Oxford University Press's Blog, page 658

Jesus takes a selfie: the Vernicle and Julian of Norwich

During her second ‘revelation’, Julian of Norwich has a bewilderingly dark vision of Christ’s face, which she compares with the most celebrated relic in medieval Rome. This was the ‘Vernicle’: the image of Christ’s face miraculously imprinted on a cloth that St Veronica lent Christ to wipe his face on his way to Calvary. The unique fascination of Veronica’s relic was that it purported to preserve an unmediated likeness of the face of God, the direct impress of his features, not as imagined or painted by anyone else, and so something akin to a photographic self-portrait – a ‘vera icon’ or true image, in a pseudo-etymology of ‘Veronica’ first recorded by Gerald of Wales (c.1215). The Veronica image became the universally-known image of Christ, and an emblem of every individual’s eventual face-to-face encounter with God in the hereafter. But this was a face often depicted as disconcertingly dark, unbeautiful, and seemingly as unfixed in appearance as the legend was fluctuating in form.

In Veronica’s story in its earliest shape a woman possesses an image of Christ on cloth (with no back story of how she came by it), and this image cures an illness suffered by Tiberius, Roman emperor at the time of the Crucifixion. In a subsequent revision of the legend, the sick emperor healed by Veronica becomes the later emperor Vespasian, so that Veronica’s cloth is instrumental in enabling the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. This was a historical event which medieval legend retells as the avenging of Christ’s death by a Roman emperor healed by Christ’s miraculous self-portrait. But much earlier the name ‘Berenike’ had already been attached to the woman in the Gospel who believes that if she so much as touches the hem of Christ’s garment she will be healed of a discharge of blood (Matthew 9:20). So Veronica’s touching of Christ’s hem is reciprocated by Christ’s later touching of her cloth with his face, and she who was miraculously healed by Christ becomes identified with an image of Christ which can effect Christ-like cures.

At first, contradictory legends circulated to explain how Veronica came to have her image of Christ. In one, the image is created when Mary presses Veronica’s veil to the dead Christ’s face on the cross, whereupon Veronica is cured of her leprosy. In the immensely influential Golden Legend, Veronica is on her way to an artist to get Christ’s likeness painted as a memento when she meets Christ who, knowing of her errand, imprints his face on her cloth. In the earliest version of what became the dominant tradition Veronica encounters Christ on his way to Calvary and he asks her to wipe his face. Not until she gets home does she discover the miraculously imprinted face, but this soon gives way to a more dramatic version in which the miraculous imprint and its healing powers are apparent at once.

Fitz MS 55.f.122v © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Used with permission.

Early references to the relic in Rome give little sense of its appearance, and it was a reported transformation in the image which propelled the relic to pan-European celebrity. In 1216 (according to the St Albans chronicler Matthew Paris) the image of Christ’s face turned upside down while being processed by Pope Innocent III, who composed a prayer to the image and instituted an indulgence for all who said the prayer. But those who could not recite the prayer received the same indulgence, provided they said the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary five times, and the Creed, while looking at an image of the Vernicle. Not surprisingly, devotion to the Vernicle mushroomed, along with images of it.

The earliest representations of the Veronica head in Western art survive from England, in manuscripts dated between the 1240s and 1270s. These take the form of noble head-and-shoulders busts, perhaps responding to the Golden Legend. Only from c.1350 do images appear of Veronica herself meeting Christ on the way to Calvary, just as the Stations of the Cross were being instituted for pilgrims in Jerusalem, of which Christ’s encounter with Veronica is the sixth. Now come references to ‘Veronica painters’ in Rome, busily producing souvenirs for pilgrims. Now the Vernicle appears just as a face, without shoulders, more accurate to what might be impressed of a face on to a cloth. But the imprinted face is soon shown wearing a crown of thorns, and often painted as if bloodied and darkened to the point of blackness. This was explained as Christ’s image reflecting to the observer the darkness of fallen humanity into which Christ had entered. As St Bernard put it: ‘Beautiful in his own right, his blackness is because of you’. The brown- or black-faced Christ may imitate copies of a famously dark-faced Orthodox icon – the Holy Face of Edessa – also imprinted by Christ himself. But there always coexisted contradictory claims about the face’s darkness alongside the divine radiance in a likeness of himself portrayed by the Supreme Artist.

For Julian of Norwich, the Vernicle image – given by Christ unmediatedly to a woman – parallels and authorizes the visions vouchsafed to women visionaries like herself. Indeed, a Lollard heretic in 1391 included the Vernicle among Christ’s miracles performed for women when arguing that there was no reason why women should not be priests. But if you’re wondering why you haven’t heard of the Vernicle’s authenticity being investigated like the Turin Shroud, it is because Veronica’s relic disappeared during the sack of Rome in 1527, and Veronica was eventually deleted from the Roman missal, the list of martyrs and calendar of saints, despite her role in one of the omnipresent images of the Middle Ages.

Featured image credits: View over Modern Day Jerusalem, CC0 via Pixabay.

