Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber points to this piece by J. K. Rowling on why she will not be voting Tory, in The Times (London):

[S]ome will say. Given that you have long since left single parenthood for marriage and a nuclear family; given that you are now so far from a life dependent on benefits that Private Eye habitually refers to you as Rowlinginnit, why do you care? Surely, nowadays, you are a natural Tory voter?

No, I’m afraid not. The 2010 election campaign, more than any other, has underscored the continuing gulf between Tory values and my own. It is not only that the renewed marginalisation of the single, the divorced and the widowed brings back very bad memories. There has also been the revelation, after ten years of prevarication on the subject, that Lord Ashcroft, deputy chairman of the Conservatives, is non-domiciled for tax purposes.

Now, I never, ever, expected to find myself in a position where I could understand, from personal experience, the choices and temptations open to a man as rich as Lord Ashcroft. The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize.

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Project Syndicate:

The battle with the United States over China’s exchange rate continues. When the Great Recession began, many worried that protectionism would rear its ugly head. True, G-20 leaders promised that they had learned the lessons of the Great Depression. But 17 of the G-20’s members introduced protectionist measures just months after the first summit in November 2008. The “Buy American” provision in the United States’ stimulus bill got the most attention. Still, protectionism was contained, partly due to the World Trade Organization.

Continuing economic weakness in the advanced economies risks a new round of protectionism. In America, for example, more than one in six workers who would like a full-time job can’t find one.

These were among the risks associated with America’s insufficient stimulus, which was designed to placate members of Congress as much as it was to revive the economy. With soaring deficits, a second stimulus appears unlikely, and, with monetary policy at its limits and inflation hawks being barely kept at bay, there is little hope of help from that department, either. So protectionism is taking pride of place.

The US Treasury has been charged by Congress to assess whether China is a “currency manipulator.” Although President Obama has now delayed for some months when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner must issue his report, the very concept of “currency manipulation” itself is flawed: all governments take actions that directly or indirectly affect the exchange rate. Reckless budget deficits can lead to a weak currency; so can low interest rates. Until the recent crisis in Greece, the US benefited from a weak dollar/euro exchange rate. Should Europeans have accused the US of “manipulating” the exchange rate to expand exports at its expense?

Although US politicians focus on the bilateral trade deficit with China – which is persistently large – what matters is the multilateral balance. When demands for China to adjust its exchange rate began during George W. Bush’s administration, its multilateral trade surplus was small. More recently, however, China has been running a large multilateral surplus as well.

Saudi Arabia also has a bilateral and multilateral surplus: Americans want its oil, and Saudis want fewer US products. Even in absolute value, Saudi Arabia’s multilateral merchandise surplus of $212 billion in 2008 dwarfs China’s $175 billion surplus; as a percentage of GDP, Saudi Arabia’s current-account surplus, at 11.5% of GDP, is more than twice that of China. Saudi Arabia’s surplus would be far higher were it not for US armaments exports.

Annalee Newitz in io9.com:

People with Williams Syndrome lack 26 genes found in a typical human genome. As a result they are inordinately friendly, and experience no social anxiety. Now a new study reveals that they may also be free of racial bias.

Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong talks about the new study, published this week in Current Biology. Yong writes:

Santos compared the behaviour of 20 white children with Williams syndrome, aged 7 to 16, and 20 typical white children of similar backgrounds and mental ages. To do so, she used a test called the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM-II), which is designed to tease out traces of gender or racial biases in young children.

PRAM-II consists of a picture book where every page includes a pair of people of different genders or skin types. The researcher tells a selection of stories to accompany the images and the children have to point to the person whom they think the story is about. As they hear positive or negative adjectives, they reveal any underlying racial bias if they point to light-skinned or dark-skinned people, or men or women, more frequently.

The typical children showed a strong tendency to view light-skinned people well and dark-skinned people poorly. Out of their responses, 83% were consistent with a pro-white bias. In contrast, the children with Williams syndrome only showed such responses 64% of the time, which wasn't significantly different from chance.

John Briscoe in The South Asian Idea Weblog:

Anyone foolish enough to write on war or peace in the Indus needs to first banish a set of immediate suspicions. I am neither Indian nor Pakistani. I am a South African who has worked on water issues in the subcontinent for 35 years and who has lived in Bangladesh (in the 1970s) and Delhi (in the 2000s). In 2006 I published, with fine Indian colleagues, an Oxford University Press book titled India’s Water Economy: Facing a Turbulent Future and, with fine Pakistani colleagues, one titled Pakistan’s Water Economy: Running Dry.

