A lighter load of articles this month and just as well as I am very busy! Almost all of this is medical related as well especially as I have started paying more attention to potential health issues.
We may as well start with the news that everyone most likely has heard already, about a man in US being the first recipient of a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig. The genes needed to be modified to reduce the risk of organ rejection due to the presence of foreign proteins and even after all that work this is understandably still a huge gamble. It is an incredible milestone to reach of course and even if the transplant fails in this particular instance, there will most certainly be many more attempts.
A very common ailment as one ages is arthritis caused by wear and tear of the cartilage protecting our joints. The only treatment possible right now are artificial implants or transplants of healthy cartilage from elsewhere which makes for a very scary surgery as someone I know had to go through this recently. So this announcement about success in inducing cartilage to regrow is promising. This experiment was performed on a rabbit and they stimulated the cartilage to regrow by constructing a tissue scaffold that generates a weak electrical field. This induces cells to colonize the scaffold and grow into cartilage and the scaffold itself is made of a biodegradable polymer that doesn’t have to be removed afterwards.
Next up is the discovery of a possible explanation for what actually causes multiple sclerosis. To the uninitiated, this is a horrifying condition in which your own immune system attacks your neurons but why this happens has always been unclear. By searching through extensive blood samples drawn from every serving member of the US armed forces, researchers showed that diagnosis of multiple sclerosis is preceded by infection by the Epstein-Barr virus, one of the most common viruses in humans. We still don’t know why only a small subset of those infected by this virus goes on to develop the condition but this finding may be enough to prompt more effort to develop a vaccine against the virus, which currently does not exist.
Finally here is a cool article about how astronomers watched a red supergiant star go supernova for the first time. Of course the star in question is located in the NGC 5731 galaxy about 120 million years away so this happened a long time ago and this still marks the first time that astronomers were able to observe the day before it went supernova and kept observing it when they detected unusual activity 130 days before the violent event.
Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan director of some renown and I believe this is the film of hers that has made the most impact internationally so far. It’s a romance about a couple of young lesbians and given the state of LBGT rights in Kenya, it’s no surprise that this was banned in its home country. The ban however was lifted after the director took the matter to court. It feels a little rough around the edges to me in terms of production quality but it is heartfelt and the Kenyan setting makes it doubly interesting.
This marks the first film that we’ve watched in the cinema since the pandemic started and I suspect that this will be the case for quite a few people. We really should have gone earlier to watch Dune but that was just after things started opening up again. Anyway we still waited until after the early rush of people to catch this and by now spoilers are everywhere so I won’t care about it that so much. This features a huge slate of characters, which ordinarily is a bad idea but director Jon Watts somehow makes it all work. I have major gripes about the nature of evil as presented here but in all other respects this is a top tier action movie and a wonderful return to form for the MCU.
Akira Kurosawa is of course one of the greatest Japanese directors of all time but he is also judged to make films that are very Westernized. I mention this because this one feels particularly Westernized to me from the nature of its plot to its esthetic. Indeed I later read that it is considered a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and yet is firmly set in Japan’s postwar era, known both for its poverty and its endemic corruption.
I am of course way late in playing this and the reason is that I completely forgot that I even owned this. I have this on the GOG platform and never even bothered to install the GOG Galaxy client. I’ve never played the legendary first game either but of course know a bit about its history and how the Fallout series is kind of its bastard stepchild. This was kind of an old-fashioned game even back in 2014 but I found that I rather like it that way.
This is another one of Alfred Hitchcock’s more experimental films, set in a single location and elaborately planned out to create the illusion of a single continuous, uninterrupted take. Even the plot is novel as the audience is shown the body and who the murderers are right at the beginning so the whole thing is an elaborate game over which, if any, of the other characters catch on. This film had a mixed reception on release and some critics thought that it was technical cleverness and nothing else. Like much else of Hitchcock’s oeuvre however it has been redeemed nowadays and I don’t consider it a minor film at all.
I found it amusing to watch both Black Widow and this film with a rather similar premise in short order, young women superspies being a Hollywood staple now. This one seemed to have rapidly dropped off the radar soon after release which is a shame because it is an excellently made film in many respects and I really appreciated how it creates a character who comes across as every bit as deadly as Black Widow, if not more so, without feeling at all like a superhero movie. Unfortunately it also has flaws and might have made for a more impressive spectacle with a bigger budget.
