From BBC News:

One of the key elements in determining if a human cell turns cancerous is a so-called “checkpoint” protein. This prevents cancer in people by stopping damaged cells from dividing. Now scientists in California have found that when they removed this same protein from the tiny worm C. elegans, the worms lived up to 30% longer than normal. The scientists deduced that a lack of this protein might mean that humans also live longer, but with an increased risk of getting cancer. The researchers think the protein’s dual function raises another important question: does the presence of this protein ensure a short but cancer-free existence for some people? The scientists involved in this study say there are likely to be other proteins that impact both cancer and ageing, and the focus of research is now to catalogue the genes that make these proteins and find out which ones are the best candidates for drug therapies.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Zaha Hadid: Thirty Years in Architecture,” her first major retrospective in the United States, gives New Yorkers a chance to see what they’ve been missing. The show, which opens tomorrow in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda, spirals through Ms. Hadid’s career, from her early enchantment with Soviet Constructivism to the sensuous and fluid cityscapes of her more recent commissions.

It illuminates her capacity for bridging different worlds: between traditional perspective drawing and slick computer-generated imagery, between the era of utopian manifestos and the ambiguous values of the information age. Born in Baghdad in 1950, Ms. Hadid came of age in an era when the Middle East was enchanted by Modernity: its glamorous forms, progressive aura and faith in the future. Early on, she soaked up the cosmopolitan values that bound cities as diverse as London, New York, Moscow, Beirut and Berlin. She was raised in one of Baghdad’s first Bauhaus-inspired houses. In the late 1950’s she observed the construction of Gio Ponti’s planning ministry, a replica of his Pirelli Tower in Milan, a symbol of postwar Italian style.

More here.

William Logan in The New Criterion:

Last year a Dublin literary magazine sponsored an open competition for the best Seamus Heaney imitation. The winning poem began,

Niall Fitzduff brought a jar
of crab apple jelly
made from crabs off the tree
that grew at Duff’s Corner—
still grows at Duff’s Corner—
a tree I never once saw
with crab apples on it.

This would be hilarious, if Heaney hadn’t written it himself (I was kidding about the competition, though surely he would win). At sixty-seven, his Nobel dusty on the shelf, Heaney is old enough and honored enough not to have to impress anyone. He’s so full of genial sanity and sly little tricks with syntax (no one since Shakespeare has been shiftier at manipulating the sequence of tenses), it’s easy to be gulled by his calloused facility.

The poems in District and Circle (the name of a London Underground line) sometimes take up the subjects of poems from twenty or thirty years ago.[1] You go through the book thinking, Oh, there’s the Tollund Man again, and there’s Glanmore, and there’s the Underground—you’d be forgiven for thinking this a Seamus Heaney greatest hits collection.

More here.

Richard K. Betts reviews Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer, in the New York Times:

By Stephen Kinzer’s count, the United States has toppled foreign governments 14 times in the 110 years between the 1893 coup in Hawaii and the occupation of Iraq, making regime change by force as American as apple pie. But Mr. Kinzer says the results are always damaging to the countries involved, and to American security as well.

Mr. Kinzer, formerly a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has written on this subject before, in books on United States intervention in Iran and Guatemala. In ”Overthrow” he surveys all 14 cases in an admirably written page-turner.

Although the book does not add to historical knowledge of the individual cases, it may be the first to bring them together in a comparison over time. This makes the narrative more interesting than a single case study, but also more depressing.

In Mr. Kinzer’s treatment there are no bright spots. In one instance after another, arrogant Americans are shown tossing out legitimate governments and installing corrupt brutes who turn out to cause more problems for foreign policy than did the ousted leaders.

Mr. Kinzer’s main explanation for these recurrent misadventures is greed.

More here.  [Thanks to Syed Tasnim Raza.]

Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

In December 2005 I spent several hours a day in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul interviewing some of the people who passed by. The hotel, perched on a hill at the edge of the city and long ago written off by the Intercontinental chain as a loss, has been through some rough times in Afghanistan’s twenty-three years of war. In 1992 I spent more than a month using the hotel as a bunker to avoid getting hit, first as the Communist regime crumbled and then as the civil war unfolded across the city below me. For much of the following decade the hotel was without regular electricity or running water and you never saw an Afghan woman there.

In 2005, sitting on a sofa in the hotel’s lobby, I found on my left a former Taliban commander with a beard down to his waist, and on my right a young and beautiful Afghan woman from Herat, whose only concession to “covering up” was a very loose and flimsy head scarf. They were both members of the new Afghan parliament that had been elected on September 18; for the past week they had been receiving instruction from UN experts on what a parliament was and how to behave in one. The two-hour lunch breaks allowed the members of parliament (MPs) to meet each other informally. As he argued with the woman, I could see that the former Taliban officer was still in a state of shock that she was there at all.