I was the Senior Water Advisor for the World Bank who dealt with the appointment of the Neutral Expert on the Baglihar case. My last assignment at the World Bank (relevant, as described later) was as Country Director for Brazil. I am now a mere university professor, and speak in the name of no one but myself.

I have deep affection for the people of both India and Pakistan, and am dismayed by what I see as a looming train wreck on the Indus, with disastrous consequences for both countries. I will outline why there is no objective conflict of interests between the countries over the waters of the Indus Basin, make some observations of the need for a change in public discourse, and suggest how the drivers of the train can put on the brakes before it is too late.

More here.

Donald Johanson, paleoanthropologist, at Bigthink:

Foxtail Pine

bark smells like pineapple: Jeffries
cones prick you hand: Ponderosa

nobody know what they are, saying
“needles three to a bunch.”

….turpentine tin can hangers
….high lead riggers

“the true fir cone stands straight,
the doug fir cone hangs down.”

—wild pigs eat acorns in those hills
cascara cutters
tanbark oak bark gatherers
myrtlewood burl bowl-makers
little cedar dolls,
……baby girl born from the split crotch
…………..of a plum
………daughter of the moon—

foxtail pine with a
clipped curve-back cluster of tight
…….five-needle bunches
….the rough red bark scale
and jigsaw pieces sloughed off
……………scattered on the ground.
—what am I doing saying “foxtail pine”?

these conifers whose home was ice
age tundra, taiga, they of the
…….naked sperm
do whitebark pine and white pine seem the same?
…….a sort of tree
…….its leaves are needles
…….like a fox's brush
(I call him fox because he looks that way)
…….and call this other thing, a
;;;;;;;foxtail pine

by Gary Snyder
from The Back Country;
New Directions Publishing, 1963

From Nature:

Researchers have successfully transplanted the genetic material in the nucleus of a fertilized human egg into another fertilized egg, without carrying over mitochondria, the energy-producing structures of the cell. The technique could be used to prevent babies from inheriting diseases caused by mutations in the DNA of mitochondria, which are present in the cytoplasm of the egg. The British team carrying out the study used fertilized eggs donated by couples undergoing fertility treatment, and which were unsuitable for in vitro fertilization (IVF). At this early stage the sperm and egg nuclei, which contain most of the parental genes, have not yet fused. The researchers removed these nuclei and transferred them into another fertilized egg cell which had had its own nuclei removed.

As very little cytoplasm was transferred with the nuclei, the transfer left behind almost all the mitochondria from the donor egg. The researchers then grew the manipulated embryos for 6 to 8 days to determine whether they were able to continue development, and tested for the presence of donor mitochondrial DNA. Their work is published online by Nature today. Last year, researchers in the United States used a similar technique in monkeys; four embryos developed to term, and so far seem to be healthy and normal. “It's very exciting,” says David Thorburn, a geneticist who studies mitochondrial diseases at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne. “It's a real shot in the arm for families that have had their children die from these various diseases.”

More here.

From Science:

Researchers say they have discovered a new molecular player in determining whether breast cancer cells will spread through the body: long strands of RNA known as lincRNAs that turn off tumor suppressor genes. The finding may lead to a test for predicting metastasis as well as drugs for preventing it. Several factors influence whether cells will turn cancerous and later go mobile. Mutations in tumor suppressor genes such as p53 and BRCA1, play a role, as do “microRNAs” that silence critical genes. Problems with lincRNAs appear to be another mechanism. Researchers first identified lincRNAs—short for large intervening noncoding RNAs—9 years ago. Often hundreds or thousands of times longer than microRNAs, which run about 22 nucleotides, some lincRNAs seem to influence gene expression by binding to enzymes that modify chromatin, the DNA-protein package that makes up chromosomes. The lincRNAs direct these chromatin-shaping enzymes to specific sites along the chromosomes, where they tack chemical groups onto genes, blocking them from being expressed. A lincRNA known as HOTAIR, for example, helps tell embryonic skin cells which genes to express depending on their location in the body.

