Steve Connor in The Independent:

A planet similar to Earth has been found orbiting a distant star by astronomers who believe they are getting closer to discovering an alien world inhabited by extraterrestrial life.

The new planet is five times the size of Earth but is itself unlikely to harbour life because it is probably covered in frozen oceans with average temperatures of around minus 220C.

However, the scientists behind the discovery believe the find marks a breakthrough in the search for relatively small, rocky planets such as Earth where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for life.

The scientists said that the discovery showed it was technically possible to discover a planet in a temperate “habitable zone” around a far-away sun that would permit the existence of liquid water, which is believed to be necessary for life.

More here.  And more here by Ker Than at Space.com.

John Leonard reviews The Diviners by Rick Moody, in the New York Review of Books:

Yes, I know, before one reviews a new book by Rick Moody, it seems now to be obligatory to cough up a couple of fur-ball paragraphs about the author and his animadverters. This is because, ever since the publication more than three years ago of his rehab/guilt-trip memoir, The Black Veil, “Rick Moody” has turned into something about which it is necessary to have a position, like sport-utility vehicles, stem cell research, or waterboarding. Permit me to hold these paragraphs in reserve until we have actually read what he’s written.

Before it raptures up and wimps out, Moody’s most recent novel, The Diviners, is not only longer and funnier than his previous three but also more accommodating. While he may still rev his motor too much, he is thinking out loud about larger matters than the substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, and sudden death in the northeast suburbs that preoccupied Garden State, The Ice Storm, and Purple America. In developing a Marx Brothers meet Thomas Pynchon plot about a frantic search, in the weeks immediately following the dead-heat presidential election of November 2000, for a much-hyped but mysteriously missing television script on dowsing through the ages, he explores the American thirst for something, anything, to believe in, our national hunger for the latest trumped-up or knocked-off meanings.

More here.

Helen Pearson in Nature:

Avian flu ravages tissues throughout the body, confirms an autopsy of infected cats. The finding suggests that the virus might infect people’s guts through what they eat, and spread via contaminated faeces.

Fears about bird flu continue to balloon, and with its arrival in Turkey, the disease has a foot in the door in Europe. The H5N1 strain of the virus has killed more than half of those people it is known to have infected.

Because of fears that the virus will spark a human pandemic, researchers want to know how it is likely to attack the body and jump between people. But they have had little opportunity to answer these questions, in part because only a handful of human victims have been autopsied.

More here.

An excerpt from Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine by Andrzej Szczeklik, from the University of Chicago Press website:

It is not just the world that sends its rhythms coursing through us. There are also rhythms inside us. There are so many rhythmic processes happening in our bodies, from the obvious ones, like sleeping and waking, to the most well hidden, like the secretion of hormones into the blood, that to explain their uncanny regularity and synchronicity we have adopted the figurative idea of the biological clock. Long before it was discovered, everyone agreed that if this extraordinary chronometer really did exist, then every last cell of our bodies would be able to tell the time from it.

Nowadays we locate it in the brain, in the part called the hypothalamus. The biological clock runs in two concentrations of gray matter, known as the hypothalamic nuclei, and so does its most essential part—the circadian oscillator. The clock’s mechanism appears to be determined by a cycle of recurring reactions: the transcription of genes and the synthesis of proteins. These reactions form a feedback loop: so-called clock genes code proteins, which accumulate and retroactively obstruct the transcription of genes. As protein disintegrates, transcription gets going again, and the protein production cycle is resumed. This “clockwork” system, characterized by rhythmicality, is common to all species, from the fruit fly to man. It is teamed with the emission of circadian signals, which depend on changes in the cell’s membrane potential. Once in existence, they spread into the nearest vicinity and to other areas of the brain as well.

But what use would a watch be if you couldn’t set it to local time?

More here.

3QD columnist Ker Than in Space.com:

A spinning black hole in the constellation Scorpius has created a stable dent in the fabric of spacetime, scientists say.

The dent is the sort of thing predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It affects the movement of matter falling into the black hole.

The spacetime-dent is invisible, but scientists deduced its existence after detecting two X-ray frequencies from the black hole that were identical to emissions noted nine years ago. The finding will allow scientists to calculate the black hole’s spin, a crucial measurement necessary for describing the object’s behavior.

More here.

