- Johns Hopkins’ Revolutionary New Gel Cured 100% of Mice With Aggressive Brain Cancer SciTechDaily
- Dual-action hydrogel prevents brain cancer returning in 100% of test mice New Atlas
- New Gel Therapy 100 Percent Effective Curing Aggressive Brain Cancer In Mice IFLScience
- Self-Assembling Chemoimmunotherapy Hydrogel Treats 100% of Glioblastoma-Bearing Mice Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
- New Gel Treatment Wipes Out Deadly Brain Cancer in Mice – Offers Hope For Defeating Glioblastoma in Humans Neuroscience News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Johns
John’s Top 5 PS5, PS4 Games of 2022
Our individual Game of the Year articles allow our lovely team of writers to share their own personal PS5 and PS4 picks for 2022. Today, it’s the turn of reviewer John Cal McCormick.
I really enjoyed my time with Cult of the Lamb. I 8/10 enjoyed it according to my review. It’s grisly, and dark, and bloody, and I named my cat friends in the game after my real life cats and then they died in horrible ways and it made me sad. That one’s on me though. I really should have seen that coming. Name your followers after people you don’t like. That’s my advice. I should have named them after people who wronged me, like that kid that bit me during a football game back in ’89. Yeah, you. Timothy. You son of a–
I liked Ragnarok a lot but I’m not as hot on it as a lot of people – especially other reviewers, it seems, given the staggering Metacritic score. I think the combat is great and some of the characters are fantastic – Odin, Thor, and Freya, in particular – but when it was all wrapped up I was left feeling more like “oh, it’s over” than anything else. Still, the bosses are much improved from the previous game and the highs generally are higher than that game, too, even if there are more lows. I don’t know. It’s good.
Oh look, it’s PlayStation’s answer to a question that nobody asked. £70 for a remake that’s not even a full remake of a game that’s not even ten years old and has already been remastered once? Yeah, we all moaned about it. But then like millions of other idiots I bought it anyway and it was fantastic. Did I want it? No. Did I need it? No. Did I pay £70 for it and thoroughly enjoy every second of it? Yes, I did. What can I say? It’s just a great game and now it’s even better than it was before. Totally unnecessary but brilliant all the same.
Horizon often seems like the red-haired step-child of the PlayStation family. People are really sleeping on it or dunking on it, perhaps because it’s just another ticky-box open world game or perhaps because Aloy actually has red hair. Maybe they should have sold out and made her blonde. Anyway, this game is, for me, one of the best ever PlayStation first party titles. The robot dinosaur battles are fantastic, the game is utterly beautiful, I really like Aloy as a character, and the story in this one is so wild that it actually made me laugh out loud at one point from the sheer audacity of where the narrative goes. Love it.
Yeah, I know. But sometimes you just have to face facts. Elden Ring is one of the easiest 10/10s I’ve ever played. It’s a game that feels special from the opening moments and the map just keeps getting bigger and the secrets more rewarding and the boss encounters more thrilling. It’s awesome, in the literal sense of the word. It’s a game that inspires genuine wonder, repeatedly, for dozens of hours. I’m thinking of starting it again right now, and I already beat it twice this year. In any year this game would be in the conversation for Game of the Year, and in a lot of them it would win. An all time great.
What do you think of John’s personal Game of the Year picks? Feel free to agree wholeheartedly, or berate relentlessly in the comments section below.
Johns Hopkins Researchers Have Identified a Potential New Treatment Target for Sleep Apnea
Sleep apnea is a potentially dangerous sleep disorder in which breathing stops and restarts many times while you sleep.
According to a recent mouse study, the target is an ion channel that has been already shown to impact blood pressure in obese mice.
According to Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists, a recent study with obese mice adds to evidence that specialized channel proteins are potential therapeutic targets for sleep apnea and other unusually slow breathing disorders in obese individuals.
