Barbara J. King in Cosmos & Culture:

Of the 100 “top science stories for 2012” chosen by Discover Magazine, I am most fascinated by #42: “The Myth of Choosy Women, Promiscuous Men.” It reports a serious challenge to an experiment that has remained a touchstone in evolutionary biology for over 50 years.

The study, on fruitfly mating, was done in 1948 by geneticist A.J. Bateman. Bateman showed that the male insects' strategy was to mate with many females, whereas the females' strategy was to be discriminating in their choice of partners. Male reproductive success, in other words, correlated positively with number of mates, but female reproductive success did not.

Now, ecologist and evolutionary biologist Patricia Gowaty and her colleagues Yong-Kyu Kim and Wyatt Anderson have repeated that study. They conclude something startling: Bateman blew it.

Before I explain where they say Bateman went wrong, I need to show how Bateman's conclusions rippled far beyond the scholarly world of fruitfly sex. His findings — promiscuous males, choosy females — seemed to strike a cultural chord. After biologist Robert Trivers cited it in a key 1972 paper on parental investment, the “Bateman principle” turned up everywhere. In my own field of primate behavior, for instance, field researchers expected to see (and thus often did) male primates with highly active sex lives and females who were coy, verging on sexual passivity.

More here.

When Danilo Kiš died in 1989, he was 54 and at the height not just of his powers but of his reputation too. Of the six works of fiction, it had been the most recent, the story collections A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and Encyclopedia of the Dead, that had won him greatest acclaim in the English-reading west. Not that the others had been found wanting; with the exception of Garden, Ashes, they remained untranslated, in the case of his first book – a pair of dissimilar novellas, Psalm 44 and The Attic – for more than a quarter of a century. Now, almost another quarter century on, the novellas are being published alongside a more or less perfect book of late stories, The Lute and the Scars (Dalkey Archive, £8.99). This completes a process – the Englishing of Kiš’s fiction – characterised during his life by indifference or sloth and since his death by energetic devotion.

more from Leo Robson at The Guardian here.

As Carroll writes, one of the most astonishing insights of modern physics, and one of the hardest to grasp, is that sufficiently powerful symmetries give rise to forces of nature. Piecing together the broken bits to see the elegance of the underlying symmetries is “like being able to read poetry in the original language, instead of being stuck with mediocre translations”. With such difficult concepts, analogies may offer a useful insight to the non-technical reader, although they are inevitably misleading to a greater or lesser extent. Carroll came up with a good one for a television programme to explain the Higgs field. Imagine little robots scooting about on the floor of a large vacuum chamber, identical apart from the fact that they are fitted with sails of various sizes. When the space is completely evacuated the sails are irrelevant because there is no air for them to feel, so all the robots move at the same speed. When the atmosphere is let in, the robots with larger sails (greater mass) are impeded more by the air than those with smaller sails (less mass) so they move more slowly.

more from Clive Cookson at the FT here.

The decay of the “average feature film” is such a common refrain it’s worth noting how Thomson’s version veers from the standard complaint. He does not think that moviemakers have simply stopped trying. He suggests, most startlingly, that the seeds of today’s anodyne blockbusters took root in the heyday of postwar film. Pronouncing Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, “Sunset Blvd.,” “the start of a new adulthood,” he explains how shrinking audi­ences led to a crisis of cinematic confidence. (The pictures did, in fact, get small.) In Thomson’s eyes, the French New Wave, and especially Godard’s work, was one propitious outgrowth of this change: because the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd rose to prominence as critics, their filmmaking employed a vocabulary tinged with allusion and anxious self-awareness. (“The critic in Godard was battling the storyteller,” Thomson writes.) By the time the young filmmakers of the late ’60s and ’70s arrived — Bertolucci, Coppola, Scor­sese — moviemaking had become the province of artists schooled in “film studies”-style appreciation.

more from Nathan Heller at the NY Times here.

Ezra Klein in The Washington Post:

If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it. Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. “Too soon,” howl supporters of loose gun laws. But as others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t “too soon.” It’s much too late. What follows here isn’t a policy agenda. It’s simply a set of facts — many of which complicate a search for easy answers — that should inform the discussion that we desperately need to have.

