Michael Price in Science:

For women looking to become pregnant through in vitro fertilization (IVF), a diamond petri dish could be a girl’s best friend. That’s one conclusion from a new study, which finds that human sperm cells live longer and move more efficiently on diamond surfaces compared with traditional polystyrene petri dishes. The researchers also discovered that shining a red light on the sperm cells improved their performance. Combining these techniques might significantly increase the chances of IVF success. During IVF procedures, sperm is introduced to an egg in a petri dish. If the egg is successfully fertilized, the resulting zygote is implanted into the woman’s uterus. The critical fertilization stage usually takes place on polystyrene, a plastic from which almost all petri dishes are made. Sperm, like most cells, exude harmful, cell-disrupting molecules known as reactive oxygen species (ROS). Inside the body, these ROS last only fractions of a second and are quickly neutralized as they bind with nearby molecules. But polystyrene naturally forms a thin, gluelike nano-layer of water on its surface, which traps the ROS. “The sperm is stewing in its own ROS,” says Andrei Sommer, a physicist who led the study while working at Ulm University in Germany and who is currently working as an independent scientist. “This longer exposure is highly, highly, highly destructive to the cell.” The upshot is that many sperm cells exposed to polystyrene quickly lose their motility, turning from “guided missiles” into barely moving or immobile cells incapable of fertilizing an egg. Generally, the more highly motile sperm cells a sample contains, the more likely it is that an IVF procedure will result in pregnancy, though a host of other factors like sperm count and egg quality also play a role. (Eggs produce less ROS and therefore are less susceptible to oxidative damage than are sperm cells.)

Building on previous work by his lab, Sommer and colleagues wondered whether keeping sperm cells on a material like diamond, which forms a slick, not sticky, surface layer of water, would protect them from ROS. The researchers coated quartz petri dishes with a superthin layer of diamond less than a micron thick, and put human sperm cells on them. They assigned the cells one of four grades ranging from A (rapidly moving and the most likely to fertilize) to D (completely immobile and incapable of fertilization). Then they did the same thing for sperm cells taken from the same sample but placed on traditional polystyrene petri dishes.

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Mitch Waldrop in National Geographic:

Albert Einstein was already a world-famous physicist when the FBI started keeping a secret dossier on him in December 1932. He and his wife Elsa had just moved to the United States from their native Germany, and Einstein had been very vocal about the social issues of his time, arguing publicly against racism and nationalism.

By the time of Einstein’s death on April 18, 1955, that FBI file would be 1,427 pages long. Agency director J. Edgar Hoover was deeply suspicious of Einstein’s activism; the man was quite possibly a communist, according to Hoover, and was certainly “an extreme radical.”

Einstein himself probably would have laughed out loud at those labels if he’d known about them; he’d heard far worse from the Nazis back home. And he was not at all intimidated by officialdom. “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth,” he declared in 1901.

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Mark Blyth and Matthias Matthijs in Review of International Political Economy:

Like the Bourbons of old, who learned nothing and forgot nothing, the narrow loss of right-wing populist Norbert Hofer in the Austrian presidential elections, or the defeat of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's constitutional reforms in Italy just a month after Trump's victory, failed to register as important, let alone connected to prior events. At the time of writing, the spread between German Bunds and French Trésors has steadily widened as financial markets began to price in the real possibility that Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right Front National, may actually win the French Presidential elections in May 2017. Contemporary International Political Economy (IPE) theory has pretty much nothing to say about these events. Sadly, this is nothing new, since it was no different a mere decade before.

Back in early 2007, both scholarly and elite conventional wisdom agreed on the following. The ongoing multilateral Doha round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was going to take some time to negotiate, but it would be completed in the not too distant future. Unsustainable global macroeconomic imbalances were thought to increase the risk of a US dollar crash. The world economy was blessed by a ‘Great Moderation’ in volatility wrought by the technocratic competence of independent central bankers. The euro was going to be the new international reserve currency of choice and a beacon of monetary stability. Further economic and political integration was still the choice for Europe despite temporary setbacks around the adoption of a proposed constitutional treaty. The IMF looked like it would soon have to shut down its operations because there were no more financial crises lurking around the corner. The ‘BRICs’ were going to substantially increase their overall clout in global economic governance. And finally, international migration flows would only continue to intensify. So what actually happened?

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Alan McIntyre in The Scottish Review:

So why has Trump latched onto the idea that coal mining is an industry that must be saved at all costs? It's for the same reason that he pedals the fantasy of bringing steel mills back to Ohio – a nostalgia for an industrial America that shaped and supported working-class communities and which technological progress is inexorably erasing. The truth, whether it's miners in West Virginia or shipyard workers on the Clyde, is that hard physical work in homogenous communities created social bonds and social capital that isn't easily replaced. Whether those communities are in the remote valleys of Appalachia or the somewhat less remote valleys of South Wales, the closing of a mine wreaks social havoc.

