James' World 2

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To make sense of difficult science, Michael Kofi Esson often turns to art.

When he’s struggling to understand the immune system or a rare disease, music, and poetry serve as an anchor.

“It helps calm me down and actively choose what to focus on,” says Esson, a second-year student at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Esson, who was born in Ghana, also thinks his brain is better at absorbing all that science because of the years he spent playing the trumpet and studying Afrobeat musicians like Fela Kuti.

“There has to be some kind of greater connectivity that [art] imparts on the brain,” Esson says.

That idea — that art has a measurable effect on the brain and its structure — has support from a growing number of scientific studies.

“Creativity is making new connections, new synapses,” says Ivy Ross, who is vice president of hardware design at Google and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.

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Microplastics are everywhere. They’re in our water, our soil, and even in our own bodies, and researchers are still unsure how they are affecting our health. Making things worse, the microscopic waste is also incredibly difficult to get rid of. Recently, though, scientists have come up with a novel solution from a surprising source — sound.

A team of researchers has developed a new method of cleaning microplastics from water using high-pitched sound waves. Unlike previous ultrasound filtering techniques, their method can theoretically remove both large and small microplastic particles using a unique two-step process, effectively making plastic-tainted water safe to drink. The results were presented today at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Microplastics are defined as any plastic debris smaller than 5 millimeters across. They usually come from larger pieces of trash, such as water bottles, styrofoam cups, or even acrylic paints, as they break down in the environment. For years, nobody paid much attention to these teeny-tiny pieces of plastic. But in 2004, a landmark study by marine ecologist Richard Thompson documented their presence across 17 different beaches. Since then, they’ve turned up everywhere researchers have looked for them: in soil, in the oceans, and even in our bodies. “[Scientists] have found microplastics in human blood samples,” says Menake Piyasena, an analytical chemist at New Mexico Tech and co-author of the study. “So this is going to be a huge impact in the future.”

Scientists don’t yet have a clear picture of what all that plastic means for human health, but it probably isn’t great. Microplastics have been linked to everything from inflammation to fertility issues to cancer, though the jury is still out on how the tiny polymer shards might cause these conditions. But this means that since 2019, microplastics have been considered an area of concern (and a potential public health emergency) by the World Health Organization.

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The future of water purification sounds great.

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One of his daughters, Princess Latifa, has now made headlines after secret videos recorded by her in captivity have been obtained and released by the BBC’s Panorama. Latifa made the videos while being held under her father’s orders in Dubai in a barred villa.

Sheikh Mohammed was born in 1949 at his family home in Shindagha, near Dubai Creek. He was the third of the four sons of Sheikh Rashid Al Maktoum, who ruled Dubai for 32 years from 1958.

After finishing secondary school in 1965, Sheikh Mohammed moved to the UK to study English at a language school in Cambridge. The young sheikh later attended a six-month training court at the British Army’s Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot, Hampshire.

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Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is the 71-year-old billionaire ruler of Dubai and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates.

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For scientists studying the health of a city and its inhabitants, their most powerful tool may just be the honeybee.

That’s because when honeybees go foraging, they collect more than just pollen and nectar. As they navigate through their environment, microorganisms and other tiny particles can also cling to the bees’ fuzzy little bodies, which the pollinators then shed as they enter their hives.

And since pollinators tend to forage within a mile radius of their hives in urban areas, there’s valuable information about a city or even a neighborhood in the honey they produce, on their bodies, and in the debris that lies at the bottom of hives. 

“Honeybees will gather a vast number of microbes day to day, far beyond things they are seeking out. They’ve been optimized by evolution to do everything that the swabs do,” said Kevin Slavin, a professor at MIT Media Lab, during a press briefing on a new report in the journal Environmental Microbiome. The new research aims to establish a feasible method for collaborating with beekeepers and their colonies of honeybees for the purpose of studying the microbiome of cities.

A microbiome is the unseen communities of microbes, fungi, viruses, and bacteria that live inside and around us, playing key roles in the functioning and health of the urban environment and the human population, as well as plants and animals. Previous research has linked exposure to a diverse microbiome to better health outcomes.

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Honeybees pick up tiny particles as they navigate around plants, animals and other objects in their environment.  Photographer: Claudio Cavalensi/500px Prime

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For around 20 years, astronomers have struggled to find an ancient group of stars mixed in with the gas, dust, and newer stars of our galaxy’s bulge. These “fossil” stars preceded the Milky Way and should have been discernible by their distinctive chemistry and orbits. Yet until recently, only a small number of them had ever been found.

