Homesick Songs, Scary Fairy Tales, Sulfur Concrete

Ted Gioia's profile of Glen Campbell starts from the odd shape of his career. Campbell was famous on the radio years before anyone knew his name.

The invisible years

Campbell arrived in Los Angeles in 1960 and joined the first-call studio players now known as the Wrecking Crew. He played guitar for Sinatra, Elvis, Phil Spector, Nat King Cole, the Everly Brothers and dozens of others. He couldn't read music. On a new song he sometimes sat out the first run-through so he could hear it, then played on the second take. The pay was union scale, $65 for a three-hour session. Back in Arkansas he had picked cotton for $1.25 per hundred pounds. In 1963 alone he played on 586 recorded songs. Leon Russell called him the best guitarist he had ever heard, and Eddie Van Halen travelled to Arizona to get a lesson from him.

He failed again and again as a solo act. Capitol released a bluegrass album (1962), a country album (1963), a 12-string virtuoso record (1964) and a rock album (1965), and all four flopped. Then he briefly took Brian Wilson's place with the Beach Boys, and fans wanted Wilson back. Gioia notes that Capitol could afford to keep trying because Beatles money was pouring in. "Gentle on My Mind" (1967) finally broke through and won two Grammys. Over the next 34 months he released twelve albums, acted in films and hosted a CBS variety show with Steve Martin and Rob Reiner on the writing staff.

The homesick song

Maria Popova's post centers on a short passage from Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012), the Polish poet and Nobel laureate. It comes from Nonrequired Reading, a prose collection of her responses to books she read during a reading binge in the 1970s. The piece, "The Importance of Being Scared," is about the first edition of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales.

Szymborska's argument

Szymborska starts from a claim about children: they "have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions," and they like being frightened by stories. She argues that Andersen scared them and that none of them held it against him, even as adults.

She singles out one character in Andersen's world: death, the figure who shows up most often. She calls it "an implacable individual who steals unexpectedly into the very heart of happiness and carries off the best, the most beloved." In her reading, Andersen took children seriously enough to tell them about woes, miseries and "often undeserved defeats," not just joyful adventures.

Her sharpest point is a paradox. Andersen's tales are full of the supernatural, including talking animals and "loquacious buckets." Even so, she argues they are than "whole tons" of modern children's stories that worry about verisimilitude and avoid wonders. What makes them realistic is emotional truth, not plausible plots.

People who lose weight on GLP-1 drugs tend to regain it once they stop. Earlier work showed that mouse fat cells hold an epigenetic "memory" of obesity that survives weight loss. A new study in Cell Reports, led by geneticists at Case Western, proposes a mechanism for how that memory gets written.

The chain: inflammation, chromatin, hunger

The suspect is transforming growth factor beta 1 (TGF-β1), a cytokine involved in inflammation. When the team treated mouse fat cells with TGF-β1, the cells made more asprosin. This hormone is normally released during fasting, and it stimulates appetite.

The researchers traced how this happens at the gene level. TGF-β1 remodeled the chromatin in fat tissue and exposed the gene that encodes asprosin's precursor. Once that gene is accessible, the cells keep making the hormone. A temporary inflammatory signal becomes a lasting change in how the tissue behaves.

The live-animal results matched. Mice given TGF-β1 ate more and gained weight. Only a brief exposure was needed, and the effects lasted for weeks. The researchers also tested whether asprosin was really the link. In mice genetically engineered to lack both asprosin and its receptor, TGF-β1 had no effect.

"Imagine having an appetite-stimulating signal stuck in the 'on' position day after day, despite losing weight," said study author Atul Chopra. The finding fits the rebound seen after GLP-1 treatment ends. The drug takes the weight off, but the fat tissue may still be primed to push appetite up.

A possible route from mother to child

Maria Popova revisits "A Slender Thread," an essay by the poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman. It appears in the anthology The Impossible Will Take a Little While and is adapted from her 1998 book of the same title. The book draws on her years as a volunteer counselor at a suicide prevention hotline. She calls the work a "slow tango of life and death" that demands "grace and cunning."

The tools are almost nothing: "only a voice and a set of ears." Yet the work, she writes, "feels like mountaineering with someone who has fallen, a dangling person whose hands you are gripping in your own."

The tunnel and the word "only"

Ackerman's central idea is about choice. Most people, she argues, make "an unconscious vow each morning" to get through the day. Almost everyone has thought about suicide, or knows someone who died by it, and has felt "pushed another inch, and it could have been me." The difference is that suicidal people have tunnel vision: no other option seems possible. "A counselor's job is to put windows and doors in that tunnel."

The essay centers on Louise, a frequent caller Ackerman had talked back from the edge many times before. Every call with Louise sounded like a last call. On this night, Ackerman hears something new. Louise keeps using the word "only," which Ackerman calls "a word tight as a noose." She tries to widen Louise's view by reminding her of her own past heroism, like filling sandbags and making sandwiches during a flood. Widening someone's perspective, she notes, is "the hardest job when someone is depressed."

Concrete on Earth is made of a powdered binder, liquid water and an aggregate such as sand or gravel. Mars has plenty of sand but no usable liquid water or lime-type binder. Earlier tests that simply swapped Martian-like regolith in for Earth sand produced weak concrete full of microscopic voids. Ethan Siegel's essay explains how two separate findings, about eight years apart, together get around the problem.

The recipe: sulfur as binder

In 2015, a Northwestern University group (Wan, Wendner and Cusatis, published 2016) dropped water altogether and used molten sulfur as the binder. On Mars, sulfur melts at about 116 °C (240 °F), a temperature a simple oven or heat pump can reach. The team made a simulant of Martian sand from its known oxide mix: 34–44% silicon dioxide, 18–24% aluminum oxide, 9–12% ferric oxide, 5–6% calcium oxide, and smaller amounts of other oxides. They varied two things and measured unconfined compressive strength, which is how much pressure a rod can take before it crumbles.