From PhysOrg:

A team of Italian researchers at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome have discovered that this molecule, called CREB1, is triggered by “caloric restriction” (low caloric diet) in the brain of mice. They found that CREB1 activates many genes linked to longevity and to the proper functioning of the brain. This work was led by Giovambattista Pani, researcher at the Institute of General Pathology, Faculty of Medicine at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome, directed by Professor Achille Cittadini, in collaboration with Professor Claudio Grassi of the Institute of Human Physiology. The research appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Our hope is to find a way to activate CREB1, for example through new drugs, so to keep the brain young without the need of a strict diet,” Dr Pani said.

Caloric restriction means the animals can only eat up to 70 percent of the food they consume normally, and is a known experimental way to extend life, as seen in many experimental models. Typically, caloric-restricted mice do not become obese and don't develop diabetes; moreover they show greater cognitive performance and memory, are less aggressive. Furthermore they do not develop, if not much later, Alzheimer's disease and with less severe symptoms than in overfed animals.

More here.

Ten or twelve years ago, when I was visiting Berlin, Stan Persky took me to see Cranach the Elder’s painting of the Fountain of Youth at the Gemäldegalerie. It is a medium-sized canvas that depicts, in excruciating detail, a rectangular swimming pool seen in perspective full of happily cavorting men and women. Old people are arriving from the left in carts and wheelbarrows; youths emerge naked from the other side where a series of red tents await them, like those bathing-machines of which Lewis Carroll’s Snark was so inordinately fond. The Cranach painting led Stan and me into a discussion on whether we would like to extend the time of our lives, if such a thing were possible. I said that the foreseeable end did not frighten or worry me; on the contrary, I liked the idea of living with a conclusion in mind, and compared an immortal life to an endless book which, however charming, would end up seeming tiresome. Stan, however, argued that living on, perhaps forever (provided he were free of sickness and infirmities), would be an excellent thing. Life, he said, was so enjoyable that he never wanted it to end.

more from Alberto Manguel at Threepenny Review here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

The scientists, at the University of Oxford in England, looked at the evolutionary family tree of 217 primate species whose social organization is known. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, challenge some of the leading theories of social behavior, including:

¶ That social structure is shaped by environment — for instance, a species whose food is widely dispersed may need to live in large groups.

¶ That complex societies evolve step by step from simple ones.

¶ And the so-called social brain hypothesis: that intelligence and brain volume increase with group size because individuals must manage more social relationships.

By contrast, the new survey emphasizes the major role of genetics in shaping sociality. Being rooted in genetics, social structure is hard to change, and a species has to operate with whatever social structure it inherits. If social behavior were mostly shaped by ecology, then related species living in different environments should display a variety of social structures. But the Oxford biologists — Susanne Shultz, Christopher Opie and Quentin Atkinson — found the opposite was true: Primate species tended to have the same social structure as their close relatives, regardless of how and where they live.

More here.

“It's when your head's turned inattentively,
just slightly, in belief that inattention comes
to swallow you whole.” —Alain Bischford

Talith

We sleep beneath your grandfather’s talith
Fine lamb’s wool striped black and white
A giant barcode to be scanned by God
The pelt of a fabulous beast.

Little tent, portable temple
It survived Dutch looters and Dublin landlords
To shelter in this Irish night even me
Uncircumcised, and all too often, unwashed.

Your father pinned it to his study wall
A flag without a shield. Eternity’s quilt,
Your grandfather didn’t think he’d need it
When he took the train in Amsterdam.

“And what,” he mocked your father,
“are they going to murder us all?”

by Michael O’Loughlin
from In This Life
publisher: New Island, Dublin, 2011

Just after the election of 2008, the Nobel laureate liberal economist Paul Krugman made a prophecy: we will not restore prosperity, he warned in The New York Review of Books, “unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead.” But as Krugman’s thoughts drifted back to the maxims of John Maynard Keynes—maxims he called “more relevant than ever”—our thoughts could be turning to the older and in some respects wiser innovations of President Lincoln and the Republican Congress during the Civil War. Here’s the gist of it: using the monetary methods of Lincoln, updated to employ the inflation-fighting tools of the Federal Reserve, we could pay for a faster recovery and a great many worthy projects without higher taxes, without more national debt, and believe it or not, without inflation. How? By letting Congress exercise a little-known power that is used (very quietly indeed) by the Federal Reserve: the power to create new money.

more from Richard Striner at The American Scholar here.

Mocked and ridiculed, the 1980s met a pitiful end at the hands of a generation of artists who considered a market-friendly, object-based art their ideological nemesis, and punished it summarily for its false richness. This is an exaggeration, of course, but ask around in my (Northern European) corner of the world, and I would guess that many of those who were working back then will confirm this picture of a generational showdown. By contrast, faded and forgotten as they may be, ‘the long nineties’ remain unsubverted.1 The symbolic revival of Félix Gonzáles-Torres at the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, for instance, echoed his status as a guiding star of curating and art theory of that decade. However, during the last five years, as the historicization of the ’90s gains momentum, the jury has gradually reconvened. The case being weighed is that of art’s relationship to the social.

more from Lars Bang Larsen at Frieze here.

John Adams in the New York Times Book Review:

That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her ­munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. Disturbed by news reports of innocents killed at sea by U-boats, she was determined to help defeat the German attacks. And Ant­heil, arguably the most mechanically inclined of all composers, having long before mastered the byzantine mechanisms of pneumatic piano rolls, retained a special genius for “out of the box” problem ­solving.

