Timothy Williamson in the New York Times:

Here’s an idea many philosophers and logicians have about the function of logic in our cognitive life, our inquiries and debates. It isn’t a player. Rather, it’s an umpire, a neutral arbitrator between opposing theories, imposing some basic rules on all sides in a dispute. The picture is that logic has no substantive content, for otherwise the correctness of that content could itself be debated, which would impugn the neutrality of logic. One way to develop this idea is by saying that logic supplies no information of its own, because the point of information is to rule out possibilities, whereas logic only rules out inconsistencies, which are not genuine possibilities. On this view, logic in itself is totally uninformative, although it may help us extract and handle non-logical information from other sources.

The idea that logic is uninformative strikes me as deeply mistaken, and I’m going to explain why. But it may not seem crazy when one looks at elementary examples of the cognitive value of logic, such as when we extend our knowledge by deducing logical consequences of what we already know. If you know that either Mary or Mark did the murder (only they had access to the crime scene at the right time), and then Mary produces a rock-solid alibi, so you know she didn’t do it, you can deduce that Mark did it. Logic also helps us recognize our mistakes, when our beliefs turn out to contain inconsistencies. If I believe that no politicians are honest, and that John is a politician, and that he is honest, at least one of those three beliefs must be false, although logic doesn’t tell me which one.

More here.

From Science Daily:

A detailed description of development of the first practical artificial leaf — a milestone in the drive for sustainable energy that mimics the process, photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert water and sunlight into energy — appears in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research. The article notes that unlike earlier devices, which used costly ingredients, the new device is made from inexpensive materials and employs low-cost engineering and manufacturing processes.

Daniel G. Nocera points out that the artificial leaf responds to the vision of a famous Italian chemist who, in 1912, predicted that scientists one day would uncover the “guarded secret of plants.” The most important of those, Nocera says, is the process that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The artificial leaf has a sunlight collector sandwiched between two films that generate oxygen and hydrogen gas. When dropped into a jar of water in the sunlight, it bubbles away, releasing hydrogen that can be used in fuel cells to make electricity.

More here.

Greta Christina in AlterNet:

The so-called “new atheist” movement is definitely not so new. Atheists have been around for decades, and they've been organizing for decades. But something new, something big, has been happening in atheism in the last few years — atheism has become much more visible, more vocal, more activist, better organized, and more readily mobilized — especially online, but increasingly in the flesh as well. The recent Reason Rally in Washington, DC brought an estimated 20,000 attendees to the National Mall on March 24 — and that was in the rain. Twenty thousand atheists trucked in from around the country, indeed from around the world, and stood in the rain, all day: to mingle, network, listen to speakers and musicians and comedians, check out organizations, schmooze, celebrate, and show the world the face of happy, diverse, energetic, organized atheism.

Atheists are becoming a force to be reckoned with. Atheists are gaining clout. Atheists are becoming a powerful ally when we're inspired to take action — and a powerful opponent when we get treated like dirt.

Case Study Number One, “Powerful Ally” Division: The million dollars currently being raised — and the goodness knows how many people being mobilized — for theLeukemia & Lymphoma Society's “Light the Night Walks,” by the non-theisticFoundation Beyond Belief and the Todd Stiefel family.

More here.

From Scientific American:

There’s more to your DNA than your DNA. We are now becoming aware of the epigenome. While DNA controls you, your epigenome may help control your DNA, or rather, it can have an extensive impact on how your DNA is expressed. The epigenome consists of changes in the structure of your DNA, how it is packaged, what parts of it are available for expression into RNA and proteins. For example, adding methyls to DNA tends to decrease the gene expression of that DNA segment, while taking away methyl groups increases it. The cool thing about epigenetics is that the methylation can vary from tissue to tissue, controlling how different genes are expressed in say, liver vs spleen.

Take muscle tissue for instance. Gene expression in muscle tissue can change the efficiency of glucose metabolism by muscle. And glucose metabolism has a very large effect on many bodily processes, include weight gain and problems like cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes. Muscle itself is very plastic, and responds quickly to changes in the environment (which for a muscle, means increases and decreases in exercise or how many calories are getting in). We know that exercise can change gene expression in muscle, but can it also change the epigenome? While immediate changes in gene expression can be very short, changes to the epigenome indicate much longer-term changes. Could bouts of exercise influence the methylation of muscle, and thus have long-term effects?

