Gardening Space
There wasn't anything here
when we moved in;
there wasn't any here, yet.
But the neighborhood grew quickly,
an ever-accelerating expansion.
Streetlights flicked on.
We waited impatiently
for the compost of matter to decay
to a substrate for life.
In the meantime, we said Howdy!
to the next-door galaxies over the back fence,
their barbeque grills glowing in the bare dark yards,
the kids arm-wrestling, flexing their muscles
in the neophyte friendships
of gravitational pull.
As the background temperature rose
in minuscule increments,
we planted seeds with each small thaw.
They dwindled and died a billion times.
Through the radiation monsoons,
each drop of energy filling a riddle
of expanding rings, we planted again and again,
scattering starry grains
into barren orbital furrows,
strings marking the seed lines.
It was springtime everywhere at once.
Glowing blooms swelled and unfurled,
vapors emanating to fill hollow voids
with being. Moons hovered like irascible insects
over coalescing worlds.
Sometimes we thought summer would never end,
that the heat would last forever.
We never asked where does it come from.
Where does it go?
We sit on the porch,
shucking green planets from
the opening pods of night,
talking about harvests
and the date of the first
hard frost.
by F.J. Bergman
from Astropoetica,
Summer 2009
From Scientific American:
Gut microbes deserve a lot of credit: They not only help digest our food, produce some nutrients, detoxify harmful substances, and protect us from pathogens—they are also important for the development of the immune system. Disturbances in the gut microbiota have been linked to allergies as well as disorders of the digestive and immune systems. Although intestinal organisms' impact on the digestive system's functioning is generally accepted, how they influence pathologies elsewhere in the body has remained a mystery. New research has begun to address this enigma. Diane Mathis, professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues have found that one species of naturally occurring gut bacteria can set off arthritis in mice, in part by manipulating cells of the immune system. Their study appears in the June 25 issue of the journal Immunity.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, incurable disease characterized primarily by painful joint inflammation. Although its precise cause is unknown, RA is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system mistakes the body's own substances and cells for foreign invaders and releases friendly fire on them. To study how gut microbes affect the development of RA, the researchers made use of a specific strain of mice that naturally develop severe inflammatory arthritis. They raised the mice under germ-free conditions and found that the animals developed RA significantly more slowly than the controls that were naturally colonized with diverse, nonpathogenic microorganisms. What's more, the colonized mice produced a much greater level of an immunoregulatory protein known as IL-17. This molecule is produced by immune cells and promotes inflammation. Blocking IL-17 function in the mice prevented disease progression, demonstrating the important role of IL-17 in arthritis.
More here.
Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:
The glare from the glass case prevents us from seeing it clearly, but the object in the photo above is a lady's hat made out of twigs and spiderwebs. It was made in the early 20th century by a San tribesmember in southern Africa, and is currently on display in the Africa Room of the British Museum. This room appears not to attract very many visitors, for reasons I'll get to soon, but I wanted to dwell on this curious hat for a moment still.
Whether or not it meets the formal criteria for qualification as such, this hat is something very close to a cargo-cult object: a reproduction by members of a technologically simple culture, from naturally available materials, of an artefact associated with a dominant, technologically advanced culture. The first cargo cults were identified by western anthropologists in New Guinea, when, shortly after the end of World War II and the disappearance of the goods that the Japanese and American troops had brought into the region, the tribespeople attempted to summon them back by building non-functioning simulations of airports.
The British Museum's labelling tells us that we are supposed to admire the spiderweb hat, in more or less the same way we are supposed to praise the plaques made by casters in the brass foundries of the highly complex early modern Kingdom of Benin. The general message of the Africa Room –which is in fact the Africa Basement– is that, first of all, there is a cohesive, unitary, and stable thing called 'Africa', and, second of all, that everything that comes out of Africa, whether made of brass or of spiderwebs, is equally and perfectly good.
This lesson is one that is very different from what we are taught in the other halls of the museum, where the labels carefully and conscientiously spell out for us the different stages in the rise and decline of classical Assyrian, Egyptian, and Mesoamerican civilizations. In this respect, the well-meaning 'Africa is good' message in fact perpetuates the myth of stagnation that Eric Wolf sought to dispel in his masterful book, Europe and the People without History of 1982.
