spacetime coordinates:Original Timeline: 1955 US > 1987 Tokyo > 2013Baltimore, Maryland > 2015 Chechnya, NY > 2016 Manhattan on the day of the Chinese New Year > 2017 (the M5-10 virus kills 7 billion people) > 2030’s Western VII Quarantine Zone / Spearhead > 2041 – 2043Project Splinter // Alternate 2015 / 2043 // Third Timeline: 2016 <> 2044 // Fourth Timeline: 1925 – 1944 US – 1950’s NY / 1961 East Berlin / 2044 <> 1971 – 1975 US / 2044 <> 2016 / 2020 Spearhead / 2044 // Fifth Timeline:1852 American frontier / 1891 London / 1917 – 1922 (fr) <> 2045 <> 1940 France / 1953 Hope Valley / 1989 US / 2046, 2047 / 2163 / 1491 /// Titan (a massive time-traveling industrial facility) __detailed timeline here__
12 Monkeys is an American television series on Syfy created by Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett. It is a science fiction mystery drama with a time traveling plot loosely adapting the 1995 film of the same name, which was written by David and Janet Peoples and directed by Terry Gilliam, itself being inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 featurette La Jetée; the series credits Marker and both Peoples for their original works.
spacetime coordinates: 1787. Amid the decadence of the Ancien Régime, Joseph Ignace Guillotin is responsible for investigating mysterious murders. He then discovers the existence of “blue blood”. This unknown virus spreads within the aristocracy. The virus has devastating effects: the infected nobles attack the “little people“, upsetting the established hierarchy. The revolt spreads and is the prelude to the French Revolution.
La Révolution is a 2020 French-language supernatural drama series produced by Netflix starring Doudou Masta, Julien Sarazin and Ian Turiak. In January 2021, the series was canceled after one season. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: Ten years after “The Great Crumble”, a virus that killed many people in the world and led to the mysterious emergence of hybrid babies born part human, part animal.
[[Was not able to jot down my thoughts on it, but that time has finally come. If I am to agree with other reviewers, I would have to keep a blind eye to my own abysmal editing of Temporal Divergence and Cosmic Drift. So no complaints about typos. Good that I cannot or will not review my own book. I am all for systematicity, since my own instincts struggle with it and yet most of the time trying to find a clear path among the ferocious brambles of speculative theory fiction/SF fabulation defeats the purpose. I enjoyed the lacunae as well as the conceptual splits, nor was I deranged by an overwrought style, with my own checkered past and unnecessary terminological excess in mind.]]
So, “Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life”, a slim 80+ page volume, is worthwhile reading. More of an extended essay, and even out of Corona context, it’s a welcome mindfuck. It arrived in 2012, Ben Woodard’s tome is an early ZerO Books snapshot, born in the throes of new materialism, OOO, the ontological turn, a new appetite for metaphysics, speculative realism & horror of philosophy (one has to dig deeper into Jane Bennett, Meillasoux, Negarestani, Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, Nicola Masciandaro, Steven Shaviro and others). It is prescient in its embrace of the putrescent & contagious and all things ‘biological’ that came to rule our quarantined days. It is biophilosophical as such and not just a tract on the philosophy of biological. Coming out of the various strains of non-correlationist thinking, it is an early, formative publication by a contemporary thinker whose involvement with natural history keeps on tracking conceptual clusters & updating a philosophy that kept itself too long at bay from evolving biological ideas. B Woodard’s texts are unavoidable for anybody interested even rhe slightest in these things. It makes a good untimely visit (or revisit) now, especially after the hype over ‘speculative realism’ is generally over.
On two accounts I consider Ben Woodard’s work important. First, from the standpoint of his familiarity and embrace of a whole plethora of weird and new weird literature, his unapologetic and almost relentlessly geeky – sticky ontological (?!) attitude towards all sorts of dirty media, no matter how remote trashy, be it over -theorized or not expunged from the canon. Secondly, these dumpster ‘horrorisms’ (from gaming, horror B movies fare, comics etc) are being stalked in a shambling lock-step by a whole gamut of Continental philosophy and Naturphilosophie + (more recently) ungainly(for me) and undigestible oddities such as the British Idealists. This includes a monography (which does not seem to be out yet, although finished) situating Francis Herbert Bradley at the very origins of that primordial split of Analytic vs Continental schools via monism & pluralism.
