Go here to browse through the 85 nominees for this year's science prize and vote. Voting ends on Monday, September 1, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

[New posts below.]

Frances Wilson in The Telegraph:

Jacqueline Rose has been taking us into what Joseph Conrad called “the dark places of the earth” for the past 30 years. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath she explored the pathology around the darkest woman of them all and in Women in Dark Times, a combination of psychoanalytic interpretation, political manifesto and personal reflection, Rose shines a light on those others who have taught her how “to think differently”: the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg, murdered by government henchmen in 1919, the iconic Marilyn Monroe, possibly murdered in 1962, and the German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, who died, five months pregnant, in Auschwitz. She also honours the tragic lives of Shafilea Ahmed, Heshu Yones and Fadime Sahindal, victims of so-called “honour” killings, and celebrates the work of the contemporary artists Esther Shalev-Gerz, Yael Bartana and Therese Oulton. An unpredictable group, you might think, but unpredictability is their point and the mark, Rose suggests, of their individual genius – as Eve Arnold said of photographing Monroe: “It was the unpredictable in herself that she used.” Nothing in these pages is predictable, least of all the journey we take. Rose, a professor of English at the University of London, begins in early 20th-century Germany, motors through Fifties Hollywood, crosses to Sweden, 2001, detours around the demonstrations in Tahrir Square in 2011 and 2013, pauses at Chester Crown Court in 2012 and terminates inside the London gallery where Oulton’s work – which “turns the world inside out” – is currently being displayed.

Rosa Luxemburg, the tiny Polish Jew who walked with a limp, is the glue that binds the book together: “I want to affect people like a clap of thunder,” she writes to her lover, “to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression.” Luxemburg, says Rose, still has a lot to teach us, but for many readers the most compelling figure will be Marilyn Monroe. Why are women so drawn to her story? Rose does not argue that Monroe was a feminist, but that she had “something urgent to say to feminism today”. Written across her face and body were the desires of America; Monroe represented capitalism to itself. “I don’t look on myself as a commodity,” she said in her last interview, “but I’m sure a lot of people have.” Her beauty was the foil of her country’s moral decay, and she knew it.

Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times:

Do you have a decisive marriage? New research shows that how thoughtfully couples make decisions can have a lasting effect on the quality of their romantic relationships. Couples who are decisive before marriage — intentionally defining their relationships, living together and planning a wedding — appear to have better marriages than couples who simply let inertia carry them through major transitions. “Making decisions and talking things through with partners is important,” said Galena K. Rhoades, a relationship researcher at the University of Denver and co-author of the report. “When you make an intentional decision, you are more likely to follow through on that.” While the finding may seem obvious, the reality is that many couples avoid real decision-making. Many couples living together, for instance, did not sit down and talk about cohabitation. Often one partner had begun spending more time at the other’s home, or a lease expired, forcing the couple to formalize a living arrangement. “Couples who slide through their relationship transitions have poorer marital quality than those who make intentional decisions about major milestones,” Dr. Rhoades and her colleagues wrote.

The research stems from a study that began with 1,294 young adults ages 18 to 34 recruited to the Relationship Development Study in 2007 and 2008. Over the next five years, 418 of the individuals in the study married, offering the researchers a glimpse into the lives and decision-making of couples before and after marriage. The researchers collected data on prior romantic experiences, whether the relationship started by “hooking up” in a casual relationship, whether the couple had a big or small wedding, and what the overall quality of the marriage was. Notably, they found that the decisions and experiences with others before marriage had a lasting effect on the relationship.

More here.

Burcu, Yonka and Defne

I walk down the Dordtselaan almost every day
to buy bread and cigarettes at Albert Heijn’s,
and malodorous French cheese, dark
Belgian beers and cold pork products.

Once, Burcu was the girl at the checkout,
before her Yonca, and Defne before her.
Each with shiny a name-tag on a lapel.
The only words I say are “Dank je wel”.

Today, Burcu saw my many packs of ham,
looked at me, stammered, was unsure, then
deciding finally that I must be Turkish,
“I’m sorry,” she said, “this is all pork.”

“I know, as we can’t buy it back home
I often yearn for it, that’s why” I said.
“Who is ‘we’?” I thought to myself
as I slowly made my way to the flat.

Would the thought have crossed her mind,
looking with tired eyes as I walked away:
“He’s not Dutch, I can tell, that’s easy.
But what is he? That’s a harder code to crack.”

by Roni Margulies

Browse the nominees in the list below and then go to the bottom of the post to vote.

