This month we have both a good number of science announcements interesting enough to be included here and they are also so important that everyone should know about them.
Let’s start with the one that will raise the most hackles. It’s a study of studies aimed at measuring the accuracy of gender stereotypes. The impolitic yet unsurprising finding is that they are mostly true in that people are generally accurate at assessing whether men or women were higher on some given trait or characteristic. That said, they underestimate gender differences in cognitive abilities and academic performance and overestimate them in personality traits and behaviors. Also worth noting that individuals were less accurate at these judgments than the group as a whole, a finding that is in line with similar studies.
Next is a paper that seems especially relevant to us in Malaysia given recent news about health insurance costs. It discusses the rise of genetic testing and how the data thus obtained can be used to predict health outcomes. Yet many jurisdictions around the world have banned insurers from pricing their products using genetic data. This creates a mismatch between individuals who have undergone genetic testing and insurers that will only grow worse as genetic testing becomes more pervasive and more accurate. It is difficult to see how health insurance markets would continue to operate under such conditions.
The major medical news this month has to be the so-called ‘tumor to pork’announcement. It’s about a Chinese team inserting a pig gene into a virus and using it to infect cancerous cells. This then causes the body’s own immune system to treat the cancer as a foreign entity and attack it. The virus used, the Newcastle disease virus, is thought to be relatively harmless to humans though it is deadly to birds. The team used the technique to treat a variety of untreatable cancers including liver, ovarian, cervical etc. with excellent results.
Finally a major discovery in the field of cosmology. Data from the James Webb Space Telescope reveals that around two-thirds of observable galaxies spin in one direction while remainder spin in the other. This contradicts the existing model of a homogenous universe in which more or less equal numbers of galaxies should spin in the opposite directions. One explanation that has caused excitement is that our own universe exists within a black hole and therefore was itself born rotating. This carries the implication that every black hole in our universe is a doorway to another baby universe. The less exciting explanation is that our own perception is skewed by the rotation of the Milky Way galaxy. I like the exciting explanation but in cases like this it’s usually the mundane one that holds true over the long term.
Once again, Mikio Naruse falls just outside of the most celebrated Japanese directors of his era. Yet I’ve also found that this allows him to do things that are ever so slightly not Japanese. This must be one of the most unorthodox romances I’ve seen and like the other Naruse films is willing to present a seedier, grimier view of the society for the camera. With the understated passion of the two leads and dynamic camera work that takes readily to the outdoors, there are times when it feels positively European. The ending kind of has it peter out but that’s an acceptable tradeoff for what is otherwise a perfect film.
Ne Zha 2 is indisputably the cinematic phenomenon of the year, breaking all box office records. When I first wrote about the first film, I called it China’s answer to the MCU. Well, this sequel is now head and shoulders above the current state of the MCU. Thematically it’s just more of the same so that’s not too impressive. But its visuals, action choreography, humor and sheer scale are all just off the charts. The pace is unrelenting as it just never stops throwing more things onto the screen for you to look at. This would actually have been better if it had just a little less fighting but it’s as good as action movie as anyone could want.
Why does it seem like running a clever scam is a running theme in Argentinean films? This one starts with a straightforward heist but at its core is the quest for freedom that perhaps money can buy. Of course there is more than one kind of freedom and there’s a whiff of Don Quixote in the main character’s dream of it. This is a long film however and it might even leave you wondering at the end what’s the point of it all. But I believe in between the subtle black humor, beautiful shots of both the city of Buenos Aires and the remote countryside of Alpa Corral, and its myriad distractions, this is more than worth watching.
I loved first game and naturally had this sequel on my watch list from day one. It was a fantastic puzzle solving experience combined with a very satisfying frame story. I thought that it had the difficulty at just about the right level for me. I never did get around to the DLC Road to Gehenna which is said to be far more difficult than the base game. This sequel naturally builds on the first game and the prologue even tricks you into believing that it is literally more of the same. Soon enough the real world opens to you and it proves that it is a worthy sequel indeed.
The news that a fourth film of this series was just released was enough to have my wife rewatch the first film. I’d never watched it myself but I suppose I’d better because its cultural impact is very real. Immediately it is obvious that this is a very in-your-face adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, with a female heroine who is just ever so slightly overweight, maladroit and tongue-tied so as to be relatable to the average woman. It is not a terribly sophisticated film but it is decently funny and I can see why it’s the almost perfect female fantasy film.
I was frustrated for so long in the process of watching this series. After a rather conventional first episode, it confusingly leaps around, seemingly refusing to be tied down to any particular time and place. I was also frustrated that it has no interest in the plausible logistics of survival in an end-of-the-world scenario and so felt increasingly unrealistic. But then as the multiple threads combine, I finally realize how everything just fits. As a Broken Forum poster pointed out, this is really about trauma and healing from it in different ways. There are many parts of its message that I dislike but I can’t deny that this is one perfectly planned and crafted standalone series.