The Creep of Life – takes a cue both from Negarestani as well as Stephen J Gould. I must say I never read Cyclonopedia by Negarestani, although his influence has been nearly ubiquitous in many quarters & given the proper treatment elsewhere, while for me S J Gould has been important on a personal level. He’s a truly formative influence on some of my earliest biological and natural history musings, so I’m always curious about any potential Gouldian cross overs. I was keen on a work that promises to juxtapose these incompatible, maybe even incompossible forces. Woodard’s ‘Dark Vitalism’ – is a child of both lovecraftian radical openness (in fact he makes Lovecraft feel quite coy) toward unbearable outside dimensions (apud Negarestani). A radical opening that invites invasiveness, quartering, fostering and hosting the alien – as well as taking full advantage of how systematically Darwinism dispels any trace of human excepționalism & sense of purpose. Even a radical contingency as that of Meillasoux, the non-teleological keeps a lingering anthropocentrism, so Woodard makes sure any taxonomic superiority and upper level inevitability has to go. Evolutionary replays will not end up with the same or any kind of intelligence valorizing biped, math or no math. Against any vertebrate-centric or multicellular-centric view, S Gould, a Marxist paleontologist & naturalist, kept encouraging these views from the below – always disdainful & ridiculing our airs of superiority in regard to ‘humble’ Monera. This ‘low’ bacterial dimension, a planetary microbiome that extends in all directions, became protoplasmic base reality (something else than just the impeding doom of pathogenicity) -moving slowly into quorum sensing limelight, one that Gould would have undoubtedly recognized.
For Woodard the critical distance from strict adaptionism, Panglossian radical selectionism & selfish genocentrism peddled by the neo-Darwinian apostles (prominently Richard Dawkins), germinates what S J Gould seeded, stemming from a vast, historically grounded encyclopedic knowledge of evolutionary ideas, humanism & many byways of natural history amd geology + making sure many racist pseudo-sciences & faulty methodologies don’t get a second chance (phrenology, IQ testing etc that informed eugenic immigration policies in the US etc). This prepares one for tackling any socio biological vagaries, whatever one-sided Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge epistemic fraternization might promise us, or whatever circular ‘just so’ stories of the day might become institutionalized as evolutionary psychology trivia.
Slime Dynamics does not trace all this, and maybe better so, since it is tracking some more rare, viscous and opaque protoplasm – the one that tends to be avoided even by the best of biologically- literate philosophers (the usual French suspects: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty or Deleuze). It is as if thinking about living thought gets obscured, killed at birth, muddled whenever brought down in the mud it came from, just the minute it gets reminded where its mindfulness oozes from.
In a time of lacking transparency, of dodgy accountability, when black-boxed (and quite racistic) AIs become existential threats and discrimination machines, this ‘darkness’ might seem completely out of tune. Corona Pandemics, fake news, and G Agamben letters of biopolitical conservatism, ‘dark vitalism’ itself feels somewhat unnecessary, an exaggerated – Lebensphilosophical – mystification. Yet ‘darkness’ – does not equal obscurantist add-ons to obfuscate even more & multiply misunderstandings, or inflame anti-scientific pathos with more or less misplaced mistrust in sometimes imperfect yet badly needed biomedical advances. First things first, Slime Dynamics is steeped in the purposelessness of evolutionary drift, it is abiogenesis – friendly even when discussing outrageous panspermia, and it is clearly familiar with experiments/scientific theories or the historical significance of discovering deep time. This possibility to think beyond the biotic dimension & into unthinking anorganic origins of life keeps on overflowing, forever unsettling our relation to pure data & mere science reports. Slime Dynamics always enjoys using biologically informed horror in order to both update & degrade philosophy and dissolve the anti-biology inhibitors that have plagued phenomenology and Continental or Critical thought in general. It ultimately takes the obscene results and cool research data of science to their ultimate, unflattering devastating conclusions. In order to dispel this ‘darkness’ of the dark I am quoting the threefold aspects that Ben Woodard attributes to this new (deep time inflected) mostly unwanted vitalism:
“1. It is dark because it is obscured both by nature (who is to say that we can divine and comprehend the details of the universe from our limited brains) and by time (we are at a temporal disadvantage in trying to discern the creation of all things) since the cause of most of the nature we know has fallen back into the deep past.
2. It is dark because it spells bad news for the human race in terms of our origins (we are just clever monkeys that emerged as a result of a series of biological and cosmological lucky breaks), our meaning (we are just meat puppets based on our construction), and our ultimate fate (Earth will die and we will probably perish if not with it then eventually with the universe).
