A bit of a slow month for science news but we do have some very interesting announcements.
Most people should know that memories in our brains are stored n the way that our neurons connect with each other via synapses. However this is usually how short-term memories are formed. A team has reported a mechanism which forms long-term memories that involves our DNA. In an experiment with mice, they found that breakage of DNA in the hippocampus helps store memories. When they deleted a gene encoding a protein known as TLR9 which has a role in detecting DNA breakage, they found that the mice remembering a chamber that they had previously learned is dangerous. As TLR9 is also involved in the body’s immune response to DNA fragments from invading bacteria, this means that untangling how exactly our memories is much harder than previously thought.
One theory about development holds that paddy rice farming leads to more collectivist societies while wheat farming leads to more individualism. A new paper uses China’s Cultural Revolution to test this theory as the government then randomly assigned people including decommissioned soldiers and urban youths to either rice or wheat farms. The team tested psychological traits of farmers at two such farms that are only 56 kilometers from one another. They indeed found that the rice farmers were less individualistic, engaging in self-inflation less and being more loyal to the community than wheat farmers.
Next is a technological development that is billed as brain-like computers but that’s really getting ahead of ourselves. What they actually made is an artificial synapse that works based on a solution of salt and water. The creators named their device an iontronic memristor that is in effect a microchannel filled with the solution. When it receives electrical impulses, ions within the solution migrate through the channel, mimicking how a biological synapse works. This is still a very long way from any kind of biological computer but it is a necessary first step.
This last bit isn’t quite science news but it’s adjacent. Time standards are of course arbitrary yet they’re necessary and this article talks about why the moon needs its own Coordinated Lunar Time. As Einstein taught us, there is no absolute measure of time and so time passes differently on the moon compared to the Earth. The difference is miniscule in the case of the moon, amounting to about 1 second across 5 years. Yet as human activity on the moon becomes more intensive and the precision of coordinating these activities becomes more important, the need to have a standard time on the moon becomes more evident. This is something that can be achieved only through international agreement and cooperation.
This film leaves me with very mixed feelings. For much of its first half, I was convinced that this was a superficial film about the spring break-type wild holiday that I don’t get the appeal of at all. But then when the main character Tara starts having doubts, I realized that it has a lot of psychological depth after all. As my wife explained, this may well be the most realistic portrayal of a young girl’s first experience of sex yet made. There’s a lot going on under the surface, Tara’s feelings, the actions of the boy, the reactions of her friends. This won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and deservedly so.
Louis Malle is a famous French director so it’s sort of funny that the onl;y films we’ve watched so far by him have been his later American ones. It’s good then to go back to this earlier one that helped establish his career. Despite its year of release, this absolutely isn’t New Wave as it actually has a straightforward narrative. The main character Alain Leroy isn’t a person that I would ordinarily have much sympathy for, being a former alcoholic who has difficulty finding purpose in life now that he is sober. Yet Malle’s direction really spoke to me and I can see why this is one of Wes Anderson’s major inspirations.
Here’s a film by a director Nicole Holofcener whose work I haven’t really seen before. It’s the kind of film that I’m not inclined to like, being set in New York in which nearly every character is a creative artist of some stripe and are each obsessed with their personal foibles. Fortunately this is a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously and the characters themselves are well aware that their problems are insignificant in the greater scheme of things. This is no psychological deep dive but it’s clever, occasionally funny and that’s good enough.
This game’s description didn’t quite make it clear to me, but it’s really a very old-school style text adventure game accompanied by still images. There are no real combat mechanics for example. They’re just skill checks to see if you can get past obstacles. There are things like RPG stats, inventory items and so on, but it’s all very simple. I was turned off by how much reading this entailed at first even though I used to be a big fan of gamebooks. But I came around as I grew to know its world and ended up enjoying myself quite a bit.
My wife wanted to watch this local film for the longest time due to the international accolades it won. Yet when it was finally screened in Malaysian cinemas, it was censored so badly that this version was disavowed by its director Amanda Nell Eu. Fortunately for us, it’s now available on Netflix so we can see for ourselves both why it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and why the Malaysian government is uneasy about it. I am in awe of the director’s ability to coax such strong performances out of its young, untrained performers and her courage in confronting the problems of female puberty in a conservative society. It struggles to land its ending but I can understand what the director is going for so it works out alright.
Even before it won all those Oscars, I was always going to have to get around to watching this eventually as much as I didn’t relish the prospect of watching a three-hour biopic. Critics have praised Christopher Nolan for successfully framing this as a thriller with the use of jumps in the timeline to add tension and uncertainty yet to my mind it is still a biopic. The unique angle that Nolan adds is elevating the character of Lewis Strauss to serve as the principal antagonist of the film. I understand that this was a major brouhaha at the time but as Nolan observes himself, it really is much ado about nothing. It feels unworthy to make such a big deal out of it and in the same vein, I don’t think very highly of this film either.
