Our Bodies Sometimes Extract
In today's edition: heartbreak, the problem of the calorie, gorilla guerrillas, The New Sound of Music, what Coke doesn't want you to say, and animal selfies.
1. A Challenger engineer talks on-the-record for the first time, 30 years after the accident.
"Thirty years ago, as the nation mourned the loss of seven astronauts on the space shuttle Challenger, Bob Ebeling was steeped in his own deep grief. The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them. That night, he told his wife, Darlene, 'It's going to blow up.' When Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, Ebeling and his colleagues sat stunned in a conference room at Thiokol's headquarters outside Brigham City, Utah. They watched the spacecraft explode on a giant television screen and they knew exactly what had happened."
2. The making of the calorie, and what that reveals about quantification's problems.
"Even if the calorie counts themselves were accurate, dieters like Haelle and Nash would have to contend with the significant variations between the total calories in the food and the amount our bodies extract. These variations, which scientists have only recently started to understand, go beyond the inaccuracies in the numbers on the back of food packaging. In fact, the new research calls into question the validity of nutrition science’s core belief that a calorie is a calorie. Using the Beltsville facilities, for instance, Baer and his colleagues found that our bodies sometimes extract fewer calories than the number listed on the label."
3. Gorillas work together to disassemble poachers' snares.
"On Tuesday tracker John Ndayambaje spotted a trap very close to the Kuryama gorilla clan. He moved in to deactivate the snare, but a silverback named Vubu grunted, cautioning Ndayambaje to stay away, Vecellio said. Suddenly two juveniles—Rwema, a male; and Dukore, a female; both about four years old—ran toward the trap. As Ndayambaje and a few tourists watched, Rwema jumped on the bent tree branch and broke it, while Dukore freed the noose. The pair then spied another snare nearby—one the tracker himself had missed—and raced for it. Joined by a third gorilla, a teenager named Tetero, Rwema and Dukore destroyed that trap as well."
4. I would watch this BBC documentary on the rise of electronic music for the diction alone.
"The New Sound of Music is a fascinating BBC historical documentary from the year 1979. It charts the development of recorded music from the first barrel organs, pianolas, the phonograph, the magnetic tape recorder and onto the concepts of musique concrete and electronic music development with voltage-controlled oscillators making up the analogue synthesizers of the day."
"A late capitalism gag may modestly undermine Coke’s brand message, but mostly it suggests a question: To what lengths has Coca-Cola gone to try to avoid unauthorized messages like Joseph’s? Plugging likely words into the GIF the Feeling website both confirms and confuses instinctive answers. Swear words are out, obviously. So are brand-name competitors: you can’t say Pepsi in a Coke ad. But also, weirder things. Black and white, and even yellow, but also green? All banned. Likewise igloo and key. Insults like moron, but also faith names likeMormon. What’s going on here? To find out, we tested a 61,406-word dictionary against the GIF the Feeling’s onboard content filter."
+ This reminds me of the infamous Habbo Hotel chat filter.
On Fusion: A study of 2.5 million animal selfies reveals that animal selfies are awesome and that some tropical species are doing better than expected. (There is something to the aesthetic of camera trap animal pics. Somewhere in-between street photography, surveillance footage, and pictures you accidentally took of the sidewalk as you were putting your phone into your pocket. I love it.)
1. npr.org | @gbrumfiel 2. mosaicscience.com 3. nationalgeographic.com 4. youtube.com | @reaktorplayer 5. theatlantic.com
Our Bodies Sometimes Extract