Category: Wacky Stuff

By Laura Grant, Claremont McKenna College.

Today the sun is shining during my commute home from work. But this weekend, public service announcements will remind us to “fall back,” ending daylight saving time (DST) by setting our clocks an hour earlier on Sunday, Nov. 6. On Nov. 7, many of us will commute home in the dark.

This semiannual ritual shifts our rhythms and temporarily makes us groggy at times when we normally feel alert. Moreover, many Americans are confused about why we spring forward to DST in March and fall back in November, and whether it is worth the trouble.

The practice of resetting clocks is not designed for farmers, whose plows follow the sun regardless of what time clocks say it is. Yet many people continue to believe that farmers benefit, including lawmakers during recent debates over changing California DST laws. Massachusetts is also studying whether to abandon DST.

Changing our clocks does not create extra daylight. DST simply shifts when the sun rises and sets relative to our society’s regular schedule and routines. The key question, then, is how people respond to this enforced shift in natural lighting. Most people have to be at work at a certain time – say, 8:30 a.m. – and if that time comes an hour earlier, they simply get up an hour earlier. The effect on society is another question, and there, the research shows DST is more burden than boon.

No energy savings

Benjamin Franklin was one of the first thinkers to endorse the idea of making better use of daylight. Although he lived well before the invention of light bulbs, Franklin observed that people who slept past sunrise wasted more candles later in the evening. He also whimsically suggested the first policy fixes to encourage energy conservation: firing cannons at dawn as public alarm clocks and fining homeowners who put up window shutters.

To this day, our laws equate daylight saving with energy conservation. However, recent research suggests that DST actually increases energy use.

This is what I found in a study coauthored with Yale economist Matthew Kotchen. We used a policy change in Indiana to estimate DST effects on electricity consumption. Prior to 2007, most Indiana counties did not observe DST. By comparing households’ electricity demand before and after DST was adopted, month by month, we showed that DST had actually increased residential electricity demand in Indiana by 1 to 4 percent annually.

The largest effects occurred in the summer, when DST aligns our lives with the hottest part of the day, so people tend to use more air conditioning, and late fall, when we wake up in the dark and use more heating with no reduction in lighting needs.

Other studies corroborate these findings. Research in Australia and in the United States shows that DST does not decrease total energy use. However, it does smooth out peaks and valleys in energy demand throughout the day, as people at home use more electricity in the morning and less during the afternoon. Though people still use more electricity, shifting the timing reduces the average costs to deliver energy because not everyone demands it during typical peak usage periods.

Other outcomes are mixed

DST proponents also argue that changing times provides more hours for afternoon recreation and reduces crime rates. But time for recreation is a matter of preference. There is better evidence on crime rates: Fewer muggings and sexual assaults occur during DST months because fewer potential victims are out after dark.

So overall, the net benefits from these three durational effects of crime, recreation and energy use – that is, impacts that last for the duration of the time change – are murky.

Other consequences of DST are ephemeral. I think of them as bookend effects, since they occur at the beginning and end of DST.

When we “spring forward” in March we lose an hour, which comes disproportionately from resting hours rather than wakeful time. Therefore, many problems associated with springing forward stem from sleep deprivation. With less rest people make more mistakes, which appear to cause more traffic accidents and workplace injuries, lower workplace productivity due to cyberloafing and poorer stock market trading.

Even when we gain that hour back in the fall, we must readjust our routines over several days because the sun and our alarm clocks feel out of synchronization. Some impacts are serious: During bookend weeks, children in higher latitudes go to school in the dark, which increases the risk of pedestrian casualties. Dark commutes are so problematic for pedestrians that New York City is spending US$1.5 million on a related safety campaign. And heart attacks increase after the spring time shift – it is thought because of lack of sleep – but decrease to a lesser extent after the fall shift. Collectively, these bookend effects represent net costs and strong arguments against retaining DST.

Pick your own time zone?

