Thursday Things: Wine & Dancing Edition

1 August 2024. Vol 6 No 31. By Dan McGirt. #260

Aug 01, 2024

It’s Thursday Things! This week we dive for wine, dance for fitness, and find the oldest presidential photo.

First we crush the grapes. Then we sink them to the bottom of the sea. Photo by Maja Petric on Unsplash

If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.

Oldest presidential photo

While we continue to eschew politics here at Thursday Things, we’re well aware it’s a presidential election year, so a thematic post or two is appropriate. In a previous edition we shared a list of photography firsts, including the oldest surviving phot of a U.S. president.

Which president? John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, who was in office 1825-1829, and later served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a congressman from Massachusetts. Because J.Q. Adams just won’t stop.

The Smithsonian displayed the photo in the National Portrait Gallery back in 2018, as reported here.

Taken in March 1843 in Washington, D.C., the daguerreotype beats out another surviving photograph from just a few months later, when Adams sat for a portrait in New York that he later deemed "hideous," reports Schuessler. That image is now held by the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery acquired the photo in a Sotheby’s auction, which is fortunate, because this a piece of both American history and the history of photography that ought to be preserved for the public.

There is one catch about this photo:

Adams was more than a decade removed from his presidency when he sat for this photo, already deep into his second act serving as a Massachusetts congressman. In these tense years leading up to the Civil War, Adams used his post and his prestige to wage a largely solitary fight against the institution of slavery on the floor of the House of Representatives, despite many efforts to silence him.

Adams was no longer president when the photo was taken. So while it is the oldest surviving photo of a president, it isn’t the oldest photo of a president while in office.

Nor was it the first photo taken of a president. The first president to be photgraphed was William Henry Harrison, the 9th president.

While this may be the oldest-surviving photograph of a U.S. president, it was not the first photo ever taken of a commander-in-chief, notes George Dvorsky of Gizmodo. That honor goes to President William Henry Harrison, who had a photo taken at the beginning of his very brief term in office before his untimely death in 1841. But only an 1850 copy of that daguerreotype exists today, which is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So there you have it!

John Quincy Adams, looking the part. Image: National Portrait Gallery

Wine from the deep

You know the feeling. You’re just diving along in the Baltic Sea and you think “I could sure go for some wine right now” but you know there’s no wine store at the bottom of the sea.

Except when there is.

Divers found cases of 150-year-old sparkling wine in a shipwreck off the coast of Sweden — and it might still be drinkable

Divers in the Baltic Sea came across an unusual find this month as they explored a shipwreck just off the coast of Sweden.
"We encountered a 19th-century sailing ship in very good condition, loaded to the sides with champagne, wine, mineral water, and porcelain," the Polish diving team Baltictech said.
The sparkling wine bottles numbered more than 100, they added.
A spokesperson told Business Insider they are "almost sure" the wine is Louis Roederer Champagne, and said they have contacted the company to try to confirm.

Score!

Anyway, a little deductive investigation and the labels on the mineral water suggest that the old wine in the old bottles dates to somewhere between 1850 and 1867. Were those good vintages? Who knows — it’s wine from the bottom of the sea!

But whose wine is it anyway?

Baltictech reported its findings to Swedish authorities and is now awaiting permission to research further and potentially retrieve some of the bottles, the Times reported.
Should the team get its hands on the bubbly, there is likely to be strong interest from fine wine collectors.
"The reason why people are interested in sparkling wine from those shipwrecks is because they've basically been kept at a very cold, constant temperature for however long," Mark Robertson, a senior wine consultant at Dreweatts auction house in the UK, told Business Insider.
"The condition of them can be quite remarkable," he added.

If you’re into that sort of thing, the price can be remarkable too. According to the article, a previous find from Davey Jones wine cellar fetched more than $145,000 for a single bottle.

According to one of the divers, he observed bubbles in the bottles, suggesting this long lost champagne may still be drinkable. The cold, dark sea bottom is apparently an ideal place to store wine. In fact, per the article, some wineries are experimenting with aging their wines in a hole at the bottom of the sea.

Assuming you had the cash to spare to buy a bottle of this Baltic bottom wine, would you open the bottle and give it a taste? Or simply store it as a curious keepsake?

Let us know in the comments!

It’s a cartilage dance, dance revolution

I’ve never torn any cartilage, but I understand it can be quite painful. Also, according to the article linked below, more than 530 million people around the word have osteoarthritis, a condition in which the cartilage between joints can wear down so thin that you’re basically at bone on bone, with no buffer. Which, again, is painful.

If only there were some way to regenerate damaged cartilage, and fast!

Cue the dancing molecules:

New study shows 'dancing molecules' can regenerate cartilage in 3 days

In November 2021, Northwestern University researchers introduced an injectable new therapy, which harnessed fast-moving "dancing molecules," to repair tissues and reverse paralysis after severe spinal cord injuries.
Now, the same research group has applied the therapeutic strategy to damaged human cartilage cells. In the new study, the treatment activated the gene expression necessary to regenerate cartilage within just four hours. And, after only three days, the human cells produced protein components needed for cartilage regeneration.

Three day is pretty fast. Just what are these dancing molecules?

Previously invented in Stupp's laboratory, dancing molecules are assemblies that form synthetic nanofibers comprising tens to hundreds of thousands of molecules with potent signals for cells. By tuning their collective motions through their chemical structure, Stupp discovered the moving molecules could rapidly find and properly engage with cellular receptors, which also are in constant motion and extremely crowded on cell membranes.

You can read the the detailed science explanation in the Journal of the American Chemical Society “Supramolecular Motion Enables Chondrogenic Bioactivity of a Cyclic Peptide Mimetic of Transforming Growth Factor-β1”

But what I take away is that the dancing synthetic nanofibers make the cartilage cells feel the beat, get on up, and start regenerating, which they normally don’t want to do.

Do the hustle, cartilage cells!

I feel my cartilage regenerating already.