a city rising from the ashes

#lostcities episode 10: Würzburg

Finally, to the city that left a hole in my heart when I was transplanted to the sticks, but there is a happy ending of sorts in that two of my children went there to study (for reasons unrelated to previous family history), so I have had plenty of opportunities to revisit in the 2010s (see eg this Flickr album or the relevant tag).

Würzburg, located on the river Main upstream of Frankfurt, was comprehensively reduced to rubble in WW II (see this aerial view from 1948), but much of it reconstructed sympathetically, so today you wouldn’t guess that it has arisen from the ashes. When my parents arrived there in October 1961, there were still ruins in every street. After a stay in a nearby village, they managed to rent a couple of rooms in Neubaustraße 8, half way between the eponymous church and the river Main. We had to swap those rooms for the attic in the same building at some point, which was probably illegal but very romantic (at least in my imagination).

The medieval fortifications of Würzburg, today presenting as a green belt, describe a semicircle closed off by the river, and Neubaustraße is just a couple of hundred metres off the bisecting radius that runs from the cathedral to the medieval bridge. Looking across the river, the vista from this street points straight at the Marienberg fortress on the hill opposite the old town. (Conversely, this photo shows the view from the fortress down into Neubaustraße.) I went to nursery in a small side road nearby, I learned to walk in the parks of the baroque palace (Residenz), just beyond the inland end of the Neubaustraße. I may not have appreciated it as a toddler, but the presumed grave of Walther von der Vogelweide (ca. 1170 - ca. 1230) is also in the neighbourhood, in the Lusamgärtchen behind Neubaukirche.

By the end of 1968, we all washed up in the middle of nowhere, at which point my great-grandmother at Bad Nauheim was the last city resident standing among my direct ancestors.

PS: A day after I posted this, Twitter flagged up the birthday of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (27.3.1845), who of course discovered X rays at Würzburg, in a laboratory on the northern side of the old town, where the street name Röntgenring as well a small museum and a memorial sculpture today remind us of the fact. Back in the 1960s, the University's chemistry labs, where I toddled about between open drains carrying flammable solvents (maybe accounts have been exaggerated a bit to scare me), were still located on Röntgenring. Soon after, they moved to the new campus on Hubland, a high plateau just south of the city centre. Right now, I hear chemistry is again planning a move to new buildings.

Würzburg 1960
Source

#lostcities series so far:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968

Stay tuned, as I still have a bonus episode in reserve.

watch your wastewater

During this pandemic I kept hearing about the great work researchers are doing detecting SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater as an early warning of coming waves and new variants up to two weeks before the relevant patients show up in hospitals. From the politicians, at least in this country, we have warnings only two weeks after the hospitals begin to fill up, and measures are generally taken several weeks too late, making the problem worse.

So I had a look around at what is being done in the wastewater epidemiology of Covid-19, and how in some countries it informs the political measures, while in some others it clearly doesn't, even though the methodology and the data are available. Still not clear why some people don't want to heed the warnings when they arrive well in time to allow them to adapt, but it is kind of reassuring that there are very clear lessons here to be learned for the next outbreak of a zoonotic disease. Reading the warnings from wastewater, we can stop the next pandemic from happening. Might require different political leadership, however, at least in some countries I can think of.

As part of the special treatment for Covid related information, my feature has been available as an open access preprint for the last two weeks, but today it is officially out in the proper format, and still on open access:

Wastewater warnings

Current Biology Volume 31, issue 06, pages R267-R269, March 22, 2021

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Samples taken from the raw sewage entering water treatment plants can be used to monitor the spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19. The image shows aeration tanks at a water treatment plant in Upper Providence, Pennsylvania, USA. (Photo: Montgomery County Planning Commission/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

a not so brief introduction

Once upon a time there was a book called Astrobiology - a brief introduction, which came out in 2006, and then in a second fully revised edition in 2011.

