fact
She has an impressive history of overcoming adversity with grit and humor.
How Your Sloppy Email Subject Lines Are Affecting Your Work
A new analysis shows that we're more error-prone during the first day of the work week—and that these mistakes affect response rate.
12 Educational Facts About the Recorder
This elementary school staple has a long history.
Scientists at Stanford University have built a super-cheap, super-fast centrifuge out of everyday items. Their inspiration? A simple spinning toy. The team described their invention in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Biophysicist Manu Prakash is on a quest to make scientific and medical equipment cheaper and more accessible for everyone. He’s developed parasite-detecting skin patches and computers that run on drops of water. Last year, he made a splash with the introduction of the Foldoscope—an inexpensive, DIY paper microscope that users can assemble themselves. His goal is to distribute 1 million to schools worldwide by the end of 2017.
For his next trick, Prakash turned his attention to the centrifuge, a machine that spins rapidly to separate blood samples into their component parts. Centrifuging is a basic and crucial element of conducting blood tests like the one for malaria, yet many clinics around the world either cannot afford a machine or don’t have access to the electricity required to power it. “I realized that if we wanted to solve a critical problem like malaria diagnosis,” Prakash said in a statement, “we needed to design a human-powered centrifuge that costs less than a cup of coffee.”
He brought the problem back to his lab and began brainstorming with postdoctoral research fellow Saad Bhamla. They realized that the centrifuge’s primary job is simply to spin—the same job shared by thousands of years of children’s toys. They brought in armloads of old toys and pieces and set to work playing with them.
One evening, Prakash was spinning a simple whirligig device that he’d made from a button and some string. He decided to set up a high-speed camera to see how fast the thing could go. When he checked the tape, he was amazed. The crude setup was powerful enough to get the button spinning 10,000 to 15,000 times per minute.
The next step was rigging the center disk to hold and process samples. After a few weeks of experimentation, Prakash had his prototype: a paper disk loaded with thin tubes of blood.
Not content to let it rest there, he and Bhamla recruited a team of mathematicians and asked them to optimize the new paper machine. “We realized that this is a toy that no one had thought about,” he told The Atlantic. “The physics of how it works weren’t understood, and its fundamental limits were completely unknown. So we spent six months thinking about the math, all with the goal of asking how fast it could really go.”
The answer: a staggering 125,000 revolutions per minute—which the team believes is the fastest rotational speed ever recorded for a human-powered object. (“We have submitted an application to Guinness World Records,” they note in the paper.) This “paperfuge,” as they call it, can separate liquid blood from plasma in just two minutes. In 15 minutes, it can extract malaria parasites from a drop of blood.
This exceptional speed is just part of the paperfuge’s appeal. The rest comes in its dirt-cheap construction. The final prototype is made out of waterproof paper, Velcro, drinking straws, and fishing line. It weighs less than 2 grams and can be produced for about 20 cents. And this, Prakash says, is the key: “Frugal science is about democratizing scientific tools to get them out to people around the world.”
January 11, 2017 – 10:30am
With the release of the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake later in 2017, it will be exciting to hear Emma Watson sing classic Disney songs, such as “Belle” (Little Town) and “Something There.” In the meantime, take a look at the song recording sessions from 10 classic Disney movies.
When Broadway star Paige O’Hara was cast as Belle in Beauty and the Beast, she had a little trouble adjusting and projecting her voice from performing to sold out large theaters to singing and acting in a small recording booth. In fact, lyricist Howard Ashman jokingly gave her the nickname “Ethel Merman” because of the full range of her voice.
Although the pair didn’t perform Aladdin and Jasmine’s speaking voices, Brad Kane and Lea Salonga were the animated couple’s singing voices, respectively, in Aladdin. Co-director John Musker emphasized to the pair to really put real emotion and the thrill of flying behind their performance to capture the correct mood of the scene.
Voice actor Jodi Benson performed both the singing and speaking voices for Ariel in The Little Mermaid. Watch as lyricist Howard Ashman coaches Benson during a recording session for “Part of Your World” in 1989. She would later reprise her role in The Little Mermaid‘s straight-to-video sequels, as well as taking on Barbie in the Toy Story film series.