Spurred by many of these arguments, several states are considering unilaterally discontinuing DST. The California State Legislature considered a bill this term that would have asked voters to decide whether or not to remain on Pacific Standard Time year-round (the measure was passed by the State Assembly but rejected by the Senate).

On the East Coast, Massachusetts has commissioned research on the impacts of dropping DST and joining Canada’s Maritime provinces on Atlantic Time, which is one hour ahead of Eastern Standard Time. If this occurred, Massachusetts would be an hour ahead of all of its neighboring states during winter months, and travelers flying from Los Angeles to Boston would cross five time zones.

These proposals ignore a fundamental fact: Daylight saving time relies on coordination. If one state changes its clocks a week early, neighboring states will be out of sync.

Some states have good reason for diverging from the norm. Notably, Hawaii does not practice DST because it is much closer to the equator than the rest of the nation, so its daylight hours barely change throughout the year. Arizona is the sole contiguous state that abstains from DST, citing its extreme summer temperatures. Although this disparity causes confusion for western travelers, the state’s residents have not changed clocks’ times for over 40 years.

In my research on DST I have found that everyone has strong opinions about it. Many people welcome the shift to DST as a signal of spring. Others like the coordinated availability of daylight after work. Dissenters, including farmers, curse their loss of quiet morning hours.

When the evidence about costs and benefits is mixed but we need to make coordinated choices, how should we make DST decisions? When the California State Senate opted to stick with DST, one legislator stated, “I like daylight savings. I just like it.” But politicians’ whims are not a good basis for policy choices.

The strongest arguments support not only doing away with the switches but keeping the nation on daylight saving time year-round. Yet humans adapt. If we abandon the twice-yearly switch, we may eventually slide back into old routines and habits of sleeping in during daylight. Daylight saving time is the coordinated alarm to wake us up a bit earlier in the summer and get us out of work with more sunshine.

Laura Grant, Assistant Professor of Economics, Claremont McKenna College

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Halloween products are already in the stores, so we thought it wasn’t too early to share this great video with some wacky, but science-based, ways that the dreaded zombie apocalypse actually could happen – and #7 even involves a real-life sorcerer!

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Have you ever wondered about life, the universe, and everything? According to Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, the answer is 42, but divide that by 6 and now we can examine in depth 7 of the most perplexing questions about the universe that science will probably never answer.

Our gratitude and appreciation to the Hybrid Librarian YouTube channel for creating this thought-provoking video.

PS: Yes, we know our intro text to this one was a bit strange… Probably because after watching this video, our minds were a little blown!  😉

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Almost everyone is familiar with the legend of the lost city of Atlantis, which was a fictional island first imagined by Plato in his stories of “Ancient Athens.”  But there are many other stories of lost lands or cities across the cultures of the world, and some that were simply assumed to be myths turn out to have actually existed, or evidence has been found that shows the stories had an actual basis in reality.

Here’s an intriguing video that explores seven of the most mysterious of these ancient lost lands:

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By Michael Casey, Dartmouth College and Daniel N. Rockmore, Dartmouth College.

Algorithms help us to choose which films to watch, which music to stream and which literature to read. But what if algorithms went beyond their jobs as mediators of human culture and started to create culture themselves?

In 1950 English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing published a paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which starts off by proposing a thought experiment that he called the “Imitation Game.” In one room is a human “interrogator” and in another room a man and a woman. The goal of the game is for the interrogator to figure out which of the unknown hidden interlocutors is the man and which is the woman. This is to be accomplished by asking a sequence of questions with responses communicated either by a third party or typed out and sent back. “Winning” the Imitation Game means getting the identification right on the first shot.

Turing then modifies the game by replacing one interlocutor with a computer, and asks whether a computer will be able to converse sufficiently well that the interrogator cannot tell the difference between it and the human. This version of the Imitation Game has come to be known as the “Turing Test.”

Turing’s simple, but powerful, thought experiment gives a very general framework for testing many different aspects of the human-machine boundary, of which conversation is but a single example.

