From Phys.Org:

Conditions which may accelerate the spread of Parkinson's disease, and a potential means of enhancing naturally-occurring defences against neurodegenerative disorders, have been identified in two new studies. Two significant breakthroughs which could inform future treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, have been announced by scientists.

The research, published in two separate studies this week, advances understanding of the early development of such disorders and how they might be prevented – in particular by identifying the biological areas and processes that could be pinpointed by future drugs. Both sets of results have emerged from collaborations between the research groups led by Chris Dobson, Tuomas Knowles and Michele Vendruscolo at the University of Cambridge, who focus on understanding protein “misfolding” diseases. These include Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, as well as numerous others. The first study provides evidence that the early spread of the protein aggregates associated with Parkinson's appears to happen at an accelerated rate in mildly acidic conditions. This suggests that particular compartments within brain cells, which are slightly more acidic than others, may turn out to be appropriate targets for future treatments fighting the disease. Meanwhile, researchers behind the second study appear to have identified a way in which the effectiveness of so-called molecular “chaperones”, responsible for limiting the damage caused by misfolded proteins, can be significantly enhanced.

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Where the apricot tree
stood still then
I stand still now.

Between the gladioli
I know the spot
where she stood then:
she threw me the apricot −
then. Now,

as memory does with itself
what it will, we begin
biting once more, almost
in unison, between

the maize plants: she her
apricot, I my apricot;

while the little foxes still prowl
through the vineyard, and the sea,
whispering: she is not with me;
no, you will not find it here;
she is not in me.

by Erven Hans Faverey
from Gedichten 1962-1990
publisher: De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 2010
translation: 1994, 2004, Francis R. Jones

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Joe Coscarelli in New York Magazine:

The Zodiac Killer, whose serial murders terrorized northern California in the late ’60s, was a man named Earl Van Best Jr., according to a new book by Gary L. Stewart, who happens to be his biological son. Stewart’s The Most Dangerous Animal of All, as we reported Monday, is for sale now from HarperCollins after a top-secret rollout. “I’m really hoping this will bring some closure to the families of my father’s victims,” Stewart tells People.

Although many others have claimed to know the killer’s identity over the years, Stewart’s publisher calls his book’s case “legally sound” — here’s some of the evidence within.

“If you look at Gary’s photo next to the sketch of the Zodiac next to his father’s mug shot, you can see that there is very clearly more than just a passing resemblance,” a HarperCollins spokesperson told Elon Green. “They look alike.”

Best, a now-deceased antique book seller, had been arrested for fraud and the rape of a minor after he tried to elope with Stewart’s mother, who was 13 at the time. After Best left her, she gave the child up for adoption, and it was Stewart’s search for his biological father that led him to supposedly crack the unsolved case.

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Adam Mann in Wired:

When Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727, he left behind no will and an enormous stack of papers. His surviving correspondences, notes, and manuscripts contain an estimated 10 million words, enough to fill up roughly 150 novel-length books. There are pages upon pages of scientific and mathematical brilliance. But there are also pages that reveal another side of Newton, a side his descendants tried to keep hidden from the public.

Even in his lifetime, Newton was hailed as an eminent scientist and mathematician of unparalleled genius. But Newton also studied alchemy and religion. He wrote a forensic analysis of the Bible in an effort to decode divine prophecies. He held unorthodox religious views, rejecting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. After his death, Newton’s heir, John Conduitt, the husband of his half-niece Catherine Barton, feared that one of the fathers of the Enlightenment would be revealed as an obsessive heretic. And so for hundreds of years few people saw his work. It was only in the 1960s that some of Newton’s papers were widely published.

The story of Newton’s writing and how it has survived to the modern day is the subject of a new book, The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts. Author Sarah Dry traces their mysterious and precarious history and reveals both the lucky twists and purposeful turns that kept the papers safe.

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How Victor Orbán launched a constitutional coup and created a one-party state.