The protein, a cation channel known as TRPM7, is located in carotid bodies, minute sensory organs in the neck that sense changes in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, as well as certain hormones such as leptin, in the bloodstream. TRPM7 proteins aid in the transport and regulation of positively charged molecules into and out of the cells of the carotid bodies.
Lenise Kim, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the leader of the current study, expands on earlier results from the lab that indicated TRPM7 had a role in the development of high blood pressure in mice.
The recent research, which was detailed in a study that was recently published in The Journal of Physiology, demonstrated that TRPM7 is involved in suppressing breathing in obese mice that exhibit symptoms of sleep-disordered breathing.
Up to 45% of obese Americans are thought to suffer from sleep-disordered breathing, which is characterized by breathing that stops and restarts while a person is asleep. Untreated, the condition can worsen the course of heart disease and diabetes, cause significant fatigue, and even death due to poor oxygenation. Weight loss and nightly use of continuous positive airway pressure devices, or CPAP, can help alleviate sleep apnea, however, CPAP treatment is often poorly tolerated by patients.
“CPAP actually works for most patients, the fact is that most patients are not adherent to this treatment,” says Kim. “So knowing that TRPM7 contributed to high blood pressure and sleep-disordered breathing, we wondered if blocking or eliminating that channel could offer a new treatment target.”
Using silencing
“This suggests that treatments designed to reduce or erase TRPM7 in carotid bodies would not be workable for people living in low-oxygen environments, such as those in very high altitudes, or for those with conditions that already limit blood oxygen saturation, such as lung disease,” says Kim.
The team’s findings also illustrate that the hormone leptin — which is produced in fat cells and is responsible for curbing appetite — may cause an increase in TRPM7 channels. Leptin is already known to accelerate production and increase the concentration of TRPM7 in carotid bodies. In obese mice who possess more fat cells, the increased amount of leptin may lead to an oversaturation of TRPM7. These high levels of the cation channel in turn may lead to the low respiration rates observed in obese mice with TRPM7.
“We have shown that the genetic knockdown of TRPM7 in carotid bodies reduces suppressed respiration in sleep-disordered breathing,” says Vsevolod (Seva) Polotsky, M.D., Ph.D., director of sleep research and professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “While more research is needed, carotid body TRPM7 is a promising therapeutic target not only for hypertension in obesity but also for abnormal breathing during sleep associated with obesity.”
Reference: “TRPM7 channels regulate breathing during sleep in obesity by acting peripherally in the carotid bodies” by Lenise J. Kim, Mi-Kyung Shin, Huy Pho, Wan-Yee Tang, Nishitha Hosamane, Frederick Anokye-Danso, Rexford S. Ahima, James S. K. Sham, Luu V. Pham and Vsevolod Y. Polotsky, 10 October 2022, The Journal of Physiology.
DOI: 10.1113/JP283678
The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Foundation, the American Thoracic Society, and the American Heart Association (AHA).
The authors of this study report no conflict of interest.
At Elton John’s White House concert, tears and a trip down memory lane
Friday night, Sir Elton offered a different statement in the form of the ebullient six-song, solo piano concert he played to a crowd of 2,000 people on the South Lawn of the White House at the invitation of President Biden and first lady Jill Biden.
“I don’t know what to say. What a dump!” said John, laughing, in a sparkling black blazer as he peered through red-tinted glasses at the floodlit columns of the South Portico towering above him, playing under a glass-paneled tent, while members of the Marine Corps band fanned out along the steps to the Truman Balcony in red dress uniforms. “I’ve played in some places before that have been beautiful, but this is probably the icing on the cake.”
Tears and joy were more the order of the day than politics at an event the Bidens said they intended to be a concert for the American people called “A Night When Hope and History Rhyme.” The evening ended with the president surprising John with the National Humanities Medal, to which the singer welled up with tears, but that felt like a capstone to the larger message of celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the bipartisan unity needed to bring an end to the disease by 2030 — as John and the United Nations have said is the goal.
