FROM ONE TREE COMES MANY FRUITS

Plums, peaches, nectarines and cherries all grow on just one of Sam Van Aken's
fruit trees. The trees blossom in a burst of red, white and pink each spring.

The artist calls his creations the Tree of 40 Fruit. And the tree at Syracuse
University, and others like it really does bear 40 or more varieties of stone fruit.
That is thanks to carefully planned grafts.

The hybrid trees provide both juicy fruit and food for thought about preserving
agricultural heritage. But most of all, Van Aken wants to provoke a response.

"When somebody happens upon it and they see it blossom in these different
colors and they see it growing all these different fruit ... there is this rethinking.
There is this sort of moment that sort of interrupts the everyday," said Van Aken.
He teaches art at the university.

Van Aken's first 40-fruit tree has been located for the past four years on the
edge of a campus green. On a recent broiling summer day, Van Aken plucked a
few yellow plums the size of golf balls. Then he ducked under a low branch to
give a trunk-to-leaf tour. He started with a plum rootstock and over the years,
grafted on a cornucopia of fruit.

"Right here is a nectarine. It comes out on a plum base. But it continues to grow
up here, until you have peaches on the end," he said. "There are a couple of
apricots that have been grafted on, and this out on the end is a red-leaf plum
variety."

The tree project is an outgrowth of Van Aken's work as a sculptor. One used to
working with nontraditional materials. Early on, he considered arranging
different trees that blossomed at different times before realizing he could
"collapse the entire orchard on to one tree." He decided to work with stone fruit
- that is, fruit with pits.

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 FROM ONE TREE COMES MANY FRUITS
The tree project is an outgrowth of Van Aken's work as a sculptor. One used to
working with nontraditional materials. Early on, he considered arranging
different trees that blossomed at different times before realizing he could
"collapse the entire orchard on to one tree." He decided to work with stone fruit
- that is, fruit with pits.

"It actually started with a Tree of 100 Fruit," he said with a laugh. "I was sort of
ambitious."

He eventually settled on 40. The number is rich with biblical allusions, such as the
40 days and 40 nights of rain when Noah built an ark and the amount of time
Jesus fasted. Van Aken was inspired to include harder-to-find fruits after reading
a century-old book, "The Plums of New York." The book listed hundreds upon
hundreds of varieties. The abundance was strikingly different from the few types
of purple plums found in modern supermarkets.

He stocked the campus nursery where he works with antique and heirloom
varieties. Those include some from a now-defunct research orchard. Over time,
he has collected more than 40 varieties of plums, peaches, nectarines, apricots,
cherries and almonds that he can graft to his trees.

The trees can turn heads in the spring. The multicolored blossoms signal
something unusual. But people who walked by the Syracuse University tree on a
recent day barely looked up from their phones to notice the small differences in
fruit from branch to branch. University employee Karen Davis said she had heard
of Van Aken's tree. But she said she walked by it at least twice a day without
realizing it.

"I heard about the tree but I did not know it was right here," said Davis, who
called it "fantastic."

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 FROM ONE TREE COMES MANY FRUITS
Van Aken said there are 16 trees sited around the nation. Most of them are in
the Northeast. More are being grown and grafted in the nursery. They include
eight that will be planted in downtown Syracuse next year. Syracuse is in New
York.

Several of the trees have been donated. The cost of the others depends on his
travel expenses. Each tree is planted with 20 varieties grafted to it. He returns
twice a year for three years after each planting to graft the rest of the
varieties.

The trees keep him busy April through September, but he likes the fact that this is
a unique type of sculpture that keeps on evolving.

"Every year it is something different. It appears different. It is radically different

than it was six months previous," he said. "And that part has been the most
rewarding part."

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10
5 WOMEN WHO CHANGED THE HISTORY OF ART
ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI (1593-1656)
An Italian Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi is
known as one of the most accomplished painters in the
generation after Caravaggio. She was the first woman
to be accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts of
Florence and today is seen as one of the most
progressive painters of her time. Often inspired by myths
or religion, she painted scenes that depicted women in
positions of both strength and suffering.

