Carl Zimmer in Stat:

Reaching into the jetsam on his desk, Epstein fished out a metal washer the size of a beer coaster. The hole at the center was sealed with two disk-shaped membranes. He showed it off for a little while, and then he retrieved three black boxes. They had perforations on their sides and were each about the size and shape of a stick of chewing gum. Finally, Epstein unearthed a cast-off box originally used for storing pipette tips. One side was open, and the other was lined with a membrane sheet.

These are the tools that Epstein and his colleagues have used to make scientific headlines. And they’re cheap. The hacked pipette tip box costs less than $10 to make. “You could build this in your garage,” he said, turning the box over in his hand.

Behind these cheap items there’s a powerful idea. Bacteria make antibiotics naturally, which means that if you can grow new bacteria in a lab, the microbes can offer up new drugs. Unfortunately, for the past century, microbiologists have failed to unlock the secret to cultivating the vast majority of bacterial species.

Now Epstein and his colleagues have found a way to make many of them thrive.

More here.

Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian:

This week, Angus Deaton will receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.” Deservedly so. Indeed, soon after the award was announced in October, Deaton published some startling work with Ann Case in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – research that is at least as newsworthy as the Nobel ceremony.

Analysing a vast amount of data about health and deaths among Americans, Case and Deaton showed declining life expectancy and health for middle-aged white Americans, especially those with a high school education or less. Among the causes were suicide, drugs, and alcoholism.

America prides itself on being one of the world’s most prosperous countries, and can boast that in every recent year except one (2009) per capita GDP has increased. And a sign of prosperity is supposed to be good health and longevity. But, while the US spends more money per capita on medical care than almost any other country (and more as a percentage of GDP), it is far from topping the world in life expectancy. France, for example, spends less than 12% of its GDP on medical care, compared to 17% in the US. Yet Americans can expect to live three full years less than the French.

More here.

Patrick McNamara in Aeon:

The medical literature abounds with descriptions of creative bursts following infusion of dopamine-enhancing drugs such as l-dopa (levodopa), used to treat Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Bipolar illness, which sends sufferers into prolonged bouts of dopamine-fuelled mania followed by devastating spells of depressive illness, can sometimes produce work of amazing virtuosity during the manic phase. Often these individuals refuse to take anti-dopamine drugs that can prevent the manic episodes precisely because they value the creative activity of which they are capable during these altered states.

Hallucinogenic drugs such as Psilocybin and LSD, which indirectly stimulate dopamine activity in the brain’s frontal lobes, can produce religious experience even in the avowedly non-religious. These hallucinogens produce vivid imagery, sometimes along with near psychotic breaks or intense spiritual experience, all tied to stimulation of dopamine receptors on neurons in the limbic system, the seat of emotion located in the midbrain, and in the prefrontal cortex, the upper brain that is the centre of complex thought.

Given all these fascinating correlations, sometime after the attack on the twin towers in New York City, I began to hypothesise that dopamine might provide a simple explanation for the paradoxical god effect. When dopamine in the limbic and prefrontal regions of the brain was high, but not too high, it would produce the ability to entertain unusual ideas and associations, leading to heightened creativity, inspired leadership and profound religious experience. When dopamine was too high, however, it would produce mental illness in genetically vulnerable individuals. In those who had been religious before, fanaticism could be the result.

While pursuing these ideas, I had a lucky break during routine office hours at the VA (Veterans Administration) Boston Healthcare System, where I regularly treat US veterans. I was doing a routine neuropsychological examination of a tall, distinguished elderly man with Parkinson’s Disease. This man was a decorated Second World War veteran and obviously intelligent. He had made his living as a consulting engineer but had slowly withdrawn from the working world as his symptoms progressed. His withdrawal was selective: he did not quit everything, his wife explained. ‘Just social parts of his work, some physical stuff and unfortunately his private religious devotions.’

When I asked what she meant by ‘devotions’ she replied that he used to pray and read his Bible all the time, but since the onset of the disease he had done so less and less. When I asked the patient himself about his religious interests, he replied that they seemed to have vanished.

More here.

Ezra Klein and Alvin Chang in Vox:

For Shanto Iyengar, director of Stanford's political communications lab, the marriage polls were yet more evidence that something important was changing in American politics.

The big institutions and broad outlines of our political system have been so stable for so long that it makes it hard for people to see when the tectonic plates of American politics are actually shifting. There's been a Democratic Party and a Republican Party for most of the country's history, and they've always bickered, so it's easy to assume — particularly in a country with a short historical memory — that the partisanship we see now is simply how it's always been.

