5 Intriguing Things
"Now, the final step – giving young human blood plasma to older people with a medical condition – is about to begin. Getting approval to perform the experiment in humans has been relatively simple, says Wyss-Coray, thanks to the long safety record of blood transfusions. He warns against swapping blood at home because transfusions need to be screened for disease, matched for blood type and the plasma needs to be separated out. 'Certainly you can't drink the blood,' he says. 'Although obviously we haven't tried that experiment.' So in early October, a team at Stanford School of Medicine will give a transfusion of blood plasma donated by people under 30 to older volunteers with mild to moderate Alzheimer's." (newscientist.com)
+ GDF11 seems to a/the protein responsible for the effects.
2. LAME INFINITY.
"Media theorist Laura Marks uses the term lame infinity to describe the phenomenon where digital technology seems infinite but is used to produce a dispiriting kind of sameness. Emoji, as 'a perfectly normcore system of emotion: a taxonomy of feeling in a grid menu of ideograms' fit that description. While emoji offer creative expression within their own terms, they also may confine us to a type of communicative monoculture. What’s more, emoji also hold out the promise of emotional standardization in the service of data analysis: If a feeling can be summed up in a symbol, then theoretically that feeling can be more easily tracked, categorized, and counted." (thenewinquiry.com)
3. What life on Mars did to the Mars Curiosity rover.
"Below is a before-and-after look at a variety of instruments and features on Curiosity and the wear they've endured during the rover's first two years, made from images uploaded by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Each image is either from the MAHLI imager or the Mastcam, and is also labeled with the Sol number (sol = one Martian solar day, the mission is currently on Sol 724) during which each image was taken." (theverge.com)
"The Russian culture which created Harbin is still very much on display, but absent of a significant Russian population, an everyday life has disappeared, and the only traces of 'Russian-ness' are objects which can be purchased — foods, souvenirs, clothes. The symbol of this commodification is 'Russian Village' — a fake Russian settlement in the Sun Island pleasure park, replete with ersatz versions of Russian architecture. It's a sort of ethnographic theme park like the one in Jia Zhang Ke’s film The World (2004), in which major world destinations are reconstructed in China. In this village, Harbin natives can pay to get their picture with a 'real Russian', in the heart of a former Russian town. But this contact is empty. What is Russia? What was Russia? The residents of Harbin will never know." (calvertjournal.com)
"'We experimented with every possible kind of sound,' Joanne remembers. 'We played everything you could possibly play on a stereo: ZZ Top. Monks chanting. Om-ing kind of tapes. We had 20 hours of wild dolphin sounds from a marine biology professor. And then there were drums, you know — people would bring drums and we would drum for a whole bunch of hours. We weren’t musicians, but it would change us. We would play them until we were catatonic. I used to be known as the Governess of Catatonia.'" (nytimes.com)
I'm considering adding a new feature. Down here, right by our tip, there'd be a book recommended by y'all. Could be old or new. Has to be intriguing. If you think that sounds fun, send me a link to a book. The perfect example would be Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux.
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
circumlocutional, -nary, -utory. Though an adj. is often wanted for circumlocution, none of these three has won any favor. It is better to make shift with periphrastic.
20 Hours of Wild Dolphin Sounds