MARY CASSATT (1844-1926)

Mary Cassatt was the only American artist to exhibit
alongside the Impressionists in Paris. After the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts refused her request to
attend drawing sessions with nude models, she moved to
France to train as an artist. She was greatly influenced
by the Impressionist movement and collaborated with
artists like Edgar Degas, eventually introducing
Impressionism to the American public. She often painted
the private lives of women, especially the relationship
between mothers and their children.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986)

Georgia O’Keeffe is known as the “Mother of American
Modernism,” a style that emerged between the two
World Wars that challenged tradition with new artistic
ideas in abstraction and the avant-garde. She is most
famous for her works of New Mexico landscapes and
her abstract paintings of flowers that have been widely
interpreted by critics to represent female sensuality,
though she never intended this reading of her work.
Nonetheless, Georgia O’Keeffe became one of the first
female painters to gain respect in the New York art
scene in the 1920s.

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5 WOMEN WHO CHANGED THE HISTORY OF ART
FRIDA KAHLO (1907-1954)
Most famous for her self-portraits, Frida Kahlo was an
iconic Mexican painter and remains to this day a
feminist symbol worldwide. After having polio as a child
and then suffering great injuries from a bus accident
when she was just 18, she underwent many operations
and experienced physical and psychological wounds
that influenced her paintings. Incorporating elements of
folk art and Mexican cultural heritage, Frida Kahlo
explored themes such as identity, gender, race, and
postcolonialism in her striking self-portraits and
surrealist scenes.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911-2010)

Louise Bourgeois was a French-American artist best
known for her large spider sculptures that explored dark
psychological themes and childhood trauma. She also
worked as a painter and printmaker, focusing on
subjects like domesticity, sexuality, and death. Bourgeois
is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement
but also with Surrealism and Feminist Art, securely taking
her place as one of the great contemporary artists in
history.

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KESSLER SYNDROME AND
THE SPACE DEBRIS PROBLEM
This feared space-junk cascade called
Kessler Syndrome may have already begun.
The Kessler Syndrome is a phenomenon in
which the amount of junk in orbit around
Earth reaches a point where it just creates
more and more space debris, causing big
problems for satellites, astronauts and
mission planners. Consider this scenario: The
destruction of a dead spy satellite spawns a
swarm of debris in Earth orbit, which wreaks
ever-increasing havoc as it zooms around
our planet.

The cloud destroys a number of

communications satellites, generating more
and more debris with every violent collision.
It takes out the iconic Hubble Space
Telescope and a NASA space shuttle, killing
several crewmembers aboard the winged
vehicle. It then lines the International Space
Station (ISS) up in its crosshairs. This dramatic
scene is fictional, of course; it's pulled from
the award-winning 2013 sci-fi film "Gravity."
But many satellite operators, mission
planners and exploration advocates worry
that it could be a dark window into a future
that's all too real, thanks The Kessler
Syndrome is named after former NASA
scientist Donald Kessler, who laid out the
basic idea in a seminal 1978 paper.
In that study, titled "Collision Frequency of
Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris
Belt," Kessler and co-author Burton Cour-
Palais noted that the likelihood of satellite
collisions increases as more and more
spacecraft are lofted to orbit.
And each such smashup would have an
outsized impact on the orbital environment.
"Satellite collisions would produce orbiting
fragments, each of which would increase the
probability of further collisions, leading to
the growth of a belt of debris around the
Earth," the duo wrote. "The debris flux in such
an Earth-orbiting belt could exceed the
natural meteoroid flux, affecting future
spacecraft designs."
The Kessler Syndrome describes, and warns
of, a cascade of orbital debris that could
potentially hinder humanity's space
ambitions and activities down the road. The
original paper predicted that satellite
collisions would become a source of space
junk by the year 2000, if not sooner, unless
humanity changed how it lofted payloads to
orbit. But a timeline is not essential to the
core idea.

