Tina Hesman Saey in Science News:

Fruit flies and plants have independently come up with similar ways to mark time, a new study suggests.

Both modify the products of certain genes based on daily rhythms set by the organisms’ circadian clocks, the study shows. The finding, published online October 20 in Nature, may help scientists better understand how plants and animals respond to light-dark cycles.

Most research on circadian clocks has focused on the process by which the biological timekeepers turn genes on and off. But the new study shows that the clocks also govern how molecules of RNA that are transcribed from a gene are spliced together for translation into the gene’s protein product.

“This paper certainly adds a very novel twist,” says Yi Liu, a biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas who was not involved in the study.

Marcelo Yanovsky, a plant physiologist and geneticist at the IFEVA Institute of Agronomy and the Fundación Instituto Leloir in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and his colleagues searched for genes in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana that cause it to raise its leaves to the light during the day and let them droop back down in the dark. The researchers found a form of the plant that moved its leaves out of sync with the usual 24-hour rhythm, in a 30-hour cycle, and traced the source of the longer cycle to a mutation in the gene PRMT5.

PRMT5 makes an enzyme that adds methyl groups to histone proteins — proteins that form spools on which DNA is wound to fit inside cells. The addition of the chemical tag causes DNA to pack more tightly and shuts down gene activity. The team found that the enzyme also adds methyl groups to proteins involved in cutting and pasting RNA molecules that will later be made into proteins.

The cut-and-paste process is known as alternative splicing, and it allows cells to create different versions of proteins much the way that film editors can splice scenes together to produce movies with alternative endings.

Daniel Gilbert in the NYT:

I RECENTLY wound up in the emergency room. Don’t worry, it was probably nothing. But to treat my case of probably nothing, the doctor gave me a prescription for a week’s worth of antibiotics, along with the usual stern warning about the importance of completing the full course.

I understood why I needed to complete the full course, of course. What I didn’t understand was why a full course took precisely seven days. Why not six, eight or nine and a half? Did the number seven correspond to some biological fact about the human digestive tract or the life cycle of bacteria?

My doctor seemed smart. She probably went to one of the nation’s finest medical schools, and regardless of where she trained, she certainly knew more about medicine than I did. And yet, as I walked out of the emergency room that night with my prescription in hand, I couldn’t help but suspect that I’d just been treated with magic.

Certain numbers have magical properties. E, pi and the Fibonacci series come quickly to mind — if you are a mathematician, that is. For the rest of us, the magic numbers are the familiar ones that have something to do with the way we keep track of time (7, say, and 24) or something to do with the way we count (namely, on 10 fingers). The “time numbers” and the “10 numbers” hold remarkable sway over our lives. We think in these numbers (if you ask people to produce a random number between one and a hundred, their guesses will cluster around the handful that end in zero or five) and we talk in these numbers (we say we will be there in five or 10 minutes, not six or 11).

But these magic numbers don’t just dominate our thoughts and dictate our words; they also drive our most important decisions.

From MSNBC:

Researchers have followed up on Rudyard Kipling's classic tale to investigate why some leopards got their spots — and why others are spotless. In one of his “Just-So Stories,” Kipling suggested that the leopard scrounged up his distinctive rosettes because he had to stalk his prey undetected in a “great forest, 'sclusively full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows.” Biologists think Kipling wasn't far wrong: The leopard-spot camouflage helps the cats move stealthily through the shadowed forest. But why aren't all big cats spotted? Researchers at the University of Bristol have developed a mathematical model that links the patterning of the leopard and 34 other species of wild cats to their different habitats. A paper about their research is being published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The model suggests that cats living in the trees within dense habitats, with high activity at low light levels, are the most likely to have complex color patterns in their fur. The cats that spent their time in well-lit and uniform environments, such as plains and grasslands, were more likely to have small spots or plain coats. The analysis supports the view that different patterns of camouflage reflect adaptation to different environments — and it also suggests that those patterns can change relatively quickly.

More here.

“A genuine liberal arts education will equip a person to live well in a place,” Orr wrote. “To a great extent, formal education now prepares its graduates to reside, not to dwell. The difference is important. The resident is a temporary and rootless occupant who mostly needs to know where the banks and stores are in order to plug in.” By contrast, “the inhabitant and a particular habitat cannot be separated without doing violence to both. The sum total of violence wrought by people who do not know who they are because they do not know where they are is the global environmental crisis…. Knowledge for the resident is theoretical and abstract, akin to training. For inhabitants, knowledge in the art of living aims toward wholeness. Those who dwell can only be skeptical of those who talk about being global citizens before they have attended to the minute particulars of living well in their place.” As this insignificant little piece goes live, I will be convening a class not around Bloom’s Closing but around the little-known works of David Orr, whose books I humbly commend to anyone who has indulged me thus far.

more from Jason Peters at Front Porch Republic here.

