Features

GRENOBLE, France — French experts fired X-rays at a 18th-century violin worth millions this weekend hoping to discover the secret of its magical sound, they said on Monday.

The violin, dubbed “Il Cannone” (the cannon) because of its powerful sound, was Italian composer and violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini’s favourite.

The maestro from the Italian city of Genoa played it for decades before it became the property of his home city after his death in 1840.

The violin, made by instrument maker Giuseppe Bartolomeo Guarneri del Gesu in 1743, is now only brought out from time to time for the world’s best to play, including the winners of Genoa’s Premio Paganini international violin competition.

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), a particle accelerator in the south-eastern city of Grenoble, scanned the instrument down to the cellular structure of its wood.

The idea is to create a 3D model of the violin in and out of which people can zoom, down to a micron, or millionth of a metre.

“The first goal is conservation,” said Paul Tafforeau of the ESRF.

“If ever any flaws need repairing, we will have all the details.”

But they also hoped the “non-destructive analysis” would help shed light on why it plays so beautifully.

“It’s an exceptional instrument in terms of its sound qualities,” Tafforeau said.

“With this data, we hope to better understand why.”

The detailed analysis of the X-rays will take several months.

“Working on this violin is like a dream,” Tafforeau said.

Luigi Paolasini, who was in charge of the project at the ESRF, said the violin had been insured for a value of 30 million euros ($32 million) to travel from Genoa to Grenoble.

“The logistics were very complicated because we’re not a museum that would have experience in moving works of art around,” Paolasini said.

Whatever the outcome of the analysis, the guiding principle for any restoration work on the instrument is “to exercise extreme caution, or abstain altogether”, said Alberto Giordano, a curator of precious instruments in Genoa.

“I get older, but the violin stays the same, and that’s the way it should be,” he said.

“Just like the picture of Dorian Gray, it stays fresh as a rose,” Giordano added in reference to a novel by Oscar Wilde in which a painting of a man ages in his stead in an attic, allowing him to remain eternally young.

PARIS — Audio recordings of healthy reefs — an underwater chorus of fish songs and crackles from snapping shrimp — may help efforts to restore coral ecosystems harmed by climate and human impacts, scientists said on Wednesday.

With the future of the world’s biodiversity-rich coral reefs threatened by climate change, some experts are looking for rehabilitation strategies to go alongside broader efforts to slash planet-heating pollution.

Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution say one such method to help reefs rebuild could be sound, after they broadcast audio from a healthy reef to entice coral larvae to settle on the seabed at a degraded reef.

Coral larvae use a range of signals from reefs, including chemical cues, as they swim through the open water in their first stage of life looking for a permanent home, said Nadege Aoki, lead author of the study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

“Now we have also demonstrated that the local sound environment is very important for these corals, and that playing reef sounds can potentially be a vital tool in the effort to restore coral reefs,” she told AFP.

Researchers had been listening to coral reefs in the US Virgin Islands for over a decade, gaining insights into the distinct sounds that separate lively habitats from those that have been damaged by bleaching, disease or direct human impacts.

“A healthy coral reef will typically feature many low-frequency sounds of croaks, purrs and grunts produced by fishes against a near-constant background of crackles and pops produced by snapping shrimp,” said Aoki. A degraded reef, with fewer species, “will be much quieter”.

Under threat 

The team collected specimens from a hardy species known as mustard hill coral — named for its lumpy shape and yellow hue.

They then distributed them in cups at three reefs in the US Virgin Islands — one healthy and two more degraded, with patchy coral growth and fewer fish.

Researchers then set up underwater speakers to broadcast their back catalogue of healthy reef sounds at one of the degraded reefs.

They found that the coral larvae at this location settled at rates 1.7 times higher on average — and up to seven times more — than the other two reefs, where no sound was played.

There was still much more to learn about how corals respond to sound, Aoki said, including whether different species behave in the same ways and how they are able to “hear”.