Thirty years on from Arthur Scargill's failed strike, the parallels are clear. It wasn't just about jobs and economics, it was about trying to protect a way of life that, while dirty and dangerous, was also unique. The jobs may eventually be replaced, but loose networks of Uber drivers are unlikely to spawn many male voice choirs, world-class brass bands, or the social and cultural corona that surrounded the pits. A key insight from J D Vance's recent award-winning Appalachian family history, 'Hillbilly Elegy', is that when the social capital anchored in a concentration of traditional jobs gets eroded, whole communities can descend into a purposeless existence in which drug abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence find fertile ground.

The political current that Trump has expertly tapped into is the need for 'meaningful work' rather than just a job.

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John Crowley at the Boston Review:

Inside every utopia is a dystopia striving to get out. World-changing plans to bring all human life and activity under beneficent control devolve inevitably into regimentation and compulsion. Edenic life-affirming communes descend into chaos and waste. Our presently evolving techutopia has barely reached its peak, and yet in it this horror-movie process has already begun: information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate; common human connections are degraded; limits on power and self-dealing erode. Inequality increases with differential access. And all this in less than a single generation.

The utopian promises of the mid-twentieth century (modernism, broadly understood) stayed alive for longer, largely because its projects, which depended on design, manufacturing processes, materials, and city planning, took years or decades to be fully realized, while the world seemed to stay much the same. In 1939 the greater part of America was still a land of Toonerville trolleys, boarding houses, balky mules, door-to-door salesmen, pump handles, iceboxes, A&P’s, nerve tonics, kerosene, two-bit haircuts, hand-rolled cigarettes, incurable diseases, and patched inner-tubes, even as the idea of the future was brought closer with every newsreel and skyscraper and issue of Life or Look.

While older utopias often were predicated on returning to the virtues of an imagined past, a key figure behind this utopia of the new was Norman Bel Geddes, a theatre designer turned industrial designer. Bel Geddes is best known for designing the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a huge and hugely celebrated vision of the world of 1960, full of towering modernist skyscrapers in new cities and lots and lots of cars.

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Max Nelson at The Point:

In 1973, the poet Robert Creeley edited a paperback anthology of Walt Whitman’s selected verse. Midway through the introduction to the book, Creeley suggested a respect in which Leaves of Grass had “a very contemporary bearing for American poets”:

It is, moreover, a marked characteristic of American poetry since Whitman, and certainly of the contemporary, to have no single source for its language in the sense that it does not depend upon a “poetic” or literary vocabulary. … An American may choose, as John Ashbery once did, to write a group of poems whose words come entirely from the diction of the Wall Street Journal, but it is his own necessity, not that put upon him by some rigidity of literary taste.

That the American poet was distinctly guided by “his own necessity” rather than by an accepted set of literary standards was a powerful idea for certain mid-century poets and writers. It had a particular hold over the poets based at Black Mountain College, the wildly eclectic North Carolina art school where Creeley sporadically lived and taught between 1954 and 1955. The school would close only two years after he left. Chronically under-enrolled, under-staffed and under-funded, it canceled its last surviving classes near the end of 1956. Its last few years, however, produced a particularly ambitious attempt to define what a specifically American poetry could be.

Creeley had grown up in Massachusetts, did a stint abroad in the American Field Service and took classes at Harvard, from which he never graduated. Beginning in 1950, he kept up a constant correspondence with Charles Olson, the fearsome, bullish poet sixteen years his senior who served as Black Mountain’s last rector and who finally lured Creeley to the school in 1954. (The letters the two poets exchanged between 1950 and 1952 fill ten volumes.) Olson was even more inclined than Creeley to make sweeping assertions about the American poet’s inheritance.

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Eamon Duffy at The New York Review of Books:

The manuscript’s celebrity is at first sight puzzling, since it is an unglamorous, even somewhat shabby object: 234 pages gathered in eighteen “quires,” or foldings, each consisting of between one and six double pages, or “bifolia.” Very unusually for a medieval manuscript, Beinecke MS 408 also includes eleven larger “foldout” pages, containing what appear to be astronomical or astrological diagrams. At some date after the book’s compilation, each folio was numbered in ink on the right-hand opening (technically known as the recto).