3. It is dark on an aesthetic and experiential level our psychosocial and phenomenological existence is darkened and less friendly to us, and our perceptions, given the destructiveness of time and space.”BW
Viruses and epidemiology play an important place in Slime Dynamics and spell out some of the most unsettling truths we have since come to loath, but can never ever again ignore (with the inception/global expanse of the Corona Pandemic). It is almost too close to home now that a very simple event of disease spillover, of outside contagion teaches us something the hard way about either complexity or basic simplicity – that medical under-development and patent trolling brings under capitalism.
Mushrooms and the fungoid also play an important role in Slime Dynamics, and I might say this is my favorite part since most of the newer The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins valuable additions tend to skip the central disgust associated with the undergrowth, the eminently -putrescient- slithering of hyphae or even the unavoidable weird (speculative lit) aspects that subtend it. In particular, space-time for Woodard is always warped along fungal apparitions – contrasting it with the networked contagion (“time overcoming space), the amorphousness and formlessness of fungal life is that of “the spatial overcoming time”, dragging life below ground, making it reliant upon down-trodden, plentiful disaggregation, dependent on the inorganic.
Slime Dynamics comes as good critical reminder of classical (altough contemporary xenobiology seems to have evolved) teleological attachments, its unimaginative program of ‘intelligent’ contact out there, its ignorance of the extremophilic non sapient possibilities out here. Slime Dynamics makes a fungus thriving inside a Chernobyl sarcophagus a much better candidate for sentient alien contact at home as well as outside of the bounds of our evolutionary bland & stationary ‘pinnacle’ position. I think Naturphilosophie has waited much too long for a comeback, and that J G Fichte and F W J Schelling in their liminal situation btw Kant and Hegel may act like a philosophic slime-mold, a composite multi-phase creature or answer to the Kantian-Blumenbachian program that can be many things at once, or one unified thing at different times. Slime Dynamics takes an important cue from H Grant making Nature After F W J Schelling as contemporary a thing as any nowadays, not just by mere retro recovery but by extending & activating ‘power metaphysics’ overall. Ben Woodard is well able to critically siphon out any romantic excess of Schelling – without jettisoning the precedence Schelling gave to base nature over thinking, as well as him being well aware of how intelligence (or better sapience) has been preserved apart from an inescapable basic materiality that keeps clinging to our angel wings. A clinging hodologic mucus not be confused with a pre-packaged and regurgitated as fixed ‘human nature’. A neo-Schellingian vibe lures our attention towards the net forces operating on environments, bodies and especially on thought as explored by another relatively forgotten German Naturphilosoph – Kielmeyer. Schelling is critical of vitalism because of his aesthetic romantic leanings, because ‘vitalism’ per se seems to entail something contradictory to him, almost feet in the sky, unopposed by any equal force, just forever exhaustive matter. Schelling thus appears to have been priming us for ‘dissipative structures’ – for riding vortices as the Russian-Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine thaught us. Maybe we have here the same ‘aesthetic’ engagement that seriously considered totality as a conjunction of opposing forces, of intensities & contrasts also vital in – A N Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, as he also came to appreciate the Romantics, beside his interest in metaphysics & history of science. To me, although Whitehead never mentions any specific German Naturphilosoph but only their British poet- adepts, he seems to qualify ‘eternal darkness’ in manner quite close to Schelling as “an environment of vagueness stretching into the darkness of what is merely beyond”.
What i miss from Woodard’s examples are maybe hints of an eastern ex Socialist SF slime – as the DDR movie Der Schweigende Stern 1960 loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Astronauts. During the the shoots it apparently used up the whole country’s whole supply of glue. These tons of glue were used to simulate a post apocalyptic Venusian surface. This civilizational residue of muck overflows everything, a preview warning of the ultimate no-return extinction, if we would choose to follow the same path of megadeath militarism & weaponized science.
But let’s see how Woodard keeps on smearing ardently cleaned paths from this history of philosophy with a necessary creepiness that is of great benefit, so I better leave him the last word:
“The material being of humans, and of all life is a slimy one. Slime is the smudge of reality, the remainder and reminder of the fact that things fall apart. The shining path of humanity is only ever the verminous – like the trail of our own oozing across time and space – the trace and proof of our complete sliminess trough and trough.”BW
Swarming , extra-dimensional or extra-galactic organicisms and entities mentioned by Ben Woodards in his book Slime Dynamics:
Tyranods pf Warhammer 40,000 mentioned by Woodard in the Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
“The Tyranids are an alien race from the colds depths of the void that hunger constantly for warm flesh. They infest the stars in their billions, a raw force of destruction that has been likened to a locust swarm”
Zerg of Starcraft also mentioned in Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
screen capture of Zerg swarm from Starcraft
“Zerg Swarm is a terrifying and ruthless amalgamation of biologically advanced, arthropodal aliens. Dedicated to the pursuit of genetic perfection, the zerg relentlessly hunt down and assimilate advanced species across the galaxy, incorporating useful genetic code into their own.”
