The British public’s choice of safety bicycle as Britain’s greatest invention of all times, bypassing scientific achievements such as electricity generation, the jet engine, the invention of vaccination and the discovery of DNA structure, triggered the topic for this Reith’s series of lectures, titled “The triumph of technology”, given by Lord Broers and broadcasted by BBC4. The lectures take place in April and May and their transcripts and recordings can be found here.

“Humankind’s way of life has depended on technology since the beginning of civilization. It can indeed be argued that civilization began when humans first used technologies, moving beyond the merely instinctual and into an era when people began to impose themselves on their environment, going beyond mere existence, to a way of life which enabled them to take increasing advantage of their intellect…In the course of these lectures I shall look at some of the ways in which technologies have grown more complex, and yet how – despite hugely expanded public education – understanding of them has diminished.”

“Modern technology tends to be thought of in terms of the advances brought about by computers and electronic communications but it is in transport, medicine, energy and weaponry that we have seen the greatest impact upon our lives. It is these areas that distinguish the first world from the second and third worlds.

If poverty and disease are to be alleviated and the environment sustained, then technology must be harnessed on a vast and all inclusive scale. Large scale industry must be involved. Significant technology is not created by lone workers but by tens and hundreds of individuals working together across social and geographic boundaries.”

“I want this lecture series to act as a wake up call to all of us. Technology, I repeat, will determine the future of the human race. We should recognise this and give it the profile and status that it deserves.”

Topics already discussed are “Technology will determine the Future of the Human Race” and “Collaboration”, and the upcoming are “Innovation and management”, “Nanotechnology and Nanoscience” and “Risk and responsibility”

Nicolai Ouroussaff in The New York Times:

  EVEN amid all the jostling institutional egos – with one museum after another gushing about ambitious expansion plans – it’s hard not to get excited about the Walker Art Center’s new home. For decades now, the Walker has been one of the liveliest museums in the country, an institution that maintained a strong independent voice despite its ties to the mainstream art world. When the museum hired the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron to design a $67 million expansion and renovation of its existing 1970’s-era building, it seemed like a match made in heaven. The architects had built their reputations on museum projects like London’s Tate Modern and the Goetz Collection in Munich, known for their meticulously refined materials and a sense of inner tranquillity.

The result is an exhilarating place to view art, one that packs in 11,000 square feet of additional gallery space, a 385-seat theater, a hip new restaurant and an expanded bookstore while upholding art’s place as the center of the museum experience. Anchored by an aluminum-clad tower, the addition is a masterly example of how exhausted motifs can acquire new meaning when reworked in a fresh setting.

More here.

From the Village Voice:

Since the Tribeca Film Festival’s 2002 debut, naysayers have grumbled that the last thing New York’s crowded movie calendar needs is an event this large and unwieldy. But the fourth annual edition, squeezing 158 features and 96 shorts plus workshops and panels into 14 venues and 13 days (April 19-May 1), should prove that Tribeca is no longer just a corporate-powered celebrity pep rally for Lower Manhattan. The city’s biggest and by default most eclectic film festival, Tribeca has also significantly upped the quality control in the last couple of years.

Night Watch A box-office smash in Russia last summer, this metaphysical horror thriller stages a battle between Light and Dark forces in present-day Moscow—complementing the struggle over a young boy’s destiny with simplistic but convoluted mythology and a ton of Slavic brooding. Director Timur Bekmambetov is a Roger Corman protégé, and there’s an endearing B-movie spirit to the enterprise, copious digi-effects notwithstanding. Amusingly crammed with blatant steals from the Matrix, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings movies (not to mention Buffy, the David Fincher playbook, and even Jonathan Glazer’s iconic UNKLE video), it’s itself the first in a trilogy—still to come: Day Watch and Dusk Watch. A Fox Searchlight release, opens July. LIM

4 This precociously nuts debut by 30-year-old Muscovite Ilya Khrzhanovsky links numerology to cloning to the genetic manipulation of livestock to the homespun manufacture of doll parts. Larded with dead and aging tissue, this jaw-dropping whatsit—winner of a top prize at Rotterdam this year—is a grandiose study of barbarism and decay, a treatise on the way of all flesh, with DNA spliced in from Leos Carax, Kira Muratova, PETA ads, and Chris Cunningham’s Aphex Twin videos. LIM

