Chinese tourists are allegedly being recruited to spy on the US
Chinese tourists are being recruited by the Chinese PLA to bring back sensitive military gear, a violation of international arms trafficking regulations.
A century has passed since the legendary skull fragment was unearthed. Recently, archaeologists confirmed our youngest ancestor. The bones Unearthed back in 1931 have been confirmed to be the youngest Homo erectus remains ever found. It could be the last tangible (or measurable) youngest connection to our human ancestors. These remains aren’t to be confused with Java Man, which was also unearthed on the Indonesian island of Java (Java Man was excavated back in 1892).
“When you think about it, out of the 25,000 some fossils on the site, only 14 were a Homo erectus,” says Russel Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and lead author of the study, published recently in the journal Nature. “They lucked out. Had they not found the skull, they may not have put such time into it.”
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Guns Akimbo is the sophomoric return of Jason Lei Howden. A marriage of America’s favorites: a balance of high-octane action and one-the-nose comedy. The film stars Daniel Radcliffe, and Samara Weaving of Three Billboards fame. The breadth of character both of these stars will bring to the big screen is going to be so much fun.
I love how much of a good sport Howden is being about YouTube’s notorious comments section on the trailer:
Give the trailer a watch, leave a comment (he is reading them after all) and share. It’s pretty awesome. Guns Akimbo opens in select theaters on February 28, 2020.
I came across these via the r/space subreddit. In the comments, a Redditor revealed that these images were processed by Seán Doran and Gerald Eichstädt and after looking through the photostream, I was completely blown away.
It’s nuts that we have a spacecraft out there in void. All alone. Snapping and transmitting these beautiful images of the Jovian giant to us. We are not worthy.
Swirling violent masses of gases rage and dance on the surface of Jupiter
Where do these photos come from? The Juno spacecraft of course! This spacecraft and mission has planned to orbit the gas giant Jupiter more than 35 times (these have been organized into perjoves), and has a planned termination date for 2021. A remarkable achievement.
Here’s a clearer shot of one of Jupiter’s polar vortexes
The last cooler than average month on planet Earth was February 1994.
If you're 25 or under you've never experienced a month of normal. You've essentially been living on an alien planet your whole life. pic.twitter.com/hxIgSHMR3s
Pictured above is a bagel from Murrary’s Bagels. Easily my favorite place to grab a bagel in New York City. But, I love that The Times previously referred to a bagel as “an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis,” in a 1960’s article concerning the topic. But, the real meat of this story has to do with mafia and the bagel producing Union Local 338. Jason Turbow at GrubStreet writes:
Except that Willner’s weren’t the only mobbed-up bagels in town. In 1964, a shop called Bagel Boys had opened in the center of Jewish New York, on King’s Highway in Brooklyn. Among its principals was Thomas Eboli, otherwise known as Tommy Ryan, a capo in the Genovese crime family and a direct counter to Dio. Eboli was so powerful, in fact, that when Vito Genovese died a few years later, Eboli reigned for a time as the family boss. […]
Ultimately, the union handled the Mafia the same way that it handled nearly all extreme issues with management: full public confrontation. Nearly as soon as Bagel Boys opened its doors, Local 338 members showed up en masse to picket, distributing leaflets headlined, “PLEASE DON’T BUY,” with warnings that nonunion bagels “jeopardize the hard won standards of labor and inspection which the New York City public now enjoy.” Their most effective tactic in such situations was handing out free product in quantities sufficient to devastate business.
Ultimately, the strategy to confront the mafia in public worked. But the showdown was far from over. This entire story is rich in vivid detail. The rise of kitchen machinery, preservatives, and dough delivery networks — the battle for New York City’s penchant for bagel seemed insatiable. The spoils of war will go to the victor surely? Such a wild ground war between the familiar Jewish union bagel makers and the mafia is ripe for a movie if you ask me. This confectionary war was waged for nearly half-century came to a close in 1971 according to the author. Read the entire story here at GrubStreet.
I came across these film posters a while back, but I just had to share these. A few of the images below are from the exhibition African Gaze, a showcase of nearly 100 film posters all deriving from the country that hugs the Gulf of Guinea, Ghana. Most of the pieces were from the Collection of Karun Thakar & the late Mark Shivas. For the uninitiated, Mark Shivas was a film and tv producer. Over his career, he produced for BBC and Channel 4 but tragically passed away from cancer in 2008.