Alphabetical list of nominated blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: The Dictionary is not Literature
2. Action Science Theater: How to fall and miss the ground
3. Aeon: Cows Might Fly
4. American Science: The Curious History of the Paleo-Diet, and its Relationship to Science & Modernity
5. An Evolutionist's Perspective: The Woes of Capitalism: Kinship, Sociality and Economy
6. Ars Technica: Could dark matter be hiding in plain sight in existing experiments?
7. Babies Learning Language: Shifting our cultural understanding of replication
8. BBC: The quest to save the Hollywood bison
9. Beach Chair Scientist: Mother Nature vs. Santa Claus
10. Brainwaves: Searching For The Elephant’s Genius Inside the Largest Brain on Land
11. Charismatic Minifauna: Bats have sparkly poop
12. Chemically Cultured: That love-hate supervisor relationship
13. Cocktail Party Physics: Seen and Unseen: Could There Ever Be a “Cinema Without Cuts”?
14. Comparatively Psyched: The Robin's Song
15. Curious Meerkat: Eating Insects
16. Eat Your Brains Out: Science and the Supernatural
17. Ecology & Evolution: And to the victor the spoiled
18. Ecology & Evolution: The Heat and Light of Science Communication
19. Ecology & Evolution: The Science of Scientific Whaling
20. Ecology & Evolution: What is(n’t) palaeontology like?
21. Ecology & Evolution: What’s it like to study Zoology?
22. Errant Science: Tradition, in Science
23. Eruptions: So, You Think Yellowstone Is About to Erupt
24. Genotopia: Hail Britannia! (Dorkins Reviews Wade)
25. Genotopia: On city life, the history of science, and the genetics of race
26. Grrlscientist: Influenza: How the Great War helped create the greatest pandemic ever known
27. Hawkmoth: On Wildness
28. Huffpost: A Few Short Rules on Being Creative
29. Illumination: GMO Leukemia Outbreak in China
30. Inkfish: Scientists Ask Why There Are So Many Freaking Huge Ants
31. Leaving Plato's Cave: The Meta-lympics: a catalyst for scientific discovery
32. Limulus: Living Fossils
33. Napoli Unplugged: Procida: Picture Perfect
34. Napoli Unplugged: Vesuvius at Night
35. Nautilus: The Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face
36. Neurobabble: Parasitic wasps vs. zombie cockroaches
37. Neurobabble: Technology and the adolescent brain
38. Neurobabble: What sign languages have taught us about our brains
39. Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: When the going gets tough, mutualism gets going
40. Pacific Standard: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland
41. Patrick F. Clarkin, PhD: Developmental Plasticity and the “Hard-Wired” Problem
42. Pen Sapiens: Monkey See, Monkey Yawn
43. Peter Pearsal: A Desert Orogeny
44. Planetizen: The Wicked Problem of Urban Biodiversity, pt 1
45. Psychology Today: Love, Love Medulla: The Neuroscience of Beatlemania
46. Preposterous Universe: How Quantum Field Theory Becomes “Effective”
47. Preposterous Universe: Why the Many-Worlds Formulation of Quantum Mechanics Is Probably Correct
48. Prophage: Modest Data Reported From Oxford Nanopore's Exciting MinION Sequencing Platform
49. Scicurious: Addiction showcases the brain's flexibility
50. Science Explained: Knock, Knock Who’s there?
51. Science Sushi: Did Allergies Evolve To Save Your Life?
52. Science Sushi: Muscles Love Oxytocin: So-Called “Hug Hormone” Important In Muscle Regeneration
53. Sexual Selection and Life History Evolution: Aesthetics, mathematics, physics and biology
54. Skulls in the Stars: How *do* cats land on their feet when falling, anyway?
55. Slate: Promiscuity Is Pragmatic
56. Space: Hazard, Risk, and the Steelhead (Oso) Landslide in Washington
57. Space: Real Atmospheric Science in Stargate: Atlantis
58. Starts With A Bang: 22 Messages of Hope (and Science) for Creationists
59. Starts With A Bang: How is the Universe bigger than its age?
60. Stuff About Space: The Strangest Star: A Neutron Star Inside a Red Giant
61. Synthetic Daisies: Playing the Long Game of Human Biological Variation
62. Synthetic Daisies: The game of evolution
63. The Bleeding Edge: Butterflies
64. The Book of Science: Photosynthesis
65. The Conversation: Despite metamorphosis, moths hold on to memories from their days as a caterpillar
66. The Conversation: The ancient Greek riddle that helps us understand modern disease threats
67. The Conversation: Why cold-blooded animals don’t need to wrap up to keep warm
68. The Last Word On Nothing: What Luis Alvarez Did
69. The Loom: The Wisdom of (Little) Crowds
70. The Mermaid's Tale: Are bees intelligent?
71. The Mermaid's Tale: The visible colors and the falseness of human races as natural categories
72. The Mermaid's Tale: Whooza good gurrrrrl? Whoozmai bayyyy-bee boy?
73. The Neurocritic: Existential Neuroscience: a field in search of meaning
74. The Neurocritic: When Waking Up Becomes the Nightmare: Hypnopompic Hallucinatory Pain
75. The New Yorker: The Power of the Hoodie-Wearing C.E.O.
76. The Philosopher's Beard: Love's Labours Lost: How Robots Will Transform Human Intimacy
77. The Trenches of Discovery: The human machine: obsolete components
78. Things We Don't Know: Squid Lady Parts
79. Too Long For Twitter: New neuroscience on why we dream
80. Tree Town Chemistry: How One Scientist Broke in to Professional Craft Brewing
81. Unthink: Five Things Scientists Know About Romance
82. Weekend Adventure: The Wild Inside
83. Wired: Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?
84. Wired: What is brain death?
85. You've Got Some Science On You: Infection: It's all a matter of perspective