Now it's taken a bit longer, and a lot of things have happened out in space and here on Earth, but later this year we will have a third edition. We've spent the whole month of February checking the page proofs and preparing the index, so the book is now "in press" as far as I'm concerned. While the cover kept the basic layout, it now has a fresh new photo, and the other change you may notice is that the word "brief" has disappeared. Must be something to do with the fact that the book including index now has over 400 pages. Not quite so brief now. (Oh, and I am told the hardback will now also benefit from the lovely cover design. In the first two editions, the hardback was produced as a plain black "library edition", but I hear that policy has been dropped now.)

Further details to follow, I just wanted to share the lovely new cover at this stage:

Update 25.3.: details are now on the publisher's website, including:

Publication Date: 3 Aug 2021
Trim Size: 6" x 9"
Page Count: 416 pages
Illustrations: 37 b/w photos, 72 b/w illus.

Paperback: $34.95
ISBN: 9781421441290

Hardcover: $75.00
ISBN: 9781421441283

E-book: $34.95
ISBN: 9781421441306

father and son

some thoughts on

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, mon père
by Jean Renoir
Hachette 1962 / Gallimard 1981
an English translation from 2001 is also available

Back in 2013, the film Renoir was one of the few French movies that still made it to our local independent cinema, and I was lucky to catch it there, and then watched it again when it came out on DVD. It is about the last years in the life of the painter, after the death of his wife, Aline Charigot, in 1915. Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is stuck in a wheelchair and barely able to move his hands, two of his sons get injured in the war, but he creates some of his most vibrant and life-affirming art.

By the time I started looking at paintings, the impressionists had become mainstream to the point of commercial overload, so I’ve never been a huge fan these works although I don’t mind seeing them every once in a while. The film, however, made me appreciate Renoir a bit more and as a result I picked up a few books about him at various charity shops and antiques fairs, including the memoir by his middle son, the film director Jean Renoir (1894-1979). The idea of the changing of the guard in visual arts, one of the first great film makers writing about one of the last impressionists to remain active in the 20th century, intrigued me so I actually read the book, assisted by the other volumes to look up paintings mentioned and consult timelines.

The biography is based on conversations Jean Renoir had with his father in the last year of his life, as well as with his long-serving model Gabrielle Renard (1878-1959) and other surviving witnesses. As the age gap between father and son is more than half a century, his own recollections only become useful towards the end of the story.

It is organised broadly chronologically, although the author tends to digress on thematic excursions, and covers a staggering range of historical change. From his childhood in the 1840s, Renoir remembered an old man who visited his parents regularly and happily shared memories of how he helped operating the guillotines in the French Revolution. Renoir’s family moved to Paris before it was completely reshaped by Haussmann in the 1850s, he experienced the restored monarchy and as he lived in the Tuileries, he played under the windows of the actual queen. Like some of the other impressionists, he lived and worked in Montmartre when it was still a village with wooden shacks, long before Sacré Coeur was built.

The complete rejection of the impressionists by critics, public and art officialdom in the 1870s is a well-trodden story but always fun to read. Apart from having fun with quoting from the hilarious reviews of the first exhibitions (one of which gave us the word “impressionists” for the artists who had called themselves “les intransigeants” initially), he highlights the occasions when French institutions like the Louvre wouldn’t even take the paintings for free, resulting in many of them winding up in North America. For instance, the painter and collector Gustave Caillebotte died in 1894 leaving his vast collection to the state and installing Renoir to execute his will. Initially the Louvre (as the official repository of the state’s art collection) didn’t want to be bothered with any of it. Three years later, they saw sense and accepted a part of the collection. Not sure if anybody has calculated what the Caillebotte collection would be worth today – I suspect you’d have to be very good in calculating with trillions and such like.

Renoir, who famously identified as a craftsman rather than an artist and considered the word intellectual an insult, comes across as an interestingly complex mixture of old-fashioned and revolutionary, which is part of the force field that keeps this book interesting, even though it isn’t the most organised biography ever written. That and the chance to meet the people you already know from those famous paintings. In another very famous French movie, Amélie, there’s the painter who copies Renoir’s Déjeuner des canotiers (1881) over and over again. Jean Renoir describes the setting and can identify most of the participants, mostly faithful friends of the painter. The woman at the front left, playing with a little dog, is Aline, the author’s mother. When we see these pictures in museums or on countless wall calendars, they are just paintings – but for Jean Renoir and the rest of the family they were life.