The first 130 pages of the volume are taken up with what appears to be an herbal, each page containing a large if somewhat sloppily executed drawing of a plant, depicting root, stem, flowers, and leaves, around which extensive text, in no recognizable language but written in a fluent cursive hand, has been carefully arranged so as to avoid encroaching on any part of the picture. This “herbal” section is followed by a cluster of large foldout pages decorated with circular zodiacal or astrological diagrams, and this in turn gives way to a section of ten folios containing yet more unrecognizable text, interspersed with decidedly unerotic drawings of groups of plump naked women, bathing in pools and conduits of blue or green water, which some students of the manuscript have suggested might be symbolic representations of bodily functions such as reproduction.

After a further group of large foldout pages with more astronomical images, there follows another cluster of “herbal” images. These consist of multiple small drawings embedded in the text of each page, alongside objects in the margin that resemble pharmacological jars, perhaps suggesting that this part of the manuscript refers back to the opening herbal, and was intended as a collection of medical recipes. The book’s closing section consists of twenty-three pages of closely written text without illustration, made up of short paragraphs of just a few lines apiece, each paragraph prefaced by a star or asterisk.

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Nick Romeo in The Christian Science Monitor:

While visiting Cairo in 1850, Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend, “The old Orient is always young because nothing changes. Here the Bible is a picture of life today.” Flaubert’s cultural arrogance was typical of 19th-century European attitudes. He not only hazarded a vast generalization about a culture he had barely encountered, he also presumed that his inability to perceive change and dynamism meant they were in fact absent. The historian Christopher De Bellaigue’s new book, The Islamic Enlightenment, is a deeply researched riposte to Flaubert’s condescension. Beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and ending with the late 20th century, De Bellaigue shows how the cultural struggles between modernity and tradition unfolded in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran. Where Flaubert saw a static biblical tableau, De Bellaigue discovers constant and contested transformation.

One powerful impetus for modernization was Egypt’s military defeat at the hands of the French. A 1798 skirmish that Napoleon dubbed the Battle of the Pyramids lasted only one hour, but 29 French soldiers died while the Egyptians lost roughly 1,000 troops. Napoleon’s expedition was not just a military one; a broad range of scientists and scholars accompanied the troops to collect data and perform dazzling displays of scientific knowledge for local populations. The French used an expropriated palace in Cairo to house an aviary, a botanical garden, and workshops that produced everything from microscopic lenses to sword blades.

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Steven M. Phelps in Nature:

One of the most pressing questions facing biologists is how variation in the genome is translated into variation in complex traits. Perhaps no trait is more complex or more interesting than social behaviour. How do genomic differences influence aggression, courtship or bonding? Few studies have asked. In a paper online in Nature, Bendesky et al.¹ combine genetic crosses, detailed behavioural assays and the latest neuroscience tools to understand species differences in parental care in mice of the genus Peromyscus.

Peromyscus is a diverse North American genus, whose habitats range from arid deserts to montane cloud forests². Along with these tremendously disparate habitats come comparably variable behaviours. For example, sharing of parental care and social monogamy are rare traits in mammals, but they have evolved at least twice in Peromyscus³. Oldfield mice (P. polionotus), for instance, live in sandy habitats at low population densities, and seem to have adapted to their sparse environments by forming pair bonds, with both sexes providing ample parental care (Fig. 1). By contrast, the deer mouse (P. maniculatus) is tremendously widespread and has a promiscuous mating system similar to that found in many other rodents³. Deer mice provide less parental care than do oldfield mice, with this difference being particularly pronounced in fathers.

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Robert Alter in the New York Review of Books:

Jeffrey Saks has undertaken a heroic task in assembling the Agnon Library, using existing translations, which generally have been revised, and commissioning English versions of previously untranslated books. It is not quite a complete works because some books could not be included for reasons of copyright or on other grounds. The most unfortunate omission is Agnon’s modernist masterpiece, Only Yesterday (1945), a wrenching and richly inventive novel about a naive young Zionist’s failed attempt to take root in the land, which unfolds in Jaffa and Jerusalem in the early years of the twentieth century.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (his original family name was Czaczkes) was born in Buczacz, a town of about 15,000, over half of whom were Jews, that at one time belonged to Poland, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the late eighteenth century until the end of World War I, and is now in western Ukraine. In an Orthodox home, under the supervision of his learned father, he was given a thorough education in the classic Jewish texts, from the Bible with its medieval Hebrew exegetes to the Talmud, and he would draw on this background extensively throughout his career. But his family also engaged a German tutor for him, and he read Goethe, Schiller, and other German writers with his mother. The adolescent Agnon was drawn to Zionism, a movement then less than ten years old, and in 1908, when he was nineteen, he immigrated to Palestine.