But she added the finding suggests audio could become part of efforts to rebuild damaged reefs, although this would need to be monitored and protected, since settlement is just one step in a coral’s life.

“At the rate that coral reefs are disappearing, human intervention will be absolutely essential to preserving reefs in anything close to their current states,” she said.

Coral reefs support about a quarter of all marine life, as well as the millions of people who rely on them for food and income.

But human-driven climate change is spurring mass coral bleaching as the oceans heat and scientists warn that up to 90 per cent of reefs could be lost if warming reaches 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels.

PARIS — Bumblebees and chimpanzees can learn skills from their peers so complicated that they could never have mastered them on their own, an ability previously thought to be unique to humans, two studies said on Wednesday.

One of humanity’s crowning talents is called “cumulative culture” — our ability to build up skills, knowledge and technology over time, improving them as they pass down through the generations.

This ability to transfer abilities no individual could learn by themselves is credited with helping driving humanity’s rise and domination of the world.

“Imagine that you dropped some children on a deserted island,” said Lars Chittka, a behavioural ecologist at the Queen Mary University of London and co-author of the bee study.

“They might — with a bit of luck — survive, but they would never know how to read or to write because this requires learning from previous generations,” he said in a video published with the study in the journal Nature.

Previous experiments have demonstrated that some animals are capable of what is known as social learning — working out how to do something by observing others of their kind.

Some of these behaviours seem to have been perfected over time, such as the incredible navigational talent of homing pigeons or chimpanzees’ ability to crack nuts, suggesting they could be examples of cumulative culture.

But it is difficult for scientists to rule out that an individual pigeon or chimp could not have worked out how to do achieve these feats by themselves.

So a UK-led team of researchers turned to the humble bumblebee.

‘So surprised’ 

The first step was training a crack squad of “demonstrators” to do a complex skill that they could later teach to others.

In the lab, some bees were given a two-step puzzle box. They were tasked with first pushing a blue tab, then a red tab to release the sugary prize at the end.

Alice Bridges, a study co-author also from Queen Mary University, told AFP: “This task is really difficult for bees because we are essentially asking them to learn to do something in exchange for nothing” during the first step.

Initially, the baffled bees just tried to push the red tab — without first moving the blue one — and simply gave up.

To motivate the bees, the researchers put a sugary treat at the end of this first step which was gradually withdrawn as they mastered the process.

The demonstrators were then paired up with some new “naive” bees, which watched the demonstrators solve the puzzle before having a go themselves.

Five of the 15 naive bees swiftly completed the puzzle — without needing a reward after the first stage.

“We were so surprised,” Bridges said. “We were all just going crazy” when it first happened, she said.

Alex Thornton, a professor of cognitive evolution at the UK’s University of Exeter not involved in the research, acknowledged that it was a small sample size.

“But the point is clear — the task was exceptionally hard to learn alone, yet some bees could solve it through social learning,” he wrote in a comment piece in Nature.

The authors of the research said it was the first demonstration of cumulative culture in an invertebrate.

Chimp off the old block 

Chimpanzees — our closest living relatives — also seem to possess this talent, according to a separate study in Nature Human Behaviour.

The puzzle box for a troupe of semi-wild chimpanzees at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia was a little more difficult.

It involved retrieving a wooden ball, holding open a drawer, slotting in the ball then closing it to release the peanut prize.

Over three months, 66 chimps tried and failed to solve the puzzle.

Then the Dutch-led team of researchers trained two demonstrator chimpanzees to show the others how it was done.

After two months, 14 “naive” chimps had mastered it.

And the more the chimps watched the demonstrators, the quicker they learned to solve the problem.

Bridges said the studies “can’t help but fundamentally challenge the idea that cumulative culture is this extremely complex, rare ability that only the very ‘smartest’ species — e.g. humans — are capable of”.

Thornton said the research again showed how “people habitually overestimate their abilities relative to those of other animals”.

LOS ANGELES — “Kung Fu Panda 4” opened at the top of the North American box office this weekend and “Dune: Part Two” became the year’s first film to pass the $150 million mark domestically as movie-world glitterati gathered in Hollywood for Sunday’s Oscars ceremony.

