Elizabeth Pennisi in Science:

Consider the spider. True, they can be terrifying to some squeamish humans—they all have venom of some sort and fangs to inject their poisons. And the only earthly refuge for an arachnophobe is Antarctica, the sole continent on which the eight-legged critters don’t live. But also consider: Bees and wasps kill more humans a year than spiders—which do in fewer than seven people annually in the United States. And arachnids eat 400 million to 800 million tons of food a year, mostly insects. They also produce silk that’s five times stronger than steel, a feat yet to be matched by people. They can come in sizes as small as a fingernail (like the long-winged kite spider, above) or bigger than a dinner plate (like the giant huntsman). Researchers have recently started to untangle spider biology and evolution using genomics and other molecular methods, but as these images reveal, the sheer diversity and ingenuity of this group should inspire awe—not shivers.

As Nathan Morehouse, a spider expert at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio points out: “Some people think spiders are really ugly, but their body shapes are adapted for what they need to do.”

More here.

Simeon Wade and Heather Dundas in Boom California:

Boom: How did you end up in Death Valley with Michel Foucault?

Simeon Wade: I was performing an experiment. I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before: imbibing a suitable dose of clinical LSD in a desert setting of great magnificence, and then adding to that various kinds of entertainment. We were in Death Valley for two days and one night. And this is one of the spots we visited during this trip.

Boom: What can you say about this photograph? Were Foucault and Stoneman already tripping when it was taken? And wasn’t it incredibly hot, Death Valley in June?

Wade: Yes. We rose to the occasion, as it were, in an area called Artist’s Palette. And yes, it was very hot. But in the evening, it cooled off, and you can see Foucault in his turtleneck in the cool air. We went to Zabriskie Point to see Venus appear. Michael placed speakers all around us, as no one else was there, and we listened to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sing Richard Strauss’s, Four Last Songs. I saw tears in Foucault’s eyes. We went into one of the hollows and laid on our backs, like James Turrell’s volcano,[1] and watched Venus come forth and the stars come out later. We stayed at Zabriskie Point for about ten hours. Michael also played Charles Ives’s, Three Places in New England, and Stockhausen’s Kontakte, along with some Chopin…. Foucault had a deep appreciation of music; one of his friends from college was Pierre Boulez.[2]

More here. [Thanks to Ruth Marshall.}

Julia Felsenthal in Vogue:

When Dr. Jane Goodall poses for a photo, she counts down, “1, 2, 3, chimpanzee!” When she has a drink, it’s often scotch, which has the added benefit of soothing her sore throat. Goodall is hoarse because she’s been talking a lot—most recently about Jane, the new documentary by Brett Morgen (Cobain: Montage of Heck) that focuses on her early years observing chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park; and more generally, about wildlife conservation and sustainable development and environmental awareness, the crusades of her past three decades, during which time she’s spent a reported average of 300 days per year on the road. Goodall, who founded the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) in 1977 and became a U.N. Messenger of Peace in 2002, is currently a regal 83 years old. You can forgive her if her vocal chords are fatigued.

Hours after I meet her—in a room at the Soho Grand Hotel where she recently spent an afternoon receiving a spree of eager journalists—Goodall will fly home to England for five days; then to Osaka, Japan; then to Argentina. Why Japan? I don’t ask, but she tells me: She’s receiving the International Cosmos Prize, a prestigious science award. The crown prince of Japan may be there for the ceremony. That’s not the point. The point is that the prize comes with money, 40 million yen (roughly $350,000), money that can go toward the JGI’s many programs. Just a few moments into our interview, it becomes clear to me that basically everything Jane Goodall does is mission-driven. This film is no exception. “I agreed to do it because we’re doing so many projects in Africa. We have our youth program in a hundred countries around the world. And we need funding.”

More here.

Sarah Kliff in Vox:

On September 28, 2016, a 3-year-old girl named Elodie Fowler slid into an MRI machine at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California. Doctors wanted to better understand a rare genetic condition that was causing swelling along the right side of her body and problems processing regular food.

The scan took about 30 minutes. The hospital’s doctors used the results to start Elodie on an experimental new drug regimen.

