From Smithsonian:

I’m traveling with Mikael Knip, a short, energetic Finnish physician and University of Helsinki researcher with a perpetual smile under his bushy mustache. He has come to Petrozavodsk—an impoverished Russian city of 270,000 on the shores of Lake Onega and the capital of the Republic of Karelia—to solve a medical mystery, and perhaps help explain a scourge increasingly afflicting the developed world, the United States included. For reasons that no one has been able to identify, Finland has the world’s highest rate of Type 1 diabetes among children. Out of every 100,000 Finnish kids, 64 are diagnosed annually with the disease, in which the body’s immune system declares war on the cells that produce insulin. Type 1 diabetes is usually diagnosed in children, adolescents and young adults. The disease rate wasn’t always so high. In the 1950s, Finland had less than a quarter of the Type 1 diabetes it has today. Over the past half-century, much of the industrialized world has also seen a proliferation of the once rare disease, along with other autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and celiac disease. Meanwhile, such afflictions remain relatively rare in poorer, less-developed nations.

Why?

Petrozavodsk, only about 175 miles from the Finland border, may be the perfect place to investigate the question: The rate of childhood Type 1 diabetes in Russian Karelia is one-sixth that of Finland. That stark difference intrigues Knip and others because the two populations for the most part are genetically similar, even sharing risk factors for Type 1 diabetes. They also live in the same subarctic environment of pine forests and pristine lakes, dark, bitter winters and long summer days. Still, the 500-mile boundary between Finland and this Russian republic marks one of the steepest standard-of-living gradients in the world: Finns are seven times richer than their neighbors across the border. “The difference is even greater than between Mexico and the U.S.,” Knip tells me.

More here.

Blue Line Incident
.
He was just some coked-out,

From Nature:

When US presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are locked in to their ideological party loyalty. But Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, knew better. “His calculation, only zeroing in on 10% of voters, is a risky proposition,” he says. When Hall and his colleagues tested the rigidity of people’s political attitudes and voting intentions during Sweden’s 2010 general election, they discovered that loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters were open to changing their minds. The team's work is published today in PLoS ONE¹. Hall’s group polled 162 voters on the streets of Malmö and Lund during the final weeks of the election campaign, asking them which of two opposing political coalitions — conservative or social democrat/green — they intended to vote for, and how strongly they felt about their decision. The researchers also asked voters to rate where they stood on 12 political wedge issues, including tax rates and nuclear power. The person conducting the experiment secretly filled in an identical survey with the reverse of the voter's answers, and used sleight-of-hand to exchange the answer sheets, placing the voter in the opposite political camp (see video above). The researcher invited the voter to give reasons for their manipulated opinions, then summarized their score to give a probable political affiliation and asked again who they intended to vote for.

No more than 22% of the manipulated answers were detected, and 92% of the study participants accepted the manipulated summary score as their own. This did not surprise Hall, who has previously demonstrated similar reversal effects, known as choice blindness, in people’s aesthetic preferences² and moral attitudes³. What is interesting about the latest study is that, on the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time.

More here.

Snow has rarely been photographed so well. You feel the icy cold that toughened the lives of fishermen pulling their catch from a frozen lagoon. You can hear the wind blowing through the snow-covered roofs of the coastal village in Akita. Many of these photographs were taken long after the war ended. Hamaya had quickly lost his enthusiasm for gunfire as the war progressed ever more disastrously for Japan. Along with many Japanese, disillusioned by the consequences of their earlier chauvinism, Hamaya embraced postwar pacifism. Some of his most striking postwar photographs are of the 1960 demonstrations in Tokyo, when large numbers of students and ordinary citizens protested against the conservative government’s renewal of a security treaty with the US, perpetuating Japan’s status as a US military base for wars in Asia.

more from Ian Buruma at the NYRB here.