“Panda”, a martial-arts comedy from DreamWorks and Universal, took in an estimated $58.3 million for the Friday-through-Sunday period, according to industry watcher Exhibitor Relations, as Hollywood saw some improving results following a wan start to the year.

The film’s numbers were good enough — for part four of an animated series — to earn it a spot in an “elite” group including “Toy Story”, “Despicable Me/Minions”, “Ice Age” and “Shrek”, said analyst David A. Gross. Jack Black voices panda Po as he battles a shape-shifting enemy.

Denis Villeneuve’s epic “Dune” sequel from Warner Bros. meantime enjoyed a strong second weekend, earning a solid $46 million. That pushed the domestic total for the extravagant sci-fi flick with its lavish cast to $157 million. It has taken in an additional $210 million internationally

“Imaginary”, a new horror film from Blumhouse Productions and Lionsgate, came in third at $10 million — not a huge figure, but one nearly equaling its modest production cost, a formula that keeps the horror films coming. DeWanda Wise plays Jessica, who rediscovers her childhood teddy bear Chauncey — only to learn he’s not nearly as cute and cuddly as she once thought — certainly no Paddington or Pooh.

Fourth spot, with $7.6 million, went to Angel Studios’ new faith-based drama “Cabrini”, about a Catholic nun in 19th-century New York who clashed with politicians and church officials while trying to care for poverty-stricken immigrants. Cristiana Dell’Anna plays Mother Frances Cabrini, who was canonised long after her death.

And in fifth place, slipping three spots from last weekend, was Paramount’s biopic “Bob Marley: One Love”, at $4.1 million. Kingsley Ben-Adir plays the iconic reggae singer in the surprise box office hit, which has now taken in $89.3 million in North America.

There was some good news for those gathering in Hollywood: the domestic box office was down just three percent this week from a three-year pre-pandemic average, Gross said — “good numbers” after a pallid January and February.

TOKYO — Celebrated Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki won his second Oscar on Sunday with “The Boy and the Heron” — the Studio Ghibli co-founder’s first film in a decade, and potentially his last.

The film, about a boy who moves to the countryside during World War II, won best animated feature, the same award scooped in 2003 by Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away”.

It bested top rival “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”, Disney’s “Elemental”, Netflix’s “Nimona” and the dialogue-free “Robot Dreams”.

The director was not present in Los Angeles to accept the award, and also did not attend a Ghibli press conference in Tokyo where producer Toshio Suzuki spoke instead.

Suzuki said he was “really happy, from the bottom of my heart”, but described Miyazaki’s less enthusiastic response as “normal, saying the win was good”.

Like other Ghibli titles, “The Boy and the Heron” is a visual feast in which mysterious creatures and strange characters cavort through a fantastical world.

After his mother dies in the haunting fire-bombing of Tokyo during World War II, the boy, Mahito, struggles to accept his new life with his father and pregnant stepmother, who goes missing.

Everything changes when Mahito meets a talking heron and embarks on a journey to an alternate universe shared by the living and the dead.

The film’s rural setting was “created mostly from my memory”, Miyazaki said in a Japanese pamphlet for “The Boy and the Heron”, whose original title translates as “How Do You Live?”

Miyazaki, 83, also lived in a big country house during the war.

He has said he did not set out to make an autobiography, but the film’s father character “is very much like my own father”.

The animator co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985, building a cult following with his highly imaginative depictions of nature and machines.

Ghibli characters, like cuddly forest spirit Totoro and princess warrior Nausicaa, are now beloved by children and adults worldwide.

“Spirited Away” is about a girl who gets lost in a mystical world where her parents, who she tries to save, are turned into pigs.

Final film? 

In 2013, Miyazaki said he would no longer make feature-length films, because he could not maintain the hectic intensity of his perfectionist work ethic.

However, in an about-turn four years later, his production company said he was coming out of retirement to make what would be “his final film, considering his age”.

