The kilogram is dead. Long live the kilogram. “After a vote (and a century of research), the standard measure for mass is redefined.” (HT: Gary Hartenburg)
Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, sold more than 725,000 copies on its first day.
“More stunning scenes have been uncovered at the site of a fifth-century synagogue in Israel, where archaeologists have been excavating an ornate mosaic floor since 2012.” They include a man-eating fish and a depiction of the construction of the Tower of Babel.
Junot Díaz remains on the Pulitzer board after a review of misconduct allegations.
In praise of Notting Hill Editions: “Headquartered in England, Notting Hill not only publishes essays; it publishes only essays.”
I reviewed Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light for the University Bookman. Here’s a snippet: “There’s something almost immediately vapid, isn’t there, in referring to a poem as a ‘prayer’ (a conceit, alas, I have used myself) or in noting an artist’s ‘redemptive’ use of this or that material? Terms like ‘incarnation’ or ‘presence’—both good words—have become nearly useless with respect to poetry because of overuse, making poetry into a pill of mild euphoria to be consumed on a gloomy Saturday morning. Never mind that both God and poetry can be terrifying, as they speak judgments against us or converse with Hell’s demons.” Read it here if you’re interested.
Why the fax is not obsolete … yet.
An ancient city believed to have been founded by the Trojans has been discovered: “First, the archaeologist and her team uncovered a sarcophagus from a village in southern Greece in 1984. Thirty-four years later, an ancient road in the same village led to a Roman mausoleum. Then, in October, a lost city called Tenea was found.”
Essay of the Day:
In Nautilus, Albert-László Barabási explains why Douglas Prasher, a courtesy driver for a Toyota dealership in Alabama, should have won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry but didn’t:
“Prasher was the first scientist to clone GFP, a luminous protein that makes jellyfish shine in the dark depths of the ocean. In essence, GFP is a tiny flashlight that researchers can attach to any protein, so when we inspect proteins under the microscope we can see exactly when they are produced, where they travel in a cell, and how and when they disappear. GFP is ‘a guiding star for biochemistry,’ claimed the Nobel Foundation when it announced its award.
“Prasher was the first to see GFP’s potential. He had been elbow-deep in the gelatinous muck of jellyfish carcasses as a young researcher, long before anyone considered them worthwhile to study. He didn’t just get his hands dirty, capturing the jellyfish using pool-skimming nets and extracting their bioluminescent proteins by the bucketful. He also built vast libraries of jellyfish DNA from frozen hand-harvested tissues. Most important, he was the first researcher to identify the gene encoding the particular light-emitting proteins that are used today in medical research. And, fully aware of the enormous potential of the fluorescent gene he’d discovered, Prasher even figured out a way to extract the material from the jellyfish and then clone it.
“Today, virtually all molecular biology labs depend on his discovery. If you want to explore how tumors grow cancerous tissues, if you want to understand how the brain of a mouse works when it navigates a maze, or if you want to develop the next drug for diabetes, you need to use GFP. Few tools have had such an enormous impact on modern biology and medicine. So it was no surprise that the Nobel Committee wanted to honor someone for the discovery of the fluorescent protein. What was a surprise, though, was that the recipient wasn’t Prasher.
“Our algorithm, applied to dozens of prizewinning discoveries, proved that the Nobel Committee rarely made mistakes. So what exactly went wrong in 2008? To find the answer, we needed to examine how credit is assigned to teamwork everywhere.”
Photos: Amazing panoramas
Poem: George David Clark, “Shiversong”
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