The last time John played the White House was at a 1998 state dinner during the Clinton administration honoring British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
According to a video feed of the event and interviews with those in attendance (media access was restricted), John appeared genuinely thrilled as he played beneath a glass-paneled tent, with the audience surrounding all sides of his stage. He plowed through several greatest hits: “Your Song,” “Tiny Dancer,” “Rocket Man,” “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” “Crocodile Rock” and “I’m Still Standing.”
Teachers, first responders, and LGBTQ activists made up the largest portion of the crowd, and had all been allowed to bring plus ones. They were the ones John thanked first, well before he acknowledged the Bidens: “They’re the heroes to me.”
Other guests included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, and Attorney General Merrick Garland — not to mention actress Anna Kendrick and John’s dear friend Billie Jean King. To those who recognized her, Ruby Bridges, the civil rights advocate who became one of the first Black children to integrate New Orleans’ all-White public school system when she was 6 years old, might have been the most impressive luminary there.
Charlotte Clymer, a D.C.-based writer and LGBTQ activist who was pleasantly surprised to get the invite, found herself overcome with emotion. “I wouldn’t even say bipartisan, it felt more nonpartisan,” she told The Washington Post. “Everyone was there because they cared about folks with HIV and AIDS. And of course, they wanted to see Elton John perform.” The White House had focused on inviting members of vulnerable communities, and Clymer said the crowd felt notably diverse — racially diverse, politically diverse, even gender diverse. For once, she added, “I was not the only trans person at one of these events, which was nice to see.”
As appealing as the narrative is of Dark Brandon sub-tweeting his predecessor by feting his favorite musician, this was not an event instigated by John as a form of high-level trolling. The conversation had started with an invitation to a “History Talks” symposium on Saturday at Constitution Hall, featuring the likes of Serena Williams and former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, sponsored by the History Channel and A&E, which also sponsored the concert. But that set date was also the day of John’s concert in the District at Nationals Park, “so it evolved into the opportunity to perform the night before on the South Lawn of the White House. And, you know, what a spectacularly beautiful setting,” David Furnish, John’s husband and manager, said on Sunday.
“Elton loved the idea and the whole evening was pitched to us as a nonpartisan event even though President Biden is in the White House,” Furnish continued, “but a nonpartisan event which was really to talk about common humanity, healing through unity, philanthropy.”
In the past, though, John did have a friendly relationship with Trump. He played at the former president’s third wedding, and Trump had even gone around telling people he’d secured John for the inauguration. Despite John asking him not to, Trump frequently used “Tiny Dancer” at his rallies. He also gave the nickname “Rocket Man” to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Instead, at this concert, John acknowledged a different Republican, former first lady Laura Bush, who had come with daughter Jenna Bush Hager and her children, saying that the Bush administration’s creation of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, “was the most incredible thing,” adding, “We never would have got this far without the President Bush administration giving us that money.” He even gave a shout-out to Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) as a supporter in the fight against AIDS, who, said John, “to his credit has always come through.”
As John came up with his set list, Furnish said, there was only one song he wanted to make sure to sing: “Crocodile Rock.” Years ago, when he and Biden, the vice president at the time, were on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” the same night, Biden told him that, as a single father, he used to drive his two sons around and sing that song in the car. Later on, said Furnish, he and John went to visit President Barack Obama in the White House during the time when, unbeknown to them, Biden’s son Beau was terminally ill with brain cancer and unconscious in the hospital.
Biden had asked John to meet with his staff, “which I thought really said so much about him,” said Furnish. As Furnish remembers being told, Biden went to the hospital and told the unconscious Beau that Elton John had come by the White House that day and he sung “Crocodile Rock” to him. “He didn’t come back to consciousness. But we’d been told that he smiled and it definitely, you know, triggered something,” said Furnish. “So we knew that was a song with a real journey that had been on a real journey for the president. And so it was important for Elton that it was included in the set.”