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Voting ends on September 1st at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most-voted-for posts) will be posted on the main page on September 3rd. The finalists will be announced on September 5th and winners of the contest will be announced on September 22nd, 2014.

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Thank you.

Bev Butkow. Untitled/Unknown/Unwanted. 2013

Vinyl collaged onto clear plastic sheeting.

More here and here.

Richard Marshall interviews Rebecca Gordon in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Are you approaching this via virtue ethics, four cardinal virtues and Alisdair MacIntyre and what is the best way to understand what torture is?

RG: I’m going to reverse the order of these questions, because I think that once we understand what institutionalized state torture is, it becomes clearer why I think MacIntyre’s contemporary virtue ethics provide a useful way of understanding torture’s moral implications.

The torture that I am concerned with is institutionalized state torture – the kind of organized, intentional program carried on by governments. It’s not Jack Bauer saving Los Angeles on24. It’s not some brave person preventing a ticking time-bomb from going off by torturing the one person who can stop it. We must stop thinking of torture as a series of isolated actions taken by heroic individuals in moments of extremity, and begin instead to understand it as a socially embedded practice. A study of past and present torture regimes suggests that institutionalized state torture has its own histories, its own traditions, its own rituals of initiation. It encourages, both in its individual practitioners and in the society that harbors it, a particular set of moral habits, call them virtues or vices as you prefer.

Here’s my definition of institutionalize state torture: It is the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical suffering by an official or agent of a political entity, which results in dismantling the victim’s sensory, psychological, and social worlds, with the purpose of establishing or maintaining that entity’s power. This definition can be expanded to reveal its legal, phenomenological, and political dimensions.

The language about “intentional infliction of severe mental or physical suffering by an agent of a political entity” mirrors the definition found in the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, or Degrading Treatment, to which the U.S. is a signatory. A phenomenological definition describes the ways in which torture reduces and distorts its targets’ orientation in time and space, its effects on language, and its destruction persons’ social connections. The “political” portion deals with the purposes of torture, which when it is institutionalized by a state, has much less to do with “intelligence gathering” than it does with political and social control.

So what does this understanding of torture have to do with virtue ethics and Alasdair MacIntyre? I would argue that when we understand torture as an ongoing practice, we can begin to see how it affects moral habits.

More here.