More here.

From The New York Times:

Genetically modified organisms are not wildly popular these days, except one: a fictional bird that is central to the hugely popular movie and book trilogy “The Hunger Games.” That’s the mockingjay, a cross between a mockingbird and a genetically engineered spy bird called a jabberjay. The action in “The Hunger Games” takes place in a fictional future in which teenagers are forced to hunt and kill one another in annual competitions designed to entertain and suppress a highly controlled population. The mockingjay first appears as a symbol, when Katniss Everdeen, the heroine, is given a pin that depicts the bird. Mockingjay pins, although not the birds, have spread to the real world. “They’re funny birds and something of a slap in the face to the Capitol,” Katniss explains in the first book. And the nature of that slap in face is a new twist on the great fear about genetic engineering, that modified organisms or their genes will escape into the wild and wreak havoc. The mockingjay is just such an unintended consequence, resulting from a failed creation of the government, what Katniss means when she refers to “the Capitol.” But rather than being a disaster, the bird is a much-loved reminder of the limits of totalitarian control.

The origin of the bird, Katniss explains, is that the rulers modified an unspecified species of jay to make a new creature, an animal of the state called a jabberjay. Jabberjays were intended to function as biological recording machines that no one would suspect. They would listen to conversations and then return to their masters to replay them. The jabberjays, all male, were left to die out when the public realized what they were doing. Like genetically modified organisms today, the jabberjays were not expected to survive in the wild, but they bred with mockingbirds and produced a thriving hybrid that could mimic human sounds and songs, and lived on, to the irritation of the government and the delight of the people.

More here.

Nanna Bisp Buchert. Untitled from the series “Withered Leaves”. 2005.

More here and here.

Atul Gawande in the New England Journal of Medicine (via brainiac):

The first volume of the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and the Collateral Branches of Science, published in 1812, gives a sense of the constraints faced by surgeons, and the mettle required of patients, in the era before anesthesia and antisepsis. In the April issue for that year, John Collins Warren, surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital and son of one of the founders of Harvard Medical School, published a case report describing a new approach to the treatment of cataracts.1 Until that time, the prevalent method of cataract treatment was “couching,” a procedure that involved inserting a curved needle into the orbit and using it to push the clouded lens back and out of the line of sight.2 Warren's patient had undergone six such attempts without lasting success and was now blind. Warren undertook a more radical and invasive procedure — actual removal of the left cataract. He described the operation, performed before the students of Harvard Medical School, as follows:

The eye-lids were separated by the thumb and finger of the left hand, and then, a broad cornea knife was pushed through the cornea at the outer angle of the eye, till its point approached the opposite side of the cornea. The knife was then withdrawn, and the aqueous humour being discharged, was immediately followed by a protrusion of the iris.

Into the collapsed orbit of this unanesthetized man, Warren inserted forceps he had made especially for the event. However, he encountered difficulties that necessitated improvisation:

The opaque body eluding the grasp of the forceps, a fine hook was passed through the pupil, and fixed in the thickened capsule, which was immediately drawn out entire. This substance was quite firm, about half a line in thickness, a line in diameter, and had a pearly whiteness.

A bandage was applied, instructions on cleansing the eye were given, and the gentleman was sent home. Two months later, Warren noted, inflammation required “two or three bleedings,” but “the patient is now well, and sees to distinguish every object with the left eye.”

The implicit encouragement in Warren's article, and in others like it, was to be daring, even pitiless, in attacking problems of an anatomical nature. As the 18th-century surgeon William Hunter had told his students, “Anatomy is the Basis of Surgery, it informs the Head, guides the hand, and familiarizes the heart to a kind of necessary inhumanity.”3 That first volume of the Journal provided descriptions of a remarkable range of surgical techniques, including those for removing kidney, bladder, and urethral stones; dilating the male urethra when strictured by the passage of stones; tying off aneurysms of the iliac artery and infrarenal aorta; treating burns; and using leeches for bloodletting. There were articles on the problem of “the ulcerated uterus” and on the management of gunshot and cannonball wounds, not to mention a spirited debate on whether the wind of a passing cannonball alone was sufficient to cause serious soft-tissue injury.