Oh, and I'll just have to watch the movie a third time, now I know the family so much better.

save the vaquita

There have been quite a few features about Homo sapiens recently(Covid, conspiracies, pollution and such like), so I was keen to get back to some endangered animals, and a faithful reader from Mexico suggested to look at their local endangered cetacean, the vaquita porpoise. It so happened that the vaquita just had a high quality genome sequence out, which led to the surprising conclusion that the species, although reduced to a population of fewer than 20 individuals, doesn't have any genetic problems. The only thing that has to happen is that the illegal fishing (for other species, but killing vaquitas as they're the same size) needs to stop.

Adding to that, I also looked at other genome and genetic diversity data of other cetacean species, to see how they're coping these days, including humpback whales recovering after a close brush with extinction.

The resulting feature is out now:

Cetaceans balancing on the brink

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 5, 8 March 2021, Pages R215-R218

FREE access to full text and PDF download

(see also my twitter thread with all 2021 features in the open archives)

The vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus) is the most endangered cetacean, but a genome study suggests that it may still recover if the threat of gillnet fishing is removed. (Photo: Paula Olson/NOAA.)

jigging into spring

Plague Year(s) Bach Project, 13th month

I enjoyed learning the Sarabande in D minor in February, which was a perfect match as the piece has 28 bars, so I've been able to stick to my established speed of memorising a bar per day (skipping some of the troublesome chords which I can always fit in later). I do feel the sadness and the strength in that one.

Staying in the second suite, I'm now tackling the gigue, which has a few bars more, so I might end up with another fractionally memorised movement, let's see how it goes.

Some helpful links:

I'm starting with Inbal Segev's musings, as always, and I found a few recordings of the whole D minor suite, (with timestamps for the gigue in the link to take you there directly) from:
Ariana Kashefi
Eva Lymenstull
Misha Maisky
Laurens Price-Nowak

I'm also adding these videos to my youtube playlist "cello repertoire".

After 12 months with 329 practice days and 347 bars memorised, the list now looks like this (parts 2 upwards make up my revision rota, with the two most recently learned movements being revised on alternating days, and the others in a separate cycle):

1) movements I've studied for a month, then put aside for now
1.1. Prelude
1.2 Allemande

2) movements memorised in a significant part
1.3 Courante (2/3)
2.5 Minuet I&II (1/2)
3.4 Sarabande (1/3)

3) movements memorised in their entirety
1.4 Sarabande
1.6 Gigue
2.4 Sarabande
3.6. Gigue

4) movements memorised and synchronised with metronome
1.5 Minuet I&II
3.5 Bourree I&II

5) watch this space ...

... like a briiiiiidge over troublllllled water ...

something in the air

With all the worries about airborne viruses these days, we shouldn't forget that the air that we breathe in our cities isn't all that healthy in normal times either. Recent reports based on 2019 data provided detailed mortality burdens for pollution on a state level for India and for cities in Europe, so I rounded these up along with some studies on what parts of the body are damaged by pollution (spoiler alert: possibly all of them), for my latest feature which is out now:

A breath of deadly air

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 4, 22 February 2021, Pages R161-R163

FREE access to full text and PDF download <

Air pollution is affecting the health of most people around the globe, but problems are particularly severe in megacities, such as Hyderabad, India, shown here. (Photo: Daniel Dara/Unsplash.)

spa break

#lostcities episode 9: Bad Nauheim

We're approaching the end of the series and coming to cities which I actually remember from my childhood. Memories left me with a soft spot for Bad Nauheim, even though when I was there as a child everybody was about a hundred years old and seeking spa treatment for some horrible diseases. My great-grandmother and great-aunt lived in a crumbling art nouveau villa which I've raved about before, and which in the whole series is the only property to mourn. Although the Frankfurter Str. is the main through road and quite noisy, the location is quite central and within walking distance of the railway station and the historic spa facilities. Cafe Bienenkorb in the Hauptstrasse is another reference point I remember.

