Mostly articles about biology this month, except for the big release of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Note that one bit of news that has been circulating this month talks about how plankton levels in the Atlantic Ocean has dropped precipitously. I was going to include it but there has been pushback about how that paper wasn’t peer reviewed and in any case covers only one part of the ocean and not the whole ocean, so I dropped it. No doubt those claims will be examined more closely and will make the news again if it proves to be true.
The James Webb Space Telescope images are just that images and it will be some time before new scientific discoveries will come from it. Still they are of such high quality that they are exciting to look at and the first glimpse of the farthest away galaxies 13 billion light years away is quite something. You may wish to read up on the telescope’s potential and how much effort, including over-engineering, was made into ensuring that the launch went perfectly and that this very expensive investment would not be a failure.
I first wrote about a possible link between gum problems and Alzheimer’s disease three years ago and now another new study appears to offer more confirmation. This one actually covers a different type of oral bacteria than previous studies and is based on animal experiments only. Yet it does show that the bacteria causes an inflammatory response that subsequently leads to the symptoms of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s getting worse.
This news came pretty late in the month but it’s too important to ignore and is also about Alzheimer’s disease. The claim is that a key study from 2006 about the main cause of the disease being sticky plaques in the brain formed by amyloid beta protein may be fraudulent as it used doctored images of the brain including such simple tricks like copying and pasting the same images. Given that the original basis was the foundation of a lot of research devoted to this approach of treating the disease, this revelation is a fairly big scandal in the scientific community and is still playing out.
Next here’s a study that follows up on previous findings that music seems to sooth pain. The new study involved playing different sounds and music to mice while testing their response to pain from an injection on their paws. They found that the type of sound or music doesn’t matter, even white noise works, but the key is that the volume of the sound is at a constantly level just above background noise. This successfully made the mice appear to feel less pain and they were even able to confirm the phenomenon by looking at the mice’s auditory cortex.
Finally here’s a really cool article on how dolphins identify themselves to others of their kind through names, effectively whistling a melody specific to themselves. It goes into how different types of whistling are used in different habitats and population sizes of dolphins and how some may use a whistle copied from their mothers but altered to be unique to themselves. Some groups even have group whistles that identify the group as a whole while still retaining enough uniqueness to refer to specific individuals in the group.
Naturally I’m going to slowly go through Kelly Reichardt filmography given how much I like her work. Here’s one that was made a couple of years after Old Joy and stars the very same dog. This is a less complex film given that it’s mostly just Wendy in many of the scenes and using a dog to pull at the audience’s heartstrings feels like cheating. Still films don’t have to be complicated to be good and this is a brutally straightforward take on being down and out in Oregon.
Director Robert Rossen is best known for the great classic The Hustler and I noted then the surprisingly complex psychologies of each character in it. Here’s another film of his that is even more explicitly psychological, set as it is in an upscale asylum. Unfortunately I like this less as it quickly falls into a familiar pattern and I would prefer it if the characters acted less mysteriously. But it is a well executed film and the presence of Jean Seberg even lends it a bit of an European air.
This came out a couple of years ago but it was only a few weeks ago that the official count of missing persons in Mexico hit the 100,000 mark so this seemed to still be a pertinent topic. Unfortunately this film is all about the emotional journey of a Mexican mother looking for her missing son and has little interest in offering more context around the crisis. I applaud it for being highly effective as a drama but it tries so hard to avoid specific details about the real-world problem that I suspect even the filmmakers fear retaliation from criminals.
I’m following one nautical theme game with another here. This is a tough one to talk about or even show any screenshot of unfortunately because just about any information I can give about it is a spoiler that would prejudice a person’s first experience of the game. Still, I suppose the game has been out for long enough now that anyone who is likely to play it has already done so. That means I will say that this is a mystery game set on a ship that returned mysteriously empty of its crew in 1807 after having been declared lost at sea in 1803. You’re an insurance investigator who is sent to write up a report about what happened. More spoilers will follow after the fold.
So this is considered one of the worst of the MCU films and having now seen it, this is definitely true. I was always going to watch it anyway, if not because it’s MCU then because it’s because it was made by Chloé Zhao. It’s undeniable that she made a mess of things here but then it’s hard to see how so sprawling a story with such a huge cast could ever have succeeded. It fails even as an action spectacle as the special effects are really bad at times and it fails as an MCU film as it has so few connections to the shared multiverse that it would have been better off as its own film. By all accounts Zhao actively sought to be a part of this project, but from the results we see here, I don’t believe she really understands comics superheroes.
American horror films usually follow a very predictable formula: a group of friends encounter a danger in some remote area and are slowly killed off one by one. The Empty Man seems at first like a typical example of the genre but then we learn that it’s just the prologue and the real story starts shortly after. It’s a little longer than typical horror films but it makes excellent use of its running time to deliver a dense plot that is built around a wonderfully rich mythos. This was adapted from a graphic novel series and it does strike me how unlikely that an original horror film script could be allowed to be this complex. Needless to say I loved it and consider one of the best American horror films I’ve seen in a while.