Gilaneh The newest film from Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Iran’s grande dame of popular-resistance cinema, isn’t quite the deft balancing act that Under the Skin of the City was, but it’s the only Persian film we’ve seen that addresses life on the ground during, and after, the eight-year-long war with Iraq and “that Baathist bastard.” It’s a diptych: First, a histrionic matriarch and her pregnant daughter, refugees from bombing, decide on the eve of the war’s end to return to their city homes, which they find bombed out and devoid of men. Fifteen years later, they’re back in barren countryside, the grim after-effects of war dominating their lives. Co-directed with newcomer Mohsen Abdolvahab, Gilaneh is too indulgent to impotent peasant speechifying, but the reverb is substantial. ATKINSON

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

It seemed rude to leave the lecture hall when the president of the Max Planck Society had generously given the floor to a representative of the “young generation of researchers” in whose hands lie the “future of science”. Still, when Thomas Fraps thanked the society for the opportunity to speak for “55 minutes on some of the many promising themes in science and medicine”, some at the back did quietly slip away.

The remaining audience grew visibly impatient as Fraps warmed to his theme. “My generation is aware of its growing responsibility to bring to the public an informed transfer of new scientific knowledge from the interdisciplinary dialogue within our universities…” They had already sat through a long evening of televised discussion on bioethics, and there was something annoyingly smug, even odd, about this guy. And was his tie really getting longer?

Fraps stepped away from the podium and began self-importantly to clean his glasses with a silk handkerchief from his pocket. Then he pulled the cloth straight through the lenses, flicked the silk to one side and revealed, in his previously empty hand, a glass of orange juice. “Cheers!” he said, taking a sip.

More here.

Anders Stephanson writes on the life and legacy of George Kennan.

“Being ideologically anti-ideological, Kennan said more about Soviet ideology in his foundational texts than he usually did, much to his later regret. The notion of containment, nevertheless, was not really about ideology. His account of the Soviet Union had centered, as was his wont, on its alleged ‘nature’ as a specific phenomenon. As was also his wont, the analysis was couched in a language seductively metaphorical and suggestive–a language whose sources of inspiration had little to do with the ideology of the embryonic cold war.

First, ‘containment’ was the language of disease and disease control. Soviet communism was for Kennan ‘a malignant parasite.'”

Anderson Tepper in the Village Voice:

In Siddhartha Deb’s peripatetic second novel, Amrit Singh, a young but prematurely jaded journalist with the Calcutta paper The Sentinel, is looking for a way out: out of Calcutta, the routine of newspaper reporting, the darkness of his gloomy office cubicle and blinkered life. The opportunity comes with an assignment to head to the northeast of the country and open a branch of the paper there. His exile to this forbidding territory along the Burmese border turns out to be precisely the mission he’s been looking for.

Deb is a fluid, thoughtful novelist intent on retracing his steps around the periphery of his country—around the very idea of the nation itself. With his intimate portrait of a shattered, neglected landscape, Deb revitalizes a very Naipaulian obsession. “It was a town dissolving bit by bit into a state of nothingness,” Singh says of Imphal, “with each one of us in the town seceding in his own way from the blinding presence of the republic.” As young writers increasingly lay claim to different regions of India (Pankaj Mishra keeps returning to Benares and the Himalayas, and Amit Chaudhuri is enveloped in the sights and sounds of Calcutta), Deb rediscovers this faraway corner of the northeast.

More here.

From the March 17 issue of Nature:

University of Connecticut Health Center scientist, Robert Reenan, has uncovered new rules of RNA recoding–a genetic editing method cells use to expand the number of proteins assembled from a single DNA code. According to his work, the shape a particular RNA adopts solely determines how editing enzymes modify the information molecule inside cells. The study may help explain the remarkable adaptability and evolution of animal nervous systems–including the human brain.

In the Figure: DNA (left) encodes the instructions for making protein, but cells can’t read them directly. Instead, the DNA code is copied first into RNA in a process called transcription. RNA includes coding regions that direct protein assembly (green) and non-coding regions–called introns–that play a regulatory role (yellow, pink). By studying the RNA code for the nervous- system protein, synaptotagmin, in several different insects, Reenan uncovered the general rules of RNA editing. Each insect’s RNA folds differently and the structures determine how the molecules get edited inside cells. This figure illustrates editing of fruit fly and butterfly RNA molecules. RNA folding brings regulatory regions (yellow, pink shapes) together with editing sites (green shapes). The resulting “knots” of fruit fly RNA (upper panel) and “loops” of butterfly RNA (lower panel) guides editing enzymes to sites destined for modification. RNA editing lets cells produce a variety of different proteins from a single DNA code (right). The altered proteins often have different functions from their unmodified counterparts. (Credit: Nicolle Rager, National Science Foundation)

More here.

