Pretty much all biotech stuff this month as if so often the case.
The most important article is also the most boring one. As part of a massive study that included 10.17 million people who were vaccinated against COVID-19 and 10.39 million unvaccinated people from the UK, Spain and Estonia, the researchers conclude that vaccination reduced the risk of post-COVID-19 cardiac and thromboembolic outcomes. They recorded results up to one year after vaccination and looked only for cases after SARS-CoV-2 infection. It makes for strong evidence that vaccination reduces the risk of cardiovascular complications rather than increases them as per widespread popular belief.
Most people agree that babies smell nice, yet children seem to not smell as nice after they grow up. A new study provides evidence that there is a biological basis to this, attributing the change to the onset of puberty. By collecting samples of body odors from infants, toddlers and teenagers, the researchers found naturally occurring steroids with musklike odors in the teens’ sweat. They stem from bacteria and bodily substances that break down the sebum that helps protect the skin. The glands that produce the sebum are active at birth and then go dormant. They reactivate again around puberty. The first time around, the sebum isn’t broken down because infants haven’t accumulated the bacteria yet and don’t sweat much. The situation is different when they become teenagers.
Most people will already know about the Flynn effect, the phenomenon whereby IQ seems to increase from one generation to the next. Most people also believe that our average attention span has gone down, coinciding with changing media consumption patterns. This paper argues that it may be possible to decompose the Flynn effect into different domains and uses a meta-analysis of previous studies to investigate the possibility that one such subcomponent is attention. They found that there has been indeed a generational improvement in concentration performance in adults but not in children. Since this is a meta-analysis I wouldn’t put too much stock in its results but I like how counter-intuitive their findings are.
Many people will have seen online videos of parrots interacting with touchscreen tablets. You may think these are isolated incidents yet there is plenty of evidence that parrots really do love tablets and games on them in particular. This article talks about how parrots of many difference species and sizes have learned to use tablets and seem to enjoy them. It also talks about how they primarily use their tongues to manipulate the touchscreens and are capable of generating a touch much faster than human fingers can. They conclude that these devices enrich the lives of parrots enough that it may be worth developing new, more robust types of devices specifically for their use.
We missed out on watching the first Dune when it was shown in the cinemas because society was just reopening after the COVID-19 lockdowns just then. So this time we made sure to watch the second part in an IMAX cinema hall. The experience was everything we’d hoped for, overwhelming us with its visuals and soundscape. This adaptation compresses many of the events in the novel and leaves out quite a few important details including the birth of Alia, Paul and Chani’s first son, and the role of the Navigator’s Guild. But there are also changes that are arguably superior to the original, including making Chani one of the main skeptics of Paul’s divinity. All in all, it’s a real triumph and the changes make the science-fiction classic more relevant to our time.
Since this is intermittently hailed as one of the greatest films of all time, not having watched it was one of the most major gaps of my cinematic journey. It’s pretty much as I expected from its reputation, being a powerful tragedy but also one that is too dated for me to really fully appreciate. One thing that did strike a chord with me is how much it’s really about the alienation and isolation of man rather than just how hard life is. The ending isn’t a surprise as the main character Ricci works himself up to it throughout his search, ignoring alternative solutions and other people in his obsession to retrieve his bicycle. I suppose this sort of depth is why it’s such a highly regarded film.
I was under the impression that this was a documentary about the ill-fated Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and so was blown away that it’s a dramatic reenactment with best in class production values. Everything else about the film is on point as well, the acting, how it handles cannibalism, how the survivors struggle to make sense of it all. It’s only the latest in a long line of adaptations about this disaster but it might be the most authentic one yet with its use of Uruguayan and Argentine actors.
Venturing a little outside of our usual picks for television shows, here’s a drama about Koreans who are in migrants in Japan. It’s really an American production, being an adaptation of an English-language novel by a Korean-American writer. That’s probably why this accords better with our tastes being a compact series with a fast moving pace, unlike the interminably long shows common in Asia. It covers multiple generations of the same family from roughly 1915 to 1989. We really liked the stories set in the distant past about the beginnings of the family but the material set in the 1980s seem uninspired. We’ll have to wait for the reviews to decide if we’re going to watch the upcoming second season.
So I don’t really care about being way late to the party for games but it does feel wrong to play this one-trick meme game so long after it first became popular. It’s an ultra-cheap game that blew up in popularity and spawned countless clones. It’s easy to understand why too: it makes you feel ridiculously powerful as you wade through screenfuls of enemies dolling out death yet it’s such a simple game to play that it takes no real effort. Some people have racked up hundreds of hours on this to unlock everything, which is just insane. For me, about a dozen hours was enough to experience all that the game has to offer. It feels addictive, sure, but it’s still a very shallow game.
This is another one of Agnès Varda’s documentaries, or video essays really, that she made late in her life. It won me over right from the beginning with the title card of her production company Ciné-Tamaris being her cat in her own house. Since everyone likely is wondering what gleaners mean, she goes straight to explaining the word from the Dictionnaire Rousseau. The film follows Varda as she travels all over France with her handheld digital camcorder to meet the people who gather the leftover crops after the harvest from fields in the countryside or scavenge food and trash in the cities. As the French title makes clear, Varda considers herself a gleaner as well as she gathers ideas, inspiration and meaning from those she meets.
