Artists hope their work will stand the test of time, but now a Canadian writer is using science to create a poem that could live forever.
Christian Bök, an experimental poet and associate professor of English at the University of Calgary, is working on a piece he plans to encipher and insert into the genetic code of an "extremophile" bacterium, one that is tough enough to survive conditions that would wipe out the human race.
He notes that others have already stored enciphered text in strands of bacterial DNA, including the lyrics to It's a Small World After All. But his poem will be the first that actually contains instructions for a protein or, as he sees it, a second poem.
Prof. Bök says his "xenotext" experiment has received $120,000 in funding from various government agencies, and it turns out that the scientific element is not at all farfetched. Collaborators will be able to put his poem into a bacterium that could keep it alive for millions of years.
But the fact that words really can live forever doesn't make it any easier to come up with 50 of them that deserve immorality.
Prof. Bök has written a software program that produces lists of words that would make both a poem and protein. (Each letter of the alphabet is assigned to a tiny piece of DNA that codes for an amino acid, the building blocks of proteins.) But the vocabulary is very limited, and few of the words are interesting. (Also, some of the basics are lacking, such as the word "the.") A winner of the 2002 Griffin Award for poetry, Prof. Bök is determined to keep at it, but says he has yet to write anything he feels is worthy.
"They are very short, haiku-like things," he says, "that aren't very interesting."
NOT SEEING IS BELIEVING The part of our brain that helps us to avoid obstacles - such as not knocking over the coffee cup when you reach over to grab the jam at the breakfast table - may not involve actually seeing what's in the way.
That's the conclusion of a study done at the University of Waterloo with a patient who was left with impaired vision after a stroke damaged the part of his brain that processes visual information.
Researchers sat the man, who was blind in the left side of his visual field in both eyes, at a table and asked him to touch a strip of paper. He would avoid an obstacle - a rectangular block - when it was placed in his right visual field near the target.
But he would do the same when it was placed on his left, even though he could not see it there.
This suggests that avoiding obstacles depends on an ancient visual pathway in the brain that bypasses the areas involved in conscious sight, says Mel Goodale, of the University of Western Ontario's department of psychology.
He and Waterloo colleague Chris Striemer published their findings in a recent edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
ULTIMATE PHOTO OP A team of U.S. and Australian astronomers claims to have found the coldest, driest, calmest location on Earth - and the best place in the world to observe the heavens.
It is known as Ridge A, on the Antarctic Plateau, and data from satellite and ground stations suggest that, because of the stable weather and lack of wind, images of the sky taken there would be three times sharper than those taken anywhere else.
COMMUNICATING BY TOUCH
Touch can be used to communicate emotions. That's the conclusion of study published in the journal Emotion by Indiana-based psychologist Matthew Hertenstein.
He and his colleagues asked more than 120 volunteers to try to convey either anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust love, gratitude or sympathy by touching any appropriate body part of another volunteer who had been blindfolded.
Afterward, those who were touched were given a list of eight emotions and asked which they thought had been conveyed (they also could say none of the above).They were correct on average 50 to 78 per cent of the time.
Dr. Hertenstein says most touches lasted only five seconds and (surprise, surprise), anger was often communicated with pushing or shaking, while sympathy was translated into hugging or rubbing.