But Iyengar was coming to believe that today's political differences were fundamentally different from yesterday's political differences; the nature of American political partisanship, he worried, was mutating into something more fundamental, and more irreconcilable, than what it had been in the past.

Political scientists have mainly studied polarization as an ideological phenomenon — in this view, party polarization is really another term for political disagreement, and more polarization simply meant more severe disagreements. But it's hard to find the evidence that the disagreements among ordinary Americans have really become so much more intense.

“If you look at Americans' positions on the issues, they are much closer to the center than their elected representatives,” Iyengar says. “The people who end up getting elected are super extreme, but the voters are not.”

But even as American voters remained relatively centrist, they seemed to be getting angrier and more fearful of the other side.

More here.

Mona Ali over at LSE US Center's blog:

My findings revealed that US-owned subsidiaries were much more profitable than foreign-owned subsidiaries in the US. The former’s rates of return were between 16 percent pre-tax to 10 percent post-tax above the latter. Contrary to the risk-return tradeoff in which high profits are associated with higher risk investment, American investment overseas was also less risky compared to foreign-owned investment in the US.

I also found that research and development (R&D) expenditures were twice as great for US firms overseas compared to foreign firms in the US. While this finding may appear to bolster Hausmann and Sturzenegger’s ‘dark matter’ thesis, to rely on relatively higher R&D expenditures as a proxy for ‘dark matter’ is problematic. For one, foreign firms in the US might choose to locate their R&D expenditures in their home countries. Moreover, intangibles—such as human capital, brand equity and reputation—may be inadequately captured by this proxy measure.

Is tax avoidance partially responsible for the apparently low profits of US-based industries (note that these industries include foreign firms located in the US)? It is clear that taxation is an important consideration in determining where multinational corporations locate their foreign subsidiaries. Modes of tax avoidance have become increasingly complex. Current strategies include extracting royalties and management fees—thereby stripping income from profits—from subsidiaries in high-tax zones or re-locating a firm’s assets to special-purpose entities in tax havens. Larger companies with more extensive transnational networks are more advantaged compared to smaller ones. The current ‘tsunami’ of US firms engaged in corporate inversions—whereby firms reduce their global tax bill by shifting their corporate headquarters overseas when merging with a smaller foreign rival—suggests the skillfulness of US firms at tax avoidance.

Given the confidentiality of firm-level data, it is difficult for tax authorities and statisticians to figure out which modes of ‘tax planning’ are at work. Using industry data, I found that the effective corporate tax burden (corporate income as a share of pre-tax income) was fairly similar for US investment overseas (20 percent) compared to foreign investment in the US (18 percent). However the tax burden for US based firms (which includes foreign firms located in the US) was remarkably lower – around 5 percent. This finding backs Kleinbard’s claim that US-based firms are leaders in tax avoidance. It is worth noting that foreign investment in the US is overwhelming acquired through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Here profits might artificially suppressed through amortization of goodwill effects and M&A tax avoidance strategies.

More here.

Lola

Under the orange-tree
she washes baby-clothes.
Her eyes of green
and voice of violet.

Ay, love,
under the orange-tree in bloom!

The water in the ditch
flowed, filled with light,
a sparrow chirped
in the little olive-tree.

………Ay, love,
under the orange-tree in bloom!

Later, when Lola
has exhausted the soap,
young bullfighters will come.

……..Ay, love,
under the orange-tree in bloom!

by Frederico García Lorca
Translated by A. S. Kline © 2007

Bajo el naranjo, lava
pañales de algodón.
Tiene verdes los ojos
y violeta la voz.

¡Ay, amor,
bajo el naranjo en flor!

El agua de la acequia
iba llena de sol,
en el olivarito
cantaba un gorrión.

¡Ay, amor,
bajo el naranjo en flor!

Luego cuando la Lola
gaste todo el jabón,
vendrán los torerillos.

¡Ay, amor,
bajo el naranjo en flor!

From KurzweilAI:

Exercise may enhance plasticity of the adult brain — the ability of our neurons to change with experience — which is essential for learning, memory, and brain repair, Italian researchers report in an open-access paper in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.

Their research, which focused on the the visual cortex, may offer hope for people with traumatic brain injury or eye conditions such as amblyopia, the researchers suggest. “We provide the first demonstration that moderate levels of physical activity enhance neuroplasticity in the visual cortex of adult humans,” says Claudia Lunghi of the University of Pisa in Italy. Brain plasticity is generally thought to decline with age, especially in the sensory region of the brain (such as vision). But previous studies by research colleague Alessandro Sale of the National Research Council’s Neuroscience Institute showed that animals performing physical activity — for example rats running on a wheel — showed elevated levels of plasticity in the visual cortex and had improved recovery from amblyopia compared to more sedentary animals.

