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Data-Driven Duet Charts Lennon and McCartney’s Tumultuous Relationship
Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 nl
This may be technology at its coolest. Or grossest. Or both. We’d say both. Scientists in Madrid have figured out a way to produce functional sheets of human skin using a 3D printer. They published their results in the journal Biofabrication.
Scientists have really seized 3D printing as a solution to all kinds of problems. In the last few years, they’ve developed techniques for printing cardiac stents, artificial rat models to spare real rats from dissection—even human jawbones and ears. Other researchers have been hard at work growing human skin in the laboratory.
The team in Madrid decided to put the two concepts together. As you can imagine, this was not a simple matter of loading up the ink and hitting a button. The team built a brand-new type of bioprinter that uses human plasma as a medium, or scaffolding.
Co-author Juan Francisco del Cañizo is a surgeon at Madrid’s Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón. He said it was tricky to create an automated process that could create a friendly environment for skin to grow. “Knowing how to mix the biological components, in what conditions to work with them so that the cells don’t deteriorate, and how to correctly deposit the product is critical to the system,” he told The Independent.
The printed skin includes the same functional layers as the home-grown variety: a tough, epidermis-like outer layer; a thick middle layer; and a layer of collagen-producing cells to make the skin stretchy and strong.
The research team believes their new skin printer has huge potential for helping burn patients and other people who need skin grafts. The printer could include the patients’ own cells in the plasma medium, which would significantly decrease the odds that their bodies would reject the new skin.
Animal advocates see the skin as a chance to put an end to cosmetic companies’ animal testing, which currently relies on rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, and dogs as surrogates for human skin.
A bioengineering firm called the BioDan Group has already expressed an interest in mass-producing the skin printers.
January 27, 2017 – 10:30am
Why Does Seeing Food Make Your Mouth Water?
Today’s Big Question: Why does seeing food make your mouth water?
The Best Time to Buy a Plane Ticket
You can save up to 30 percent on your plane ticket if you book at the right time. Here’s when to buy those tickets for optimal savings.
A Brief(ing) History of the White House Press Secretary
The official position of White House Press Secretary is more recent than you might think—in the 19th century, the press had no regular presence at the White House. Theodore Roosevelt changed all that.
A hiring manager won’t notice your slick suit, sterling resume, or clever conversation if they’re turned off by a weak handshake or poor eye contact. Created by UK loans company On Stride Financial (and spotted by Lifehacker), the infographic below lists seven non-verbal behaviors that bug prospective employers during job interviews, and—even more importantly—advises how to avoid them.
[h/t Lifehacker]
January 26, 2017 – 6:30pm
Every year since 1981, the Golden Raspberry Awards, a.k.a. the Razzies, have taken place the day before the Academy Awards to celebrate the worst in cinema. Ironically, on several occasions actors have won both a Razzie and an Oscar—sometimes in the same year (we’re looking at you, Sandra Bullock). Yet the Razzies never cease to amaze with their picks. Here are 12 surprising winners.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s first film after the juggernaut Titanic was the 1998 swashbuckling remake of The Man in the Iron Mask. He played twins King Louis XIV and Philippe, and apparently neither one of them gave a very impressive performance. In 1999—five years after he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape—DiCaprio defeated Spice World to win for Worst Screen Couple at the Razzies, which means he won twice.
In 1991, more than a quarter-century before he was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump won a Worst Supporting Actor Razzie for playing himself in Ghosts Can’t Do It. The movie’s IMDb description reads: “Elderly Scott kills himself after a heart attack wrecks his body, but then comes back as a ghost and convinces his loving young hot wife Kate to pick and kill a young man in order for Scott to possess his body and be with her again.” Anthony Quinn plays Scott, and Bo Derek plays Kate (Leo Damian played the young man, not Trump). Trump won the award at the 11th annual ceremony, held on March 24, 1991. If it’s any consolation, John Derek won Worst Director for the movie, Bo Derek won Worst Actress, and the movie tied with Andrew Dice Clay’s The Adventures of Ford Fairlane for Worst Picture. In his category, Trump edged out Gilbert Gottfried (who was nominated for three movies), Burt Young, Wayne Newton, and his own co-star, Leo Damian.
