James' World 2

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Two Israeli strikes hit a hospital in southern Gaza on Monday, killing five Palestinian journalists and at least 15 other people, according to local health officials.CreditCredit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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A brain-imaging study of people with amputated arms has upended a long-standing belief: that the brain’s map of the body reorganizes itself to compensate for missing body parts.

Previous research had suggested that neurons in the brain region holding this internal map, called the primary somatosensory cortex, would grow into the neighbouring area of the cortex that previously sensed the limb.

But the latest findings, published in Nature Neuroscience on 21 August, reveal that the primary somatosensory cortex stays remarkably constant even years after arm amputation. The study refutes foundational knowledge in the field of neuroscience that losing a limb results in a drastic reorganization of this region, the authors say.

“Pretty much every neuroscientist has learnt through their textbook that the brain has the capacity for reorganization, and this is demonstrated through studies on amputees,” says study senior author Tamar Makin, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, UK. But “textbooks can be wrong”, she adds. “We shouldn’t take anything for granted, especially when it comes to brain research.”

The discovery could lead to the development of better prosthetic devices, or improved treatments for pain in ‘phantom limbs’ — when people continue to sense the amputated limb. It could also help scientists working to restore sensation in people who have had amputations.

Mapping cortical plasticity

Study first author Hunter Schone, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, says that previous reports from some people with amputations had led him and his colleagues to doubt the idea that the brain’s map of the body is reorganized after amputation. These maps are responsible for processing sensory information, such as touch or temperature, at specific body regions. “They would say: ‘I can still feel the limb, I can still move individual fingers of a hand I haven’t had for decades,’” Schone says.

To investigate this contradiction, the researchers followed three people who were due to undergo amputation of one of their arms. The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map the cortical representations of the body before the surgery, and then after the amputation for up to five years. It is the first study to do this.

Before their amputations, participants performed various movements, such as tapping their fingers, pursing their lips, and flexing their toes while inside an fMRI scanner that measured the activity in different parts of the brain. This allowed the researchers to create a cortical ‘map’ showing which regions sensed the hand. To test the idea that neighbouring neurons redistribute in the cortex after amputation, they also made maps of the adjacent cortical area — in this case, the part that processes sensations from the lips. The participants repeated this exercise several times after their amputation, tapping “with their phantom fingers”, says Schone.

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As a kid growing up in Seattle, Coco Cultr founder Jesa Chiro remembers thinking that as a little sister, “your older brother just seems like the coolest person in the world,” she says. “At least to me, anyway.” Her older brother, Munya, who she describes as a “basketball fanatic,” collected everything basketball-related he could: jerseys, NBA 2K games, bobbleheads, and whatever memorabilia he could get his hands on. Some of Chiro’s earliest memories include waking up early to go to Munya’s basketball camps, watching games together, and tagging along on trips to Goodwill with him in search of jerseys. The Chiro family’s team was the Seattle SuperSonics until it was sold in 2006, later moving to Oklahoma City and rebranding as the Thunder in 2008.

While Chiro never had the innate athletic ability or handles for basketball, she did go through a brief obsessed-with-Lauren-Jackson-and-Sue-Bird phase. (Her brother had the Sonics, she had the Seattle Storm.) After receiving a wristband from Bird at age 11, she claims, “I never washed it.” Years later, she’d find her place in the sport not by way of her brother or as a WNBA fan, but through fashion.

“Why is there not any cute sportswear for women?” asks Chiro, who sits on a patio over Zoom. While that question might seem outdated in light of countless collaborations, capsule collections, and brands like Playa Society reshaping WNBA merch, Chiro called out the gap early on. When the Sonics left her hometown, the cultural and emotional pull of sports memorabilia was palpable, inspiring her to stockpile and rework jerseys. Chiro also cites Xuly. Bët’s spring 1995 collaboration with Puma—which saw deadstock soccer jerseys reimagined as dresses—as an early Coco Cultr influence. “In an interview, [Xuly.Bët designer] Lamine Badian Kouyaté said, ‘Why not use something that would go to waste and make something new and beautiful?’ That really stuck with me. It captures how I approach Coco.

”Chiro founded Coco Cultr during the height of pandemic lockdown, while studying at Western Washington University. After graduation, she moved to New York, and came across the aforementioned Xuly.Bët fashion show on YouTube one day. Inspired, Chiro went to L Train Vintage near her apartment and picked up an old Philadelphia 76ers Hardwood Classics jersey. “I didn’t know what I was going to make,” she says. “I just started cutting and sewing, no pattern, no plan.” At the time, Chiro was working retail at Lower East Side vintage store Procell. She wore her custom mini jersey dress, with the word “Sixers” across the front, to her shift the next day. Her boss clocked it immediately: “That’s really sick,” he said. “Do you have more? We should be carrying this.” And they did, becoming the first store to place an order with the brand; Procell still carries Coco Cultr today.

