For me, it all started with Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Then came the tales of Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, Ursula LeGuin. Storytelling that takes vivid imagination combined with some devastating reality to add up to something that is unsettling and disturbing. You can get your socks spooked off by the supernatural, the ghostly, the otherworldly. But a story can also be really freaky even by just nudging at the thin veil between reality and fantasy. As stories like “The Lottery,” “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” show, sometimes the most alarming…
Author: Admin
“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover”—Mary Shelley I skipped the day we discussed Frankenstein in my Romantics Literature seminar in my sophomore year of college. It was the late 90s, a time when email existed but was only used for the most urgent and timely emergencies, text messaging was charged per send, and a professor could still reasonably request that you make up for a missed class by visiting them during office hours. I wish I could remember what I believed Frankenstein to be before that lecture, but those impressions escape me. Like Frankenstein…
While automation and machine-learning technologies hold great promise for radiation oncology programmes, speakers at the ASTRO Annual Meeting cautioned that significant challenges remain when it comes to clinical implementation. Joe McEntee reports Automation for the people The challenges around automated treatment planning proved to be a talking point for speakers and delegates at the ASTRO Annual Meeting. Above: Laura Williams, a dosimetrist at Cone Health, reviews an automated treatment plan. (Courtesy: Cone Health) The automation of core processes in the radiation oncology workflow is accelerating, creating the conditions for technology innovation and clinical upside – at scale – across the…
Darrin Bell didn’t set out to write his much anticipated graphic memoir, The Talk. He’d initially sold another project delving into the lives of three generations of men in his family, all descendants of an enslaved man named Addison Bell, in a two book deal to Henry Holt and Co. But as he was working on the original project, George Floyd was murdered and the Black Lives Matter protests began. “My editor Retha called me,” Bell explained, “And she apologized and said, ‘I think maybe we should put this book on the backburner and do another book that deals with…
You Can’t Raise a Daughter on Hope and Junk Food Alone Kristen Gentry Share article A New World by Kristen Gentry Parker stares at his niece Zaria’s stomach, covered by a stretched-out white tank top. Her belly is a dingy full moon creeping on the horizon of the kitchen table. She carries a whole new person, a whole new world. Zaria, sixteen, sits with Parker’s daughter, JayLynn, who is fifteen and wears a new hickey on her neck. It’s smaller than the last one, which was actually two, neighboring islands that were fading by the time Parker saw them. The…
Mitigating skin tone bias Conventional (top rows) and SLSC (bottom rows) photoacoustic images of volunteer 1 (light skin tone) and volunteer 18 (dark skin tone) at 750, 810 and 870 nm. The green arrows indicate the radial artery location; the white arrows show a smaller blood vessel enhanced with SLSC imaging. (Courtesy: CC BY 4.0/G S P Fernandes et al Photoacoustics 10.1016/j.pacs.2023.100555) Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is a non-invasive diagnostic technique that can visualize anatomic structures – such as arteries and blood vessels – up to several centimetres deep into tissue. But while this imaging modality works well for people with…
Join the audience for a live webinar at 2 p.m. GMT/3 p.m. CET on 14 November 2023 exploring MRI-guided radiotherapy quality assurance Want to take part in this webinar? We will delve into the world of MRI-guided radiotherapy systems and the critical role of quality assurance in delivering precise, personalized cancer treatments. This webinar will address the unique challenges and considerations that MRgRT QA presents. From image distortion and system calibration to complex workflows, understanding and mitigating these challenges is vital for every healthcare professional working with MRgRT systems. Moreover, the webinar will delve into well-established quality assurance protocols and procedures…
From trees and mortality to colonialism and FaceTime sex, Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence investigates a restless range of subjects with a truth-finding precision that would be breathtaking for a single poem but is present here across an entire collection. What unites this book is the question of how to speak when one’s personhood or subjectivity is assumed to be nothing and nowhere—when one can’t be plotted on the neat graph of normative racial categories. Further, how does one provide an account of oneself when both account and self are either supposed blank spaces or forever in flux? These concerns are…
Multiple qubit platform: in this diagram, an STM tip coated with iron (top) operates the sensor spin qubit. Also shown are the remote spin qubits, which are aligned by the magnetic fields of nearby iron atoms. (Courtesy: Institute for Basic Science) A quantum computing platform that is capable of the simultaneous operation of multiple spin-based quantum bits (qubits) has been created by researchers in South Korea. Designed by Yujeong Bae, Soo-hyon Phark, Andreas Heinrich and colleagues at the Institute for Basic Science in Seoul, the system is assembled atom-by-atom using a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). While quantum computers of the…