The post Jesus takes a selfie: the Vernicle and Julian of Norwich appeared first on OUPblog.

Five ways nature can improve our health

How does nature benefit our health? Many of us intuitively know that we simply feel better after ‘stepping out for some fresh air.’ Now over 30 years of research has begun to reveal exactly what health benefits we get from nature. Here are five reasons why we need to make space and time for nature in our lives.

Our physical health improves when we spend time in nature.

Spending just ten minutes in a natural environment is enough to lower your blood pressure. Generally speaking, your stress levels and mental fatigue drop when you visit green spaces, and they also provide a great place for exercise. These effects can have an impressive and lasting impact on your physical health. For example, hospital patients who have a view of nature from their window have been found to heal faster and are discharged earlier than those with a view of a wall, and people who live in greener environments tend die less often from circulatory disease. But there other less intuitive benefits from spending time in nature. For example, children who are exposed to the more diverse bacterial life in the soils around well-vegetated areas can build a more robust immune system, and tend to suffer less from allergies. All up, the full suit of physical benefits we get from nature inevitably reduce the cost of public health.

Natural environments support good mental health.

The relief from stress and mental fatigue that we gain when we spend time in nature not only impacts our physical health, but it can also enhance our mental well-being. Exercising in a natural environment can boost your mood and self-esteem, and can also reduce the symptoms of depression – much more so than exercising indoors. Yet you can also get some of these benefits just by looking at a view of nature out the window. Workers with a view of trees tend to have greater job satisfaction, as well as lower stress levels, than people with no view of trees.

All images courtesy of Danielle Shanahan.

Nature creates a healthier living environment.

Until recently the public health community has focused mainly on the down-sides of nature in cities. For example, mosquitos that carry disease or pollen that causes allergies. But we now know that nature can also make our living environment much healthier. Trees and shrubs filter the pollutants out of the air we breathe. Vegetation also absorbs and reflects heat, providing an inexpensive way to regulate the temperature and prevent heat-related illnesses or deaths in hot-climate cities. These are just two examples of the services that nature provides for people.

Public green spaces create happy communities.

City green spaces provide us with a place to see and interact with people who live in our neighbourhoods. This can foster social cohesion – that is, a sense of trust and familiarity with the people who live near us. People who are lonely or socially isolated have poorer general health as well as mental health problems, so this is another way through which nature in cities can reduce public health care costs. Perhaps tied to this (as well as the lower levels of stress that we tend to feel in natural environments), a number of studies have now recorded a link between green space and lower levels of violent crime.

Experiences with nature enhance our cognitive performance.

Our lives are becoming increasingly busy, but spending time in nature can provide a welcome respite from constant work and home pressures. This has a remarkable effect on how well we do at school and at work. For example, studies have shown people improve in memory tasks after looking at pictures of nature or walking through natural environments, and high school students with a view of nature from their school rooms achieve better exam results. This may have a longer-term impact on our well-being and achievements in life.

City green spaces are freely accessible to all. They could therefore be used to reduce inequalities in health outcomes that we often see across socio-economic gradients. As scientists develop a better understanding of exactly what elements of nature deliver what health benefits, how often we need to visit, and for how long, it could also be better integrated into city planning to reflect the health needs of different communities.

The post Five ways nature can improve our health appeared first on OUPblog.

The real world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke’s bestselling novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a very clever evocation of a particular period in English history when the country was at war with Napoleon’s France and the metropolis thrummed with prophets and dissenting voices. But Clarke’s version of history also has a magical twist. Some reviewers of the first episodes of the current BBC1 adaptation have dismissed it is over-blown fantasy, even childish, yet Clarke’s characters are only once removed from the very real magical world of early nineteenth-century England. What few readers or viewers realise is that there were magicians similar to Strange and Norrell at the time: there really were ‘Friends of English Magic‘, to whom the novel’s Mr Segundus appealed in a letter to The Times.

If we rummaged a little harder among the magazines and periodicals, such as The Friends of English Magic and The Modern Magician, that littered Jonathan Strange’s library, we might also uncover old copies of the Conjuror’s Magazine, or, Magical and Physiognomical Mirror, which was published in 1792-93. Amongst the books in Mr Norrell’s library we would surely find an edition of Ebenezer Sibly’s A New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology, a popular guide to the occult sciences that saw its twelfth edition published in 1817, the year in which Clarke’s novel ends. A Freemason and astrologer, Sibly (1751-c.1799), was the most famous English occultist of his time. One can imagine Mr Norrell sitting by the fire in heated argument with Ebenezer Sibly over the boundaries between beneficial and iniquitous forms of magical practice, and its national importance.

Norrell would undoubtedly have had regular correspondence with the influential occult bookseller John Denley. During the early nineteenth century Denley’s London antiquarian bookshop brought together the most comprehensive collection of magic books and manuscripts outside of the British Library, Oxford and Cambridge – and Norrell’s library, of course. Denley’s magicians’ paradise was frequented by the likes of Coleridge and the young novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It was the centre of London’s magic scene.