I do not remember Things Fall Apart as particularly life-changing at that age, I simply loved the story, this recreation of a world that seemed entirely familiar, that echoed the stories that my grandparents told. A few years later, I read No Longer at Ease, a I realised what an extraordinary gift he had given to us, creating a space for us in the world, allowing us the chance to say: We too are here. battered early edition, missing a cover, illustrated by Bruce Onobrakpeya, the famed Nigerian artist some of whose etchings hung on the walls of our living room. I was unimpressed then by the non-realistic etchings with their stylized depictions of human beings but was utterly captivated by the story of Obi Okonkwo, who could easily have stepped out of one of my parents’ photograph albums. I imagined him in a fedora hat and suit, being met at the port on his return from England by his town union, the way my parents and many of their friends had been. Along the way I also read his books for children, first Chike and the River, then the allegory of abuse of power How the Leopard Got Its Claws, co-written with John Iroaganachi and his collection of short stories Girls at War, which again resounded with familiar stories from my parents and their friends of their experiences during and just after the Biafran war.

more from Ike Anya at Granta here.

I am intrigued by Mortality for one main reason, which is this: Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. I hesitate to use the word delusional, as he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, but he clearly steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the sparsely populated right side of the bell-shaped curve of outcome statistics. He famously mocked religious folk for their faith in supernatural entities and survival of the soul after bodily death, yet the views expressed in Mortality are just as wishful and magical. “The oncology bargain [oncology is that branch of medicine which deals with the treatment of cancer],” writes Hitchens, “is that in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery.” Years? I must now confess to a professional interest. I am a gastroenterologist in a large acute hospital, and I have diagnosed many patients with oesophageal cancer. “Years” is a word not generally used when discussing prognosis in Stage Four oesophageal cancer, “months”, in my experience, being a more useful one.

more from Seamus O’Mahony at the Dublin Review of Books here.

From Scientific American:

A little blast from the past to puzzle over while your head spins from chocolate overload this weekend.

Two centuries before M.C. Escher confounded us with his optical illusions and play on perspective, William Hogarth (1697-1764) created Satire on False Perspective. Hogarth was a British painter and engraver sometimes credited with beginning the tradition of sequential art in Western culture due to his series of paintings depicting the rise and fall of a dandy, A Rake’s Progress. Complicated methods of using perspective to create an illusion of 3-dimensions in 2-dimensional art had been mastered (again) in Renaissance art a few centuries earlier. As well as a painter, Hogarth was something like a political cartoonist and satirist in his day. Here, in his engraving Satire on False Perspective are a number of errors. Can you spot them all?

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

In 1963, eight women crossed the Charles River to crack a barrier that had stood for more than half a century at Harvard, becoming the first of their gender to enroll in the Business School’s two-year M.B.A. program. Fifty years and 11,000 female graduates later, women make up about 40 percent of today’s incoming M.B.A. classes. An equal number of men and women graduate with honors, and their current dean, Nitin Nohria, considers himself a feminist. Yet when Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg ’91, M.B.A. ’95—the keynote speaker at the recent W50 Summit, a two-day conference celebrating 50 years of women in the M.B.A. program—asked a group of about 800 alumnae gathered in Burden Hall to stand if they had ever vocalized wanting to become CEO of their own companies, almost no one did. “I’m here today to do one thing: to give every woman in this audience not just the permission, but the encouragement to stand up next time that question is asked,” said Sandberg, author of the New York Times best-selling book Lean In. “Not just to be CEO of the company you are in, but to do anything you might not think you can do…anything you might be afraid to do. I want to do that for the men in this room today as well, but I want to do it especially for the women, because the blunt truth is, men still rule the world.”

Throughout the two-day conference, alumnae gathered in small groups to discuss topics like “Negotiate What You Need to Succeed: A Workshop for Women,” “Getting onto Boards Bootcamp,” and “Using Business Acumen to Effect Social Change.” They heard from such business-world leaders as former Time Inc. chief Ann Moore, M.B.A. ’78, and Gail McGovern, the president and CEO of the American Red Cross, as well as from prominent faculty members, including Arbuckle professor of business administration Rosabeth Moss Kanter. A Women’s Place, a new film on the history of women at HBS, was screened on Thursday evening.

More here.

A Ghazal: Intimations of Ghalib

آہ کو چاہیے اک عمر اثر ہوتے تک

کون جیتا ہے تری زلف کے سر ہوتے تک

It takes a lifetime for sighs to sway hearts.
Shall I live to pick lilacs for your hair?