1. Shooting sprees are not rare in the United States.

Mother Jones has tracked and mapped every shooting spree in the last three decades. “Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii,” they found. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally:

2. Eleven of the 20 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States.

Time has the full list here. In second place is Finland, with two entries.

More here.

Gail Collins in The New York Times:

“I’m sorry,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy, her voice breaking. “I’m having a really tough time.” She’s the former nurse from Long Island who ran for Congress in 1996 as a crusader against gun violence after her husband and son were victims of a mass shooting on a commuter train. On Friday morning, McCarthy said, she began her day by giving an interview to a journalist who was writing a general story about “how victims feel when a tragedy happens.” “And then 15 minutes later, a tragedy happens.” McCarthy, whose husband died and son was critically wounded, is by now a practiced hand at speaking out when a deranged man with a lot of firepower runs amok. But the slaughter of 20 small children and seven adults in Connecticut left her choked up and speechless. “I just don’t know what this country’s coming to. I don’t know who we are any more,” she said.

President Obama was overwhelmed as well, when he attempted to comfort the nation. It was his third such address in the wake of a soul-wrenching mass shooting. “They had their entire lives ahead of them,” he said, and he had trouble saying anything more.

More here. (Note: Painting by my favorite NY artist Zarina Hashmi)

The most glaring omission from Diamond’s account is the violence involved in the imperial grab for power. As Eric R. Wolf wrote in Europe and the People Without History (1982): “Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristine past if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents.” Wolf was a Marxist, writing at the dawn of the neoliberal era; his work will never be made into a PBS documentary series as National Geographic did with Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond’s bowdlerized account of empire, in contrast, left out the inconvenient history and captured the triumphalist zeitgeist of the fin de siècle. Diamond’s next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), was a fitting companion to the previous one. If Guns, Germs, and Steel played to the racial liberalism of upper-class professionals, Collapse flattered their environmental concerns. It purported to illuminate the dark side of the story told in the earlier book. If the haves acquired wealth through geographic accident, Diamond claimed, the have-nots lost it by squandering their own natural resources.

more from Jackson Lears at Bookforum here.

Getting into the People’s Liberation Army was hard, but not as hard as getting into college. So, starting in 1973, I sent in my application and took a physical exam at the commune every year, and every year I was rejected. But then, in February 1976, with the help of some important people, my persistence paid off—I received my enlistment notice. Soon after that, on a cold, snowy day, I walked some fifteen miles to the county town. There I put on an army uniform and climbed into the back of a military truck for the trip to Huang County, where I moved into the famous “Ding Family Compound” barracks and began basic training. (I would not revisit the site until the fall of 1999, after Huang County had evolved into the city of Longkou and Ding Family Compound had been converted into a museum. What had originally impressed me as the magnificent home of a wealthy landlord I now saw was little more than a squat building, proof that my horizons had broadened.)

more from Mo Yan at the NYRB here.

“I had to write only this book and no more. You try to write only one book and put everything you want to say in one book, to create my own literary world with my sentences,” Krasznahorkai told last week’s audience. The Irish Tóibín made a stab at describing Krasznahorkai’s style, which he saw as “removing the need for objects in novel and seeing whether a novel can live in a different space. Tóibín described the novel as “a secular space,” yet this one “deals with spiritual questions rather than material questions.” God “interferes” with the novel and its characters. “Bringing God into the novel, it’s dynamite,” Tóibín said. Comment? The Hungarian Krasznahorkai demurred. “Hmmmm,” he said. Then again, “Hmmmm…”

more from Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven here.

Ray Kurzweil:

There has been recent disappointment expressed in the progress in the field of genomics. In my view, this results from an overly narrow view of the science of genes and biological information processing in general. It reminds me of the time when the field of “artificial intelligence” (AI) was equated with the methodology of “expert systems.” If someone referred to AI they were actually referring to expert systems and there were many articles on how limited this technique was and all of the things that it could not and would never be able to do. At the time, I expressed my view that although expert systems was a useful approach for a certain limited class of problems it did indeed have restrictions and that the field of AI was far broader. The human brain works primarily by recognizing patterns (we have about a billion pattern recognizers in the neocortex, for example) and there were at the time many emerging methods in the field of pattern recognition that were solving real world problems and that should properly be considered part of the AI field. Today, no one talks much about expert systems and there is a thriving multi-hundred billion dollar AI industry and a consensus in the AI field that nonbiological intelligence will continue to grow in sophistication, flexibility, and diversity. The same thing is happening here.