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From Phys.org:

Researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have developed biodegradable nanoparticles that can be used to genetically program immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells—while the immune cells are still inside the body.

In a proof-of-principle study to be published April 17 in Nature Nanotechnology, the team showed that nanoparticle-programmed immune cells, known as T cells, can rapidly clear or slow the progression of leukemia in a mouse model.

"Our technology is the first that we know of to quickly program tumor-recognizing capabilities into T cells without extracting them for laboratory manipulation," said Fred Hutch's Dr. Matthias Stephan, the study's senior author. "The reprogrammed cells begin to work within 24 to 48 hours and continue to produce these receptors for weeks. This suggests that our technology has the potential to allow the immune system to quickly mount a strong enough response to destroy cancerous cells before the disease becomes fatal."

Cellular immunotherapies have shown promise in clinical trials, but challenges remain to making them more widely available and to being able to deploy them quickly.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Eric Alterman in The Nation:

I haven’t seen much discussion of Daniel Drezner’s new book, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas—which is weird, because it’s the kind of book that is written more to be reviewed and argued about, as opposed to actually purchased.

Drezner’s book is the latest investigation into the state of America’s public intellectuals and the “debate” they conduct with their patrons and their public, and, especially, among themselves. He joins a distinguished procession of thinkers who have tackled the subject, including Walter Lippmann, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Edward Shills, Irving Howe, Russell Jacoby, Edward Said, and, most recently, Richard Posner. (See my “Judging the Wise Guys,” The Nation, January 10, 2002.) Drezner is a reliable and intelligent guide to the current state of play. But while focusing on the trees, he doesn’t always pay proper attention to the forest, which in this case is the power of money to corrupt and control literally everything with which it comes into contact—most particularly intellectual culture.

Drezner by no means ignores the issue. Early on, he makes a crucial distinction between old-fashioned “public intellectuals” and the now-trendy “thought leaders.” The latter model is one that sells itself less to an identifiable “public”—something that has become increasingly difficult to define in a society continually segmenting itself according to ever-more-narrow criteria—than to plutocratic patrons. Once upon a time, we relied on intellectuals to “speak truth to power,” as the saying goes.

More here.

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Adrian Tinniswood at Literary Review:

Historians have a bad habit of glossing over the Protectorate. It just isn’t interesting: no drama, no battles, all those drab Puritans cancelling Christmas. Traditionalists tend to lump the four and a half years of Oliver Cromwell’s reign as Lord Protector in with the rest of the Interregnum, just another stage in that embarrassing aberrant gap between one Charles and another. Radicals dismiss it as a betrayal of the revolution and prefer to focus with longing on the Diggers, the Ranters and the Fifth Monarchy Men.

These attitudes have been challenged over the past decade. One thinks of Little and Smith’s Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007), or Blair Worden’s important essay ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Protectorate’ (2010). Now, in The English Conquest of Jamaica, Carla Gardina Pestana has taken a single event in the life of the Protectorate and produced a gripping study that sheds light not only on governmental thinking in the 1650s but also on the birth of the British Empire itself.

Pestana’s previous book The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution(2004) was a landmark in the relatively new field of Atlantic studies. Here she takes as her starting point the ‘Western Design’, Cromwell’s ambitious plan, hatched early in 1654, to send an invasion force to the West Indies with the aim of conquering Spanish colonies in the region and establishing a permanent English presence there.

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Patrick Blanchfield at n+1:

In the past few months we have witnessed the emergence of what we might call a hystericization of American politics. The structure of hysteria, as classical psychoanalysis has it, involves a consuming orientation toward a powerful Other, a state of erratic toggling between paranoia and attraction, fears of persecution, and demands for love. America has had its political hysterias and various histrionic politicians in the past, but as a symptom of our current collective pathologies and miserable cultural institutions, Trump is of another order entirely. It’s perhaps fitting that the 21st-century version of the fin-de-siècle Viennese hysteric—the marginalized woman succumbing to her mythical “wandering womb” by going into spasms on a chaise longue—is a sexually abusive reality TV star happy to spend precious minutes of televised debate time bragging about the size of his dick.

Yet the real hysteria hasn’t been Trump’s—it’s been the American media’s. “What Does Trump Really Want?” has become the great question of our time—the center of an entire cottage industry. Everything Trump says and tweets, no matter how trivial or unthinking (and very little of it is anything but), is instantly transformed into an utterance of major import: fodder for endless, breathless speculation and feverish interpretation. To whom was he sending a message with that tweet? While we’re playing checkers, he’s playing 4-dimensional chess—what’s his next play? What Does Trump’s Refusal to Shake Angela Merkel’s Hand Reveal About His Foreign Policy? Are his desires really the desires of some Other (Putin, Bannon, and in recent days, Kushner)?