More here.

Lisa Ruddick in The Point:

In the course of interviewing some seventy graduate students in English for a book on the state of literary criticism, I’ve encountered two types of people who are having trouble adapting to the field. First, there are those who bridle at the left-political conformity of English and who voice complaints familiar from the culture wars. But a second group suffers from a malaise without a name; socialization to the discipline has left them with unaccountable feelings of confusion, inhibition and loss.

Those in the latter group share a quality of inwardness. In interviews, they strike me as reflective, intuitive individuals, with English teacher written all over them. These are the people who say that something in this intellectual environment is eating them alive. Gina Hiatt, the president of a large coaching service for academic writers, tells me that many of her clients in the humanities have a similar experience. She believes these clients sense “an immorality they can’t put their finger on” in the thought-world of the humanities. They struggle as writers because talking the talk would make them feel complicit, yet they cannot afford to say, in Hiatt’s words, that “the emperor has no clothes.” Some keep their best ideas out of their scholarship for fear that if they violate certain ideological taboos, others will “hate” them (a verb Hiatt hears repeatedly). Hiatt describes these individuals as “canaries in the mine.”

Is there something unethical in contemporary criticism? This essay is not just for those who identify with the canaries in the mine, but for anyone who browses through current journals and is left with an impression of deadness or meanness.

More here.

James Marcus at Harper's Magazine:

Primo Levi’s literary conquest of America has been slow, sketchy, almost diffident. The English translation of his first book, If This Is a Man, appeared in this country in 1959, twelve years after the publication of the original in Italy, and despite a handful of good reviews, it sank without a trace. Perhaps it was too soon for Levi’s clear-eyed account of life in Auschwitz — perhaps, for readers enjoying the postwar boom and the pleasures of the Pax Americana, the book seemed too bitter, even medicinal. His second book, The Truce, repeated this disappearing act in 1965. Levi, of course, kept writing and publishing in Italy, where he won every literary prize and came to be regarded as one of the sanest, sharpest, and most sweetly rational voices of the century. There, he was a major writer and public intellectual (who happened to make his living as a chemist). Here, he was invisible — until The Periodic Table showed up in 1984, an elemental masterpiece and a reminder to American readers that they had an awful lot of catching up to do.

In short order, English versions of Levi’s work began spilling from the chute: fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs. It was a windfall to have all this stupendous work at last. It was also a lot to digest in a hurry. Levi’s suicide, in 1987 — there are still doubters, but most agree that the author threw himself down the stairwell of his Turin apartment building — seemed for some time to contaminate the pleasure that so many had taken in his work. And even after the initial shock faded, his substantial oeuvre felt somewhat scattered.

more here.

K. C. Cole in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Why build a universe anyway?

To create something beautiful, concludes Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek in his relentlessly engaging new book, A Beautiful Question. “Many motivations have been ascribed to the Creator,” he points out, “but artist ambition is rarely prominent among them.”

The beautiful question the book considers, stated simply, is this: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?”

The answer is an emphatic yes: “You bet it does,” Wilczek writes. “And so do you.”

What is the meaning of “beautiful”? Physics is pretty clear on the issue, and Wilczek makes the argument deeper, broader, and far more colorful (literally and figuratively) than ever before: it is harmony, balance, and above all symmetry, the core of artistry.

Symmetry is seductive, whether it appears in natural forms, like snowflakes, snails, and faces, or in human creations, like doilies, arches, and decorative tiles.

In physics, symmetries underlie every fundamental law, because symmetries reveal the deep truths often hidden behind superficial differences. Energy and matter are two sides of a coin, as are space and time, electricity and magnetism, waves and particles.

More here.

Michael Upchurch at The American Scholar:

Our native language can be like a well-worn shirt, so comfortable that it’s easy to forget one is wearing it. But all permutations seem possible with language once we’ve been jarred out of our own. With the help of polyglots and linguists, we can even begin to make sense of the babel.

Two new books provide the lay reader with lively tours through the mysteries of language. Dutch writer Gaston Dorren’s Lingo serves up story after story about linguistic differences. He notes how the definite article (“the”) is attached to the ends of nouns in Romanian, Bulgarian, and Albanian rather than in front of them as a separate word. He suggests that Icelandic has stayed so unchanged over the centuries thanks to its “monolingual environment, strong social networks and perhaps the absence of a youth culture.” And he explains why, if we want to say “I call her” in Basque, we’ll wind up saying something that translates literally as “Me calls she.”

more here.