Kim Lane Scheppele in The Nation:

What is clear is that with his re-election, Orbán has consolidated a well-orchestrated constitutional coup that has rattled the European Union’s complacency about being a club of well-behaved democracies. Since 2010, Fidesz has rewritten the Constitution without engaging any opposition parties and has granted overwhelming and unchecked power to its party leader, who in turn wasted little time in wresting control of every state institution from opposition hands, entrenching his political allies everywhere, bringing the judiciary to heel and radically centralizing political authority. The Fidesz constitutional “reform” has spawned a Frankenstate, a form of government created by stitching together perfectly normal rules from the laws of various EU members into a monstrous new whole. The component pieces of the Hungarian Frankenstate might have operated perfectly well in their original contexts, but combined in a new constitutional system, these once-normal rules produce abnormal results. As government spokespeople have said every time there is criticism of a particular aspect of the new constitutional order: that rule exists in Greece. Or Germany. Or the United Kingdom. It’s normal. End of story. But nowhere do all those rules exist together, except in the Hungarian Frankenstate.

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Sir Geoggrey Nice and Francis Wade in Foreign Policy (photo Andre Malerba/Getty Images):

In conflicts that have potential to produce the worst of human atrocities, states and international actors must take action to identify the precursors of mass killing and stop it from ever happening. That's precisely what is needed now in western Burma, where the Rohingya minority faces attacks so violent that state crime experts fear a full-on genocide is in the making. The Muslim minority, numbering around 1 million, shares the state with Rakhine Buddhists, who consider them to be illegal Bengali immigrants. The Burmese government, which shares this view, denies them citizenship as well as limiting their access to education and healthcare. Organized mob violence in late March, which wrecked the entire aid infrastructure serving 140,000 displaced Rohingya, was only the latest in a series of incidents in recent months that qualify as one of five commonly accepted indicators of a genocide.

The Burmese government's apparent reluctance to intervene in the situation — it took the state three weeks and persistent warnings to allow some aid groups to return — should be of pressing international concern. It signals a disregard for the lives of hundreds of thousands of people that can only be influenced by strong global condemnation.

The violence of late March was clearly planned, as were the resultant effects: The mobs effectively cut off access to life-saving medicine, destroyed warehouses storing food donations, and dismantled boats and vehicles used to transport those donations to Rohingya camps. The attackers clearly intended to sever the assistance on which displaced Rohingya rely. In the aftermath, aid workers have reported dozens of preventable deaths just three weeks after the attack, showing that victims of persecution can be made to suffer as effectively by indirect assaults on the support systems as by direct physical attack. (The photo above shows an injured Rohingya woman whose doctor is unable to help her due to a lack of medicine and medical equipment.)

For the Rohingya, deprivation of food and aid, rendered more powerful by isolation, has received little domestic sympathy. But this attack marks the start of a dangerous process: Those Rakhine complicit in the violence have signaled that Rohingya aren't worthy of the essential support mechanisms that a highly vulnerable population requires for its survival.

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Salil Tripathi in Caravan:

Modi’s relentless campaign projects him as the Indian equivalent of bapak pembangunan, or the Father of Development, as Suharto was called during his 32-year-rule of Indonesia. Indeed, Modi may potentially become India’s first leader in the East Asian, and not South Asian, mould. Those seeing a Reagan in Modi are, like Christopher Columbus, mistaken about the direction they are looking in. Modi’s approach and governance style are closer to China’s Deng Xiaoping or Indonesia’s Suharto. Deng and Suharto both bore the burden of massacres (as does Modi)—in Suharto’s case several, with Deng it was Tiananmen Square, 25 years ago this June. Both put in place economic policies that delivered sustained economic growth, lifted millions out of absolute poverty, and improved health and education indicators. But they ruled as stern authoritarians, and jailed writers, human rights activists, artists, union leaders and dissidents, sometime for years. A crucial difference: if Modi becomes India’s prime minister, he would have been elected in a free and fair election, unlike Deng (who never faced an election) or Suharto (whose elections were sham).

But how valid are the claims about Gujarat’s growth and Modi’s role in enabling it? The evidence is mixed. Other states, large and small, have also grown rapidly, and sometimes from a weaker base. Gujarat was hardly an industrial or economic laggard before Modi became chief minister, and the growth is not a post-2001 phenomenon. From motels in American towns without tourists to shops in cashless African villages, under Communist-ruled Kolkata or entrepreneurial Mumbai, Gujarati businesses have succeeded without Modi’s leadership. In fact, despite Modi’s claims of leading a booming economy, fresh investments dipped soon after the 2002 massacres and new capital remained shy of Gujarat for a few years. Further, the 2002 massacres were not an aberration, and the state has not always been at peace since then. Troops had to be called in 2006 and there have been other communal incidents after. (In contrast, while there have been terror attacks in Mumbai and Delhi regularly, neither has seen mass communal violence or massacres since 1993 and 1984, respectively.)

