Hello email friends, Mo here again. Hope all’s well. Let me know either way, would you? I’m still sick, so even more stuck indoors than I otherwise would be. But it’s not all bad: I’ve refreshed the 💥BLAST! website so I could fit in some of the kind things some of you have replied. So if you were waiting for me to tease out some of those year-old bugs before recommending to chums, now’s the time… 😘
Right, this week I thought it’d do us all well to flip-flop between matters of science and those of art.
🚶♀️ Don’t Underestimate the Power of a Walk: Walking is one of the simplest and most strategic things you can do for yourself. It takes little preparation, minimal effort, no special equipment, and it can contract or expand to fit the exact amount of time you have available. When we go for a walk, we perform better on tests of memory and attention; our brain cells build new connections, staving off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age; we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down; and our attention is left to meander and observe, helping us generate new ideas and to have strokes of insight. See also: a course on The Science of Well-Being.
⚔️ Bayeux Tapestry Construction Kit: This has been all over the internet this week so I’m alert to the possibility you’ve done nothing else but play with it. But just in case, this make-your-own-Bayeux-Tapestry app found fame when an art history professor let her students loose on it before sharing their work.
🪨 Bill Gates backs Icelandic startup that turns carbon dioxide into stone: Forests are currently the best technology for putting carbon into the ground, but there’s many places in which the towering, luscious forest in your mind’s eye simply can’t grow. There’s an old joke about what to do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest: stand up. So it’s fitting that Reykjavik-based Carbfix have developed the means to dissolve CO₂ in water, then inject it into the ground where it turns into stone in less than two years. A lot of these sorts of carbon-capture stories are nonsense, but this one looks credible providing the process can be scaled. See also: Scientists Just Created a Catalyst That Turns CO₂ Into Jet Fuel but again scalability is the watch-out.
🎨 Grayson’s Art Club Soundtrack is a divine work by film and TV composer Alex Parsons. Currently in its second series, Grayson’s Art Club must now be my favourite thing on TV and the stand-out triumph of lockdown commissioning.
💩 It Turns Out You Can Bullshit A Bullshitter After All: Contrasting previous assumptions, a paper from researchers at the University of Waterloo, Canada, reports those who bullshit more often in a bid to impress or persuade others are also more susceptible to bullshit themselves.
🔥 Bitcoin’s Climate Change Impact Is Under Scrutiny: These days a new venture can’t be considered a success unless its environmental impact is in order. So as companies and investors increasingly say they are focused on climate and sustainability, the cryptocurrency’s huge carbon footprint could become a red flag.
🐴 The horse comforting cancer patients in Calais: ‘Doctor’ Peyo is a therapy horse who previously competed at dressage events with his owner. Now they spend their time doing rounds in a French hospital, often staying with sick people until the end. This is the sweetest story I’ve seen for a long while.
🦠 Lessons from a year of Covid: in a year of scientific breakthroughs, and political failures, Yuval Noah Harari ponders what can we learn for the future.
To look, to see, to find. Interesting delights are out there: we might know where to look for them, but when did we really seek them out?