A frequent visitor to Denley’s shop was a young man named Francis Barrett, an artist and experimental chemist. He would have undoubtedly featured in the now lost The Life of Jonathan Strange (London: John Murray, 1820). We know little about Barrett’s life, and much of what we do know comes from newspaper reports of his exploits as an early experimenter with balloon flight. Jonathan Strange would have made the ideal companion as Barrett careered around the countryside from one ballooning disaster to another. Barrett is now best known now for his tome The Magus: Or Celestial Intelligencer (1801). It was a practical guide to ritual magic, which drew primarily from seventeenth-century books of magic, and was heavily influenced by Sibly’s published work. Barrett’s stated aim was ‘to free the name of Magic from any scandalous imputation; seeing it is a word originally significative not of any evil, but of every good and laudable science, such as a man might profit by, and become wise and happy.’

Barrett gave private tuition on the magical arts, and one of his pupils was a Lincolnshire cunning-man named John Parkins. When this rural magician returned to his home near Grantham he set up a Temple of Wisdom, and began publishing a series of divinatory, herbal and magical texts. In 1812 we find Strange using his magic in the service of Lord Wellington, and that same year Parkins advertised a lamen or talisman for military and naval officers in his Cabinet of Wealth, or the Temple of Wisdom. ‘God Save the King, and Defend this Nation!’ He declared. Parkins’ lamen would ‘not only powerfully protect and defend the British Army and Navy in all those times of the greatest danger, but also give them the most complete victory over all enemies, both foreign and domestic.’

So when you watch the next episode of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, spare a thought for those very real friends of English magic: Sibly, Barrett, Denley, and Parkins.

Featured image credit: Magic Library. Public domain via Pixabay.

The post The real world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell appeared first on OUPblog.

The ‘mullet’ mystery – Episode 23 – The Oxford Comment

Often described as ‘business in front, party in the back,’ most everyone is familiar with this infamous hairstyle, which is thought to have been popularized in the 1980s. How, then, could the term have originated as early as 1393, centuries before David Bowie ever rocked it? We embarked on an etymological journey, figuratively traveling back in time to answer what seemed like a simple question: What, exactly, is a mullet? And does it really mean what we think it means?

In this month’s episode, Sara Levine, a Multimedia Producer in our New York Office, chats with Katherine Martin, head of Oxford Dictionaries, and other key players in this language mystery. Together, they discovered surprising revelations about the term, finally arriving at the truth about the origins of the word ‘mullet.’

Image Credit: ‘Mullet Diagram’ by Sara Levine for Oxford University Press.

The post The ‘mullet’ mystery – Episode 23 – The Oxford Comment appeared first on OUPblog.

The Stones’ “Satisfaction,” June 1965

In the spring of 1965, The Rolling Stones could be forgiven their frustration. Even though they had scored three number-one UK hits in the past year, the American market remained a challenge. Beatles recordings had already thrice dominated the US charts since New Year’s Day and Brits Petula Clark, Herman’s Hermits, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, and Freddie and the Dreamers had all topped Billboard between January and May. Meanwhile, even the Jagger and Richards breakthrough hit “The Last Time” had only reached number 9 in the United States. The Rolling Stones were, essentially, a novelty act and an object of some derision in the American media. If they were to survive, they needed a song and a recording that would force America to reconsider them.

Keith Richards writes in his 2011 autobiography Life that he began the song while at home in London. Inspired by Martha and The Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street,” he recorded an idea late at night on a cassette recorder next to his bed and then infamously dozed off, filling remainder of the tape with his snoring. The song offered a new spin on a classic rhythm-and-blues musical cliché that had even more recently been given voice by the Ad-Libs in their “The Boy from New York City.” Isolating one melodic line from this accompaniment, Richards created the iconic motivic germ that would generate an entire song.

The only lyrics he had were “I can’t get no satisfaction, I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I can’t get no satisfaction.” Chuck Berry may have inspired the words, but the articulation was new and Richards’ version took these ideas down a new path. While on their American April-May tour, Mick Jagger sat by a Florida swimming pool, palm trees waving over him, and took a crack at adding verses to Keith Richards’ refrain. Although Bob Dylan and others critiqued racism and violence in America, Jagger’s attention was drawn to something he seldom saw on the British television and certainly did not hear on BBC radio: commercial advertising. Detergent and cigarettes in particular caught his ear as some of the most heavily promoted products in the United States. At first, two verses seemed enough to make his point. The song didn’t seem to warrant any more consideration given that it would probably end up as album filler. But, while he was at it, Jagger added another verse about the frustrations of a failed seduction attempt that ends when the object of his attention puts him off until after her menstruation. Satisfaction denied.

Arriving in Chicago in May, the band headed to the Chess studios where they had been inspired on earlier recordings and where they had notably produced “It’s All Over Now,” which had given them their first British number one. Giving Richards’ catchy riff to the harmonica seemed appropriate in the studio where Little Walter and others had previously wailed, but this country blues interpretation still fell short of what they thought might be possible. They would take it up again in a couple of days when they arrived in Los Angeles.