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Over at Juncture (image from Wikimedia Commons):

Nick Pearce: Your book has received a huge amount of attention. Can we start with some of the central critiques of your core arguments? To begin with, there are those on the left who say that your treatment of the category of capital is a fairly orthodox one. It essentially puts together assets and their relative prices, instead of treating capital conceptually as constituted through relations of production and other structures of power, as it would be in Marxian and other heterodox traditions.

Thomas Piketty: I have read that. I think that it is a bit unfair in the sense that I really try hard in the book to do justice to the multi-dimensionality of capital. The history of real estate is not the history of land, it is not the history of financial assets or business assets, or the public debt; all these different assets come with different power relationships, and with different social compromises to determine their rate of return, and the labour return that is used together with these assets.

At some point in the book I also take the sum of all of these assets, and use the market prices of these different assets to compute the total capital stock of the economy. But I try to make clear in the book that while this may be fine for some purposes – this addition of different kinds of capital, in computing the capital stock – one always needs to keep in mind that this is a pretty abstract operation. I certainly don’t claim that you can summarise the multi-dimensionality of capital, and the inequality and power relationships that go with it, by making this gigantic operation of adding all of these categories together. In fact, in the book I have long parts in different chapters where I try to tell the story of the public debt, the story of real estate bubbles, the story of ‘slave capital’, which of course is a very particular kind of wealth, and of the power relationships that go along with it, and this all plays a role in the book. So, I find that this critique – although I can hear it – is not really justified in the sense that I do perfectly agree that capital is a multi-dimensional concept.

In particular, the market value of assets may not always coincide with their social values, so this does not mean that it is the only way to measure the value of capital. For instance, I have a long discussion about the value of German manufacturing companies and the fact that their market value may not be as large as British, American or French corporations, but apparently that does not prevent them from producing good cars. The market does a number of things well, but there are also a number of things that the market does not do so well, and putting a price on assets is always a complicated business.

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D. Graham Burnett at Cabinet:

Throwing confetti is not an exact science, and neither is philology. But the latter comes closer. Confetti hails from the Latin past participle of conficere, meaning “to prepare or make ready.” Passed through Old French, the root word took on the sense of “preserving”—hence the French confit andconfiture, meaning, respectively, “preserved meat” and “preserved fruit,” i.e., jam. In the wake of the discovery of the New World and the intensive cultivation of sugar cane on slave plantations in the tropical Americas, the dominant meaning of confit and its pan-European cognates came to becandying—cooking in sugar. Confetti, in eighteenth-century Italian, thus meant “little sweets,” the kind of thing an Englishman might call a “sugarplum,” which is to say, small balls of confect-ionary. Sometimes these consisted of a mince of candied fruit (often encased in a sugar shell—powdered, granulated, panned), and sometimes they were built like a jawbreaker around a kernel of seed (anise, coriander, etc.) or a nut (like what we now call a “Jordan almond”). These were things that could be thrown.

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Muriel Spark at Bookforum:

There exists a long, passionate, and somewhat batty tradition of writerly appreciation for feline ways, its entries cropping up among the serious work of many otherwise serious people. In The Informed Air (New Directions, 2014), a new collection of Muriel Spark's criticism and occasional prose, Spark joins the chorus with a paean to her own cat, Bluebell. Spark is known for her novels, not her nonfiction. Yet in this volume's frequently short and sometimes oddball selections, drawn from the full arc of her career, Spark's precision and wit are much on display. “Ailourophilia,” too, is funny—but not only that. The love of a cat, it turns out, is itself a serious subject.

If I were not a Christian I would worship the Cat. The ancient Egyptians did so with much success. But at least it seems evident to me that the domestic cat is the aristocrat of the animal kingdom, occupying a place of quality in the Great Chain of Being second only to our aspiring, agitated and ever-evolving selves.

The dog is known to possess a higher degree of intelligence than the cat. Cat addicts are inclined to challenge this fact. But I think the higher intelligence, as we commonly mean it, must be conceded to the dog, and the highest to ourselves.

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The Editors at n+1:

THERE’S A REASON Ukraine is at the heart of the most significant geopolitical crisis yet to appear in the post-Soviet space. There is no post-Soviet state like it. Unlike the Baltic states, it does not have a recent (interwar) memory of statehood. Nor, unlike every other post-Soviet state aside from Belarus, does the majority population have a radically different language and culture from the Russians. In many cases, for these countries, the traditional language suggests a natural political ally—Finland for the Estonians, Turkey for the Azeris, Romania for the Moldovans. These linguistic and cultural affinities are not without their difficulties, but they do give a long-term geopolitical orientation to these countries.