Surgery, nonetheless, remained a limited profession.

George Dvorsky in io9:

Your relationship is on the rocks. Begrudgingly, you and your significant other visit a marriage counselor in the hopes that there's still something left to salvage in your relationship. You both spill your guts and admit that the love is gone. The counselor listens attentively, nodding her head every now and then in complete understanding. At the end of the session she offers the two of you some practical words of advice and sees you on your way. Oh, but before you leave she fills out a prescription for the two of you. Your marriage, it would seem, has been placed on meds.

Now, as messed up as this scenario might seem, this could very well be the future of marriage counseling. At least that's what Oxford neuroethicists Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg believe. In their paper, “Neuroenhancement of Love and Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us,” they argue that such a possibility awaits us in the not-too-distant future, and that a kind of ‘love potion' could eventually be developed to strengthen pair bonding. In fact, most of the compounds required to make such a concoction are already within our grasp. It's just a matter of doing it.

It's no secret that divorce rates are going up. Most people would agree that the end of a relationship is a tragic and undesirable thing. Modern couples tend to break-up between the five to nine year mark, a time when the initial honeymoon phase is long gone and the hard realities of managing a longterm relationship really start to kick in.

And while economic and social factors can often play a part in the disintegration of a marriage, neuroscience is increasingly showing that that love is in the brain.

Gary Gutting in the New York Times:

Physicists have been giving philosophers a hard time lately. Stephen Hawking claimed in a speech last year that philosophy is “dead” because philosophers haven’t kept up with science. More recently, Lawrence Krauss, in his book, “A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing,” has insisted that “philosophy and theology are incapable of addressing by themselves the truly fundamental questions that perplex us about our existence.” David Albert, a distinguished philosopher of science, dismissively reviewed Krauss’s book: “all there is to say about this [Krauss’s claim that the universe may have come from nothing], as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right.” Krauss — ignoring Albert’s Ph.D. in theoretical physics — retorted in an interview that Albert is a “moronic philosopher.” (Krauss somewhat moderates his views in a recent Scientific American article.)

I’d like to see if I can raise the level of the discussion a bit. Despite some nasty asides, Krauss doesn’t deny that philosophers may have something to contribute to our understanding of “fundamental questions” (his “by themselves” in the above quotation is a typical qualification). And almost all philosophers of science — certainly Albert — would agree that an intimate knowledge of science is essential for their discipline. So it should be possible to at least start a line of thought that incorporates both the physicist’s and the philosopher’s sensibilities.

More here.

Natan Sachs in Foreign Policy:

Something has gone very wrong with Israel's posture on Iran's nuclear program. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak lead a confrontational approach — including dramatic interviews and speeches to U.S. audiences that have convinced many that Israel might soon strike Iran's nuclear facilities — the former heads of Israel's intelligence agencies have come out publicly against the government's position. First, Meir Dagan — who headed the Mossad until late 2010 and coordinated Israel's Iran policy — called an attack on Iran “the most foolish thing I've heard.” In April, Yuval Diskin — the previous head of the domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet — voiced a scathing and personal critique of Netanyahu and Barak. Diskin questioned not only the leaders' policy, but also their very judgment and capacity to lead, warning against their “messianic” approach to Iran's nuclear program.

Given these differences, should the United States — and Iran — fear an Israeli strike more, or should they relax as Israel busies itself with internal arguments? Although it may be tempting to think that the Dagan-Diskin campaign lessens the chance of confrontation, in truth it raises two dire possibilities. First, if the former spy chiefs are correct about Netanyahu's and Barak's lack of judgment, this is hardly cause for comfort. If, however, Dagan and Diskin are mistaken and Israeli strategy is in fact calculated and sober, then undermining Israel's credibility — as they themselves have done — makes an Israeli strike more likely, not less. The less credible the Israeli threat, the more likely Iran is to try to call an Israeli bluff, and thus the more likely Israel is to try to back up its words with deeds.

More here.

Transcript from NPR:

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Every member of the House of Representatives and a few from the Senate, about a third of the Senate, I believe, is up for re-election this year. There will be hundreds of debates, local and national. Candidates will be asked questions about unemployment, the deficit, gay marriage, budget cutting. But will any of them be asked about their opinions or their knowledge of science and technology?