On May 18 at Dartmouth, we will explore a different area of intelligence, taking up the question of distinguishing machine-generated art. Specifically, in our “Turing Tests in the Creative Arts,” we ask if machines are capable of generating sonnets, short stories, or dance music that is indistinguishable from human-generated works, though perhaps not yet so advanced as Shakespeare, O. Henry or Daft Punk.

Conducting the tests

The dance music competition (“Algorhythms”) requires participants to construct an enjoyable (fun, cool, rad, choose your favorite modifier for having an excellent time on the dance floor) dance set from a predefined library of dance music. In this case the initial random “seed” is a single track from the database. The software package should be able to use this as inspiration to create a 15-minute set, mixing and modifying choices from the library, which includes standard annotations of more than 20 features, such as genre, tempo (bpm), beat locations, chroma (pitch) and brightness (timbre).

In what might seem a stiffer challenge, the sonnet and short story competitions (“PoeTix” and “DigiLit,” respectively) require participants to submit self-contained software packages that upon the “seed” or input of a (common) noun phrase (such as “dog” or “cheese grater”) are able to generate the desired literary output. Moreover, the code should ideally be able to generate an infinite number of different works from a single given prompt.

To perform the test, we will screen the computer-made entries to eliminate obvious machine-made creations. We’ll mix human-generated work with the rest, and ask a panel of judges to say whether they think each entry is human- or machine-generated. For the dance music competition, scoring will be left to a group of students, dancing to both human- and machine-generated music sets. A “winning” entry will be one that is statistically indistinguishable from the human-generated work.

The competitions are open to any and all comers. To date, entrants include academics as well as nonacademics. As best we can tell, no companies have officially thrown their hats into the ring. This is somewhat of a surprise to us, as in the literary realm companies are already springing up around machine generation of more formulaic kinds of “literature,” such as earnings reports and sports summaries, and there is of course a good deal of AI automation around streaming music playlists, most famously Pandora.

Judging the differences

Evaluation of the entries will not be entirely straightforward. Even in the initial Imitation Game, the question was whether conversing with men and women over time would reveal their gender differences. (It’s striking that this question was posed by a closeted gay man.) The Turing Test, similarly, asks whether the machine’s conversation reveals its lack of humanity not in any single interaction but in many over time.

It’s also worth considering the context of the test/game. Is the probability of winning the Imitation Game independent of time, culture and social class? Arguably, as we in the West approach a time of more fluid definitions of gender, that original Imitation Game would be more difficult to win. Similarly, what of the Turing Test? In the 21st century, our communications are increasingly with machines (whether we like it or not). Texting and messaging have dramatically changed the form and expectations of our communications. For example, abbreviations, misspellings and dropped words are now almost the norm. The same considerations apply to art forms as well.

Who is the artist?

Thinking about art forms leads naturally to another question: who is the artist? Is the person who writes the computer code that creates sonnets a poet? Is the programmer of an algorithm to generate short stories a writer? Is the coder of a music-mixing machine a DJ?

Where is the divide between the artist and the computational assistant and how does the drawing of this line affect the classification of the output? The sonnet form was constructed as a high-level algorithm for creative work – though one that’s executed by humans. Today, when the Microsoft Office Assistant “corrects” your grammar or “questions” your word choice and you adapt to it (either happily or out of sheer laziness), is the creative work still “yours” or is it now a human-machine collaborative work?

We’re looking forward to seeing what our programming artists submit. Regardless of their performance on “the test,” their body of work will continue to expand the horizon of creativity and machine-human coevolution.

Michael Casey, James Wright Professor of Music, Professor of Computer Science, Dartmouth College and Daniel N. Rockmore, Professor, Department of Mathematics, Computational Science, and Computer Science, Dartmouth College

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Featured Image Credit: Copyright © Annelise Capossela; used by permission

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A software tool makes it easy for anybody to quickly design a custom robot—including its movements—and print out its parts with a 3D printer. You assemble the parts like a puzzle. Add electronic motors to the joints, install a control unit and battery, and then unleash your creature.

