Tag: science

Review – Crypt

Posted March 8, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Crypt

Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond

by Alice Roberts

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 352
Rating: five-stars
Synopsis:

In her previous two bestsellers, Professor Alice Roberts powerfully and evocatively revived people of the past through examining their burial rites, bringing a fresh perspective on how they lived. In Crypt, Professor Roberts brings us face to face with individuals who lived and died between ten and five centuries ago.

The stories in this book are not comforting tales; there’s a focus on pathology, on disease and injury, and the experience of human suffering in the past. We learn of an episode of terrible brutality, when hate speech unleashed a tide of violence against an ethnic minority; of the devastation caused by incurable epidemics sweeping through medieval Europe; of a protracted battle between Church and State for the heart of England – a battle that saw the most famous tomb in the country created and destroyed; and a tumultuous story, forged in the heat of warfare, that takes us out of the Middle Ages into the sixteenth century and the reign of Henry VIII.

In the Middle Ages, there’s barely a written note for most people’s lives. The information we can extract from archaeological human remains represents is an essential tool for understanding our history. Most of these dead will remain anonymous. But, in the thrilling final chapter, Professor Roberts introduces an individual whose life and bones were marked by chronic debilitating disease – and whose name might just be found in history…

I was really excited about Alice Roberts’ Crypt coming out, because I enjoyed both Ancestors (my review) and Buried (my review), and this essentially concludes the trilogy, making it a survey through time about burial practices and archaeological finds in Britain. Crypt in particular was extra-exciting to me because it promised to discuss palaeo/archaeopathology, meaning looking in more depth at how people died, including whether infectious disease may have been involved. There are three chapters (of the seven) which deal heavily with this, discussing leprosy (Mycobacterium leprae), the Black Death (Yersinia pestis), and syphilis (Treponema pallidum) — obviously right up my street as someone who is fascinated by infectious disease (and especially leprosy’s cousin, Mycobacterium tuberculosis).

It was everything I’d hoped for, discussing deaths throughout the Middle Ages and going pretty in-depth about the stories we can see written into bone, plus the ways we’ve been able to find the trace of infectious diseases that are less apparent, or potentially ambiguous. The methods used weren’t too much of a surprise to me (“fishing” for ancient disease DNA using primers definitely occurred to me as a possibility), but it’s still fascinating to see it discussed at a bit more length.

As usual, Roberts writes clearly and engagingly, though maybe I could’ve done with slightly less about Henry VIII’s Mary Rose — I get that context is important, but I’m just not that interested in the Tudors and their squabbles, and I think it could’ve done with a bit less about that.

One thing I do wish is that the book used numbered references. I know it’s for a wider audience, but it’s so hard to follow up any particular interesting claim if I can’t find the paper or book it’s from, even when a detailed references section is included (as here).

Still, I enjoyed it very much, and I wish I had three more lined up just like it.

Rating: 5/5

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Review – The Hidden World

Posted February 29, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Hidden World

The Hidden World: How Insects Sustain Our Life on Earth Today and Will Shape Our Lives Tomorrow

by George McGavin

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 288
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Insects conquered the Earth long before we did and will remain here long after we're gone. They outnumber us in the billions and are essential to many of the natural processes that keep us alive and that we take for granted. Yet, despite this, very few of us know much about the hidden world of insects.

In this fascinating new book, entomologist and broadcaster George McGavin takes a deep dive to reveal the unknown truths about the most successful and enduring animal group the world has ever seen, and to show the unseen effects this vast population has on our planet, if only we care to look.

McGavin explores not only the incredible traits that insects have evolved to possess, such as dragonflies that can fly across oceans without resting or beetles that lay their eggs exclusively in corpses, but also the vital lessons we have learnt from them, including how therapy using maggots can save lives and how bees can help grow rich tomato yields.

The Hidden World reveals the wonderful complexity of our relationship with insects, how they have changed the course of our history and how, if we continue to learn from them, they could even be the key to our future and survival.

George McGavin’s The Hidden World comes across as a bit of a grab-bag of random thoughts about insects, particularly given the random insertion of interviews with various naturalists and entomologists mid-chapter. Each one does go some way toward illustrating the point of the chapter, but it still breaks up the flow and makes things feel a bit disorganised.