The RCA studios in Hollywood were certainly sophisticated and, while they lacked the urban edge of South Chicago, they held the possibility of something more aggressive. Drummer Charlie Watts would kick off the new version with a driving groove that drew in the other musicians, who now included session pianist Jack Nitzsche, as well as band members Brian Jones and Bill Wyman. Sensing he had something special, Richards now wanted a horn section for his theme, but that lacking, he settled for a distortion pedal fetched from a local music store by road manager Ian Stewart. The recording reveals Richards’ unfamiliarity with the device, with noisy clicks and sloppy entries; still, the take held excitement. When Jagger dubbed his vocal over the backing track, manager-producer Andrew Oldham, perhaps concerned about censors, had engineer Dave Hassinger bury the vocals in the mix, rendering them ever so slightly difficult to hear.

Neither Jagger nor Richards thought the recording was ready for prime time, even if they did hear its possibilities. However, Andrew Oldham heard adrenaline that he feared would be lost if they recorded it again. When put to a vote, the band overruled Jagger and Richards to release it as a single. Jagger would later acknowledge that “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was the recording that transformed The Rolling Stones from just another British group into a “huge, monster band.” London Records released the disc in the United States in June 1965. Decca would release it in the UK on 20 August.

Featured image credit: The Rolling Stones getting off an airplane at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol on 8 August 1964. Photo by Hugo van Gelderen (ANEFO). gahetNA (Nationaal Archief NL): Aankomst van de Rolling Stones op Schiphol, Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Fotocollectie Anefo, 2.24.01.03 916-7420. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Stones’ “Satisfaction,” June 1965 appeared first on OUPblog.

ZaSu Pitts, the little-known confectioner

Silent-screen star ZaSu Pitts is usually remembered for her extraordinary name, her huge eyes, and her fluttering fingers, but not many know that she also put her nimble fingers to confectionery use, crafting elegant candies that were famous on Hollywood sets.

Candy Hits by ZaSu Pitts: The Famous Star’s Own Candy Recipes, a cookbook filled with bittersweet memories of Pitts’s years in film and TV, contains the star’s favorite recipes (it was published posthumously in 1963). Pitts offers instructions in exquisite detail to ensure that even novices will succeed in the notoriously fickle art of making candy. She writes like a confidante, sharing the secrets she learned through sometimes-painful practice. Not surprisingly, Pitts is drawn to an illustrated recipe for Bonbons au grillage in a French-language cookbook:

There were drawings of hands in action — fingers so delicately sweeping pale fondants through luscious melted chocolate, the thumb and index finger so fastidiously holding a Brazil nut over a gleaming copper kettle. I glanced at my hands. Could they capture my dream?

Alas, no: “An hour later my tears were washing away the chocolate smears on my face. My hands and arms were covered with a brown, sticky goo…” Although Pitts initially chalks the disaster up to the fact that she couldn’t read French, she goes on to confess that she hadn’t realized that chocolate must be tempered, “catered to and cajoled into acceptable behavior,” and that cocoa-butter-rich couverture is crucial for success. She then shares with her readers “How to Master Chocolate Dipping in Ten Hard Lessons,” the first of which simply exhorts “Pray!”

ZaSu Pitts in Tish trailer. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Other recipes display similar charm. Fondant is “as basic to a candymaker as the ‘little black dress’” is to a traveler. For Chocolate Fudge, Pitts cautions against using a kettle that is too small, warning that “an absent-minded candymaker can find her syrup boiling all over the range if the telephone rings or if she starts reciting the last act of The Bat,” a dark-house-mystery play in which Pitts’s character claims to have seen a caped man prowling the stairs. I would have loved to hear her recite those lines, or to see the candies she made as history lessons to honor Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin — molded marzipan heads mounted on chocolate plaques.

Pitts made her confections in her beloved kitchen, whose layout she’d devised with the architect Paul R. Williams when he designed a new house for her and her husband in 1936 (Williams went on to design LAX in 1960). Located in LA’s Brentwood neighborhood, the house was Georgian in style, with seven bedrooms and eight-and-a-half bathrooms. But the kitchen was the real showpiece. It had built-in shelves to hold Pitts’s extensive cookbook collection, and plenty of space on the walls to hang the decorative molds she collected. In addition to a stylish black-and-white enamel stove, the kitchen featured a brick oven. But what made the room truly extraordinary was its shape: it was completely round, with a round central island where Pitts could display her confections.

When in 1919 one reviewer called Pitts “the girl with the ginger snap name,” he couldn’t have imagined how important sweet things would become in Pitts’s life, especially when her career periodically floundered. Throughout all the ups and downs, Pitts madly made candy, finding its complexity both a welcome challenge and a release. As she relates in her book, “everybody began to call my morale-builder sessions in the kitchen ‘ZaSu’s sweet moments.’”