Ukraine has this to some extent in its western part, formerly known as Galicia, which has cultural and linguistic affinities with Poland. But the country’s capital, Kyiv, has much stronger ties to Russia: Russians consider Kievan Rus, which lasted from the 9th to the 13th century (when it was sacked and burned by the Mongols), to be the first Russian civilization. Russian Orthodoxy was first proclaimed there. Most people in Kyiv speak Russian, rather than Ukrainian, and in any case the languages are quite close (about as close as Spanish and Portuguese). On television, it is typical for any live broadcast—whether it’s news, sports, or a reality-TV show—to go back and forth seamlessly between Russian and Ukrainian, with the understanding that most people know both.

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Massimo Pigliucci in Scientia Salon:

It seems like my friend Neil deGrasse Tyson [1] has done it again: he has dismissed philosophy as a useless enterprise, and actually advised bright students to stay away from it. It is not the first time Neil has done this sort of thing, and he is far from being the only scientist to do so. But in his case the offense is particularly egregious, for two reasons: first, because he is a highly visible science communicator; second, because I told him not to, several times.

Let’s start with the latest episode, work our way back to a few others of the same kind (to establish that this is a pattern, not an unfortunate fluke), and then carefully tackle exactly where Neil and a number of his colleagues go wrong. But before any of that, let me try to halt the obvious objection to this entire essay in its tracks: no, this isn’t about defending “my” turf, for the simple reason that both philosophy and science are my turf [2]. I have practiced both disciplines as a scholar/researcher, I have taught introductory and graduate level classes in both fields, and I have written books about them both. So, while what follows inevitably will unfold as a defense of philosophy (yet again! [3]), it is a principled defense, not a petty one, and it most certainly doesn’t come from any kind of science envy.

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Editorial in The Point:

In August of last year the psychologist Steven Pinker took to the pages of the New Republic to defend the relevance of science to “humanistic scholarship.” Science, he wrote, is “of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism,” and should accordingly be recognized as contributing to investigations concerning “the deepest questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of our lives.” A month later, the New Republic’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, fought back. The humanities are “the study of the many expressions of human inwardness,” he argued, and therefore categorically inappropriate for the brand of empirical research advocated by Pinker. But Pinker, like the rest of the “scientizers,” would not be satisfied with “consilience” between science and the humanities anyway; what he really wants, according to Wieseltier, is for “the humanities to submit to the sciences, and be subsumed by them.”

The debate might as well have taken place in the 1960s, or in outer space. Pinker, the author of a recent doorstop on the virtues of a world created by scientific progress, behaves as if we were still living in the Dark Ages, alleging a “demonization campaign” against science led by powerful humanists such as the historian Jackson Lears and the ethicist Leon Kass (all Pinker has on his side are the administrations of nearly every research university in the country, not to mention the president of the United States). Wieseltier, on the other hand, trots out Tolstoy and Proust as if these nineteenth-century luminaries have anything to do with what is going on in contemporary English departments and philosophy workshops.

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From Edge.Org:

The strange thing about academics, which always fascinates me, is that they believe they're completely immune to status considerations and consider themselves to be more or less monks. In reality, of course, academics are the most status-conscious people in the world. Take away a parking space from an academic and see how long he stays. I always find this very strange when you occasionally get in the realm of happiness research, you get fairly considerable assaults on consumerism as if it's just mindless status seeking. Now, the point of the matter is, is that academics are just as guilty of the original crime, they just pursue status in a different way. …

I have probably stolen, without realizing it, your own job title of “impresario” rather unfairly. The reason I did this was that occasionally people started writing about me online as a “behavioral economist” and I realized that, among academic behavioral economists, this would drive them practically apoplectic to have someone with no qualifications in the field so described. (I'm a classicist by background in any case). So my being described as a behavioral economist would make them practically deranged.

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Rabia Chaudry in Time:

Hey there, Bill. You hate religion. You particularly hate Islam. We get it. Your liberal bigotry against Muslims and Islam is no secret. For a while now I’ve just avoided watching your show, which kind of stinks because for many years I was a great fan and really loved it. I wasn’t even bothered when you called out Muslims doing stupid, criminal or horrific things. You do that with a lot of groups, and it’s important to do. But I stopped watching when it became clear that you loathed a faith I was devoted to.