Matthew Snyder in the LA Review of Books:

A biologist at Duke University, Stuart Pimm, recently published a research article in the journalScience, which claims — that in the past — before humans evolved, only one species went extinct each year per every 10 million years. However, after the emergence of humans, that extinction rate has exploded at a rate between 100 and 1,000 species each year. To make matters worse, by 2050, three things are quite likely to occur: 1) the North Pole will have melted to such an unreal extent that — by summer — passenger ships will be able to cross through the North Pole with ease, nudging small, dainty ice chunks past the petro-churn of their port and starboard; 2) the largest living thing on our planet with an ecology stretching for 2,600 kilometers, The Great Barrier Reef, will go extinct. As the Earth warms, its coral will increasingly bleach into a white death by the parallel acidic warming of the ocean temperatures; 3) just as well, according to the United Nations, the Earth’s oceans might be entirely absent of fish — the kind of fish people like to eat in their sushi restaurants. Beyond these dire benchmarks, by 2100, the Earth’s temperatures will rise from 2.4 to 6.4 Celsius. If global warming ramps up to its ultimate extreme, centuries into the future, with both the North and South Poles having melted completely, important swaths of world’s continents would be engulfed by water. In a elaborate, but sophisticated work of cartography by Martin Vargic, an amateur graphic designer from Slovakia, he imagines such a future where sea levels rise 260 as a result of the caps melting: America’s major cities would be underwater: Miami, New Orleans, New York and Washington D.C. From the farther South and West of the U.S., in Latin America, the Amazon would bursts its banks, becoming a sea reaching into vast expanses of Brazil, while a sizable component of Australia’s continent would be swamped by the Murray Gulf and the Artesian Sea. All of this would make Kevin Costner’s fictional Waterworld(1995) and Radiohead’s animated video for “Pyramid Song” hapless documentaries streamed to us from this forlorn future. But this new world map would match the depressing baritone of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl — a masterful, SF corollary to Dicken’s Bleak House, which stratocasts us into such a future. This paradigm-shifting novel details a world where global warming in the 23rd century has left Earth’s coastlines underwater and new eco-plagues make any hour of life a precarious one; where calorie-companies control global food production via private armies and bioterrorist acts on third-world ecologies (or just the usual buying off of their politicians and the wealthy); and where sophisticated levees and pumps keep Bangkok from going underwater.

Unlike the drowned world of the future-possible described in The Windup Girl, Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s French comic, Le Transperceneige (1982),imagines a dystopian world that’s frozen over. The comic book cleverly blends the SF subgenres of the post-apocalypse, where life no longer exists outside the train, to the dystopia that exists inside the train’s many caste-cars, where minus the awareness of its slowing engine, the people acknowledge that the train is bleak but altogether sustainable. Therein, Le Transperceneige, written by Lob and illustrated by Rochette, details a world where an unnamed ecological catastrophe has frozen the Earth solid of any living beings other than the formidable Snowpiercer — a train whose engine of perpetual motion keeps passengers alive, and in doing so, no longer stops at stations for the lonely, frozen, and forgotten. Everything outside is dead — encased in a white carapace of ice, storms, and snow.

More here.

Ray Monk in Prospect:

Ludwig Wittgenstein is regarded by many, including myself, as the greatest philosopher of this century. His two great works, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) have done much to shape subsequent developments in philosophy, especially in the analytic tradition. His charismatic personality has fascinated artists, playwrights, poets, novelists, musicians and even movie-makers, so that his fame has spread far beyond the confines of academic life.

And yet in a sense Wittgenstein’s thought has made very little impression on the intellectual life of this century. As he himself realised, his style of thinking is at odds with the style that dominates our present era. His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.” Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face.

Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.

More here.

Brian Leiter in The Huffington Post:

Late Friday afternoon (August 22), the University of Illinois broke its three-week long silence on the controversy regarding the Chancellor's revocation of a tenured offer to Steven Salaita, who had accepted a faculty position in the American Indian Studies Program at the flagship campus at Urbana-Champaign. Chancellor Phyllis Wise and Board of Trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy both issued statements explaining the revocation, but in terms far more alarming than the original decision itself. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees have now declared that the First Amendment does not apply to any tenured faculty at the University of Illinois.

A bit of background to Friday's bombshell statements. Last October, Professor Salaita, then teaching at Virginia Tech, accepted a tenured offer from the Urbana-Champaign campus. He went through the regular appointments process at the University of Illinois, and received approval by the relevant departments and deans after a review of his scholarship and teaching. The offer, which he accepted, was conditional on approval by the Board of Trustees. Such approval clauses are typical in all teaching contracts and had, previously, been pro forma at Illinois, as they are at all serious universities: it is not the job of the Board of Trustees of a research institution to second-guess the judgment of academics and scholars. Well before the Board took the matter up, even University officials were describing Salaita as a faculty member, and he moved to Illinois and was scheduled to teach two classes this fall.

