Vly News - Professional news Platform

While on a journey across Australia, Oli Firth finds himself in a place he never thought he would end up: In prison. Mr Firth’s journey was cut short in the dusty NSW outback after he was caught on drugs and sent to the Broken Hill Correctional Centre. “It was the toughest time of my life,” he told ABC’s RN’s Life Matters. But while behind bars, Firth is involved in a program called Songbirds that teaches inmates songwriting. That changes it. “[Music] is a real beacon of light for me. It was the only thing that got me through it.” And Mr Firth is not alone in seeking entertainment through music in prison. Into the forest Murray Cook is a musician (as well as a marine biologist) who has played with Midnight Oil, Mental as Anything and Mixed Relations. But for more than 20 years, Mr Cook has also run music classes in various NSW prisons, including stints as a music teacher in the psychology ward at Sydney’s Long Bay Correctional Center. He is currently program director for Songbirds, a

Tiny blobs of jelly spin perfect circles in the water – their movement produces a force that attracts their neighbors. When enough of them come together, this synchronized dance aligns them into a precise six-sided, regular, repeating pattern, much like the carbon atoms in graphene’s crystal structure. But these are not atoms or any kind of inanimate object governed solely by the forces of physics – they are living, self-propelled, embryonic starfish ( patiria miniata ). The spinning starfish embryos gather into living crystals. (Tan et al., Natural 2022) “We know we have crystals of many materials, but we have never really linked crystal formation to actually living components,” said MIT physicist Nikta Fakhri. Natural . “This is a truly extraordinary phenomenon that has never been reported before.” Fakhri, MIT physicist Tzer Han Tan and colleagues studied active matter — a system in which each individual component (such as a bird in a flock, or a cell in a drop of water) uses energ