The late 1980s in Ghana saw the emergence of exuberant new visual modes of expression in a new local and innovative film industry (alongside that of Nigeria commonly referred to as Nollywood), especially in the ways films were promoted by vivid hand painted posters on sack or canvass.
Highly skilled artists emerged to create striking images with their surfaces co-ordinated in eye catching colour arrangements to command the attention of passers-by. These film posters were commissioned by mobile local entrepreneurs taking the films to a range of communities and using the cloth posters that could be rolled up, unfurled and transported very easily as they criss-crossed the country. The intense competition between films enhanced the creativity and imaginative possibilities realised by the artists in the film posters and established their individual renown.
I don’t recall seeing any Sai in The Matrix, but this is awesome.
The Ghanian film posters are such a phenomenon, that even Conan got in on the fun:
The artist, Daniel Anum Jasper, is seriously talented, and gracious. I would recommend giving him a follow on his Instagram account, @dajasperart. He is incredible, and continues to produce film posters very much in the spirit of his predecessors. You can see more of the film posters at this story from the BBC, here.
You can find a few more of these Ghanian film posters at the Deadly Prey Gallery in Chicago. They sell reproductions and originals (apparently) on at their shop.
That’s right. Namgoong Hyeonja, the architect mentioned in the film Parasite, is a fictional architect. He’s not real. However, the genius behind the house in the film was real. Bong Joon-Ho tapped his production designer Lee Ha-Jun, and their art department wizards to build a remarkable architectural vision. The Park house was constructed entirely on a film lot. Here’s some of the initial renderings and concept models:
Compare some of those concept renderings with some actual stills from the film:
Incredible attention to detail and commitment to getting the right shot. There are more photos and insights from Bong and Lee in the interview piece at IndieWire. Bong Joon Ho’s stories and films are heavily steeped in symbolism. They’re dense and delicious like a strong sun tea that’s been sitting outside for hours in the hot sun. They’re chock full of complex metaphors and reference cultural deep-cut films such as Akira Kurosawa’s, High and Low.
Bong’s intelligent cuts, tedious blocking, and deliberate recycling of shots are a delicious recipe for a fun film. Here’s some of his own words (from the IndieWire piece) on why they chose the structure of the house and the film:
Cinephiles may be reminded of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low.” In that case, the structure is simpler and stronger. The Japanese title is “Heaven and Hell.” On the top of the hill is a rich guy and in the bottom, there is the criminal kind of structure. It’s basically the same in “Parasite,” but with more layers.
Because the story is about the rich and poor, that’s obviously the approach we had to take in terms of designing the sound and lighting. The poorer you are, the less sunlight you have access to, and that’s just how it is in real life as well: You have a limited access to windows. For example, in “Snowpiercer,” the tail cars didn’t have any windows and with semi-basement homes, you have a very limited of sunlight you get during the day — maybe 15 or 30 minutes — and that’s where the film opens.
We actually used natural lighting for those scenes in “Parasite.” All of our sets, the rich house and the poor house, were built on outdoor lots.
Lee Ha-Jun, a seasoned production designer says the the living room should act as a stand-in for TV. I believe he means that literally for Mr. and Mrs. Park, initially. But, offering an appreciative and wide view of the garden, the large window becomes a living portal to the backyard green space. A gateway of vast symbolic significance within Bong’s plot. The window occupies an intentional 2.35:1 aspect ratio, which is culturally symbolic to film, but more importantly feels spacious on screen. It has its production merits too, inviting light and warmth during the day on set. Lee has a terse explanation, but it is pretty clear that almost everything on set was thoughtfully produced for the sake of blocking:
The front yard was a key reason why he had to build Mr. Park’s house. Director Bong already had the actors’ blocking in mind.
Even all of the furniture was custom-made for Bong’s film:
The semi-basement neighborhood was built to flood:
Photo: ⓒ 2019 CJ ENM Corporation, Barunson E&A All Rights Reserved.A still from the film, using the same fabricated production set.
I wasn’t joking when I said it was full of metaphors. Here’s a few examples I fell in love with that caught my eyes. Ample repetition reinforces significance. As a resolution begins to unravel, the same shot cedes itself to darkness as something sinister emerges only moments later.