For all that McGavin is clearly enthusiastic about insects, and dying to share all kinds of facts and figures about them… there wasn’t a lot new for me here. It’s more of a primer for people who aren’t already interested in insects (which generally I wouldn’t say I am, but I have read several other popular science books and studied a degree of medical entomology — so, of necessity, I probably know more than the average person).

So as always it’s enjoyable to read something by a person who is enthusiastic about their subject, but I wasn’t blown away by it.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Lost Boys

Posted February 24, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Lost Boys

The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif's Robbers Cave Experiment

by Gina Perry

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 384
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

The fascinating true story of one of the most controversial psychological experiments of the modern era — a real-life Lord of the Flies.

Competition. Prejudice. Discrimination. Conflict.

In 1954, a group of boys attended a remote summer camp where they were split into two groups, and encouraged to bully, harass, and demonise each other. The results would make history as one of social psychology’s classic — and most controversial — studies: the Robbers Cave experiment.

Conducted at the height of the Cold War, officially the experiment had a happy ending: the boys reconciled, and psychologist Muzafer Sherif demonstrated that while hatred and violence are powerful forces, so too are cooperation and harmony. Today it is proffered as proof that under the right conditions warring groups can make peace. Yet the true story of the experiments is far more complex, and more chilling.

In The Lost Boys, Gina Perry explores the experiment and its consequences, tracing the story of Sherif, a troubled outsider who struggled to craft an experiment that would vanquish his personal demons. Drawing on archival material and new interviews, Perry pieces together a story of drama, mutiny, and intrigue that has never been told before.

I really enjoyed Gina Perry’s book about Stanley Milgram’s most famous experiments, Behind the Shock Machine. It shook up the received wisdom about Milgram, and made it clear that he interfered with the data he was presenting, cherry-picked what he wanted to share in order to make his own interpretation inevitable, etc. It’s a book that’s stuck with me, though it’s been a few years since I read it now.

So I was eager to dig into The Lost Boys, which discusses the experiments on groups of young boys made by Muzafer Sherif, designed to play out his theories about how groups can turn on one another and then be reconciled. The book discusses these theories, and then goes off into trying to understand Sherif himself and where these theories came from.

It never manages to be as surprising and illuminating as Behind the Shock Machine, though I did find it interesting, and I think that’s because Sherif’s conclusions are less well-known. I knew about Stanley Milgram’s work like it was in the air (bearing in mind of course that I’m a particular kind of voracious reader and learner), and his work is so well known in the field, so shaking it up makes a real buzz. In this case, less so, and it’s less shocking to find that an experimenter we’re consistently shown manipulating his subjects to get the results he wants was, well, manipulating his results to get what he wanted. That’s apparent early, so there’s no shock going into the deep-dive. Muzafer Sherif would have liked to believe in his own mythology, but for my money he was no Milgram.

It all comes out as a somewhat uncertain book, leaving Perry ambivalent about how to interpret the impacts of the studies on the lives of the participants. She suggests that it was formative for them, that the studies were unethical, but it all comes out much more muted than her conclusions in Behind the Shock Machine.

I’m glad I read it, but my worldview hasn’t been upended.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Soonish

Posted February 18, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Soonish

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/Or Ruin Everything

by Zach Weinersmith, Kelly Weinersmith

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 368
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

What will the world of tomorrow be like? How does progress happen? And why do we not have a lunar colony already? What is the hold-up?

In this smart and funny book, celebrated cartoonist Zach Weinersmith and noted researcher Dr. Kelly Weinersmith give us a snapshot of what's coming next -- from robot swarms to nuclear fusion powered-toasters. By weaving their own research, interviews with the scientists who are making these advances happen, and Zach's trademark comics, the Weinersmiths investigate why these technologies are needed, how they would work, and what is standing in their way.

New technologies are almost never the work of isolated geniuses with a neat idea. A given future technology may need any number of intermediate technologies to develop first, and many of these critical advances may appear to be irrelevant when they are first discovered. The journey to progress is full of strange detours and blind alleys that tell us so much about the human mind and the march of civilization.

To this end, Soonish investigates ten different emerging fields, from programmable matter to augmented reality, from space elevators to robotic construction, to show us the amazing world we will have, you know, soonish.

