Greetings!
In the United States, the Los Angeles Rams won the 56th Super Bowl, the annual national championship game of American football. Ticket prices to the annual game set record highs, averaging just over 10,000 USD several days before the event and reaching as high as 107,775 USD. The price of parking a car near the stadium in Los Angeles also ranged from hundreds to thousands of USD.
According to CNN, companies paid record-highs of around $7 million USD to air 30-second commercials during the Super Bowl, which is viewed by more than 100 million people in the US.
According to NPR around 16 million people in the US viewed the opening ceremony of the 2022 winter Olympic games in Beijing, and fewer have watched the games each day.
In Hong Kong, businesses and companies took the annual reprieve of Chinese New Year, when people scramble to clean themselves and their homes ahead of time so as to honor the taboos, such as cleaning during the holidays - sweeping your floor on the first day means you are sweeping away your good luck.
After the holidays, when people typically travel to be with extended families, Hong Kong began recording record numbers of cases, with more than a thousand cases per day over the past 5 days and over 2,000 recorded on Monday, February 14.
Bans on dining in restaurants between 6:00 pm and 5:00 am continue along with closures of gyms, bars, studios, public libraries, karaoke venues, among other types of venues. The latest restrictions include no more than two people per table during dining hours, adding hair salons and places of worship to the venues closed, and bans on private gatherings with more than two families - punishable with a 10,000 HKD (~1280 USD) fine.
Positive change is a long road. Hang in there! Thank you for your consistent support!
What’s happening - a selection
Tomorrow! We’re hosting a GBO Fireside Chat with Ritesh Nandwani
💡 What is it like to be a venture capitalist?
🧠How does a VC choose whether to invest in a startup, especially one in a very early stage?
🔅What are the emerging opportunities we should be watching?
👟What does a VC wear to work?
Join us for a “fireside chat” style conversation with GBO Hong Kong member Ritesh R. Nandwani to hear his insights on these and your questions about life as a venture capitalist.
Visit the event page to learn more and register for the event.
Of course there’s more happening… Perfectionism, procrastination, and many things discussed offline for now… Stay tuned
This week’s science post - online February 16
Have you heard of or experienced "Long COVID" or "COVID fog?" Though known as a respiratory disease, COVID-19 affects other organ systems too, including the nervous system.
In a study published last month, researchers measured levels of 7 different proteins in the blood, also called "biomarkers", of 251 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in New York City with no prior history of brain injury or disease.
Elevated levels of these biomarkers in the blood are signs of toxic-metabolic encephalopathy (TME) - brain injury that can occur after infection or excessive encounters with mind-altering substances.
The researchers found that levels of five of these biomarkers were significantly elevated among COVID-19 patients with symptoms of brain injury or who died in the hospital, and higher levels correlated with more severe disease.
Researchers also compared these measurements with data from those of non-COVID patients with a history of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer's disease (AD).
They found that, for COVID-19 patients experiencing symptoms of brain injury, the levels of three of these biomarkers were higher in COVID patients than in non-COVID patients with MCI or AD.
One of these proteins, p-tau181, is associated with loss of memory, cognition, language and executive functions during Alzheimer's disease.
Since the COVID-19 patients had no previous history of brain injury or disease, these findings indicate that chemical changes that cause brain injury can happen in the body during COVID.
Studies like this shed light on what is happening inside us that cause the symptoms we experience, and to what extent can we detect or even predict disease or damage in the brain by making measurements in the blood.
A general discussion on NPR about COVID and harm to the brain
From blood clots to infected neurons, how COVID threatens the brain
Human Resources – the most important resource in any enterprise
Marcus Lui - Hong Kong-based consultant, service designer strategist, design thinking practitioner, researcher, enthusiast for Aussie pies, dystopian Netflix shows, airline miles, and stylish fusion food. Growing up with relations across a former British colony and multiple commonwealth countries, Marcus has a keen sense of the nuances of race, and class of these societies. This year, he realized his dreams and joined a major airline during some of the most challenging times in the industry's history. As the Head of End-to-End Customer Experience & Strategy, he connects multiple teams that shape the experience across physical, digital and human touch-points in the traveler’s journey. As the executive director of the non-profit organization Design Thinking in Action (DTIA), he helps oversee programs that enable design thinkers to serve other non-profit and government organizations. Ask him about defending against scope creep, facilitating dialogue between polarized stakeholders, and allegory in Squidgame.
Interesting Reads
Rosalind Franklin was so much more than the ‘wronged heroine’ of DNA - an editorial in Nature, July 2020.
Rosalind Franklin is well known for not receiving the same recognition for her contributions to understanding DNA as James Watson and Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material."
Her other contributions to science are underappreciated.
She was an expert at discerning structures of things we can’t see from the way X-rays scattered from them. Her earliest work answered fundamental questions about the structure of coal, why products of burning coal - char and coke - burn differently, and why only coke is a good fuel for processes requiring intensive heat, like making steel.
She also illuminated the structure of plant viruses, and then began foundational work to understand the polio virus.
She died in 1956 of ovarian cancer at the age of 37. According to this article, a year later, her collaborators, John Finch and Aaron Klug, dedicated their publication of the structure of the polio virus to her memory, and Aaron Klug won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 for “his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes” - work that helped us understand numerous viruses.
About
The Weekly RoundUp is Clear Water Science Consulting’s weekly newsletter – a collection of news from select locales, sharable business updates and insights, and features of interesting people and media.
Clear Water Science Consulting empowers science and scientists through effective communication. Our main activities are science communication (content creation, editing, technical review) and full-suite coaching for people interested in science and research (communication and soft skills coaching, research coaching, career coaching) – one-on-one and workshops.
Lately, we’ve expanded into personal coaching, where the same curiosity, inquiry, patience, and persistence is helping people help themselves become more empowered actors of their own lives.
Visit our website to learn more about our vision, services, portfolio, and reviews.
For our regular content, check out our updates and science posts, many of them about COVID, on LinkedIn.
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Neither science nor the human experience has borders. As ambassadors for GBO, the unboring business club, Hong Kong, we provide opportunities for business owners in HK and around the globe to build friendships, rapport, and identify opportunities.