Over several years the composer and the movie star spent countless hours together drafting and redrafting designs, not only for the torpedo system but also for a “proximity fuse” antiaircraft shell. In reality, their patent was an early version of today’s smart bombs. The device as they made it employed a constantly roving radio signal to guide the torpedo toward its target. Because the signal kept “hopping” from one frequency to another, it would be impossible for the enemy to lock onto. To solve the problems of synchronizing receiver and transmitter, Ant­heil proposed a tiny structure inspired by the workings of a piano roll. This was a feat that years later would be used in everything from cellphone and Bluetooth technology to GPS instruments.

More here.

…and that’s a good thing. Now the Saudi innovator is doing work that could save millions of lives in the developing world—and launching her own Mideast foundation.

Abigail Pesta in The Daily Beast:

Stephen M. Walt has picked the winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Kenan Malik, Rethinking the Idea of “Christian Europe”
2. Strange Quark, $300: David Graeber, On the Invention of Money
3. Charm Quark, $200: Corey Robin, Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism

Here is what Professor Walt had to say about them:

Picking three winners from the nine impressive finalists was not an easy task. In judging the different selections, I looked for writing that combined clarity and verve and made a topic of enduring interest come alive. Did the author help the reader see connections previously unnoticed, or bring into sharp relief a phenomenon that had been forgotten or misunderstood? Did the article advance a novel argument with such force that even skeptical readers might be convinced? That is the essential feature of deep analysis and sharp writing: it forces us to question our prior beliefs and see the world anew. Each of the nine nominees succeeded in considerable measure, but for me, these three stood out.

#1 Top Quark: Kenan Malik, “Rethinking the Idea of 'Christian Europe',” Pandaemonium (August 12, 2011).

Soldiers in today’s culture wars believe “European civilization” rests on a set of unchanging principles that are perennially under siege—from godless communism, secular humanism, and most recently, radical Islam. For many of these zealots, what makes the “West” unique are its Judeo-Christian roots. In this calm and elegantly-written reflection on the past two millenia, Malik shows that Christianity is only one of the many sources of “Western” culture, and that many of the ideas we now think of as “bedrock” values were in fact borrowed from other cultures. This essay is a potent antidote to those who believe a “clash of civilizations” is inevitable—if not already underway—and the moral in Malik’s account could not be clearer. Openness to outside influences has been the true source of European prominence; erecting ramparts against others will impoverish and endanger us all.

#2 Strange Quark: David Graeber: “On the Invention of Money – Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics,” naked capitalism.com (September 13, 2011).

Where did money come from? Graeber takes the standard economists' explanation–dating back to Adam Smith–and leaves it (and a few of its defenders) in shards. Instead of simply assuming that money emerged from the process of barter (as economists are wont to do), Graeber marshals an array of anthropological evidence demonstrating that money first arose as a means of account within non-state bureaucracies (such as Sumerian religious temples). It’s a tour de force of sustained argumentation, leavened by incisive writing and deadly flashes of wit, and it tells you a lot about how social science ought to be done (but often isn’t).

#3 Charm Quark: Corey Robin, “Revolutionaries on the Right: the Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism,” www.coreyrobin.com (September 27, 2011).

Why are today's so-called “conservatives” so enamored of far-reaching social and political transformations, not to mention costly and ill-fated efforts to export “liberty” at the barrel of a gun? Far from being traitors to true conservatism, Robin argues that today's conservative radicals are drawing upon a tradition of discourse dating back to Edmund Burke’s fear that established orders cannot generate the passion and commitment needed to vanquish revolutionary movements. To defeat Jacobinism and its various revolutionary successors, in short, die-hard “conservatives” have to fight fire with fire. And from these deep roots arises a “conservatism” that takes no prisoners and leaves few traditions unscathed. It is the “conservatism” of NSC-68 (which told Cold Warriors not to shrink “from any means, overt or covert, that could frustrate the Kremlin’s design”), of the Patriot Act, and of today’s drone wars and targeted killings. It takes real imagination to help us see Burke afresh, and Robin provides it here.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (I will send the prize money later today or tomorrow–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Stephen M. Walt for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed by me (top and strange) and Sughra Raza (charm). I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Stow Wengenroth. Shadow of The Elm. 1946.

Lithograph.

More here and here.

Malise Ruthven reviews Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest by Hamid Dabashi in the New York Review of Books:

In 2004, anticipating the victory of the Shiite parties in the Iraqi parliamentary elections, King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran into Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon that would be dominated by Iran with its large majority of Shias and Shiite clerical leadership. The idea was picked up by the Saudi foreign minister, who described the US intervention in Iraq as a “handover of Iraq to Iran” since the US was supporting mainly Shiite groups there after overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt claimed that Shias residing in Arab countries were more loyal to Iran than to their own governments. In an Op-Ed published in The Washington Post in November 2006, Nawaf Obaid, national security adviser to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, reflected on the urgent need to support Iraq’s Sunni minority, which had lost power after centuries of ruling over a Shiite majority comprising more than 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

Shiaphobia is nothing new for Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s legitimacy derives from the Wahhabi sect of Islam, a Sunni Muslim group that attacked Shiite shrines in Iraq in the nineteenth century, and today systematically discriminates against Shias. We know from WikiLeaks that the US government regards the Saudi monarchy as a “critical financial support base” for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other terrorist groups. As well as attacking American and Indian targets, all these are violently anti-Shiite. We also know that the Saudi king venomously urged his US allies to cut off the “head of the snake” by attacking Shiite Iran.

More here.