Let's take it chronologically, though, this is what happened:

After fleeing from Königsberg (see episode 6) and rejoining the rest of the family in the sticks, my great-grandfather remembered that he quite liked the spa town of Bad Nauheim where he had spent time as a reconvalescent decades earlier. In July 1945 he moved there, initially to a room in Frankfurter Str. 26. By November he had moved to Frankfurter Str. 12 (the villa mentioned above), found space for the family, and started relaunching his trade with textiles. He died in March 1950, however, aged 66. My great-grandmother stayed at that address until she died in 1972. My great-aunt had continued the textile business until 1960, then bought the property with funds from the compensation for the lost factory in Königsberg. At that point she gave up on the textiles and operated a bed-and-breakfast for spa guests, but she hadn't inherited the business sense of her father, clocking up debts to wipe out the value of the property.

When I was visiting there as a child, we used to make fun of the fact that my great-aunt changed the layout of the flats all the time, so the running joke was that the loos are now where the kitchen used to be. Which may explain where the money went. She also hired a carpenter to build shelves for a customised floor-to-ceiling library (which I inherited, so mustn't grumble) and had a habit of taking taxi rides everywhere.

Of the town, I remember the swimming pool which included a heated outdoor basin even in winter (maybe not the most sustainable thing on climate grounds). I also went ice skating there (I believe Bad Nauheim used to be successful in ice hockey) and saw a lot of the historic spa buildings, like the ones in the post card below. Funnily enough I don't remember the lake at all, maybe that was too far, being on the other side of the town.

Re-visiting the town in 2010, I found the town layout built around the spa rather than a proper town centre slightly odd, but then again, the sheer wealth of art nouveau architecture that survived there makes up for that. Although it's still relatively small (amazingly, in 1970, only 14,000, but now upwards of 32,000), I could walk around a few days just looking at the houses. And it does have direct trains to Frankfurt, if one gets fed up with the small town thing.

Bad Nauheim 1956 (still looked very much the same when I spent time there in the 1970s). Source

#lostcities series so far:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935-1945
7. Aachen 1936-1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940-1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945-1972

some viral stories

Quite Covid-heavy this round-up of German pieces, with the variants covered in December (just before the issue exploded) and the vaccines in February (see the cover below), as well as a tongue-in-cheek appreciation of the dog-led diagnostics. Other topics available include soil biodiversity, ammonia emissions from human skin, and protein crystals found inside the glass needles of marine sponges.

The Covid stories are on open access, and some of the others appear to be too, not sure why.

Ausgeforscht: Wir Emittenten
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 68, Issue 11, November 2020, Page 98
Access via Wiley Online Library

Der Stammbaum der Pandemie
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 68, Issue 12, December 2020, Pages 64-65
FREE access via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: Pandemic genomics

Verflixt verschachtelt
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 69, Issue 1, January 2021, Pages 87-88
FREE access via Wiley Online Library

Der Covid-Schnuppertest
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 69, Issue 1, January 2021, Page 114
FREE access via Wiley Online Library

Biomineralisation: Im Innern der Glasnadeln
Chemie in unserer Zeit Volume 55, Issue 1, February 2021, Page 12
Access via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: Sponges feature

Impfen gegen Covid-19
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 69, Issue 1, January 2021, Pages 50-53
Access via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: Vaccines feature

cool cover of the Feb issue of Nachrichten aus der Chemie, although not quite a representation of how the vaccines work ...

vaccines revolution

By mid January, a year after the novel coronavirus was formally identified and sequenced, eight new vaccines of three different types were approved in full or in emergency mode by at least one country. So I though this was a good time to have a look at how this miracle happened. Especially here in the UK we're still rubbing our eyes a bit as it is about the only aspect of the Covid response that has worked better than expected (so far).

As part of the special treatment for Covid related information, my feature has been available as an open access preprint for the last two weeks, but today it is officially out in the proper format, and still on open access:

How to develop 8 vaccines in 12 months

Current Biology Volume 31, issue 03, pages R101-R103, February 08, 2021

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Although the new vaccines have materialised at record speed, they have been tested as thoroughly as any previous vaccines. (Photo: Lisa Ferdinando/US Secretary of Defense (CC BY 2.0).)

