Cross-Nucleation between Concomitantly Crystallizing \uce\ub1- And \uce\ub3-Phases in Polypivalolactone: Secondary Nucleation of One Polymorph on Another

Cross-nucleation between polymorphs occurs when a new crystal structure nucleates on the surface of a pre-existing crystal of a different modification. The understanding of the phenomenon is still mostly phenomenological and qualitative. Here, we report quantitative measurements of cross-nucleation rate of the \uce\ub1 phase of polypivalolactone on its \uce\ub3 phase, during melt crystallization over a large temperature range. The cross-nucleation kinetics is well modeled as heterogeneous secondary nucleation of one polymorph on another, in which the formation of a viable \uce\ub1-phase nucleus on the surface of \uce\ub3-crystals is the rate-limiting step. According to this analysis, cross-nucleation can occur because the interfacial energy between the two structures is small, and the nucleation free energy barrier is similar to that for secondary nucleation within the same polymorph in crystal growth. Some peculiar aspects of cross-nucleation with respect to conventional heterogeneous nucleation, arising from the continuous growth of the nucleating substrate, are also highlighted

How not to return to normal

In a March 2020 article published in Le Monde, Bruno Latour defined the Covid-19 emergency as "the big rehearsal" for the larger disaster to come: one that extends to all forms of life on Earth. The ongoing crisis, in his eyes, becomes both a risk and an opportunity to trial and develop new action plans necessary for the continuation of life. "The pandemic is a portal," wrote author Arundhati Roy a few days later, calling for a more equitable and sustainable post-pandemic future. The pandemic is an opportunity for un-learning and changing direction, particularly in how we approach risk and disaster. The dominant narrative for politicians and the media, however, is one of “returning to normal” as soon as possible, bouncing back, relying on established models of resilience based on the management of economic risk. They are also rehearsing, or modelling, worst- or best-case scenarios. Artists, designers, and institutions are shaping discourses around the growing extinguishment of our resources, but also performing, visualising, simulating and modelling responses to possible risks and imagining resilience differently. Design and art can foster new visions, pilot new modes of communication and knowledge sharing, and drive the interdisciplinary collaborations necessary to address common issues. This panel explores ways in which art and design practices can be mobilized to transform current approaches to risk and disaster in imaginative, sustainable and equitable ways. The papers selected for this session reflect a need to reassess, reframe, and reimagine the roles of museums, art and design, and thus contribute to a space for critical reflection to inform action, strategy, and practices. It is important to remember that our fields are far from immune from being complicit in the creation and reinforcement of the kinds of inequalities and injustices that have been made even more unmistakably clear in the last year: as Sasha Costanza-Shock, author of the book Design Justice, has pointed out, designers are ‘often unwittingly reproducing the existing structure of [...] who's going to benefit the most and who's going to be harmed the most by the tools or the objects or the systems or the buildings or spaces that we're designing.’ The urge to respond in an emergency, whether it's a design challenge in the context of COVID 19 or exhibition on climate change, requires space for critical thinking, inclusive conversation and production. This necessity comes across on the three papers brought together for this panel, and in the opening presentation by Emily Candela and Francesca Cavallo

Sensing it Coming: Regarding the Aesthetics of Risk

Today the ubiquitous guidance, warnings and protocols of risk management construct possible futures as risks to be managed. How is this need to manage risk transforming the contemporary visual language? Are its rhetorics of danger, reassurance or rationality effectively convincing us that we are prepared? Can art reconcile us with these issues and be a safe space for constructing resilience? This dissertation focusses on the rhetorics of risk from the perspective of art and visual culture, examining warnings, instructions, drills and data visualisations across risk and art

Decoding intentions from movement kinematics

How do we understand the intentions of other people? There has been a longstanding controversy over whether it is possible to understand others’ intentions by simply observing their movements. Here, we show that indeed movement kinematics can form the basis for intention detection. By combining kinematics and psychophysical methods with classification and regression tree (CART) modeling, we found that observers utilized a subset of discriminant kinematic features over the total kinematic pattern in order to detect intention from observation of simple motor acts. Intention discriminability covaried with movement kinematics on a trial-by-trial basis, and was directly related to the expression of discriminative features in the observed movements. These findings demonstrate a definable and measurable relationship between the specific features of observed movements and the ability to discriminate intention, providing quantitative evidence of the significance of movement kinematics for anticipating others’ intentional actions