Reflections and oppositions are important. Light and warmth. Opaque and transparent. Cloudy and clear. Clean and dirty. Level and angled. Rich and poor. Survival and oppression. High and low.
What I find to be the most striking, is these temples of film production are all temporary. They’re built on film lots, hundreds of works laboring to build these realistic places, used for shots, deconstructed, and the cycle repeats for the next big movie. It’s like they’re emulating the Himalayan practice of creating Tibetan Sand Mandalas. For more photos and concept images from the film, check out Architectural Digest.
John Baldessari, the influential conceptual artist who helped transform Los Angeles into a global art capital through his witty image-making and decades of teaching there, died on Thursday at his home in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 88. […]
Mr. Baldessari majored in art education at San Diego State College and earned a master’s degree in art there. In short order he took jobs teaching art in junior high school, community college and in an extension program before joining the faculty of University of California, San Diego. He spent one summer teaching teenagers at a camp for juvenile delinquents run by the California Youth Authority; he would joke that he had been hired only because of his size — an imposing 6 foot 7 inches.
His artwork at the time, which he was just beginning to show in Los Angeles galleries, was moving in a more philosophical direction. In 1968, already distancing himself from painting, he reproduced a cover for Artforum magazine featuring a Frank Stella canvas, hiring a sign painter to add a caption below it: “This is not to be looked at.”
Love that. Baldessari was a die-hard Duchamp fan. He leaned into that hilarious realm, art on the edge.
According to an exclusive 6-minute sneak-peek hat premiered before Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in IMAX, there’s quite a lot to take in. Birth.Movies.Death reports there’s counterterrorism, Nolan’s trademark quick-cuts, and featured the infamous time-rewind car scene:
Tenet has a pretty well-put together cast. Many are Nolan alums from Dunkirk, The Prestige,Inception and The Dark Knight. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Nolan success, but interesting enough, Tenet is missing his favorite composer, Hans Zimmer.
For this film, Christopher Nolan opted for Ludwig Göransson, a Swedish composer who’s résumé includes some action-packed heavy hitters such as Venom,Creed,Death Wish and the knockout Marvel hit, Black Panther. Ludwig is a righteous choice, but not an obvious one. The trailer reveals an industrial tone and has a memorable cacophonous percussion. In fact, the escalating beats, and echoey hits has me jonesing for a classic progressive house bass drop.
If we can expect anything, it is that Nolan will present us with something delicious. Resolution or not, the mysterious plot of this movie awaits us.
It was only two days ago that the New South Wales Rural Fire Service warned the developing bushfires were growing in intensity and would generate its own weather system. Unfortunately, these bushfires were growing far too quick to be contained. In turn, these sorts of weather patterns become a repeating cycle: fires, wind, thunderstorm, lighting, and repeat.
The Amazon fires had roughly 2.2M hectares burned, the 2019/2020 Australia Bushfire has burned 5.9M hectares so far. It’s a bit mind-blowing to draw a comparison between two very large numbers. The destruction of wildlife alone is enough to make your stomach churn, and the video really communicates the devastation:
Let’s talk about what’s happening in Australia, which is suffering its worst bushfire season in recorded history.
— Bookdigger Jim____CO2 @ 413 parts per million (@goodoldcatchy) January 2, 2020
Most of the pictures of these bushfires and the pyro-cumulonimbus (sometimes referred to as cumulonimbus flammagenitus) cloud formations are really intense:
Pyro-cumulonimbus clouds have developed to altitudes over 16km in East #Gippsland this afternoon. These fire-induced storms can spread fires through lightning, lofting of embers and generation of severe wind outflows #VicWeather#VicFirespic.twitter.com/gZN6sC7meU
As global temperatures rise, pyrocumulus clouds may become more common. A similar fire-induced weather system took place during California’s wildfire season in 2018. The state’s hilly terrain created perfect conditions for not only thunderstorms, but fire tornadoes. An unprecedented number of wildfires in north Russia and the Arctic Circle in the summer of 2019, as captured by satellite images, contributed to an increase in lightning strikes in the North Pole.
Syd Mead, a designer whose wide-ranging work included envisioning vehicles of the future as well as helping to shape the look of environments in movies like “Blade Runner,” “Tron” and “Aliens,” died on Monday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 86.