Eddie Redmayne’s 2016 Razzie win is yet another example of an Oscar winner alternating the high with the low, because the previous year he won a Best Actor Oscar for The Theory of Everything (and was nominated in the same category again last year, for The Danish Girl). Redmayne beat out Chevy Chase, Josh Gad, Kevin James, and Jason Lee to take home the Worst Supporting Actor award for Jupiter Ascending, which received additional nominations for Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Channing Tatum), Worst Actress (Mila Kunis), and Worst Director and Screenplay (the Wachowskis)—though Redmayne was the film’s single award winner.
Michael Moore’s controversial 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 treated both former president George W. Bush and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, as villains. In 2005, for the first time ever, the Razzies nominated a movie that was both critically-acclaimed and a financial success (it grossed $222 million worldwide). Bush beat out Ben Stiller, Ben Affleck, Colin Farrell, and Vin Diesel—actual actors—for Worst Actor, while Rumsfeld was named Worst Supporting Actor over perennial favorite Val Kilmer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jon Voight, and Lambert Wilson. Bush also won for Worst Screen Couple: “George W. Bush and either Condoleezza Rice or his Pet Goat,” the book Bush read to Florida schoolchildren the morning of the 9/11 attacks. Fahrenheit 9/11 won a total of four Razzies, including one for Britney Spears, who made a tiny cameo in the film (as herself).
Over the course of his more than 50-year career, Marlon Brando earned eight Oscar nominations and won twice. But that didn’t prevent him from starring in a few stinkers. Brando received his first Razzie nod at the very first Razzie Awards, in 1981, when he was nominated for Worst Supporting Actor for The Formula. He was nominated in the same category again in 1993, for Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, and then again in 1997, when he won for playing Dr. Moreau in the critically panned The Island of Dr. Moreau. He beat out co-star Val Kilmer, Burt Reynolds, Steven Seagal, and Quentin Tarantino to win the not-so-coveted award.
Neil Diamond segued into film acting when he starred in the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer. The movie grossed a middling $27 million, but the Diamond-penned and performed soundtrack sold 5 million copies. The odd thing is, in the same year that Diamond won a Worst Actor Razzie for The Jazz Singer, he was nominated for a Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy Golden Globe for the same role.
Long considered one of the world’s greatest actors, Sir Laurence Olivier fell from grace in 1981 when he, like his co-star Neil Diamond, won a Razzie for The Jazz Singer—in Olivier’s case, it was a Worst Supporting Actor award, which he ended up sharing with John Adames from Gloria (so at least he wasn’t alone in his shame). It’s a head-scratcher how the Shakespearean actor—who won three Oscars, three Golden Globes, and five Emmys—ended up with not one, but two Razzies (he won a Worst Actor award in 1983 for Inchon, besting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s portrayal of Conan the Barbarian). But the Razzies weren’t the end of Olivier’s lauded career: In 1984 he won an Emmy for King Lear.
In 1989, McDonald’s iconic mascot, Ronald McDonald, won a Worst New Star award—beating out then-newcomer Jean-Claude Van Damme—for playing himself in Mac and Me. The movie, about a wheelchair-using young boy and his alien friend, was also nominated for Worst Director, Worst Picture, and Worst Screenplay. Today, Mac and Me is probably best-known for finding its way into movie clips whenever Paul Rudd appears on Conan.
Sylvester Stallone is a three-time Oscar nominee, and a Razzie veteran. He won his first Golden Raspberry in 1985, for Worst Actor in Rhinestone. He has been nominated for dozens more Razzies since then, and won 10 of them, including a Worst Actor of the Century in 2000 and the Razzie Redeemer award in 2016, which is about as nice as the Razzies get, as it was for his move “From All-Time Razzie Champ to Award Contender for Creed” because of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod he received last year for Creed.
Oscar-winning screenwriters Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) and Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential) won a Razzie in 1998 for adapting the book The Postman into a terrible Kevin Costner movie. Their script, according to the Razzies, was worse than the screenplays for Anaconda, Batman & Robin, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Speed 2: Cruise Control. Fortunately (or unfortunately), Roth and Helgeland weren’t the only members of The Postman team to earn some attention from the Razzies; the film also won for Worst Picture (Costner), Worst Actor (again, Costner), Worst Director (again, Costner), and Worst Song (not Costner). The day after the Razzies, Helgeland and writer/director Curtis Hanson won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for L.A. Confidential. Roth, who had won an Oscar in 1995 for writing Forrest Gump, shook off his Golden Raspberry win and went on to win three more Oscars (and counting).