Before he launched into “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” John also acknowledged Jeanne White-Ginder, the mother of Ryan White, who had died of AIDS-related complications in 1990 and in his short life had become a symbol of the cruelty endured by the epidemic’s victims. The White family was John’s entry into becoming an AIDS activist. He’d met them, “and I got to love them and look at them and they faced such terrible hostility,” he said from the stage. “And yet when Ryan was dying in the hospital in Indianapolis, the last week of his life where I went and tried to help Jeanne do menial things, there was no hatred. There’s no hatred. There was just forgiveness.”
“It was a very heartwarming experience to see somebody that gives so much of themselves and wants no attention whatsoever,” White-Ginder told The Post on Sunday, recalling those days. Six months after White’s death, John checked into rehab for cocaine and alcohol addiction and got sober. Onstage Friday he said the family “saved my life.
The moment when Biden gave John the National Humanities Medal was a complete surprise not just to John, but also to Furnish, who as his manager usually knows everything. John had said he was completely “flabbergasted,” and burst into tears during his citation.
“Elton had absolutely no idea he was getting the medal. It’s very rare to see Elton rendered speechless on anything, and when that came out, he was completely gobsmacked,” said Furnish. “And just everyone felt the love.”
Britney Spears and Elton John’s ‘Hold Me Closer’ Previewed
When the new Britney Spears single drops on Friday, it will be the first music the singer has released in six years—to the day. Spears’ most recent album, her ninth, Glory, came out on August 26, 2016. And the time since, which included a high-profile emancipation from her conservatorship, has been tumultuous, to put it mildly. A musical comeback is the move, and Spears teamed up with Elton John for assistance.
John, looking very much the grande dame of pop that he is, recently unveiled their long-teased collaboration, “Hold Me Closer,” for patrons at the Cannes spot La Guérite. This was livestreamed and then uploaded to John’s Instagram:
The rub? John sang over most of the track as he played it in public. A shorter but clearer preview of the song more recently uploaded reveals an update of John’s “Tiny Dancer” with vocals by Spears merely dusted over the hook. It sure sounds like a hit…namely, the 2021 hit John had with Dua Lipa, “Cold Heart,” which interpolated past John hits like “Rocket Man” and “Sacrifice.” John also recently revealed the apparent single cover on his Instagram:
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Meanwhile, Spears posted this:
Good luck to all involved parties in this new/old endeavor in pop music.
Good luck to all of us, for that matter as the biggest music news story of the last 24 hours involves an AI rapper named FN Meka being dropped from Capitol Records after conjuring racist stereotypes and saying the N-word in its music. The project’s effective mastermind, Anthony Martini, said in an interview last year that to power the Meka project, his team had “developed a proprietary AI technology that analyzes certain popular songs of a specified genre and generates recommendations for the various elements of song construction: lyrical content, chords, melody, tempo, sounds, etc. We then combine these elements to create the song.” Dystopia: now in aesthetic form!
Genius did some pecking around last year and suggested the human (for now) voice behind Meka belongs to a non-Black man, though Martini told the New York Times “’he’s a Black guy’ — and ‘not this malicious plan of white executives. It’s literally no different from managing a human artist, except that it’s digital.’” Got it!
Something tells me that despite the cut major-label ties, this isn’t the last we’ll be hearing from FN Meka. What a world!
