{"id":270334,"date":"2024-12-18T09:41:08","date_gmt":"2024-12-18T14:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=270334"},"modified":"2024-12-18T09:41:15","modified_gmt":"2024-12-18T14:41:15","slug":"mirror-life-is-possible-but-it-could-destroy-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/12\/18\/mirror-life-is-possible-but-it-could-destroy-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Mirror life is possible but it could destroy the world"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From the New York Times<\/a>: “On Thursday, 38 prominent biologists issued a dire warning: Within a few decades, scientists will be able create a microbe that could cause an unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems. The scientists called for a ban on research that could lead to synthesis of such an organism. The molecules that serve as the building blocks of DNA and proteins typically exist in one of two mirror-image forms. While sugar molecules can exist in left- and right-handed forms, DNA only uses the right-handed molecules. That\u2019s the reason DNA\u2019s double helix has a right-handed twist. Our proteins, by contrast, are made of left-handed amino acids. In theory, a mirror cell \u2014 with left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins \u2014 could carry out all the biochemical reactions required to stay alive.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A British nurse found guilty of being an “angel of death” may be innocent<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From The New Yorker<\/a>: “Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The Guardian<\/em>, which published more than a hundred stories about the case, called her \u201cone of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.\u201d The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four \u201csuspicious events,\u201d which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was widely pirated in the 1840s<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From JSTOR Daily<\/a>: “During the tender youth of international copyright law, the wildly popular Dickens was constantly trying to get ahead of unscrupulous publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic. When Lee and Haddock\u2019s London twopenny weekly, Parley\u2019s Illuminated Library<\/em>, published a pirated version of A Christmas Carol<\/em> under the byline of Hewitt, Dickens had had enough. He sued. When he eventually won in court, he wrote in celebration: \u201cThe pirates are beaten flat. They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone.\u201d Not quite. Parley\u2019s<\/em> never did publish the next installment of their version, called simply \u201cChristmas Ghost Story,\u201d but the pirate crew got out of any damages by claiming bankruptcy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/em>through my Patreon<\/em><\/a> 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!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world’s oldest bond is still paying interest 400 years later<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From the Financial Times<\/a>: “On New Year\u2019s Day in 1624, drifting ice on the river Lek in the Netherlands smashed up a dike outside Utrecht. Soon, the region was flooded, with even Amsterdam threatened by the water. The locals eventually managed to staunch the flood, but they still needed to do a full, durable rebuild, which would be extremely expensive.  Fortunately, the Dutch were brilliant, sophisticated financial pioneers, and had developed the era\u2019s most vibrant bond market. The local water authority swiftly sold over 50 bonds to finance the repairs. Of these bonds the only surviving one is a 1,200 guilder bond sold to a wealthy woman in Amsterdam. The water board promised her and anyone who owned the bond 2.5 per cent interest in perpetuity. Remarkably, this bond is still alive and pays \u20ac13.61 of interest a year.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He lived in a Central Park high-rise but sold potato peelers on the street<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Now I Know<\/a>: “For the better part of two decades \u2014 well into his 70s \u2014 Joe Ades followed the same routine. He\u2019d get up early, typically before dawn, and get dressed in his $1,000 suit with high-end shirts and ties. He\u2019d leave his Manhattan apartment (and, toward the end of his career, that was a three-bedroom one on Park Avenue) and make his way to work. Like his millionaire neighbors, Ades probably pulled down well north of $100,000 a year. But unlike his neighbors, he wasn\u2019t off to a job on Wall Street or at any other typical six-figure income job. He was off to a street corner to sell $5 potato peelers. He came to the United States and by 1993 had settled in Manhattan, focusing his sales acumen on potato peelers he imported from Switzerland.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her identical twin died so she pretended to be both of them<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/em>: 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 <\/em>The Morning News<\/em><\/a> from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s <\/em>Curious About Everything<\/em><\/a>, Dan Lewis’s <\/em>Now I Know<\/em><\/a>, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s <\/em>The Browser<\/em><\/a>, Clive Thompson’s <\/em>Linkfest<\/em><\/a>, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s <\/em>Why Is This Interesting<\/em><\/a>, Maria Popova’s <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em><\/a>, Sheehan Quirke AKA <\/em>The Cultural Tutor<\/em><\/a>, the <\/em>Smithsonian<\/em><\/a> magazine, and <\/em>JSTOR Daily<\/em><\/a>. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the New York Times: “On Thursday, 38 prominent biologists issued a dire warning: Within a few decades, scientists will be able create a microbe that could cause an unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems. The scientists called for a ban on research that could lead to synthesis of such … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Mirror life is possible but it could destroy the world”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270336,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270334\/revisions\/270336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}