record for any month with a high of 108°F on Tuesday.
• Laramie, Wyo. tied its all-time high temperature record of 94°F on Tuesday.

Again, we did it to ourselves.

20%

 The ice shelf on Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier lost about one-fifth of its area from 2017 to 2020, mostly in three dramatic breaks. (Image credit: Joughin et al./Science Advances)

Global warming, the 900lb gorilla, is alive and well but we already know that, right?

Pine Island Glacier, one of the fastest-shrinking glaciers in Antarctica, hastened its slide into the sea between 2017 and 2020, when one-fifth of its associated ice shelf broke off as massive icebergs, a new study reveals.

The glacier sped up another time in recent history, between the 1990s and 2009, when warm ocean currents ate away at the underside of the ice shelf, destabilizing its structure and causing the glacier to accelerate toward open water, according to a 2010 report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

(a) Modeled velocity constrained to match the 1996 (GL96) flow speed. The lower-right inset shows the grounding-line positions as observed in 1996 (cyan) and 2009 (magenta). Figure 1a shows the modeled grounding lines, which for simplicity exclude the isolated, grounded region in 2009. (b) Profiles (along black line in Figure 1a) of measured (color) and modeled flow speed (grayscale). Only the average for the three pre-retreat models constrained by the 1996 data (GL96) are shown, since they are almost identical. The GL09 curves show the different model responses to instantaneously moving the grounding line from the 1996 to 2009 position. Black bar indicates the region that ungrounded.

GW acceleration enters primetime 24/7.

Makeup :)

So glad I'm a guy save for the shaving bit. :)

 

Fabbing

 

The last step in AI ascendency is the ability for said tech to design chips in just 6 hours versus the 6 month  process done by us. Warms the cockles of one's heart does it not?

Google says it has developed a way of using deep reinforcement learning (RL) to create computer chip floorplanning in just six hours — a complicated feat that typically requires humans months to achieve. 

The chips Google's AI develops are on par or superior than those humans can create, the team explained in its paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, June 9. 

In a first for one of its commercial products, Google's research is being used for the company's upcoming tensor processing unit (TPU) chips, which are optimized for AI computation.

So Google's AI method to design chips can eventually be used to improve and quicken the future development of AI. 

Perhaps our final invention? "No one knows, do one ..."  - Fats Waller

Invisibilities

This pix, taken by yours truly, represents an object with great invisibilities as we see nothing of how the building was made, the raw materials used or the tech involved to erect said sky scraper in the first place and ... we haven's even discussed basic research in learning about what base materials needed to be known beforehand prior to building the construct in the first place. What's interesting about this is the fact the great invisibility applies to virtually everything in reality from dust motes to the universe as everything's connected at levels we will never fully understand.

An illustration of M4, the sponge after four iterations of the construction process

Beginning in 2013, yours truly became fascinated by the fact infinities reside in finite space as shown by geniuses Georg Cantor, Karl Menger and Benoit Mandelbrot, among significant others, which became a series of blurbs in BRT indirectly connecting to the great invisibilities of everything known to exist in a entangled reality we will never fully understand. 

The eyes have it

The eyes have it. The larger the pupil, the smarter the person as per Scientific American.

It has been said that “the eyes are the window to the soul,” but new research suggests that they may be a window to the brain as well.

Our pupils respond to more than just the light. They indicate arousal, interest or mental exhaustion. Pupil dilation is even used by the FBI to detect deception. Now work conducted in our laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that baseline pupil size is closely related to individual differences in intelligence. The larger the pupils, the higher the intelligence, as measured by tests of reasoning, attention and memory. In fact, across three studies, we found that the difference in baseline pupil size between people who scored the highest on the cognitive tests and those who scored the lowest was large enough to be detected by the unaided eye.

Factoid ...

To be clear, pupil size refers to the diameter of the black circular aperture in the center of the eye. It can range from around two to eight millimeters. The pupil is surrounded by the colorful area known as the iris, which is responsible for controlling the size of the pupil. Pupils constrict in response to bright light, among other things, so we kept the laboratory dim for all participants.

As per Col. Nathan Jessup, Are we clear? :)

Something else altogether

Quantum computing - Something else altogether ...

By a whisker :)

Northwestern University scientists have developed the first mechanical simulation of a rat whisker inside its follicle, to better understand how that sensory input is communicated to the brain.

So many animals have whiskers. From cats to rats to seals, said mammals come equipped with a sensory aparatus us rubes don't have and ... researchers finally learned how whiskers actually work.