8472 Species of Star Trek also mentioned in the Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
the chapter on Extra-Galactic Terror also mentions “The Yuuzhan Vong—Children of Yun-Yuuzhan, also called the Chosen Race, known to the Chiss and Ferroans as the Far Outsiders, and sometimes incorrectly abbreviated to Vong (which implied that one was disowned by their family and their gods)—were a nomadic extra-galacticsentientspecies that nearly destroyed the New Republic, and were responsible for the deaths of nearly 365 trillion sentient beings during their invasion of the galaxy.”
Ubbo-Sathla, Ubbo-Sathla a short story by Clark Ashton Smith, originally published in 1933, also known as The Unbegotten Source or The Demiurge, is an Outer God which features in the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu Mythos. Art by infernvs
“colossal mass of protoplasmic goo, Ubbo-Sathla is a creature which has dwelt on Earth since its formation. Constantly spewing forth a plethora of primitive organisms, some believe that this creature was the source of all life on the planet, and that one day it will emerge to re-absorb all of its biomass.” source Monster wiki
Apart of the current divisive populist politics in this 2020, there is this widening gap that seems to separate the past i.e. these last years of microbiome and holobiont revelations, the recognition of Lynn Margulis’s life’s work, of probiotics, craft beers, hipster sourdough homemade bread, super-bugs multi-resistance warnings – and the sudden ramping up of antibacterial soaps production and biocidal technologies. While invisible for much of mankind’s history and ultimately relegated to imaginary beings, demons, spirits – bacteria and viruses (not to talk about mushroom, molds and their kin) have been with us, in and on us since the beginning and while their profile is rising for the first time, enriching our schlock ‘blob’ B-movie repertoire (our heightened sense of contagion is already indistinguishable from general online virality). As an aside in our management-drenched culture, I might add that the very start-up culture of late capitalism, of venture capital and tech unicorns (TESLA, Google, Amazon etc) – overshadows another use of the term “starter” – maybe its initial, dirty secret embedded in its biological anb biosemiotic material sense, the one in which there is always something antecedent, some highly transmissible starter-culture, a microbial mat that has preceded all ulterior divisions, ever evolving invasions, and upon which back everything else grows, blooms, and who’s metabolic pathways and chemical chain reactions we enjoy, inherit, borrow or dread. There is scope in just having a look into the various questions raised by scientist regarding this undercover complexity that animates much of what we regard as the most basic, simple (and thence falsely simplistic) and mostly still highly disregarded (non charismatic) organisms.
With current rising ‘Pandemic Fatigue’ and governments searching for new ways to variously entice and/or enforce effective restrictions and contact tracing technologies, one should balance it out with the work of Rob Dunn (check out his classic The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today), Dr. Anne A. Madden (The Kingdom documentary which I urge u to see), Sandor Katz (Wild Fermentation primer), Athena Aktipis (applying system biology and evo-devo to cancer research). They and a bunch of other wonderful people at NC State University’s Department of Applied Ecology including Lauren Nichols, Erin McKenney under self-isolation measures have organized this year’s incredible series of webinars concerning FERMENTOLOGY – the incredible shapeshifting science of fermentation, ‘umami’ taste with a motley crew honing changing practices, field research experience, trough labs and out of lab works, trough ancient history archaeology and multispecies coreographies in humans and non-humans.
As a fellow practitioner and fermentation necromancer, putrescient beginner and bacterealist I urge you to check out these free seminars below. Climate science outreach has become a caricature of struggling to reach the decision makers, an important lesson in loosing its touch with an increasingly disdainful and aggressively non-scientific (or not sufficiently scientific) crowd (including politicians) . yet microbiology and fermentology offers hope in the sense that it has became highly pop – both in bad (as every hype can witness) and good example of translatable, relatable, surprisingly material gooey way of exploring new and exciting discoveries that somehow have a two pronged way: both home kitchen and highly rated chef restaurateur, both laboratory oriented outcomes and field work, both insider talk and informing day to day people’s experiences. While heeding all the warning signs of the groomed bearded sourdough hipster (mostly male bro type) guy – and his newfound hobby in its breadtivist breadarian accusatory tinge – it is still a fact that such slimy, sticky gooey (almost in tandem with the slime – kids videos) have raised the profile of wild fermentation online around the globe. Partly industrial knowledge, partly hype, partly a blob of big pharma and wild fermentation bio hacking type of exchanges – its troublesome and meddling prospects prosper at the edge of traditional knowledge expropriation and biocapitalisation and/or speculative biological experimentation.