The sustainable label made a name for itself online with upcycled, reworked vintage pieces: two-piece sets, bikinis, and, most notably, the vintage jersey dresses. Think: A-line cut, body-conscious fit, mid-thigh hem dresses with a heavy emphasis on NBA team logos. The rarer the jersey, the more excited Chiro is to work with it. Her signature silhouette has caught the attention of the sports and streetwear industries—from celebrity stylists and WNBA teams that have gifted her jerseys to reimagine, to brands like Nike and Supreme that have tapped her for special projects.

Chiro calls herself a “digger” when it comes to seeking out vintage jerseys. “It’s fun for me to dive into what makes something rare,” she says. “What was happening at the time? Why this colorway? That’s the part I love.” These days, though, with high demand, she has rules: no Michael Jordan Bulls jerseys (too common) and deadstock Ray Allen Sonics jerseys are a priority, as are any of Kobe Bryant’s.

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Photo: Liv Solomon

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The lawyer took the elevator 32 floors to the U.S. attorney’s office, where for eight years he had worked as a highly regarded prosecutor. He had a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies to share and some thoughts to keep to himself.

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Michael Gordon, left, was dismissed as a federal prosecutor after he investigated the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021

A scene at the United States Capitol.Joseph Rushmore

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

An estimated one out of every 10 people in the U.S. has some kind of food allergy, which adds up to more than 33 million Americans. Peanut allergies are among the most common and certainly take the lead as the most visible.

But peanut allergies weren’t always so prevalent. In the late 1990s, a nationwide survey found that peanut allergies were reported in 0.4 percent of American children. Just over a decade later, that number had more than tripled.

Scientists still aren’t completely sure what led to this big uptick, but it could stem in part from parental anxiety over peanut allergies—and misguided advice about how to keep kids safe.

Here to tell us more about the latest research on peanut allergies, including new avenues for treatment and prevention, is Maryn McKenna, the author of a recent article on the subject for Scientific American. Maryn is a journalist who covers food policy and public health.

Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.

Maryn McKenna: Thanks for having me.

Feltman: So what do we know about the origins of peanut allergies?

McKenna: This is a really interesting mystery still. No matter how much study and how much research funding has gone into the problem of peanut allergy—and food allergies more broadly—a lot of it still remains kind of opaque.

Feltman: Mm.

McKenna: We know the biological mechanisms of what makes an allergy happen, but why peanut allergy in particular came on the scene 20, 30 years ago or so, and why it blew up to such a major public health problem—people are still working that out.

Feltman: So I guess let’s start with the easier question, then, which is: What is a food allergy? How does it work, both genetically and in the moment in a person’s body?

McKenna: I think most people are familiar with the concept of our having an immune system that, through a variety of mechanisms, defends our bodies against the outside world, broadly speaking, against things that are not us. Most of the time, the immune system works really well to adapt its reactions, its defenses of us, to the way we continue to live our lives.

Sometimes its reactions get wildly out of scale, and that’s what happens in food allergy and peanut allergy. The immune system recognizes proteins in these foods as being sort of not self, not part of us, and mounts an extraordinary reaction that expresses itself in the kind of symptoms that, if you’re allergic, you’ve experienced or that you may be familiar with from hearing about them from other people: hives, itchiness, difficulty breathing, difficulty swallowing; in the worst presentations depressed blood pressure, inability to breathe and sometimes, in, in the worst case, a heart attack.

Feltman: And what are the actual rates of nut allergy? It’s definitely one of the ones we hear about a lot, but how prevalent is it?

McKenna: This can be a frustrating question to try to answer because what we know about people being allergic depends on their telling researchers that they’re allergic …

Feltman: Mm.

McKenna: So it’s all self-reported. There are biological markers for allergy, but we don’t apply tests for those biological markers to the entire population, so all of the data relies on people telling researchers who have asked that an allergy is present in themselves or in their kids, if they’re parents answering for children.

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Shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, President Jimmy Carter said, in a TV interview, that the assault “made a more dramatic change in my opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time that I’ve been in office.”

Carter’s critics chortled at his belatedly acknowledged naïveté, but at least he admitted that he’d been wrong and took corrective actions—ending economic assistance to the USSR, suspending nuclear arms control talks, withdrawing his ambassador, pulling out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, stiffening defenses in southern Asia, and arming anti-Soviet insurgents (a move that had woeful consequences later on, but that’s another story).