The soul’s slow sea journey is perilous.
It is a rough ride from a drop to a pearl.

Love practices poise: ardor abhors time.
Can I keep my heart cooking in this fire?

I grant you will hurry when I ask for you.
I will be dust when my cry reaches you.

A sun glance lifts a dewdrop to extinction.
I too shall wait for a ray of light from you.

This life is over before you even know it.
We are in the world like sparks in the night.
.
. .
translated by M. Shahid Alam
from Notre Dame Review, Winter/Spring 2013

Kevin Young in VQR:

Memoir is a form under siege. In the small-print preface to Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity (2008), Kerry Cohen inadvertently indicates what’s wrong with the memoir today: This book is a work of nonfiction. I have changed most names and identifying details. I have also, at times, combined certain characters to allow for narrative sense. I have tried to recount the circumstances as best I remember them, but memory can be a faulty device. Facts are important but I believe that even more important than the facts is truth. I trusted truth to guide me as I wrote. Jack Kerouac once said, “Every-thing I wrote as true because I believed what I saw.” So it is for this book.

Such prefatory notes, indicating the degree of fiction found in its pages, have become necessary in the wake of James Frey’s best-selling blowout, his come-to-Oprah moment when he revealed what careful readers suspected: Much of his so-called nonfiction was made up. If Frey’s televised admission in 2006 was a kind of religious confession, then the real penance has been paid ever since by the memoirists who followed, for whom fact-checking has become a ritual purification—and the disclaimer a Hail Mary pass resulting, they hope, in brisk sales, the modern measure of success.

Truth is the goal of the memoir—or at least of its preface. Such authenticating devices are ways of gaining trust in a distrustful world. And yet such a disclaimer comes up against the problem encountered by a fabricator coming clean: “To tell you the truth, I am a liar.” The liar’s paradox has become the memoirist’s mantra, indicated by Loose Girl’s strategic separation of facts from truth; and its declared reliance on memory as recreated facsimile rather than on a strict recounting of verifiable events. Like Mary Karr’s Liars’ Club (1995) and Geoffrey Wolff’s Duke of Deception (1990), two books that helped jump-start the memoir form, even the titleLoose Girl seems to play with the notion of truth interrupted. This is not to say that these three memoirs are false. Rather, as indicated by their very titles, books such asThe Liars’ Club and The Duke of Deception discuss family members who are con artists in ways large and small that the memoir form has proven well suited for.

You could say the memoir is a promiscuous form. The novel, the memoir’s direct antecedent, is omnivorous—it is a form that cannibalizes other forms, from letters to hymnals to confessions themselves. The confusion the memoir has caused is actually one over form—for despite what its recent practitioners seem to think, the memoir is a form, not a genre. In trying to expand the memoir from a form into a genre rather like the broader field of nonfiction, the authors of memoir often mistake its strengths—hard facts ennobled by the fluid, specific act of memory—as something not to be championed but chiefly ignored. As a result, instead of flirting with fiction, as almost all writing does, the memoir flirts with the truth.

Jessa Gamble in Aeon:

Human sleep comprises several 90-minute cycles of brain activity. In a person who is awake, electroencephalogram (EEG) readings are very complex, but as sleep sets in, the brain waves get slower, descending through Stage 1 (relaxation) and Stage 2 (light sleep) down to Stage 3 and slow-wave deep sleep. After this restorative phase, the brain has a spurt of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which in many ways resembles the waking brain. Woken from this phase, sleepers are likely to report dreaming.

One of the most valuable outcomes of work on sleep deprivation is the emergence of clear individual differences — groups of people who reliably perform better after sleepless nights, as well as those who suffer disproportionately. The division is quite stark and seems based on a few gene variants that code for neurotransmitter receptors, opening the possibility that it will soon be possible to tailor stimulant variety and dosage to genetic type.

Around the turn of this millennium, the biological imperative to sleep for a third of every 24-hour period began to seem quaint and unnecessary. Just as the birth control pill had uncoupled sex from reproduction, designer stimulants seemed poised to remove us yet further from the archaic requirements of the animal kingdom.

