Rorotoko: scholars, artists and thinkers on their own work, in their own words

Memory doesn't retrieve the past: memory makes the present.

An hourlong work for speaking voice and string quartet, built around Beckett's last prose, uses memory as its raw material. Musical events return, arrive early and open inside one another, so the past changes the size and meaning of the present.

Stirrings Still

Roman-period mourners used cattail fluff bedding to make graves resemble places of rest

A lump in museum storage labelled a moss pillow turned out, under the microscope, to be something else entirely. The find widens into a question about what archaeology can and cannot see.

Pillows, mattresses or log coffin linings: Use of cattail (Typha sp.) in Roman period funerary rituals at Czarnówko in Pomerania

What to feed them as they grow from paralarvae to juveniles and finally to adults remains a mystery.

Two obstacles, one biological and one political. Nobody has worked out what to feed a newly hatched octopus, despite decades of research, and until they do there is no industry. And if they do, the objectors are already waiting: American states have banned octopus farming outright, though not one octopus has ever been farmed in North America. In the nineteenth century it was the devil-fish; now it’s a beloved cultural icon.

Life on the Octopus Farm: The Ethics and Future of Growing the World's Most Intelligent Invertebrate

A very powerful woman's story

A phone hidden in a baby's diaper became a young mother's way of telling her story from detention in Libya. The rescue in the title is hers.

Rescue

The TLE that hit the ER-2 produced very strong UV signals but comparatively weak IR.

The pilot remembered the storm shooting lasers at him. Ultraviolet signals and a purple hue told researchers what the lasers were, and why the next generation of lightning sensors needs to see in the UV.

Detection and Analysis of an Upward Jet-Like Electrical Discharge Intercepting a High-Altitude Research Aircraft

In a flash, one of them climbs onto the bike and rides off.

Day one of a new job, up a ladder, pasting Rita Hayworth to a wall half by half. Some men circle between the parked cars; in a flash the bike is gone, an accomplice fakes concern, another points the wrong way down the road. The street sounds give way to a swelling score, the camera cranes back, and within seconds a bicycle has stopped being a bicycle.

Bicycle Thieves

A giant Jurassic dipluran shows that hidden mouthparts evolved more than once.

A 165-million-year-old fossil from Inner Mongolia looks like a textbook dipluran, except its jaws sit outside its head. That single detail suggests hidden mouthparts evolved separately in three groups, overturning the idea that they share one ancestral origin.

A Jurassic giant with its mouthparts showing

Life is what you can get away with, and so is making a record.

A poet left alone in a vocal booth, session after session, produced a catalog of old poems, songs and stories. When six busy musicians could not gather in one room, that catalog and a rule against heavy gear shaped the record.

Sing the Color Blue