I didn’t love Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s Soonish as much as I liked A City on Mars: I think that’s partly because the latter is much more of a deep dive, whereas the chapters here are necessarily a bit shallower, since they’re looking at multiple different technologies, and don’t have the time to get into the nitty gritty as much. There’s also some information (and even jokes) that feels repetitive if you’ve already read A City on Mars already, as well.

That said, they pick an interesting raft of likely technologies and start picking into why we don’t have them yet, why they feel within reach, and what we need to figure out to make them reality. The tone is fairly light, but they explain things pretty well.

After a certain point the humour does start to grate a bit, I must admit; I didn’t find that in A City on Mars, and of course, your mileage may vary.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – How To Make A Vaccine

Posted February 10, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Review – How To Make A Vaccine

How To Make a Vaccine

by John Rhodes

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 160
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Distinguished expert in vaccine development John Rhodes tells the story of the first approved COVID-19 vaccines and offers an essential, up-to-the-minute primer on how scientists discover, test, and distribute vaccines.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has affected every corner of the world, changing our relationship to our communities, to our jobs, and to each other, the most pressing question has been—when will it end? Researchers around the globe are urgently trying to answer this question by racing to test and distribute a vaccine that could end the greatest public health threat of our time. In How to Make a Vaccine, an expert who has firsthand experience developing vaccines tells an optimistic story of how three hundred years of vaccine discovery and a century and a half of immunology research have come together at this powerful moment—and will lead to multiple COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. John Rhodes draws on his experience as an immunologist, including working alongside a young Anthony Fauci, to unravel the mystery of how vaccines are designed, tested, and produced at scale for global deployment. Concise and accessible, this book describes in everyday language how the immune system evolved to combat infection, how viruses responded by evolving ways to evade our defenses, and how vaccines do their work. That history, and the pace of current research developments, make Rhodes hopeful that multiple vaccines will protect us. Today the complex workings of the immune system are well understood. The tools needed by biomedical scientists stand ready to be used, and more than 160 vaccine candidates have already been produced. But defeating COVID-19 won’t be the end of the story: Rhodes describes how discoveries today are also empowering scientists to combat future threats to global health, including a recent breakthrough in the development of genetic vaccines, which have never before been used in humans.

As the world prepares for a vaccine, Rhodes offers a current and informative look at the science and strategies that deliver solutions to the crisis.

For a short book, John Rhodes’ How To Make a Vaccine is surprisingly in-depth. Motivated by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Rhodes discusses how vaccines are manufactured, along with some of the history of vaccination and the cultural reaction to it. While most of this obviously isn’t new to me (as someone studying for my MSc in infectious diseases), his explanations are very clear.

I did find that after a while he got a little too in depth, towards the end of the book, discussing every single possible type of vaccine and adjuvant. For me, it got a little tedious because I know this stuff in slightly more depth… and I worry that for a layperson, it’s actually a bit too much depth. It’s hard for me to judge, though, as I haven’t been a layperson for a while now!

If you’re curious about the topic, and ready for some of the ins and outs of the regulatory proces, different types of vaccine and adjuvant, etc, I think this would be of interest, all the same.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Blue

Posted February 3, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Blue

Blue: The Science and Secrets of Nature's Rarest Colour

by Kai Kupferschmidt

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 224
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Blue is the most widely beloved color—but in nature, it’s the rarest hue of all. True, physics paints the sea and sky blue, but we can’t bottle this trick of the light. And blue pigment requires such complex chemistry that blue creatures, plants, and minerals are few indeed. Artists and kings have treasured blue dye like precious gold since the time of the pharoahs—and who today can help but marvel at a morpho butterfly in the rain forest or a blue jay at the window?

Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been enraptured by blue since childhood. In his quest to understand the mysteries of his favorite color, he takes readers on a vivid journey—from a biotech lab in Japan and a volcanic lake in Oregon to his native Germany, home of the last blue-feathered Spix’s macaws. Deep underground where blue crystals grow, and miles overhead where astronauts gaze at our “blue marble” planet—wherever he finds this alluring color, it always has a story to tell.

Kai Kupferschmidt’s Blue is a book-length meditation on all things, well, you guessed it. It discuss blue as a pigment, blue as a historical and cultural thing, blue in linguistics, blue in plants, blue dye… you name it, it discusses it. Kupferschmidt is fascinated, and he’s sharing the journey, and along the way he explains some complex things very succinctly and clearly.