Our current president, Donald Trump, has admitted that he’d overestimated his ability to end the Russia–Ukraine war and expressed puzzlement over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued bombardment of Ukrainian cities. But he hasn’t done much about it, and his view of Putin’s character and goals—which has always been, to say the least, rosy—hasn’t changed one whit.

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Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has been relentlessly attacked by President Trump.Credit…Amber Baesler/Associated Press

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1975

Earth Fires Seeds into Space

“Imagine that the earth has been watched over the aeons by an extremely patient extraterrestrial observer. Nothing, save a little hydrogen and helium, leaves the planet. And then, less than 20 years ago, the planet suddenly begins, like a dandelion gone to seed, to fire tiny capsules throughout the inner solar system. First, they go into orbit around the earth. Six capsules set down on the moon, and from each two small organisms emerge. Five little spacecraft enter the hellhole of Venus’s atmosphere. More than a dozen are dispatched to Mars. Two spacecraft successfully traverse the asteroid belt, fly close to Jupiter, and are ejected by its gravity into interstellar space.

It is clear, the observer might report, that something interesting is happening. We have entered, almost without noticing it, an age of exploration unparalleled since the Renaissance, when in just 30 years European people moved across the Western ocean to bring the entire globe within their ken. Our new ocean is the shallow disk of space occupied by the solar system. Centuries hence, our age may be remembered chiefly as the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. —Carl Sagan”

1925

Television via Radio

“C. Francis Jenkins, radio photographic experimenter of Washington, D.C., has demonstrated apparatus by which moving objects, including a Dutch windmill and motion picture film, were sent by radio for five miles and reproduced on a miniature screen, 10 by eight inches. The transmitter was set up at station NOF, near Anacostia, D.C., and the receiver in Jenkins’s laboratory. He predicts that the process will be perfected so that scenes at baseball games and prize fights can be broadcast over long distances.”

Clearly Written Books

“Below are some of the recent books that can be recommended for clearness of treatment, obtainable from the Scientific American Book Department.

Red-Lead and How to Use it in Paint, by Sabin
White-Lead. Its Use in Paint, by Sabin
The Science of Knitting, by Tompkins
Carbureting and Combustion in Alcohol Engines, by Sorel, Woodward, Preston
Evolution and Animal Intelligence, by Holmes
I Believe in God and in Evolution, by Keen
God or Gorilla, by McCann”

1875

Cincinnati is the Center of the U.S.

“The center of our population has traveled westward, keeping curiously near the 39th parallel of latitude, never getting more than 20 miles north or two miles south of it. In 80 years, it has traveled only 400 miles, and it is now found nearly 50 miles eastward of Cincinnati, Ohio.”

Spiritualist Rebuke

“Most of the organs of the spiritualists in this country are filled with insipid ghost matter, very tiresome and useless to all whose brains have not been softened by the spirit craze. The Spiritual Scientist, a weekly periodical, is an exception. Its editorial columns exhibit talent, while its conductors, with boldness, condemn as unworthy of true believers the printing of the unauthenticated trashy stuff delivered by common mediums. To its contemporary, the Banner of Light, it administers a severe rebuke for its agency in this matter, and alleges that for the past 10 or 12 years, that journal has poured out a weekly stream of pretended spirit communications, of which not more than two in a hundred had contained anything beyond childish nonsense.”

Huge Ganoids Ruled the Seas

“Professor J. S. Newberry gave descriptions of some newly discovered ancient fishes found in the rocks of Ohio. Among these was the entire bony structure of Dinichthys terrelli, the hugest of the old armor-plated ganoids. The dorsal shield weighed 30 pounds. Professor Newberry explained that the dipnoans of Africa and South America were descended from these ancient plated ganoids, and were the last remnants of a group of fishes which in the Devonian age not only ruled the seas, but were the most powerful and highly organized of living beings.”

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1975, Sun Loops: “Loops on the sun are shown in a false-color picture made with the Harvard College Observatory ultraviolet spectroheliograph aboard the Skylab crewed orbiting satellite. The loops, which are part of the inner corona, extend some 150,000 kilometers from the sun’s western edge. Black and blue areas represent the least intense radiation, yellow and magenta the more intense, and red the most intense.” Scientific American, Vol. 233, No 3; September 1975

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The New York attorney general’s office sued Donald Trump and his real estate business in 2022, accusing them of inflating his net worth to obtain favorable loan terms. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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