Nayanah Siva in Nautilus:

The scientists crowded around Yuanchao Xue’s petri dish. They couldn’t identify the cells that they were seeing. “We saw a lot of cells with spikes growing out of the cell surface,” said Xiang-Dong Fu, the research team’s leader at the University of California, San Diego. “None of us really knew that much about neuroscience, and we asked around and someone said that these were neurons.” The team, who were made up of basic cellular and molecular scientists, were utterly puzzled. Where had these neurons come from? Xue had left a failed experiment, a dish full of human tumor cells, in the incubator, and when he looked two weeks later, he found a dish full of neurons.

It’s not often an unexpected cell type appears in a petri dish, as if from nowhere. Scientists all over the world have spent a lot of time and money actively trying to generate neurons in the lab—the implications for neurodegenerative disease would be massive. And yet this research team, who were actually studying the RNA-binding protein PTB, had unknowingly generated a whole dish of neurons.

“It puzzled me for quite a long time, and I didn’t know what was wrong with my cells,” said Xue, who is now a researcher at the Institute of Biophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing. Xue was attempting to deplete human tumor cells of PTB with small interference RNAs (siRNAs). He expected his cell lines, which are typically very proliferative, to keep growing, but they stopped, and so were cast aside for two weeks. Sure that the dish had become contaminated, Xue and colleagues tried the experiment again … and again … and again.

More here.

At the Beginning of Covid-19

Night, night, night. And the shadows
That wane talk to us. The music rounds
Up, exempt from history. It’s an endless
Canceling out of divinity, ready to speak

Again, saying, I am here. I’d call it endless,
Endless. What is stripped of its mortality
Goes on like a soldier to war. But we can’t
Do that, not really. Instead, we balance

On the head of a pin with the angels. I’ve
Spent hours lettering the borders of this
World. My cohorts, I don’t believe the laments
About leaving our lives, but I do believe it

That there is elegy, as green as grass. Nothing’s
Touching me anymore, and the spring rain Is peace.

by Noelle Kocott
from The National Poetry Library

Justin E. H. Smith in his newsletter:

Is the individual person a composite of a material body and an immaterial mind or soul? And if so, what is the relationship between these two ingredients?

This is the “mind-body problem” in its simplest formulation. But simplicity is not always a virtue, and in fact this formulation conceals a good deal of the historical complexity of the issue. Most philosophers are generally aware that the problem is part of our inheritance from early modern Europe, but when it is formulated in this concise way, we miss some of the important reasons why seventeenth-century Europeans were so anxious about apportioning and delimiting the respective powers of the mind and the body. And without understanding these, neither can we understand the nature of the problem we have inherited.

Anglo-American scholars have for the most part treated the problem as a timeless one, while continental scholars have tended to see its origins in early modern Europe as a result of the cultural transformations of the wars of religion. It became urgent, these latter maintain, to account for such questions as whether spirit is coextensive with body, or rather whether it should not be said to have any locus at all, in a cultural setting in which entire populations were being massacred over disagreements about the composition of the Eucharist. But what both the historically ignorant Anglo-Americans and the historically sensitive but terribly ethnocentric Europeans miss is the crucial role of global encounters, in what used to be called the “age of exploration”, for the shaping of a distinctly modern set of philosophical problems, among them, importantly, that of the relationship between mind and body.

More here.

Wilfred M. McClay at Hedgehog Review:

The work of cultural criticism never ends. A hundred years ago, Thomas R. Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, proclaimed that “what this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” But who would say that now? Times have changed, tobacco has become an evil weed, and anyway, what the country needs now is a really good four-letter word.

No, I’m not talking about love, although that would be a decent guess, since love is highly desirable and always in short supply. I’m talking about the primordial human need for the genuinely dirty word, or, better yet, a few of them, a finite but reliable stock of good old-fashioned profanities—racy, pungent, transgressive, maybe even a bit radioactive. Words that can shock, provoke, even lead to a barroom brawl.

more here.

John Spurr at HistoryExtra:

In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare’s Hotspur turns on his prissy wife: “Heart! You swear like a comfit-maker’s wife. ‘Not you in good sooth!’ and ‘as true as I live!’”. Instead Hotspur demanded a good mouth-filling oath. Something like his own “By God’s heart” was more suited to a lady of rank.

The oaths of the Tudor and Stuart centuries, the era of Shakespeare (1564–1616), still jump out at modern readers from plays, courtroom testimonies and countless other sources. And they strike us as very different from our own bad language. Swearing – solemn or profane – was a religious issue: an oath called on God to guarantee the truth of a statement, just as profane swearing took God’s name in vain.