Fowler’s parents knew the scan might cost them a few thousand dollars, based on their research into typical pediatric MRI scans. Even though they had one of the most generous Obamacare exchange plans available in California, they decided to go out of network to a clinic that specialized in their daughter’s rare genetic condition. That meant their plan would cover half of a “fair price” MRI.

They were shocked a few months later when a bill arrived with a startling price tag: $25,000. The bill included $4,016 for the anesthesia, $2,703 for a recovery room, and $16,632 for the scan itself plus doctor fees. The insurance picked up only $1,547.23, leaving the family responsible for the difference: $23,795.47.

More here.

Sigal Samuel at The Atlantic:

A researcher at a Swedish university says that Viking burial clothes bear the word “Allah”—and some people really want to believe her.

Annika Larsson, a textile researcher at Uppsala University who was putting together an exhibit on Viking couture, decided to examine the contents of a Viking woman’s boat grave that had been excavated decades ago in Gamla Uppsala, Sweden. Inspecting the woman’s silk burial clothes, Larsson noticed small geometric designs. She compared them to similar designs on a silk band found in a 10th-century Viking grave, this one in Birka, Sweden. It was then that she came to the conclusion that the designs were actually Arabic characters—and that they spelled out the name of God in mirror-image. In a press release, she described the find as “staggering,” and major media outlets (including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC) reported the story last week.

But other experts are not sure the silk bears Arabic script at all, never mind the word “Allah.” They warn that people being credulous of Larsson’s claim may be guided less by solid evidence than by a political motivation: the desire to stick it to white supremacists.

more here.

Dorian Stuber at Open Letters Monthly:

“I was born in Romania, and I am Jewish. That makes me a Jew, and a Romanian.” This might seem a straightforward, even self-evident claim. But for Mihail Sebastian—whose brilliant novel For Two Thousand Years, first published in 1934, is now available in a sparkling translation by the Romanian-based Irish short story writer Philip Ó Ceallaigh—this assertion of identity names a problem rather than a tautology. To be a Jew and to be Romanian: the impossibility of this “and” is Sebastian’s great subject.

Born Iosif Hechter to a Jewish family in the Danubian port city of Brâila in 1907, Sebastian studied law in Bucharest and Paris in the late 1920s and early 30s. After returning to Romania he turned increasingly to literature, drawn to a group called Criterion, which included the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, the philosopher E. M. Cioran, and the playwright Eugen (later Eugène) Ionesco. Although at first apolitical, the group became increasingly fascistic and anti-Semitic; Sebastian found himself marginalized by his former colleagues.

Sebastian turned this hostility into art. Taking the form of the notebooks of an unnamed protagonist closely modeled on Sebastian himself, For Two Thousand Years documents the struggle of an introspective young Jewish man intent on making his way in a profoundly anti-Semitic society. (Romania granted legal equality to Jews only in 1923.)

more here.

Meghan O'Rourke at Literary Hub:

It’s true, as Daudet says, that words aren’t of “use” to the ill person: They can’t capture pain. But words help us in a subtler way—they save us from the isolation of illness and mortality. I don’t mean anything as reassuring as “they make us less alone” (they don’t, really). But they do give form to an experience that is otherwise shapeless, and in so doing they make us less estranged from ourselves. Writing shapes us even as we try to shape it. In writing about illness I found myself changing—I was trying to capture the experience, but it was capturing me. I no longer felt that “I wasn’t myself” or that I wasn’t a person. I felt I had become, instead, a person who happened to be sick, with news to bring from what Susan Sontag called “the kingdom of the sick” in her essay Illness As Metaphor. It is news we need: we will all hold “dual citizenship,” she points out, in the realms of the well and the unwell.

Life is an ongoing detonation of the idea that we have control. My inability to voice what I couldn’t understand, my search for words that weren’t there, was a kind of schooling. In one essay I wrote, “The sick body is always having speech seized from it”—meaning by others who don’t listen. But the sick body also seizes speech from it itself. Seizing speech back, even fragmented, impoverished, “useless” speech—well, that remains the task of the writer.

more here.

Dan Garisto in Nautilus:

Dementia is typically thought of and treated as an individual sickness. Unlike something like measles, dementia is non-transferrable, and can’t be vaccinated against. But Malaz Boustani, a professor of medicine at Indiana University, thinks that the right way to think about dementia may be through the lens of epidemiology—“the branch of medicine that deals with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.” After all, like many viral diseases, dementia ends up affecting a large swathe of the population. As the populations of highly-developed countries age, treating dementia at scale will be more important than ever.

