Air Mattress

Not infrequently, we start on the area which we are passionate about, and many of us can be single-minded about our forte.

Finding the right niche isn't easy, though. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia should have thought so. I've heard about their story from the book Don't Trust Your Gut. These two roommates in San Francisco first met in art school and were jobless. Their problem were really simple: they were broke and couldn't afford to pay their bills. To solve the money problem, two of them rented their spare air mattresses to attendees of a major design conference when hotels were fully booked.  

After stumbling on the idea of air mattress rental and serving breakfast, they had created a website: airbedandbreakfast.com. They were dead wrong. The business wasn't impressive at all. Chesky and Gebbia ended up each accumulating more than 20,000 dollars in credit card debt. They tried their luck elsewhere, where the number of conference guests in Austin might be bigger. But the business remained stagnant, and worse. Ditto for Denver.

As much as Chesky and Gebbia might wish to kickstart their business idea to pay back their debt, they had yet to find the breakthrough.

But – and I'm sure you expected a "but" – the proverbial "aha" moment came after David Rozenblatt, a drummer for American singer Barry Manilow, requested that he be allowed to rent out his whole apartment before going on a tour. The airbedandbreakfast.com founders first said no, noting he would be unable to provide breakfast if David wasn't there. But wait: do they really have to keep sticking to air mattresses and breakfast? The two entrepreneurs then realised the idea of dropping the air mattresses, dropping the breakfast. They could simply ask people to rent apartments when they were out of town. 

Airbedandbreakfast.com was rebranded as Airbnb. And the rest is history.

Pooh

Animals are amazing natural healers. So much so that we have a concept called zoopharmacognosy, a term entirely new to me until I picked up the book Doctors by Nature this month.  

Examples are plentiful to show that animals are innately knowledgeable about their body need and self-medication with natural remedies. As mentioned in the book by Jaap de Roode, humans are latecomers to this earth; millions of animal species were practicing medicine before we even evolved. It also means animals have lots of things to teach us.

Offering our patients antibiotics is an easy way to deal with bacterial infection, but the problem of gut microbiome destruction ensues. Once our patients develop inflammation caused by Clostrioides difficile, the highly contagious and nasty bacteria can quickly take over the human colon. Alas, no patients would thank their doctors for the fever, tummy pain, and diarrhoea as a result of the antibiotic use. 

We have spent a good chunk of time finding treatment of Clostrioides difficile. A healthy gut microbiome seems to be the best answer for our body's defence against the infection. Little did we know that elephant calves have long eaten their mother's faeces at the time of weaning. If you aren't sure the benefit of dung cocktail, the elephants will tell you this meaningful tool of restoring the gut microbiome. Once you learn their insight of restoring ecosystem from pooh-pooh sharing, you will realise why we are now learning to use faecal microbiota transplant, a medical term for "poo transplant", for managing C. diff infection.

Tuberculosis

Tell me what you think of when you hear the name John Green. Most probably his novel The Fault in Our Stars, which has sold more than 23 million copies worldwide. 

I'll tell you what I think of: a boy with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. His name is Henry. He lives in Sierra Leone, and has got open sores in his neck and shoulder from ruptured lymph nodes, yellow clouds in the white of his eyes – a byproduct of the liver toxicity from the not-too-effective treatment he was on. 

John Green writes books other than novels. His non-fiction Everything is Tuberculosis tells the story of meeting Henry, a charismatic teenager who was nearly killed by the same disease which claimed the lives of John Keats, Franz Kafka, and Henry David Thoreau.

It has taken four years for Henry to be able to get home. During his hospital stay, he was emaciated and could hardly attend school. Why did it take so long for Henry to be accurately diagnosed? Why did he get worse in hospital? John Green captures the trajectory of a disease that continues to kill over a million people every year. Among them, many could not afford the pills. For those who could, they abandoned the pills because the pills made them terribly sick when taken without food, which they could not afford.

John Green came to the inescapable conclusion that the root cause of tuberculosis is injustice. Depressing as it is to utter the word injustice, I do believe he is right.