Call me a Yahoo but if you prick up your ears you might just catch the sound of mass whinnying; the pawing of hoofs and the odd titanic neigh coming from somewhere in north Kent where Mark Wallinger will be installing his colossal gee-gee by the Ebbsfleet railway station in time for the Olympic influx in 2012. Fifty metres high, that’s a hell of a croup, a monster fetlock. But then contemporary art seems so stampeded with equimania that an extra-terrestrial visiting in time for Frieze (and they probably are) could be forgiven for assuming that, from Queen to commoners, Britain is in the grip of an esoteric cult of the filly and the stallion. Petrified horses are closing in on the West End of London where War Horse commands the stage. On Park Lane, David Backhouse’s Animals in War memorial features a noble patriotic dobbin and only a few months back, minding my own business at night, I caught sight of something colossal mounted on high where the Lane meets Bayswater Road. By daylight, the object turned out to be one of Nic Fiddian-Green’s decapitated and slightly shattered outsize horse-heads.

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

My friend Tom invited me to visit him in Tbilisi. He’s a fearless, openhearted man, an international aid worker who had put in hard time in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Now, he was the head of child protection for UNICEF in Georgia. “You can stay at my apartment, I’ve plenty of room. It’ll more than cancel out the price of the ticket to get here.” To entice me further he quoted a piece of graffito he had seen scrawled on the side of a building that afternoon: NO GOD, ONLY KINGS. “That’s the kind of place this is. Original. Enigmatic. Unexpected.” He reminded me that Joseph Stalin and George Balanchine were both Georgian—”a major murderer and a major modernist”—a fact that seemed to suggest a great deal about the country, while at the same time increasing its aura of mystery. “I’ll book a flight for next month,” I told him. Tom met me at the airport. He appeared to enjoy my startled reaction to the new, gleaming terminal, which seemed much grander than required for the small former Soviet republic. “It’s one of Georgia’s many attempts to make its fantasy about itself feel real,” he said. The fantasy sharpened when we drove into the city along George W. Bush Street, smoothly paved and with a billboard of Bush waving to his Georgian comrades, free marketers all.

more from Michael Greenberg at Bookforum here.

Nancy Goldstein in the Washington Post has some comments on the debate between the candidates for the Senate seat from Delaware. Let's hope this is not an accurate description of the state of politics:

So what do we get if we assess this morning's debate primarily in terms of tone and cadence, with substance following a distant third? He: Angry daddy. Impatient, know-it-all older brother. Responds with a veritable wall of verbiage delivered in a flat, tense, aren't-you-a-moron tone, even when expressing compassion (as Coons did when talking about the importance of lessening stigma against people with HIV/AIDS). She: Passionate black-sheep aunt. Unfairly treated younger sister. Can't answer half the questions, but her initial response is often simple and straightforward. Openly frustrated and befuddled with a system, and an opponent, that she doesn't like or understand.

My point isn't that O'Donnell's the winner when it comes to tone and Coons is the winner when it comes to content. It's that he's saying many of the right things, but in a way that makes you want to sit next to someone else at Thanksgiving. She, on the other hand, may be a mess, and the accusations she lobbed at Coons during the debate may or may not be true. But they hit a nerve with everyone who finds politicians like Coons hard to understand or privileged or aloof: That he's a rich kid who went to Yale and married into yet more money. That he interrupts her when he feels like it, but sics the moderator on her when the tables are turned. That he treats military funerals as a photo op. That he doesn't answer the questions.

Over time, it's not surprising that the Coonses of the world–the professional politicians, the guys who talk the talk and wear the suit and know all the stuff that confuses you, and went to a good school, are going unheard by Americans who constantly feel dismissed and disrespected by the system that rules them but rarely serves them.

George Russell in PopMatters:

For most of us artificial light is known only by its absence. At night walk down any street in any town in the industrialized world and your shadow will blink off and on as it follows you, intermittently illuminated by ubiquitous street lamps.The generation of Americans that can remember a time without artificial light, those living in rural areas during the first half of the 20th century, before power lines reached them, are quickly dying off. My grandparents were of that generation – a rancher and a farmer that were each born by the light of a kerosene lamp.