More here.
Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:
Snaking around the outer wall of the courthouse in Mbaiki, Central African Republic, is a long line of citizens, all in human form and waiting to face judgment. It’s easy to imagine them as the usual mix of drunks, reckless drivers, and check-bouncers in the dock of a small American town. But here most are witches, and they are facing criminal punishment for hexing their enemies or assuming the shape of animals.
By some estimates, about 40 percent of the cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions. (Drug offenses in the U.S., by contrast, account for just 12 percent of arrests.) In Mbaiki—where Pygmies, who are known for bewitching each other, make up about a tenth of the population—witchcraft prosecutions exceed 50 percent of the case load, meaning that most alleged criminals there are suspected of doing things that Westerners generally regard as impossible.
I went to the front of the witch line and asked Abdulaye Bobro, the chief judge, what the punishment was for casting spells.
More here.
Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn:
Ever since the late French physician, Maurice Bucaille — on a hefty payroll of the Saudi royal family in Riyadh — wrote Islam, Bible & Science (1976), many believe that ‘proving’ scientific truths from holy books has been the exclusive domain of Muslims. However, in spite of being impressed by the holy book’s ‘scientific wonders’, Bucaille remained a committed Christian.
Very few of my wide-eyed brethren know that long before Muslims, certain Hindu and Christian theologians had already laid claim to the practice of defining their respective holy books as metaphoric prophecies of scientifically proven phenomenon. They began doing so between the 18th and 19th centuries, whereas Muslims got into the act only in the 20th century.
Johannes Heinrich’s Scientific vindication of Christianity (1887) is one example, while Mohan Roy’s Vedic Physics: Scientific Origin of Hinduism (1999) is a good way of observing how this thought has evolved among followers of other faiths. It is interesting to note how a number of Muslim ‘scientists’ have laboured hard to come up with convoluted interpretations of certain scriptures. Ironically, their ancient counterparts, especially between the 8th and 13th centuries in Baghdad and Persia, had put all effort in trying to understand natural phenomena and the human body and mind through hardcore science and philosophy.
More here.
Gina Kolata in The New York Times:
On a recent Monday, Helen Elzo got a call from her doctor’s office. A device implanted in her heart was not functioning. She needed to go to the hospital and have it replaced. She was aghast — her heart is damaged and, at any time, can start quivering instead of beating. If the device, a defibrillator, was unable to shock her heart back to normal, her life was in danger. In the old days, Mrs.Elzo, 73, who lives outside Tulsa, Okla., could have gone for months before the problem was discovered at a routine office visit. But she has a new defibrillator that communicates directly with her doctor, sending signals about its functions and setting off alarms if things go wrong.
On the horizon is an even smarter heart device, one that detects deterioration in various heart functions and tells the patient how to adjust medications. They are part of a new wave of smart implantable devices that is transforming the care of people with heart disease and creating a bonanza for researchers. The hope is that the devices, now being tested in clinical trials, will save lives, reduce medical expenses and nudge heart patients toward managing their symptoms much the way people with diabetes manage theirs. Patients, who often are frail or live far from their doctors, can be spared frequent office visits. Doctors can learn immediately if devices are malfunctioning or if patients’ hearts are starting to fail.
More here.
I have always liked the fact that we are not the primary objects of our own intellects. We are said to be the lowest of the intellectual beings in the universe. We do not know by knowing ourselves. We know ourselves by knowing first what is not ourselves. While knowing what is not ourselves, we become alive, active. We reflect that it is my very self that knows. I become alive to myself through the gift of what is not myself. Again this suggests that things fit together. They serve one another even by being what they are. Aristotle pointed out that a medical doctor has a very precise purpose that limits what he does. If things could not go wrong with the physical side of man, we would not need doctors. They are called in when things do not function properly. The doctor does not, however, cure us. Nature cures us. The doctor removes or adds to what is preventing our bodies from curing themselves. The doctor is not qua doctor concerned with the good life. He is concerned with life, health. His activities are properly directed to restoring a particular patient to health. When this is accomplished, the relationship of doctor and patient ceases.
more from James V. Schall, S.J. at First Principles here.
