It's a frightening idea: to have half of one's brain removed on purpose. But this surgery, called a hemispherectomy, is sometimes done in children who suffer from constant epileptic seizures, as a last-ditch effort when medication or other treatments don't help. You would think that such traumatic surgery would leave the patient profoundly impaired. But the brain is an amazing organ.

In a new study in the journal Cell Reports, neuroscientists at Caltech describe an investigation of six of these rare patients that offers new insights into how human brains adapt to such extreme changes. The research team performed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans on the patients, all of whom received the surgeries as children and now have relatively normal cognitive abilities. The patients' scans were compared to those of healthy individuals.

The results showed that brain networks in the hemispherectomy patients—networks that control walking, talking, and other functions—were remarkably intact.

Read about these remarkable findings at Caltech. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Caltech Brain Imaging Center)

As we approach the end of the decade, get ready for more and more lists of everything that happened over the last ten years. Yes, I know that numerically the decade doesn't officially end for another year, but that's not how real people use numbers. DJ Earworm gives us a mashup of 100 of the biggest songs from the 2010s. Due to some notable missing songs, I believe these were picked based on their beat. There's an alphabetical list of the songs he used at the YouTube page.  -via Metafilter  

Mental Floss has an article about why we eat pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. While the history of pumpkin pie is interesting, it also led me to something not quite so wholesome. The Thanksgiving holiday was a sticking point in the schism between the North and the South that developed leading up to the Civil War. 

“Thanksgiving was, above all, a New England holiday, and New England was abolitionist territory,” as Diana Karter Appelbaum put it in her book “Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, an American History.”

Those who urged their fellow Americans to celebrate Thanksgiving as a national ritual were Northern evangelical Protestants who were strongly linked to the abolitionist movement. As anti-slavery sentiment swelled in the 1840s, many Northern ministers took the opportunity of Thanksgiving to rail against the moral wrongs of slavery.

Southerners, in turn, pushed back against the idea of Thanksgiving. Resistance to the holiday was particularly strong in Virginia, where local leaders viewed their state, not New England, as the cradle of the new American nation.

The acceptance of Thanksgiving in the South came about gradually, with sweet potato pie being served as an alternative to pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving is celebrated across the United States these days, only now it is a time where families traditionally come together to argue about their political differences.

(Image credit: TheCulinaryGeek)

With all the monsters defeated, a king feels his days of glory are past. His daughter wants him to feel important again. With the best of intentions, she hatches a plan to make him a hero again. Royal Madness is from the French animation school Gobelins, but no French skills are needed to catch the feels.

J.J. Abrams on #TheRiseOfSkywalker: "Everyone is doing the best work I’ve ever seen anyone do. But the ambition of this movie is far greater than Force Awakens. What we set out to do was far more challenging. Everything is exponentially larger on this” https://t.co/jWMuUPOp2T

— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) November 19, 2019

Entertainment Weekly spoke to J.J. Abrams and some of the Star Wars cast about the upcoming movie The Rise of Skywalker. While they didn't go into plot points all that much, we do find out some things about the movie that we didn't learn from the trailers.

Here’s what we know about how Episode IX begins: It’s been more than a year since the events of 2017’s The Last Jedi. The First Order has decimated the Resistance. Rey has been training to use the Force. Finn and hotshot pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) have been sent by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) to find allies throughout the galaxy, but so far haven’t had any luck. “They’re trying to put bandaids on this leaking ship of the Resistance,” Isaac says.

Their mission leads Finn, Poe, and Rey to work together, which has, oddly, never happened before in the trilogy. And since there’s a time jump, the characters have all grown and changed since we last saw them. “We’re not just a ragtag group of people who have been thrown together,” Isaac says. “We’ve actually had time to train. There are some really great sequences with the three of us in infiltrating spaces.”