Anne Enright at the London Review of Books:

It is tempting to see Antigone as a play not just about the mourning female voice, or about kinship and the law, but about the political use of the body after death. Creon, the ruler of Thebes, dishonours the body of his nephew to serve as a warning to other potential enemies of the state. One brother, Eteocles, has been buried ‘in accordance with justice and law’, the other, Polynices, ‘is to lie unwept and unburied’ – this according to their sister Antigone, who has already decided at the play’s opening to ignore Creon’s edict and bury the corpse. And so she does. When asked to deny the crime, she says, in Anne Carson’s 2012 translation of Sophocles: ‘I did the deed I do not deny it.’ She does not seek to justify her actions within the terms of Creon’s law: she negates the law by handing it back to him, intact – ‘If you call that law.’

Antigone later says she is being punished for ‘an act of perfect piety’, but that act is also perfectly wordless in the play. The speeches she makes to her sister Ismene and to Creon are before and after the fact. She is a woman who breaks an unjust law. We can ask if she does this from inside or outside the legal or linguistic system of the play, or of the state, but it is good to bear in mind that Antigone does not bury her brother with words, but with dust.

more here.

Chris Mooney in the Washington Post:

For some time, social science researchers have been studying an oddity about the U.S. — compared with many other nations, we’re a hotbed of global warming doubt and denial. Accordingly, and to counteract this, a variety of messages or ways of “re-framing” the issue have been proposed, often with the goal of appealing to the ideology of political conservatives, which is where most of the doubt lies.

Some of the most popular framing ideas include talking about climate change in the context of economic opportunity (solving climate change will lead to a clean energy boom), national security (not solving it will make the world a dangerous place), faith-based ethics (we need to be good stewards of the Creation) and public health (climate change will make us sicker, or lead to the spread of diseases).

Now, however, a new study suggests not only that these messages may not be particularly effective, but that messages espousing climate change doubt or denial — which are ever-present in the din of public debate and discourse — appear to have considerably more impact.

More here.

Adam Grant in Evonomics:

Here are some of my favorite surprising studies. What do they have in common?

• People are more likely to buy jam when they’re presented with 6 flavors than 24.
• After inspecting a house, real estate agents thought it was $14,000 more valuable when the seller listed it at $149,900 than $119,900.
• When children play a fun game and then get rewarded for it, they lose interest in playing the game once the rewards are gone.
• People conserve more energy when they see their neighbors’ consumption rates.
• If you flip a coin six times, people think Heads-Heads-Heads-Tails-Tails-Tails is less likely than Heads-Tails-Tails-Heads-Heads-Tails, even though the two are equally likely.
• Managers underestimate the intrinsic motivation of their employees.

They’ve all appeared in the media as studies done by behavioral economists, when in fact they were done by psychologists.

More here.

Alex Mar in The Believer Magazine:

Maybe it was during nap time or snack time or shortly after their parents dropped them off each day, but it was certainly during preschool hours that the teachers Mrs. McMartin and Mr. Buckey led the children through trapdoors in the classroom floor and down into the maze of tunnels. There below, the cold walls were covered in images of Satan, with his red face and massive horns (any child would have recognized him). There underground, the children—all of them young, between two and five years old—were touched in private places and made to pose for dirty pictures. And maybe those tunnels made up a vast underground network, because somehow, in daylight, without any witnesses, the teachers managed to take the entire class to a nearby Episcopal church, where the grown-ups donned black robes and masks and stood before the altar and slit the throats of baby rabbits and birds and even a couple of turtles, letting the hot blood run into fancy cups. And they passed the cups to the children and forced them to drink the animals’ blood. And babies were killed (maybe); and corpses were dug up from the ground (maybe); and the teachers took the kids out into the cemetery, among the tombstones, and touched them between their legs. And once Mr. Buckey took a long knife and chopped a pony to death right in front of them, saying that their parents would die that way, too, if any of the children said a word about anything that had happened at preschool that day or any other day or ever. And everybody spoke the name of the Devil over and over again, dancing.

