It’s been a particularly rich month for science with some really cool articles. Here goes:
Due to my own interest in computer science, I couldn’t not include this. This Popular Mechanicsarticle explains how a computer program created a model of the inner workings of a flatworm. The scientists were interested in how the worm’s genes regulate the organism’s impressive regenerative ability. The program essentially took a brute force approach to the problem, randomly making guesses and matching the results to the available data and refining its guesses until it ended up with a model that is a perfect match. This is the kind of work that would take human researches ages to do manually even if humans can explore the search space more intelligently and it’s likely that we’re going to see more and more of this kind of science.
It’s been said again and again that science is a work in progress and we’re constantly revising what we know. But one of the areas that everyone has long thought is settled science are the structures of the human body. It turns out we were wrong when we thought we’d thoroughly mapped every part of the body because scientists have discovered a lymphatic network that links the brain and the immune system as this Neuroscience Newsarticle explains. Needless to say this is a huge bit of news that has implications for every brain disease in existence and all of the medical textbooks will need to be revised.
Staying on the subject of the brain, this article from Hacked talks about how a team has managed to build what is in effect an artificial neuron. They claim that it is made of organic bioelectronics with no living parts but is capable of mimicking the function of a normal organic neuron in every way. Since the device is currently the size of a fingertip, it’s not going to be implantable into a real brain any time soon but you can bet that miniaturization is on the cards.
Finally here is yet another paper on the favorite thought experiment of quantum physicists, Schrödinger’s cat. This article from Nature covers a new, purely theoretical finding that quantum superpositions would collapse in the presence of gravity. As such the classical setup of the cat would only work in deep, interstellar space far from any planet.
Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel is, I think, best known for his surrealist works as exemplified by his famous collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou. As such Los Olvidados, being a more realistic and grounded story is probably not representative of his body of work, though it does feature a dream sequence that gives you a taste of that style.
Sita Sings the Blues is as indie a film as you can imagine, being made largely by a single person, Nina Paley, with crowdfunded money. Apparently she created almost the entire thing on her own home computer with popular commercial software like Adobe Flash. The film also makes heavy use of jazz songs by Annette Hanshaw from the 1920s. This caused copyright problems which made it difficult for this film to be distributed normally. That’s why the creator has encouraged fans to freely distribute it in any way they like including using BitTorrent.
Despite hearing lots of praise for it, I’d skipped out on Bastion, thinking that it looked too lightweight. Supergiant’s follow-up, Transistor, was an even bigger success. It has a cool female protagonist, an awesome, nigh infinitely-configurable weapon and an original science-fiction world.
This is a relatively obscure film that showed up on my radar both because it is frequently cited on Broken Forums as an old favorite and because a videogame adaptation of it was made not too long ago, decades after the release of the original film. Apparently this film proved to be quite controversial during its time, as there were fears of gang violence and vandalism associated with it, and it was critically panned upon release. But its reputation improved as time passed and it has since been recognized as a cult film.
Since this five-week course by Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University officially ended this week, I guess I should write a few words on it as I usually do. I’m more reticent than usual about this because it turned out to be a rather bland course about a very narrow subject: how Hollywood depicts the institution of marriage in its films and whether this has changed over time and if so, how.
Considering how much I liked both Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, I was really looking forward to watching Persona. It is apparently considered to be Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made. My wife says she has watched this many times already but was willing to watch it again with me. In the event, I can’t say that I like it very much. On an intellectual level, I have to admire how brilliant it is, but it’s just not a film that speaks to me.
