Paleontologists aren’t easily deterred by evolutionary dead ends or a sparse fossil record. But in the last few years, they’ve developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. In the absence of a living specimen, scientists say, an ambling, flying, swimming, or slithering automaton is the next best thing for studying the behavior of extinct organisms. Learning more about how they moved can in turn shed light on aspects of their lives, such as their historic ranges and feeding habits.
Digital models already do a decent job of predicting animal biomechanics, but modeling complex environments like uneven surfaces, loose terrain, and turbulent water is challenging. With a robot, scientists can simply sit back and watch its behavior in different environments. “We can look at its performance without having to think of every detail, [as] in the simulation,” says John Nyakatura, an evolutionary biologist at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Indelibly though the various emperors are drawn, The Lives of the Caesars ranks as much more than a collection of individual biographies. Read in its entirety, it furnishes a sweeping analysis of how, over the course of a century and a half, autocracy came to bed itself down in the Roman state, evolve and replicate itself. It is a drama shaped as well by its interplay with a further dimension: that of the supernatural. So rooted in the diurnal realities of political life are Suetonius’s biographies that the intrusions of the otherworldly, no matter how repeatedly they occur, invariably deliver a jolt. Ghosts are glimpsed on lonely roads, phantoms on the banks of distant rivers, and portents everywhere.
Rocks, minerals, metals – these materials from the depths of the Earth and from distant space – have inspired reverence and horror, wonder and greed. They have power over us, and they give us power. It’s likely that the first murderer used a rock. So did the first artist. Our connection with the mineral world is bone deep.
In Under a Metal Sky, travel writer Philip Marsden follows the seam of this story from the defunct tin mines around his Cornish home to the untapped gold deposits of Svaneti, high in the Caucasus. How, he asks, have the materials we shape, shaped us? And what lies behind our often impractical desire to dig, chisel, smelt and collect?
Into this debate marches Morgan Falconer, an art critic and educator at Sotheby’s. His new book, “How To Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art,” proposes that a solution to this problem may be found among the enfant terribles of the early 20th century, who radically transformed our perception of what art can be with their unorthodox, confrontational, and irreverent methods. It’s an engrossing survey, full of colorful characters and winning personal touches. Like all good art, it ultimately raises more questions than it answers.