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August 16, 2006
"How would you define a left-hand glove compared to a right-hand glove so a person who had no knowledge of those terms could tell you which you meant? And not get the other? The mirror opposite?"
Kim got an unwelcome call from a push-poller the other night:
Caller: Hi, this is Tammi with the Dove Foundation. This call will only take 90 seconds of your time.
Me: (sighing internally) Okay.
Caller: Public surveys of parents and grandparents of children indicate that TV and movie ratings are becoming more lenient. What do you think?
Me: I'm not a parent. And I don't watch television.
(Note: except on DVD)
Caller: It doesn't matter. Hollywood controls most of the production for family feature films, and I'd like to know if you think that more funding should go towards movies that actual families can watch.
Me: I like dirty movies.
Caller: Well, but if you liked movies for families, don't you think more funding should go towards family feature films?
I immediately suspected that the call was somehow connected to a crazy Christian billionaire film producer I'd read about, Philip Anschutz. Anschutz was dubbed "the greediest man in America" after he swindled his own employees at Qwest Communications out of their retirement money. His pet project is Walden Media, a little film studio that puts entertainment second to morality. Their M.O. is to rip off established literary classics by adapting them into feel-good dreck, force-feed them to the public by exploiting church groups with some target marketing, and then funnel them to his own chain of Regal movie theaters:
In the run-up to the premiere, 'Narnia Sneak Peek' events have been held in churches around the country, the Christian Post reported: "At the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., members of the 20,000-plus congregation viewed exclusive clips, received free gift bags full of outreach material, and were treated to a special live performance by Steven Curtis Chapman. In addition, C.S. Lewis' stepson and co-producer of the film, Doug Gresham; Walden Media President and film's visionary Michael Flaherty; and other Narnia filmmakers discussed the making of the movie."
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that, "the Los Angeles County Probation Department [had] put together" a series of "Narnia"-related events "for its juvenile centers." "In addition to reading the book, exercises included making crumpets in cooking class and recreating the movie sets in construction class. The grand finale: seeing the movie after it comes out on Dec. 9."
Pre-release marketing efforts have reached out "to a panoply of special-interest groups, from the Coast Guard Youth Academy to Ronald McDonald House, wooing them with invitations to glitzy presentations on the studio lot and lavishing them with posters, snow globes and other promotional gear."
Walden and Disney claim that, "they have sent out 'Narnia' materials to every elementary and middle school in America. That includes posters, educational guides and more than 90,000 copies of the novel. The guides include suggested lesson plans for teachers on topics ranging from the Blitz to the art of writing music lyrics."
Sure enough, Michael Flaherty (heralded in the quote above as the "visionary" for the latest Narnia adaptation), Walden Media's President, is also an advisor to the Dove Foundation. Not surprisingly, Dove considers Walden's Narnia film the best movie of 2005. As opposed to Crash, the pick of Roger Ebert and the Oscars, or Brokeback Mountain, the top ranked film of 2005 by critics overall. I wish the Dove Foundation kept a public list of its donors...I'm curious how much of their cash comes straight from Anschutz.
Sony's started shipping 50GB Blu-Ray discs.
The fastest evolving part of the human genome only affects the brain and other sexual organs.
They found 35,000 pieces of non-coding DNA that were very similar in chimpanzees, rats, and mice. Since these mammals are separated by 100 million years of evolution, their similarity suggests these segments may be playing an important function that has been conserved by natural selection. If they didn't have a function, mutations would have built up in each lineage. They then looked at these segments (or rather, they had a computer look at them) in the human genome. They picked out segments in which the human versions had acquired a significant number of new mutations not found in other mammals. These mutations must have evolved since our ancestors split from chimpanzees.
The scientists found 49 candidate segments. These segments have evolved a lot in our lineage. The most drastically altered of all is a segment the scientists dubbed HAR1 (for human accelerated region). It is 118 base pairs long. Chimpanzees and chickens, separated by over 300 million years, carry versions of HAR1 that are identical except for two base pairs. In humans, on the other hand, 18 base pairs have changed since we split from chimps.
What's HAR1 for? This is the sort of question that seems like it should be easy to answer unless you're the scientist doing the answering. The scientists found that human cells make RNA molecules out of the HAR1 segment. Specifically, they found that brain cells do. Specifically, brain cells in the cortex, the hippocampus, and certain other regions. We do love our brains, and so it is reasonable to consider that HAR1 took on some new role in the brains of human ancestors. The sequence of HAR1 suggests that an RNA molecule produced from it would be stable enough to carry out some important job, such as regulating the activity of protein-coding genes. HAR1 probably plays several roles. It is not just active in the adult brain, but in development-guiding cells in the fetus.
In a commentary that also appears in Nature, two Oxford scientists point out that HAR1 is also active in the ovary and testis of adult humans.
Normal, everyday brain cells can become progenitors.
Last year, the researchers published details about how they used stem-like brain cells from rodents to duplicate neurogenesis - the process of generating new brain cells - in a dish. The latest findings go further, showing common human brain cells can generate different cell types in cell cultures. In addition, when researchers transplanted these human cells into mice, the cells effectively incorporated in a variety of brain regions.
The human cells were acquired from patients who had undergone surgical treatment for epilepsy and were extracted from support tissue within the gray matter, which is not known for harboring stem cells.
When the donor cells were subjected to a bath of growth agents within cell cultures, a type of cell emerged that behaves like something called a neural progenitor - a cell that is a bit further along in development than a stem cell but shares a stem cell's vaunted ability to divide and transform into different types of brain cells.
Even when the cells from the epilepsy patients were transplanted into mice, bypassing any growth enhancements, they were able to take cues from their surroundings and produce new neurons.
"That these cells were able to integrate into tissue in an animal model and actually survive - it was extremely important to show that. Now the question is what will these cells do in a human brain? Will they be able to survive for the long term and rebuild circuitry? This work is a first step toward that end."
Left-handed men with at least some college education earned 15 percent more than similarly educated right-handers, while those who finished college earned about 26 percent more, wrote Christopher S. Ruebeck of Lafayette College, and Joseph Harrington and Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Posted by Jon Rubin at August 16, 2006 08:35 PM
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