lee and che

My series on Oxford buskers seems to be settling in on a monthly rhythm now. For a daily fix of street music visit my street music blog on tumblr. This month's artists are duo Lee and Che - I think she's called Cheryl in real life, so he must be Lee. They play covers of pop/country songs that are a bit less well known (at least to me), so I discover new songs every time I see them. Here they are doing their thing in Cornmarket Street (own photo):

I have a couple of street videos of them on my youtube channel:

Cover me up by Jason Isbell

For you by Angus and Julia Stone

For more info find them on Facebook.

Links:

My flickr pics of Lee and Che

Lee and Che's youtube channel

 

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NB: Anybody wanting to join the vibrant Oxford busking scene needs a busking pass from the Oxford City Council, application details here. See also the code of practice and the map of the nine official busking spots here.

four years on flickr

as another summer solstice rolls by, it's also another anniversary for my flickr photostream. After four years on the site, I have accumulated 1415 photos, that's just under one per day, which I think is a reasonable rate. I am at no risk of exhausting the 1TB storage space, the site tells me that I'm still under 1% of capacity. So I could carry on for another 400 years.

While I'm not entirely happy with the design changes that flickr has made in the last year, the site still works well for me in terms of finding an audience that will look at my photos and occasionally provide feedback. While I would be perfectly happy to post pictures of architectural details and bumblebees all the time, the audience seems to have a weird preference for photos of human beings, so I'm also providing a few of those. Especially if the humans of Oxford engage in activities I'm interested in such as playing music or reading.

I would embed a few flickr pics here, but they tend to mess up the lovely link within app which crosslinks between my blog posts. So instead I'm offering you a screencap showing the top of my viewing charts as of today:

Visit my flickr photostream here.

phage therapy for trees and people

The use of bacteriophages as antibacterial therapeutics is an option that has been underappreciated for too long, considering the current crisis of widespread resistance to antibiotics. As I've reported three years ago, much of the ecological research into the triangular relationship between a pathogenic bacterium, its host and its phage has been carried out with plants such as the horse chestnut. This has now reached the point where experimental treatments for plant diseases can be introduced based on phage cocktails. These can also serve as models to study the promise and pitfalls of future use of phages to treat infectious diseases in humans.

My feature is out in Current Biology today:

Phage therapies for plants and people

Current Biology Volume 24, Issue 12, 16 June 2014, Pages R541–R544

Summary and restricted access to full text / pdf download

NB there has been a change of access policy so the features will no longer be on open access in the first two weeks after publication date. They will, however, become freely accessible one year after publication. If you have problems accessing a feature, please do drop me an email (michaelgrr aatt yahoo ddott co ddott uk) - I have pdf files at hand which I'll be happy to send for personal use.

A horse chestnut sapling, own photo.

science in south america

Back in 1999 I applied for a fairly amazing job at Nature and got through to the final, meaning I had the opportunity of a long chat with the editor, telling him what I would like the the magazine and website to add to its existing strengths. One of the main things I obsessed about was that they should do more to represent and support science in Latin America. Which obviously wasn't what they wanted to do at the time, so I didn't get the job. (Click the tag "LA_ciencia" for further attempts at supporting Latin American science).

It looks like it took 15 years and a world cup to make them change their mind - the special section Science Stars of South America in the current issue looks quite comprehensive at first glance (I may have more to say on it once I've actually read it). It seems to be on open access, start your reading here.

Cover of Nature, 12.6.2014.

how drugs became demons

In my long essay review of the book "Demons - our changing attitudes to alcohol, tobacco and drugs" by Virginia Berridge (OUP 2013), I had plenty of space to ponder the perversity of current drugs regulation, as highlighted by David Nutt and others. As for the book itself, Berridge does a very good job explaining how events from the Opium Wars onwards led to the world ending up in this particular rabbit hole. My main criticism was the author's remarkable detachment from these hotly debated issues, which can at times be infuriating. Also, as she apparently has no opinions on any of the controversial issues surrounding current drugs policies, she doesn't offer a way out of the mess either.

Anyhow, my review is out in the June issue of Chemistry & Industry, on pp 50-51. If you have any problems accessing it, drop me a note.

archaic proteins and all that Bach

In the round-up of German pieces published in May-June 2014 we have medical marijuana, curious carbohydrates, and paleo proteins, as well as intellectual giants from Johann Sebastian Bach to Dr House.

Wirkstoff THC: Marihuana-Medizin macht Ernst
Chemie in unserer Zeit Vol 48, No 3, p 163

Biochemie: Kohlenhydrate spielen Protein
Chemie in unserer Zeit Vol 48, No 3, p 167

Ausgeforscht: Kobalt im Blut
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Vol 62, No 5, p 595

Ausgeforscht: Proteinreiche Buchstabensuppe
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Vol 62, No 6, p 727

Blickpunkt Bio: Proteine aus der Urzeit des Lebens
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Vol 62, No 6, pp 632-634

Oh, and I nearly forgot, the paleo proteins made the cover of Nachrichten:

coffee and chocolate

I generally avoid writing about food, as it gets written about too much already, but if the few food types I really care about (essentially: wine, chocolate, coffee) are under threat, I have to ride to their rescue.