His spouse, Roger Servick, said the cause was lymphoma.
Mr. Mead started out in the car business, designing for Ford. By 1970 he had founded his own firm, Syd Mead Inc., and had a wide range of clients, working on architectural interiors and exteriors, restaurants, catalogs and more.
I never knew he began his career at Ford. That’s pretty rad, and it shows. His depictions (or visions?) of vehicles and transport are honest and divine.
Aliens and Blade Runner’s sterile living environments, dank off-world Weyland-Yutani industrial complexes, and the jagged colonial spacescapes gripped my young imagination like a face-hugger. I doubt any of Ridley Scott’s motion pictures would be the same without Mead’s futuristic conceptual input. I mean look at this stuff:
Syd Mead is a very well respected conceptual designer and artist, whose work has influenced multiple generations of sci-fi creators and artists for decades. Tendrils of his work can be found alive and well in the far-away worlds in Hollywood. Obviously his most notable breakout was Blade Runner. Just look anywhere beyond off-world.Moon, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Star Wars franchise, Interstellar and even Pixar films such as WALL·E are a few notable areas where Hollywood really latched onto Mead’s futuristic visions: floating colonies, shiny white airlocks, moody AI, light-cycles, damp neon-lit cities, levitating transports and of course Cyber Trucks.
Sometimes, advertising can be really really fun. BBC really outdid themselves here. Drive or walk by this billboard during the day and you see one thing — but at night you see a ghastly vampire visage. Very clever:
Today, Knopf is one of the most venerable literary publishers in the country. In its 100-year history, the company, which is now part of Penguin Random House, has had only three people at the helm—Knopf himself, Robert Gottlieb, and current editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta.
Sonny Mehta, a literary tastemaker and kingmaker who spent more than three decades at the helm of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, where he courted critical acclaim, profits and sometimes both at once with a lineup of books that included works by a stable of Nobel laureates, the memoirs of presidents and prime ministers, and page-turning crime and love stories, died Dec. 30 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, according to a statement from Knopf, where Mr. Mehta served as editor in chief and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Mehta was a legendary leader, godspeed.
Knopf has only had three editors in chief in a century. Sonny kept a firm hand on the tiller. I hope the next leader will be guided by the instincts of the great editors who went before. https://t.co/mmK7zLI8UB
At first glance, the Recycle Mode seems like a good idea. Except for this one crucial feature of the Sonos App:
Recycle Mode is a state your device enters 21 days after recycling confirmation in the Sonos app. In Recycle Mode, all data is erased and the device is permanently deactivated so you can safely and securely dispose of it. Once a device is in Recycle Mode, it cannot be reactivated.
Wait. What the fuck? This is so fucked. I’m all for reducing, reusing and recycling. But, I prefer to do the reducing and reusing first.
Anyone even remotely familiar with recycling can tell you the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle." Recycling takes energy and, while it saves materials, reuse is always better.
Sonos is throwing any claimed environmental friendliness in the trash in order to sell more speakers. pic.twitter.com/4yL4XKZfvQ
Executive Editor at Vox, Mercedes Kraus, penned a travel guide for would-be visitors to Marfa. Marfa is located in West Texas. Heck, even the Simpsons visited Prada Marfa:
Texas, is well known for many things. A couple of venerable and memorable characters from Texas’s past include Sam Houston and Lyndon B. Johnson. A few of my personal favorite things about Texas: the tall skies, grassy hills, semi-arid desert landscapes, swell thunderstorms, quiet dive bars, and loud honky-tonks. It’s easy to forget that Texas has a substantial art culture in Marfa. But, its there damnit! It has frequently been overshadowed by larger-than-life subjects such as Austin’s tech boom, and of course Texas oil booms.
For art: Don’t let anyone tell you to skip Chinati. I recommend either the full tour ($25) or all three self-guided tours ($30). The self-guided are “the sheds” (where I experienced a visual symphony), the Dan Flavin buildings (for your Instagram fulfillment), and the new Robert Irwin—an artwork and experience that is in fact an entire building. The thing that I think you, a fan of this newsletter, would really miss if you don’t do the full tour is the arena. If you are unable to take the Judd Foundation tour (see above), you must do the full Chinati tour so that you can experience the arena. (Pro tip: get to know your docent—locals in Marfa are super friendly, will give you great tips, and might even invite you to a local party or happening.)