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Samuel Earle at the London Review of Books:

His radical, fearless economic programme has resonated with the public – and left the markets in a panic. He has promised to tax incomes above €400,000 at 100 per cent, increase public spending by €250 billion a year, drop the retirement age, and cut the working week from 35 hours to 32 (Macron wants to increase it to 37). ‘The rich are living beyond our means,’ he says. If they want to leave, ‘let them.’

Investors have sold off French bonds and the euro has dropped against the dollar. The ‘nightmare scenario’ for the finance sector – a second round that sees Le Pen pitted against Mélenchon – is possible. Pierre Gattaz, the head of France’s biggest pro-business organisation (MEDEF), says it would be a ‘catastrophe’: a choice ‘between economic disaster and economic chaos’. The Economist called the choice ‘unpalatable’. Le Figarocompared Mélenchon to Chávez, Castro and Robespierre, ‘en passant par Lenin’. Slate recently released a ‘survival guide’ for Le Pen v. Mélenchon: leaving France is apparently the most ‘rational’ option.

Parts of the left are uneasy, too. It’s possible Mélenchon would take France out of the EU – or at least hold a referendum on the question – and he is committed to leaving Nato. His hostility towards supranational institutions has led to comparisons with Le Pen, but there is a complete absence of xenophobia in Mélenchon’s campaign, and he has refused to join in with her migrant-bashing. Towards the beginning of his rally in Marseille, he held a moment’s silence for all those who have died in the ‘mass grave’ behind him, the Mediterranean Sea.

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Brenden O'Neill in Sp!ked:

The most curious thing about the political class’s war in defence of truth is that it coexists with a war against freedom of speech. In one breath, our betters, whether it’s the technocrats of the EU or broadsheet thinkers, bemoan a crisis of truth, claiming that a combination of demagoguery and populist myth-making has propelled the modern West into a ‘post-truth’ era. Yet in the next they express disdain for the ideal of unfettered free thought and debate. Whether they’re instituting laws against ‘hate speech’ or enforcing social stigma against such things as ‘climate-change denial’ or ‘Europhobia’, they exhibit a palpable discomfort with the idea of a fully open public sphere in which nothing is unsayable.

We might even say that in 2017, there are two things that really animate the political and cultural elites of the West: first, their self-styled urge to defend truth, their pose as warriors for honesty against the misinformation of the new populists; and secondly, their agitation with unfettered discussion and with the expression of what they consider to be hateful or outré views. This is striking, because truth without freedom, without the freest possible space in which to debate and doubt and blaspheme, is not truth at all. It is dogma. It represents an assumption of intellectual and moral infallibility rather than a winning and proving of it in the only way that counts: through free public contestation. That our rulers both claim to love truth and fear freedom of speech utterly explodes the pretensions of their moral panic about a ‘post-truth’ era. It’s not truth they want to protect – it’s the authority of their prejudice.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Neuroscientists observed a sustained increase in neural signal diversity – a measure of the complexity of brain activity – of people under the influence of psychedelic drugs, compared with when they were in a normal waking state. The diversity of brain signals provides a mathematical index of the level of consciousness. For example, people who are awake have been shown to have more diverse neural activity using this scale than those who are asleep. This, however, is the first study to show brain-signal diversity that is higher than baseline, that is higher than in someone who is simply 'awake and aware'. Previous studies have tended to focus on lowered states of consciousness, such as sleep, anaesthesia, or the so-called 'vegetative' state. The team say that more research is needed using more sophisticated and varied models to confirm the results but they are cautiously excited.

Professor Anil Seth, Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, said: "This finding shows that the brain-on-psychedelics behaves very differently from normal. "During the psychedelic state, the electrical activity of the brain is less predictable and less 'integrated' than during normal conscious wakefulness – as measured by 'global signal diversity'. "Since this measure has already shown its value as a measure of 'conscious level', we can say that the psychedelic state appears as a higher 'level' of consciousness than normal – but only with respect to this specific mathematical measure." For the study, Michael Schartner, Adam Barrett and Professor Seth of the Sackler Centre reanalysed data that had previously been collected by Imperial College London and the University of Cardiff in which healthy volunteers were given one of three drugs known to induce a psychedelic state: psilocybin, ketamine and LSD. Using brain imaging technology, they measured the tiny magnetic fields produced in the brain and found that, across all three drugs, this measure of conscious level – the neural signal diversity – was reliably higher.

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Manveena Suri at CNN:

With a budget of $155 million, India is set to make the longest poem ever written into its most expensive film ever.