Things started out pretty slow in the new year and I despaired at coming across anything cool. Thankfully, the scientists picked up the pace towards the end of the month. Once again, it’s almost all in biology and psychology.
Let’s start with one that’s easy to understand and sympathize with. It’s a study that asked respondents to install special software on their computer to track their social media activity and particularly what content they chose to share. They found that elderly Internet users above the age of 65 were particularly likely to share fake news and hoaxes, and this remained true regardless of the person’s party affiliation or ideology.
One exciting finding in medical science has been a long sought for answer to what actually causes Alzheimer’s disease. We’ve known that the disease is associated with malformed proteins protein present in the brain but how the proteins came to me. Now it seems that it may be due to the same bacteria responsible for gum diseases that eventually invades the brain. The bacteria uses a toxic enzyme to feed on human tissue and blocking the mechanism of this enzyme might be an effective treatment for the disease.
Next is an update on a previous effort to create organisms with extra DNA letters not found in nature. The idea now is to make new proteins that could not otherwise have existed and one candidate is a synthetic version of interleukin. This is a cancer drug which can promote an immune system response to tumours but in the original form also has side effects which kill the patient. The new version, made with extra DNA letters, binds only to some parts of lymphocytes and not others, thus keeping the desired anti-tumour effects without the toxicity.
Then we have this bit of news that I absolutely don’t understand why it isn’t all over the headlines. It’s about a project that is attempting of improve on natural photosynthesis by simplifying the pathways that plants use to build sugars out of carbon dioxide. It turns that the natural process works but is inefficient and occasionally makes a mistake by using oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, resulting in a toxic by-product. The researchers engineered new versions in tobacco plants with higher productivity and increased biomass. The implications for this is huge if this is allowed to be used for other crops.
Finally we end with a speculative and sure to be strongly disputed paper in economics. It uses tax data to try to determine if the highest earning people in the US, whose income is mainly non-wage income as expected, are the idle rich or the working rich involved in their own private businesses. Their conclusion is that the top earners segment is dominated by the working rich.
This one is another compact European film that punches way above its weight class and it’s also the feature film debut by its director Xavier Legrand. It’s a little difficult to write about this because part of the intended effect involves some ambiguity over who is actually in the wrong. However if I don’t reveal anything at all, there wouldn’t be anything worth commenting about, so go on ahead only if you don’t mind spoilers.
Here’s another of Stanley Kubrick’s early films and though it’s said to be the best on his early career, I don’t believe it’s all that great. It’s a relatively short heist film that’s more about the plot than the directing. Apparently Kubrick cast Sterling Hayden as the male lead after seeing his performance in The Asphalt Jungle. Unfortunately for Kubrick this one is inferior to that other heist film in just about every way.
Given designer Jonathan Blow’s stature and, yes, his arrogance, it’s a little strange to think this is only his second game. He has apparently stated that his next project has an unheard of 20-year development schedule. For all that I agreed that Braid was a work of genius, it’s hard not to be annoyed by how full of himself this guy is.
I ignored this when it first popped up on cinemas but it received enough critical praise to get my attention. Even my cinephile friend commented that it’s ‘pretty scary’. It’s the debut feature of its director Ari Aster with performers that are mostly not that well known. There is one exception in the form of a supporting character and unfortunately her first appearance is about when the film takes a turn for the worse.
This is an adaptation of an 1956 Argentine novel and won plenty of plaudits from critics. The novel is apparently rather important in Argentine literature but I haven’t read it and I believe this film makes some assumptions that make it difficult to understand for those who have no knowledge of the book. For example, I had no idea that the events depicted take place in Paraguay. Add to that the usual dose of surrealism that you often see in South American literature and you get a film that takes some effort to make sense of.
John Scalzi is pretty prominent in science-fiction circles currently and it wasn’t so long ago that he made his debut with the Old Man’s War series which I haven’t read yet. A big part of it is due to his holding the post of president Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and taking a strong stand on feminist issues and against Gamergate and related alt-right controversies. This particular novel won the Hugo Award in 2013 which brought it to my attention then. But the premise seems so obvious that it’s a wonder no one wrote this novel before this.