Nautilus caught up with Boustani earlier this month.

How does dementia impair function?

If you have dementia, then you become more likely to lose your attention. And a lot of cognitive abilities require you to first pay attention. Take language—in order for you to speak, first you have to pay attention. If you’re not speaking well, I can’t tell if you’re not speaking well because you’re not able to pay attention, or because your language center has died. Stuff that makes your attention fluctuate is very different from the stuff that makes you have memory or language problems.

What distinguishes the treatment of dementia from the treatment of other conditions?

First, dementia creates a burden not just on the patients who suffer from the disease, but also on family members, so the definition of patient is expanded. Second, dementia itself affects your cognition. Your self-management, your self-awareness, your competency becomes cloudy. That means that, in addition to your cognitive problems, you start behavioral and psychological disabilities. There is a clear line between dementia and normal aging. If your aging makes you unable to function in your physical and social environment and leads you to have a disability, then it’s not normal aging anymore. The cutoff is your ability to maintain your independence socially and physically in your changing environment. Normal aging does not take that away. You have people over 100 and they’re still adapting to their physical and social environment without any disability.

More here.

Andrew J. Bacevich in the Boston Review:

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the subject of a briskly readable and instructive new biography, would probably have taken issue with its title. He did not see himself as a chronicler of empire or as an agent of imperial ambition. The cause to which he devoted his professional life was the promotion of U.S. liberalism, in his view “the vital center” of U.S. politics.

As a prodigiously gifted historian, Schlesinger celebrated the achievements of those he deemed liberalism’s greatest champions, notably Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the martyred Kennedy brothers. As a skillful polemicist, he inveighed against those he saw as enemies of liberalism, whether on the communist left or the Republican right. As a Democratic operative, he worked behind the scenes, counseling office seekers of a liberal persuasion and drafting speeches for candidates he deemed likely to advance the cause (and perhaps his own fortunes).

Arthur Schlesinger lived a rich and consequential life, and had fun along the way. He died just a decade ago at the ripe old age of eighty-nine. Yet as this account makes abundantly clear, Schlesinger comes to us from an altogether different time, far removed from our own in terms of attitudes, aspirations, and fears. Indeed, Donald Trump’s elevation to the office once occupied by Schlesinger’s heroes signifies the repudiation of all that Schlesinger, as scholar and public intellectual, held dear.

More here.

Jedediah Purdy in n + 1:

Fantasy answers a lack, however imperfectly. And so much is lacking. Every inhabited continent has been denuded of ecosystems and species. Most North American places have shed wolves, elk, moose, brown bears, panthers, bison, and a variety of fish and wild plants, which were all abundant four hundred years ago. Before those species were driven out, there was the slaughter of the mammoth, the ground sloth, the wild horse. The squirrels, rabbits, and sparrows that surround my North Carolina porch are less signs of burgeoning life than survivors of an apocalypse; so are the revenant coyotes that poach chickens and puppies from the neo-hippie farmsteads outside town. Yet in the restored Arts and Crafts cottages that fill my neighborhood, the children’s bedrooms are as totemic as the Chauvet Cave: covered in animal iconography from the farm, the rain forest, the Cretaceous, and the deep sea. Planet Earth, the BBC series narrated by David Attenborough, makes us invisible participants in lives otherwise as remote as those in the Ramayana. We witness migrations, hunts, nestings, and hatchings. Forty years ago, John Berger called the zoo “an epitaph to a relationship” between people and animals. Today those words could be applied to much of middle-class mass culture: it has become a kind of memorial to the nonhuman world, revived in a thousand representations even as it disappears all at once.

Human isolation from nonhuman nature, from Shanghai to Mumbai to Phoenix, goes beyond extermination and segregation.

More here.

Christopher Glazek in Esquire:

The newly installed Sackler Courtyard at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is one of the most glittering places in the developed world. Eleven thousand white porcelain tiles, inlaid like a shattered backgammon board, cover a surface the size of six tennis courts. According to the V&A’s director, the regal setting is intended to serve as a “living room for London,” by which he presumably means a living room for Kensington, the museum’s neighborhood, which is among the world's wealthiest. In late June, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was summoned to consecrate the courtyard, said to be the earth's first outdoor space made of porcelain; stepping onto the ceramic expanse, she silently mouthed, “Wow.”