January 26, 2017 – 6:00pm
There’s strong evidence that babies inherit their gut microbiomes from their mothers, but it’s been unclear if the microbiome transmission takes place in the womb, at birth, or after birth; there are likely multiple paths of transmission unfolding over time. Microbial diversity is crucial to building up many functions, including the immune system, digestion, and even combating complex diseases. Recent research has found a connection between our gut microbiomes and our mental health as well.
However, studying the direct transmission of these microbes and identifying the strains of bacteria has been difficult until recently. Now researchers at the Centre for Integrative Biology at the University of Trento (UoT), Italy, have developed methods to track this microbial “vertical transmission,” as it’s called, and made some new discoveries in their methodological study, published in mSystems, an open access journal from the American Society for Microbiology.
“We know the infant increases [its] microbial diversity after birth and will continue doing so until being an adult,” senior study author Nicola Segata, an assistant professor at UoT, tells mental_floss. “We needed to understand from where microbes are coming in the first place.”
Many microbes are likely transmitted from mother to infant at birth and just after birth through direct contact with the birth canal, the skin, and through breast milk, but they had not yet done thorough investigations of the strains of bacteria to corroborate this. This is also important in the case of identifying the transmission of microbes that are dangerous to the infant’s health, such as Group B Streptococcus, which can cause an infection, and even death, in infants.
Segata explains, “Our contribution is really tracking which bacteria are moving from mother to infant. It was already known that certain microbes were present in the mother and infant but each had a different strain of, say, E. coli or Bifidobacterium. We looked to see if mothers and infants had the same strain of E. coli, or if it was a different strain from other infants and mothers.”
Taking fecal and breast milk samples from five mother-infant pairs when the infants were 3 months, 10 months, and, for one pair, at 16 months of age, Segata and his team used a technique called shotgun metagenomic sequencing of 24 microbiome samples of either fecal or breastmilk samples to determine which microbes were present. (This technique makes it possible to sample genes from all organisms in a sample.) Then they used another method known as metatranscriptomics to study RNA in fecal samples to identify active microbes.
“Each mother and infant pair had different strains of bacteria, but when you match each mother and her infant, they have the same strain, so this is strong evidence of the strain coming from the mother,” Segata says.
Another important discovery, Segata says, is that “these strains acquired from the mother are also active in the infant gut, they are alive. It’s important that the strains moving from mother to infant are active, colonizing.”
While this study allowed them to say confidently, “We can track microbe transmission from mother to infant,” Segata says their next study will allow them to identify which microbes, and whether they will survive in the infant gut.
January 26, 2017 – 5:30pm
iStock
The town of Flint, Michigan, passed an ordinance in 2008 barring residents from wearing saggy pants that drop below the buttocks.
Screenshot via Orbitz
In 1900, eleven years after Michelin was founded, the tire company released its first city guide as a way to promote travel to its customers. In the spirit of the guide’s origins, Orbitz has published a map plotting the fastest way to visit every Michelin-starred restaurant in the U.S. by car.
America is home to a number of areas with the most Michelin-starred restaurants on Earth—including the San Francisco area, which boasts more than 50 stars spread out across more than 30 establishments, and is where this road trip starts. After knocking out the California spots, drivers take a 2111-mile trip to Chicago, where 26 Michelin-starred eateries await them. After that, there are two culinary destinations left to visit: New York City, which has more stars than any other city in the U.S. (with 77), and Washington D.C., which received its first Michelin guide this year. Even though the restaurants are concentrated in just four states, the sheer number of restaurants on the list means that if you ate at a different one each night, it would take you five months to try them all.
The road trip is 3426 miles in total, with the optimal distance calculated by road trip wizard Randy Olson (you may be familiar with his epic National Park route or his “Where’s Waldo?” search algorithm). You can check out an interactive version of the map, complete with each restaurant’s name, address, and total number of stars, at Orbitz.com.
January 26, 2017 – 4:30pm
