Acilius diving beetle male front tarsus (foot) 100x

Christopher Jobson in Colossal:

If you’ve ever wondered how a diving beetle swims through the water or manages to rest just on the surface, the answer is in part because its foot is infinitely more complicated than your own. As seen above, this microscopic image of a male Acilius sulcatus (diving beetle) by photographer Igor Siwanowicz reveals the extraordinary complexity of this aquatic insect’s tiny appendage. This is just one of many examples of Siwanowicz’s work as a neurobiologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus.

More here. [Thanks to Jennifer Oullette.]

John Hewitt in Inference:

Current approaches to the neurosciences are naïve and often misguided. Contemporary researchers are hopelessly enthusiastic about computer simulations, wiring diagrams or connectomes, and brain activity maps. We may need software tools to visualize brains, but they will not provide any deep understanding of the brain itself.

I shall argue that the fundamental, discrete units of the nervous system are its mitochondria. The feature that we expect of an irreducible neural component is excitability. Mitochondria take excitability to an extreme. If mitochondria are the fundamental units of the nervous systems, then in any CAD model of the brain, they are precisely the parts to which the most care and attention should be applied.

More here.

Hermione Hoby at Vice:

When I met Emily Witt six years ago, I felt that touch of vertigo that comes when you realize you're in the presence of a highly sophisticated and committed mind. Witt is an alumnus of Brown, the Columbia School of Journalism, and Cambridge. So she did not strike me as the sort of person who would get high and have sex in the “orgy dome” of Burning Man with a person she'd just met. I'd made this assumption because I am, like most people, susceptible to normative narratives of what a hyper-educated, somewhat reserved young woman does and does not do. Nowhere are those narratives more fraught than in the realm of sex and dating.

In Future Sex, published this month by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Witt interrogates both our cultural myths around feminine sexuality and the vanguards of sexual experimentation seeking to dismantle them. Her serious, radical book places her in a lineage that started with writers like the late feminist critic Ellen Willis, and, yes, Joan Didion herself. Didion didn't do acid in Haight-Ashbury, but Witt, who, for example, details attending the live filming of a hardcore pornography series, is participant as well as observer. Her progressiveness is not just of politics, but of practice. The result is this wise, honest, and necessary book. We met for coffee last week in Brooklyn to talk about Future Sex and how to approach writing about female sexuality.

More here.

Sewell Chan in the New York Times:

The singer and songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” in the words of the Swedish Academy.

He is the first American to win since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993. The announcement, in Stockholm, came as something of a surprise. Although Mr. Dylan, 75, has been mentioned often as having an outside shot at the prize, his work does not fit into the literary canons of novels, poetry and short stories that the prize has traditionally recognized.

“Mr. Dylan’s work remains utterly lacking in conventionality, moral sleight of hand, pop pabulum or sops to his audience,” the former Rolling Stones bass player Bill Wyman wrote in a 2013 Op-Ed essay in The New York Times arguing for Mr. Dylan to get the award. “His lyricism is exquisite; his concerns and subjects are demonstrably timeless; and few poets of any era have seen their work bear more influence.”

Mr. Dylan was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minn., and grew up in Hibbing. He played in bands as a teenager, influenced by the folk musician Woody Guthrie, the authors of the Beat Generation and modernist poets.

More here.

Emma Duncan in The Economist:

The origins of Le Jardin Secret lie in a dentist’s waiting-room in Mayfair. Sante Giovanni Albonetti, an Italian businessman, had acquired a development site on the ruins of an ancient riyad and its garden at the centre of Marrakech’s medina with his business partner, Lauro Milan. They had planned to build a hotel, but after the crash of 2008 started contemplating other possible uses for a space that was both huge and, because of the high walls in the medina, invisible to the outside world. Browsing through a magazine, Albonetti saw an article about a “secret garden” that Tom Stuart-Smith, Britain’s most celebrated garden designer, was creating – and thought, “That’s it!” So the developers hired Stuart-Smith to make one for them too.