Looking ahead, I do hope that the success story of vaccine developments also translates into successful elimination of the disease, but it's too early to start victory celebrations. One thing I worry about here in the UK is the large gap between first and second dose which produces two problems:

1) patients feeling somewhat protected by the first dose increasing their risk behaviour may very well overcompensate the extent of protection they have. So if their infection risk is reduced by a factor of 2 but they are having 3 times as many risky encounters, they may in the end be more likely to catch it. So the only relaxing (of rules and precautions) should be happening as a function of second doses given, not of first ones.

2) having a vast population partially protected and still exposed to the virus could be a breeding ground for mutants resistant to the vaccine.

So, in the UK in particular, given how Johnson's government has mishandled and amplified the first and the second wave, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that they are cutting corners again and thereby facilitating the third wave.

PS In nerdy note-taking news, this feature completes 10 years since I started writing a feature for every issue of CB. Since issue 4 of 2011, there have been 235 features in 240 issues, so it worked out quite nicely, even if I say so myself.

sadness and strength

Plague Year(s) Bach Project, 12th month

Ariana Kashefi recently played the D minor suite in a lockdown livestream and explained that it represents sadness and grief with an underlying sense of strength and courage. So I guess it's perfect for lockdown number three and the beginning of plague year number two. And to properly wallow in the sadness bit, I'm now moving on to the Sarabande.

Some helpful links:

I'm starting with Inbal Segev's musings, as always, and I found a few recordings of the whole D minor suite, (with timestamps for the sarabande in the link to take you there directly) from:
Ariana Kashefi
Eva Lymenstull
Misha Maisky
Laurens Price-Nowak

I'm also adding these videos to my youtube playlist "cello repertoire".

In January, I learned the second minuet of the D minor suite (there were some scary chords that put me off the first minuet). It took me just over 21 days to memorise its 24 bars, which inspired me to check if the rate of 1 bar per day of practice is typical and indeed it is: since March 15 2020 I have clocked up 300 days of practice and managed to memorise 311 bars. I should check how many bars the six suites have overall, but I suspect three years won't be enough to learn them all.

I spent the rest of the month memorising what was left of the Gigue in C, and learning to play the Bourrees in time with a metronome, so with all these improvements, the list now looks like this:

1) movements I've studied for a month, then put aside for now
1.1. Prelude
1.2 Allemande

2) movements memorised in a significant part
1.3 Courante (2/3)
2.5 Minuet I&II (1/2)
3.4 Sarabande (1/3)

3) movements memorised in their entirety
1.4 Sarabande
1.5 Minuet I&II
1.6 Gigue
3.6. Gigue

4) movements memorised and synchronised with metronome
3.5 Bourree I&II

Heinrich at last September's socially distanced slow session in Florence Park.

PS: predictably, I couldn't resist doing the maths, I think the total is 1933 bars, so learning all at one bar per day would take five years, three months and two weeks. Realistically though, I've spotted quite a few bars in suites 5 and 6 that I definitely won't be able to get into my head.

entering plague year 2

The novel coronavirus started spreading in the UK around this time last year, so we're now entering the second year. And we've passed 100,000 deaths even by the most conservative metrics used by the government. And with the new vaccines and the new variants, the second year will be a completely different game, although I'm not confident the UK government will handle it much better than the first one.

Oh and my new feature on the development of the vaccines that are now being used is out as a preprint, free access here, the regular publication date will be Monday Feb 8th. I'll do a proper blog post for it then.

Might be a good time to round up the Covid-related contributions from the first year:

Features

• Pandemic genomics (21.12.)
• Communicating science in a crisis (6.7.)
• Finding comfort in nature (20.4.)
• Virus outbreak crosses boundaries (9.3.)

Blog entries

• the first 40,000 (6.6.)
• numbers crunched (17.5.)
• maths for dummies (9.5.)
• stuck inside (26.4.)
• chronicle of a disaster foretold (19.4.)
• mind your exponentials (27.3.)
• stay home save lives (22.3.)

I'm a great fan of the Corona cover art of Der Spiegel, this is issue 03 of 2021.

Links

This Guardian editorial concludes: "the story of Britain’s pandemic will long serve as a monument to bad government."

See also the very depressing video summary from Led by donkeys.