Mercedes is on-point about getting to know your locals too. Don’t be shy. Texas’s state motto is, after all simply, friendship. You might just make a friend. Having a Texan in your contact book is like personally knowing a hobbit. Cherished, magical and kind.
The Office was pure gold. The Jim Halpert and Michael Scott characters were the unstoppable dyads in the series. Behind the scenes, when the comedy dam breaks, John Krasinski’s laughter is contagious as the flu. I love hearing Steve Carell completely lose it over Krasinski’s wincing high-pitched giggles and his explosive belly laughter explode like Bart Simpson. Two whole minutes of raw uncut comedy:
Drought has been a chronic issue in southeastern Australia for years. In regions such as southern Queensland, months can pass without rain. Local communities have to ration water or risk running out.
Yet a company owned by Chinese investors based in Brisbane still got approved last week to run a commercial water-mining operation in the area. It plans to transport the water to a facility where it can bottle and sell it.
From the winding of twine around the rubbery-core, to the wrapping of the stretched leather, to the hand-sewn red stitching — it’s a miraculous process to behold. Kind of romantic that they’re still hand-sewn nowadays:
“Always restless, even daring when he had to be, Shaughnessy worked hard to get in and around the railroad, in all conditions, in all settings,” writes Kevin P. Keefe, former editor-in-chief of Trains magazine, in a book essay. “If the life of a crossing watchman was important, then Shaughnessy shuddered through a subzero night until the perfect moment when his subject dashed back into the warmth of a shanty. If the guts of a steam locomotive were interesting, then he’d insert himself into the depths of roundhouses and sidle up next to the hostlers in order to record the oily intricacies of valve gear and side rods.”
Born in Troy, New York, in 1933, Shaughnessy published his first photograph in Trains in 1952. While the detailed captions in Essential Witness are those of a true rail enthusiast (the “Pennsylvania Railroad 11-class 2-10-0” is identified as chugging over an elevated bridge), his images have a broader appreciation for how people exist with the railroads in North America, and how these systems altered the landscape. The silhouette of a tunnel in Canaan, New York, in 1989 reveals its jagged edges, framing the train with this rock that was blasted through for progress. Sometimes the trains are tiny against the mountains or waterfalls, sometimes the focus is elsewhere, like a 1953 photograph that concentrates on the cows in a Vermont pasture, unperturbed by the freight train zooming behind.
Jim Shaughnessy, “Pennsylvania Railroad operator hoops up train orders to crew of a northbound coal train, Trout Run, Pennsylvania” (1956) (source: the artist and Thames & Hudson)
I love this photo. Train orders, are largely obsolete here in North America. But sometimes, it still happens. Traditionally orders get hooped to the conductor at the front, and the operator(s) at the caboose. Nowadays, operations are radioed or even downloaded.
It’s has cozy corners, thick carpets and a complimentary hardwood interior. The dimly lit hull interior is stuffed with tall stacks of books for reading. My idyllic nap decor if we’re being completely honest. The exterior features planks that over-extend over the canal sidewalk for laid-out books for passerby customers. I wonder if the unique bookstore has a book on boat speak?
You can read more about Word on the Water at Atlas Obscura, here.
Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century.
In rare cases, political will and a thorough written record can resurrect a lost language. Hebrew was extinct from the fourth century BC to the 1800s, and Catalan only bloomed during a government transition in the 1970s. In 2001, more than 40 years after the last native speaker died, the language of Oklahoma’s Miami tribe started being learned by students at Miami University in Ohio. The internet has connected rare language speakers with each other and with researchers. Even texting has helped formalize languages that don’t have a set writing system.
Other languages have not been so lucky in a post-internet world. Many, will never return from extinction. But it’s true that being more connected, we have more opportunities to connect and preserve our ancestral dialects and languages. In National Geographic’s article, they share a video of two surviving speakers of Gottscheerish:
For more information, check out WikiTongues, the seed bank of the world’s languages.
On Oct. 7, it was announced that astronauts on the International Space Station had successfully grown their own meat from microscopic animal cells, using a process called cell-culturing. The bit of cow muscle they produced was small, but it was a historic accomplishment nonetheless.