Decision

If optimism and happiness are twin cherries on a single stalk, a runaway bride and wedding oath are opposite poles of a magnet. 

There is a huge difference between saying yes "I do" and leaving a man at the altar. So much so that it is the theme of the sliding doors-style novel Written in the Stars by Ali Harris. The conundrum, as in most situations, shows how one decision leads us into completely different paths. It's true in relationships. It's true in sports. It's true in business. No matter how great the incentives to negotiate, how great the flexibility – in the end, the choice is an "either / or" decision.  

We can pick only one. Not two.

Dragonfly

For many, dragonfly is just an insect. 

For biologists, dragonfly is testimony to the power of evolutionary adaptation. A careful look at the fossil records confirms that dragonflies have been around for 300 million years, or a hundred times as long as humans. If dragonflies flew above the heads of dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era and survived when the dinosaurs did not, this is by itself a great piece of evidence for their evolutionary success. The power of evolution, demanding though it is, has made dragonflies one of the oldest creatures on the planet.

With the announcement of the "extremely hot" weather from the effect of severe typhoon Bavi, I heard the forecast of temperature as high as 36 degrees Celsius over the weekend. I can't think of better outdoor activity than field trip of dragonfly watching. I ended up learning the way dragonflies make adaptation for thermoregulation. 

The first lesson from male crimson-tailed marsh hawk is the wax-like coating on their body, known as pruinescence. This beautiful dragonfly has a vibrant red abdomen, and a powdery (or pruinose) blue thorax. The wax-like pruinescence isn’t a pigment, but a “bloom” secreted by the insect’s cuticle to reflect harsh sunlight. So smart is it that it can cool down in hot weather. 

Another tactic is the blue dasher's posture at rest. The characteristic “obelisk” posture reminds me of my daughter’s handstand-like pose. Why does this dragonfly raise its abdomen into an almost perfectly vertical position, pointing the very tip directly toward the sun? Again, that has to do with thermoregulation for the cold-blooded insect. The vertical  body alignment significantly reduces the surface area exposed to direct solar radiation, thus avoiding overheating.

Cool.

STEM

If you've ever asked elementary school students to draw you a scientist fifty years ago, you'd be guaranteed that more than 99% drew you a man in a white lab coat. You could be mistaken for thinking that women are meant for housekeeping, and less good at maths, physics, or engineering.

Has there been a paradigm shift in stereotype portrayals of women in science? More recent research showed that around a quarter of children depicted a scientist as a woman, although these are mostly drawn by girls. 

Now that we saw more females depicted as pioneers on magazines or media (think Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas who makes CRISPR genome-editing technology breakthrough), the ongoing unevenness of female visibility seems to be making progress. 

Think we're having equality of opportunity? Well, think again. Go read the book Not Just for the Boys by Athene Donald. You shall then find the story of Katie Bouman who took up the position as an Assistant Professor at Caltech and became an international sensation after creating an algorithm to capture the first-ever image of a black hole. The image went viral, followed by anti-feminist internet trolls making angry attacks. 

Unfortunately, the misogynist trolls show us there is a long way to go for women in science.    

Lips

When it comes to censorship, all writers develop skills to minimise risk of accusations. 

Susan Conley, an author who grew up in Maine and lived in Beijing for more than two years, has shown us the style of mealy-mouthed language. In her memoir The Foremost Good Fortune, there are many occasions for touching the "Three T's and the One F" (Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Falun Gong), but she prefers to dodge touching the taboo subjects. 

Instead, Conley writes a candid story of her breast cancer during her stay in Beijing. Subjects like mastectomy, mortality, and median survival are better go unsaid. Behind these uncomfortable subjects, Conley faces the difficulty of walking on eggshells. 

Should Conley mention the Camel Lights she smoked in high school? Can she? And what about the answer for her chance of being alive in ten years? And the odds to see her two boys graduate from high school? What about her boy's watching her armpit skin change after radiation? She nodded after her son suggested, "Mum, you've got to put sunscreen on there." For many subjects, Susan Conley chooses to keep her mouth shut. 

Silent tears are mean't to be wiped, not to be heard.