Design and perception, plus quantum dots, Australians, and increasing noise
Nemertes [Next] Newsletter Issue #30
The first session of the Nemertes [Next] Live Fall 2025 conference entailed an invigorating conversation with UPenn’s Konrad Körding, who left Nemertes community members with the following takeaway: “Deep down, brains, biology, AI, and organizations are the same thing: Learning algorithms in a complex world,” where he considered the evolutionary strategy of whole-system gradient descent as an essential accelerant to optimize piecewise-incremental improvement in complex systems like his exemplars.
The upcoming [Next] Live event, on October 1 (5:00–6:30 pm Eastern), features two speakers and will similarly alter perceptions—in this case literally, since the overarching theme will be “Design and Perception; and Designing Perception.” Founding chair of Department of Design Tech within Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Jenny Sabin, speaks to “A Dynamically Responsive Built Environment: The Interplay of Design and Science” by sharing her lab’s philosophy of design and a range of her artistic, architectural, and inspired projects. Jenny is followed by University of Waterloo’s Austin Roorda speaking about expanding limits of perception, in particular the color “olo,” generated by selectively exciting retinal M-cones, something that doesn’t occur in nature, but that he has personally experienced. His talk is “Perceiving Something Entirely New: Olo.” As is the norm for [Next] Live, the final half hour of the event is an open conversation stimulated by the pair of speakers.
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Nancy Kleinrock*
Content Director, Nemertes [Next]
Work underway at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering (field trip, Brooklyn June 2018) uses colloidal quantum dots to bypass the need for the conventionally toxic processes involving heavy metals when manufacturing infrared cameras (Dror Sharon, San Francisco, Dec 2014; Greg Dobler, Austin, Feb 2026)—a product category increasingly important in autonomous vehicles, medical imaging, and national security. Instead of the tedious, costly, and environmentally unfriendly process of individually placing atoms across a detector’s pixels, solution-based colloidal quantum dots are synthesized in solution and then applied uniformly using conventional roll-to-roll coating processes. The outcome is ultrasensitive IR detection at the microsecond timescale.
An eco-friendly way to see in the dark using colloidal quantum dots
Staying on the subject of quantum dots, combining an old standby with new-fangled addition can lead to accentuated success. In this case, the goal is to combat drug-resistant bacteria, the old standby is simple vinegar—i.e., acetic acid, a natural antibacterial agent—and the newcomer is cobalt-containing carbon quantum dot nanoparticles. A research team of Australians and Norwegian scientists have demonstrated nontoxicity to humans and microbial lethality to antibiotic-resistant staph and E. coli.
Nanoparticles supercharge vinegar’s old-fashioned wound healing power
Sticking with Australian researchers, and refocusing on matters of eco-friendliness, work at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has yielded a surprisingly strong building material simply using cardboard and dirt to entirely sidestep the need for concrete when constructing the foundations of buildings. Assuming appropriate-quality soil at the building site, a construction team would only need to bring with them cardboard tubes and use on-site dirt to create rammed-earth support structures from which to build the foundation. But not just any old cardboard tubes: The relevant innovation in this low-tech construction process is the precise specifications of the dimensions and aspect ratio for the tubes. An important side benefit, of course, is to keep waste cardboard out of landfills. This work follows a higher tech—and more expensive and less ambiently available—earth-rammed-into-carbon-fiber-tubes support material that the same researcher developed and showed to have comparable strength to high-performance concrete. (Heidi Kujawa, San Francisco, Dec 2016)
Cardboard and earth reshape sustainable construction
This same RMIT researcher, who heads up the university’s Centre for Innovative Structures and Materials, doesn’t restrict himself to dry land, although this next project also focuses on material strength. With biomimetic inspiration from the Pacific Ocean sea sponge Venus’ flower basket that fashions its intricate basket-like skeleton out of silica, his lab developed a strong new auxetic metamaterial. “While most materials get thinner when stretched or fatter when squashed, like rubber, auxetics do the opposite,” says Jiaming Ma. “Auxetics can absorb and distribute energy effectively, making them extremely useful.” He anticipates applications in construction—notably to enhance earthquake safety—as well as protective equipment, sports gear, and medical applications. (Julia Greer, San Jose, Dec 2021; San Francisco, Dec 2015). Stay tuned for more bio-inspired architectural design on Wednesday with Jenny Sabin.
New material inspired by a sea spong’s glass skeleton
You don’t need me to tell you that we live in a multiply connected world, but here’s one facet that I hadn’t previously considered: the link between a warming climate and ambient noise in the vicinity of airports. (Maybe that’s because I don’t live directly in a flight path—although, ironically, a loud military jet is flying overhead as I type this.) Warmer air is less dense, leading an airplane to take off with as much as a 7.5% reduced angle of climb according to the British researchers in the University of Reading’s Turbulence Research Group. The upshot will be a broader area around airports where aircraft noise will regularly rise above 50dB, subjecting neighbors to noise pollution. Oh, and this is in addition to the group’s other recent findings that a warming climate increases flight turbulence and airport flooding. Something to look forward to. (Robert Carter, Memphis, Sep 2006; field trip to FedEx, Memphis, Sep 2006)
Airports will get noisier as Earth gets warmer
”Seems like half of my anxiety dreams are about airports.”—Lois McMaster Bujold
*This email is sent from, but doesn’t originate with, Substack; it’s written by me, Nancy Kleinrock. I invite you to write to me at nancy.kleinrock@nemertes.com with your thoughts—positive, negative, or otherwise—about this posting or whatever’s on your mind. If someone forwarded it to you and you like what you see, feel free to subscribe by clicking the button below.
Oh, and although it took over a week, I finally found not only my mug, but also my delightful North Country Public Radio pint glass—the one etched with an owl.