It was hard to forget the account of parasitologist Arthur Looss pouring hookworm culture over a boy’s still warm amputated leg, or of the African infested with nematodes who has to ‘wheel his scrotum around in a wheelbarrow’. An Egyptian girl has a yard of ‘spaghetti-thick’ Guinea worm emerging from her arm, wound gingerly around a twig. In the Australian outback, Missus Murphy’s phantom pregnancy proves to be a cyst of tapeworm tips weighing all of eighteen pounds. Well, you get the idea. In his saga of trysts and cysts, exploding buboes, chiggers, leeches, defecation and ingestion, Kaplan keeps his already pullulating narrative constantly on the move with personal anecdotes attesting to his unquenchable enthusiasm. We see him chasing escaped cockroaches, embarking on a seagull cull, and hunting the Brooklyn mudflats as a boy, where couples making out in their automobiles were said to be ‘watching the submarine races’. But it is the biological drama of his subject that enthrals him. Of the canine tapeworm, he notes: ‘The proglottids are tapered at each end into a lovely chain that I have seen imitated in jewellery’ (I bet Mrs K can’t wait for her birthdays); and of land snails, that they ‘eat the egg-laden faeces with the leaf like caviar on crackers’. Dissecting a frog, he admires ‘huge, ciliated protozoans regally gliding along in the rectal fluid like motile, translucent leaves’.
more from David Profumo at Literary Review here.
Stoic holism offers a refuge from individualism, the intrinsic faith of our age, and its petty, exhausting calculations. Through Marcus’ writings, individual self-interest and concern for others become mutually supporting ends: The well-being of others and my own well-being are one and the same. And so my happiness consists in orienting my actions toward others and the good of the whole, rather than in pursuing the endless vagaries of earthly desire-sex, fame, fine things, the love and approval of peers-the Goblin Market cravings (to borrow a term from the poet Christina Rossetti) that contemporary society usually encourages us to indulge as the means to self-fulfillment. Have more orgasms, we’re told, wear spiffier outfits, watch another movie, speak more assertively, and the longings, the sense of something missing, will abate. Stoicism says just the opposite: Stop indulging illusory physical and emotional longings and see your real happiness outside of yourself, your body, your emotions. As McLynn points out in his explanation of Marcus Aurelius’ intense popularity in the Victorian era and increasing neglect in our own, ours is a culture more interested in rights and entitlements than in duty, while Stoicism is only interested in duty, and duty understood to be synonymous with virtue and happiness. But it is a duty that liberates-a duty that teaches us to transcend the tyranny of the emotions and the body and that insists that contentment is ours for the having whenever we summon the strength to push away the things of the world that obscure it.
more from Emily Colette Wilkinson at In Character here.
Richard Dawkins has picked the three winners:
- Top Quark, $1000: Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria
- Strange Quark, $300: The Loom: Skullcaps and Genomes
- Charm Quark, $200: My Growing Passion: The Evolution of Chloroplasts
Congratulations to the winners (I will send the prize money later today–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Richard Dawkins for doing the final judging.
The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Carla Goller, Sughra Raza, and me. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!
Details about how the 3QD science prizes work, here.
Joan Brigham. Steamshuffle. Circa 1977-79
“Poems appear by walking along” this installation.
More on this environmental artist here, here, and here.
Thanks to artist Lauren Shaw (www.laurenshaw.com) for the introduction to this work.
To the Choirmaster
The rock lives in the desert, solid, taking its time.
The wave lives for an instant, stable in momentum
at the edge of the sea, before it folds away.
Everything that is, lives and has size.
The mole sleeps in a hole of its making,
and the hole also lives; absence is not nothing.
It didn’t desire to be, but now it breathes
and makes a place, for the comfort of the mole.
I am a space taken, and my absence will be shapely
and of a certain age, in the everlasting.
In the fierce evening, on the mild day,
How long shall I be shaken?
(Habakkuk)
by Paul Hoover
from Poetry Magazine,
June 2010