Any remedy for sleepiness must target the brain’s prefrontal cortex. The executive functions of the brain are particularly vulnerable to sleep deprivation, and people who are sleep-deprived are both more likely to take risks, and less likely to be able to make novel or imaginative decisions, or to plan a course of action. Designer stimulants such as modafinil and armodafinil (marketed as Provigil and Nuvigil) bring these areas back online and are highly effective at countering the negative effects of sleep loss. Over the course of 60 hours awake, a 400mg dose of modafinil every eight hours reinstates rested performance levels in everything from stamina for boring tasks to originality for complex ones. It staves off the risk propensity that accompanies sleepiness and brings both declarative memory (facts or personal experiences) and non-declarative memory (learned skills or unconscious associations) back up to snuff.

Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times:

The burly American was escorted by Pakistani policemen into a crowded interrogation room. Amid a clatter of ringing mobile phones and cross talk among the cops speaking a mishmash of Urdu, Punjabi and English, the investigator tried to decipher the facts of the case.

“America, you from America?”

“Yes.”

“You’re from America, and you belong to the American Embassy?”

“Yes,” the American voice said loudly above the chatter. “My passport — at the site I showed the police officer. . . . It’s somewhere. It’s lost.”

On the jumpy video footage of the interrogation, he reached beneath his checkered flannel shirt and produced a jumble of identification badges hanging around his neck. “This is an old badge. This is Islamabad.” He showed the badge to the man across the desk and then flipped to a more recent one proving his employment in the American Consulate in Lahore.

“You are working at the consulate general in Lahore?” the policeman asked.

“Yes.”

“As a . . . ?”

“I, I just work as a consultant there.”

More here.

Marcia C. Inhorn at CNN:

Egg freezing is the newest reproductive technology: a recently perfected form of flash-freezing that allows human eggs to be successfully stored in egg banks. Only commercially available in American IVF clinics since October 2012, when the “experimental” label was lifted, egg freezing is being heralded as a “revolution in the way women age,” a “reproductive backstop,” a “fertility insurance policy,” an “egg savings account” and in particular, a way for ambitious career women to postpone motherhood until they are ready.

With egg freezing, women can use their own banked eggs later in life to effectively rewind their biological clock, becoming mothers in their 40s, 50s and beyond. It's a technological game changer that just might allow women to defy the notion that they can't have it all.

Trying to balance career and family is difficult for many professional women. I am one of those educated career-driven women who completed my Ph.D., found a good husband and landed my first tenure-track job at a major public university by 35.

But as my husband sometimes reminds me, I took only a single day of vacation during my first year on the job. I worked relentlessly to prepare lectures for four courses, to convert my dissertation into the mandatory book manuscript for tenure, and to advise the throngs of students coming to my office hours.

More here.

His cultural impact has greatly deepened and enriched the American conversation about literature, history, thought. Did we influence him? That’s an even larger topic, and a more interesting one. Nowhere in America would have been home. The Polish landscape of its countryside, the architecture of its towns, the old feuds and old friends, the cafés, and familiar jokes in his native tongue were gone. In America, he would always be the devotée of “some unheard-of tongue.” The density and intensity of a language whose 40 million speakers are concentrated in 121,000 square miles cannot easily be likened to the world’s new Latin, the imperial language with nearly ten times as many native speakers. His 1960 emigration was a game-changer. I speak as an émigré to the same land—the republic of California, a place with trees 30 feet across and waterfalls a thousand feet high, a land with 2,000 species of plants found nowhere else on earth. California is separated from the rest of the continent by a mountain range and uniquely borders Mexico and faces Asia.

more from Cynthia Haven at The Quarterly Conversation here.