Because some cancer genes had popped up in this skin cell work, cancer biologist Howard Chang of Stanford University began exploring whether HOTAIR and other lincRNAs might also play a role in cancer. His group and collaborators eventually homed in on HOTAIR in human breast cancer samples. Levels of HOTAIR were hundreds of times higher than normal in samples from metastatic breast cancer, the researchers found, and they were sometimes abnormally high in primary tumors as well. Looking at samples from 132 women with breast cancer followed for many years, the team also found that women with high HOTAIR levels in their primary tumor were three times more likely to develop metastatic cancer and die.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

It must be noted, also, that all the letters from diocese to Ratzinger and from Ratzinger to diocese were concerned only with one question: Can this hurt Holy Mother Church? It was as if the children were irrelevant or inconvenient (as with the case of the raped boys in Ireland forced to sign confidentiality agreements by the man who is still the country's cardinal). Note, next, that there was a written, enforced, and consistent policy of avoiding contact with the law. And note, finally, that there was a preconceived Ratzinger propaganda program of blaming the press if any of the criminal conduct or obstruction of justice ever became known.

The obscene culmination of this occurred on Good Friday, when the pope sat through a sermon delivered by an underling in which the exposure of his church's crimes was likened to persecution and even—this was a gorgeous detail—to the pogroms against the Jews. I have never before been accused of taking part in a pogrom or lynching, let alone joining a mob that is led by raped deaf children, but I'm proud to take part in this one.

The keyword is Law. Ever since the church gave refuge to Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston to spare him the inconvenience of answering questions under oath, it has invited the metastasis of this horror. And now the tumor has turned up just where you might have expected—moving from the bosom to the very head of the church. And by what power or right is the fugitive cardinal shielded? Only by the original agreement between Benito Mussolini and the papacy that created the pseudo-state of Vatican City in the Lateran Pact of 1929, Europe's last remaining monument to the triumph of Fascism. This would be bad enough, except that Ratzinger himself is now exposed as being personally as well as institutionally responsible for obstructing justice and protecting and enabling pederasts.

One should not blame only the church here. Where was American law enforcement during the decades when children were prey? Where was international law while the Vatican became a place of asylum and a source of protection for those who licensed or carried out the predation?

[H/t: Anandaroop Roy]

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Ken Burns' Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until–in all honesty–some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and “lucky” enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee's relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be.

It was sad to hear frankly. If the war actually weren't about slavery, I think all our lives would be a lot easier. But as I thought on it, my sadness was stupid. What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy–it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn't about “honoring” the past–it's about an inability to cope with the present.

The God of History bounds the Confederacy in its own chains. From the declaration off secession in Texas…

…in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states….

To Virginia…

Lindsay Beyerstein in Focal Point:

A recent study on college students' preferences for dating vs. hookup is, unaccountably, generating national media attention. The authors found that a bunch of 18-year-old college freshmen in the South embraced traditional gender norms. The study is called “To Hook Up or Date: Which Gender Benefits?” Notice the operative assumptions: That hooking up and dating are mutually exclusive; and that college intimacy is a zero-sum game that pits one gender against the other.

The paper opens with a startling claim, namely that “hooking up has replaced dating” on college campuses. The authors go on to say that college students now report more hookups than first dates. The authors define a hookup as an encounter between strangers or passing acquaintances with no expectation of commitment. The physical component can be anything from kissing to intercourse.

The authors acknowledge that theirs was a “sample of convenience. 221 subjects completed the 20-minute pencil and paper survey. They were all undergraduates, mostly freshmen, at James Madison University, a public school in Virginia. Their average age was 18.72 years. Women subjects outnumbered men by more than 2:1 (presumably because there were more female psych students in need of research participation credit).

If hookup culture killed dating, you wouldn't know it from this sample. Nearly half the subjects said they were in a relationship: 29 had been dating for less than 6 months; 76 had been dating for at least 7 months, and 1 was engaged. Unfortunately, the study doesn't break down relationship status by gender.

Students were asked whether they preferred traditional dating or hooking up in general. They were also asked about their preference for dating vs. hooking up in a variety of specific situations. For example, if they were drinking alcohol with an attractive person, would they prefer to go on a date with them or hook up with them? If they saw a potential for a long-term relationship with someone, would they prefer to date or hook up?

Fatema Ahmed in the LRB blog reports:

The highlight of the April issue of Cahiers du Cinéma is an interview with Slavoj Žižek. Following up on a piece he wrote about Avatar, reprinted in the March issue of Cahiers, he confesses to his interviewers that he hasn’t seen the film; as a good Lacanian, the idea is enough, and we must trust theory. Žižek promises that he will see the film and then write a Stalinist ‘self-criticism’.