The problem starts with the word “genomics.” The word sounds like it refers to “all things having to do with genes.” But as practiced, it deals almost exclusively with single genes and their ability to predict traits or conditions, which has always been a narrow concept. The idea of sequencing genes of an individual is even narrower and typically involves individual single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) which are variations in a single nucleotide (A, T, C or G) within a gene, basically a two bit alteration.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Mo Yan, China's first Nobel laureate for literature, has been greeted withsome extraordinary hostility in the west. This week Salman Rushdie described him as a “patsy” for the Chinese government. According to the distinguished sinologist Perry Link, “Chinese writers today, whether 'inside the system' or not, all must choose how they will relate to their country's authoritarian government.” And, clearly, Mo Yan has not made the right choice, which is to range himself as an outspoken “dissident” against his country's authoritarian regime.

But doesn't the “writer's imagination” also conflict with the “imagination of the state” in a liberal capitalist democracy? This was broadly the subject that John Updike was asked to speak on at a PEN conference in New York in 1986. Updike delivered – to what Rushdie, also in attendance, described as a “considerably bewildered audience of world writers” – a paean to the blue mailboxes of the US Postal Service, which, he marvelled, took away his writings with miraculous regularity and brought him cheques and prizes in return.

EL Doctorow was irritated enough by this gush to suggest to Updike that if “he goes around the corner” from his mailbox, “he'll find a missile silo buried in the next lot”. Rushdie himself went on to accuse American writers, much to Saul Bellow's exasperation, of having “abdicated the task of taking on the subject of America's immense power in the world”.

Both Rushdie and Doctorow were trying to point out that the American writer held an uninformed and complacent view of his heavily militarised – indeed, insanely nuclearised – state.

More here.

Mark Leibovich in the New York Times:

Like many people who sometimes travel in high-powered circles, I am a complete fraud. I have no idea how I got here. This is an especially familiar condition in Washington, where I live, and where the impostor syndrome is like our psychological common cold. So a lot of people lie about reading The Economist here. We probably have the highest number of lied-about subscribers. Because it’s important to come off smart and worldly and cognizant that Lagos will overtake Cairo to become Africa’s biggest city in 2013. Also, that 2013 will be the first year since 1987 that will have all digits different from one another. And it could be a really big year for neutrinos.

Reading The Economist also makes you feel smart. Recall the Simpsons episode when Homer is handed a copy of the magazine on an airplane. “Look at me, I’m reading The Economist,” he boasts to Marge. “Did you know that Indonesia at is a crossroads?”

I especially love The Economist at this time of year. Holiday parties abound, which creates a constant need for the kind of fancy-pants knowledge the journal confers. I love the wry, punchy leads and the adorable British spellings (“globalisation”) and the concern the magazine engenders in me over whether the president of Colombia can regain his momentum (that would be Juan Manuel Santos, obviously); or whether we will learn of sufficient progress in the development of a “virtual liver” at much-awaited conferences next year in Luxembourg, Denmark and the Netherlands. Damn, gotta book those plane tickets.

December also marks the arrival of The Economist’s annual look-ahead issue: a confident and sophisticated accumulation of factoids and predictions for 2013 that can make you seem not only smart but also visionary.

More here.

I have spoken to three doctors about this and they all said the same thing to me: you should be taking a 325 mg tablet of aspirin daily. All three do it themselves and two of them said they have been taking a daily aspirin for more than 20 years. So do speak to your own doctor about it when you next see her/him.

David B. Agus in the New York Times:

Many high-quality research studies have confirmed that the use of aspirin substantially reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease. Indeed, the evidence for this is so abundant and clear that, in 2009, the United States Preventive Services Task Force strongly recommended that men ages 45 to 79, and women ages 55 to 79, take a low-dose aspirin pill daily, with the exception for those who are already at higher risk for gastrointestinal bleeding or who have certain other health issues. (As an anticoagulant, aspirin can increase the risk of bleeding — a serious and potentially deadly issue for some people.)

New reports about aspirin’s benefits in cancer prevention are just as convincing. In 2011, British researchers, analyzing data from some 25,000 patients in eight long-term studies, found that a small, 75-milligram dose of aspirin taken daily for at least five years reduced the risk of dying from common cancers by 21 percent.