More here.

Helena Cobban in the Boston Review:

On January 25, Palestinians went to the polls and, in an election supported by the United States and judged free and fair by observers, elected members of Hamas, a movement on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist-organization list, to 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats.

Six weeks after the election, I sat down separately with two of the key architects of the Hamas victory, Prime Minister–designate Ismail Haniyeh and Foreign Minister–designate Mahmoud Zahar, and with a dozen other Hamas leaders, activists, and supporters in Gaza and the West Bank. A main question in diplomatic circles has been how Hamas will respond to the “three demands” that the United States and its allies have placed on the new Palestinian government: that it recognize Israel’s right to exist; that it affirm its commitment to all international agreements concluded by its predecessor, the Fateh Party; and that it renounce violence. President George W. Bush and the leaders of the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia—the so-called Quartet that has sought since 2002 to manage Israeli–Palestinian diplomacy—stressed that they could not work diplomatically with the new Palestinian government if it did not meet these demands. The United States and the EU also threatened to withhold economic aid, and Israel threatened to block its provision.

More here.

David D. Perlmutter in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Media attention to blogging has exploded, in part because of a number of what I call blogthroughs, events that allowed bloggers to demonstrate their powers of instant response, cumulative knowledge, and relentless drumbeating. Those incidents included bloggers’ role in challenging the memo about President Bush’s National Guard service revealed on CBS, which may have led to Dan Rather’s resignation as anchor of the network’s evening news; video logs of the tsunami in Southeast Asia; and the high-profile use of blogs by Howard Dean’s campaign for the last Democratic presidential nomination. Now, according to various measurement and rating services such as Technorati and BlogPulse, tens of millions of Americans are blogging on all kinds of subjects, like diets, relatives, pets, sports, and sex. Bloggers include journalists, marines in Afghanistan, suburban teenagers, law-school professors, senators, and district attorneys.

Of greatest interest to modern students of politics are the blogs that focus on public affairs.

More here.

From The Nonist:

Picked up a slim little volume, which accompanied a recent show at the Marlborough gallery here in New York, of drawings by one Stephen Talasnik. To me his work looks like drawings of impossible architectural projects, each laying out a particular expanse of the Tower of babel let’s say. Stylistically they might fall into the same category as recent works by Matthew Ritchie or Julie Mehretu. Thought I’d share some of it with you.

More here.

From Nature:

Scientists in Israel have pinpointed a common genetic trait that could make some of us hungrier for sex than others. The team looked at a gene known as the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4), which partly controls the brain’s response to dopamine, a chemical often associated with the body’s ‘pleasure system’. Scientists know that this neurotransmitter can control sexual behaviour in animals and humans, and that dopamine circuits help to create the drive for things such as sex, drugs and food. Richard Ebstein at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem was prompted to examine the DRD4 gene after a 2004 study showed that a drug blocking this gene’s function helped to trigger erections in rats.

Ebstein and his colleagues asked 148 male and female college students to fill in a sex questionnaire that posed questions such as ‘How important is sex in your life?’ and ‘How often do you have sexual fantasies?’ The researchers found that students with one particular version of the gene scored roughly 5% lower, on average, in sexual desire than those with an alternative gene variant; a small but statistically meaningful difference. Around 70% of the population carry the low-arousal version and some 20% carry the high-arousal version of the gene.

More here.

From The New York Times:

France is a republic, but it still takes the story of its royals very seriously, especially if the story happens to be retold by an American. So the release last week of “Marie Antoinette,” Sofia Coppola’s $40 million film, has revived a centuries-old fascination with the ancien régime’s last queen. No matter that some critics savaged the Coppola film. Even the highbrow world of French culture recognizes the power and profitability of the woman who is still portrayed by some history teachers — incorrectly — as the heartless spendthrift who told the poor to eat cake if they had no bread. “The royalists still portray her as a martyr and a saint, the republicans as an evil foreigner who deserved beheading,” said Évelyne Lever, one of Marie Antoinette’s most authoritative biographers.

Le Figaro has issued a special 112-page glossy magazine on Marie Antoinette’s life as “princess, icon, rebel.” The women’s magazine Atmosphères has devoted most of its current issue to her “secrets.” The weekly Le Point put a portrait of the queen on a recent cover with the caption, “Misunderstood, decapitated, Marie Antoinette, the remorse of the French.”

More here.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked:

Over the past six weeks a Western security force has effectively taken over the small African nation of Namibia. A beach resort in Langstrand in Western Namibia has been sealed off with security cordons, and armed security personnel have been keeping both local residents and visiting foreigners at bay. A no-fly zone has been enforced over part of the country. The Westerners have also demanded that the Namibian government severely restrict the movement of journalists into and out of Namibia. The government agreed and, in a move described by one human rights organisation as ‘heavy-handed and brutal’, banned certain reporters from crossing its borders.