The book is also beautifully illustrated, all in colour, and has a section with further reading and sources, including image sources. All-in-all, beautifully presented and a joy to read — exactly the kind of curiosity I enjoy, zooming in on one subject and unravelling the things that touch it.

It’s shorter than it looks, given the illustrations and the full pages printed blue; I’d say it’s meant to be an object you enjoy looking at as much as anything else. I sped through it!

Rating: 4/5

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Review – A City on Mars

Posted January 30, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – A City on Mars

A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?

by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 448
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered:

Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism?

With deep expertise, a winning sense of humor, and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.

Get in, we’re going to Mars.

Zach and Kelly Weinersmith cover a lot of information about the colonisation of Mars in this book, but they do so in a breezy, conversational way that makes it really easy to read. I found the whole thing fascinating, if a bit disheartening: somehow from popular culture you’d think we were really close to putting settlements on Mars, at least within the next decade or something, but the Weinersmiths make it clear we’re not there yet, for a bunch of reasons.

Those reasons can roughly speaking be broken up into categories: the things we don’t know about human bodies and how they’ll react to low or no-gravity situations, the technology we don’t yet have, the stuff we don’t yet know about Mars, and the legal framework that is currently ambiguous/contested/not likely to produce happy, harmonious space settlements.

The whole time I was reading, I couldn’t stop thinking about James S.A. Corey’s Expanse books, which wrestle with the aftermath of these issues in a fictionalised way: Belters are physically different to those born on Earth, the whole political structure (and the implosions thereof), the issue of childbirth, etc, etc.

Anyway, the Weinersmiths have solid reasonings for the things they assert, it all makes sense, it’s wonderfully readable for the layperson, and there are lots of illustrations which make it all a bit more fun along the way.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Science of Sin

Posted January 19, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Review – The Science of Sin

The Science of Sin: Why we do the things we know we shouldn't

by Jack Lewis

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

It can often seem that we are utterly surrounded by temptation, from the ease of online shopping and the stream of targeted advertising encouraging us to greedily acquire yet more stuff, to the coffee, cake and fast-food shops that line our streets, beckoning us in to over-indulge on all the wrong things. It can feel like a constant battle to stay away from the temptations we know we shouldn't give in to. Where exactly do these urges come from? If we know we shouldn't do something, for the sake of our health, our pockets or our reputation, why is it often so very hard to do the right thing? Anyone who has ever wondered why they never seem to be able to stick to their diet, anyone to whom the world seems more vain and self-obsessed than ever, anyone who can't understand why love-cheats pursue their extra-marital affairs, anyone who struggles to resist the lure of the comfy sofa, or anyone who makes themselves bitter through endless comparison with other people - this book is for you.

The Science of Sin brings together the latest findings from neuroscience research to shed light on the universally fascinating subject of temptation - where it comes from, how to resist it and why we all tend to succumb from time to time. With each chapter inspired by one of the seven deadly sins, neurobiologist Jack Lewis illuminates the neural battles between temptation and restraint that take place within our brains, suggesting strategies to help us better manage our most troublesome impulses with the explicit goal of improving our health, our happiness and our productivity - helping us to say `no!' more often, especially when it really counts.

The Science of Sin takes on a lot of religious baggage, for all that Jack Lewis, its author, says that he’s an atheist. To some extent that’s inevitable given his background, and his choice to shape the book around the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins, looking for neurological and evolutionary explanations for the origins of each — both their pitfalls and their utility.

The problem is that it inevitably becomes very moralising. He does try to point out when certain neurological things might not be someone’s choice, but he seems to have more sympathy for paedophiles than for fat people, and is very certain that being fat is almost totally a choice people make (when in fact there are many contributing causes, including sheer poverty, where good food choices are not always available), and a moral one that impacts badly on society and on everyone around them. Fatness is also unequivocally bad for you, in Lewis’ view, where the real picture is more mixed (fat people, for instance, have lower 30-day mortality from bacterial pneumonia and have better survival rates and reduced immune depletion when living with HIV) and thinness is no guarantor of health of any kind.

(Important note: this is not something I’m interested in debating in the comments on this blog. I’ve studied some of the science of nutrition in relation to immunity as part of my MSc, but you’re best off heading to the literature with an open mind and a careful eye for bias — your own and that of the papers you find.)