Oh, we all know this song! In 2013, Disney unleashed the box office juggernaut Frozen on the world. The animated film gained global success partly due to the hit single “Let It Go,” which was performed by Broadway star Idina Menzel, as well as 24 other wonderful singers from around the world.
In 2010, Disney released Tangled, a CGI-animated film about Rapunzel. Singer Mandy Moore voiced the Disney Princess, while Zachary Levi played the dashing rogue “Flynn Rider.” “I See The Light” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song, but lost out to “We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3.
Seinfeld‘s Jason Alexander performed the speaking and singing voice of Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Charles Kimbrough and Mary Wickes join Alexander as Victor and Laverne, respectively, as a trio of gargoyles that befriends Quasimodo. Watch as they perform “A Guy Like You.”
In 1999, Disney hired Phil Collins to write and perform the soundtrack for Tarzan. He later won an Academy Award for Best Song for “You’ll Be in My Heart.” Watch Collins’s recording session for “Strangers Like Me” in multiple languages above.
Lea Salonga returned to Disney as the singing voice for the titular character in Mulan. A 65-piece orchestra accompanied her while she belted out the animated film’s hit ballad, “Reflection.”
Fun Fact: While B.D. Wong and Donny Osmond provided the speaking and singing voices for Captain Li Shang, respectively, Jackie Chan performed the voice for the three different versions of Mulan in China.
Before Hercules was animated, singers Lillias White, Cheryl Freeman, LaChanze, Roz Ryan, and Vanéese Y. Thomas were brought in to record the song “From Zero To Hero,” while co-directors John Musker and Ron Clements blended live-action sequences and storyboards to help animators visualize the musical number.
In 2014, Stephen Sondheim’s hit Broadway musical Into The Woods was adapted to the big screen with a number of Hollywood A-listers, including Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, and Johnny Depp as The Big Bad Wolf.
January 11, 2017 – 10:00am
When physician Dale Mole stepped off the C-130 turboprop plane that had landed at the South Pole in January 2012, he felt a twinge of disappointment. It was only minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Granted, it was summer—but he had expected worse.
“The average winter temperature is minus 85,” he says. As the weeks and months passed, however, the thermostat dropped as low as minus 107. Mole’s exhaled breath would freeze in mid-air; no one dared leave bare flesh exposed more than 10 or 15 seconds; teeth would ache for hours after exposure.
Once, as Mole was cresting a snow bank, his face mask froze. “I had to remove my mask to breathe and the super-cooled air felt like ice daggers in my throat,” he says. “I was afraid my windpipe was going to freeze, which could prove fatal.”
In Antarctica, the coldest and most isolated place on the planet, even the simple act of breathing becomes an endurance test. Home to three permanent U.S. expedition outposts—McMurdo Station, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, and Palmer Station—it’s inaccessible eight months out of the year due to oppressive weather conditions. Researchers from a variety of countries fly in with the knowledge they’re about to be effectively cut off from the world.
But what happens when a medical situation arises? More than 2800 miles from the nearest hospital in New Zealand, Antarctic crews must rely on the expertise of a single physician responsible for upwards of 150 people. (The number varies by season.) Working autonomously, the doctor is charged with analyzing x-rays and blood work, providing aftercare, overseeing pharmaceutical duties and even performing dentistry. Serious conditions that could be managed in a major facility become radical emergencies. Surgery is a major undertaking, and intensive care can’t be sustained.
Such adversity is not for the claustrophobic or easily shaken. But for Mole, volunteering was academic. “I signed up,” he says, “because I wanted the challenge of providing medical care in the most remote and austere environment on Earth.”
The view from the observation deck. Courtesy Dale Mole.
Scott Parazynski, M.D., had spent 16 years in NASA’s astronaut corps and was an experienced mountaineer when the offer came to become Chief Medical Officer overseeing healthcare for the National Science Foundation’s U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP). Having tended to climbers all the way to the summit of Mount Everest, he was familiar with the psychological and physical demands of practicing medicine without a net.
