undulation

Belgium’s Amenra, headlining Thursday, is one of half a dozen international bands performing alongside Friday and Saturday headliners, Forbidden and Weekend Nachos, as well as locals like Seattle’s Undulation, Nox Novacula and Oxygen Destroyer.

“Terror Fest really cements the fact that there is a thriving metal scene here, and the balance of local and national/international artists is great,” said Olivia Hatfield, who performs as The Executioner in melodic blackened death metal band Undulation.

Most methods of snake locomotion involve some pattern of curling up and straightening out again, such as concertina movement, scrunching their tails up toward their heads and pushing out headfirst, or lateral undulation, tensing and flexing alternating muscles in a sort of continuous wiggle.

Naming this astonishing new structure the Radcliffe Wave, in honor of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where the undulation was originally discovered, the team now reports in Nature that the Radcliffe Wave not only looks like a wave, but also moves like one – oscillating through space-time much like “the wave” moving through a stadium full of fans.

The team didn’t see telltale signs of lateral undulation, the kind of movement that would indicate swimming played a prominent role in the evolutionary loss of limbs.