Salaita also has a Twitter account. “Tweets” are limited to 140 characters, so the medium is conducive primarily to spontaneous and superficial commentary. As a Palestinian-American and scholar of colonialism, Salaita tweeted extensively about the Israeli attack on Gaza. Contrary to the initial misrepresentations put into circulation by far right websites, none of the tweets were either anti-semitic or incitements to violence. Some were vulgar, some juvenile, some insulting, some banal. The First Amendment unequivocally protects Salaita's right to express every one of those opinions on a matter of public concern, and to do so, if he wants, with vulgarity and insults. As a matter of American constitutional law, this is not a close case.

More here.

Amar Sindhu in Herald:

Fahmida Raiz, writer, human rights activist and the author of more than 15 books on fiction and poetry, has always remained at the centre of controversies. When Badan Dareeda, her second collection of verse, appeared, she was accused of using erotic and sensual expressions in her poetry. The themes prevalent in her verse were, until then, considered taboo for women writers. The feminist scholarship and women’s movement, however, not only acknowledged her expressions but welcomed them with applause. Riaz was also faced with challenges due to her political ideology. More than 10 cases were filed against her during General Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship. She was forced into exile during the same regime, only to return to Pakistan after Haq’s death in 1988. The poems from her collection Apna Jurm Sabit Hae are politically charged and reflect the torment her homeland experienced under dictatorship. In terms of using creative expression for political discourse, Riaz stands among literary greats such as Nazim Hikmet, Pablu Neruda, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Following are excerpts of a conversation she had with Herald on her literary journey and issues confronting Pakistan’s literati.

Amar Sindhu: Does creativity need ideology?
Fahmida Riaz: Once creativity expands beyond the very personal, almost biological paradigms, it seeks some ground to stand upon. Creativity is very often rooted in some idea. Our folk songs and stories do not seem to be ideological but they seem to have ideas, when looked at closely. The question of ideology is raised mostly in the context of progressive literature that sees individuals in a web of external circumstances and class conflicts. Literary creativity does not have to emanate from this consciousness, nor does this consciousness hamper creativity. In the 20th century, great writers such as Pablo Neruda, Paul Nizan, Nazim Hikmet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Gabriel García Márquez declared themselves to be Marxists. An artist like Pablo Picasso, who revolutionised the world of painting, was a member of the Communist party of France. On the other hand, two literary giants before these writers, Leo Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, saw the individual and the society in the context of Christian teachings and sought the answers of all human problems in Christ. You may notice, though, that too was a kind of ideology.

More here.

Mary Beth McCauley in The Christian Science Monitor:

Gallup polls report that 86 percent of Americans say they believe in God. Thirty nine percent say they attended worship services in the past week. So while God may not be dead, religion struggles. And why shouldn’t it? Religion has awful PR: unrelenting sectarian wars abroad, political infighting over morality at home, scandal, shopping to be done and football to be watched on the Sabbath, high profile competition from secular ideology, and a worldview that can seem out of step with popular culture.

Krista Tippett, host of the award-winning public radio show and podcast “On Being,” which takes up questions of religion and meaning, is alarmed. This, she says, is “the first generation of humans in any culture who didn’t inherit a religious identity.” But even while parents who have distanced themselves from their faith traditions are hesitant to pass that religion on to their children, science seems to take up the cause, as it unearths a host of practical benefits of religious practice. Everything from the physical effects of a heightened immune response to social benefits like closer interpersonal ties and better behavior in teens, is linked to the state of being religious. Is there a way parents can overcome their personal ambivalence about religion in order for their children to have its benefits?

More here.

October, Month Without Gods

The Japanese think this is the month-without-gods.
They celebrate it this way. They don’t alliterate October
with gold falling from the fragile trees,
or with revolutions that changed history.
October, like a truce. Like an absence of everything
that exceeds limits. May it be for us
liberation. Because now they don’t exhibit
the relentless naked gods of summer,
the too many gods, and so much remains
for the child of winter to be born,
and our sight doesn’t reach any further, from this
month of distances, month of far aways,
imperfect, attained, fortuitous. If only it would be
like this for us. Without the eight million
gods that hide in the city or in the forest,
the scales coincide with our statures.
Let us be carried away by our premonitions.
Let us write things with small letters.
Let us celebrate October for its absence of gods.
Let us enjoy its name because it is only a number
in a truncated series. And forgotten. It is October.
We have thirty days all to ourselves.

by Juan Antonio González-Iglesias
from Circumference Magazine
translated from Spanish by Curtis Bauer

Sam Leith in The Guardian:

Around the time his novel The Pregnant Widow came out in 2010, an interviewer asked Martin Amis whether the book constituted a return to form. “What's this return shit?” he shot back. “I don't know how this will go down, but my talent seems to me to be perfectly vigorous.” You can almost hear the voice, the italics, the roll-your-own rasp: part surly, part amused. A little bit more surly.

