Author: n Jennifer Ouelletten

Netflix’s international offerings include some entertaining Norwegian fare, such as the series Ragnarok (2020–2023), a surprisingly engaging reworking of Norse mythology brought into the 21st century that ran for three seasons. Another enjoyable offering was a 2022 monster movie called Troll, essentially a Norwegian take on the classic Godzilla formula. Netflix just dropped a trailer for the sequel, Troll 2, which looks to be very much in the same vein as its predecessor.

(Spoilers for the first Troll movie below.)

Don’t confuse the Netflix franchise with 2010’s Trollhunter, shot in the style of a found footage mockumentary. A group of college students sets off into the wilds of the fjordland to make a documentary about a suspected bear poacher named Hans. They discover that Hans is actually hunting down trolls and decide to document those endeavors instead, but soon realize they are very much out of their depth.

Read full article

Comments

Last year, a group of researchers won the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. But as with many Ig Nobel awards, there is a serious side to the seeming silliness. The same group has conducted a new study on the feasibility of adapting this method to treat people with blocked airways or clogged lungs, with promising results that bring rectal oxygen delivery one step closer to medical reality.

As previously reported, this is perhaps one of the more unusual research developments to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated shortages of ventilators and artificial lungs to assist patients’ breathing and prevent respiratory failure. The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center team took their inspiration from the humble loach, a freshwater bottom-dwelling fish found throughout Eurasia and northern Africa. The loach (along with sea cucumbers) employs intestinal breathing (i.e., through the anus) rather than gills to survive under hypoxic conditions, thanks to having lots of capillary vessels in its intestine. The technical term is enteral ventilation via anus (EVA).

Would such a novel breathing method work in mammals? The team thought it might be possible and undertook experiments with mice and micro-pigs to test that hypothesis. They drew upon earlier research by Leland Clark, also of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, who invented a perfluorocarbon liquid called Oxycyte as a possible form of artificial blood. That vision never materialized, although it did provide a handy plot point for the 1989 film The Abyss, in which a rat is able to “breathe” in a similar liquid.

Read full article

Comments

Chances are you’ve encountered some version of the “Ebbinghaus illusion,” in which a central circle appears to be smaller when encircled by larger circles and seems larger when surrounded by smaller circles. It’s an example of context-dependent size perception. But is this unique to humans or are some animals susceptible as well? According to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, it might depend on the specific sensory environment, since the illusion relies on contextual clues to be effective.

Prior research has produced mixed results on the question of animals and their susceptibility to optical illusions, per the authors. Dolphins, chicks, and redtail splitfins seem to be susceptible, for example, while pigeons, baboons, and gray bamboo snakes are not.

Perhaps the best-known example is cats’ undeniable love of boxes and squares—the “if it fits, I sits” phenomenon documented all over the Internet. This behavior is generally attributed to the fact that cats feel safer when squeezed into small spaces, but it also tells us something about feline visual perception. Both a 1988 study and a 2021 study concluded that cats are susceptible to the Kanizsa square illusion, suggesting that they perceive subjective contours much like humans.

Read full article

Comments

In 1890, a German scientist named Robert Koch thought he’d invented a cure for tuberculosis, a substance derived from the infecting bacterium itself that he dubbed Tuberculin. His substance didn’t actually cure anyone, but it was eventually widely used as a diagnostic skin test. Koch’s successful failure is just one of the many colorful cases featured in Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels, a new nonfiction illustrated children’s book by science historian Lindsey Fitzharris and her husband, cartoonist Adrian Teal.

A noted science communicator with a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art, in 2017—a great, if occasionally grisly, read. She followed up with 2022’s  The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, about a WWI surgeon named Harold Gillies who rebuilt the faces of injured soldiers.

And in 2020, she hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of…, exploring famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. For his part, Teal is a well-known caricaturist and illustrator, best known for his work on the British TV series Spitting Image. His work has also appeared in The Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph, among other outlets.

Read full article

Comments

We all feel it: Our once-happy digital spaces have become increasingly less user-friendly and more toxic, cluttered with extras nobody asked for and hardly anybody wants. There’s even a word for it: “enshittification,” named 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The term was coined by tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow, a longtime advocate of digital rights. Doctorow has spun his analysis of what’s been ailing the tech industry into an eminently readable new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.

As Doctorow tells it, he was on vacation in Puerto Rico, staying in a remote cabin nestled in a cloud forest with microwave Internet service—i.e., very bad Internet service, since microwave signals struggle to penetrate through clouds. It was a 90-minute drive to town, but when they tried to consult TripAdvisor for good local places to have dinner one night, they couldn’t get the site to load. “All you would get is the little TripAdvisor logo as an SVG filling your whole tab and nothing else,” Doctorow told Ars. “So I tweeted, ‘Has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most enshittified website I’ve ever used.'”

Initially, he just got a few “haha, that’s a funny word” responses. “It was when I married that to this technical critique, at a moment when things were quite visibly bad to a much larger group of people, that made it take off,” Doctorow said. “I didn’t deliberately set out to do it. I bought a million lottery tickets and one of them won the lottery. It only took two decades.”

Read full article

Comments