- Julia Fox would like to clarify she is not an advocate for child labor: “I said that kids need to learn skills.” [Instagram]
- Usher says he’s the King of R&B. Whitney Houston is rolling in her grave: That was the title she bestowed upon her-then husband Bobby Brown. [Page Six]
- The anonymous woman suing Horatio Sanz for sexual assault asked the court permission to add SNL alums Jimmy Fallon and Tracy Morgan, as well as Lorne Michaels, as defendants to her lawsuit, alleging that they enabled Sanz. [Variety]
- Megan thee Stallion is requesting $1 million in relief from her record company, which has pushed back over whether her releases constituted albums and applied to her contract. The very nature of what makes an album is at the center of this legal battle. Existential! [People]
- Ladies and gentlemen, he is not floating in space: John Boyega confirms he will not be returning to the Star Wars franchise. [Indiewire]
- This is just a great headline: “Brooklyn Beckham films himself making homemade pizza – but fans think it looks ‘undercooked’” [Mirror]
Ex-Papa John’s CEO claims NFL team owners asked him to get Roger Goodell fired
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Former Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter opened up to Sportscasting late last month about a situation in 2017 in which he claimed Washington Commanders team owner Daniel Snyder and Dallas Cowboys team owner Jerry Jones wanted him to get NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell fired at the height of the national anthem controversy.
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Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and John Schnatter attend the DirecTV Super Saturday Night at Pier 40 on February 1, 2014 in New York City.
(Noam Galai/WireImage)
The New York Post noted Schnatter at the time was feuding with Goodell and blamed him for Papa John’s falling stock. Schnatter was against players kneeling during the national anthem.
Schnatter told Sportscasting he told Snyder and Jones it wasn’t his job to oust Goodell.
“… Remember, Goodell is a coward, and he is incompetent. And he’s just lucky. Jerry Jones, the owner of the Cowboys, Indra Nooyi [former CEO] with PepsiCo, and Dan Snyder all called me — several other folks — about Goodell’s conduct and the way he was handling this. Jones and Dan Snyder … wanted Goodell fired. This is like …the first of November, end of October.
EX-RAIDERS PRESIDENT ALLEGES FIRING WAS RETALIATORY FOR RAISING CONCERNS ABOUT ‘HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT’
INGLEWOOD, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 04: NFL commissioner Roger Goodell looks on before the Las Vegas Raiders play against the Los Angeles Chargers at SoFi Stadium on October 4, 2021 in Inglewood, California.
(Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
“They called and said, ‘You need to take this guy out. You’re the number one sponsor of the league, as far as notoriety and acceptance and association. Everybody loves you, they love Peyton [Manning]. We hate Goodell.”
Schnatter added: “I said, ‘No. This is not my job to fire your commissioner. He works for you. I just sell pizzas. I have a family of small businesses that, you know, probably 35 percent of our spend’s NFL, it’s down 20 percent. This behavior of not addressing the issue to the owners’ and players’ satisfaction is causing me and my franchisees a lot of problems. And this is going on now for two seasons… I had a free shot from two owners to go after Goodell personally. I didn’t go after him in a vicious, venomous way. I just said, ‘Hey, grow up, be a leader, and fix the problem so my small business owners stop taking it on the chin.’”
Goodell would go on to sign another contract. He reportedly requested nearly $50 million per year in addition to the lifetime use of a private jet.
Dan Snyder, center, co-owner and co-CEO of the Washington Commanders, adjusts his mask as he arrives to unveil his NFL football team’s new identity, Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022, in Landover, Md.
(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
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Schnatter eventually resigned as chairman after he was heard saying the N-word on a conference call.
Dr. Madhu Subramanian, Johns Hopkins surgeon, shot driving to work in Baltimore
An attempted carjacking in Baltimore left a doctor with gunshot wounds on his morning commute Friday, according to local reports.
Dr. Madhu Subramanian, a 38-year-old surgeon at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and an assistant professor of surgery, was on his way to work around 7 a.m.
City police said they found a man injured on the 1200 block of East 36th Street in Northeast Baltimore a few minutes later.
Subramanian specializes in acute care surgery, trauma surgery, surgical critical care, burn care and general surgery, according to the hospital’s website.
Johns Hopkins leaders said Subramanian has already been released in an email to staff obtained by the Baltimore Sun.