This is Amis in combat stance, the position he has occupied for as long as most of us can remember. There is no living British writer who garners as much attention as Amis; so much of it hostile; and so much of that hostility, circularly, arising from the attention itself. He pushes back.

With a new novel coming – this month's heavily embargoed Auschwitz book The Zone of Interest – the circus starts up again. Amis occupies a really peculiar position in our national life. He is the object of envy, contempt, anger, disapproval, theatrical expressions of weariness – but also of fascination. Has there in living memory been a writer whom we (by which I mean the papers, mostly) so assiduously seek out for comment – we task him to review tennis, terrorism, pornography, the state of the nation – and whom we are then so keen to denounce as worthless? In recent years his public interventions on everything from Islamist terror to population demographics have caused mini shitstorms; and critics seem to take a particular, giant-killing glee in slamming his fiction. Setting out to write a retrospective essay on his work and reputation, the implied title you find yourself reaching for is “in defence of … “

It's as if, and in answer to some inchoate public need, we demand of Amis that he say things in public so we can all agree on what an ass he is. He has spoken in the past – surly/amused – of an “eisteddfod of hostility”, as if his detractors were the excitable participants in a provincial arts festival.

Why the eisteddfod? Why him? I think it has to do with the way we have positioned him, and – to an extent – with the way he has positioned himself.

More here.

Tom Holland in The Spectator:

As the fighters of the Islamic State drive from village to captured village in their looted humvees, they criss-cross what in ancient times was a veritable womb of gods. For millennia, the Fertile Crescent teemed with a bewildering variety of cults and religions. Back in the 3rd Christian century, a philosopher by the name of Bardaisan was so overwhelmed by the sheer array of beliefs to be found in Mesopotamia that he invoked it to disprove the doctrines of astrology. ‘It is not the stars that make people behave the way do but rather the diversity of their customs.’

Bardaisan himself was a one-man monument to Mesopotamian multiculturalism. A Jewish convert to Christianity, a Platonist fascinated by the wisdom of the Brahmins, an inhabitant of the border zone between the Roman East and the Iranian empire of the Parthians, he stood at the crossroads where antiquity’s most potent traditions met and intermingled. Just how far the process of blending rival faiths could be taken was best illustrated by a man born in Mesopotamia a few years before Bardaisan’s death: a soi-disant prophet called Mani. Brought up within a Christian sect that practised circumcision, held the Holy Spirit to be female, and prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, he fused elements of Christianity with Jewish and Zoroastrian teachings, while also claiming, just for good measure, to be the heir of the Buddha. Although Mani himself would end up executed by a Persian king, his followers were nothing daunted. Cells of Manichaeans were soon to be found from China to Carthage. Syncretic as their religion was, and global in its ambitions, Manichaeism was a classic Mesopotamian export of the age.

More here.

Brian Merchant in Motherboard:

Geoengineering—basically, hacking the planet's climate system to cool it off—is a touchy subject. So touchy that some argue it shouldn't be touched at all. Yet 300 scientists, policymakers, legal experts, and NGOs have traveled to Berlin precisely to discuss it, in its biggest public forum yet.

That paradox is central to understanding the concept of climate engineering, which scares just about everybody who actually works on it. But so does the prospect that humanity might not reduce its carbon emissions in time to stave off catastrophic global warming.

“We have to decide what it would mean if humans were to try to take control of the world's climate,” said Dr. Mark Lawrence, the scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, who delivered the opening remarks.

As such, the first two days of the Climate Engineering Conference 2014 offers what we could plausibly consider an accurate snapshot of the current state of geoeningeering: Interested scientists are calling for more research and proposing new ideas for climate control; public institutions and politicians are weary of getting too involved; humanitarian groups are worried about the ramifications; and legal scholars are already declaring the most ambitious geoengineering proposals “ungovernable.”

And a few staunch advocates want to put the pedal down, hard.

Regardless, more parties than ever are taking seriously the notion that geoengineering may become a reality.

More here.