Night owls will have a chance to see the stars this week as local astronomers set up sidewalk telescopes for the public.
Stargazers the world over will break out their viewing scopes this Friday and Saturday as part of International Sidewalk Astronomy Night. Organized by the Royal Astrological Society of Canada, it’s an annual event meant to get people interested in space.
This event is geared more towards us in the north, says Frank Florian, director of public programs at the Edmonton Telus World of Science — night falls too late for us to enjoy International Astronomy Day, which is in April.
Locals will have about five telescopes set up at the southwest corner of St. Albert Place on both nights, says astronomer Murray Paulson, ready to pick out stars and planets.
“We’ll be able to see the moon by the stars of the Pleiades on Saturday night,” he says, referring to a star cluster in the constellation Taurus. “Very early in the evening, we may be able to see the planet Venus in the twilight.” Mars will be high in the sky, and Saturn should drop by later that night.
The event runs from 8 to 11 p.m. on March 19 and 20. Contact Murray at 780-459-1168 or Sharon at 780-458-9345 for details.
Babies are born to dance, suggests a new study.
Research published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that babies have a built-in instinct to move rhythmically to music.
Researchers know very little about what causes entrainment, writes study author Marcel Zentner of the U.K.’s University of York, which is the tendency for people to spontaneously tap their fingers or feet to music. Previous studies suggested that it was a learned behaviour since young kids were pretty bad at moving to the beat.
Zentner and Tuomas Eerola of Finland’s University of Jyväskylä decided to test that theory. They took 120 babies aged five to 24 months and exposed them to clips of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Saint-SaĂ«n’s Carnaval des Animaux, and people speaking English and French. They also played random drum tracks, a fiddle song, and beat-only versions of the classical pieces.
The kids sat in their parent’s laps while they listened and had motion-tracking balls stuck to their limbs and head. The parents did not listen to the music, and were told to keep still during the experiment. Any motion that the kids repeated at least three times in a short period was considered intentional and rhythmic. Researchers filmed the kids and had professional ballet dancers judge how well they matched the beat.
The researchers found that the kids were more likely to move rhythmically to the music clips than the speech ones, including the beat-only tracks. This implies that the kids were more focused on the beat of the songs rather than their actual contents. They also found that the kids matched their movement to the tempo of the music, wiggling more when it sped up and less when it slowed down. The kids were also more likely to smile the more their movements matched the song’s rhythm.
The experiment suggests that moving to the beat is a natural, rather than learned behaviour, as there were no social cues in the experiment telling the kids to move as they did. Brain scans of adults suggest these motions may be built into the brain itself.
Why people evolved this response is anyone’s guess, the experimenters write.