The ISS project was part of a joint venture by San Francisco-based Finless Foods and Israel-based Aleph Farms, just two of many startups pioneering the concept of cell-cultured meat. Their technology isn’t just a sci-fi fantasy, conceived to nourish future space colonies: It has very real implications for our food systems right now.
The omnivore’s dilemma deepens. Cell-culturing is a pretty straightforward, and interesting solution for decreasing our carbon-footprint while keeping us well-fed. For the rest of us, vegetarianism seems to be the best way to reduce your carbon-footprint. Not into that idea? Even just cutting beef from your diet alone can reduce your carbon footprint a sizable amount. But, replacing farm-grown meats with lab-grown meats? This introduces new wrinkles into an already complex problem our society needs to solve I we want to end climate change.
The shoe is an insanely popular design which bears Kaepernick’s iconic name (and Afro). It’s a really cool shoe. Marc Bain for Quartz reports:
The sneaker, a version of Nike’s popular Air Force 1, quickly sold out in adult sizes on Nike’s site and its SNKRS app after dropping this morning. Nike also released child and toddler sizes, and launched the sneaker first in North America, with global releases to follow.
The shoe comes about a month after Kaepernick once again made headlines for a new confrontation with the NFL. Since kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality and other injustices against black Americans, the quarterback has effectively been shut out of the league. In November, having finally settled his lawsuit against the NFL, Kaepernick was meant to take part in a league-approved workout demonstrating his readiness to return to play, until a dispute over terms led him to hold his own alternate workout instead.
The real story here is the success of Kaepernick’s successful Nike shoe launch in the shadow of a confrontation with NFL league politics and lawsuits. That’s a very impressive feat, for anyone. I’m proud of Kaepernick and his steadfast uncompromising ideals. I hope Kap continues to press forward as a free-agent (or NFL player), because athletes like him are a rare breed. In general, we need more leadership like Kap.
After selling more than $2B of his shares, Travis Kalanick has severed his final ties to Uber. The New York Times reports:
Travis Kalanick, the founder and former chief executive of Uber, has stepped down from the company’s board of directors, severing his last tie with the company.
Mr. Kalanick, 43, started the Uber in 2009 with co-founder Garrett Camp, and grew it from a small start-up to a behemoth that defined the ride hailing industry. The company went public in May, and has since struggled on the public market. The board forced Mr. Kalanick to resign as chief executive in 2017 after a series of sexual harassment and privacy incidents.
Talk about selling out. Kalanick’s reign of burning a seemingly endless supply of cash may have finally come to an end, but Uber continues to hemorrhage cash. Travis has been riding the IPO pony to cash out slowly (which, I should add, many others were not so lucky). A majority of his shares have been locked-up since the IPO, which is why he didn’t sell them en masse. There’s no ambiguity about this $2B conclusion, he’s done with Uber.
Perhaps, instead of destroying the bacteria directly, the venom’s effect is indirect, kick-starting the immune system. Bee venom studies have shown promise in combating symptoms for autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. According to Justin Schmidt, an insect venom expert at the Southwestern Biological Institute, in Tucson, it’s possible that when the immune system begins attacking itself, an injection of bee venom may help by providing an alternate target—“something to chew on,” he said, “and this tends to regulate the immune system so it does what it’s supposed to be doing, which is attack toxins that are getting into your body.” While Lyme is a bacterial infection, it sometimes mimics autoimmune disorders, and so maybe, somehow, similar rules apply.
It’s also possible that the pain of the stings plays a role. “Maybe the venom is doing something to kick off pain receptors,” he said. Anecdotal evidence suggests that other types of venom may also work this way. A brief article in the Lancet, from 1983, described a 43-year-old woman in Arizona who had MS and went into remission for two months following a scorpion sting on her right foot. An immunologist in Houston told me she was contacted by a physician experiencing progressive MS who said he’d been stung by a sea anemone and went into temporary remission.
This piece from Texas Monthly was mind-blowing. For one I had no idea that bee venom had a use for treating Lyme disease. The viability of the treatment is still unknown. The entire ritual of using bee-stingers has an Eastern-medicine quality to it (never mind the fact it kills our precious bee friends in the process). But, whatever works for treating the pain of Lyme is a win in my book. Even if it is a placebo, pain management is hard.