“With his permission, we can share that Dr. Madhu Subramanian, a trauma and acute care surgeon, was on his way to work at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center when the incident occurred near the 3600 block of Loch Raven Boulevard,” Johns Hopkins Medicine CEO Paul Rothman and Johns Hopkins Health System President Kevin Sowers wrote, according to the paper. “Thankfully, Dr. Subramanian was not seriously injured and has been treated and released.”
The shooting comes as Baltimore and other large American cities see skyrocketing violence, with robberies, shootings and homicides on the rise. Later Friday, police said they responded to another shooting and found two young men, ages 19 and 20, with gunshot wounds. Both of their injuries were considered not life-threatening, according to authorities.
Dr. Joseph Sakran, a fellow Johns Hopkins surgery, addressed his colleague’s shooting in a Twitter thread Friday after he said he treated his Subramanian’s injuries.
“We are so grateful he survived this horrific incident and will be OK,” he wrote.
“In the heat of the moment, we often compartmentalize the emotion that goes along with caring for these injured patients. And we do that in order to effectively make one methodical decision after the other to save a person’s life. How do you do that when it’s one of your own?”
Sakran, who survived a shooting himself as a teenager, added that “Gun Violence is a Public Health Crisis that we face daily in Baltimore, and communities all across America” and called on society to “do better.”
Anyone with information on the shooting was asked to contact Baltimore detectives at (410) 396-2444.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Paige Bueckers returns from 19-game absence, scores 8 points in UConn’s rout over St. John’s
After being sidelined for nearly three months with a left knee injury, reigning national player of the year Paige Bueckers made her much anticipated return in the UConn Huskies’ 93-38 win over St. John’s Friday evening in Hartford, Connecticut.
The sophomore All-American guard took the floor for the first time since Dec. 5 when she checked in at the 3:41 mark of the first quarter to a standing ovation from the XL Center crowd.
Bueckers had missed the previous 19 games for the No. 7 Huskies (21-5) after suffering an anterior tibial plateau fracture and lateral meniscus tear in the final minute of UConn’s 73-54 win over Notre Dame on Dec. 5. She underwent surgery to repair the injury on Dec. 13.
Bueckers came off the bench Friday for the first time in her career, and her first basket since December was a memorable one. With the clock winding down at the end of the first quarter, Bueckers shook her defender and nearly lost the ball before collecting it and sinking an elbow jumper right at the buzzer. Bueckers roared and raised her hands to amp up the student section whom she’d scored in front of before being embraced by her teammates on the bench.
The star guard finished with eight points on 4-for-5 shooting in 12 minutes, with three stints of action before she sat the entire fourth quarter. She played within herself, but looked more and more comfortable creating her own shot and running in transition as the game went on.
“We tried to get her 15 minutes,” coach Geno Auriemma said in a courtside interview with SNY after the game. “I think we got close to that. We’ll see how she feels tomorrow. And hopefully we can do the same thing and maybe a little bit more on Sunday.”
UConn has one more regular-season game, Sunday versus Providence, before the Big East tournament.
Bueckers averaged a team-best 21.2 points, 6.2 assists, 5.5 rebounds and 2.7 steals in the six games she played this season prior to injury. The Huskies started the year 5-1 with her in the lineup, losing to top-ranked South Carolina in the Bahamas Nov. 22, and went 15-4 without her.
At the buzzer: Indiana 76, St. John’s 74 – Inside the Hall
Quick thoughts on a 76-74 win over St. John’s:
How it happened: It looked like Indiana might run St. John’s right off Branch McCracken Court on Wednesday night. The Hoosiers started strong defensively and built a double-figure lead by the 6:45 mark of the first half. As the Red Storm misses continued, however, Indiana’s offense stagnated and the Hoosiers missed an opportunity to build a bigger lead before intermission. After IU claimed its biggest lead of the half at 14, the Hoosiers settled for a 12-point cushion at the half. St. John’s managed just .79 points per possession in the first half on 33.3 percent shooting from the field.