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KESSLER SYNDROME AND THE SPACE
DEBRIS PROBLEM
"It was never intended to mean that the
cascading would occur over a period of
time as short as days or months. Nor was it a
prediction that the current environment was
above some critical threshold," Kessler wrote
in a 2009 paper that clarified the definition
of the Kessler Syndrome and discussed its
implications."The 'Kessler Syndrome' was
meant to describe the phenomenon that Due to the increases in the space activities,
random collisions between objects large the area of the debris is also increasing
enough to catalogue would produce a without reducing its speed and due to this,
hazard to spacecraft from small debris that governments are started to take action to
is greater than the natural meteoroid
decrease the amount of space trash, for this
environment," he added.to the KEarth orbit is
aim SpaceX even started to use its
getting more and more crowded as the
spaceships as a cleaner for the debris where
years go by.
takes tons of trash while coming back to
Humanity has launched about 12,170 earth. Also other methods for cleaning are
satellites since the dawn of the space age in still in consideration between the space
1957, according to the European Space firms. So what will you do if you are in their
Agency (ESA), and 7,630 of them remain in position?
orbit today — but only about 4,700 are still
operational. That means there are nearly
3,000 defunct spacecraft zooming around
Earth at tremendous speeds, along with
other big, dangerous pieces of debris like
upper-stage rocket bodies. For example,
orbital velocity at 250 miles (400 kilometers)
up, the altitude at which the ISS flies, is about
17,100 mph (27,500 kph). At such speeds,
even a tiny shard of debris can do serious
damage to a spacecraft — and there are
huge numbers of such fragmentary bullets
zipping around our planet.essler Syndrome.

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NEW TECHNIQUE DEVELOPED AT
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO USES EEG
TO SHOW HOW OUR BRAINS
PERCEIVE FACES
A new technique developed by
For the study, test subjects hooked up to EEG
equipment were shown images of faces. Their
brain activity was recorded and then used to
digitally recreate the image in the subject’s
neuroscientists at the University of Toronto mind using a technique based on machine
can, for the first time, reconstruct images of learning algorithms.
what people perceive based on their brain It’s not the first time researchers have been
activity. able to reconstruct images based on visual
The technique developed by Dan Nemrodov, stimuli using neuroimaging techniques. The
a postdoctoral fellow in Assistant Professor current method was pioneered by Nestor,
Adrian Nestor’s lab at U of T Scarborough, is who successfully reconstructed facial images
able to digitally reconstruct images seen by from functional magnetic resonance imaging
test subjects based on (fMRI) data in the past, but this is the first
electroencephalography (EEG) data. time EEG has been used.
“When we see something, our brain creates a
mental percept, which is essentially a mental
impression of that thing. We were able to
capture this percept using EEG to get a
direct illustration of what’s happening in the
brain during this process,” says Nemrodov.

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 CONFUSING ART PIECES THAT SHOW MATH IS IN THE ART
Mathematics has directly influenced art with conceptual tools
such as linear perspective, the analysis of symmetry, and
mathematical objects such as polyhedra. For example; M. C.
Escher’s surreal artistic spaces. Many will recognize Escher’s
endless staircases and scenes that challenge easy understanding.
Mathematicians have pointed out that Escher’s art often deals
with hyperbolic geometry. The artist was friends with and even
worked on some of the concepts for his art with the Canadian
mathematician and geometer Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter.

Drip painting method by Jackson Pollock. The contemporary

painter Jackson Pollock is known for his chaotic canvases that
have splatters and drips of different coloured paint. Art historians
have pointed out, and mathematicians have echoed, the way
that his works are forms of fractal geometry, seemingly random
but having underlying symmetries. However, there is also a
dispute among mathematicians about whether Pollock's works
are true expressions of fractals.

Geometry in art by Salvador Dali. The absurdist painter Salvador

Dali was obsessed with geometric shapes. Many of his works
have cones, spheres, rectangles, triangles and various other
shapes. Dali is said to have begun every work of art with a
geometric shape, and then built creatively based on his intuition
of where to go next.

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