Rats, cats, and many other mammals have whiskers, which they typically use to sense their surrounding environment, akin to the sense of touch. But scientists have yet to precisely determine the means by which whiskers communicate that sense of touch to the brain. Now an interdisciplinary team at Northwestern University has come up with a new model to help predict how a rat's whiskers activate different sensory cells to do just that, according to a new paper published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. Such work could one day enable scientists to build artificial whiskers as tactile sensors in robotics as well as shed further light on human touch.

Mechanics is key to a whisker's tactile sensation. When a whisker is deflected, its deformation profile within the follicle determines the activity of different groups of mechanoreceptors.

Seems it's how they bend.

Hartmann et al. found that rat whiskers are most likely to bend in an "S" shape within the follicle when they touch an object. This bending then pushes or pulls on the sensor cells, triggering them to send touch signals to the brain. The same bending profile results regardless of whether the whisker brushes against an object or is externally touched. And both intrinsic muscle contraction and an increase in blood pressure can improve the tactile sensitivity of the system.

"Our model demonstrates consistency in the whisker deformation profile between passive touch and active whisking," said co-author Yifu Luo, a graduate student in Hartmann's lab. "In other words, the same group of sensory cells will respond when the whisker is deflected in the same direction under both conditions. This result suggests that some types of experiments to study active whisking can be done in an anesthetized animal."

How cool is that? :)

Since 1820 ...

 When two fluids move past each other at different speeds, complex instabilities arise. Mathematicians want to prove that the Navier-Stokes equations can predict what will happen in every possible case.

This exquisite gif showing fluids moving at different speeds is both hypnotic and beguiling at the same time. Seems the very complex but reliable Naiver-Stokes equations are also as described in the Quanta article titled Mathematicians Find Wrinkle in Famed Fluid Equations. 

The Navier-Stokes equations capture in a few succinct terms one of the most ubiquitous features of the physical world: the flow of fluids. The equations, which date to the 1820s, are today used to model everything from ocean currents to turbulence in the wake of an airplane to the flow of blood in the heart.

While physicists consider the equations to be as reliable as a hammer, mathematicians eye them warily. To a mathematician, it means little that the equations appear to work. They want proof that the equations are unfailing: that no matter the fluid, and no matter how far into the future you forecast its flow, the mathematics of the equations will still hold. Such a guarantee has proved elusive. The first person (or team) to prove that the Navier-Stokes equations will always work — or to provide an example where they don’t — stands to win one of seven Millennium Prize Problems endowed by the Clay Mathematics Institute, along with the associated $1 million reward.

George Gabriel Stokes

Claude-Louis Navier

In lock step

 

In lock step happens if tipping points cascade to generate global changes in a given system, a scenario that may jump start a climate catastrophe for the ages if the Earth System Dynamics research rings true. 

Ice sheets and ocean currents at risk of climate tipping points can destabilise each other as the world heats up, leading to a domino effect with severe consequences for humanity, according to a risk analysis.

Tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts. Some large ice sheets in Antarctica are thought to already have passed their tipping points, meaning large sea-level rises in coming centuries.

The new research examined the interactions between ice sheets in West Antarctica, Greenland, the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream and the Amazon rainforest. The scientists carried out 3m computer simulations and found domino effects in a third of them, even when temperature rises were below 2C, the upper limit of the Paris agreement.

The study showed that the interactions between these climate systems can lower the critical temperature thresholds at which each tipping point is passed. It found that ice sheets are potential starting points for tipping cascades, with the Atlantic currents acting as a transmitter and eventually affecting the Amazon.

Figure 1Interactions between climate tipping elements and their roles in tipping cascades. The Greenland Ice Sheet, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the Amazon rainforest are depicted along with their main interactions (Kriegler et al., 2009). The links between the tipping elements are colour coded, where red arrows depict destabilising and blue arrows depict stabilising interactions. 

We did this to ourselves.

Bach, Bernstien & Gould/Sublime without question

It doesn't get any better than this, an exquisite educational take on music, grace under performance pressure and, above all else, artistic virtuosity and heart felt respect given to Bach's Keyboard Concerto No. 1 (I) in D minor performed at the highest level by two great artists and a wonderful orchestra.

1891 ...

1891, the first color photographs goes prime time, courtesy French physicist Gabriel Lippmann.

A physics professor at the Sorbonne, Lippmann became interested in developing a means of fixing the colors of the solar spectrum onto a photographic plate in 1886, "whereby the image remains fixed and can remain in daylight without deterioration." He achieved that goal in 1891, producing color images of a stained-glass window, a bowl of oranges, and a colorful parrot, as well as landscapes and portraits—including a self-portrait. (Fun fact: Lippmann's laboratory protégés included a promising Polish physics student named Marie Skłodowska, who went on to marry Pierre Curie and win two Nobel Prizes of her own.)

A visionary to the max.