“It takes a really broad skill set,” he says. “I call it MacGyver medicine. What can you do to diagnose and treat conditions in a really remote environment when the chips are down? You have to invent solutions on the fly.”
Physicians who volunteer typically have backgrounds as surgeons or emergency room veterans. When Parazynski selected former submarine medical officer Mole to go to the South Pole, the 63-year-old underwent a rigorous screening: an EKG to assess cardiovascular health, an ultrasound of the gallbladder to rule out any simmering problems, and a psychological test.
“Some of the items I remember from visiting the doctor in the 1950s,” he says. There was a World War II embalming kit, a straitjacket, and glass syringes with reusable needles. “Some of our lab equipment was also designed for use on animals, but was perfectly suitable for humans. The x-ray unit was the portable kind used by veterinarians, but it worked.”
Ventilators, ultrasound, and critical life support devices are also present, though luxuries like an MRI device would be cost-prohibitive owing to the small population. “You’re relying upon clinical judgment and your resourcefulness,” Parazynski says.
Because the Antarctic workers are carefully screened for any major conditions, Mole and other physicians frequently find themselves treating conditions common to any industrial environment: slips, common colds, and lacerations. The plummeting temperatures and non-existent humidity also give rise to dry skin conditions and respiratory ailments. One, “the McMurdo crud,” is a hacking cough that tends to nag at patients.
Despite the cold, frostbite is not as common as one might expect. Mole saw only a few cases, albeit one that resulted in a patient losing part of an ear. Most injuries, he says, “were sports related, as many played basketball, volleyball and dodge ball on their off-duty time.”
Sean Roden, M.D., who stayed during the comparatively warmer summer months prior to Mole’s arrival, recalls that altitude sickness was a problem for many: Antarctic stations are 9500 feet above sea level. Staff and crew take Diamox, a drug that helps adjust the body’s chemistry to the environment, but it isn’t always effective. “I had a headache for over two months,” Roden says. “Everyone was just constantly short of breath, had a headache, had a hard time sleeping. You get winded just brushing your teeth.”
Summer also invites a scourge of insomniacs, with the sun refusing to go away and inhabitants putting up blackout shutters to try and cope with the irregular seasons. “People were walking up and down hallways, not really awake, not asleep,” Roden says, “like zombies.”
It’s a hypochondriac’s worst nightmare: alone in the Antarctic, with the lone physician too ill to care for anyone else. Modern screenings have reduced that possibility, but the area has been home to a series of legendary crises.
Some countries require their doctors undergo an appendectomy to ward off the potential for appendicitis. If that seems excessive, consider the case of Leonid Rogozov, a Russian physician who diagnosed himself with a swollen appendix during a 1961 expedition. Trapped in the Austral winter with no flights in or out—the harsh weather can prevent aircraft from functioning properly—he deputized a few researchers to be his surgical assistants and cut out his own organ using only local anesthesia. He recovered in just two weeks.
In 1999, Jerri Nielsen discovered a lump in her breast. She performed a biopsy using only an ice cube to numb the area; upon discovering a cancerous growth, she had drugs air-dropped to her until she was able fly out for treatment.
If anything similar were to occur today, physicians would have the benefit of teleconferencing with colleagues. “We can look remotely in someone’s ear, eyes, listen to their heart, share views of ultrasound or EKG tracing,” Parazynski says. “We can look over their shoulder and be part of the decision making process.”
That assumes, however, communications are working. Mole says Internet access was available only a few hours at a stretch. Without it, “You rely upon textbooks you either brought with you or were available in the small South Pole medical library.”
Much of a physician’s time is spent in preventative preparation, training staff in the event of an emergency. During his stay, Roden orchestrated the medical evacuation of a crew member who had fallen ill with a neurological issue more than 400 kilometers from base. “We had rehearsed it in a drill, so we were prepped for it.” (The patient recovered and returned to work.)