Since Walt Whitman, the American sentence has shape-shifted in and out of forms, from race-car lyrical lines that drive off the page, to fields of hailstorm words floating in white space in a way that resembles visual art, and back to semi-formal stanzas that lilt and groove around a pentameter-like beat. I’ve designed my poetry collection Tiny Extravaganzas around experiments that push against the boundaries of the American sentence. There’s a quiet thrill in being part of a tradition that turns away from the English iambic pentameter line and tries to define the characteristics of a sentence that is uniquely…
We’re celebrating peak fall with this interactive choose-your-own-journey which will let you decide where the story goes, with book recommendations for each chapter! Apple picking or pumpkin picking? Haunted house or Halloween party? Make up or break up? The choice is yours and every answer leads to a different story. The full list of books and stories is linked below. Short stories: Mary Robinson’s Minimalist Sorcery My Slut-Shaming Ghost Can Go to Hell Don’t Trust a Guy Who Promises You the Moon I’m the Wrong Ghost for This Haunting A Wax Man Lit a Fire in My Heart A 5-Star…
[embedded content] Earlier this year, the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World, launched a campaign to persuade journalists to stop using the outdated slang term “boffin†when referring to scientists. The initiative was aimed at the red-top tabloids such as The Sun as well as The Daily Star, who have a particular soft spot for the word. The IOP says that using the term in their coverage has a negative impact and puts people off from studying science. This is because boffin conjures up the image of a scientist being a slightly dishevelled, elderly white man. In this new…
In Myriam Gurba’s latest essay collection Creep, the Mexican American author interrogates both those who deceive, exploit, and oppress others as well as the culture that enables them. “People who hurt other people can be charming,” Gurba notes in the title essay. “It works in their favor.” In Creep, Gurba moves beyond the memoir she became known for with 2017’s critically acclaimed Mean “to writing family history, and in some senses also genealogy. I’m locating myself within literary genealogies and also pedagogical genealogies related to education,” she tells me. Creep’s eleven essays address, among other topics, femicide, the criminalization of…
I have a set of cigarette burns zagging up my right arm. I don’t talk about them to friends—there are mainly two reasons you get burned in that particular way, and neither are good. They’re red and angry-looking, like wasps’ stings, and they’re right above my wrist which means I can’t hide them. The burns sit out in the open for everyone to see. I could say they’re beautiful, but there are some things that should never be recuperated. I will say the cigarette burns are stunning, though. As in: they stun. They stun others when they realize what they…
This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features two pioneers in their fields. Margaret Gardel is a biophysicist who is setting up a new National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center at the University of Chicago. The Center for Living Systems will focus on the physics of adaptation, a new field that looks at how living matter stores, retrieves, and processes information as it adapts to change. Gardel explains how physics-inspired theory and experiments are providing fresh insights into biological systems. Our second pioneer is Susannah Glickman who has just completed what is probably the first scholarly history of quantum…
I met Bella Swan in the middle of 2008, when the anticipatory Twilight movie poster circulated at my school. I took her home and hung her on my wall, blacks and grays covering the coral paint near my headboard. She gripped the folds of Edward Cullen’s dark denim jacket. They both looked like teens, but anyone who’d read the books knew he was a vampire, ninety years older than her. Edward looked off to the distance, to abstracted danger, to the movie’s simultaneous bomb and success, too busy to think about anything besides how the woman—girl—at his side reinforced his…
Recreational drug use has been prevalent in societies for centuries, and it continues to be a topic of interest and concern. As the pursuit of altered states of consciousness persists, it becomes crucial to prioritize the safety and well-being of individuals engaging in such activities. One effective strategy in harm reduction is the testing of recreational drugs. This article aims to explore the importance of drug testing, its benefits, and how it can contribute to a safer recreational drug culture. UNK Lab Solutions has revolutionized drug testing with their fentanyl test strip kits, primarily used by recreational drug users who…
The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise One little pale fresh tennis ball of rain bounces across my forehead. Fifteen-love. I have very bad posture. An only somewhat inquiring mind. But they tickle me the many and various uses for mayonnaise considering there is only one use for poetry. To lose money. To lose money. Toulouse Monet. I think we just connected, you and I. We’re inside of really quite a touching moment. Balloons lost in the trees. Balloon fruit. Rottenway the rotten the rotten way you therotten way you look in the…