Jai Singh in The New Republic:

Two weeks ago, Chad’s authoritarian president Idriss Déby effectively revoked a law requiring his government to spend 80 percent of the country’s oil revenues on health, education, and infrastructure while placing 10 percent of the revenue in a fund for future generations. The law was part of a 2000 agreement in which the World Bank and an ExxonMobil-led oil consortium agreed to fund a massive project to extract Chadian oil and pipe it through Cameroon for export.

Wolfowitz, now in his eighth month on the job, responded to Déby’s move by ending all future Bank disbursements for its eight projects in the country, which would have totaled $124 million over several years. He also froze a bank account that held millions in Chadian oil revenue. Playing hardball with a small and impoverished country may seem like overkill, but in reality this is a high-stakes dispute that will have key ramifications. Firms are combing Africa in search of new oil fields, and the best hope for staving off the corruption and abuse that is bound to result from future projects is good revenue management.

More here.

The Economist provides its own kind of look at CUNY’s history and renewal.

Until the 1960s, a good case could be made that the best deal in American tertiary education was to be found not in Cambridge or Palo Alto, but in Harlem, at a small public school called City College, the core of CUNY. America’s first free municipal university, founded in 1847, offered its services to everyone bright enough to meet its gruelling standards.

City’s golden era came in the last century, when America’s best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish students they would admit at exactly the time when New York was teeming with the bright children of poor Jewish immigrants. In 1933-54 City produced nine future Nobel laureates, including the 2005 winner for economics, Robert Aumann (who graduated in 1950); Hunter, its affiliated former women’s college, produced two, and a sister branch in Brooklyn produced one. City educated Felix Frankfurter, a pivotal figure on the Supreme Court (class of 1902), Ira Gershwin (1918), Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine (1934) and Robert Kahn, an architect of the internet (1960). A left-wing place in the 1930s and 1940s, City spawned many of the neo-conservative intellectuals who would later swing to the right, such as Irving Kristol (class of 1940, extra-curricular activity: anti-war club), Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer.

What went wrong? Put simply, City dropped its standards. It was partly to do with demography, partly to do with earnest muddleheadedness.

From the BBC:

An American professor has developed a theory that Germans are bad-tempered because pronouncing German sounds puts a frown on the face.

Professor David Myers believes that the facial contortions needed to pronounce vowels modified by the umlaut may be getting the Germans down in the mouth.

The umlaut is the two dots which modify the sound of the vowels a, o and u – dots which many foreigners omit altogether, but which give the German language three alternative vowel sounds.

Saying “u” – one of German’s most recognisable sounds – causes the mouth to turn down.

. . . A spokesperson for the German Embassy said: “We can give no comment on this as it is too scientific.”

(Hat tip: Linta Varghese)

I got my things and left.

This, the opening line to Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger, apart from being the coolest opening line in African fiction, is a fair summary of the writer’s life. He was always getting his things and leaving; not that he had many things to get—in his last years, homeless and reduced to sleeping on park benches in Harare, Zimbabwe, all he had were his typewriter and a few books. He died at thirty-five, an age when most writers are just publishing their first novels. It is a mark of his genius that, with only three novellas, some short stories, poems, and essays published during his lifetime, he is regarded today as one of the most influential postcolonial African writers.

more from The Virginia Quarterly Review here.

From despardes.com:

“Water” caused a spark in a tinderbox in 2000. It had to be doused. So its locale was moved from Varanasi to Sri Lanka. There, its production was kept secret until completed. India’s Uttar Pradesh (UP) government had to withdraw the film’s location permits when mobs stormed the ghats along the Ganges, destroying the film’s sets and burning effigies of Mehta. “I’ve gone through an ordeal by fire – no pun intended. In fact (Pakistani litterateur) Bapsi Sidhwa has written a book on the making of ‘Water’, which will be published when the film is released,” said Deepa Mehta – Water’s Indo-Canadian desi filmmaker and director. Its commercial release in India still remains a big question mark though. But a motley crowd of Delhi’s crème de la crème, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s wife, watched it recently in rapt attention as her Water had its first screening in the capital. At the end loud sobs were heard from various corners of the auditorium. “It was unreal! I had a great deal of insecurity about the reactions to Water in India. They were all laid to rest that evening,” said the relieved filmmaker. In Dubai and Karachi, its recent screening drew accolades too. “I’m so glad I’ve got it out of my system. Now I feel I could just retire. I’m that satisfied with ”Water”,” she has been quoted saying.