That was “The Boy and The Heron”, which was released in Japan last July without trailers or other advertising, meaning cinema audiences had little idea of what to expect.

The movie was nonetheless a box office success in Japan and reached number one in North America, where it was promoted as usual.

In Tokyo, Ghibli producer Suzuki said Miyazaki still appeared “energetic” despite the octogenerian’s claims.

“He says his eyesight has gone bad and his arms don’t work. If you ask me, he’s exaggerating,” Suzuki laughed.

“It’s not going to be easy to make another feature film. Miyazaki has made animation shorts in the past, so I’m now telling him I’d like him to do something like that.”

A star-studded cast voiced the film’s English dub, featuring Robert Pattinson as the heron alongside Willem Dafoe, Florence Pugh, Christian Bale and Mark Hamill.

In a documentary aired by Japanese public broadcaster NHK in December, Miyazaki was visibly affected by the 2018 death of his Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata.

The animation master said he had based the character of the granduncle in “The Boy and the Heron” on Takahata, with whom he shared a “love-hate relationship”.

“The truth about life isn’t shiny, or righteous. It contains everything, including the grotesque,” Miyazaki said.

“It’s time to create a work by pulling up things hidden deep within myself.”

WASHINGTON — Four astronauts left the International Space Station on Monday and were bound for Earth following a more than six month mission.

Led by American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, NASA’s Crew-7 arrived at the research platform last August aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

The same spacecraft undocked on Monday morning, with Andreas Mogensen of Denmark, Satoshi Furukawa of Japan, and Russian cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov also on board.

Moghbeli, who was making her first spaceflight, paid tribute to the post-Cold War international partnership that paved the way for the construction of the ISS in the 1990s.

“It’s an indication of what we can do when we work together,” she said during a farewell ceremony on Sunday.

“To think back to when this was just a dream itself, and the people that had the vision, the grit and the courage to pursue this orbiting laboratory in low Earth orbit, I’m really proud to be a part of this.”

NASA and SpaceX are targeting as soon as 5:35 am Tuesday (09:35 GMT) for a splashdown off the Florida coast.

Space remains a rare area of cooperation between the United States and Russia despite the invasion of Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to reshape the global balance of power. Americans also continue to fly aboard Russian Soyuz rockets that launch from Kazakhstan.

The members of Crew-7 carried out science experiments including collecting samples during a spacewalk to determine whether the station releases microorganisms through life support system vents. Another assessed how microgravity, which accelerates ageing, affects liver regeneration.

Crew-7 is the seventh routine NASA mission to the orbital platform for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, with the first coming in 2020. The latest, Crew-8, launched on March 4.

NASA pays SpaceX for the taxi service as part of a US programme put in place to reduce dependency on Russian rockets following the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011.

Boeing is the other contracted private partner, but its programme has fallen behind, and now plans to fly its first crew in May.

The first segment of the ISS was launched in 1998, and it has been continuously inhabited by an international crew since 2001.

Its operations are set to continue until at least 2030, after which it will be decommissioned and crash into the ocean. Several private companies are working on commercial space stations to replace it, while China has already established its own orbital lab.

Dr Reham Ma’ani,
Dental & Oral Surgeon

Imagine talking to someone and all you can think of is how bad their breath smells! Do you continue talking to them? Or do you make your excuses and run?

Oral hygiene and your love life

If you can’t stand talking to them, you are not going to want to kiss them! When we think about having a relationship with someone, we have certain standards that we set.

Let me walk you through ways bad oral hygiene can affect your relationship, so that you can imagine situations, and what you would do.

A smile

This is one of our strongest features when it comes to attracting a partner. They say that the eyes are the gateway to our souls. So is our smile a key to our hearts. This can be a big deal maker or breaker with relationships.

Imagine looking across the room and seeing this beautiful smile. As you go over and start a conversation, you are hit with this overwhelming smell.

Are you going to continue the conversation and try to ignore the smell?

Bad breath

Bad breath can be caused by many factors.