Here is one of her sweetest moments (extracted from cookbook Candy Hits by ZaSu Pitts: The Famous Star’s Own Candy Recipes):

Pirate’s Treasure

This coconut candy is rightly named — the recipe is my greatest treasure. The candy is so delicious it should be kept under lock and key. It also improves with age when kept in a tightly covered tin. I pack it in pretty metal-hinged boxes I found in a ten-cent store, and they simulate a pirate’s chest.

3 large fresh coconuts

6 cups granulated sugar

1½ cups coconut milk

2 teaspoons vanilla

Grate coconut meat; in heavy saucepan mix with sugar and coconut milk. Blend thoroughly. Place on a very low heat. Cook gently until mixture becomes thick and heavy. Stir gently from time to time. You can test it by dropping a spoonful on waxed paper — if it holds its shape, it is done. If it is cooked too fast it may scorch and change color. Allow for time and patience. When it is done, add the vanilla. Drop by teaspoonfuls on waxed paper. Let stand till hardened. Pack your treasure in suitable airtight tins and await the battles for your loot!

Headline Image Credit: SugarDiamonds1. Photo by amp2. Royalty free via Freeimages.

The post ZaSu Pitts, the little-known confectioner appeared first on OUPblog.

How do gut bugs affect brain health?

Our brain lives in a symbiotic relationship with the bugs in our gut. Whatever we eat, they eat. In return, they help our brain function optimally in a variety of ways. During the past few years, it has become increasingly apparent that in the absence of bacteria humans would never have evolved to our current level of cognitive performance. Our brains are profoundly dependent upon a wide range of chemicals produced by these gut bugs. For example, without these gut microbes our brains don’t correctly develop the serotonin neurons that play a key role in the control of emotion.

For every one of your big human cells, roughly 100 to 1000 little bugs live alongside and inside of you. If you were to count all of the cells on and inside of you that are not actually you, they would number in the hundreds of trillions, with approximately one million of these microbes living within every square centimeter of your skin. These bugs were not simply along for the ride as we became the dominant species on this planet; they made the journey possible. As soon as individual cells evolved into fully multicellular organisms during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago these bacteria and viruses quickly discovered the fantastic survival benefits of fully integrating themselves. Once there, they never left.

The total weight of the many trillions of bugs that reside in your gut is over two pounds and they are multiplying constantly thanks to all of the food you are providing them. They are also in a constant battle for survival. The viruses in your gut kill so many bacteria every minute that their carcasses account for about 60% of the dry mass of your feces (now you know what is in there).

ARS Campylobacter jejuni. 22 October 2007. Agricultural Research Service via Public Domain via Wikimedia.

Gut bacteria produce many different chemicals that can influence brain function. They convert the complex carbohydrates in our diet to the fatty acids butyrate, acetate, and propionate. Butyrate can easily leave the gut and enter the brain, where it can influence the levels of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF plays a critical role in the birth and survival of neurons and the ability of the brain to learn and remember. Reduced levels of BDNF are correlated with impaired cognitive function and depression.

Gut bacteria also produce the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, dopamine, acetylcholine, and GABA. Although these molecules cannot cross the blood brain barrier, they indirectly affect brain function via their actions at the vagus nerve. The presence of the bacterium Bifidobacerium infantis 35624 has an antidepressant effect in animal models of depression due to its ability to release tryptophan, a precursor to the production of serotonin. Accumulating evidence suggests that gut bugs play key roles in both the developing and mature nervous system, and may contribute to emotional and behavioral disorders as well as numerous neurodegenerative diseases.

We need to take good care of these bugs so that they will take good care of our brains. Consuming prebiotics and probiotics can help us to maintain a healthy diversity within the bug environment. For example, elderly and frail humans who have major cognitive impairments also have the lowest level of bug diversity in their guts. Can we manipulate their world in order to improve our health? Yes.

Diabetes and the metabolic syndrome are well-known risk factors for developing dementia. A recent study discovered that consumption of Lactobacillus acidophilus and nutritional supplements combining probiotics and prebiotics for six weeks had significant positive effects on the level of serum insulin, C-reactive protein, and uric acid. Humans fed a mixture of probiotics containing Lactobacillus helveticus R0052 and Bifidobacterium longum R0175 for thirty days had reduced production of the stress hormone cortisol. Clearly, the bugs in your gut can positively or negatively influence your mental function and stress response. It is definitely worth your effort to keep them very happy with a healthy diet. However, what happens when we attack them with antibiotics? There is now good evidence that antibiotic treatments may have long term negative effects upon mood. If someone has a genetic predisposition to a mood disorder, such as major depression or bipolar disorder, the risk is much higher. The challenge becomes how to balance intelligently the risk to the gut biome and brain against the risk of not taking an antibiotic.

The post How do gut bugs affect brain health? appeared first on OUPblog.

TED Talks and DNA

One of the most fun and exciting sources of information available for free on the internet are the videos found on the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) website. TED is a hub of stories about innovation, achievement and change, each artfully packaged into a short, highly accessible talk by an outstanding speaker.

As of April 2015, the TED website boasts 1900+ videos from some of the most eminent individuals in the world. Selected speakers range from Bill Clinton and Al Gore to Bono and other global celebrities to a range of academics experts.