So here comes a feature on how climate change, financial speculation, and growth in demand may make it harder to find decent coffee and chocolate at affordable prices in the near future:

Coffee and chocolate in danger

Current Biology Volume 24, Issue 11, pR503–R506, 2 June 2014
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.05.035

OPEN access to full text and PDF file

own photo.

PS A few months after my feature appeared, the genome of Coffea canephora was published in Science magazine, accompanied by an excellent perspectives piece arguing that in light of the present dangers to coffee crops, researchers should urgently link up genome info with phenotype characterisation:

A wake-up call with coffee
Dani Zamir
Science 5 September 2014, vol 345, p 1124.
abstract and restricted access to full text

And I'm chuffed that the author cited my feature (even referred to it twice). It doesn't happen every day that my journalistic work gets cited in Science magazine.

communication breakdown

les femmes du bus 678 (original title: 678)

director: Mohamed Diab
starring Nahed El Sebai, Boushra, Nelly Karim

This film based on real events in Egypt describes the intersecting lives of three women who had been exposed to sexual harassment in public (only one of them on public transport, so the French title is misleading!) and who strike back in different ways. One of them, apparently, was the plaintiff in the first-ever harassment case in the history of the country, resisted immense pressure to withdraw her accusations, and went on to win the case. Another holds self-defence lectures for other women, but gets frustrated when none of the women attending ever admits to having experienced harassment. And the third, after attending these lectures, takes to using sharp objects against the offending males.

The fourth significant person in the story is the (male) police detective who investigates the sharp object episodes. To me the most significant observation that the (male) film-maker makes about the relationships of these four people with their significant others is that in three of the four couples the communication about important issues fails completely. Incidentally, in the one couple that does communicate successfully, both partners work as stand-up comedians in their spare time. Surely that’s telling us something …

The film is, of course, very timely and important given the things we hear about not just in Egypt but everywhere else, and covers the difficult issue sensitively (as far as I can tell from the French subtitles on my DVD from France – I can’t vouch for the quality of the Arabic dialogue which I don’t understand). Not easy to watch and maybe not exactly a date movie, but worth the effort.

(IMDB entry)

nikki loy

Continuing my series on Oxford buskers, here comes Nikki Loy, a jazz-influenced singer-songwriter with several releases and lots of indoor gigs to her name (see her busy schedule, I'll try to catch her at the Cowley Road Carnival, July 6th). I first saw her at an in-store gig at the Truck Store when she released her "Live in London" CD, and on a later occasion found her busking at Carfax:

A youtube video (not mine) of her busking is here.

Free download of her song "Effortless".

More info on her website: www.nikkiloy.com and/or on twitter: @nikkiloymusic.

raccoon invasion

My next book in German, due to come out in September, is a collection of biology stories. Almost no chemistry/biochemistry this time, mainly ecology and organism level biology.

Invasion der Waschbären: und andere Expeditionen in die wilde Natur (Erlebnis Wissenschaft)

Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA; (17. September 2014) 256 Seiten,
ISBN-10: 3527336680, ISBN-13: 978-3527336685
amazon.de

The raccoon on the cover points to a story on invasive species, by the way.

More info soon ...

stop stressing

why are people chronically stressed and what can they do about it? I've been looking for answers to this in a feature that has just appeared in a special issue on stress:

Chronic stress means we’re always on the hunt

Current Biology Volume 24, Issue 10, pR405–R408, 19 May 2014
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.04.051

Full text (on open access for two weeks, and then again after one year)

Spending time looking across water helps to fight stress, says Wallace J. Nichols. Works for me. (Own photo, taken in Frankfurt, Germany.)

La vie d'une autre

La vie d'une autre (another woman's life)
France/Belgium 2012

review

Marie, played by Juliette Binoche, wakes up one morning and is horrified to discover that she is middle-aged. Last thing she can remember is being 25 and falling in love and into bed with Paul (Mathieu Kassovitz). Look at it this way, and it’s what happens to many people, even if most wake up middle-aged in somewhat less affluent circumstances than Marie. It used to be called mid-life crisis. And if we think very hard, we may still remember how all these years went by, whereas Marie can’t, due to either amnesia or time-travel (see also Camille redouble for a voyage in the opposite direction), take your pick.

In Sylvie Testud’s adaptation of a novel by Frédérique Deghelt, this time-jump is just a device to heighten the challenge of turning around a relationship that must have decayed gradually over 15 years, as for Marie these 15 years are shrunk into one night. Predictable confusion about everyday routines and complex emotions ensues – you’re not allowed to smoke in a restaurant? When did that happen? – but I think that for everybody on the wrong side of 30 the more interesting aspect is to examine whether there is a little bit of Marie’s predicament in our own lives.

Sometimes, I could swear that the 17-year-old in my household went to primary school just last week, but fortunately, I’m not quite as confused and bewildered (yet) as the protagonist of the film. Some aspects of international affairs have this 15-year gap for me – for instance, I have no idea how, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia ended up handing out its public property to a small club of people we now call the Russian billionaires as if they had always existed. I surely missed the memo when those billions changed hands.

Speaking of which, in this time of scandalous increases in economic inequality, it is a bit unfortunate that Testud expects us to feel for people who appear to be obscenely rich by anybody’s standards, but as the film dates from 2011, she probably didn’t quite see this problem coming. Otherwise, I found it quite enjoyable and thought-provoking. (And of course it didn't get released in the UK, that's why I'm reviewing it in my series of Films Not Shown)