Fast Company reports that the “hard drive style” device is a three-square-inch piece of quartz glass on which up to 100GB of data, or roughly 20,000 songs, is etched using a femtosecond laser. Machine learning algorithms can then access the information by analyzing patterns created when light is shone through the translucent material. Importantly, it is estimated that the data can be retrieved from the device up to 10,000 years later — even if it is exposed to extreme heat or electromagnetic pulse.

Microsoft, who partnered with Global Music Vault on Project Silica, estimates that the common hard drive can store data for roughly five years before it begins to degrade. As the software giant shifts more and more of its business to the cloud, it has come to seek out more reliable ways to store information.

“With over 4 million music producers globally, and over 60,000 songs being released just on Spotify every day, today’s digital and physical data storage solutions are quickly becoming outdated, irrelevant and a risk to our future,” said Global Music Vault Managing Director Luke Jenkison. “We not only want to put this high on the global music industry agenda, we want to work with the best companies in the world to find solutions. As we want to offer the global music ecosystem an eternal solution, we believe that Microsoft’s Silica is that exact solution for our storage needs.”

The developers of Project Silica successfully stored and retrieved the 1978 film Superman in 2019. As part of a new promotion for the device, the Global Music Vault will house platters storing recordings from the International Library of African Music, the Polar Music Prize, and the National Library of New Zealand.

More information on Project Silica is available on the Microsoft website.

The report states that beaches across the Balearic Islands (the Spanish archipelago where Ibiza is located) will be “permanently lost” due to rising sea levels and changing wave patterns.

This prediction comes from a group of marine scientists who used mathematical modeling, sea levels, and local geography to support their findings. They believe that there will be a permanent 56%-65% loss of the islands’ coastline by the end of the century if global emissions continue their current trend. The numbers go up to 84%-86% if weather conditions are extreme.

Ibiza remains largely a tourist economy thanks to its unique beaches that attract partygoers around the world. A large subset of this revenue comes from U.K. visitors looking to experience its nightlife.

“Much of the income of touristic regions in the Mediterranean comes from beach and sun tourism,” the study says. “This means that it is essential to predict the date of these beaches under climate change.”

Those interested in reading more about the group’s findings can find the entire study here.

The collection of 10,000 individual tracks are available as a non-fungible token (NFT). Each unique track covers a different part of the sequence and he songs were created using a technique called “DNA Sonification.”

The process takes DNA’s repeating structure of string-like molecules and turns them into musical notes. A DNA molecule is made up of four letters: G, A, T, C. These letters, in turn, form three-letter structures called codons. Using computer software, Viromusic engineers then assigned each codon a musical note to produce the track.

Interested buyers can browse the whole collection on Rarible, a marketplace specializing in NFT collections. Each track starts at 0.07 ETH (around $280 USD at the time of this writing) and comes with information about which track corresponds to which part of COVID-19’s sequence. They also come with information on how the virus uses that specific sequence.

“The idea for this collection was born from an awe of the beauty in the code of life. We hope this project helps to raise awareness that even a virus capable of inflicting such misery is fundamentally based on the same code as every living thing on each,” the project creators write on their website.

NFTs are a relatively new technology allowing buyers to collect digital items that are recorded on the blockchain.

Launched in October, Eco-bot.net is currently set up to flag ads it deems “greenwashing.” According to their site, greenwashing is when corporate advertisers mislead consumers about their green credentials. As of this writing, 1,369 ads posted on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have been flagged as containing false or misleading information regarding climate change.

Del Naja developed the system alongside artist/researcher Bill Poster and Dale Vince, the founder of green energy company Ecotricity. According to an interview with Creative Review, the project was meant to run alongside a scheduled show in Liverpool. The group canceled the show in protest when they found out an arms fair was taking place at the venue, however. Instead, they shifted their focus to The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). Their platform flagged numerous greenwashing examples from companies who sponsored the conference.