Each tells a unique story; TED is famous for being the home of ‘ideas worth spreading’. Since the TED Conference started in 1984 it is possible to track how ideas emerge. TED is a litmus test of what is intellectually and culturally ‘scorching hot’.

Who can forget the first time they saw Hans Gosling talk world-shaping statistics by showing his moving bubble plots, like the relationship between life-expectancy and income for countries across the world? It is a TED legend along with these ‘must see’ and ‘most viewed’ talks.

So, what does TED have to say about DNA?

James Watson talks about his Nobel Prize winning discovery of the Double Helix. Craig Venter talks about sampling the ocean’s DNA. Svante Pääbo talks about our inner Neanderthal DNA. Paul Rothmund talks about DNA origami, using computers to design strands of DNA that act as tools. Gabriel Barcia-Colombo talks about his art, which now includes a DNA vending machine, an outgrowth of his fascination with how easy it is to extract DNA from his friends at his dinner parties.

These are just the TED talks with “DNA” in the title. Digging a little deeper reveals a larger library of talks.

“DNA research is pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge on a daily basis. DNA-ideas are emerging that are worth spreading.”

Craig Venter talks about creating synthetic life and the birth of his artificial microbe “Synthia”. Hendrik Poinar details how cloning could bring back the woolly mammoth as part of the TedxDeExtinction Conference, the field of reanimating lost genomes through the technologies of cloning and synthetic genomics.

Jack Horner talks about how we sadly won’t be de-extincting dinosaurs, or even reading their DNA (because the half-life of DNA is too short) but how he is doing the next best thing of uncovering dinosaur genes in modern dinosaurs – chickens. Called genetic atavisms, genes for traits like teeth can be uncovered and he explains how he tells the kids he is trying to turn chickens into T. Rex’s.

Juan Enriques, genomic futurist, talks about bioliteracy and how ‘the life code’ of genomics is set to change society. He believes genomics will lead to the emergence of ‘Homo evolutis’, part human, part bio-machine, part cyber-being; our kids might be a wholly new species.

Rob Knight explains how our microbiome, our ‘second genome’, the trillions of microbes that live in an on us, makes us who we are. John Wilbanks talks about a brighter future where we pool medical information, including genomic information, to improve human health. Emma Teeling talks about how understanding the secrets of the bat genome help us understand our own.

DNA is woven into a range of other talks. Sugata Mitra talks about his TED Prize wish to build a School in the Cloud based on his experiments of leaving computers with children in remote India and documenting how impressively they self-teach. Trying to prove there are limits to his ‘hands off’ didactic method, he fills his computer with content that is ‘too hard’ – DNA biotechnology. His kids absorb the knowledge.

DNA even appears in symbolic form. David Eagleman talks about creating new human senses and curing deafness with vests that translate speech into digital signals that are sensed on users’ backs. The top half of his opening slide depicts the cosmos and the bottom half the DNA helix.

These and other talks illustrate how DNA is spreading through TED, as a result of its invasion of global science and culture.

TED is an indicator of the arrival of an idea. It is therefore interesting to speculate on what the next big DNA-flavoured TED talks might be.

Researchers working on DNA today could all fire off long lists of potential speakers and topics, attesting to the rapid pace of advance in this field and the magnitude of the societal impacts. Everyone will have their favourites but an obvious choice for already completed work is the story of the discovery of the gene editing system, CRISPR-CAS, by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. In 2015 they shared the Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences and are strong candidates for a Nobel Prize.

The point is that there are so many worthy discoveries and speakers. DNA research is pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge on a daily basis. DNA-ideas are emerging that are worth spreading.

TedMed, the Ted conference dedicated to medicine, is filled with further talks of the DNA kind, like that of George Church describing genomic technology, its future and the Personal Genome Project.

Perhaps, one day a TedDNA Conference that brings together all aspects of DNA research will be on the cards.

Featured image credit: Back-lighting in the auditorium, by Steve Jurvetson. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

The post TED Talks and DNA appeared first on OUPblog.

Bugs: a postscript

Most of what I had to say on bug can be found in my book Word Origins and in my introductory etymological dictionary. But such a mass of curious notes, newspaper clippings, and personal letters fester in my folders that it is a pity to leave them there unused until the crack of etymological doom. So I decided to offer the public a small plate of leftovers in the hope of providing a dessert after the stodgy essays on bars, barrels, barracks, and barricades, to say nothing about cry barley.