Randy Dotinga in Wired:

Despite concerns about the ethics of pay-for-play publishing, the number of open-access academic and medical journals is growing at a fast clip.

In January, an open-access pioneer announced it would more than double the number of journals it offers. Meanwhile, Blackwell Publishing, the world’s largest publisher of academic society journals, is dipping its toes into open access, and the number of free journals has grown by about 300 over the last few months…

Not everyone is thrilled, however. With some exceptions, journals have done things the old-fashioned way — charging for subscriptions and accepting advertising — for as long as anyone can remember. Many of the biggest names in the journal industry are sticking with the traditional model, and some of their editors say they have major doubts about their new competitors, especially considering the financial pressures they face to stay afloat.

More here.

Margaret Paxson in the Wilson Quarterly (via Arts & Letters Daily):

Can a nation look for grace? Can it assign a category of persons to bear the burden of its moral tribulations, to be its collective conscience and collective sacrifice, to be its source of spiritual transcendence? In the story that Russia tells about itself, the category of people known as the intelligentsia has borne much of that burden. Members of the intelligentsia have prodded and scolded the people, sought spiritual high ground through their knowledge, and endured the loneliness of sacrifice and struggle against the powers of the state. Pushkin and Dostoyevsky and Maya­kovski and Brodsky (scolds and prophets all) were part of the intelligentsia, but so too were thousands of other souls, more modest in their orations to the people, perhaps, but no less full of longing for knowledge and truth.

And now, in the rough-and-tumble of Russia’s transformation, what is to become of this intelligentsia, so weighed down by its historical role and by a sense of its moral mission?

More here.

This week in the magazine, Ian Parker travels to Antarctica with the Brazilian-born photojournalist Sebastião Salgado. Here are photographs by Salgado, narrated by Parker.

Listen to the conversation (and see the pictures).

NOTE: To listen to the conversation, you will need Flash Player, which may be obtained free of charge here.

Debora MacKenzie in New Scientist:

The virus that caused the 1957 “Asian flu” pandemic has been accidentally released by a lab in the US, and sent all over the world in test kits which scientists are now scrambling to destroy.

There are fears the virus could escape the labs, as the mistake was discovered after the virus escaped from a kit at a high-containment lab in Canada. Such an escape could spread worldwide, as demonstrated in Russia in the 1970s.

The flu testing kits were sent to some 3700 labs between October 2004 and February 2005 by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), a professional body which helps pathology laboratories improve their accuracy, by sending them unidentified samples of various germs to identify.

The CAP kits – prepared by private contractor Meridian Bioscience in Cincinnati, US – were to contain a particular strain of influenza A – the viral family that causes most flu worldwide. But instead of choosing a strain from the hundreds of recently circulating influenza A viruses, the firm chose the 1957 pandemic strain.

More here.

Dinitia Smith in the New York Times:

Jacob Neusner, a mild-seeming, grandfatherly man relaxing in his easy chair, might have published more books than anyone alive. “As of this morning, 905,” he said recently. It was 4 p.m. The count was still good.

Hold it! Mr. Neusner, 72, a professor of theology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., has just called to say there are 924. This year alone there have been 22 books, most in his field, ancient Judaism. And no, he doesn’t count revisions or translations.

Mr. Neusner studies rabbinical writings of the first 600 years A.D., when rabbinic Judaism evolved. He has translated both the Palestinian Talmud (35 volumes) and the Babylonian, twice (second translation, 46 volumes). In fact, he has translated most of the ancient rabbinic literature. The Chronicle of Higher Education has called him probably the most prolific scholar in the nation.

More here.

Gregory M. Lamb in the Christian Science Monitor:

Most people think of placebos as harmless “sugar pills” given in clinic trials to some participants so that medical researchers can gauge the effects of the real drug on others. But in some trials, the “placebo effect” proves to be as strong as that of the drug. Consistently 30 percent or more of the subjects given placebos will show some improvement by taking the dummy pills.

So over the decades a small band of researchers has taken a hard look at those pills. Are they really effective? Should they play a role in medical therapy?

More here.

From the BBC News:

A gamma ray burst could have caused the Ordovician extinction, killing 60% of marine invertebrates at a time when life was largely confined to the sea.

These cosmic blasts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe.

The scientists think a 10-second burst near Earth could deplete up to half of the planet’s ozone layer.