The good Lacanian goes on to inform the Cahiers editors that he wrote about The Talented Mr Ripley before seeing it, and that although he has seen Psycho and Vertigo (the interviewers sound quite jittery by this point), there’s a long chapter on Rossellini in Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out and, no, he hadn’t seen the films when he wrote it. Out of respect for Lacan? Not this time: ‘As a good Hegelian, between the idea and the reality, I choose the idea.’

Zizek's reading without having seen the film, in the New Statesman:

Given the 3-D hyperreality of the film, with its combination of real actors and animated digital corrections, Avatar should be compared to films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) or The Matrix (1999). In each, the hero is caught between our ordinary reality and an imagined universe – of cartoons in Roger Rabbit, of digital reality in The Matrix, or of the digitally enhanced everyday reality of the planet in Avatar. What one should thus bear in mind is that, although Avatar's narrative is supposed to take place in one and the same “real” reality, we are dealing – at the level of the underlying symbolic economy – with two realities: the ordinary world of imperialist colonialism on the one hand, and a fantasy world, populated by aborigines who live in an incestuous link with nature, on the other. (The latter should not be confused with the miserable reality of actual exploited peoples.) The end of the film should be read as the hero fully migrating from reality into the fantasy world – as if, in The Matrix, Neo were to decide to immerse himself again fully in the matrix.

This does not mean, however, that we should reject Avatar on behalf of a more “authentic” acceptance of the real world. If we subtract fantasy from reality, then reality itself loses its consistency and disintegrates. To choose between “either accepting reality or choosing fantasy” is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality. Because the hero of Avatar doesn't do this, his subjective position is what Jacques Lacan, with regard to de Sade, called le dupe de son fantasme.

This is why it is interesting to imagine a sequel to Avatar in which, after a couple of years (or, rather, months) of bliss, the hero starts to feel a weird discontent and to miss the corrupted human universe. The source of this discontent is not only that every reality, no matter how perfect it is, sooner or later disappoints us. Such a perfect fantasy disappoints us precisely because of its perfection: what this perfection signals is that it holds no place for us, the subjects who imagine it.

Matthew Taylor in The Telegraph:

The resilience of religion has been a spur to scientists interested in understanding the evolutionary, developmental and neurological basis of faith. Among evolutionists, the big debate is between those who argue that religious belief has helped human beings prosper as a species, and those who see faith merely as a by-product of other aspects of our development.

The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson is perhaps the most prominent advocate of the adaptationist view, arguing that religious belief helped make groups of early humans comparatively more cohesive, more co-operative and more fraternal, and thus better able to fight off less organised foes. And as human needs changed, so did the content of religious belief. In close-knit tribal cultures, there are many gods residing in nature, but in modern mass societies, where it is harder to enforce social norms, a single all-seeing God helps keep us on the straight and narrow.

Adaptationist accounts are far from universally accepted. Richard Dawkins describes the group selection theory that underlies Sloan Wilson’s account as “sheer, wanton, head-in-bag perversity”. But whatever is happening at the group level, there is something about the way individual human beings develop that makes us susceptible to religious belief.

Clues to this lie in the study of child development. It appears, for example, that at a particular age – usually around 10 – children become fascinated by big questions about life, death and the origins of the universe. At earlier ages, as children begin to apply language to the world around them, they seem to ask questions for which religion has answers.

We appear, for example, to be natural creationists. A child’s account of nature relies on what developmental psychologists call “immature teleology”. This is the idea that something exists because of the function it provides for the child: the river is there so I can swim in it, the tree so I can climb it. If something has a purpose, it must have been created for that reason.

The attraction of religious explanations to young minds doesn’t explain their persistence into adulthood. Grown-ups don’t believe in fairies. But while we may rid ourselves of childhood myths, our susceptibility to belief in the supernatural persists.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Sean Kenney makes life-size sculptures of endangered animals out of Lego bricks. Adam Reed Tucker reconstructs famous buildings throughout the world in Lego form. Beth Weis specializes in Lego as home décor. Some people grew up building with Legos, and then never stopped. Lego invaded their minds and now they view the world through a Lego prism. These people have made Lego into a full-time profession. So much so that Lego now has an officially recognized category of what they call “Certified Professionals.” There are nine of these Certified Professionals at present. They are good at making things with Lego.

Certified Professional Nathan Sawaya got his start at the Legoland theme park in Southern California. Now, he is taking aim at the art world proper. His show, “The Art of the Brick,” is currently on tour at museums and galleries throughout the country. I went to see his Lego art at the Agora Gallery in Chelsea, New York.

