What with all of the drama in Hong Kong recently, I thought we might watch a film from there as it has been a while since the last one. This one was directed by Cheung King Wai who is apparently a documentary filmmaker of some renown but this is his first feature film. It stars Stephy Tang who is a pop star but otherwise everyone else in here are unknowns. Unfortunately this seems to have had a cheap budget and the subsequent production quality looks as amateurish as most of the actors.
I’ve been swamped by the number of cool science stuff. It’s been a great month for some amazing announcements and studies.
We start with what is really more of a wake-up call than a new finding and that’s about improvements in the CRISPR technique that I’ve talked about so often here. This comes from a team in China which claims to have tripled the efficiency of the technique and greatly reduced errors. This means it will soon be safe enough to deployed on a mass scale even though the ethical and legal debate about it is far from being resolved.
Most people who are born with extra fingers on their hands have non-functional digits. A rare few have fully developed extra fingers with working muscles and nerves but most still have them amputated as they considered undesirable. This study examined how they work when allowed to grow and develop normally, It found that the subjects were indeed capable of more complex manipulation with their hands than normal people and that their nervous system is able to accomodate them without loss of control to any other fingers. In effect they have a kind of superpower and it has interesting consequences when it comes to adding future bionic implants that need to interface with the human nervous system.
We all know by now how worries about the causes of autism has led to all manner of bad practices. New studies, backed by evidence, now claim that it may be caused by differences in the population of bacteria present in the gut. Experimental treatments which consist of transplanting faecal bacteria from healthy people to those diagnosed with autism have been able to alleviate symptoms and similar findings have also been made with mice that given transplanted bacteria from both normal humans and those with autism symptoms. Indeed, mice given bacteria from autistic humans began showing autistic symptoms themselves.
Next is a fascinating study about how some chimpanzees in Guinea practise crab-fishing. It is apparently the first known instance of a non-human primate being shown to habitually catch and eat aquatic crabs. Also interesting that populations who ate crabs more, ate ants less. I always think it’s cool to learn when animals have a wider range of behaviors than we expect.
One widely shared bit of science news this month has been a social experiment on civic honesty. The team deliberately dropped wallets containing identifying documents, some including money and some not, then waited to see how many would be returned. This was done in 40 countries and 355 cities around the world so the data is good. The unsurprising find that the return rate is highest in countries like Switzerland and the Scandinavian nations, lowest in African and Asian countries. The surprising find is that it is higher when the wallets actually contain cash.
This is a little old by now and it’s so widely talked about that I had to share it. It’s a primer on the Baumol Effect, the name given to the phenomenon whereby prices rise inexorably in industries that don’t increase in productivity. This explanation is not new, being named after the economist William Baumol but as it’s not widely understood, this primer is timely and very digestible even to laymen. I’m not summarizing it here so read it for yourself.
Finally for fun reading here’s a physics paper describing how lightsabers are physically possible in theory but implausible in practice due to the extreme energy densities required. The key challenge they wanted to solve was how to get light interact with itself in a vacuum. However in quantum mechanics, the vacuum is not fully empty but instead filled with virtual particles. The passage of an electromagnetic wave can polarize the quantum vacuum. allowing two lightsaber blades to interact with one another. However the energy required is immense and even the most efficient theoretically possible energy production methods would result in a ridiculously large and heavy lightsaber.
Usually when I add films to my list from critics’ lists of the most notable releases of the year, they usually have stellar aggregated ratings. So I was surprised to note that this has a relatively dismal rating in the low 70s on Rotten Tomatoes. I decided to watch it anyway as my wife has a weakness for biographies of writers and was pleasantly surprised by its lyrical quality and tight focus on the final years of Wilde’s life.
Our cinephile friend told us ages ago about the iconic scene from this film about a man trying to carry a lit candle across a courtyard. But it wasn’t until I watched the full scene that was included in the Jonathan Blow game The Witness that I bumped it up the priority list. I would say that rewatching the scene again here does lessen its impact but the whole thing is still an incredible triumph of the visual arts.
This is as high profile a release as some other shows, but it’s great example of how much innovation and experimentation is going on in television these days. It’s an anthology series of science-fiction shorts, each unrelated, of varying lengths and made by various animation studios. It’s also very much adults only as it has plenty of nudity and violence. This would have been pretty much impossible to pull off before the era of streaming video as broadcast television would have required consistent episodes lengths and likely more censorship.
I’m sure that this is an adventure game that everyone has heard of due to how successful it is and how it swept up gaming awards. It has since spawned a prequel and a sequel, though the latter is still being released on an episodic basis. I may pick up the prequel later but from what I can see the sequel has nothing to do the story here and I have little interest in it.
In This Corner of the World is a wildly successful and highly praised animated film. It’s so well liked that it’s difficult to find anyone saying anything bad about it. In this era of computer graphics, its traditional hand drawn animation also gives it plenty of retro charm. I even like its premise of depicting a civilian perspective of the Second World War. However it’s pro-Japanese bias is evident and I am uncomfortable that so many international critics have let its politics pass without remark.