The first step is to create a basic skeleton for the desired robot, specifying how many extremities the figure will have and how many segments there will be in the backbone. This skeleton can be modified at will by extending or shortening its segments or breaking them up with new joints.

The primary challenge of the research project was to design the robot’s movements so that they would also work outside the digital realm.

“That’s the hard part of this work, the part where technical innovation is needed,” says Bernhard Thomaszewski of Disney Research Zurich. From a user’s perspective, he says, the tools offered by their program are comparable with those used in the animation of purely digital figures.

However, unlike in digital animations, the robots must obey the laws of physics. In particular, physical robots cannot balance in every pose that is digitally possible, and there is a limit to the accelerations that can be produced by the motors.

“Without support from a computer, it is extremely difficult for users to take these restrictions into account when planning the movements, and this quickly becomes frustrating for the layman,” says Thomaszewski. “This is precisely the task that our software automates through simulation and numerical optimization.

“The user can therefore focus entirely on the creative aspects of the design.”

HOW THE ROBOTS MOVE

In order to design the motion of a robot, the user specifies simple motion goals such as “walk forward” or “turn left.”

Vittorio Megaro, a doctoral student at ETH Zurich, designed the program to automatically convert these high-level commands into low-level control signals for the motors, allowing the robot to walk stably.

Whenever the user changes the robot’s skeleton or its motion goals, the computer automatically adapts the time-dependent motor values. This process is very fast, offering immediate feedback on the resulting motion, as predicted by simulation.

Once the user is satisfied with the robot, the program automatically generates three-dimensional building plans for all segments of the body and for the connecting parts, which house the electric motors.

Standard sizes of various commercially available motors are stored in the program, which means users only need to select the one that matches to get the connecting parts.

The parts are fabricated on a 3D printer and, finally, the robot is assembled by hand.

CHEAP COMPONENTS, EXPENSIVE PRINTING

The electric motors, cables, battery and control unit for the robot are available commercially, and Megaro was able to buy these components cheaply online. On the other hand, a greater financial burden is associated with manufacturing the robot limbs on a high-quality 3D printer.

Megaro manufactured the first two prototypes using an in-house printer. This was cheap, he says, but the quality of the body parts was not particularly good. Apparently, the shin bones broke in the first prototype, which was a four-legged robotic dog.

He commissioned an outside company to produce his insect-like masterpiece. This, he says, made of sturdy, high-grade plastic. “That quality comes at a price,” says Megaro.

Megaro and his colleagues intentionally kept the design of their robotic creatures simple. They can only adopt gaits that the user has first created using the software.

Megaro’s five-legged robotic insect can move forwards and sideways using various techniques. It cannot, however, identify obstacles—the robots don’t have sensors and aren’t designed to travel independently. They also cannot be controlled remotely, something that could potentially be achieved using a smartphone app.

“It also wasn’t the project’s aim to create an autonomous robot,” Megaro points out.

The software is still in development and not available to the public yet. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University collaborated on the project.

Source: Republished from Futurity.org as a derivative work underthe Attribution 4.0 International license. Original article posted to Futurity by Peter Rüegg-ETH Zurich.

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By David Kipping, Columbia University.

What would it take to hide an entire planet? It sounds more like a question posed in an episode of “Star Trek” than in academic discourse, but sometimes the bleeding edge of science blurs with themes found in science fiction.

Of course we’ve been leaking our own position to distant stars via radio and television signals for six decades now, largely ignorant of the cosmic implications. But several notable scientists, such as Stephen Hawking, have publicly voiced concerns about revealing our presence to other civilizations. These concerns largely draw from the darker chapters of our own history, when a more advanced civilization would subjugate and displace a less advanced one.

It might be too late for us to withdraw back into invisibility, but maybe not for other intelligent alien civilizations out there. A far-off planet’s inhabitants might prefer to hide from the likes of us. Recently, my graduate student Alex Teachey and I published a paper that proposes a way to cloak planets, as well as a way to broadcast a civilization’s existence. Even if we’re not manipulating our own signal in this way, it doesn’t mean other planets out there aren’t. It’s possible what we see as we scan the universe for other habitable planets has been engineered to disguise or highlight the existence of other civilizations.