The food and drinks we consume can have a huge impact on the smell of our mouth.

The bacteria in our mouths can be passed from person to person via many things. Are you going to want someone’s saliva in your mouth if they have bad breath?

The smell and the taste will be forever embedded in your brain!

A very affectionate part of intimacy is kissing. Imagine you wake up with your partner and you both have bad morning breath. You get up, do your daily routine, which includes brushing your teeth, and then carry on with your day.

Now, imagine that smell every day due to bad oral hygiene.

Are you going to choose to ignore it and hope it goes away? Or would you want to solve the problem? Are you worried that your children will grow up not understanding the seriousness of good oral hygiene?

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

PATAUDI, India — Once a housewife in rural India, Sharmila Yadav always wanted to be a pilot and is now living her dream remotely, flying a heavy-duty drone across the skies to cultivate the country’s picturesque farmlands.

Yadav, 35, is among hundreds of women trained to fly fertiliser-spraying aircraft under the government-backed “Drone Sister” programme.

The scheme aims to help modernise Indian farming by reducing labour costs, as well as saving time and water in an industry hamstrung by its reliance on outdated technology and growing climate change challenges.

It is also a portent of rural India’s changing attitudes towards working women, who have traditionally found few opportunities to join the labour force and are often stigmatised for doing so.

“Earlier, it was difficult for women to step out of the house. They were supposed to do only household chores and look after the children,” mother-of-two Yadav told AFP, after a day’s work crisscrossing a drone through the clear blue sky above a lush green field of young wheat stalks.

“Women who went out for work were looked down upon. They were taunted for neglecting their motherly duties. But now mindsets are changing gradually.”

Yadav was a homemaker for 16 years after marrying her farmer husband, with few job opportunities for women in her small rural hamlet near the town of Pataudi, a few hours’ drive from the capital New Delhi.

She will pocket 50,000 rupees ($600) after spraying 60 hectares of farmland twice over five weeks, a little over double the average monthly income in her native Haryana state.

But she said her new occupation was not just a “source of income” for her.”I feel very proud when someone calls me a pilot. I have never sat in a plane, but I feel like I am flying one now,” she said.

Patriarchal attitudes

Yadav is among the first batch of 300 women trained by the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO), the largest manufacturer of chemical fertilisers in the country.

The women trained as pilots are given the 30-kilogramme drones for free, along with battery-run vehicles to transport them.

Other fertiliser companies have also joined the programme, which aims to train 15,000 “drone sisters” across the country.

“This scheme is not just about employment but also empowerment and rural entrepreneurship,” Yogendra Kumar, the marketing director of IFFCO, told AFP.

“Women, who earlier could not step out of their houses owing to deep-rooted patriarchal attitudes and lack of opportunities, are coming forward with enthusiasm to take part,” he told AFP.

“They are now able to meet the household expenses on their own without depending on others.”

Kumar said that spraying fertiliser by drone was cost-effective, used less water and took a fraction of the time of manual spraying.

“One acre can be sprayed in just five to six minutes,” he said.

A little over 41 per cent of rural Indian women are in the formal workforce compared to 80 per cent of rural men, according to a government survey last year.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has championed the scheme and mentioned it in his annual Independence Day address last August, said he was pleased to see women at the forefront of a revolutionary new farming practice.

“Who would have thought until a few years ago that in our country women living in villages too would fly drones? But today this is becoming possible,” he said in a radio programme last month.

‘My own two feet’

Women have to pass an interview before they are enrolled in the programme.

They then sit a written test after a weeklong theory course before another week of practical training.

In one of the classrooms welcoming a fresh batch of pilots, 23-year-old Rifat Ara said she was initially apprehensive about enrolling.

But once she learned the ropes, she said there was no looking back.

“I feel I can now earn something and also teach other women how to fly,” she told AFP.

“It’s a great feeling to be able to stand on my own two feet and be called a drone pilot.”

Nisha Bharti, an instructor for training school Drone Destination, said she had been heartened by watching the transformation of her pupils as they mastered their craft.