Now, a determined effort using data-intensive machine learning has unearthed a trove of them, bringing into focus their features and fates. The methods used in their discovery have enabled scientists to update their understanding of the Milky Way’s formation and of disk galaxies in general.

Competing Theories

Astronomers believe that the Milky Way was preceded by something called a proto-galaxy—a violent, chaotic place containing young stars with wild orbits. Its origin story starts out credibly enough. After the Big Bang, dark matter coalesced in our region of space. The dark matter attracted ordinary matter. The first waves of stars then arose, but how these stars got there was anyone’s guess.

“People didn’t have a really good idea of what the proto-galaxy looked like,” said Vedant Chandra, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and one of the lead authors on a recent paper detailing the ancient star discoveries.

By the 2000s, scientists had settled on two formation theories. Either the proto-galaxy gave birth to the Milky Way’s first stars internally, as gas coalesced into stars, or it cannibalized other galaxies, ripping out stars and siphoning off dark matter. To settle the question, astronomers would need to isolate the Milky Way’s earliest star population. Studies identified candidate stars, but if the internal-nursery theory was correct, a much larger fossil population lay undiscovered.

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There once was a cosmic seed that sprouted the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have discovered its last surviving remnants.

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The Motion Picture Association (MPA) recently released their annual THEME report for 2021. The report tracks the theatrical and in-home entertainment industry domestically as well as globally and includes trending data from several video industries. For the report, the MPA relied on various data sources.

With studios and movie theaters reopening around the world, the global and U.S. entertainment market rebounded from 2020. With studios reopening in 2021, the number of movies in production grew substantially, although, with the lingering impact from the pandemic, movie attendance remained at less than half of 2019. The number of television programs reached record highs as “peak TV” continues unabated and movie production rebounded. Digital continues to be the fastest-growing segment and a significant revenue driver in the home entertainment market, as viewers and content continue to migrate to streaming platforms. Here are some of the highlights.

Total Entertainment U.S.: For 2021 the entertainment (home and mobile) market, consisting of digital and physical (discs) and theatrical, totaled $36.8 billion in the U.S., a year-over-year increase of 14% and a figure even surpassing the record $36.1 billion in 2019. At $29.5 billion, digital accounted for 80% of all dollars with a year-over-year increase of 19%. Digital has been the fastest-growing sector, since 2014 revenue has nearly doubled twice (from $7.6 billion). Theatrical accounted for 12% and physical the remaining 8%.

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Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was the highest-grossing film since Avengers: Endgame in … [+]  Getty Images

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Imagine walking into a party where you know almost no one (pathetic) — a party at which I, a stranger to you (probably), have arrived well before you (sorry). Should this occur in real life, it is inevitable that shortly after your entrance, as you are tentatively probing the scene in search of safe ingress into social traffic, I will yank you, abruptly, into the middle of a conversation. I will turn to you and start talking as if you’d been involved in the discussion for an hour. I will lob questions at you that are tailored so that any answer you give can be right. Soon, you will forget I dragged you into this interaction; your easy popularity will seem, in retrospect, inevitable. You will most likely feel at least vaguely friendly toward me, because I so clearly want to be your friend. And the whole time I am doing this — because, despite your rewritten recollections, I am the one doing all of this — I will be thinking: Oh, my God, I’m doing it again. I hate this. I hate this. Why can’t I stop doing this to people?

Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down. And so, in January, I booked a package vacation to Morocco through a company whose stated aim — beyond offering package vacations — is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends.

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Rosie Marks for The New York Times

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When Nisar Ahmad Wani succeeded in carrying out the world’s first camel cloning in 2009, it was hailed as a great achievement. Today, Wani is scientific director at the Reproductive Biotechnology Centre, in Dubai, and the practice is so popular that cloning has become his nine-to-five job.

Wani and his team research and develop new cloning techniques and maintain cell banks, allowing them to make copies of animals including buffalo and sheep. But the center’s focus is on cloning camels.

Each year, it produces dozens of cloned dromedary camel calves. Among the most popular are copies of camel “beauty queens,” with the right combination of drooping lips and long necks.

Replicating beauties

Camel beauty pageants are popular in the Gulf states and prize money runs into the tens of millions of dollars at some events. Owners have been disqualified in the past for using banned techniques such as injecting camels with silicone and fillers and inflating body parts using rubber bands to enhance their appearance. But as far as these competitions are concerned, cloned camels are perfectly legitimate.

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