Tracking transits to find other planets

Before we talk about how to hide a planet from distant voyeurs, consider the best way we’ve figured out to find one.

Humanity’s most successful technique for detecting other planets is the transit method. A transit occurs when a planet appears to pass in front of its parent sun, blocking out some of its starlight for a few hours. So if we have our telescopes trained at one part of the universe and a star seems to fade out for part of a day, that tells us that a planet has temporarily come between us as it goes about its orbit.

Using this technique, NASA’s Kepler Mission has discovered several thousand planets.

It seems likely that any advanced civilization would be aware of this simple method. Each time a planet transits its star, its existence is essentially being advertised to all points lying along the same plane as the planet and star.

An advanced civilization might be okay having its planet’s location, size and even atmospheric chemistry advertised across the cosmos. Or it might wish to conceal its presence. If the latter, it might choose to build a cloak.

A planetary invisibility cloak

It turns out that hiding planets from the transit method would be surprisingly easy, so easy that we earthlings could do it right now, if we chose. Since transits appear as a brightness decrease of a distant star, our hypothetical cloak simply produces the opposite brightness increase.

Lasers provide an efficient means of countering that dip in brightness. All a laser’s power is contained in a relatively narrow beam, as opposed to spreading out in all directions like starlight does. Due to the way light spreads as it travels – called diffraction – the laser beam would spread to encompass entire solar systems after journeying many light years across space, bathing that distant planetary system within the cloaking beam. No dip in brightness makes it look like there’s no planet there at all.

A laser cloak capable of hiding the Earth from an alien version of NASA’s Kepler Mission would require 30 megawatts of power at peak intensity, approximately equivalent to 10 wind turbines worth of power output.

While Kepler sees light in only one color, advanced civilizations might use more sophisticated detectors capable of collecting light at all wavelengths. Here too, our current technology could cloak us using modern tunable lasers, for a cost of about 10 times more power overall. More advanced civilizations might be able to detect other fine details of the light’s properties, betraying the cloak. But here too there’s no reason why with a little bit of work we couldn’t engineer solutions, leading to a near perfect cloak which could be targeted at distant stars where we suspect someone might be home.

Why choose to hide

So yes, it sounds like science fiction, but even current technology could do a fine job of cloaking the Earth’s transit signature.

Forget the Earth though; we never really thought of this as something humanity should or should not do. Instead, we posit that if our rudimentary human technology can build such an effective transit cloak at relatively little economic cost, then more advanced civilizations may be able to hide from us with respect to all detection techniques. The universe might not be all that it seems.

Why might a civilization choose to wrap itself in invisibility? It could be a sort of insurance policy: find the nearby planets with potential for supporting life and turn on a targeted cloak – just in case a civilization ever emerges. Such a policy effectively buys them time to reveal their presence when they see fit.

Given how cheap such a cloak would be, an insurance policy for your home planet is perhaps not as strange as it seems. It’s certainly not implausible a civilization might want to bide its time – surveilling the neighbors for a while before rolling out the intergalactic welcome mat. But there’s a flip side to this technology that could turn it from an invisibility cloak into more of a we-are-here spotlight.

The reverse: flick on the beacon

Perhaps not all civilizations are xenophobic – some might want to talk. If you wanted to reveal your presence to other civilizations as cheaply and unambiguously as possible, how might you do it?

Imagine looking at some data of a distant planet – which has become a somewhat normal enterprise for astronomers – and noticing something weird. The signature of the planet has a strange shape – in fact, none of your models are able to explain it. It looks like someone has imprinted a series of spikes into the data, following the prime number series. Nothing in nature can do this – you have just detected another civilization’s beacon. Alternative use of the cloaking system’s laser could be to make a planet’s signal look highly artificial, instead of hidden. Now they don’t care about building the perfect cloak; they want to be found!