“In terms of the way it’s propagating [climate misinformation] on social media, it’s frightening,” Del Naja said. “When we ask Facebook what their response is to some of the information we’re picking up, some of the data we’re finding, they always refer us to the fact-checkers. But who are the fact-checkers?”

The study, titled “Modelling song popularity as a contagious process,” was published in Proceedings Of The Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences. It found the parallels between music downloads and the spread of epidemic diseases by employing SIR, a classic model used in the study of infectious diseases.

The study cited a database of nearly 1.4 billion songs acquired through the now defunct music streaming service MixRadio. The top 1,000 songs downloaded in the U.K. between 2007 and 2014 very closely resembled the SIR model.

“It implies that a lot of the social processes that drive the spread of disease, or analogues of those processes, might also be driving the spread of songs,” Rosati said of the study. “More specifically, it supports the idea that both music and infectious diseases depend on social connections to spread through populations.”

The team employed the R0, or reproduction number — a numerical rating of a disease’s ability to spread — to evaluate the popularity of music by genre. Electronica had the highest R0 of 3,430, making it roughly 190 times more “transmissible” than measles, which has an R0 of 18. Pop, rock, and hip-hop proved to be quite infectious as well, while metal and dance music clocked in with the lowest R0 scores: 3.7 and 2.8, respectively.

“The reason why we might see some really sky-high R0s for songs is that you can just make a tweet and you have already infected a hundred people,” said Dr. Thomas Rawson, a disease modeler at Imperial College London. “You can spread a song disease far quicker than you could an infectious disease.”

“There are probably a lot of people in a population that may already be immune to a genre like electronica, because of their existing tastes. My nan, for example, is particularly resistant to the infection of trap and dubstep,” he continued.

Rosati concluded: “Maybe what those numbers are telling us is that electronica fans tend to be more passionate about their favorite songs… Or maybe the social network of electronica fans is more strongly connected.”

Read the full study via The Royal Society Publishing. 

“We’re hugely excited to reveal our plans to introduce a state-of-the-art renewable heating and cooling system to the SWG3 complex, transferring body hear from clubbers and gig-goers into a source of energy to be used again,” the club wrote in a press release.

“BODYHEAT uses heat pumps and fluids to capture the incredible amounts of body heat generated by SWG3’s crowds, channeling their combined energy into twelve 150-m deep bore holes drilled beneath the venue,” they continued. “This heat can then either be used immediately to cool the audience, or stored underground until it’s needed to heat the building.”

When idle, the average human radiates about 100 watts of heat. When dancing, they radiate significantly more. Combine this with confined spaces, venue owners have the perfect environment to capture large amounts of energy. They estimate saving about 120 tons of CO2 annually with this new system.

SWG3 Managing Director Andrew Fleming Brown recently explained the organization’s decision. “There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 has brought huge challenge to the events sector around the world, but it has also created a seismic jolt across businesses – underlining the need for a stable and sustainable future,” he said.

The announcement comes as part of Going Net Zero, which is their goal to become totally carbon neutral by COP26 (the United Nations Climate Change Conference). The gathering takes place November 1st-12th, 2021, in Glasgow.

The Global Music Vault‘s mission is to safeguard “the most important living musical expressions” with a high-tech, bomb-proof shelter. Buried 1,000 feet beneath a mountain somewhere in the Svalbard archipelago north of Norway, the vault is built to withstand man-made and natural disasters.

Svalbard’s unique location makes it perfect for such an ambitious project. 42 nations have declared it a demilitarized zone, meaning there’s little chance of it being affected by conflict. For added security, the vault will also be impervious to electromagnetic pulses resulting from potential nuclear explosions.

Furthermore, Svalbard’s unique climate creates the perfect environment for storing sensitive information. Its dry, arctic weather provides consistent temperatures and an added layer of natural security thanks to its dense layers of permafrost.