While that accounted for the preponderance of degree-holding jihadis, it did not explain the dominance of engineering. For that, the social scientists turned to what they called the “engineering mindset”. “Engineering is a subject in which individuals with a dislike for ambiguity might feel comfortable,” they wrote. According to a US survey, engineers were “less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of the social and political realms and . . . inclined to think that societies should operate in an orderly way akin to well-functioning machines”. Had the sociologists panned their lens across from the Middle East to the west coast of the US, they would have found that same mindset not confined to the political margins but flourishing in the commercial mainstream. If this age belongs to any profession, it surely belongs to the engineer – not in the term’s historical sense of builders of dams and railways but in its new sense of makers of technology and software. Look at the Forbes billionaire list, published in March: of the ten richest people in the world, three – Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison – made their riches through engineering.

more from Aditya Chakrabortty at The New Statesman here.

What if a young Charles Darwin, stricken with seasickness, had been washed over the side of HMS Beagle on a dark and stormy night in 1832? Peter Bowler’s dramatic opening paragraph, complete with a nod and wink to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, sets a scene that would have averted the far higher drama that ensued from the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species. How would biological science’s role in history have differed? By 1900, Bowler argues, scientifically informed opinion would have absorbed the idea that living forms evolve, without recognising that this happens through natural selection. In fact, as Bowler has demonstrated in his previous work on the history of evolutionary thought, that is pretty much what did happen. Although Darwin’s theory of natural selection transformed the understanding of life by turning all eyes to evolution, the subsequent decades saw a successful effort to sideline it in favour of less disturbing candidates for mechanisms of change. People were ready to accept the idea of evolutionary transformation as long as it seemed orderly, progressive and purposeful. Lamarckian ideas, suggesting that individuals could improve themselves through their own striving and then pass on these improvements to their offspring, were a popular alternative. Other theories proposed that living forms were shaped by inner laws that guided change in beneficial directions.

more from Marek Kohn at Literary Review here.

Sarah-Marie Belcastro in American Scientist:

Over the years I’ve knitted many Klein bottles, as well as other mathematical objects, and have continually improved my designs. When I began knitting mathematical objects, I was not aware of any earlier such work. But people have been expressing mathematics through knitting for a long time. The oldest known knitted mathematical surfaces were created by Scottish chemistry professor Alexander Crum Brown. (For more about Crum Brown's work, click the image at right). In 1971, Miles Reid of the University of Warwick published a paper on knitting surfaces. In the mid-1990s, a technique for knitting Möbius bands from Reid’s paper was reproduced and spread via the then-new Internet. (Nonmathematician knitters also created patterns for Möbius bands; one, designed to be worn as a scarf, was created by Elizabeth Zimmerman in 1989.) Reid’s pattern made its way to me somehow, and it became the inspiration for a new design for the Klein bottle. Math knitting has caught on a bit more since then, and many new patterns are available. Some of these are included in two volumes I coedited with Carolyn Yackel: Making Mathematics with Needlework (2007) and Crafting by Concepts (2011).

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The Myc oncogene can disrupt the 24-hour internal rhythm in cancer cells. Timing of the body's molecular clock in normal cells synchronizes the cellular need for energy with food intake during our sleep-wake cycle. Timing matters to the study of cancer in two ways. First, toxicity to some chemotherapy drugs is related to time of day. For example, a cancer drug called 5-flourouracil is less toxic if given to a patient at night because the liver enzymes that detoxify it are more abundant at night. Second, several circadian rhythm genes have been implicated as tumor suppressors, although those exact connections are as yet unclear. Other researchers have also observed that many, but not all, cancer cell cultures lack proper circadian rhythm. “Our hypothesis is that disrupting circadian rhythm benefits cancer cells by unleashing their metabolism from the constraints of the molecular clock,” says Altman. “In this regard, cancers don't sleep; they don't rest.” The Penn study deals with the relationship of clock proteins in peripheral tissues associated with three types of cancer cells. The researchers surmise that Myc may affect circadian rhythm by promiscuously binding to promoter regions in key genes for maintaining circadian rhythm. In fact, using a well known genome browser they confirmed that Myc binds to circadian genes.

…”This work ties together the study of cell metabolism and cancer chronotherapy – If cells don't have to 'rest,” they may replicate all the time, with no breaks at all. ” “The understanding of these basic mechanisms from our work should lead to better cancer treatment strategies that reduce side effects and increase effectiveness” says Hsieh.

More here.

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