Deep Time Background + take it with a grain: Maybe grasslands should be seen as the first in a series of new warming earth changes at the geologic scale – that started happening roughly 20 mil yr ago (accelerating incredibly nowadays due to human herd in tow with other herds that have been replacing dwindling forests environments) and have included co-evolved multiple stomachs, specific enzymes from grass and grain digesting yeasts and bacteria). While mostly growing around bread and sourdough, these webinars have been more than diverse – encompassing cheese, milk etc You will say ahhhhhh AGAIN the grain-grass eater ecosystemic bias – well yes, grass again (!!) in an age of steppes, grasslands, lawns, dwindling forests and high yield crops – the haunt of all those Neolithic revolutionaries. Well grasses and ruminants are here to stay so we better learn and ruminate along. In spite of gluten free authoritarianism bread keeps diversifying and going in unsuspected directions. And so not any grain is on the menu, so one might also see here a Western- North /Near-Eastern/Fertile Crescent bias towards a particular kind of grain products (so not so much about rice culture and rice wine fermentation – or pickling such as jiu niang (酒酿) or miso using koji.
A few of the highlights for me (although please consider watching all of them since they are very much in tune to what I mentioned above):
Jessica (Jessie) Hendy is a lecturer in paleoproteomics at the University of York where she studies ancient proteins associated with foods in archaeological sites. Jessie will describe her research at ancient archaeological sites in Turkey, Mongolia and elsewhere to understand, using ancient protein analyses, the beginnings of milk fermentation. She will take viewers on a journey to one of her archaeological sites, describe her approach to archaeology and consider take homes from her work with regard to what anyone can do in their kitchen with milk today.
Jessie has recently made major discoveries with regard to the history of Mongolian dairying and dairy fermentation and the oldest dairy fermentation in the world. This talk is sponsored and supported by the Max Planck Institute’s ERC-funded project, Dairy Cultures. (YT description)
Margarita López-Uribe is the Lorenzo L. Langstroth Early Career Professor at Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Entomology where she studies bees of many kinds. Many bees rely on fermentation in different ways (some ferment nectar, others pollen, others still ferment leaves). Margarita will talk about the fermentation carried out by honeybees. Honeybees make bread out of pollen that they ferment (and then feed to their babies). Margarita and her student Brooke talk about what goes into making bee bread and what microbes are involved in this process. They will also share preliminary data of an ongoing project about how various biocides shape bee bread microbiome.
This talk is supported and promoted by the NC State Apiculture Program.(YT)
In many parts of the world, especially in regions with limited growing seasons and long winters, people preserve vegetables through fermentation. Learn about the illustrious history of fermented vegetables, the science behind it, and how simple it is to ferment vegetables yourself at home. This talk is hosted by Sandor Ellix Katz, a fermentation revivalist. His books Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation, along with the hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world, have helped to catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, the New York Times calls him “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.” S
andor is the recipient of a James Beard award and other honors.(YT)
How does fermentation fit into your zombie apocalypse preparation plan? Fermenting can provide a number of benefits – from enhancing the nutritional value of your food, to preserving it for the long haul, to cultivating antimicrobial compounds that might help protect you from the agents of the zombie apocalypse. Fermented foods are also an example of multi-species cooperation that might serve as a good example for us all for how we might cooperate to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Athena Aktipis is an assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University, chair of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance, and co-director of the Human Generosity Project. She is the author of the new book The Cheating Cell from Princeton University Press and the host of the science podcast Zombified.(YT)
Tate Paulette is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor at NC State’s Department of History. He studies agriculture, food, and fermentation in the ancient world, with a particular focus on Bronze Age Mesopotamia. He co-directs archaeological excavations at the site of Makounta-Voules-Mersinoudia in Cyprus (Makounta-Voules Archaeological Project), and he is currently working on a book about the history/archaeology of beer in Mesopotamia. In this talk, we will explore the foods and, especially, the fermented foods of ancient Mesopotamia. We will look at ancient recipes, royal inscriptions, administrative records, archaeological remains, artistic works, and more on our culinary tour through the famous “land between the rivers.” Particular attention will be devoted to bread, beer, yogurt, and cheese, the fermented cornerstones of the Mesopotamian diet.