There is nothing unusual about creating an ambitious garden in Morocco. It is a wonderful place for cultivation (the region does much of Europe’s market gardening), for the High Atlas mountains keep temperatures down and provide snow-melt that flows into underground aquifers. Gardens are central to Islam. While Christianity’s paradise is a vague notion of proximity to God, Islam’s is firmly rooted in a garden, with a detailed planting scheme described in scripture: fig and pomegranate, olive and date-palm. The basic chahar-bagh (four-garden) shape was first used by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great two and a half millennia ago, and the idea of a formal garden came to Europe from the Muslim world via Moorish Spain. The illustrations for the “Roman de la Rose”, a 13th-century French poem, show a garden clearly modelled on an Islamic one.

More here.

Jared Keller in Smithsonian:

Friday, October 7, may have been among the strangest, most tumultuous days in American political history. No fewer than three events occurred that in any other campaign would have shocked the nation. Most infamously, The Washington Post released a devastating 2005 video showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women: “When you're a star they let you do it.” Moments later, Wikileaks released the transcripts of some of the Wall Street speeches delivered by Hillary Clinton, which had been a contentious point during the Democratic primary. This was all just hours after Trump had claimed that the “Central Park Five” were guilty, even though the suspects in the 1989 case were exonerated through DNA evidence and the true perprator has confessed. It was a day of “October Surprises” after the previous week had already had a few of them, including revelations from The New York Times that the Republican may have avoided paying federal taxes for some 18 years. The term “October Surprise” was coined by a 1980s political operative but has ever since been appropriated by the media to describe unexpected political disasters in the twilight hours of the campaign. Sometimes they are intentionally positioned by political opponents to impact voters, often days before they head to the polls. They aren’t always successful, but they’ve become a staple of modern politics. Though the term was coined by Reagan campaign manager and future CIA director William Casey during the 1980 campaign, the October surprise enjoyed a long, unusual history even before it entered American political vernacular:

2012: The Storm Before the Storm

Last election’s October surprise wasn’t the result of political scheming or well-timed investigative reporting, but a freak of nature. Hurricane Sandy, which devastated communities up and down the East Coast in the closing days of October, had two important effects: It took swing states New Hampshire and Virginia off the campaign trail for a week or two and gave President Obama the opportunity to appear presidential while responding to a national emergency. The image of then-popular Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie warmly greeting Obama in the aftermath of the storm didn’t help either, according to political analysts at the time. While Obama was already on the rebound in the national polls after a mixed performance during the presidential debates, Hurricane Sandy gave him an additional edge days before the election. The rest, as they say, is history.

More here.

John Kaag and Clancy Martin in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

I have, alas! Philosophy,
Medicine, Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labour, studied through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.

For two professors, the opening words of Goethe’s Faust have always been slightly disturbing, but only recently, as we’ve grown older, have they come to haunt us.

Faust sits in his dusty library, surrounded by tomes, and laments the utter inadequacy of human knowledge. He was no average scholar but a true savant — a master in the liberal arts of philosophy and theology and the practical arts of jurisprudence and medicine. In the medieval university, those subjects were the culminating moments of a lifetime of study in rhetoric, logic, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

In other words, Faust knows everything worth knowing. And still, after all his careful bookwork, he arrives at the unsettling realization that none of it has really mattered. His scholarship has done pitifully little to unlock the mystery of human life.

Are we and our students in that same situation? Are we teaching them everything without teaching them anything regarding the big questions that matter most? Is there a curriculum that addresses why we are here? And why we live only to suffer and die?

More here. [Thanks to Eric Chaffee.]

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

If we could snap our fingers and change the way math and science are taught in U.S. schools, most of us would. The shortcomings of the current approach are clear. Subjects that are vibrant in the minds of experts become lifeless by the time they’re handed down to students. It’s not uncommon to hear kids in Algebra 2 ask, “When are we ever going to use this?” and for the teacher to reply, “Math teaches you how to think,” which is true — if only it were taught that way.