Swearing supposedly ran along the lines of social status and gender. And swearing was always something of a performance.

more here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

For nearly three full centuries, the most accurate way that humanity kept track of time was through the pendulum clock. From its initial development in the 17th century until the invention of quartz timepieces in the 1920s, pendulum clocks became staples of household life, enabling people to organize their schedules according to a universally agreed upon standard. Initially invented in the Netherlands by Christian Huygens all the way back in 1656, their early designs were quickly refined to greatly increase their precision.

But when the first pendulum clock was brought to the Americas, something bizarre happened. The clock, which had worked perfectly well at keeping accurate time in Europe, could be synchronized with known astronomical phenomena, like sunset/sunrise and moonset/moonrise. But after only a week or two in the Americas, it was clear that the clock wasn’t keeping time properly. The first clock in America was a complete failure, but that’s only the beginning of a story that would revolutionize our understanding of the physics of planet Earth.

More here.

Brad Evans interviews James Martel in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

BRAD EVANS:For those of us who remain deeply concerned with understanding the worst episodes in human history, the life and work of Walter Benjamin still appear all too resonant. This in part has something to do with the tragedy of what he came to represent, along with the undoubted brilliance of his insight and challenges to political dogmatism. What is it about Benjamin that captures your attention as an author and critic?

JAMES MARTEL: I think that Benjamin has never been as relevant to questions of politics as he is today with the exception of his own lifetime. As I read him, Benjamin offers one of the best explanations both for the ongoing resilience of capitalism, despite all of its predations and all the instability that it creates, as well as the connection between fascism and liberalism that we are seeing being expressed today. He also offers, I think, the best way to understand how to address our contemporary moment and how to resist and upend capitalism, liberalism, and fascism all round.

More here.

From Medical Xpress:

The BCG vaccine has a broad, stimulating effect on the immune system. This gives it an effective preventive action against various infections—possibly also against COVID-19. New studies are investigating that. BCG is frequently given to children, but a double-blind randomized clinical study, a collaboration between Radboud university medical center and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens shows that elderly people also benefit from it. The results are published in Cell. At Radboudumc, Professor of Experimental Internal Medicine Mihai Netea is conducting research into this protective effect against various infections by the BCG vaccine, an effect called “trained immunity.” Prof. Mihai Netea said, “Two years ago we started the ACTIVATE study, with the aim of showing whether BCG vaccination could protect against infections in vulnerable elderly people. Patients over 65 years of age who were admitted to hospital were randomized to receive BCG or placebo vaccination at their discharge. We followed them for a year to see if BCG could protect them against a broad range of infections.”

The ACTIVATE study had already started before the corona pandemic. 198 elderly people were given either a placebo or a BCG vaccine upon discharge from the hospital. The last follow-up was scheduled for August 2020, but due to the arrival of COVID-19, the researchers looked at the preliminary results, published today in Cell. There was a noticeable difference: in the placebo group, 42.3% of the elderly developed an infection, while this was the case in only 25% of the BCG group. It also took longer: the BCG-vaccinated participants had their first infection on average 16 weeks after vaccination, compared to 11 weeks for the placebo group. There was no difference in side effects.

More here.

Oreskes and Conway in Scientific American:

It is a truism among scientists that our enterprise benefits humanity because of the technological breakthroughs that follow in discovery’s wake. And it is a truism among historians that the relation between science and technology is far more complex and much less linear than people often assume. Before the 19th century, invention and innovation emerged primarily from craft traditions among people who were not scientists and who were typically unaware of pertinent scientific developments. The magnetic compass, gunpowder, the printing press, the chronometer, the cotton gin, the steam engine and the water wheel are among the many examples. In the late 1800s matters changed: craft traditions were reconstructed as “technology” that bore an important relation to science, and scientists began to take a deeper interest in applying theories to practical problems. A good example of the latter is the steam boiler explosion commission, appointed by Congress to investigate such accidents and discussed in Scientific American’s issue of March 23, 1878.

Still, technologists frequently worked more in parallel with contemporary science than in sequence. Technologists—soon to be known as engineers—were a different community of people with different goals, values, expectations and methodologies. Their accomplishments could not be understood simply as applied science. Even in the early 20th century the often loose link between scientific knowledge and technological advance was surprising; for example, aviation took off before scientists had a working theory of lift. Scientists said that flight by machines “heavier than air” was impossible, but nonetheless airplanes flew.

When we look back on the past 175 years, the manipulation of matter and energy stands out as a central domain of both scientific and technical advances. Techno-scientific innovations have sometimes delivered on their promises and sometimes not. Of the biggest advances, three really did change our lives—probably for the better—whereas two were far less consequential than people thought they would be. And one of the overarching impacts we now recognize in hindsight was only weakly anticipated: that by moving matter and energy, we would end up moving information and ideas.

More here.

