Curious Dilettantes #0006
Curious Dilettantes #0006
Expand your mind, in less than 5 minutes each week.
The Eye
Felix Hernandez is a photographer, digital and miniature artist based in Cancun, Mexico. He builds miniature sets to realize his vision, and makes extensive use of practical effects* to imbue his images with an incredible sense of realism. The result? Surreal images that often appear to be digitally created, but are actually photographs of physical sets straight from the mind of an artistic genius.
* Real, physical, 3-dimensional models or figures, as opposed to computer-generated imagery (CGI), which is created digitally.
The Mind
Why do we blame Mercury being in retrograde for so many things? What is it, to begin with?
Mercury normally moves faster than Earth around the sun. But when Mercury is in retrograde, it is moving slower than Earth around the sun, which creates the illusion that it’s moving backwards (east to west) from its typical trajectory (west to east).
So why does it seem that so many things get messed up when Mercury is in retrograde? A common explanation is that the gravitational pull from Mercury influences the water in our bodies in the same way that the moon controls the tide. Science puts a dent in that belief, though, as a car that’s only 20 feet away from a person exerts a stronger pull of gravity than the planet Mercury does.
So how *does* Mercury in retrograde explain the shitty stuff that happens in our lives? Dr. Mark Hammergren, an astronomer who worked at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago for almost 20 years gives his scientific opinion - confirmation bias is the reason. He encourages people to look back and see if the periods of their lives when Mercury was retrograde were especially catastrophic. They’ll likely find that misinterpreted messages and technical problems are fairly common throughout the year.
The Machine
Precision medicine technology that’s only 6 years old has cured an English teen who was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia in May 2021, after conventional treatments failed. T-cells are a type of white blood cell, and they are supposed protect our body from infection. In this form of leukemia, the T-cells grow out of control, and too many T-cell lymphoblasts (immature white blood cells) are found in the bone marrow and blood.
Doctors attempted to treat her first with chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, but were unable to rid it from her body. Fortunately for her, doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital were successful in using "base editing" to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug that proved to be effective.
Bases are the building blocks of our genetic code, and there are four types of base - adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Base editing allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions. The large team of doctors and scientists used this tool to engineer a new type of T-cell that was capable of hunting down and killing the patient’s cancerous T-cells.
Base editing is an exciting technology that will allow the realization of precision medicine, where medical care will be designed to optimize efficiency or therapeutic benefit for specific groups of patients.
The Heart
One of the most challenging things to do is to figure out how to console or support someone you care about who is grieving as a result of loss. Here are some tips for how to support that person in a way that respects their situation, and their road ahead:
Don’t be afraid to use the person’s name if the loss is a death. Saying you’ll miss [name] is better than a generic “I’m sorry for your loss”
Instead of “How are you?”, ask “How are you today?”. This helps to acknowledge the loss instead of being a generic greeting
Acknowledge that there’s no quick solution to the loss, and offer hope. One possible way is to say “You will grieve for as long as you need to, but you are a strong person, and will find your way through this.”
Help by providing meals or volunteering to cook. It addresses an immediate need to help the person adjust to the loss.
Help out by providing offers to take on specific tasks. In the short term, there’s the work of setting up funeral arrangements, informing family members and friends, meals and laundry. Later on, there’s work that has to be done with a handling the estate, care for a pet or child, or
Listen, without offering advice.
Don’t exercise any judgment about how long it takes the person to grieve.
The Wonder
Nils Bohlin invented the three point safety belt for Volvo in 1959, a design which the company successfully patented. Volvo then decided to allow other car manufacturers to use their life-saving invention…. without charging them a licensing fee. Bohlin’s invention, and the generosity of Volvo’s then president, Gunnar Engellau, is responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
Engellau was an engineer himself, and he suffered the misfortune of losing a relative in a traffic accident, in part because of shortcomings in the two-point safety belt design, which only crossed the wearer’s lap. (It’s notable that the use of safety belts in general was somewhat of a rarity when the accident happened).
This personal tragedy encouraged Engellau to poach Nils Bohlin from rival firm Saab and set him on the mission to create a better safety belt design. If like me, you’ve been in a car accident where your safety belt did its job and helped prevent worse harm than what you experienced, then we have these two Swedes to thank.