But the Red Storm had an answer. As the Hoosiers failed to clean up the defensive glass, St. John’s seized the opportunity to second chance points. By the 8:49 mark, St. John’s tied the game at 56, but the Hoosiers got a quick five-point burst on a 3-pointer by Jordan Geronimo and a layup from Khristian Lander. The Red Storm tied it again at 65 on a 3-pointer by Julian Champagnie, but Indiana again answered with buckets from Trayce Jackson-Davis and Race Thompson to claim a 69-65 lead at the under four media timeout.
After a pair of Posh Alexander free throws brought St. John’s within one with 54 seconds to play, Race Thompson hit a runner in the lane with 25 seconds to go to push the IU lead to three. Champagnie answered with a jumper with 11.1 seconds to play and St. John’s used its final timeout. St. John’s then fouled Xavier Johnson with 8.4 seconds to play. Johnson split the free throws to make it 76-74 and Champagnie missed a 3-pointer badly as Indiana won its third straight game to start the season.
Standout performers: Jackson-Davis was once again Indiana’s best player, finishing with 18 points, 10 rebounds, four assists and two blocked shots in 37 minutes. But Jordan Geromino, who finished with seven points, was also important as was Miller Kopp, who had 12 points. Thompson’s 15 points were second on the team and he also grabbed five rebounds. Tamar Bates also had a big first half as the freshman scored all 11 of his points before intermission.
Statistics that stands out: Indiana was able to hold off St. John’s despite shooting just 33.3 percent on 3s (6-of-18) and 52.6 percent from the free throw line (52.6 percent). Indiana’s bench outscored St. John’s 20-7.
Final IU individual statistics:
Final tempo-free statistics:
Assembly Call postgame show:
(Photo credit: IU Athletics)
Filed to: St. John’s Red Storm
First Look: Jasper Johns ‘Slice’
At 91, Jasper Johns is turning out impressive and touchingly personal work. During the solitary months of the pandemic, he completed a painting titled “Slice,” and a group of related drawings and prints. Likely to be a standout of his upcoming show, “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” a two-venue retrospective opening Sept. 29 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Slice” is a large, horizontal and predominantly black oil painting that combines unrelated images of a map of outer space and a human knee.
When I first saw it in July in the artist’s barn in Sharon, Conn., I was riveted and asked him to help me decode it. Without elaborating he mentioned a name that was new to me: Margaret Geller.
A few days later I reached Dr. Geller, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, known as the “genius grant.” She’s recognized as a pioneer in mapping the universe. The story of her history with Johns, as it turns out, sheds much light on the genesis of his painting and the role that a random encounter with a person can play in the creation of a work of art.
I learned that she has harbored a fascination with Johns since 1996, when, on a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, she happened to see his “Mirror’s Edge 2” (1993), a chalk-blue and gray canvas scattered with images that felt like clues in a mystery. She was transfixed by the lower half, which contains a ladder, an illustration of a whirling galaxy, and a stick figure falling headfirst through space.
Dr. Geller, now 73, believed that the painting chronicled, of all the crazy things, the highs and lows of researching cosmology. “To me, what the painting said is, you climb up this ladder to the galaxy. You try to understand: How did it originate? What is it made of? And then you fall back through space not knowing whether you are right or wrong.”
She was pleased to find that the galaxy depicted in “Mirror’s Edge 2” was M101. Twice as large as our own Milky Way, M101 was cataloged in the 18th century by the French astronomer Charles Messier, which accounts for the M in its name. Its spiraling arms have earned it an affectionate moniker: the Pinwheel Galaxy.
Dr. Geller couldn’t wait to write Johns to ask how he became so knowledgeable about astronomy. But she had read that he was inordinately private and loath to discuss the meaning of his work. She thought, “I don’t want to write and have him not write back.”
