I needed to read this, as I stare at my tomatoes: Don’t Be Weird About Gardening. [Food & Wine]
Preservation society: meet the craft revivalist The ceramicists, rush weavers and other dedicated artisans saving rare skills from the brink of extinction
Johnson started with a series of chunky, irregular but functional tableware conceived by furniture designer Max Lamb. “People looked at me as though I had just landed,” she says of the moment she shared these designs with the city’s potters. “They were like, ‘You want to make that in our beautiful bone china?’” There was, however, one potter prepared to take the project on, using plaster models, hand-carved by Lamb with stonemasonry tools, to slip-cast the avant-garde jugs, plates and bowls – called “the Flintstones” by the factory workers. . .
Relic souvenirs
In early Christian tradition, the power of saints’ relics could be transferred from object to object by a simple touch.
The birthday paradox
Put 70 people in a room and there’s a 99.9% chance that two of them share a birthday. Why?
Tech & Learning: “A recent meta-analysisfound that children ages 1 to 8 were less likely to understand picture books if they read the ebook version instead of the print version, but only when the ebook didn’t have effective enhancements. For the analysis, researchers examined more than 39 studies involving more than 1,800 children. Though generally print picture books outperformed their digital counterparts in terms of reader comprehension, if the ebooks contained enhancements that reinforced story content not only did the print advantage go away but students learned more. Natalia Kucirkova, one of the study’s authors and a professor of Early Childhood and Development at the University of Stavanger, Norway and Open University, United Kingdom, discusses the implications of the study for educators…”
Katalin Kariko, the Scientist Behind the Groundbreaking mRNA Vaccines
The NY Times has a profile of Dr. Katalin Kariko, who struggled for decades against a system unwilling to consider and fund her ideas about how messenger RNA could be used to instruct cells inside human bodies to “make their own medicines”. Her work has culminated in two highly effective vaccines for Covid-19 and is being extended to produce possible vaccines for HIV, the flu, tuberculosis, and malaria.
Now Katalin Kariko, 66, known to colleagues as Kati, has emerged as one of the heroes of Covid-19 vaccine development. Her work, with her close collaborator, Dr. Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania, laid the foundation for the stunningly successful vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on messenger RNA, or mRNA — the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery. She was convinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own medicines, including vaccines.
Stat also wrote a piece about Kariko and the development of the mRNA vaccines. It seems like Kariko will be strongly considered for a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her achievements. The Covid vaccines will save hundreds of thousands of lives alone, and if mRNA can indeed be harnessed to protect against HIV and malaria, the effect on the world will be immense. Give Kariko all the prizes and whatever she wants to be happy in life — she’s earned it and more.
“You Can Be a Different Person After the Pandemic”
Olga Khazan, writing for the NY Times in an essay adapted from her book Weird, tells us that if we’re not satisfied with our personalities, we can change them.
After all, the person who emerges from quarantine doesn’t have to be the same old you. Scientists say that people can change their personalities well into adulthood. And what better time for transformation than now, when no one has seen you for a year, and might have forgotten what you were like in the first place?
It was long thought that people just are a certain way, and they’ll remain that way forever. The Greek physician Hippocrates believed that people’s personalities were governed by the amounts of phlegm, blood, black bile and yellow bile that flowed through their bodies.
Modern science, of course, has long since discarded notions of bile and humors. And now, it appears the idea that our personalities are immutable is also not quite true. Researchers have found that adults can change the five traits that make up personality — extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness and conscientiousness — within just a few months. Much as in Dr. Steffel’s case, the traits are connected, so changing one might lead to changes in another.
Put more succinctly: “Remember that your personality is more like a sand dune than a stone.”