Both Isaac and Boyega say they had their character wishes granted for the final film. Isaac wanted Poe to get “out the cockpit and into the group,” while Boyega wanted Finn to become a more capable solider (and not, as the actor candidly puts it, just a “comedic goofy dude who never gets stuff done”).

The article also tells us a bit about Rey's interactions with Kylo Ren, incorporating Carrie Fisher into the film, some new characters, and the return of Palpatine and Lando Calrission. Oh yeah, and force ghosts. -via Uproxx

So, you had a little oops with your vehicle and it's going to be some time before you get it fixed -if ever. This looks a lot like my 20-year-old truck, and I wouldn't bother getting a dent banged out, but I might be tempted to add a decal of where Wile E. Coyote went through it. The owner of Hussy Horse Designs makes custom decals, and he made this one just the right size for the dent. He can make you one, too! -via Boing Boing

The Disney princess movie Tangled came out in 2010, when my kids were old enough to go to the movies without me, so I missed it altogether. According to this Honest Trailer, the retold story of Rapunzel was pretty good, if formulaic, and the main drawback is the lack of any song catchy enough to be heard outside of the theater. Watching this caused me to look up the movie at Wikipedia, and the plot seems totally incomprehensible. Still, I now want to see Tangled.

"Bubble boy disease" is officially called X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). That's when a child is born without an immune system, due to a gene mutation. The standard treatment is to isolate the child in a sterile environment, or bubble. Some victims are helped by a bone marrow or stem cell transplant from a sibling, but those are a minority of patients. The good news is that a 2018 trial at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis has returned promising results in engineering an immune system with gene therapy.

St. Jude wasn’t the first to try gene therapy for SCID-X1. Nearly 20 years ago, researchers in France reported successfully reconditioning immune systems in SCID-X1 patients using a particular virus to deliver the correct gene to cells. But when a quarter of the patients in that study developed leukemia, because the modified virus also disrupted the functioning of normal genes, the study was halted and scientists interested in gene therapy for the disorder hit the brakes.

At St. Jude, experts led by the late Brian Sorrentino, a hematologist and gene therapy researcher, set out to engineer a virus delivery vehicle that wouldn’t have side effects. They started with a modified HIV vector emptied of the virus and its original contents, and filled it with a normal copy of the IL2RG gene. They engineered this vector to include “insulators” to prevent the vector from disturbing other genes once it integrated into the human genome. The goal was to insert the gene into stem cells that had come from the patients’ own bone marrow, and those cells would then go on to produce working immune system cells. It was crucial for the viral vector to not deliver the gene to other kinds of cells—and that’s what the researchers observed. “After gene therapy, for example, brain cells do not have a correct copy of the gene,” explained Stephen Gottschalk, who chairs St. Jude’s Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy.

Did I say promising results? All eight children in the trial were able to leave the hospital and paricipate in normal activities! Read about the disease and the experiment at Smithsinian.

(Image credit: Michelle Goebel)

YouTuber C4D4U gives us an experimental animation featuring Tetris played with what appears to be gummy candies or jello jigglers. He talks about "rendering textures," while the rest of us are mesmerized and can't stop watching. The whole video is frustrating on many levels. Tetris is such a familiar game that we can't handle the rows not disappearing when they are filled. And we can't handle not being able to control where the blocks fall. Seeing them scooch into place after their turn is over is bothersome, too. Also, gummy candy is such a familiar thing that we can't handle not eating it. Metafilter calls it "profoundly unsatisfying." Yet that frustration is due to the realism, so you have to admit the animation experiment was successful.

Many of your favorite movies were adapted from books you never read. And sometimes that's a good thing. People who have both read the book and seen the movie often say the book was better, because the book usually lasts longer and has more detail. That's fine for a great story, but sometimes movie directors and scriptwriters see room for improvement and take things to a more satisfying level.

Now, let's be fair. Mean Girls was written by Tina Fey, who was inspired by the book Queen Bees and Wannabes. The plot is all Fey's.