On your show you recently discussed the kidnapping of hundreds of girls by Boko Haram, followed by the new sharia laws in Brunei, and rounded out the segment with a nod to your buddy Ayaan Hirsi Ali—quite the trifecta of examples to support your conclusion that Islam itself is, as you said, “the problem.” Your reasoning is essentially that Muslims are doing many horrible things around the world, and they all believe in Islam, so naturally Islam is the nonnegotiable culprit.

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Mark Perry in delanceyplace:

In 1934, General Douglas MacArthur and President Franklin D. Roosevelt clashed verbally in one of the worst confrontations between a senior military offi­cer and a president in American history. Roosevelt was determined to minimize the budget deficit in the midst of one of the country's most perilous economic times, and so had proposed that the army's budget be cut in half:

…Roosevelt's face was ashen with contempt. 'He was a scorcher when aroused,' MacArthur later wrote. 'The tension began to boil over.' It was at this point, MacArthur later confessed, that he 'spoke recklessly' and 'said something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an en­emy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.' MacArthur's words hung in the air. Roosevelt could hardly believe what he'd heard. He wheeled on MacArthur and bellowed his re­sponse: 'You must not talk that way to the President! MacArthur, suddenly realizing what he'd said, backtracked. 'He was, of course, right,' he later wrote, 'and I knew it almost before the words had left my mouth. I said that I was sorry and apologized. But I felt my army career was at an end. I told him he had my resignation as Chief of Staff.' With that, MacArthur turned to leave the room. But even be­fore he reached the door, Roosevelt mastered his anger ('his voice came with that cool detachment which so reflected his extraordinary control,' MacArthur remembered) and dampened the confrontation. 'Don't be foolish, Douglas,' he said, 'you and the budget must get together on this.' MacArthur left the room quickly, then waited on the White House porch for Dern to appear. When he did, he was beaming, as if the confrontation had not occurred. 'You've saved the Army,' Dern said. But MacArthur felt defeated and, without warning, was suddenly over­come by nausea. He looked at Dern and then, leaning over, vomited on the White House steps.”

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The Island

Since I'm Island-born home's as precise
as if a mumbly old carpenter,
shoulder-straps crossed wrong,
laid it out, refigured
to the last three-eighths of shingle.

Nowhere that plowcut worms
heal themselves in red loam;
spruces squat, skirts in sand
or the stones of a river rattle its dark
tunnel under the elms,
is there a spot not measured by hands;
no direction I couldn't walk
to the wave-lined edge of home.

Quiet shores — beaches that roar
but walk two thousand paces and the sea
becomes an odd shining
glimpse among the jeweled
zigzag low hills. Any wonder
your eyelashes are wings
to fly your look both in and out?
In the coves of the land all things are discussed.

In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,
a red tongue.
Indians say a musical God
took up his brush and painted it,
named it in His own language
“The Island”.
.

by Milton Acorn
fromThe Island Means Minago
Toronto NC Press, 1975

Sara Reardon in Nature:

The human body teems with trillions of microorganisms — a microbial landscape that has attracted roughly US$500 million in research spending since 2008. Yet with a few exceptions, such as the use of faecal transplants for treating life- threatening gut infections or inflammatory bowel disease, research on the human microbiome has produced few therapies. That is poised to change as large pharmaceutical companies eye the medical potential of manipulating interactions between humans and the bacteria that live in or on the body. On 2 May, drug giant Pfizer announced plans to partner with Second Genome, a biotechnology firm in South San Francisco, California, to study the microbiomes of around 900 people, including those with metabolic disorders and a control group. “We are looking at using this as one piece of a puzzle to understand an individual,” says Barbara Sosnowski, vice-president of external research and development at Pfizer in New York. A day earlier, Paris-based Enterome revealed that it had raised €10 million (US$13.8 million) in venture capital to develop tests that use the composition of gut bacteria to diagnose inflammatory and liver diseases.

Experts predict that the next few months will see a boom in such partnerships and investments, and that new microbiome-derived drugs and therapies will come to market within a few years. Probiotics, or beneficial gut bacteria, have become a popular therapy in recent years. Television advertisements feature celebrities touting Bifidobacterium-laced yogurt, and consumers flock to buy pills that contain Lactobacillusto quell their gut disturbances and other ailments.

More here.