Two decades went by. In the fall of 2018, encouraged by a friend, she finally sent off a letter saying how much “Mirror’s Edge 2” meant to her. She enclosed a computer printout of her own work: a map entitled “Slice of the Universe,” which shows the distribution of nearby galaxies. Its publication, in 1986, brought her and her collaborators great fame in their field.
Six months passed before she heard back from Johns. “It was a very terse letter,” she told me. “I had asked him how he found M101 and the answer I got was, ‘I am not interested in astronomy.’ So I thought that was the end of that.”
It was, in fact, Johns told me, far from the end. Interested in images of all sorts, the artist was intrigued by the map she sent. Googling around, he found a few educational videos in which Dr. Geller explains her work. What is the universe? “It’s our home,” she told a PBS talk-show host in 1993. “It’s the last line in our address.”
Johns is well-known for his own preoccupation with cartography. (The Whitney show will include a selection of his map paintings of the United States, in which his vigorous brushwork crosses state boundaries and at times dissolves them.) Dr. Geller’s map held a special appeal for him. When you look at it closely, the random-seeming dots and galaxies coalesce into a distinct and delectable shape — that of a giant stick figure, a pointillist Gumby with outstretched arms and bowed legs flowing along with the fabric of the universe.
It was an amusing coincidence. Johns had long featured stickmen in his work. They usually appear in little troupes and might be waving paintbrushes or just dancing around the perimeter of things, perhaps a nod to his dear friend Merce Cunningham, the great modern dancer and choreographer, who died in 2009. Now, he learned from the “Slice” map that nature had spun its own alluring stick figure in the midst of the infinite darkness of the firmament.
Early in 2020, Dr. Geller received another letter from Johns, one that startled her. “He told me that he was thinking about making a painting, and since he was old he wasn’t sure if he would finish it. And if he finished it, I would be partly responsible for this painting.”
He had always found inspiration in pre-existing images. You can start with his early “Flag” paintings and his debt to the seamstress Betsy Ross. His use of commonplace subjects, as art-history textbooks point out, spawned the Pop Art movement of the ’60s. But unlike the Pop artists, with their Campbell’s soup cans and comic-book women crying on the phone to their boyfriends, Johns is not interested in satirizing consumer culture. He is a more interior and poetic artist who shows how objects can be entrusted to express feelings and ideas, conjuring presences and absences.
“Slice,” in the end, does borrow from Dr. Geller’s map, as viewers can see when the painting makes its debut in the Whitney half of “Mind/Mirror.” There he is: that funny stickman dangling in the sky, his body rendered in red, blue and green dots rimmed in white pigment.
Other elements are no less important. The painting derives much of its power from its tarry, visceral surface. On the left side, black pigment thins and drips, exposing patches of bare canvas as well as a linear pattern (which happens to be based on Leonardo’s drawings of knots). Light fades. Something is vanishing.
The right side, by contrast, is dominated by a hand-drawn illustration of a knee. It is fixed in place with four little pieces of masking tape that look so real you might be tempted to peel them off the canvas, but they’re just a trompe l’oeil illusion. Johns found the original knee drawing, which was done by a high-school student from Cameroon named Jéan Marc Togodgue, in the office of an orthopedist whom the artist sees for his longtime knee problems.
All in all, “Slice” captures the haphazardness of life, with its mix of the achingly personal (a throbbing knee) and the coldly impersonal (the infinite expanse of outer space) and no clear connection between them. The artist seems to be saying that even his paintings are mere objects, as separate and eternally silent as the maps and illustrations and other oddities they depict.
As Johns lamented when we first met in 1988, “One wants one’s work to be the world, but of course it’s never the world. The work is in the world; it never contains the whole thing.”
On the other hand, “Slice,” I think, is full of genuine linkages that cut across the distances of time and space. Although Dr. Geller has never met the artist or spoke to him on the phone, the painting reminds us that connections between individuals do not always require words. Sometimes an image is enough. And sometimes a painting, as much as a galaxy, can brim with points of light.