This talk is co-sponsored by NC State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.(YT)
In this talk, Benjamin Wolfe will explore how microbes compete and cooperate in cheese rind microbiomes. From fungal highways on wheels of Saint Nectaire to antibiotic producing fungi in cheddar, we’ll learn about the ecology and chemistry of microbial interactions in some of your favorite stinky cheeses. We will also learn how cheesemakers can use this knowledge of microbial interactions to improve the safety and quality of their products. Benjamin Wolfe is the Aptman Family Assistant Professor of microbiology at Tufts University.
The Wolfe Lab at Tufts uses fermented foods as model systems to identify the processes that shape the diversity of microbiomes. In addition to research focused on the basic biology of microbes, the Wolfe lab has worked with chefs and food producers, including David Chang’s Momofuku Culinary Lab and Jasper Hill Farms, to understand the roles of microbes in creating the diversity of flavors in fermented foods. This talk is co-sponsored by NC State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences. (YT)
The origins of bread have long been associated with the development of farming communities that first cultivated and domesticated cereals in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago. However, most recent discoveries show that bread was not a product of farming, but perhaps something which fuelled it. Amaia and Lara will share the story of the discovery of the oldest bread and what we do and don’t know about its recipe, how it was baked and more. They will also talk about the cereal-based foodstuffs that prehistoric communities consumed in southwest Asia and how they changed with the development of new technologies such as pottery.
Amaia Arranz Otaegui is Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen. She is an archaeobotanist and investigates the use and consumption of plants by prehistoric hunter-gatherers and early farming communities in southwest Asia. Lara Gonzalez Carretero is an archaeobotanist at the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) and a researcher at the Scientific Department of the British Museum. She is an expert on the study of archaeological food remains, with especial interest in cereal meals such as bread, porridge, etc. (YT)
The world’s oldest culinary recipes exist in the form of clay tablets from ancient Babylonia dating to the 18th century BCE. In this talk, Patricia Jurado, Gojko Barjamovic and Pia Sörensen from Harvard University will introduce the history and science of the recipes, as well as their team’s efforts interpreting and reproducing them. Their work follows an experimental approach and draws on expertise from their team’s collective backgrounds in assyriology, the life sciences, and culinary practice and history. Join us for this deep dive into culinary history — you may even come away knowing how to cook a 4,000 year old recipe!
Part of the 2020 BEESS seminar series: Wildlife microbiomes, the complex communities of microorganisms that inhabit virtually every body site, perform countless micro-ecosystem services for their host, profoundly affecting wildlife behavior, physiology, reproduction, health, survival and ultimately evolution.
To study these tightly co-evolved systems, I strive to build diverse and collaborative interdisciplinary research teams to (a) advance our knowledge of the eco-evolutionary factors (e.g., sex, diet, phylogeny) governing wildlife-associated microbiomes, (b) identify species-specific microbiomes that can serve as sentinels for environmental quality (i.e., biomarkers for wildlife population health), (c) evaluate the impact of environmental perturbations on wildlife microbiome functions, and (d) inform management decisions to promote long-term conservation of wildlife and their symbiotic microbes.(YT)
The world’s oldest culinary recipes exist in the form of clay tablets from ancient Babylonia dating to the 18th century BCE. In this talk, Patricia Jurado, Gojko Barjamovic and Pia Sörensen from Harvard University will introduce the history and science of the recipes, as well as their team’s efforts interpreting and reproducing them. Their work follows an experimental approach and draws on expertise from their team’s collective backgrounds in assyriology, the life sciences, and culinary practice and history. Join us for this deep dive into culinary history — you may even come away knowing how to cook a 4,000 year old recipe!
#The team that conducted this research includes: + Patricia Jurado Gonzalez (Research Scholar, Harvard University), + Gojko Barjamovic (Senior Lecturer on Assyriology, Harvard University), + Pia Sörensen (Senior Preceptor in Chemical Engineering and Applied Materials, SEAS, Harvard University), + Chelsea Alene Graham (Digital Imaging Specialist at the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, Yale University), + Agnete Wisti Lassen (Associate Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, Yale University), + Nawal Nasrallah (Culinary historian, author, chef) (YT)
TimeSpace Warps 