In March, The Lancet published two more papers bolstering the case for this ancient drug. The first, reviewing five long-term studies involving more than 17,000 patients, found that a daily low-dose aspirin lowered the risk of getting adenocarcinomas — common malignant cancers that develop in the lungs, colon and prostate — by an average of 46 percent.

In the second, researchers at Oxford and other centers compared patients who took aspirin with those who didn’t in 51 different studies. Investigators found that the risk of dying from cancer was 37 percent lower among those taking aspirin for at least five years. In a subsection of the study group, three years of daily aspirin use reduced the risk of developing cancer by almost 25 percent when compared with the aspirin-free control group.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

A new synthesis by two Santa Fe Institute researchers offers a coherent picture of how metabolism, and thus all life, arose. The study, published December 12, 2012, in the journal Physical Biology, offers new insights into how the complex chemistry of metabolism cobbled itself together, the likelihood of life emerging and evolving as it did on Earth, and the chances of finding life elsewhere. “We're trying to bring knowledge across disciplines into a unified whole that fits the essentials of metabolism development,” says co-author Eric Smith, a Santa Fe Institute External Professor.

Creating life from scratch requires two abilities: fixing carbon and making more of yourself. The first, essentially hitching carbon atoms together to make living matter, is a remarkably difficult feat. Carbon dioxide (CO2), of which Earth has plenty, is a stable molecule; the bonds are tough to break, and a chemical system can only turn carbon into biologically useful compounds by way of some wildly unstable in-between stages. As hard as it is to do, fixing carbon is necessary for life. A carbon molecule's ability to bond stably with up to four atoms makes it phenomenally versatile, and its abundance makes it suitable as a backbone for trillions of compounds. Once an organized chemical system can harness and manipulate carbon, it can expand and innovate in countless ways. In other words, carbon fixation is the centerpiece of metabolism – the basic process by which cells take in chemicals from their environments and build them into products they need to live. It's also the link between the geochemistry of Earth and the biochemistry of life.

More here.

The Dream

On a nameless beach in France,
revolution: “But, Jesus,” I say,
“you can't have walked on water
because you're a metaphor.”

He looks at me as though I am Iscariot,
but the prince stands next to me
with a face of clay, hair adrift
on the sooty breeze.

Jesus Christ turns away
and I see his feet
feathery and clawed,
golden like lion skin

but mangled, a mass of bone like my own.
Disciples around us flock like chattering gulls:
I am marvelous,I should write a book,
they say. They ignore

the man who has just left me
with ashes in my mouth,
who marches silently to the cold surf,
glides away on the gray waves.

Jillian Saucier
Clarion 15, 2012

I don’t think I ever quite felt I was Elvis, that I and name were one. It was always a little alienating, that name, never fully overlapping, ever so lightly suspended off my body. I could hear it called out and it wouldn’t quite resonate inside me. No, I’d register it from the outside, so to speak, having to connect it intellectually to the contents behind the eyes. This is perhaps why I felt no compunction about toying with it, and in my late teens I was sometimes Eluis di Bego, mangling the last name of my birth, peeling off its edges. I wanted something shorter, less difficult than my real (is a name ever really “real?”) name. And what about it—Avdibegovic? The etymology of those eleven letters (just like Shakespeare, I once counted, blissfully) tells us three things: Muslim aristocracy of Slavic origins. How?

more from Elvis Bego at Threepenny Review here.

In August 2009, Scott Conarroe set out from Toronto in his 1992 Toyota to photograph the North American coastline, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to Alaska. After nearly a year on the road—travelling alone, with a few clothes, an atlas, a foam mattress, and his Wista RF field camera—he returned home. In March 2011, he debuted By Sea, an exhibit of his journey, at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto. Soon afterward, he completed the ambitious project at last, documenting the Arctic with the Canadian Forces Artists Program. Conarroe, thirty-eight, cites Impressionism as an early influence, along with beat generation photographer Robert Frank. In the ’50s, Frank toured the United States in a used Ford coupe, recording the land and its people for his seminal book, The Americans. “All of that beat scooting around seems germane to my experience,” says Conarroe.

more from Scott Conarroe at The Walrus here.