The Sackler Courtyard is the latest addition to an impressive portfolio. There’s the Sackler Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the majestic Temple of Dendur, a sandstone shrine from ancient Egypt; additional Sackler wings at the Louvre and the Royal Academy; stand-alone Sackler museums at Harvard and Peking Universities; and named Sackler galleries at the Smithsonian, the Serpentine, and Oxford’s Ashmolean. The Guggenheim in New York has a Sackler Center, and the American Museum of Natural History has a Sackler Educational Lab. Members of the family, legendary in museum circles for their pursuit of naming rights, have also underwritten projects of a more modest caliber—a Sackler Staircase at Berlin’s Jewish Museum; a Sackler Escalator at the Tate Modern; a Sackler Crossing in Kew Gardens. A popular species of pink rose is named after a Sackler. So is an asteroid.

More here.

Síle Ní Mhurchú at the Dublin Review of Books:

The earliest reference we have to Fionn mac Cumhaill is a brief one in a poem by Senchán Torpéist which may date back as far as the seventh century, and in which he is depicted as belonging to an evil band of men who cause warlike brandishing from ships, a negative portrayal which may seem surprising to those more familiar with the later stages of the Cycle. Fionn’s Fianna are based on the historical institution of the fían that provided an outlet for the energies of young free-born men who had not yet come into their inheritances, allowing them to form bonds with people outside their own kinship groups and improve their hunting and fighting skills; the early law texts suggest that fíana also performed a role in maintaining law and order. They were, however, seen by the church as a disruptive force given to robbery and plundering, which would explain why such groups are vilified in early writings; it was only after the fían as an institution had disintegrated that a more accepting attitude towards fictional fíana could be permitted.

Other fían-leaders besides Fionn feature in early Irish literature and thus Murray devotes a chapter to the best-documented of these, Fothad Canainne, demonstrating that he was the star of his own literary cycle, of which only fragments now remain, before being subsumed into the Finn cycle. There was also a regional component to the cultivation of the early Finn Cycle, one example being three interlinked tales probably of the eighth century and set around the river Suir near Cathair Dhún Iascaigh (modern-day Cahir, Co Tipperary) – Bruiden Átha Í (The Contention of Áth Í), Marbad Cúlduib (The Slaying of Cúldub) and the tale now known as “Finn and the Man in the Tree”.

more here.

Jenny Turner at the LRB:

In France, Chris Kraus wrote in an essay from 2003, there exists ‘a formal/ informal structure for the perpetuation of a dead artist’s work’ that gets called ‘the Society of Friends’. The friends gather up the artist’s work, plans, notebooks and so on and write and elicit tributes, then publish the lot in a book called the ‘Cahiers’, maybe at their own expense. ‘Why do the friends do this? It can only be that they believe, in some real way, the friend’s life and work belongs to them … It speaks for them because they shared a place in time.’

Madeleine Wattenbarger at n+1:

One week after the earthquake, as rescue workers continued digging in rubble for victims, Mexicans gathered on Paseo de la Reforma to march in memory of the three-year anniversary of the Ayotzinapa massacre. The case of the forty-three students disappeared in September 2014 lingers unresolved, and no one has been charged. Ayotzinapa has come to represent, among many things, the corruption, impunity and violence that characterizes the Mexican government in this decade. The students join the disappeared of Chimalpopoca, those crushed in buildings constructed with misdirected money, those still unnamed.

In the upstairs room at Café Zapata, the Autonomous Brigades continue transmitting for a few days more. The radio station is provisional, but for now, they bear witness to the devastation throughout the city and the country. Volunteers rotate in and out of the ad-hoc studio, eating corn flakes, listening to others talk on the radio, resting on the blankets piled in one corner. Some have returned from towns in the Istmo of Oaxaca, where the September 7 earthquake devastated small towns in the Juchitan district, and where a September 23 aftershock shook to the ground buildings made precarious a few weeks earlier. A series of helicopters and airplanes had made a show of delivering bags of donations, they said, which held nothing but toilet paper.

more here.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

More here.

Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen et al in Nature:

Our knowledge of the cells that make up the human body, and how they vary from person to person, or throughout development and in health or disease, is still very limited. This week, a year after project planning began, more than 130 biologists, computational scientists, technologists and clinicians are reconvening in Rehovot, Israel, to kick the Human Cell Atlas initiative¹ into full gear. This international collaboration between hundreds of scientists from dozens of universities and institutes — including the UK Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, RIKEN in Japan, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts — aims to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells as a basis for research, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment. On behalf of the Human Cell Atlas organizing committee, we outline here some of the key challenges faced in building such an atlas — and our proposed strategies. For more details on how the atlas will be built as an open global resource, see the white paper² posted on the Human Cell Atlas website. Cells have been characterized and classified with increasing precision since Robert Hooke first identified them under the microscope in the seventeenth century. But biologists have not yet determined all the molecular constituents of cells, nor have they established how all these constituents are associated with each other in tissues, systems and organs. As a result, there are many cell types we don’t know about. We also don’t know how all the cells in the body change from one state to another, which other cells they interact with or how they are altered during development.

New technologies offer an opportunity to build a systematic atlas at unprecedented resolution. These tools range from single-cell RNA sequencing to techniques for assessing a cell’s protein molecules and profiling the accessibility of the chromatin. For example, we can now determine the RNA profiles for millions of individual cells in parallel (see ‘From one to millions’). Protein composition and chromatin features can be studied in hundreds or thousands of individual cells, and mutations or other markers tracked to reconstruct cell lineages. We can also profile multiple variants of RNA and proteins in situ to map cells and their molecules to their locations in tissues.

More here.

Michèle Mendelssohn in the Oxford University Press Blog:

The idea that life imitates art is one of Oscar’s best yet most often misunderstood. It is central to his philosophy and to his own life. Take The Decay of Lying, for example, an essay in the form of a dialogue that he wrote in the late 1880s. What did he call the interlocutors? Why Cyril and Vyvyan, the names of his two young sons, of course. But the piece’s intellectual party really gets started when Wilde has his learned young gentlemen interview each other. Naturally, what is uppermost in their minds is the relationship between life and art. Just like their clever father, Cyril and Vyvyan are curious about how the real world and the imaginary world mirror each other.

Doublings such as these are usually a clue in Wilde that he is working through some element of autobiography. By the time he penned the essay, he was in his mid-30s, and on the verge of hitting it big. He also had a wife and family to support. He hadn’t yet written The Importance of Being Earnest or any of the mischievous society comedies that would make his name throughout the world. But he had taken a double first from Oxford, accessorized it with the Newdigate Prize for poetry, cut a dash as a London dandy and gained a reputation as a heartthrob in the United States where “Oscar Dear” became the name of one of the many songs immortalizing his charms. When he wasn’t flirting, he was lecturing Americans and Canadians about art and interior decoration, editing a feminist women’s magazine, reviewing books, and writing essays.

All the world seemed to be a stage to him, and life itself a kind of performance. And that became the subject of one of his most memorable pieces, The Decay of Lying.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Everyone is rightly excited about the latest gravitational-wave discovery. The LIGO observatory, recently joined by its European partner VIRGO, had previously seen gravitational waves from coalescing black holes. Which is super-awesome, but also a bit lonely — black holes are black, so we detect the gravitational waves and little else. Since our current gravitational-wave observatories aren’t very good at pinpointing source locations on the sky, we’ve been completely unable to say which galaxy, for example, the events originated in.

This has changed now, as we’ve launched the era of “multi-messenger astronomy,” detecting both gravitational and electromagnetic radiation from a single source. The event was the merger of two neutron stars, rather than black holes, and all that matter coming together in a giant conflagration lit up the sky in a large number of wavelengths simultaneously.

Look at all those different observatories [see image above, right], and all those wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation! Radio, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray — soup to nuts, astronomically speaking.

A lot of cutting-edge science will come out of this, see e.g. this main science paper. Apparently some folks are very excited by the fact that the event produced an amount of gold equal to several times the mass of the Earth. But it’s my blog, so let me highlight the aspect of personal relevance to me: using “standard sirens” to measure the expansion of the universe.

More here.