Off-duty, Roden says numerous groups were devoted to salsa dancing, knitting, or Doctor Who viewing parties; Mole read, ran four to six miles a day on the treadmill, and ventured outside sporting at least six layers of insulation—anything to stretch out from his cramped 6 x 10-foot living quarters. He says he experienced none of the depression that can result from a lack of sunlight for months at a time.
“Being at the South Pole was like living on another planet, one with only one day and one night per year,” he says. “There was always something unique to experience, so I was never bored or felt an overwhelming desire to leave.”
After 10 months, Mole saw his first plane, thought of his wife, and breathed a sigh of relief. With winter over, he was able to return to the States in November 2012. During his tenure, he had attended lectures on art history, cared for a group requiring everything from dentistry to physical therapy, and trained non-medical staff to provide critical care in the event of an emergency.
Roden’s four-month stay was a kind of sensory deprivation. Back home, life had gone from being a blinding sea of white to glowing Technicolor. “Coming off the ice, seeing a sunset, the colors were just, wow,” he says. “Getting back to sea level was amazing. I felt great.”
Such experiences are more than an endurance test: they help inform future remote care in environments as varied as rural America, third world nations, and even Mars. Advanced handheld diagnostic tools, Parazynski says, are already on the way. “The notion is to develop a device that would have the diagnostic capabilities of a full lab in a major hospital. Not overly prescriptive, just basic physiological parameters, blood chemistries. It will help revolutionize healthcare in remote and in regular health care.”
While the efforts of Mole and other physicians are a valuable learning tool for future explorers, it’s the physician who may benefit the most. “The months of profound darkness, the majestic starry skies, the shimmering auroras, the icy desolation, going to bed at night a few feet from where all the lines of longitude converge …” Mole trails off. “These are the memories I will carry with me to my grave.”
This story originally appeared in 2015.
January 11, 2017 – 8:00am
Obama is the only Nobel peace prize recipient to bomb another Nobel peace prize recipient. In 2015, US/NATO planes bombed a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan. Doctors Without Borders won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. President Obama was awarded his in 2009. As Commander-in-Chief of the military that bombed the Doctors […]
What worried Russ Meyer most was that Roger Ebert might be murdered by Satan worshippers.
It was the summer of 1969, just weeks after actress Sharon Tate and her house guests had been brutally murdered by followers of Charles Manson, and Meyer wasn’t looking to take any chances. The director had hired Ebert to write his first major studio film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and situated him at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood. He insisted Ebert take a second-floor room to avoid any crazed, knife-wielding intruders coming in through the window.
It was a bizarre request, but nothing about the situation was normal. Meyer was known in film circles as “King Leer,” a lascivious filmmaker who made films on modest budgets that capitalized on the female form without resorting to pornography; Ebert was a Chicago film critic with no screenwriting experience and an erudition that seemed above Meyer’s exploitative instincts. Somehow, the two found themselves in charge of a $900,000 film that 20th Century Fox hoped would redeem a lousy run of flops.
Ebert took both the job and the room, making him one of the few critics to transition into filmmaking. Before it was over, people would be fired, the studio would be sued, and Ebert would find himself the credited writer on an X-rated movie. It is not the stuff future Pulitzer Prize winners are normally made of.
Growing up in Urbana, Illinois, Roger Ebert devoured science fiction novels. A voracious reader, he describes in his memoir, Life Itself, an early need to not only write but to publish. His neighborhood received unsolicited copies of the Washington Street News that was run off on a hectograph machine that used gel to make copies. While still in high school in 1958, the News-Gazette hired him to cover sports. At 16, Ebert could break curfew and stay out until 2 a.m. putting his column to bed.
While attending to his doctoral studies in English at the University of Chicago, Ebert was hired as a cub reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. In March 1967, he was named the paper’s movie critic, despite having no film education beyond going to matinees as a child. He figured he’d do it for a little while and then go off to become a novelist. The job lasted over 40 years.