Mehta lives in a villa in suburban Toronto, Canada. Last year the Toronto Film Festival screened her Water. She and her film got standing ovations. “‘Water’ was the last of my elemental trilogy after ‘Fire’ and ‘Earth’. I felt incomplete without it. I just had to make ‘Water’,” the director said, whose script had sparked violent protests and even death threats in India. When asked what her next project was, Mehta wryly replied: “I refuse to do a film about Air”. Recently, an eclectic crowd of Pakistanis assembled in Karachi to watch it. The movie reportedly brought a packed auditorium of Muslims to forget their differences, sympathize with each other and take a moment to ponder that which has divided Indians and Pakistanis for so long.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows. And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view. Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered. “We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say. Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

More here.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

According to surveys, most of the people in the world say that religion is very important in their lives. Many would say that without it, their lives would be meaningless. It’s tempting just to take them at their word, to declare that nothing more is to be said — and to tiptoe away. Who would want to interfere with whatever it is that gives their lives meaning? But if we do that, we willfully ignore some serious questions. Can just any religion give lives meaning, in a way that we should honor and respect? What about people who fall into the clutches of cult leaders, or who are duped into giving their life savings to religious con artists? Do their lives still have meaning, even though their particular “religion” is a fraud?

More here.

Helen Phillips in New Scientist:

WHAT if there was a drug that helped you do your job better, and your boss was pressuring you to take it, even though it could be bad for your health? There are already drugs that can boost memory or alertness, but whose long-term effects are unknown. Or what if scientists could tell what you were thinking or planning to do before you knew it yourself? Brain scans can now do this.

Should these drugs and procedures be regulated – or permitted at all? That is the inspiration for the “Meeting of minds” project, a brainchild of Belgian organisation the King Baudouin Foundation.

For the past two years, a citizens’ panel of 126 Europeans from different age groups and backgrounds has been considering the ethical dilemmas emerging from brain science research. This weekend they are meeting in the Belgian capital, Brussels, to finalise their recommendations before presenting them to the European Parliament on 23 January (see “Causes for concern”).

More here.

Matt Welch in Reason Online:

If Australian Prime Minister John Howard gets his way, citizens down under will soon face seven years in prison if they are convicted of “sedition.” That’s not entirely new—sedition laws have been on the country’s books for at least 40 years—but the proposed legislation more than doubles the penalty. It also expands the definition of criminal speech to include “assist[ing], by any means whatever, an organisation or country…at war with the Commonwealth, whether or not the existence of a state of war has been declared.”

What comprises such “assistance,” and how on earth do you know when an organization is at “war with the Commonwealth” in the absence of a declaration to that effect? The answers are not clear, even after one very heated month of public debate and outcry.

. . .

Australia wasn’t the only English-speaking American ally to put the squeeze on speech last November in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism. At the seat of the monarchy that—on paper, anyway—still reigns over the former penal colony, Prime Minister Tony Blair pushed through by a single vote legislation outlawing the “glorification of terrorism,” defined as speaking or publishing words that would encourage the “commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.” This measure came on the heels of another Blair bill, also passed by the House of Commons, outlawing “inciting religious hatred.”

Very funny stuff from The Beast:

47. Martha Stewart

Charges: Only in America could a plutocrat convicted of insider trading find sympathy among her social inferiors—people she would have either sterilized or mustard gassed, if the law permitted her. Stewart, a woman so frigid she makes Gila monsters look cuddly, rode this wave of infamy to a resurgence in popularity and a second television show. To the nation’s delight, she then used this public forum to demean the aborigines in her charge with robotic mordancy. Is in obvious discomfort when laughing. Would have drowned the survivors on the Titanic and used their corpses as a human pontoon to walk to dry land.

Exhibit A: Seemed to genuinely enjoy prison.

Sentence: Forced to use own K-Mart products.

Read about the rest here.

In Frieze.com:

[F]rieze asked the following critics and curators from around the world to choose what they felt to be the most significant shows and artists of 2005:

Will Bradley

The Backroom, a ‘research project temporarily occupying a space in Culver City’, plays off its situation in the midst of the overheating art/property speculation complex and air-conditioned, quasi-Minimalist 1980s’ cool of LA’s latest gallery strip. Curators Magali Arriola, Kate Fowle and Renaud Proch invited artists to present the research material that their working process needs or generates, ‘to counterbalance the increasing emphasis and value placed on product’: a flashback to avant-garde Europe post-World War II, where to actually finish a painting or hold an exhibition was to surrender to the conservative forces that were reshaping the art world.

