From The Guardian: “I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world,” said American women’s suffragist Frances Willard in the 1800s, epitomising how bicycles were caught up with women’s rights and social reform in the US. Back then the image of a woman on a set of wheels symbolised a swelling tide of transportation independence and freedom from restrictive Victorian fashion for women. Fast forward a century later, halfway across the world in the Indian state of Bihar, and a similar revolution is afoot. Bicycles gifted by the state government are teaching families that their girls can move around fearlessly, attend school like their brother and act on their ambitions, untethered to cultural expectations of their role in society.”
The weight-loss drug Ozempic was derived from the venom of the Gila monster lizard
From The University of Queensland: “In the 1980s John Pisano, a biochemist with a penchant for venoms, and a young gastroenterologist Jean-Pierre Raufman were working with poisonous lizard venom from the Gila monster, a slow-moving reptile native to the south of the United States and north of Mexico. By the 1990s, Pisano, Raufman and colleague John Eng identified a hormone-like molecule they called exendin-4. This stimulated insulin secretion via action at the same receptor as GLP-1. Excitingly, exendin-4 was not quickly metabolised by the body, and so might be useful as a diabetic therapeutic. Eng was convinced this would work, but pharmaceutical companies didn’t want to give people a hormone that would mimic a drug from a venomous lizard. Even the medical centre where Eng was working said that it wouldn’t help fill the patent.”
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Barbarian warriors in Roman times used stimulants in battle, findings suggest
From Phys.org: “Small, spoon-shaped objects found on the end of warriors’ belts at archaeological sites across northern Europe could have been used to dispense stimulants before battle, a study suggests. The widespread use of narcotics, such as opium, in ancient Greece and Rome is well-documented in ancient sources and supported by archaeological finds. However, this body of evidence is missing for the barbarian peoples living outside the Roman Empire, and it is generally assumed that they made little use of drugs apart from alcohol. Now, analyses by archaeologist Prof. Andrzej Kokowski and biologists from Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, shed a different light on these issues. The researchers identified and categorized 241 small, spoon-shaped objects found at 116 sites dating from the Roman period, primarily marsh sites and graves in modern-day Scandinavia, Germany and Poland.”
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. And I appreciate it, believe me!
Avatar robot cafe in Tokyo provides independence for bedridden ‘pilots’
From Mainichi: “A single encounter can change a life. For 30-year-old Masato Nagahiro, a resident of the Japanese capital’s Minato Ward, that change happened when he was 25. Bedridden due to an incurable disease, Nagahiro, called “Masa” by his friends, had never worked or held a part-time job. Worries about the future led him to think that he didn’t even really want to live a long life. However, that was when he first encountered an “avatar robot cafe” and his new allies there. By remotely controlling a serving robot, he was able to try a customer service job, something he had never imagined he’d be able to do. On Sept. 1, the Avatar Robot Cafe Dawn in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district was bustling with customers. Nagahiro was piloting a mobile OriHime-D robot in the cafe, operated by OryLab Inc., from his home using a computer, serving food to the guests, which he does using methods including eye movements.”
Your friends shape your gut microbiome — and so do their friends
From Nature: “A shared meal, a kiss on the cheek: these social acts bring people together — and bring their microbiomes together, too. The more people interact, the more similar the make-up of their gut microorganisms is, even if individuals don’t live in the same household, a study1 shows.The study also found that a person’s microbiome is shaped not only by their social contacts but also by the social contacts’ connections. The work is one of several studies2 that raise the possibility that health conditions can be shaped by the transmission of the microbiome between individuals, not just by diet and other environmental factors that affect gut flora. The study has its roots in research published almost 20 years ago that investigated how obesity spreads.”
A visual illustration of the size of a giant lily pad
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com