Month: December 2023

Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off Thursday night from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

It seems like SpaceX did everything this year but launch 100 times.

On Thursday night, the launch company sent two more rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket in commercial service, carrying the US military's X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 8:07 pm EST (01:07 UTC). Less than three hours later, at 11:01 pm EST (04:01 UTC), SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off a few miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Internet satellites.

The Falcon Heavy's two side boosters and the Falcon 9's first stage landed back on Earth for reuse.

Enlarge / The bundengan (left) began as a combined shelter/instrument for duck hunters but it is now often played onstage. (credit: Utrezz0707/CC BY-SA 4.0)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: the surprisingly complex physics of two simply constructed instruments: the Indonesian bundengan and the Australian Aboriginal didgeridoo (or didjeridu).

The bundengan is a rare, endangered instrument from Indonesia that can imitate the sound of metallic gongs and cow-hide drums (kendangs) in a traditional gamelan ensemble. The didgeridoo is an iconic instrument associated with Australian Aboriginal culture that produces a single, low-pitched droning note that can be continuously sustained by skilled players. Both instruments are a topic of scientific interest because their relatively simple construction produces some surprisingly complicated physics. Two recent studies into their acoustical properties were featured at an early December meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held in Sydney, Australia, in conjunction with the Australian Acoustical Society.

The bundengan originated with Indonesian duck hunters as protection from rain and other adverse conditions while in the field, doubling as a musical instrument to pass the time. It's a half-dome structure woven out of bamboo splits to form a lattice grid, crisscrossed at the top to form the dome. That dome is then coated with layers of bamboo sheaths held in place with sugar palm fibers. Musicians typically sit cross-legged inside the dome-shaped resonator and pluck the strings and bars to play. The strings produce metallic sounds while the plates inside generate percussive drum-like sounds.

Enlarge / A greater honeyguide (credit: Keabetswe Maposa)

With all the technological advances humans have made, it may seem like we’ve lost touch with nature—but not all of us have. People in some parts of Africa use a guide more effective than any GPS system when it comes to finding beeswax and honey. This is not a gizmo, but a bird.

The Greater Honeyguide (highly appropriate name), Indicator indicator (even more appropriate scientific name), knows where all the beehives are because it eats beeswax. The Hadza people of Tanzania and Yao people of Mozambique realized this long ago. Hadza and Yao honey hunters have formed a unique relationship with this bird species by making distinct calls, and the honeyguide reciprocates with its own calls, leading them to a hive.

Because the Hadza and Yao calls differ, zoologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge and anthropologist Brian Wood of UCLA wanted to find out if the birds respond generically to human calls, or are attuned to their local humans. They found that the birds are much more likely to respond to a local call, meaning that they have learned to recognize that call.

Enlarge / Aitana Lopez, an AI-generated influencer, has convinced many social media users she is real. (credit: FT montage/TheClueless/GettyImages)

Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret.

Brands have paid about $1,000 a post for her to promote their products on social media—despite the fact that she is entirely fictional.

Aitana is a “virtual influencer” created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21 billion content creator economy.