The vault’s goal isn’t “to just project a certain genre and certain era,” according to Global Music Vault Managing Director Luke Jenkinson. Music ranging from The Beatles to worldwide indigenous stylings will be stored. Individual nations can submit compositions to the vault as well. No formal criteria for deciding what makes the cut has been decided upon as of yet.

Music in the vault will be stored using technology from Piql, a Norwegian firm specializing in preserving digital data.

Put together by Primavera Sound, the Fight AIDS Foundation, and the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital, the study found that no participant contracted COVID-19 from the test event according to a screening performed eight days later. The participants were broken down into two groups: one permitted into the event and another not allowed in so that they could be used as a control group.

In addition to the aforementioned testing, all participants were required to wear an N95 mask during the event and were told to only remove it when consuming a beverage. The five-hour event was also organized in such a way that reduced lines in the bathroom and bar areas. No restrictions on social distancing, dancing, or singing were put in place, however.

These findings led researchers to declare that live music events with rapid testing and health guidelines will not increase the spread of COVID-19. “Therefore, attending a live music concert staged with a series of security measures that included a negative antigen test for SARS-CoV-2 done on the same day, was not associated with an increase in COVID-19 infections,” reads a passage of the conclusion.

Limitations of the Sala Apolo Study

While a promising sign for the future of the live music industry, some have aired concerns over its replication outside of a clinical study. One can’t help but question if adherence to the health and safety rules will be followed as closely by the average concertgoer as their test event counterpart. Another limitation includes the potential for false negatives in a rapid test.

As shared by Harvard’s Health Blog, “False negative results tend to occur more often with antigen tests than with molecular tests.” This could create a situation where one infected with the virus tests negative and still gains entry to the event.

The complete results of the Primavera Sound-powered study on COVID-19 transmission during live music events can be found on their website.

Image credit: Long Truong

Scientists from Halle University in Germany conducted the Restart-19 experiment in August, where volunteers attended three successive events headlined by German pop star Tim Bendzko. Other factors of the study included social distancing and attendees practicing proper hygiene and sanitation methods. The volunteers were also pre-tested for COVID-19 and had their temperatures taken beforehand.

Upon entry, attendees were given face masks, location trackers, and dyed hand sanitizer so that the scientists could track where surface contact was made. Different variables were measured during each of the three events. At the first event, everything proceeded as if there were no virus or mandates in place. The second saw attendees practicing social distancing and hygiene measures, and attendance was halved with greater social distancing measures adhered to at the third.

The study found that ventilation is a key factor in limiting the spread of the virus. At one of the events, air jets blasted fresh air into the Leipzig venue with beneficial results. When air was sucked into the venue from outdoors and the jets were turned off, risk of spread increased significantly.

Dr. Gabriel Scally, president of epidemiology and public health at the Royal Society of Medicine, warned that despite Restart-19’s findings being “potentially useful,” the exact conditions created at the Leipzig venue for the experiment could be difficult to replicate at other venues and events worldwide.

The full study has not yet been peer-reviewed, but can be read at this link.

Coombes took part in an experiment conducted at the National Music Center in Calgary, where TONTO is housed. She wore a headset that read her thoughts and converted them to voltages corresponding to different parameters on the synth. The more complex the thought, she said, the more significant its effect on volume and pitch.

“We could actually create a voltage that would go to TONTO and [then] manipulate things like reverb, low frequency oscillators, resonance cut off – and it worked,” Coombes told CBC.

TONTO was built in 1968 by music producers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. It was perhaps most notably utilized by R&B singer, songwriter and producer Stevie Wonder, who used it on several of his albums.

Coombes holds degrees in biology and neuroscience in addition to providing vocals for songs by the likes of Lambert McGaughy and Anthony Jimenez. She will reportedly use recordings from her work with TONTO in an upcoming album.

“When [TONTO] was first created in the late 1960s, it was really quite an enigma,”  Coombes told CBC. “But where we’re applying this new modern technology, with the brainwave headset to this old analog synthesizer… It’s a world first.”