In 1884 a correspondent sent a letter to the American journal The Nation asking why lighthouses are called bugs. The editor answered: “Perhaps the down-East American firebug, meaning ‘an incendiary’, would also be covered by the explanation sought for.” Now, why did firebug get this meaning? The usual answer refers us to the sense bug “fan, obsessive enthusiast,” probably best remembered from gold-bug, as in the title of Edgar Poe’s tale. Apparently, “enthusiast” is derived from bug “devil, goblin, boogie, boggart.” But to return to lighthouses. In the next issue of The Nation, someone who signed his letter by the initials F. M. had a slightly different suggestion about firebug: “To one who has always been used from childhood to calling fireflies ‘lightning-bugs’, and known that this name is common in New England, the name presents no mystery. …it seems to me most probable that the resemblance of an intermittent light to the fitful flashes from these ‘lightning-bugs’ has caused the fanciful term to be applied.” (Those among our readers who are old and happen to be professional linguists may remember an example illustrating the vagaries of English sentence stress: a lighthouse keeper versus a light housekeeper; it graced countless articles and introductory texts for students.)

Goblin or boglin?

The trouble with bug is that its usual meaning “beetle” or “insect” surfaced in texts only at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in contrast to bug “devil,” which has been known since the Middle English times. Although it is natural to suppose that beetles were associated with all kinds of demons, bug in its entomological (mind the difference between entomological and etymological) sense is such a neutral word that its expressive origin comes as a surprise. Yet we could perhaps accept it but for the chronological gap between the two senses. James Murray refused to ignore such an obvious difficulty, and those who came after him have not been more successful.

Yet bug “demon” and bug “beetle, insect” must be the same word despite the lack of evidence and all the facts that contradict this etymology. A piece of dried nasal mucus has several names. Some call it booger, while others prefer bugaboo. Are those little devils or little insects? Probably both. Bug “devil” may well be from Welsh, but, regardless of its ancient antecedents, it is an international Eurasian word. Its Russian equivalent is buka (pronounced as bookah). To show us the way, the diminutive bukashka (stress on the second syllable) means “a small insect.” The booger we remove from infants’ nostrils is called in Russian koziavka (stress again on the second syllable), a synonym for bukashka, that is, “little insect.” Has the affectionate word buggerlugs attached itself to children because their noses are full of bugaboos, with lug- merely rhyming with bug-? Be that as it may, the first element has nothing to do with bugger (and bugger has nothing to do with bug), while lugs, contrary to what has often been suggested, cannot mean “ears” here. The fact that this word is often applied not only to children would then be explained as a trivial case of the amplification of meaning. All the bugs seem to have been born somewhere between the nursery and the capricious sound symbolic world of the grownups in which the consonant group b-g inspires terror.

More than twenty years ago Mr. Frederick S. Holton sent me the following letter:

“I recently came across a footnote in Richard F. Burton, trans., The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (New York: Heritage Press, 1934), p. 1245, in which Burton derives the word bug from Arabic bakk. On the small chance that this is of some use to you, I send the text of the entire footnote: ‘Page 1175, line 3. Arab. Bakk; hence our bug, whose derivation (like that of cat, dog and hog) is apparently unknown to the dictionaries, always excepting M. Littré’s.’”

I owe a great deal to such friendly, selfless correspondence. At the end of the nineteenth century, Skeat used to write indignant letters to Notes and Queries, wondering why people keep suggesting stupid etymologies instead of looking up words in the OED.

A buggy of undiscovered origin.

Burton may have consulted the OED; yet he did not fear to tread where Murray felt unsafe and confused. To my ear (“lug”) the Arabic word sounds more like pug without aspiration, but this is not important, for pug and bug are interchangeable in the group under discussion. What matters is that one cannot postulate borrowing without explaining how a word from one language reached another (I am sorry for beating this willing—or dead—horse again and again). Littré, whose splendid French dictionary appeared in the eighteen-seventies, was an astute etymologist, as follows from both his own work and his multiple reviews in Journal des Savants. Here he noticed what I referred to above as the Eurasian dissemination of words like bug. From Arabic and Russian to Welsh and English bugs are bugs, bogs, boogs, and Pucks. I once saw a suggestion that boggart is a disguised compound going back to bar-ghost, that is, “threshold ghost.” Quite enough has been said in this blog about thresholds, but boggart cannot be connected with them. Whatever its origin, boggart is allied to bug ~ bog. Nor does the name Bogart have any ties with devilry.

A most edifying article on the origin of the term computer bug was written in 1987 by Fred R. Shapiro. Allegedly, one day in the 1940 the Harvard scientists discovered a moth in the computer and removed it gingerly, so that ever since any disruption in the work of machinery has been called bug. The most respectable media were not ashamed to promote this story. Like the targets of Skeat’s ire, those people never thought of looking up the word in the OED, for, if they had done so, they would have discovered that bug in this sense and the verb debug antedate the event they were describing with such glee. The engineering term bug dating from the 1800s reminds us of supernatural forces always on the lookout for unheeding humans. Also, when an embassy or our house is bugged, we bow to the spying agencies over which we have no control.

The topic is inexhaustible, but I promised dessert, not a meal. If you have not had enough, look up the idioms as cute as bug’s ear and as snug as a bug in a rug and think of Bugs Bunny. My real concern in what remains untouched is the etymology of the noun buggy. Did someone who invented the word and applied it to his gig feel buggy (that is, proud of himself), or does the buggy resemble a small bug? No one knows. The word seems to be of native origin.