However, this Western security force is not a US or European army plundering Namibia’s natural resources or threatening to topple its government. It is the security entourage of one Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the celebrity couple better known for living it up in LA than slumming it in Namibia. They reportedly wanted their first child to be born in Namibia because the country is ‘the cradle of human kind’ and it would be a ‘special’ experience (1). And it seems that no security measure is too stringent in the name of making Ms Jolie feel special. Welcome to the new celebrity colonialism.

More here.

Jennifer Oullette in her always excellent blog, Cocktail Party Physics:

The father of modern architectural acoustics is an American physicist named Wallace Clement Sabine. In 1895, he was a lowly faculty member of Harvard’s physics department, who was handed the knotty problem of improving the infamously bad acoustics of the university’s Fogg Lecture Hall, part of the recently constructed Fogg Art Museum. Sabine didn’t have any particular expertise with sound — he didn’t even hold a PhD (the horror!) — but he doggedly tackled the challenge  as he would any other physics experiment. He spent several years studying the acoustical qualities both the museum’s lecture hall, and the Sanders Theater, widely considered to have excellent acoustics, in order to determine  what might be causing the difference in sound quality.  Specifically, he was attempting to find some objective formula or standard by which to measure and assess the acoustics of performance space designs.

It wasn’t an easy task because so many variables had to be taken into consideration. He and his assistants tested each space repeatedly under varying conditions, moving materials back and forth between the two halls — such as hundreds of seat cushions from the Sanders Theater — and making careful measurements armed only with an organ pipe and a stop watch. He timed how long it took for different frequencies of sounds to decay to inaudibility under those varying conditions: with and without Oriental rugs, various numbers of people occupying the seats, and so forth.

Ultimately, he was able to determine that there was a definitive relationship between the quality of a room’s acoustics, the size of the chamber, and the amount of absorption surfaces that were present. And he came up with the formula for calculating reverberation time, still the critical factor for gauging a space’s acoustical quality…

The field of concert hall acoustics has advanced far beyond Sabine’s rudimentary first measurements, although there are still purists who believe that there will always be a subjective element that eludes attempts at strict mathematical description. Nonetheless, using just those sorts of quantifiable tools, Leo Beranek, one of the most eminent acoustic engineers, has identified three basic aspects to achieving a sufficiently good sound in a concert hall: (1) Listeners should be as close to the orchestra as possible; (2) Listeners should have a line of sight to the orchestra so the sound can travel unobstructed; and (3) the interior surface of the hall should be made of a hard material so that sound energy is not absorbed or lost. So an acoustical consultant needs to balance strength, reverberation and clarity requirements when designing a performance space.

Computer modeling has become one of the modern acoustician’s most important tools. It turns out that the sound diffusing through a performance space can be modeled as particles of light bouncing around that space, much like a billiard ball bounces around a table in response to being hit by the cue.

More here.

Alexandra Lange in New York Magazine:

This is Tomorrowland—a new city, a city larger than San Francisco, built on top of the city we know. In ten years, New York City will be transformed in ways we can only guess at. But in the pages that follow, you will explore our best guess, based on the plans, the dreams, the cornerstones, and the rising steel in nine city neighborhoods, spread over all five boroughs. In 2016, we won’t be able to be so parochial anymore—one Times Square isn’t going to be enough to fulfill the entertainment needs of that bigger, younger, more diverse population, and you’ll be talking about the lights on 125th Street. Fresh Kills will be three times the size of Central Park. If you imagine the city as a play—every neighborhood has a role—a lot of understudies are finally going to be called onstage.

Across the five boroughs, New York’s skyline (and everything else) is being reimagined by some of the world’s best architects. Here are a few of the city’s future landmarks—scrunched together in a way that obviously won’t happen in the real world, but that may very well happen in the mind’s eye.

1. Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn, phase one, 2010; phase two, 2016
2. The New Museum, Chelsea, future
3. 80 South Street, Downtown, future
4. IAC Headquarters, High Line, 2007
5. Silvercup West, Queens, 2009
6. Freedom Tower, Downtown, 2011

More here.  [Thanks to Margit Oberrauch.]

From Majikthise:

Last night I went to see Al Gore’s new anti-global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth (IMDB). I was very impressed. It’s not great art, but it’s terrific science. More importantly, it’s an easily accessible message that everyone needs to hear. Go see it whether you feel like it or not and take your kids.

Al Gore lays out the evidence of an impending climate crisis clearly, rigorously, and compellingly. Given the profound implications Gore’s argument, it seems almost perverse to dwell on the movie’s aesthetics or its implications for American presidential politics. An Inconvenient Truth deserves to be assessed as a scientific, political, and moral argument for American leadership in the fight against global warming.

More here.