Could such signals be lurking in our existing measurements? Perhaps so. No one has ever looked, and we hope our work sparks efforts on that front. It may be a long shot, since to even get to this point we need to try to imagine how aliens might think – but given the scientific prize on offer it’s also worth it. If we identify a strange transit, it may well contain information encoded via laser light pulses. Huge volumes of information could be hidden within the transit signatures of other planets.

For us, this was an exercise in intellectual curiosity. We simply calculated how much energy it would take to either cloak or broadcast a planet’s existence. Whether we should seriously consider wrapping Earth in a protective cloak of invisibility – or conversely, getting serious about trumpeting our existence – via laser manipulations is something we should all decide together.

David Kipping, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, Columbia University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Featured Photo Credit: European Southern Observatory, CC BY

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By Samuel Redman, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

When Dr. Gunther von Hagens started using “plastination“ in the 1970s to preserve human bodies, he likely did not anticipate the wild success of the Body Worlds exhibitions that stem from his creation. Body Worlds has since hosted millions of visitors to its exhibits, including six spin-offs. The offshoots include a version on vital organs and another featuring plastinated animal remains. The process replaces natural bodily fluids with polymers that harden to create odorless and dry “specimens.”

Frozen in place, plastinated remains in the exhibits are rigidly posed – both for dramatic effect and to illustrate specific bodily features. Over 40 million museum visitors have encountered these exhibitions in more than 100 different locations worldwide. Even copycat exhibits have taken off, eschewing accredited museums in favor of places like the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

But Body Worlds – though seemingly an entirely modern phenomenon only made possible with futuristic plastic technology – emerges from a long tradition of popular exhibits featuring actual and simulated human remains. What continues to draw so many people to human body exhibitions – even today?

Early exhibits of human bodies

For nearly as long as physicians and anatomists have attempted to understand the body, they have attempted to preserve, illustrate and present it. Cabinets of curiosities displayed in the homes of European nobility in the 16th century frequently included human skulls. As civic museums emerged in cities throughout Europe and the United States, some began to formally organize collections around anatomical questions.

Medical museums were often more interested in pathologies – abnormal medical conditions or disease. They also collected thousands of skulls and bones, attempting to address basic questions about race. Early on, medical museums were generally closed to the public, instead focusing on training medical students through hands-on experience with specimens. Almost reluctantly, they began opening their doors to the public. Once they did, they were surprised by the relatively large number of visitors curiously entering their galleries.

Medical museums were not the sole institutions housing and displaying remains, however. Collections aimed more squarely at the general public often included such items as well. The Army Medical Museum, for instance, located along the National Mall, exhibited human remains between 1887 and the 1960s (living on as the National Museum of Health and Medicine). The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History built its own large body collections, especially during the early 20th century. Popular exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History exhibited human remains in New York City just steps from Central Park.

Notable exhibits featuring human remains or innovative reproductions were also wildly popular at World’s Fairs, including Chicago (1893), St. Louis (1904) and San Diego (1915), among many others. People crowded galleries even as these exhibits proved vexing to critics.

Troubling transition from person to specimen

In the quest to rapidly build collections, remains were sometimes collected under highly questionable ethical circumstances. Bodies were removed from graves and sold, gathered from hospitals near exhibitions reminiscent of human zoos, and rounded up haphazardly from battlefields.

In the United States, the human body in the late 19th and early 20th century was racialized in almost every respect imaginable. Many people became obsessed with the supposed differentiations between Native Americans, African Americans and European Americans – occasionally stretching claims into rigid hierarchies of humankind. The exhibitions dehumanized bodies by casting them as observable data points rather than actual human beings.

Some exhibits blended medical science and racial science in a bizarrely inaccurate manner. Medical doctors supported eugenics groups organizing temporary exhibits comparing hair and skulls from different apes and nonwhite humans, underscoring popular notions about the supposedly primitive nature of those outside of Western civilization. To our modern eyes, these attempts are obviously stained by scientific racism.