I do not love you…

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

by Pablo Neruda
translation: Mark Eisner

Sulari Gentill in Crime Reads:

It is the nature of progress that what is now cutting-edge will, with the passing of time, become traditional. And it is the nature of human beings to remake and refine what has worked in the past, and call it new.

And so the term “traditional mystery” is from the outset somewhat difficult to define absolutely. It has an almost organic structure, with successive authors and generations adding their own extensions and renovations to the house built by the likes of Poe, Christie, James, Sayers and Conan Doyle.

That original house had a foundation built on the reassurance of the middle classes, and four recognizable walls: the amateur detective or private investigator with superior powers of deduction, violence and sex occurring largely off-stage and referenced rather than shown, an incompetent or indifferent police force and, above all, the restoration of social order.

Over the years, Hardboiled, Noir, Forensic and Suspense have moved into the street and Traditional crime has been influenced by the architecture of its neighbors. Its walls have been repainted, moved and even knocked down to improve both the view and street appeal for contemporary tenants.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Not too long ago nobody carried a mobile phone; now almost everybody does. That’s the kind of rate of rapid progress we’re seeing with our ability to directly edit genomes. With the use of CRISPR-Cas9 and other techniques, gene editing is becoming commonplace. How does that work — and perhaps more importantly, how are we going to put it to use? Fyodor Urnov has worked in this area from its beginning, having coined the term “gene editing.” We talk about how this new technology can be used to cure or prevent disease, as well as the pros and cons of designer babies.

More here.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff in the New York Times:

Jack Gallant never set out to create a mind-reading machine. His focus was more prosaic. A computational neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Gallant worked for years to improve our understanding of how brains encode information — what regions become active, for example, when a person sees a plane or an apple or a dog — and how that activity represents the object being viewed.

By the late 2000s, scientists could determine what kind of thing a person might be looking at from the way the brain lit up — a human face, say, or a cat. But Dr. Gallant and his colleagues went further. They figured out how to use machine learning to decipher not just the class of thing, but which exact image a subject was viewing. (Which photo of a cat, out of three options, for instance.)

One day, Dr. Gallant and his postdocs got to talking. In the same way that you can turn a speaker into a microphone by hooking it up backward, they wondered if they could reverse engineer the algorithm they’d developed so they could visualize, solely from brain activity, what a person was seeing.

More here.

Cynthia Green at JSTOR Daily:

Most people have heard of Art Nouveau, but few remember two of the most influential figures in its conception. (No, not Gustav Klimt.) They were a pair of sisters named Margaret and Frances MacDonald, who, along with their Glasgow School of Art classmates Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair, comprised the Glasgow Four. Art Nouveau wouldn’t be what it is without them.

Straddling the turn of the twentieth century, from roughly 1890 to 1914, a new kind of art emerged in Europe and America. It used linear, plant-like forms, and drew from science, nature, mythical history, gender, and modernity for inspiration. People called it, simply, Art Nouveau. (Literally, new art.) The Glasgow Four were in art school as Art Nouveau was taking shape. They drew from Victorian Puritanism and Celtic Spiritualism and created ground-breaking pieces. Elongated bodies and a characteristic dreamy palette are ever-present. Colors are light, neutral, metallic, natural and mythical at the same time. And yet, there are touches of modernity, like geometric symmetry and the use of squares.

more here.

Candia McWilliam at Literary Review:

The painter and broadcaster Lachlan Goudie could not introduce The Story of Scottish Art in a more personal fashion. His preface begins, ‘My father, Alexander Goudie, was a painter; I grew up surrounded by Scottish art, I’ve been depicted in it and I’ve spent my adult life trying to add in some small way to its legacy. I am not, however, an academic, and this is not a textbook.’ Whether those words are meant to offer relief or be a warning is unclear, but I think the implication is that academics are pedantic and textbooks dry. Fairly often, alas, academics do not seem to be aware that they might treat language as a collaborator, even a medium, and textbooks, unless written exclusively in symbols and figures, in which case I must trust that they are beautiful, are unintelligible.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI0kM1Es29c

The Doomed

It is not because I’m scared, nor pessimistic,
…. nor have a coward’s heart,
But, whenever I’m forced into a war
I think about it this way:
If anyone is going to die
Then it will obviously be me.

My friend/enemy over there in the opposite trench
Thinks in another way:
If anyone is going to survive this war
Then it will obviously be me.

There is always another witness
Who everyone sees and yet no one
….. yearns to know what he thinks,
Standing alone on the hill
Gazing on everyone’s trenches
He thinks of it in a different way:
If one must die and one survive,
This means all are doomed.
.
by Nazih Abou Afach
from Dam’u Al-Yamaam (The Dove’s Tear; forthcoming)
publisher: First published on PIW, 2011
translation: 2011, John Peate