Today, artificial light is a constant companion. Darkness implies a situation to be remedied, if only by the dim light of a television or computer screen. However, our relationship with it has also blinded us to its effects. For most of us, the charges on a monthly electric bill serve as the only reminder that there is any cost at all to flipping a light switch. Brilliant, The Evolution of Artificial Light, shows how artificial light and its twin invention, electricity, have in one way or another shaped everything that we have become.

The book follows the path of this catalyzing technology as it winds it way from the last Ice Age into present day. As Brox connects the dots from early humans using stone lamps for painting the walls at Lascaux, to the the whaling trade as it arose to supply the world with lamp oil, to Edison’s Menlo Park and the dawn of modernity, to the massive power grids of today, a story of evocation begins to emerge. Seeing the broad strokes of history laid out in front of you, it’s difficult not to see a form taking shape in the flickering candlelight.

What that form is has yet to reveal itself, but its effects have probably been best described by Marshall McLuhan in 1964 when he wrote in Understanding Media, “The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no ‘content’. And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. […] The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive and decentralized. For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone and TV, creating involvement in depth.”

By focusing almost entirely on the evolution of light and electricity, in a few hundred pages Brox achieves what could be considered a historical proof of McLuhan’s ideas. She shows in Brilliant that technology, as extensions of our own bodies and minds, are what shape humanity; not the messages contained in the technology, nor the petty power struggles of day to day politics and ideologies. We have made our tools, and in turn our tools have made us.

Ron Cowen in Science News:

In late September, an experienced group of U.S. astronomers made headlines with news of the first extrasolar planet likely to be hospitable to life. The planet lies at a distance from its parent star at which water could be liquid (SN: 10/23/10, p. 5).

But a Swiss team of veteran planet hunters has now cast some doubt on that finding. On October 11, Francesco Pepe of the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland, announced at an extrasolar planet meeting in Torino, Italy, that a combination of old and new data acquired by his team shows no sign of the planet, dubbed Gliese 581g.

“If a signal corresponding to the announced Gliese 581g planet was present in our data,” Pepe says, “we should have been able to detect it.”

Other astronomers say that only time, and more studies, will tell if the first exoplanet in the habitable zone has truly been found or not. “I don't know if we should be in such a hurry to say one way or the other,” says MIT astronomer Sara Seager. “We will have consensus at some point; I don't think we need to vote right now.”

I wanted to say something to counteract the perception of Shakespeare’s compositional method as a kind of lyric soduku, and put in a word for the kind of glorious, messy procedure I’m quite certain it was, whatever the crystalline and symmetrical beauty of the final results. Like most poets, Shakespeare uses the poem as way of working out what he’s thinking, not as a means of reporting that thought. Often he’ll start with nothing more than a hangover, a fever and a bad night spent being tormented by the spectre of his absent lover. Then he’ll use the sonnet as a way of making sense of it all – a way, first, to extract a logic from pain, and then a comfort from that logic, however warped it might be. Form, in other words, allows him to draw some assuagement from the very source of the agony itself. So I decided to try to honour this sense of free play by taking as different an approach as the individual poem might itself prompt. Sonnet 109, for example, is a patently disingenuous excuse offered for Shakespeare’s negligence of his lover, and I made a parallel translation from bullshit into English.

more from Don Paterson at The Guardian here.

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Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

A few weeks ago there was a bit of media excitement about a somewhat surprising experimental result. Observations of quasar spectra indicated that the fine structure constant, the parameter in physics that describes the strength of electromagnetism, seems to be slightly different on one side of the universe than on the other. The preprint is here.

Remarkable, if true. The fine structure constant, usually denoted α, is one of the most basic parameters in all of physics, and it’s a big deal if it’s not really constant. But how likely is it to be true? This is the right place to trot out the old “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” chestnut. It’s certainly an extraordinary claim, but the evidence doesn’t really live up to that standard. Maybe further observations will reveal truly extraordinary evidence, but there’s no reason to get excited quite yet.

Chad Orzel does a great job of explaining why an experimentalist should be skeptical of this result. It comes down to the figure below: a map of the observed quasars on the sky, where red indicates that the inferred value of α is slightly lower than expected, and blue indicates that it’s slightly higher. As Chad points out, the big red points are mostly circles, while the big blue points are mostly squares. That’s rather significant, because the two shapes represent different telescopes: circles are Keck data, while squares are from the VLT (”Very Large Telescope”). Slightly suspicious that most of the difference comes from data collected by different instruments.