“When they first come here from the villages, they are so nervous. But by the time they finish the course, they become super confident,” she said. “It is as if they grow wings and want to fly higher and higher.”

LOS ANGELES — When “Barbie”, a neon-pink pop culture phenomenon like no other, was nominated for eight Academy Awards including best picture, the team organising this year’s Oscars gala knew exactly who they needed to approach.

“The fact that Ryan Gosling will be performing ‘I’m Just Ken’ for the very first time, I think, will be a moment that everybody will want to watch,” Oscars showrunner Raj Kapoor told AFP.

Gosling “was rightfully a little hesitant at the beginning”, but quickly agreed because “he is a total professional”, explained Executive Producer Molly McNearney.

It is traditional for each of the year’s five best song nominees to be performed live on the Oscars telecast. But it is rare that two of those tunes both come from the year’s top-grossing film.

“What Was I Made For?” will be performed at Sunday’s ceremony by Billie Eilish, one of the world’s biggest music stars who has already won two Grammys for the tune.

And the other, a six-minute power ballad to the fragile male ego, will be sung by the Oscar-nominated Gosling, who plays Barbie’s boyfriend-turned-foe Ken in the surreal feminist comedy.

The former Disney child star turned A-lister, who performed at weddings and fronted an indie rock band in his teens, has been deep in rehearsals since agreeing to perform, meeting producers multiple times at the venue.

“He’s going to leave no one disappointed with that performance,” said McNearney.

The emphasis on “Barbie” is unsurprising. It grossed $1.4 billion, and movies that do well at the box office tend to attract more viewers to the Oscars when nominated.

Last year, producers heavily emphasised “Top Gun: Maverick”.

A promotional skit for Sunday’s Oscars saw returning host Jimmy Kimmel visit the film’s pink “Barbieland”, alongside its stars including Gosling and America Ferrera, also a nominee.

The producers also can showcase “Oppenheimer”, which is the favourite for best picture, itself earned nearly $1 billion, and was the other half of last summer’s “Barbenheimer” viral phenomenon.

“It just feels like that energy has carried on through the year,” said Executive Producer Katy Mullan.

“We’re giving ‘Barbie’ plenty of love in the show. But we’re giving every movie that’s been nominated lots of love,” added McNearney.

Another highlight will be Osage musicians performing a song from Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”, on a night that could see its star Lily Gladstone become the first Native American actor to win an Oscar.

“For everybody in that room and everybody at home, to have a little insight into the musical nuances of a historical tradition within that tribe, and it to be celebrated on our show? There’s been a lot of time and thought into how we honor that correctly,” said Kapoor.

Celebrate 

After a pandemic low of barely 10 million viewers led some to question the Oscars telecast’s relevance in the era of TikTok, audiences bounced back strongly last year, to 18.7 million.

Part of that was attributed to the successful return of late-night funnyman Kimmel as host, and he is back again on Sunday for a fourth stint.

Could he be planning to go for Bob Hope’s remarkable record of hosting 19 times?

“I hope not — I don’t think he could survive that!” joked McNearney, who is married to Kimmel.

“I think it’s really important to remind someone of all the obstacles before taking on such a big and truthfully thankless job. So I always try to talk him out of it!

“If he still wants to do it, then I know he’s truly committed,” she said.

Kimmel was partly inspired to return by a desire to celebrate the end of last year’s massive Hollywood strikes, which he plans to mention in his opening monologue, said McNearney.

The host’s first Oscars ended with the infamous envelope mix-up in which “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as best picture winner, before the prize was awarded to “Moonlight”.

Kimmel recently said he hopes Sunday night will again take some unexpected, spontaneous twists.

“That is where Jimmy completely shines. He is the most comfortable in discomfort,” agreed McNearney.

Mullan — who oversaw the London Olympics opening ceremony — has a more cautious approach.

“I love that Jimmy says he hopes that something goes wrong,” she said. “I really hope that nothing goes wrong.”