Ebert had discovered Russ Meyer back in college: Students would duck in to see 1959’s The Immoral Mr. Teas, a comedy with a lot of nudity that seemed to play in perpetuity near campus. He observed Meyer’s work in 1965’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill and 1968’s Vixen! as surrealist fantasies of excess. Meyer’s women were empowered and buxom—and in many cases, empowered because of their endowments.
The director’s reputation for turning a profit on his cheap features caught the attention of The Wall Street Journal: the newspaper profiled him in 1968 under the headline “King of the Nudies,” to which Ebert responded with a note congratulating them on recognizing Meyer’s talents. A flattered Meyer saw the letter and wrote to Ebert. The two met in Chicago, where Meyer grew to understand that Ebert was as much a fan of Meyer’s cleavage-heavy photography as anything.
“I’ve considered full and pendulous breasts the most appealing visual of the female anatomy,” Ebert later wrote. In Meyer, he found a kindred spirit: the director spoke of having to corral a starlet’s merits with brassiere structures “along the lines of what made the Sydney Opera House possible.”
When Meyer’s massive return-on-investment fortunes were publicized in The Wall Street Journal, it caught the attention of 20th Century Fox. The studio was having a rough time, suffering flops like Barbra Streisand’s Hello, Dolly! and Doctor Doolittle at the same time Columbia Pictures was hitting a cultural chord with Easy Rider. Studio executives Richard Zanuck and David Brown were desperate enough to entertain Meyer’s brand of cinematic cotton candy. They signed him to a three-picture deal and told him he could do whatever he wanted with a title they had in storage: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Valley of the Dolls was their hit of 1967, a soapy melodrama about women addicted to downers (the “dolls”) and lousy men. Jacqueline Susann had written the novel it was based upon, but hadn’t been able to deliver a follow-up story agreeable to the studio. Hoping to cash in on the brand equity, they retained ownership of the sequel title and figured Meyer could apply his sensibilities in a way that made sense.
Excited, Meyer called Ebert and offered him the screenwriting job. It would pay $15,000, a tidy sum for the era, and would take just six weeks. At 27, Ebert was being asked to collaborate with a filmmaker he respected on a film that would almost certainly involve voluptuous women. He asked his editor at the Sun-Times for the time off and flew to California, getting shuttled directly into a Manson-proofed room near Sunset Boulevard. Roger Ebert was going to write a movie.
Ebert wrote every day from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. He and Meyer were granted an office on the Fox lot that consisted of three rooms. When Ebert stopped typing to ponder story or character, Meyer would rush in and ask if anything was wrong.
A treatment took just 10 days; their first draft was ready in three weeks. It was a frenetic pace, one that Meyer helped fuel by insisting Ebert abandon plans to diet and instead eat lots of meat to keep up his energy.
The plot reflected the expedited nature of their script work. In Dolls, three women form a rock band, The Carrie Nations, and head to Hollywood to achieve success while navigating the pitfalls of industry excesses. At the urging of Meyer, there were scenes of graphic violence, elements of winking satire, predatory characters, and a deeply irreverent tone. (As an indictment of the music industry, it was superficial at best: neither man had spent any time in the business.)
Fox, needlessly worried their pending releases like MASH and Patton were going to be perceived as square in the coming months, largely left the two alone. Without an executive policing the script, Ebert was free to look up from his typewriter and announce that a sleazy record executive named “Z-Man” would be revealed as a woman. There would be a quadruple murder and a tri-couple wedding. By Ebert’s own admission, it was a kitchen-sink affair. If it could be forced to make even slight sense, it had a place in the film.
Satisfied with Ebert’s work, Meyer began shooting in December of 1969. A former Playboy photographer, the director cast two former Playmates—Cynthia Myers and Dolly Read—in leading roles and used repertoire actors like Charles Napier to round out the cast. Fearing any attempt by the performers to be funny on purpose would sink his project, he instructed them as though they were performing Macbeth.
