MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, the billionaire former mayor of New York, has announced he is running for president. But he is late to join the race and not very popular with Democratic primary voters. We also look at TikTok, a wildly successful video-sharing app that some see as a threat to security in the Western world. And much of Switzerland is up in arms—about the reliability of the country’s coffee supply. Runtime: 20 min
Listen to the latest science updated, brought to you by Nick Howe and Shamini Bundell. This week, delving into the results of the latest graduate student survey, and assessing ageism in science fiction literature.In this episode:
The results of Nature’s 2019 PhD survey are in. David Payne, Nature’s Chief Careers Editor, takes us through them. Nature’s PhD survey collection
Giant tortoises are quick learners, and colour-changing magic mushrooms. Research Article: Gutnick et al.; Research Highlights: Why magic mushrooms turn dark blue when picked
Author Sylvia Spruck Wrigley has been looking into the number of older women that appear in sci-fi novels, and the roles they play. Essay: Space ageing: why sci-fi novels shun the badass older woman
A trove of mummified remains causes excitement in Egypt, and Italy plans a new science funding body. News: Rare mummified lions add to Egyptology buzz; News: Italy’s plan to create €300-million research agency draws fire
From a Wall Street Journal online article:
Courmayeur, both a town and a ski resort, boasts nearly as many ambitious, full-service restaurants as it does lifts on the slopes. Even on bright sunny days with powdery trails, the big question tends to be, “What’s for lunch?” The village, nestled in a snug valley on the south slope (the Italian side) of Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest peak, is a typically sleepy mountain town for much of the year with around 3,000 full-time residents. But when the ski season kicks into high gear, its restaurants, bars and cafes all come roaring to life. It’s a favorite winter escape for residents of Italy’s fashion capital, Milan, a straight two-hour shot up the highway.
For the urbane crowds in from the city on winter weekends, Courmayeur is as much an epicurean as snow-sports destination, known for its mountain cheeses, wild game and cured meats, and for its increasingly serious restaurants. Top tables on and off the slopes can book up weeks in advance. The region’s minerally white and earthy red wines come from some of the highest altitude vineyards in Europe. The sparkling Cuvée des Guides is made 7,000 feet above sea level on the slopes of Mont Blanc, with a tasting room atop one of the state-of-the-art Skyway Monte Bianco cable car stations.
To read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-italian-ski-town-where-the-food-rivals-the-views-11574791692
From a Classic Driver online article:
‘CUT 7’ was campaigned extensively throughout the 1962 season. With victories at Mallory Park, Silverstone, Crystal Palace and Snetterton, Protheroe had his eyes set on securing the Autosport National Championship for Production Sports Cars, and with just one retirement in 10 outings, he won the Over 3-litre class.
Former RAF pilot Dick Protheroe was no stranger to the Jaguar brand. Stationed in Egypt in 1952, Protheroe acquired his first Jaguar, an aluminium bodied XK120 which he modified and campaigned before returning to England in 1953.
Chassis Number ‘860004’, was the fourth right-hand drive fixed-head E-type produced by Jaguar at the famous Brown’s Lane factory in Coventry. Painted in Opalescent Gunmetal Grey with dark blue interior trim, it was aptly delivered to Protheroe on 13thSeptember 1961 by Jaguar Dealer, Sturgess of Leicester. Robin Sturgess had a close affinity to the marque having raced XK’s, C-type, D-type and E-types successfully for many years.
To read more: https://www.classicdriver.com/en/car/jaguar/e-type-si/1961/716497
From a Becker’s Hospital review news release:
Any customer with an active prescription and an Alexa-enabled device will be able to access the medication management skill on the device, a Giant Eagle spokesperson told CNBC. Rachel Jiang, who leads the Amazon Alexa health and wellness team, said the company began developing the skill after noticing that customers were using the devices to create medication reminders.
Beyond a simple reminder, the skill also offers more information about medication regimens and can be used to order refills. When the skill is installed, Alexa, which was confirmed earlier this year to be HIPAA-compliant, will prompt users to set up a profile and passcode, which must be delivered each time Alexa is asked a question about a medication.
Amazon and Pittsburgh-based supermarket and pharmacy chain Giant Eagle have formed a partnership that will allow Amazon Echo devices to offer Giant Eagle pharmacy patients medication reminders, CNBC reports.
From a Stanford Medicine online news release:
“What you want is more, small fat cells rather than fewer, large fat cells,” Jackson said. “A large fat cell is not a healthy fat cell. The center is farther away from an oxygen supply, it sends out bad signals and it can burst and release toxic contents.” Large fat cells are associated with insulin resistance, diabetes and inflammation, he added.
Jackson and his colleagues found that when omega-3 fatty acids bind to a receptor called FFAR4 on the cilia of fat stem cells, it prompts the fat stem cells to divide, leading to the creation of more fat cells. This provides the body with more fat cells with which to store energy, something that is healthier than storing too much fat in existing fat cells.
For years, researchers have known that defects in an ancient cellular antenna called the primary cilium are linked with obesity and insulin resistance. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that the strange little cellular appendage is sensing omega-3 fatty acids in the diet, and that this signal is directly affecting how stem cells in fat tissue divide and turn into fat cells.
To read more: http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/11/omega-3-fatty-acids-health-benefit-linked-to-stem-cell-control.html
An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical and cultural context, and drawing connections between art and its context can be illuminating for both. Today’s guest, Stephen Greenblatt, is one of the world’s most celebrated literary scholars, famous for helping to establish the New
Historicism school of criticism, which he also refers to as “cultural poetics.” We talk about how art becomes entangled with the politics of its day, and how we can learn about ourselves and other cultures by engaging with stories and their milieu.