We have politicians who claim global warming is a hoax, others who don't believe in evolution. Shouldn't we want to know what the candidates know about the basic things in science? Will any moderators of the inevitable presidential debates even ask one question about science?

These are some of the reasons that a grassroots coalition of scientists, engineers and science advocates is calling for a televised presidential science debate. Their goal: for candidates to give us more than canned responses and for voters to make an informed decision in November, informed meaning knowing something about the candidates' views about science.

Joining me now to delve into some of these questions: Shawn Otto is the CEO and co-Founder of ScienceDebate.org, the group trying to organize a presidential science debate. He's also author of “Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America.” He joins us from Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul. Welcome back to the program, Shawn.

SHAWN OTTO: Thanks, Ira.

FLATOW: Dr. John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University and author of several books, including “Innumeracy” and “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.” He joins us from Philadelphia. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Paulos.

DR. JOHN ALLEN PAULOS: Thanks much.

FLATOW: And former Congressman Vern Ehlers is a Republican, former Republican congressman from Michigan. He's also a physicist. He joins us from Grand Rapids. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Your friendly Census Bureau has provided the following facts about mothers, children and there is some surprising history behind the annual ritual we call Mother’s Day (and that some people see as a gift from greeting card companies to themselves). First of all, where did Mother’s Day originate and how is that the founder of the day eventually came to be arrested for protesting a Mother’s Day carnation sale?

Says the bureau:

“The driving force behind Mother’s Day was Anna Jarvis, who organized observances in Grafton, W.Va., and Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. As the annual celebration became popular around the country, Jarvis asked members of Congress to set aside a day to honor mothers. She finally succeeded in 1914, when Congress designated the second Sunday in May as “Mother’s Day.” As it turns out, her mother, Ann, had started Mother’s Day Work Clubs in five cities to improve health and sanitary conditions during the Civil War; soldiers from both sides were cared for equally. After her mother died, Anna Jarvis organized memorials in what ultimately led to the congressional action on Mother’s Day. But, according to Biography.com and other sources, Anna Jarvis eventually came to resent the commercialization of the holiday — so much so that she campaigned for its abolition — to no avail. She is said to have complained that she wanted it to be “a day of sentiment, not profit,” but instead had become a bonanza for greeting cards which she saw as “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.” She and her sister spent the family assets trying to end it — and she was once arrested for protesting a sale of carnations for Mother’s Day after florists and greeting card companies realized in the early 1920s that the holiday could be a bonanza for them.

More here.

Javed Jabbar in the Express Tribune:

Of Martyrs and Marigolds by Aquila Ismail is a poignant and evocative portrayal of the so-far largely untold aspects of a sad saga. In a novelised form, the book depicts the shattered dreams and dilemmas of the Urdu-speaking Bihari-origin residents of East Pakistan, particularly in the years 1971 and 1972.

There has been patchy coverage of the roughly 200,000 Biharis living in refugee camps post-1971, who want to move to a Pakistan which is no longer willing to accept them. But news media in general and non-news media in particular have devoted little attention to the paradoxical plight of those Bihari East Pakistanis who genuinely loved the land and the people they had adopted. Many of them condemned the postponement of the National Assembly session by General Yahya Khan on March 1, 1971. They were grieved by the use of excessive military force against the Awami League onwards of March 25, 1971. And they did not support the pro-Pakistan militias that were pitched against the Bengali militias.

When these innocent, non-combatant Biharis and other Urdu-speaking residents of East Pakistan began to be indiscriminately targeted by Bengali Awami League extremists to settle scores against General Yahya Khan’s policies and the actions initiated by General Tikka Khan, tens of thousands of these persons became victims overnight at the hands of fellow countrymen.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Researchers have found that bird species with multiple plumage colour forms within in the same population, evolve into new species faster than those with only one colour form, confirming a 60 year-old evolution theory. The global study used information from birdwatchers and geneticists accumulated over decades and was conducted by University of Melbourne scientists Dr Devi Stuart-Fox and Dr Andrew Hugall (now based at the Melbourne Museum) and is published in the journal Nature.

