Weekly Meanderings, 10 July 2021

Summer time means relaxation and vacation for many.

Photo by S Migaj on Unsplash

Kris and I participated in those old-fashioned Spelling Bees so this contest is always fun for us. Go Zaila!

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) — Whether dribbling a basketball or identifying obscure Latin or Greek roots, Zaila Avant-garde doesn’t show much stress.

The 14-year-old from Harvey, Louisiana, breezed to the championship at the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night, becoming the first African American winner and only the second Black champion in the bee’s 96-year history.

Zaila has described spelling as a side hobby, although she routinely practiced for seven hours a day. She is a basketball prodigy who hopes to play some day in the WNBA and holds three Guinness world records for dribbling multiple balls simultaneously.

Zaila twirled and leaped with excitement after spelling the winning word, “murraya,” a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees.

Only one word gave her any real trouble, “nepeta,” a genus of Old World mints, and she jumped even higher when she got that one right than she did when she took the trophy.

Boz on false narratives:

When abusive behavior of faith leaders is uncovered, all too often the immediate response is not an unconditional admission or a genuine expression of authentic repentance. Instead, a common response is a new narrative. A false narrative. A narrative that attempts to paint a picture of the situation without any regard for truth. A narrative designed to protect reputations and preserve future incomes. A narrative designed to keep the leaders in the spotlight and the victims out of the way.

Since many of these leaders tend to be narcissistic, the primary purpose of a false narrative is to enable them to hold onto power as they crave affirmation and continued relevance. Seeking out friendly media interviews is one way that provides opportunities for offending leaders to elaborate and “sell” their new narrative. Social media is also an effective means to communicate this narrative because it tends to attract those who crave the leader’s attention and who will be quick to “like”, “share”, “comment”, “reply” or “re-tweet” the leader’s narrative. These same followers will often be quick to vilify and attack anyone who questions or criticizes the leader or the narrative.

She’s a sommelier:

Jessica Locarnini is a sommelier. Her palate can distinguish nuanced flavours and terroir; she can detect faults and adulteration. But unlike a restaurant sommelier who recommends wine to guests, Locarnini works in the field of honey.

The Melbourne-based marketing professional has trained with – and received official certification from – the American Honey Tasting Society to detect hundreds of different aromas in the sticky, viscous liquid and even distinguish what sort of flowers bees have foraged on.

She is now working with beekeepers to develop language around Australian honey collected in native forests, and advising chefs on the right honey for the right dish.

To explain her evaluation process, Locarnini holds a wine glass dolloped with honey up to the light. She turns it, watching the light catch the fine crystals.

“Crystals are good,” she says. “They indicate that the honey is natural and has not been pasteurised, which destroys nutrition.”

Locarnini plunges her nose into the glass and takes a long whiff, pausing to work out the aromas. Using a spoon, she then takes a small sample of the honey and rolls it around in her mouth.

The sommelier ponders for a moment then writes down a few descriptive words which far exceed “sweet” and “floral”. Locarnini uses terms such as caramel, yeasty, lactic, camphorous, spicy and medicinal.

“You have to remain neutral and not bring in prejudice when evaluating honey,” she says. “But the nasal bulb is connected to the part of the brain related to memories and emotion. When you smell honey it inevitably evokes memory.”

Macrophages:

In the language of Morse code, the letter “S” is three short sounds and the letter “O” is three longer sounds. Put them together in the right order and you have a cry for help: S.O.S. Now an NIH-funded team of researchers has cracked a comparable code that specialized immune cells called macrophages use to signal and respond to a threat.

In fact, by “listening in” on thousands of macrophages over time, one by one, the researchers have identified not just a lone distress signal, or “word,” but a vocabulary of six words. Their studies show that macrophages use these six words at different times to launch an appropriate response. What’s more, they have evidence that autoimmune conditions can arise when immune cells misuse certain words in this vocabulary. This bad communication can cause them incorrectly to attack substances produced by the immune system itself as if they were a foreign invaders.

The findings, published recently in the journal Immunity, come from a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) team led by Alexander Hoffmann and Adewunmi Adelaja. As an example of this language of immunity, the video above shows in both frames many immune macrophages (blue and red). You may need to watch the video four times to see what’s happening (I did). Each time you run the video, focus on one of the highlighted cells (outlined in white or green), and note how its nuclear signal intensity varies over time. That signal intensity is plotted in the rectangular box at the bottom.

The macrophages come from a mouse engineered in such a way that cells throughout its body light up to reveal the internal dynamics of an important immune signaling protein called nuclear NFκB. With the cells illuminated, the researchers could watch, or “listen in,” on this important immune signal within hundreds of individual macrophages over time to attempt to recognize and begin to interpret potentially meaningful patterns.

Work less? Produce more!

From 2015 to 2019, Iceland ran the world's largest trial of a shorter working week. An analysis of the results was finally published this week, and surprise! Everyone was happier, healthier, and more productive. Please pretend to be surprised.

The report was jointly prepared by the Association for Sustainability and Democracy (Alda) in Iceland and UK think tank Autonomy, who note that Iceland's experiment could be used as a blueprint for future trials around the world.

"This study shows that the world's largest ever trial of a shorter working week in the public sector was by all measures an overwhelming success," said Will Stronge, Autonomy's director of research. "It shows that the public sector is ripe for being a pioneer of shorter working weeks — and lessons can be learned for other governments."

Don’t use these words, please.

Dental breakthrough?

Scientists have invented a product that can encourage tooth enamel to grow back, which means we could finally have a game-changing way to treat dental cavities.

In 2018, researchers at the University of Washington announced the development of a treatment based on peptides - short chains of amino acids, linked by peptide bonds, that aren't long enough to be considered full proteins.

When applied to artificially created dental lesions in a laboratory setting, the product remineralized tooth enamel, effectively "healing" the lesion.

"Remineralization guided by peptides is a healthy alternative to current dental health care," said materials scientist Mehmet Sarikaya.

Tooth enamel is produced by a type of cell called an ameloblast; these secrete the proteins that form enamel while the tooth is still in the gum.

Unfortunately, once the process of forming tooth enamel is complete and the tooth has emerged, our ameloblasts die off. But we continue to lose enamel throughout our lifetime.

"Bacteria metabolize sugar and other fermentable carbohydrates in oral environments and acid, as a by-product, will demineralize the dental enamel," said dentistry researcher Sami Dogan.

To a small extent, our teeth can be remineralized with the help of saliva, fluoride toothpaste and drinking water additives.

But once there's a visible cavity on the tooth, it needs to be treated by a dentist - which usually means drilling, and packing the hole with a dental filling.

To develop their new treatment, the team turned to one of the proteins produced by ameloblasts. Called amelogenins, these proteins play a key role in regulating the formation of tooth enamel.