But from a completely separate angle, there is also good reason for theorists to be skeptical, which is what I wanted to talk about. Theoretical considerations will always be trumped by rock-solid data, but when the data are less firm, it makes sense to take account of what we already think we know about how physics works.

More here.

Laura Secor interviews Karroubi in The New Yorker:

LAURA SECOR: There is a widespread perception outside Iran that the Green Movement has been defeated. We no longer hear about millions-strong demonstrations, and a great many opposition figures have been imprisoned or forced out of the country. Is there still a Green Movement in Iran? Does it have an organized structure and a strategy for achieving its goals?

MEHDI KARROUBI: Because of heavy government suppression, people are not visible in the streets, chanting and demonstrating. But the movement runs very deep. If the government allowed any kind of activity in the streets, the world would see millions of people. The authorities know it, and that is why they have cracked down for the last sixteen months, shutting down any kind of opposition in the most brutal ways. The government has many problems at the moment…. The economy and foreign policy are both sources of conflict. All of this makes it very hard for the current administration to accomplish anything. In the first months and days after the election, many officials from the top down were sent to prison, and this has continued. These are clear signs that the movement is still alive.

More here.

Frans de Waal in the New York Times:

I was born in Den Bosch, the city after which Hieronymus Bosch named himself. [1] This obviously does not make me an expert on the Dutch painter, but having grown up with his statue on the market square, I have always been fond of his imagery, his symbolism, and how it relates to humanity’s place in the universe. This remains relevant today since Bosch depicts a society under a waning influence of God.

His famous triptych with naked figures frolicking around — “The Garden of Earthly Delights” — seems a tribute to paradisiacal innocence. The tableau is far too happy and relaxed to fit the interpretation of depravity and sin advanced by puritan experts. It represents humanity free from guilt and shame either before the Fall or without any Fall at all. For a primatologist, like myself, the nudity, references to sex and fertility, the plentiful birds and fruits and the moving about in groups are thoroughly familiar and hardly require a religious or moral interpretation. Bosch seems to have depicted humanity in its natural state, while reserving his moralistic outlook for the right-hand panel of the triptych in which he punishes — not the frolickers from the middle panel — but monks, nuns, gluttons, gamblers, warriors, and drunkards.

Five centuries later, we remain embroiled in debates about the role of religion in society. As in Bosch’s days, the central theme is morality. Can we envision a world without God? Would this world be good?

More here.

From The Telegraph:

From The New York Times:

For nearly all of human history, lives were short and miserable because there was little anyone could do about disease. Now we know what to do. The science is there. The technology is there. But we have a different problem ─ a happier one, but no less challenging: how do we get these interventions to people everywhere? And this problem doesn’t just apply to health care, it applies to almost every modern good or service, whether it’s education, energy, clean water or job opportunities. As the science fiction writer William Gibson has said, “The future is here ─ it’s just not evenly distributed.”

That’s why we’re beginning Fixes with the story of a health assistant named Tsepo Kotelo, whose job is to take care of people in remote mountain villages in the Maseru district of Lesotho. Kotelo’s story shows the critical need for something not usually on the global to-do list for Third World health: motorcycle maintenance. Lesotho has some of the world’s highest rates of AIDS and tuberculosis, and much of Kotelo’s time is spent counseling and testing people for these diseases, giving talks about AIDS prevention, and helping people stick to their treatment plans and deal with side effects. He also checks the water supply, helps villagers improve sanitation, weighs and immunizes babies, examines pregnant women and treats basic diseases.

Until 2008 Kotelo could visit only three villages a week, because he had to reach them on foot, walking for miles and miles. But in February of that year, Kotelo got a motorcycle ─ the best vehicle for reaching rural villages in Africa, most of which are nowhere near a real road. Just as crucial, he was given the tools to keep the bike on the road: he received a helmet and protective clothing, he was taught to ride and trained to start each day with a quick check of the bike. His motorcycle is also tuned up monthly by a technician who comes to him. Now, instead of spending his days walking to his job, he can do his job. Instead of visiting three villages each week, he visits 20. Where else can you find a low-tech investment in health care that increases patient coverage by nearly 600 percent?

More here.

Federico Diaz. Geometric Death Frequency – 141. 2010.

At Mass MoCA.

More here and here.