The link between having more than one colour variation (colour polymorphism) like the iconic red, black or yellow headed Gouldian finches, and the faster evolution of new species was predicted in the 1950s by famous scientists such as Julian Huxley, but this is the first study to confirm the theory. By confirming a major theory in evolutionary biology, we are able to understand a lot more about the processes that create biodiversity said Dr Devi Stuart-Fox from the University's Zoology Department. “We found that in three families of birds of prey, the hawks and eagles, the owls and the nightjars, the presence of multiple colour forms leads to rapid generation of new species,” Dr Stuart-Fox said. “Well known examples of colour polymorphic species in these families include the Australian grey goshawk which has a grey and pure white form, the North American eastern screech owl and the Antillean nighthawk, each with grey and red forms.”

More here.

Family

In the empty kitchen
next to the cold stove,
the sound of my own chewing
echoes off the walls.

It makes me reconsider
yesterday's annoying comment
that made no sense
and had nothing to do
with anything
anyway.

by Sassan Tabatabai
from Uzunburun
The Pen and Anvil Press, 2011

Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim in The Nation:

In 1909 a group of men met on an estate in Wales to save Western civilization. Troubled by the erosion of British world power, they believed the decline could be reversed if statesmen turned away from the mundane tasks of modern diplomacy and channeled the wisdom of ancient Greece instead. The Greeks, in reconciling rulership with freedom, had made the West great, and supplied a model for their Anglo-Saxon heirs. No longer should the empire run itself; members of the group, including Lloyd George and Lord Milner, would train men of penetrating insight to direct imperial affairs more self-consciously than ever before. Drawing protégés from Oxbridge, the Round Table, as the group called itself, aimed to impart the lessons of enlightened leadership to a new generation. They produced countless articles and monographs. Chapters of the society flourished all over the empire. Ten years later, they had disappeared: nationalism had swept away their plans to knit the colonies closer together. British ascendancy ended sooner than any of them could have imagined.

The mantle of world leadership soon passed to the United States, and it’s here, where the ruling class is now experiencing its own crisis of confidence, that the Round Table is having something of a second act. Anxiety about America’s place in the world intensified after 9/11 but first became acute in the late 1990s, when the ills of the post–cold war world no longer appeared transient and seemed to demand concerted US leadership in response. This was the moment when liberal interventionism and neoconservatism ascended to the political mainstream and the grand narrative of “globalization” entered into wide circulation. In New Haven, historians John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy put forth a different response. Opposed to the Clinton administration’s ad hoc policy-making, they conceived a series of “grand strategy” seminars at Yale that aspired to train the next generation of leaders.

More here.

Over at Edge, a conversation with Simon Baron-Cohen:

Many of you know that the topic of sex differences in psychology is fraught with controversy. It's an area where people, for many decades, didn't really want to enter because of the risks of political incorrectness, and of being misunderstood.

Perhaps of all of the areas in psychology where people do research, the field of sex differences was kind of off limits. It was taboo, and that was partly because people believed that anyone who tried to do research into whether boys and girls, on average, differ, must have some sexist agenda. And so for that reason a lot of scientists just wouldn't even touch it.

By 2003, I was beginning to sense that that political climate was changing, that it was a time when people could ask the question — do boys and girls differ? Do men and women differ? — without fear of being accused of some kind of sexist agenda, but in a more open-minded way.

First of all, I started off looking at neuroanatomy, to look at what the neuroscience is telling us about the male and female brain. If you just take groups of girls and groups of boys and, for example, put them into MRI scanners to look at the brain, you do see differences on average. Take the idea that the sexes are identical from the neck upwards, even if they are very clearly different from the neck downwards: the neuroscience is telling us that that is just a myth, that there are differences, even in terms of brain volume and the number of connections between nerve cells in the brain at the structure of the brain, on average, between males and females.

I say this carefully because it's still a field which is prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, but just giving you some of the examples of findings that have come out of the neuroscience of sex differences, you find that the male brain, on average, is about eight percent larger than the female brain. We're talking about a volumetric difference. It doesn't necessarily mean anything, but that's just a finding that's consistently found. You find that difference from the earliest point you can put babies into the scanner, so some of the studies are at two weeks old in terms of infants.