An absolute treasure trove of fascinating findings this month, this time including economics and history papers in addition to the usual lineup from the life sciences.
We’ll start with the economics paper. It uses data from France to show that existing residents of municipalities are willing to pay a premium to avoid having lower income peers becoming their neighbors. They obtained this result from leveraging a French policy to require that municipalities build more social housing or pay a fine. All households dislike having lower income neighbors and the higher income the municipality, the more they are willing to pay to avoid having to host social housing projects. This result is of course both intuitive and unsurprising but does help illustrate the obstacles against building more housing to alleviate high prices in the property market.
Last month I highlighted research about how schizophrenia patients mistake mistake inner speech with external stimuli, leading to auditory verbal hallucinations, i.e. hearing things that aren’t real. This month I have a startlingly similar finding in the same vein by a different team. They show that the same principle applies to the sense of touch when the experiment called for the subject to differentiate between touching their own arm, being touched by an experimenter and touching a pillow as a control. From observing the brain activity of the participants in the study, the researchers were able to notice significantly higher activity in the right superior temporal gyrus among schizophrenia patients when touching themselves compared to healthy individuals. Similar results were found in other variations of the experiment.
How many people remember the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage about a submarine being shrunk down to microscopic size and inserted into a human body so that the crew can repair that person’s brain damage?? It seems that we’re about to have something similar though of course it’s not a submarine but tiny robots guided through the body using magnetic fields. The article describes trials of the microrobots in the blood vessels of pigs and sheep which are guided to the target sites to release precise doses of drugs at specific locations. The system has yet to be tested in humans but the potential to deliver such precise doses, avoiding the toxicity of inundating the entire body in drugs, and to target hard to reach areas are obvious.
Next we have this news about how North American raccoons are physically changing as they adapt to life in closer proximity to humans. Specifically they find that raccoons living in urban environments have significantly shorter snouts than those in rural areas. They classify this as an early form of self-domestication as selection pressures push them to be bold enough to forage for food from human garbage yet not appear as a threat to humans. This is similar to the processes that proto-dogs and cats went through.
Finally we have the release of a high-resolution dataset of the roads of the Roman Empire. The dataset draws on published historical and archaeological information, topographic maps, and remote sensing data to create a map of the Roman Empire at its maximum extent at around 150 CE. The resulting map includes an astonishing 299,171.31 km of roads, revealing just how extensive the reach of the empire was.
Kathryn Bigelow keeps doubling down on making these military thrillers which I think is a bit of a shame as I preferred her earlier, weirder work. I already knew going in that this wouldn’t be very good but I had to watch it anyway as it’s being talked about so much. Indeed, it is a very detailed procedural on how the US would respond to an unexpected nuclear missile so a lot of research must have gone into getting all of the agencies involved and the jargon right. Unfortunately the entire premise is unrealistic, it wastes all of its tension by showing the same set of events from three perspectives and in the end ducks out of having to say anything substantial at all.
This very old French film is so influential that it has been remade several times and even inspired a Looney Tunes character. Its setting of the Casbah of Algeria is exotically attractive thought unfortunately it’s mostly shot on sets made up to look like the real thing. It’s a rather simple plot but the setting as well as the sleazy charm of the Pépé character who actually longs after Paris all along, both make it work.
It’s hardly possible not to have heard of this film given how blatantly it sexualizes the bodies of its female stars. But that’s alright, because it was made by a female feminist director Coralie Fargeat and all that titillation soon turns to disgust as this is after all body horror at its goriest. The imagery is striking in a very visceral way and setting in a strange hyperreal world was certainly the right choice. Yet it’s psychologically very simple with the character having no backstory at all and drags on long past the point that we get all that the director has to say.
I first played the original Fantasy General during my schooling days. It was a pirated copy back then of course and without a manual, I never had a firm grasp of the ruleset and was never able to beat it. I never forgot the game however and it seems that it has its share of fans. More than twenty years, another company made a sequel and now here I am playing it, because I noticed that it was being given away free on Steam.
During the last years of the Second World War, the remote village in northern Italy boasts of gorgeous views of the surrounding mountains but its inhabitants are dirt poor. Centered around a large family led by stern teacher, this film does have a plot but mostly it serves as a way to remember their way of life. Director Maura Delpero says as much as her father was from the region and takes great care to depict their lives as authentically as possible. I don’t think the main story is anything special but I do love the film itself and its setting.
This animated film winning multiple awards should be reason enough to get it added to my watchlist but there’s also the fact that it was made using Blender. It’s a relatively short film but it still took the team more than five years to make it. With beautiful visuals, pleasant music and no dialogue, this sure is an easy film to watch and who could dislike its animal characters? It’s nice enough but there’s no plot, no world building and not much meaning at all. As its title suggests, it’s just one scene flowing into another with no direction so I’m not that impressed.