To say that this is now changing is to invite an eye roll. For a number of entrenched reasons, from the way teachers are trained to the difficulty of agreeing on what counts in each discipline, instruction in science and math is remarkably resistant to change.

That said, we’re riding the next big wave in K-12 science and math education in the United States. The main events are a pair of highly visible but often misunderstood documents — the Common Core math standards and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) — that, if implemented successfully, will boldly remake the way math and science are taught. Both efforts seek to recast instruction in the fundamental ideas and perspectives that animate the two fields.

More here.

Samuel Granados, Zoeann Murphy, Kevin Schaul and Anthony Faiola over at the Washington Post:

But it is in Europe, not the American Southwest, where the cauldron of migration has truly begun to boil over.

In a region where borders were being erased, more new barriers suddenly went up than anywhere else on Earth. It happened as 2015 saw a rush of more than a million migrants — the vast majority fleeing the wars in Syria and Iraq — taking to rough seas and scaling mountainous terrain to find sanctuary in Europe.

At first, the newcomers arrived largely unhindered. But then fear took hold, driven in part by terrorist attacks involving militants posing as migrants as well as crimes involving asylum seekers. Hungary began building a fence in June 2015, and it was not long before others followed suit. By early this year, Austria and other nations had banded together to halt migrant transit through the Balkans, and the E.U. signed a deal with Turkey to stop asylum seekers from crossing the Aegean Sea.

The combined moves left nearly 60,000 migrants trapped in Greece, with the single largest bottleneck forming in Idomeni, a border town that formerly served as a waystation for those heading deeper into Europe. Before the camp was cleared in May and the migrants relocated to other corners of Greece, as many as 14,000 desperate asylum seekers were living in squalid conditions there, some in tents strung along the very barbed wire fence that barred their way.

More here.

Paul Mason in The Guardian:

A single day of fighting in June 1859, among the vineyards and villages near Lake Garda, left 40,000 Italian, French and Austrian soldiers dead or wounded. The Battle of Solferino might have been remembered simply for its carnage, but for the presence of Henry Dunant. Dunant, a Swiss traveller, spent days tending the wounded and wrote a memoir that led to the founding of the Red Cross and to the first Geneva convention, signed by Europe’s great powers in 1864.

Solferino inspired the principle that hospitals and army medical personnel are not a legitimate target in war. Today, with the bombing of hospitals by the Russians in Syria, the Saudis in Yemen and the Americans in Afghanistan, those who provide medical aid in war believe that principle is in ruins.

So far this year, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 21 of their supported medical facilities in Yemen and Syria have been attacked. Last year an MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan was destroyed by a US attack, in whichthose fleeing the building were reportedly gunned down from the air, and 42 patients and staff died.

A UN resolution in May urged combatants to refrain from bombing medical facilities. MSF says that the resolution “has made no difference on the ground”. Four out of the five permanent members of the UN security council, it says, are actively involved in coalitions whose troops have attacked hospitals.

More here.

Sanjay Reddy over at his website:

The announcement that the new Secretary-General of the United Nations will be Antonio Guterres of Portugal brings to an end a process of making this important appointment which has been more transparent than ever (as it included such innovations as a public debate between declared candidates). However, despite the credentials of the new Secretary-General and his laudable intentions for the organisation, the process has highlighted the continued deficiencies in the selection process, including but not confined to lack of full transparency, in particular on the basis of the final decision.