Shooting took just three months. Though Ebert’s six-week engagement was over, he made frequent visits to the set and fielded concerns from actors who were puzzled by Meyer’s serious approach to the outrageous material. And though the director’s “King Leer” reputation was not undeserved, Ebert was amused to find Meyer didn’t play the part of lecherous filmmaker. While on the Fox lot, Ebert even introduced Meyer to his future wife, actress Edy Williams.
Despite the film’s relative lack of gore or adult content, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had little desire to validate a Russ Meyer movie. Over Fox’s protests, they gave Dolls an X rating each of the three times it was submitted. Fed up, Meyer then asked the studio if he could splice in some more nudity: an X was an X, after all.
They declined. The film was to be released immediately. Zanuck and Brown needed a hit. They would get it, but not without a price.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls opened on June 17, 1970. It made $9 million—an incredible sum considering its lack of name actors, rating, and inexperienced writer. Audiences enjoyed it for many of the same reasons they came out for the original Valley of the Dolls: sex, excess, and histrionics. (“This is my happening and it freaks me out!” became the movie’s signature quotable line.)
Meyer had pulled off what he always had—selling titillation for a modest investment—only on a much larger scale. But even though ticket buyers were placated, most everyone else was not. Jacqueline Susann was aggravated that the in-name-only sequel capitalized on her original work and sued Fox. (She died in 1974; her estate collected $1.5 million the following year.)
Zanuck and Brown, meanwhile, were vilified for even allowing Meyer in the front door. Amid poor reviews of the studio’s other scandalous movie, 1970’s Myra Breckinridge, the two were ousted from Fox—a harsh sentence considering Zanuck’s own father, Darryl, was still on the board of directors.
Meyer and Ebert collaborated a half-dozen times more through the 1970s, though only one project—1979’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens—was produced. It was the last feature Meyer made before his death in 2004. After Dolls, Ebert forbid himself from reviewing Meyer’s movies to avoid any conflict of interest; once he became a nationally syndicated critic, he decided not to involve himself in screenplays at all. “I don’t believe that a film critic has any business having his screenplays on the desks at the studios,” he told Playboy in 1991.
The film has gone on to have a remarkable shelf life despite what Ebert (who died in 2013) claimed was an attempt by Fox to ignore its existence. Musician Joan Jett told Ebert she was inspired to form her band after watching it; Mike Myers used the “This is my happening” quote as Austin Powers; Richard Corliss of Time would declare it one of the 10 best films of the 1970s, a fact Ebert enjoyed repeating often.
Corliss was the rare critic who found merit in Meyer and Ebert’s effort. Most were dismissive of the movie’s gratuitous violence and perceived tastelessness.
“For some reason,” one reviewer fumed, “Meyer has saddled himself with a neophyte screenwriter.” He called Dolls one of the worst films of 1970, made by filmmakers who “excuse their lack of art by saying they are just kidding.” The paper was the Chicago Tribune, and its critic was Gene Siskel.
Additional Sources:
Life Itself; Big Bosoms and Square Jaws
January 11, 2017 – 8:00am
A live snail was kept in a museum for years before anyone knew it was alive. In the mid-1800s, scientists found a desert snail and sent it to the British Museum as a specimen. Museum workers thought it was dead, so glued it to a display. The snail was used to starvation and curled up […]
Heng Balance Lamp / Kickstarter
When it’s turned off, the Heng Balance Lamp resembles a work of modern art. But join the two wooden spheres in the center and the piece lights up to become one of the most creative lamps ever crafted.
Spotted over at WIRED, the Heng Balance Lamp is available for $44 through Kickstarter. Its switchless design is made possible through the magnetic balls attached to the top and bottom of its frame. Raise the lower sphere to meet the one in the center and watch the frame’s interior illuminate. Magnetic forces hold the two orbs suspended in place until you’re ready to turn the lamp off.
The deceptively simple concept was impressive enough to earn the lamp a coveted Red Dot Design Award in 2016. The crowdfunding project has already surpassed its initial goal many times over, and there’s still more than two weeks left in the campaign. Backers have until January 30 to reserve their Heng Balance Lamp with shipping projected for June of this year.
[h/t WIRED]
January 11, 2017 – 9:00am
