Innholdsfortegnelse for 01/19/2018 i Newsweek International

AT 2:40 A.M. ON JUNE 9, 2013, SERGEANT DETECTIVE GARY HAYWARD WAS DISPATCHED TO AN ADDRESS NEAR THE CENTER OF THE TONY TOWN OF TOPSFIELD, IN THE NORTH SHORE REGION OF MASSACHUSETTS. THERE, HE FOUND AN ELDERLY WOMAN ON A BENCH OUTSIDE THE TOWN LIBRARY IN HER BATHROBE, SOBBING, HER DISHEVELED AND DISTRAUGHT COMPANION BESIDE HER. HAYWARD, A PATIENT MAN WITH A CALM DEMEANOR HONED OVER nearly 30 years in law enforcement, sat with the woman, Glenda Duckworth, as she described being forced to climb out of her bedroom window to escape her 6-foot-2, 240-pound son, Daniel Morley, after he attacked her, yelling, “Witch, burn in hell!” She said her son snatched her eyeglasses off her face and began melting them on the stove, threw her in a chair and…

THE STUDY OF DECOMPOSED, parasite-riddled human feces does not seem like an especially rewarding one, but for one team of researchers it provided the answer to a 2,500-year-old mystery. Scientists studying prehistoric poop on the Greek island of Kea were able to finally identify the parasitic worms Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician widely considered the father of modern medicine, described in his famous medical texts. Scientists collected decomposed human poop from the pelvic region of skeletons from the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Roman periods, then studied the soil produced by said poop. Analysis by University of Cambridge scientists revealed it contained eggs from two kinds of parasites: the whipworm (common in dogs, but can live in the human large intestine) and the roundworm (larger, with some types reaching 3 feet…

WHAT’S THE OPPOSITE OF OVERNIGHT success? Sidling up to it? Or, to borrow from Joan Didion, slouching towards it? Perhaps the latter in the case of actor John Hawkes, whose slow ascent to stardom is thanks to the sort of characters that populate Didion’s short stories—men and women who, Dan Wakefield once wrote, “are neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful.” Hawkes was once described as a cross between Sean Penn and a Doonesbury character, and there’s truth to that, but it doesn’t capture the creased soulfulness that makes him ideal for film noir. Like Humphrey Bogart before him, one look at Hawkes and there’s no questioning the particular shit show his character is inhabiting. In his latest film, the hard-boiled comedy Small Town Crime,…

PROMISING NEW RESEARCH suggests that a drug developed to treat diabetes significantly reverses memory loss and brain degeneration in mice. If it does the same for humans, it could be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other memory-related illnesses. In a study published online by Brain Research, scientists from England’s Lancaster University used a diabetes drug known as a triple receptor on mice bred to have certain genes associated with Alzheimer’s disease in humans. Researchers waited for the mice to age, giving their disease some time to develop and damage their brains, then gave them the drug. The animals were then run through a maze test. The mice that had displayed signs of a rodent version of Alzheimer’s disease showed improved learning and memory skills. The results were also seen…

FRANCIS WHATELY, THE DIRECTOR BEHIND THE 2013 BBC DOCUMENTARY David Bowie: Five Years, was as stunned as anyone when Bowie died of liver cancer on January 11, 2016. Whately, like everyone outside of the music legend’s inner circle, didn’t know he was ill. And the timing was eerie: Bowie had just released his most daring album in decades, Blackstar. In hindsight, there were clues, such as Blackstar’s persistent imagery of death and mortality. “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” Bowie sings at the start of one song. And there was the puzzling note Whately received a month before Bowie’s death, at 69. “He wrote a rather odd email saying that he was very happy with the new album,” Whately says. “And he was very happy with his lot in life.…

SILICON VALLEY’S “FEMALE problems” were well known long before the #MeToo movement started toppling piggish men in media, politics and the arts. But emails obtained by Newsweek reveal another sordid corner of the tech sector: a horny nest of prostitution “hobbyists” at Microsoft, Amazon and other companies in the Seattle area’s high-tech alley. The emails from the men, some hoovered up in a sting operation against online prostitution review boards, are often disguised as replies to wrong addresses. “I think you might have the wrong email address,” one man wrote from his Amazon work address to a brothel. “Got it,” another wrote from an Oracle email address, to a pimp. Those emails are among hundreds fired off by employees at major tech companies hoping to hook up with trafficked Asian…

DEMENTIA DOESN’T HAPPEN ALL AT once, and it’s not well understood what, if anything, can be done to reverse it. But new research suggests that exercise may slow its progression. Late last month, the American Academy of Neurology issued guidelines for patients beginning to see signs of cognitive decline. “If we can push it back two, three, five, years, that’s a big deal,” Dr. Ronald Petersen of the Mayo Clinic, a neurologist and lead author on the guidelines, tells Newsweek. He says some exercise twice a week, 150 minutes total, should make a difference. Petersen is not recommending that Grandma sign up for CrossFit or start pole vaulting. He says light aerobic exercise, even walking, could do the trick. He recommends simply doing a little more of whatever it is…

“Quiet cursing is pretty frightening to people. ‘This person’s so angry they can’t raise their voice to me!’” HE HAS APPEARED IN MORE THAN 100 FILMS, BRINGING A BIBLE-QUOTING hit man (Pulp Fiction), a Star Wars character (Mace Windu) and a Marvel crusader (Nick Fury) to vivid life. When the actor is on screen, you pay attention, so who better to command a classroom? Samuel L. Jackson, acting teacher, makes his debut with a course presented by the online education platform MasterClass, which offers the basics to students in 21 lessons. Jackson enjoyed it more than he thought he would. “I didn’t think I was even-tempered enough to watch people do something bad and not be upset by it,” the actor says with a laugh. And nobody wants Samuel L.…