The widespread anticipation that the next Secretary-General would be the first woman in the position has been disappointed, as has been the supposition that the candidate should come from Eastern Europe, the one officially recognized regional grouping from which a Secretary-General has not come before. However, it is less surprising that these expectations were disappointed than at first might be thought. UN insiders, including both member states and activists engaged with the organisation, informally imposed both a regional and gender criterion, creating a gradient against which potential candidates who did not satisfy the requirements had to climb – inevitably limiting the range of strong candidates, including women candidates, who were willing to enter the race. (While two of the five finally declared women candidates were from outside Eastern Europe many others had been discouraged previously, and both of those who did run were decided insiders whose actions during their UN tenure were viewed by many either adversely or as unremarkable). Although there were numerous candidates, the preponderance of those from Eastern Europe was relatively weak, and on the whole without much experience of the United Nations system or with a checkered record. Strong candidates from elsewhere, with a few exceptions, may inevitably have been discouraged by the idea that the candidate must if possible be both a woman and from Eastern Europe, even as the process remained opaque and dependent on state sponsorship and power-broking. [The regional groupings are also highly unequal in terms of number of countries and their share of the world’s population — more than half of the world’s population and more than a quarter of countries are in the Asia-Pacific, while twelve percent of member states and less than five percent of the world ‘s population lives in Eastern Europe].

If the expectation had been that the candidate selected would have been a woman, without imposing a regional criterion additionally, this would surely have increased the quantity and quality of the women candidates who made themselves available globally, especially if the process had also been made more transparent to all individual candidates.

More here.

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Durs Grünbein at Literary Hub:

For the most part they were unobtrusive, almost invisible—our occupying power. Their day-to-day life carried on behind closed doors, as if someone were trying to shield them from us, or maybe us from them.

They lived a hidden life in the barracks, behind the crooked fences and walls that were made impenetrable by skeins of barbed wire, like a hedge of rose thorns. But anyway, who would have dared try to climb over, who would have had the courage to infiltrate the forbidden zone on the other side? Not even we children were brave enough to give each other a leg up over the wall, though our knees were sometimes itching to.

It wasn’t hard to imagine what it was like behind the walls—over there with the Ivans—as people called them ironically behind their backs. Or the Russians, as was said, though still sotto voce, since the word was strange and chauvinistic too—and we all knew it. But talking about Soviets wasn’t the answer either. Those who used the phrase on official occasions or at school felt immediately that there was something embarrassing, something not quite right about the hypocritical turn of phrase. The problem was that there was no suitable designation for these strangers in our country. Everyone knew that they were one of the victorious occupying powers at the end of the Second World War; their dominance in our country was such a dirty open secret that no one dared say it out loud. Our own country: nothing but a Soviet satrapy?

more here.

David Remnick at The New Yorker:

Like anyone of his age, Cohen counts the losses as a matter of routine. He seemed not so much devastated by Marianne’s death as overtaken by the memory of their time together. “There would be a gardenia on my desk perfuming the whole room,” he said. “There would be a little sandwich at noon. Sweetness, sweetness everywhere.”

Cohen’s songs are death-haunted, but then they have been since his earliest verses. A half century ago, a record executive said, “Turn around, kid. Aren’t you a little old for this?” But, despite his diminished health, Cohen remains as clear-minded and hardworking as ever, soldierly in his habits. He gets up well before dawn and writes. In the small, spare living room where we sat, there were a couple of acoustic guitars leaning against the wall, a keyboard synthesizer, two laptops, a sophisticated microphone for voice recording. Working with an old collaborator, Pat Leonard, and his son, Adam, who has the producer’s credit, Cohen did much of his work for “You Want It Darker” in the living room, e-mailing recorded files to his partners for additional refinements. Age and the end of age provide a useful, if not entirely desired, air of quiet.

more here.

Amjad Iraqi at the London Review of Books:

When Peres died last month, many Palestinians resented the national and international outpouring of praise he received. They were especially angered when President Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinian Authority (PA) officials went to the funeral in Jerusalem; Abbas had to getpermission from the Israeli army to enter the city. Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List of Arab political parties in the Knesset, sent his condolences to Peres’s family but refused to go to the funeral. ‘This is a national day of mourning in which I have no place,’ he said. ‘Not in the narrative, not in the symbols that exclude us, not in the stories of Peres as a man who built up Israel’s defences.’