 

I wouldn't even want to read that book. See 30 examples of movies that improved upon its source material at Cracked.

As of 2010, Formula One racing does not allow refueling at pit stops. They are only for tire changes. DHL runs a competition for the fastest pit crews, and it appears that Red Bull will be the winners this year. During the Formula 1 Brazilian Grand Prix on Sunday, they serviced Max Verstappen's car in a mere 1.82 seconds, setting a new world record! Verstappen went on to win the race.  -via Digg

In ancient Japan the year was divided into 24 seasonal stages and 72 microseasons, each lasting a few days, with names like, "mist starts to linger," "wild geese fly north," "first lotus blossoms," and "deer shed antlers" pic.twitter.com/g7doEBp0O9

— Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) November 14, 2019

Science writer Ferris Jabr talks about seasons. We in the temperate zones learn there are four: winter, spring, summer, and autumn. But tropical regions have only rainy and dry seasons. And polar regions have only light and dark seasons. Once you get past those simple calendars, different cultures mark the passing of seasons in many different ways. And even here in the US, people are very aware of microseasons, particularly mud season between winter and true spring.   
 

amazing

— Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) November 15, 2019

Read the discussion with contributions from all over the world at Twitter. You'll find more thoughts on the matter at Kottke.

The best architects are also visionaries. A really good building will be able to accommodate features that aren't even available yet! Tom Scott takes us on a tour of the Cooper Union building in New York, ground zero in the history of the elevator.

Galaxy's Edge is the new Star Wars theme park located at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Both put visitors on the planet Batuu at a time point just after The Last Jedi in the Star Wars canon. Several months after the parks' openings, Wired takes a look at the origin, architecture, and engineering that goes into creating a fantasy world in the Star Wars universe.

There are two ways to talk about Galaxy's Edge. Both are true.

One:

The remote planet of Batuu was once covered with trees thousands of feet tall. After a cataclysm petrified them, only their trunks remained. For mysterious reasons, one looks like obsidian, giving a town that grew up around it its name: Black Spire Outpost. A disreputable trader named Hondo Ohnaka recently opened a cargo business there, for which he is recruiting pilots to fly off-books cargo runs that may also be in support of the galactic Resistance movement. Stormtroopers from the First Order have just arrived to hunt for Resistance sympathizers.

Two (this one is longer):

In 2012, George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company for $4 billion.

Following that is the story of how Galaxy's Edge came about. But most of the article is a description of the Galaxy's Edge experience, which is not only geographically and chronologically placed in the Star Wars universe, but also follows an immersive storyline, while offering the rides, games, and character interactions you'd expect from a Disney park. You can even become a character in that world by logging in with your phone and unlocking games at various locations that follow the plot. Before you plan a visit to Galaxy's Edge, read what to expect at Wired.

During World War II, servicemen shipping out to the South Pacific would write their name on a dollar bill and tack it to the ceiling of their favorite bar the night before leaving. On returning, they would head to the bar, retrieve their dollar, and buy a drink. A veteran who knew that tradition stuck a dollar into the ceiling of the tiki bar Forbidden Island in Alameda, California, some ten years ago. He used a little paper umbrella to attach the bill to the ceiling. That started a tradition, as other patrons followed suit, many of them decorating their bills with doodles and messages. The ceiling was covered in paper money, as well as nearby light fixtures, when the bar's owner, Michael Thanos, decided to take it all down.

It was a bigger job than they had first realized. As it neared opening time, they had to stuff the cash in four big garbage bags to deal with at later time. "And it was a really dirty job. We had to wear gloves and face masks because there was layers of fire retardant and dust," reported General Manager John Peterson. When they got back to sorting and counting it, they were surprised to learn they had a significant amount of money on their hands.

"$10,367 to be exact," said John.

The even better part of the tale is what they did with the money. Read the whole story at Boing Boing.

(Image credit: Rusty Blazenhoff)