The sad-eyed research scientist might be, as the title suggests, some kind of spy, perhaps working to undermine the U.S.-backed military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The film's amber light and ample bell-bottoms situate it firmly in the late 1970s, a time of repressive dictatorships and jittery paranoia, triggered by political malfeasance and instability across the world. But Armando, played with cagey vulnerability by Wagner Moura, who is up for Best Actor in a Leading Role at the Oscars, doesn't read as a man accustomed to subterfuge. He's no political dissident or intrepid freedom fighter, much less the elusive secret agent of the film's title. Instead, he has simply crossed the wrong man and become a hapless victim of corruption, impunity, and greed'problems still common in contemporary Brazil. As Mendonca Filho told the Brazilian news magazine Veja in 2023, The Secret Agent, then still being made, 'is not a dictatorship film: It's about the logic of Brazil.' That 'logic' has been a central focus of Mendonca Filho's work across his career. His first two features, Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, dealt with the rapacious development transforming Recife, the sprawling coastal metropolis where he grew up, and the persistent tensions of race and class roiling beneath the city's surface. In 2019, he and Juliano Dornelles co-directed Bacurau, a gruesome spaghetti Western in which a group of bloodthirsty anglophone tourists pay a venal Brazilian politician for the right to hunt the inhabitants of a rural village. That lurid fable was followed by 2023's Pictures of Ghosts, an impressionistic documentary that told the parallel stories of Mendonca Filho's life in movies and Recife's decaying cinemas. Pieced together from found footage, archival imagery, and clips from his own oeuvre, Pictures of Ghosts tracks Recife's transformations and, by extension, Brazil's tendency to build over its past. Early in that film, the director's late mother, the historian Joselice Juca, appears in an archival television interview to talk about her research: 'Through oral history,' she says, 'we collect the information that's been left out of history.'...
The research, published in Nature Medicine on 9 March1, reveals that taking a daily supplement for two years slowed biological ageing in older adults by around four months, compared with those who didn't take them. The aim of studies like this is 'not just identifying how to live longer, but also how to live better', says study co-author Howard Sesso, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Although it's too early to link the data to clinical outcomes, 'the multivitamin intervention appeared to be on that type of trajectory over two years,' he says. 'This is a very interesting and rigorous study,' says Steve Horvath, a geroscientist at biotechnology company Altos Labs in Cambridge, UK. 'The public appetite for knowing whether everyday supplements can genuinely slow ageing is enormous. This study provides some of the most credible evidence we have to date.' Sesso and his colleagues analysed blood samples from 958 healthy participants in the COSMOS study, a randomized controlled trial in the United States, who were 70 years old on average. The samples were taken at three time points: when they enrolled in the study and after 12 and 24 months....
When Associate Professor Eliezer Calo PhD '11 was applying for faculty positions, he was drawn to MIT not only because it's his alma mater, but also because the Department of Biology places high value on exploring fundamental questions in biology. In his own lab, Calo studies how craniofacial malformations arise. One motivation is to seek new treatments for those conditions, but another is to learn more about fundamental biological processes such as protein synthesis and embryonic development. 'We use genes that are mutated in disease to uncover fundamental biology,' Calo says. 'Mutations that happen in disease are an experiment of nature, telling us that those are the important genes, and then we follow them up not only to understand the disease, but to fundamentally understand what the genes are doing.' Calo's work has led to new insights into how ribosomes form and how they control protein synthesis, as well as how the nucleolus, the birthplace of ribosomes in eukaryotic cells, has evolved over hundreds of millions of years....
Last summer, the Dalai Lama was having a party in Dharamshala for his 90th birthday, and Bethany Morrison, a newly appointed State Department official, was eager to meet with him there. Inconveniently, the United States had recently canceled about $12 million worth of annual foreign aid benefiting Tibetan-exile communities as part of the implosion of USAID. This, Morrison and other State officials thought, would not make a particularly good impression on His Holiness, according to a former State and a former USAID official. Prior to the Dalai Lama's birthday, the two former federal employees told me, they had spent months lobbying for Donald Trump's administration to restore at least some Asia-based aid projects. They had argued that these projects passed Secretary of State Marco Rubio's new litmus test for overseas spending: They would make America 'safer, stronger, and more prosperous.' Nothing changed. (Like other aid workers I spoke with for this story, the former employees requested anonymity because of fear of professional reprisal.)...