Eventually, the racialized science that had led to collecting thousands of skulls and other bones from people around the world came under increased scrutiny. The comparative study of race – dominating many early displays of human remains – was largely discredited.

Indigenous activists, tired of seeing their ancestors viewed as “specimens,” also began pushing back against their display. Some exhibit planners began seeking other methods – including more sophisticated models – and exhibiting actual human remains became less prominent.

By midcentury it was less common to display actual human remains in museum exhibits. The occasional Egyptian mummy notwithstanding, museum remains were largely relegated behind the scenes to bone rooms.

Specimen exhibits fade, temporarily

With largely unfounded concern, museum administrators, curators and other critics worried audiences would be disgusted when shown vivid details about human anatomy. Gradually, as medical illustrations became better and easier to reproduce in textbooks, the need for demonstrations with real “specimens” seemed to dissipate.

First displayed at a World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933, see-through models of the human body became a favorite attraction at medical exhibits in years to come. Models replicated actual human body parts rather than displaying them in preserved form. Exhibits were sometimes animated with light shows and synchronized lectures.

Later, in the 1960s, new transparent models were created for popular education. Eventually, some of the many transparent medical models wound up in science museums. Although popular, it remains unclear how effective the models were in either teaching visitors or inspiring them to learn more about the human body.

Over the years, methods for teaching anatomy shifted. Many medical museums even closed permanently. Those that could not dispose of collections by destroying them donated or sold them. Human body exhibits generally faded from public consciousness.

But after decades of declining visitor numbers, something surprising started happening at one of the nation’s most important medical museums. The Mütter Museum’s displays continued to draw heavily from its human remains collections even as similar institutions moved away from such exhibits. From the mid-1980s to 2007, the number of visitors entering the Mütter’s galleries grew from roughly 5,000 visitors per year to more than 60,000. Today, the museum is the most visited small museum in Philadelphia, hosting over 130,000 visitors annually.

When Body Worlds began touring museums in the mid-1990s, it tapped into a curiosity in the U.S. that has probably always existed – a fascination with death and the human body.

Adding a gloss of scientization to the dead

People are very often unsettled by seeing what were once living, breathing, human beings – people with emotions and families – turned into scientific specimens intended for public consumption. Despite whatever discomfort emerges, however, the curious appeal of medicalized body displays at public museums lingers, enough so to make them consistently appealing as fodder for popular exhibitions.

Body Worlds states “health education” is its “primary goal,” elaborating that the bodies in exhibits are posed to suggest that we as humans are “naturally fragile in a mechanized world.”

The exhibits are partially successful in achieving that mission. In tension with the message about human fragility, though, is the desire to preserve them by preventing their natural decay through technology.

With public schools cutting health programs in classrooms around the United States, it stands to reason people might seek this kind of body knowledge elsewhere. Models are never quite as uniquely appealing as actual flesh and bone.

But while charged emotional responses have the potential to heighten curiosity, they can also inhibit learning. While museum administrators voiced concern that visitors would be horrified viewing actual human bodies on exhibit, the public has instead proven to have an almost insatiable thirst for seeing scientized dead.

In the face of this popularity, museums must fully consider the special implications and problems with these exhibitions when choosing to display human bodies.

One basic concern relates to the exact origins of these bodies. Criticisms elicited an official response from von Hagens. Major ethical differences exist between exhibitions including human remains where permission has been granted in advance by the deceased or through descendants and museum displays revealing bodies of individuals offered no choice in the matter.

Spiritually sacred objects and the remains of past people present unique issues which must be dealt with sensitively and on an individual basis. Cultural and historical context is important. Consulting with living ancestors is critical.

Exhibitors also need to do more to put these displays into greater historical context for visitors. Without it, visitors might mistake artfully posed cadavers as art pieces, which they most assuredly are not.

These are all issues we will likely be grappling with for years to come. If past history is suggestive of future trends, visitors will continue to be drawn to these exhibits as long as the human body remains mysterious and alluring.

Samuel Redman, Assistant Professor of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Featured Image Credit: Yelp Inc., CC BY-NC-ND

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