Reminiscence & Return

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Orca Alert! is a weekly collection of links to articles you make have missed with a focus on the arts, culture, and science. Orca Alert! goes out every Sunday to paying customers of Message from the Underworld. Thank you for your support.

Welcome to Hogewyek, an artificial village for people with dementia, where patients can carry on daily activities but everyone they meet is a careworker. It’s called reminiscence therapy.

Can egg whites save the planet? Scientists at Princeton Engineering may have found a way to cheaply remove salt and microplastics from seawater. "I was sitting there, staring at the bread in my sandwich, and I thought to myself, this is exactly the kind of structure that we need."

What Laura van den Berg discovered about herself by learning how to fight.

A new history of shipwrecks presents some startling facts: “The oldest known shipwreck, on the coast of Greece, is more than 4,000 years old, and UNESCO has estimated that there are more than 3 million shipwreck sites around the world.”

NASA’s Artemis I is once again poised for take-off next week.

For the firs time, a child with a rare genetic disease was successfully treated while she was still in her mother’s womb.

I loved this profile of the Irish writer John McGahern, author of six novels and three short story collections, who wrote about the west of Ireland and in so doing “caught so well the peculiar hopelessness of contemporary Ireland." I especially loved this passage:

Consider the way he reuses certain characters, most notably an emotionally abusive farmer and his second wife, Rose, who appear prominently in the stories Wheels, Sierra Leone and Gold Watch, and are mentioned in several others. In each of these stories the narrator visits from Dublin and clashes with the father. Yet Rose, the farmer and the returning son are not intended to be the same characters from story to story. Rather they are archetypes of some kind, and through its repetition the struggle enacted in each story comes to seem like some eternal battle from myth.