From an Artsy.net online article:
Eakins’s ambitious painting brought Renaissance-era virtuosity to the mid–19th century United States, as American art was still struggling to find its place on the world stage. The Gross Clinic, which still hangs in Philadelphia today, is a triumph of composition, light, and shadow.
In 1875, Thomas Eakins decided to paint a picture that would glorify his hometown of Philadelphia. The first ever World’s Fair to be held in the United States, the Centennial International Exhibition, would open in the city the following year. Through his painting, Eakins hoped to honor the scientific breakthroughs that were coming out of the local Jefferson Medical College. The artist observed live procedures by the celebrated surgeon Dr. Samuel Gross, then translated them onto a large-scale canvas that he titled Dr. Gross (1875) (now known as The Gross Clinic). The work has become perhaps the most important painting in the history of American art.
To read more: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-thomas-eakinss-the-gross-clinic-american-painting
Filmed, Edited and Directed by: Juan Carlos Cortina
Music by: Marco Martini
In Euskadi and Cantabria, an adventure that began in 2017 on the Galician coast ends and that has meant a trip of 3 years throughout the north of Spain portrayed in 3 different timelapses. A trilogy that supposes the first time that a work of this type is realized in all the Cantabrian coast.
In this last part the trip begins in Santander and ends in Biarritz and the protagonist is mainly the marine and interior landscape of the Basque Country. With 14,500 photographs, it is the first time I explore Euskadi in depth and I have to say that I have returned absolutely in love with its corners, especially with all the wonderful area of the Urdaibai estuary. Recorded in May, September and October 2019.
See Part I and II below:
Website: https://www.jccortina.com/
For the second year in a row, editors at The New York Times got together for a live taping of the podcast to discuss the Book Review’s list of the year’s 10 Best Books. “These are books that we think will endure, that will be looked at and read and consulted and referred to well after the year in which they were named,” says Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, as part of her introductory remarks about what the editors look for in their selections.
In the first chapter of this assured debut novel, two young girls vanish, sending shock waves through a town perched on the edge of the remote, brooding Kamchatka Peninsula. What follows is a novel of overlapping short stories about the various women who have been affected by their disappearance. Each richly textured tale pushes the narrative forward another month and exposes the ways in which the women of Kamchatka have been shattered — personally, culturally and emotionally — by the crime.
Fiction | Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. | Read the review | Listen: Julia Phillips on the podcast
Fiction | Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27. | Read the review
Many of the nine deeply beautiful stories in this collection explore the material consequences of time travel. Reading them feels like sitting at dinner with a friend who explains scientific theory to you without an ounce of condescension. Each thoughtful, elegantly crafted story poses a philosophical question; Chiang curates all nine into a conversation that comes full circle, after having traversed remarkable terrain.
Fiction | Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. | Read the review | Listen: Ted Chiang on the podcast
Fiction | Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95. | Read the review | Read our profile of Luiselli
A desolate ferry terminal on the Spanish coast isn’t a place where you’d expect to encounter sharp-edged lyricism or rueful philosophy, but thanks to the two Irish gangster antiheroes of Barry’s novel, there’s plenty of both on display, along with scabrously amusing tale-telling and much summoning of painful memories. Their lives have become so intertwined that the young woman whose arrival they await can qualify as family for either man. Will she show? How much do they care? Their banter is a shield against the dark, a witty new take on “Waiting for Godot.”
Fiction | Doubleday. $25.95. | Read the review | Listen: Kevin Barry on the podcast
Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book — as finely paced as a novel — Keefe uses McConville’s murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga.
Nonfiction | Doubleday. $28.95. | Read the review
The English painter Joshua Reynolds just wanted to cheer up his friend Samuel Johnson, who was feeling blue. Who knew that the Friday night gab sessions he proposed they convene at London’s Turk’s Head Tavern would end up attracting virtually all the leading lights of late-18th-century Britain? Damrosch brings the Club’s redoubtable personalities — the brilliant minds, the jousting wits, the tender camaraderie — to vivid life, delivering indelible portraits of Johnson and Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, the actor David Garrick, the historian Edward Gibbon and, of course, Johnson’s loyal biographer James Boswell: “a constellation of talent that has rarely if ever been equaled.”
Nonfiction | Yale University Press. $30. | Read the review
In her extraordinary, engrossing debut, Broom pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, “The Yellow House” is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. Tracing the history of a single home in New Orleans East (an area “50 times the size of the French Quarter,” yet nowhere to be found on most tourist maps, comprising scraps of real estate whites have passed over), from the ’60s to Hurricane Katrina, this is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large.
Nonfiction | Grove Press. $26. | Read the review | Listen: Sarah M. Broom on the podcast
Snyder’s thoroughly reported book covers what the World Health Organization has called “a global health problem of epidemic proportions.” In America alone, more than half of all murdered women are killed by a current or former partner; domestic violence cuts across lines of class, religion and race. Snyder debunks pervasive myths (restraining orders are the answer, abusers never change) and writes movingly about the lives (and deaths) of people on both sides of the equation. She doesn’t give easy answers but presents a wealth of information that is its own form of hope.
Nonfiction | Bloomsbury Publishing. $28. | Read the review | Listen: Rachel Louise Snyder on the podcast
Higginbotham’s superb account of the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is one of those rare books about science and technology that read like a tension-filled thriller. Replete with vivid detail and sharply etched personalities, this narrative of astounding incompetence moves from mistake to mistake, miscalculation to miscalculation, as it builds to the inevitable, history-changing disaster.
Boomers Daily 