Israelis were shocked by these reactions. Since his presidency, Peres was revered in Israel as a peacemaker, a founding father, and a moral compass. He was an architect of the Oslo Accords and the peace treaty with Jordan, a Nobel laureate, and a sponsor of Jewish-Arab coexistence programmes through the Peres Centre for Peace. But he had not been a popular politician for much of his career: he was distrusted by his colleagues (‘a tireless schemer’, Yitzhak Rabin called him), and his brief stints as prime minister ended in political failure and lost elections.

Defenders of Peres’s legacy argue that he shed years of hawkish politics to become, in David Grossman’s words, a statesman who ‘symbolised the willingness for compromise with the Palestinians’.

The Palestinians, however, cannot forget the hawk so easily.

more here.

Erika Check Hayden in Nature:

Lurking in the genes of the average person are about 54 mutations that look as if they should sicken or even kill their bearer. But they don't. Sonia Vallabh hoped that D178N was one such mutation. In 2010, Vallabh had watched her mother die from a mysterious illness called fatal familial insomnia, in which misfolded prion proteins cluster together and destroy the brain. The following year, Sonia was tested and found that she had a copy of the prion-protein gene, PRNP, with the same genetic glitch — D178N — that had probably caused her mother's illness. It was a veritable death sentence: the average age of onset is 50, and the disease progresses quickly. But it was not a sentence that Vallabh, then 26, was going to accept without a fight. So she and her husband, Eric Minikel, quit their respective careers in law and transportation consulting to become graduate students in biology. They aimed to learn everything they could about fatal familial insomnia and what, if anything, might be done to stop it. One of the most important tasks was to determine whether or not the D178N mutation definitively caused the disease.

Few would have thought to ask such a question in years past, but medical genetics has been going through a bit of soul-searching. The fast pace of genomic research since the start of the twenty-first century has packed the literature with thousands of gene mutations associated with disease and disability. Many such associations are solid, but scores of mutations once suggested to be dangerous or even lethal are turning out to be innocuous. These sheep in wolves' clothing are being unmasked thanks to one of the largest genetics studies ever conducted: the Exome Aggregation Consortium, or ExAC.

More here.

Ru Freeman in the New York Times:

War is a constant wellspring of literature, and the best of it looks not for the obvious and sensationally violent, but instead searches for the subtle ways that life unfolds regardless. While Sri Lankans writing in Sinhala and Tamil have long borne nuanced witness to the country’s three decades of civil war, writing in English has been much slower to respond. And too much of it has taken the easy route, giving a foreign readership what it desires: a voyeuristic, and ultimately unengaged, affirmation of what it believes is true of savage peoples in other countries.

Anuk Arudpragasam’s brave debut takes the higher road. In language that is often poetic, he describes a single day and night in the life of a refugee fleeing both the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelem and government forces.

More here.

Barack Obama in Glamour:

There are a lot of tough aspects to being President. But there are some perks too. Meeting extraordinary people across the country. Holding an office where you get to make a difference in the life of our nation. Air Force One.

But perhaps the greatest unexpected gift of this job has been living above the store. For many years my life was consumed by long commutes­—from my home in Chicago to Springfield, Illinois, as a state senator, and then to Washington, D.C., as a United States senator. It’s often meant I had to work even harder to be the kind of husband and father I want to be.

But for the past seven and a half years, that commute has been reduced to 45 seconds—the time it takes to walk from my living room to the Oval Office. As a result, I’ve been able to spend a lot more time watching my daughters grow up into smart, funny, kind, wonderful young women.

That isn’t always easy, either—watching them prepare to leave the nest. But one thing that makes me optimistic for them is that this is an extraordinary time to be a woman. The progress we’ve made in the past 100 years, 50 years, and, yes, even the past eight years has made life significantly better for my daughters than it was for my grandmothers. And I say that not just as President but also as a feminist.

More here.

Barack Obama at CNN:

Just five years ago, US companies were shut out of the global commercial launch market. Today, thanks to groundwork laid by the men and women of NASA, they own more than a third of it. More than 1,000 companies across nearly all 50 states are working on private space initiatives.