With the ozone layer devastated, the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation could have killed off much of the life on land and near the surface of oceans and lakes.

More here.  And there’s more about gamma ray bursts at PBS’s Nova here.  [Thanks Robin.]

Anhoni Patel reviews Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to Fame by Michael Joseph Gross, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Starstruck” analyzes the dysfunctional relationship between celebrity and fan. He interviews über-devotees and parties with the rich and famous and strives to provide insight into both worlds. The book covers several topics: the business of celebrity, the subculture of zealous fans, entertainment journalism and interpersonal connections made with luminaries. The two strongest chapters are those in which Gross profiles both Michael Jackson’s and Dolly Parton’s followers and makes a trip to the Sundance Film Festival.

There are tremendously engaging stories, such as that of Diana D’Alo, whose loyalty to the king of pop was unwavering, regardless of the fact that he was being arraigned on child molestation charges at the time she was being interviewed…

More here.

Via Brad Delong, the Left Business Observer’s founder and editor, Doug Henwood, has made his book Wall Street: How it Works and For Whom (New York: Verso, 1998) freely available online (contruibutions are requested).

THIS is a make-or-break year for Sudan, Africa’s biggest country. In Oslo this week, donor countries pledged $4.5 billion in aid to Sudan, but while I applaud the donors’ generosity, promises alone are not enough. . . .

In this watershed year for Sudan, it is vital that the international community move speedily to provide the resources to consolidate a fragile peace in the south, and to protect civilians from recurring violence in Darfur. We know what we need: money to help win the peace in the south, more African Union boots on the ground to help end the atrocities in Darfur, and political pressure to settle the conflict. It’s that simple, and that essential.

The rest of the op-ed at the NY Times is here. One could parse some of the language here and wonder why he wasn’t more explicit about who and what but it was a good thing for Kofi to do and it’s a tough job he’s got with the running the UN thing.

From MSNBC:

Scientists recently unveiled the tiniest electric motor ever built. You could stuff hundreds of them into the period at the end of this sentence. One day a similar engine might power a tiny mechanical doctor that would travel through your body in the ultimate house call. The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube.

The technique exploits the fact that surface tension — the tendency of atoms or molecules to resist separating — becomes more important at small scales. The motor, a surface-tension-driven nanoelectromechanical relaxation oscillator, was built by a team of researchers led by Alex Zettl at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although the amount of energy produced is small — 20 microwatts — it is quite impressive in relation to the tiny scale of the motor. The whole setup is less than 200 nanometers on a side, or hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. If it could be scaled up to the size of an automobile engine, it would be 100 million times more powerful than a Toyota Camry’s 225 horsepower V6 engine, the researchers say.

More here.

From Science Daily:

  A leading expert in artificial intelligence and neural networks, Robert Hecht-Nielsen argues that cognition in humans and many animals occurs in a very different, non-algorithmic and less complex way than has been widely assumed until now. The Hecht-Nielsen theory posits that all aspects of cognition – seeing, hearing, understanding, planning and so on – are carried out using a single type of knowledge (antecedent support) and a single information processing operation called ‘confabulation’ which is carried out between the brain’s cerebral cortex and thalamus. The scientist’s theory hypothesizes that confabulation is the only information processing operation used in cognition. The theory also explains the cognitive mechanism by which behaviors (thoughts and movements) are launched, moment by moment, throughout the day.

So what are the implications of the new theory for software makers? “The character of people working in software, at least those working on cognitive systems, will alter substantially,” said Hecht-Nielsen. “People from the communications department or philosophy will be more useful for building these systems than engineers who know how to program in C or Java. The utility of algorithmic programming in this kind of a pursuit will be marginal, because the new ‘brains’ will be machines with endless amounts of time, that will be able to de-bug endlessly.”

More here. (Thanks to my colleague and friend, Dr. James Rooney for bringing this article to my attention).

The Economist gives us an answer that it loves.

“One theory is that Homo sapiens had more sophisticated tools, which gave him an advantage in hunting or warfare. Another is that the modern human capacity for symbolic thinking (manifest at that time in the form of cave paintings and carved animal figurines) provided an edge. Symbolic thinking might have led to more sophisticated language and better co-operation. But according to Dr Shogren’s paper in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, it was neither cave paintings nor better spear points that led to Homo sapiens‘s dominance. It was a better economic system.

One thing Homo sapiens does that Homo neanderthalensis shows no sign of having done is trade.”