If our readers find this type of tossed salad agreeable, I’ll be happy to provide it every now and then.

Image credits: (1) Goblin 19th illustration. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Doll and buggy parade–WPA recreation project, Dist. No. 2 / Beard. Public domain via Library of Congress.

The post Bugs: a postscript appeared first on OUPblog.

Facing the challenges of palliative care: development

The fifth edition of the Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine is dedicated to the memory of Prof Geoffrey Hanks, one of three founding editors of the textbook, who died in June 2013. With a legacy spanning almost four decades as a clinician, researcher, teacher, and editor, Geoffrey was a man of great compassion and wisdom. While we are greatly saddened by his death, we are inspired by his legacy.

The two decades since the first edition of this textbook have witnessed truly remarkable growth in palliative care. Such growth is challenging to master, and brings both uncertainties and optimism about the future. In this three-part series of articles, we’ll take a look at some of the complex and challenging issues of continuity, development, and evolution in the field of palliative care.

The maturing of palliative medicine as a profession has been accompanied by the ongoing development of palliative medicine education and educational resources all over the world.

Globally, the principles and precepts of palliative care are finding a new home in medical education. Palliative care is an excellent framework for teaching the bio-psycho-social model of illness and the inter-professional approach to complex health care problems. Curricula have been developed and published in many countries, universities and individual faculties; moreover, there are a plethora of teaching models and aids that have been published and disseminated.

Yet, much more needs to be done to introduce palliative care into the curriculum of every specialty that provides care to populations with serious or life-threatening illness. In all of these specialties, there have been important developments, but change around the world is inconsistent at best, and at worst, disappointing. Despite evidence of progress, the development of a high level of skill and understanding of palliative medicine remains a goal that has yet to be achieved.

The Beauty of Old Age by vinothchandar. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Palliative medicine is now a recognized medical specialty or subspecialty in over 20 countries, and in others application for specialty or subspecialty accreditation are underway or pending. There is however no consensus as to how to best train palliative medicine specialists. The content and duration of advanced training programmes vary greatly around the globe, from one year in the United States, to four in the UK, and three in Australia. Given that the level of training not only affects competence and service delivery, but also influences the role and well-being of specialist clinicians working in the field, the issue of adequate training is salient. How best to adequately equip specialist palliative care clinicians remains an open question worthy of further evaluation and research.

Preclinical, translational, and clinical research are all badly needed to expand the boundaries of knowledge and provide an evidence base for patient care. This truism is valid for the medical endeavor in general, but is particularly relevant to palliative medicine, in which evidence-base practice is still relatively underdeveloped. The proliferation of research relevant to the care of the incurably ill has been a critical part of the maturation of palliative medicine. Research findings have sharpened our understanding of the mechanisms of symptoms we seek to relieve, helped define the limits of old approaches, and have uncovered new approaches to the problems that have hitherto been refractory to older treatments.

By its nature, research in palliative medicine is very broad in its scope. Palliative care needs research in communication, service delivery, quality, and ethics, as much as it needs biomedical and psychological research. Rigorous observational studies and well-crafted clinical trials are both essential at this point. The care of the incurably ill and their families is a “complex system” challenge, requiring multiple inputs, resource allocation, pharmacotherapeutic and psychological skills, and social understanding. All of these factors are increasingly represented in the evolving research culture that we encourage and cultivate. Some believe that palliative care is unlike other disciplines in that it is not possible to inform practice with rigorous trials. We do not believe this. We must learn from our colleagues in other disciplines and ensure that, whenever possible, we run multi-site studies.

The past two decades have seen a flourishing of palliative medicine services in different settings worldwide. This has been well documented and monitored by the International Observatory of End of Life Care Project. There are now a great many models of palliative medicine service delivery: inpatient and home-based hospices, hospital consultation services, acute palliative care wards, and day hospitals, ambulatory clinics, and mobile clinics. Although the underlying principles and philosophy are consistent, the spectrum of observed problems may be profoundly different depending on the care settings.

This is particularly true with the increasing movement towards “upstream palliative medicine”, in which palliative medicine is being delivered at an earlier stage of the trajectory of illness. The issues confronted by clinicians working in early stage palliative medicine units, such as those in acute palliative medicine units, are often quite different from those confronted by clinicians who are providing immediate end-of-life care. The goals of care are different with a greater emphasis on optimizing function and, often, life prolongation (even in the face of progressive incurable disease). In such cases, the duration of care will be prolonged and the fluctuating status of illness (with treatment-induced remissions and relapses) may involve rapidly changing care needs, problem lists, and priorities.

The quality of care that is offered through these services must be measured and responses to variations in the quality of care or its outcomes actively addressed. As in all areas of clinical care, we must each be striving to improve the care offered. In palliative medicine, as in any area of clinical practice, we can and do cause morbidity and, at times, premature mortality. To ensure the ongoing development of the specialty, such outcomes must be acknowledged and critically addressed.

Read part one of this three-part series, “Facing the challenges of palliative care: continuity”.

The post Facing the challenges of palliative care: development appeared first on OUPblog.