Month: November 2020

Enlarge / A segment of fiber cord that has been wrapped with turkey feathers, along with a single downy feather. (credit: Washington State University)

Indigenous Pueblo populations in the American Southwest—ancestors of today's Hopi, Zuni, and Rio Grande Pueblo tribes—typically wove blankets, cloaks, and funeral wrappings out of animal hides, furs, and turkey feathers. Anthropologists at Washington State University (WSU) have examined one such ancient turkey-feather blanket and determined it took thousands of those feathers, wrapped around nearly 200 yards to yucca fiber, to make, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

"Blankets or robes made with turkey feathers as the insulating medium were widely used by Ancestral Pueblo people in what is now the Upland Southwest, but little is known about how they were made because so few such textiles have survived due to their perishable nature," said co-author Bill Lipe, emeritus professor of anthropology at WSU. "The goal of this study was to shed new light on the production of turkey feather blankets and explore the economic and cultural aspects of raising turkeys to supply the feathers."

For their study, Lipe and his WSU colleague and co-author, Shannon Tushingham, studied a blanket framework on display at the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah. Although insects had devoured the original feather vanes and barbs, the shafts were still visible, wrapped around yucca fiber cords. They were also able to look at a second, smaller blanket which still had most of its feathers intact. Both blankets roughly date to the early 1200s CE.

Enlarge / Diagram of the structure of the virus' spike protein. (credit: McLellan Lab, University of Texas at Austin)

When the COVID-19 pandemic was first recognized for the threat that it is, researchers scrambled to find anything that might block the virus' spread. While vaccines have grabbed much of the attention lately, there was also the hope that we could develop a therapy that would block the worst effects of the virus. Most of these have been extremely practical: identify enzymes that are essential for the virus to replicate, and test drugs that block similar enzymes from other viruses. These drugs are designed to be relatively easy to store and administer and, in some cases, have already been tested for safety in humans, making them reasonable choices for getting something ready for use quickly.

But the tools we've developed in biotechnology allow us to do some far less practical things, and a paper released today describes how they can be put to use to inactivate SARS-CoV-2. This is in no way a route to a practical therapy, but it does provide a fantastic window into what we can accomplish by manipulating biology.

Throw it in the trash

The whole effort described in the new paper is focused on a simple idea: if you figure out how to wreck one of the virus' key proteins, it won't be able to infect anything. And, conveniently, our cells have a system for destroying proteins, since that's often a useful thing to do. In some cases, the proteins that are destroyed are damaged; in others, the proteins are made and destroyed at elevated paces to allow the cell to respond to changing conditions rapidly. In a few cases, changes in the environment or the activation of signaling pathways can trigger widespread protein destruction, allowing the cell to quickly alter its behavior.

Enlarge / Film critics Roger Ebert (center) and Gene Siskel appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on December 12, 1986. (credit: Gary Null/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

Update: Fifteen years ago around Thanksgiving, legendary film critic Roger Ebert set off a mini-storm in video game journalism circles by taking to his column and poo-pooing the medium. And with Ars staff off for the holiday weekend, we thought it'd be interesting to resurface this analysis of Ebert's critiques from Ars contributor Jeremy Reimer. While there have definitely been a few game-to-film duds in the intervening years (ahem, Assassin's Creed), there's been no shortage of breathtaking video game storytelling (Her Story) or Hollywood looking to new titles (Last of Us on HBO, either. This piece originally ran on November 30, 2005 and appears unchanged below.

Roger Ebert, the famed movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and co-host of the syndicated TV show Ebert and Roper at the Movies has thrown down the gauntlet on his website by stating that video games will never be as artistically worthy as movies and literature. Ebert does not believe that this quality gap can ever be crossed, as he feels it is a fundamental limitation of the medium itself:

There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

Whether or not interactive art can still be art is an interesting question. Modern artists such as Chin Chih Yang, who design interactive multimedia projects as well as creating "traditional" art, would probably tell you that whether something is "art" depends on only the artist and the audience, and not the medium itself. However, there are undoubtedly more conservative artists who would dismiss "interactive multimedia projects" as not being worthy of the term art. Of course this debate is not a new one, nor has it been confined to video games. Movies and comic books both struggled (and still struggle) to receive the same level of respect as traditional media, such as literature and dramatic plays.