In almost every chapter, he finds a way to reference narcissism, blame fat people, suggest fat people are narcissistic, and so on. And again, he treats these as moral issues, failures that people should rectify.

In some cases, he isn’t wrong, but he’s replacing religious moralising about it with a kind of secular moralising about it that sits badly with any effort to be objective. Combine that with his reliance on scans like fMRI to tell us about what’s going on in someone’s brain, and a lot of his conclusions are questionable: you can get apparently significant results from the brain of a dead salmon, with fMRI, an issue that he very briefly references before waving it away and saying that fMRI is the tool we have, so he’s going to use it.

For me, there was a kind of entertainment value in watching him build up his argument, but I was aware of the one-sided nature of his search for appropriate sources, and not appreciative of his moralising.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Tickets for the Ark

Posted January 7, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Tickets for the Ark

Tickets for the Ark: From Wasps to Whales - How Do We Choose What to Save?

by Rebecca Nesbit

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 256
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Our planet hasn't seen the current rate of extinction since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and global conservation efforts are failing to halt this. As a society, we face choices which will determine the fate of Earth's estimated 8.7 million species, including humans. As wildlife declines, conservation needs to make trade-offs. But what should we conserve and why?

Are we wrong to love bees and hate wasps? Are native species more valuable than newcomers (aka invasives)? Should some animals be culled to protect others, and what do we want the 'natural world' to look like? There are many surprising answers in Rebecca Nesbit's lively, stimulating book, which sows the seeds of a debate we urgently need to have.

Rebecca Nesbit’s Tickets for the Ark attempts to be somewhat nuanced about the topic of conservation, and to dig into why we want to save the creatures we want to save — and why we might want to save other animals instead. It’s not always obvious that we might want to save parasites, but we know little about some parasites, and little about what advantages they might offer taken as part of a whole ecosystem. Nesbit also talks about what we define as “wild” vs “domesticated”, how our responsibilities differ between the two, and how much responsibility we might want to or need to take for animals in rewilding projects.

That’s just a taster of the various dilemmas she serves up, but hopefully it gives an idea of the gist of the book. I appreciate that she recognises the potential role of animals that people don’t like — wasps, including parasitic wasps, and other ectoparasites like lice — and the issue that it’s very difficult to decide what counts as a “native” plant. All cut-offs are artificial, and do we really want to roll back time? Maybe we need a new normal?

None of it came as a surprise to me, since it’s a topic I’ve thought about a fair bit, but it’s an attempt at nuance in a world that sometimes lacks it, and I appreciated that. It was a slower read than I expected, but full of helpful context that can get a layperson properly interested and involved in the hypotheticals.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones

Posted January 6, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones

Dragons' Teeth and Thunderstones: The Quest for the Meaning of Fossils

by Ken McNamara

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 288
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

For at least half a million years, people have been doing some very strange things with fossils. Long before a few seventeenth-century minds started to decipher their true, organic nature, fossils had been eaten, dropped in goblets of wine, buried with the dead, and adorned bodies. What triggered such curious behavior was the belief that some fossils could cure illness, protect against being poisoned, ease the passage into the afterlife, ward off evil spirits, and even kill those who were just plain annoying. But above all, to our early prehistoric ancestors, fossils were the very stuff of artistic inspiration.

Drawing on archaeology, mythology, and folklore, Ken McNamara takes us on a journey through prehistory with these curious stones, and he explores humankind's unending quest for the meaning of fossils.

Ken McNamara’s Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones is basically a history of how people have related to and understood fossils, how they’ve used them and appreciated them, and the things we’ve believed about them. He discusses a lot of different superstitions, and bits of evidence about how ancient peoples thought about fossils; I’m not always convinced, particularly about the one where the dead five-armed starfish-like creature looks like a human, especially with a hole between its legs. Seems like wishful thinking to me.

In the end it’s an interesting survey, best when McNamara keeps his theories out of it (I’m not sure how wide the agreement is about things like “obviously that was viewed as a human”, but it doesn’t convince me anyway). It has some illustrations so you can see what he’s referring to, though they’re in black and white, so can be a little muddy.

Adrienne Mayor’s books might also be interesting to people who are tantalised by these ideas, particularly The First Fossil Hunters. McNamara spends a lot of time looking a bit further back in the past, beyond the point where we can refer to literature with our questions.

Rating: 2/5

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