There’s been so much in the way of interesting science-related announcements this month that I decided to cut some out as they are either too speculative or perhaps political. What’s left are all still fairly major announcements.
The first bit of news really comes from Sabine Hossenfelder whose YouTube channel I’ve taken to following and I wouldn’t have understood its significance without her laying it clearly. This paper describes success at using a laser to excite the nucleus of the Thorium isotope Th-229. Th-229 is a particular target as its excitation energy 8.4 eV is considered quite low, making it accessible to tabletop laser systems. I won’t go into the technical details of how the team achieved this but the upshot is that this opens the pathway towards optical nuclear clocks that are more precise than anything currently possible. As Hossenfelder points out, this is definitely a Nobel Prize-level achievement as last year’s award was for attosecond physics.
The news about a male orangutan in Indonesia being observed intentionally using a medicinal plant to treat a wound on his face has since gone viral. What is particularly impressive is that it was a multi-step, deliberative process. First, the orangutan chewed leaves from a climbing plant and then smeared the resulting juice on his wound. Then he finished by covering the wound with the chewed up leaves. This plant is known to be used in traditional medicine for treating illnesses like dysentery, diabetes and malaria. The scientists say that the wound was likely from a fight with another orangutan and they currently do not know how this orangutan learned to use the plants in this way.
Many of the pyramids in Egypt are located on a narrow strip of desert, yet researchers today don’t know why they were concentrated on this specific area. In this paper, a team describes how they used satellite imagery, geophysical data and soil coring to show that a now extinct branch of the Nile River used to run at the foothills of the Western Desert plateau. The waterway then would have been critical to transport building materials and workers for the massive construction projects.
Next we have a large release of data that surely yield many, many more papers and theories for years and years to come. The team took a 1mm cubic volume of human brain tissue, sliced it very finely and imaged everything with an electron microscope. The result is about 1.4 petabyes of data covering 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. It is the largest connectomics study of human brain tissue so far. It will take a lot of time for other researchers to sift through this treasure trove and mine novel insights but already there has been a lot of excitement over previously unseen structures.
Finally, here’s a paper that is sure to be highly controversial. The team used food-liking data from participants in the UK to find associations between dietary habits and mental health. Notable is that instead of deciding what the different food groups are themselves, they look at the data to find natural patterns. From there, they found that dietary choices fell into four types: reduced-starch or starch-free, vegetarian, high protein and low fiber, and balanced. They also found that those on a balanced diet had better mental health and cognitive functions compared to those on other diets. More controversially, they state that those on a vegetarian diet exhibited more mental health issues including anxiety, depression, mental distress and so on. The team is cautious in saying that they cannot draw a causal conclusion but this paper is sure to lead to a firestorm of protests all the same.
A new high-concept science-fiction series is always something that I have to watch even if I feared it might be more of a thriller or a drama. The central conceit is original enough but really grabbed my attention is that this is kind of an office dystopia setting in the vein of The Stanley Parable. The series even cites the game as an influence! Despite some clever ideas, the plot develops in a very predictable direction and slows down in the middle of the first season. Fortunately the last two episodes drastically ramp up the tension, all but guaranteeing that we’ll be there for the next season.
This is only the second film by Mikio Naruse and it goes all the way back to the silent era. It’s probably unnecessary unless you’re being a completionist but I was curious about Japan’s silent film era and this does feature imagery from a very distant in the past Tokyo. I don’t particularly like the story or the characters but I was surprised by how strong the female characters shown here are and how much agency they have. As to be expected from Naruse, the outcome is bittersweet at best and the characters face numerous crises, yet they never break down nor turn against one another. Quite remarkable for a work from that era.
There’s a lot going on in this film, a large cast of characters, a popular online game that connects many of them, a webcomic inspired by the game, a seemingly random shooting spree in a night market. I bewildered at first as what it is trying to achieve. If it’s just about frustrated youth boiling over and killing people, the large cast seems superfluous. Then the film switches modes and makes it obvious that its real theme is that anyone can flip and go crazy under the right circumstances. I admit that this is kind of clever but it took too long to make its point and it’s not a terribly well made film anyway.
This is an absolutely insane wild ride of a high school comedy that went far further than I expected. The thing is, it’s a totally formulaic and predictable story about two buddies who want to get laid and so do something outrageous to become popular. The twist is that the two buddies here are lesbian girls and indeed the entire film is framed through a sort of gay-tinted lenses perspective. I’m not certain I really liked it that much but it’s creative and it left me with so many questions like do high schoolers in the US talk like that these days and are attitudes like this mainstream?
Divinity: Original Sin 2 was so wearying to play that I kept looking forward to unwinding with this relaxed, top down rally game. As you can see from these screenshots, it uses very simplified graphics and it’s meant to be played with just a game controller. Yet that doesn’t prevent it from being a reasonably decent rally game with plausible physics, good enough to win over fans of such games as the Dirt Rally series. It’s a short game and fairly easy for someone already experienced with rallying but I had a great time with it.
Most people have probably never heard of Barbara Loden and this is certainly the only film of note she ever made. Still, it’s an important enough film to be included in the US National Film Registry and most people will have heard of her husband, Elia Kazan. Mostly I am impressed that Loden would write, direct and then cast herself in the lead role of an extremely stupid character. She states that this is partly autobiographical and that too feels profoundly honest. Many films have tried to deglamorize classic Hollywood tropes but this succeeds more than most simply because the characters are such unsympathetic losers that there’s nothing cool about them at all.