Timothy Garton Ash in the New York Review of Books:

Poland’s normal condition seemed to be that of occupation, backwardness, frustration, and alienation from the foreign-controlled state. The virtues for which it became famous were endurance, cultural vitality, and heroic but doomed resistance. Pierced by foreign arrows, its white eagle bled to produce the national colors of red and white. Its heroes were martyrs. Even a historian as sympathetic to the Polish cause as Norman Davies could write in 1983 that “Poland is back in its usual condition of political defeat and economic chaos.”^[1]

Anyone looking at Poland today must conclude that the country’s basic situation has been transformed. Poland is now a free country. As sovereign as any other European state on a close-knit continent, it has enjoyed unprecedented security in NATO since 1999 and been a full member of the European Union since May 1, 2004. Some analysts already identify Poland as one of the “big six” inside the EU of twenty-five member states, along with Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Spain. Its gross domestic product has grown by some 50 percent since it recovered independence in 1990.

More here.

Somini Sengupta in the New York Times:

Tyeb Mehta’s paintings fetch the highest prices of any living Indian artist: last fall, “Mahisasura,” a 1997 rendering of the buffalo-demon of Hindu mythology, brought $1.58 million at Christie’s in New York, the first time a contemporary Indian painting had crossed the million-dollar mark. (The turning point came five years ago, when a room-size triptych by Mr. Mehta, “Celebration,” sold for more than $300,000, signaling a surge of market interest in Indian art.)

Mr. Mehta’s career has mirrored the changing fortunes of contemporary Indian art over the last six decades, from the intellectual fervor of its birth at Indian independence in 1947, to a lifetime of aesthetic and financial struggle, to the improbable rise of the Indian art market in the last few years. As the Indian economy has galloped forward, art galleries have mushroomed, prices have skyrocketed and contemporary art has become the latest marker of affluence among the newly minted rich.

More here, including a slide show of TM’s work.

“Robert P Crease explains why Pythagoras’s theorem is not simply a way of computing hypotenuses, but an emblem of the discovery process itself.”

From Physics Web:

Pythagoras’s theorem is important for its content as well as for its proof. But the fact that lines of specific lengths (3, 4 and 5 units, say) create a right-angled triangle was empirically discovered in different lands long before Pythagoras. Another empirical discovery was the rule for calculating the length of the long side of a right triangle (c) knowing the lengths of the others (a and b), namely c² = a² + b².

Indeed, a Babylonian tablet from about 1800 BC shows that this rule was known in ancient Iraq more than 1000 years before Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century BC. Ancient Indian texts accompanying the Sutras, from between 100 and 500 BC but clearly passing on information of much earlier times, also show a knowledge of this rule. An early Chinese work suggests that scholars there used the calculation at about the same time as Pythagoras, if not before.

But what we do not find in these works are proofs – demonstrations of the general validity of a result based on first principles and without regard for practical application. Proof was itself a concept that had to be discovered. In Euclid’s Elements we find the first attempt to present a more or less complete body of knowledge explicitly via proofs.

More here.

This semester, the NYU administration has “terminated the fellowships” of striking graduate students–in truth, terminated pay, but that would be admitting that they are employees of the university and not apprentices.

In response, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee has set up a Hardship Fund to support strikers, whose srike benefit will fall short of covering expenses, especially in New York City. Specifically, the monies will go towards indispensable expenses such as health care, utilities, and rent for those who have lost their pay.

The strike, as many of you know, centers around the recognition of a graduate student union, in this case GSOC. In its essence, it is a fight over the right of grad students to organize and represent themselves. Cosma Shalizi has perhaps best summed it up: “[U]nions can ask for stupid and/or selfish things, of course — which distinguishes them from any other organization how, exactly? — but the merits of particular proposals isn’t the issue here; punishing people who attempt to organize to exert their rights is.”

If you support that right, I urge you to donate to the Hardship Fund if you can.

(For those of you who don’t know or know little about the strike, these three earlier dispatches by Asad, who is on strike, lay out the background and the issues at stake.)