These were among the 208 charges of abuse leveled against the seven teachers of the mostly family-run McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, in 1984. It began when the mother of one two-year-old boy claimed that her son had been molested by his teacher. The initial accusations were so over-the-top—not only was there baby killing and blood drinking, but clown costumes were involved—that the DA dismissed them as utterly unsubstantiated. (The mother had also accused the boy’s absent father of abuse, and was eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.) But at this point, the Manhattan Beach chief of police took it upon himself to send around a “confidential” letter to parents of two hundred present and former McMartin students, outlining the charges in detail, and advising them to ask their kids if they, too, had been assaulted. When nearly all the children denied mistreatment, the authorities recommended that the parents take them to Children’s Institute International, a Los Angeles center with a new focus on child-abuse prevention, where they were interviewed with puppets and anatomically correct dolls and asked leading questions, with some case workers outlining very specific abuse scenarios for the kids before they were given a chance to answer on their own.

More here.

Sabine Lou in Nature:

When Lokesh Joshi was studying glycobiology as a postdoc at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, he had mentors who helped to guide his research — and others who trained him in the practice of mindfulness. For up to 45 minutes each morning, in accordance with his teachers' counsel, he would sit on the carpet in a corner of his apartment, close his eyes and focus on his breathing or on the functioning of his internal organs, second by second. “This helped me find my own point of stillness — what I call grounding,” he explains. After regularly practising this morning routine, Joshi found that he could think more clearly, and that he felt better. He no longer had sweaty palms when he was about to give a talk at a conference, for example, nor did he feel anxious or defensive when a manuscript got rejected or needed major revisions. “It helped me take a step back and not react too quickly to my emotions,” he says. And on days that he did not engage in mindfulness practice, he could tell the difference — his stress levels would ratchet up and his ability to concentrate would decrease.

Now vice-president for research at the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway, Joshi continues to practise mindfulness on a daily basis, during his 1.5-kilometre walk to and from his office. He thinks that it is a crucial soft skill for researchers, and he values it so strongly that he organized and spoke at a university conference on the subject in October. The university has also launched a lecture series and free drop-in classes on the art. Mindfulness has long been in use in the corporate, entrepreneurial and other sectors. It is more than a new-age buzzword, said speakers at the conference. “In academic circles, there is fear about mindfulness because people believe it could stop you from thinking,” says Gelong Thubten, a Tibetan Buddhist monk at the Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery near Langholm, UK, who conducted mindfulness sessions during the conference. “But we are not trying to get rid of thoughts — it is the mind that you are training. We are looking at the container, not the content.”

More here.

CarlZimmerinThe New York Times:

Scientists are investigating the epigenetics of fatherhood: how a man’s experiences can alter his sperm, and whether those changes in turn may alter his children. Credit Dann Tardif/LWA, via Corbis. A week before the operation, the man provided a sperm sample to Danish scientists. A week after the procedure, he did so again. A year later, he donated a third sample. Scientists were investigating a tantalizing but controversial hypothesis: that a man’s experiences can alter his sperm, and that those changes in turn may alter his children. That idea runs counter to standard thinking about heredity: that parents pass down only genes to their children. People inherit genes that predispose them to obesity, or stress, or cancer — or they don’t. Whether one’s parents actually were obese or continually anxious doesn’t rewrite those genes. Yet a number of animal experiments in recent years have challenged conventional thinking on heredity, suggesting that something more is at work.

In 2010, for example, Dr. Romain Barres of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues fed male rats a high-fat diet and then mated them with females. Compared with male rats fed a regular diet, those on the high-fat diet fathered offspring that tended to gain more weight, develop more fat and have more trouble regulating insulin levels. Eating high-fat food is just one of several experiences a father can have that can change his offspring. Stress is another. Male rats exposed to stressful experiences — like smelling the odor of a fox — will father pups that have a dampened response to stress.

More here.

Philip Hoare in the New Statesman:

In the autumn of 1849, a young American wearing a new green coat – of which he was inordinately proud – arrived in London. He checked in to a boarding house on Craven Street, a narrow road running down from the Strand to the then unembanked Thames. The house is still there, at the end of a Georgian terrace, an improbable survivor. You may have passed the turning many times and never thought to have walked down it. Even if you had, you may not have noticed that on the wall of the end house, whose bow window still looks out on to the river, is an equally improbable blue plaque. The young American was Herman Melville and the plaque commemorates the author and his greatest creation – the wondrous phantasmagoria that is Moby-Dick, which was born in that boarding house.

That November, the writer wandered around the imperial metropolis, down its “anti-lanes” and river tunnels, from tavern to publisher’s office, trying to sell his latest book,White-Jacket. Melville had been youthfully famous from his debut, a bestselling book of sensual tales of the South Seas, Typee, first published in London, but had become increasingly obscure in his literary output. He knew he had to come up with something spectacular – “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”.

It is clear from Melville’s journal, one of only two such surviving documents, that his mind was already playing with these ideas.

More here.