The show takes on big issues like Despair and Grief. One sculpture, “Red,” shows a male figure from the waist up, emerging from a pile of red Lego bricks into full form. The figure reaches upward, desperate fingers clutching for the sky. Another, “My Boy,” is a blue Lego man on his knees holding the collapsed form of what is presumably the dead or injured (Lego) boy in his arms. It’s a Lego tragedy!

The implied formal question in Sawaya’s sculptures is about the limitations and possibilities of a Lego brick as an artistic material. Looking at the work of Nathan Sawaya in relation to his professional Lego colleagues one thing becomes obvious. Sawaya has achieved a qualitative leap. The other pros, talented as they may be, are essentially doing the same thing that children do with Lego bricks, though at a higher level of proficiency. Instead of making a one-room house with 50 bricks, they make the Sears Tower with 50,000.

Sawaya has managed to separate Lego from that kind of literalism. It’s sort of analogous to the moment when painting finally freed itself from the limitations of direct representation and got wild with abstraction and other nifty new tricks. Sawaya’s work is still representational, for the most part, but it isn’t Lego-like anymore; his constructions aren’t simply the toy-version of some real-world thing.

The sculptures are, however, extremely stupid. I don’t really mean that as an insult.

Postcards From God

Yes, I do feel like a visitor,
a tourist in this world
that I once made.
I rarely talk,
except to ask the way,
distrusting my interpreters,
tired out by the babble
of what they do not say.
I walk around through battered streets,
distinctly lost,
looking for landmarks
from another, promised land.

Here, in this strange place,
in a disjointed time,
I am nothing but a space
that sometimes has to fill.
Images invade me.
Picture postcards overlap my empty face
demanding to be stamped and sent.

'Dear…'
Who am I speaking to?
I think I may have misplaced the address,
but still, I feel the need
to write to you;
not so much for your sake
as for mine,

to raise these barricades
against my fear:
Postcards from god.
Proof I was here.

by Imtiaz Dharker

from Postcards from God;
Viking Penguine, New Delhi, 1994

Alvaro Vargas Llosa in the Wall Street Journal:

George Lucas won't tell us if he based Indiana Jones on Hiram Bingham III, the swashbuckling, fedora-topped explorer who in 1911 (re)discovered Machu Picchu, an Inca citadel in Peru. But it is hard to find anyone other than Bingham who would make a more suitable model.

The grandson and son of Protestant missionaries, Bingham broke out of his Puritan constraints to became a professor, explorer, photographer, writer, World War I pilot and U.S. senator. His character was so complex that not even his closest family members felt that they fully understood him. Referring to Bingham's marriage to Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany jewelry fortune, his son wrote that one “never could be sure how much his love forAlfredawas for herself and how much for her family's money.” Nakedly ambitious, Bingham was a man of his age—an era when fortune-hunters ventured into remote parts of the world in search of “lost cities” and when the U.S. was making ever more inroads into Latin America.

Hiram Bingham and the Machu Picchu saga deserve no less than “Cradle of Gold,” Christopher Heaney's thorough, engrossing portrait of a mercurial figure at a crucial juncture of his life. In the end, Mr. Heaney pronounces harsh judgments on Bingham's very real flaws—the author, for one thing, sides with detractors who regard Bingham as a terrible archaeologist, even if he was an effective publicist for the profession. But it is a tribute to Mr. Heaney's sense of fairness that different conclusions can be reached through a careful weighing of the material he presents.

More here.

From PhysOrg.com:

Although it looks small and unassuming, the tiny origami crane sitting in a sample dish in University of Illinois professor Jennifer Lewis' lab heralds a new method for creating complex three-dimensional structures for biocompatible devices, microscaffolding and other microsystems. The penny-sized titanium bird began as a printed sheet of titanium hydride ink.

The team will publish their novel technique in the April 14 online edition of the journal Advanced Materials. Small, intricate shapes made of metals, ceramics or polymers have a variety of applications, from biomedical devices to electronics to rapid prototyping. One method of fabricating such structures is by direct-write assembly, which the Lewis group helped pioneer. In this approach, a large printer deposits inks containing metallic, ceramic or plastic particles to assemble a structure layer by layer. Then, the structure is annealed at a high temperature to evaporate the liquid in the ink and bond the particles, leaving a solid object.

However, as more layers are added, the lower layers tend to sag or collapse under their own weight – a problem postdoctoral researcher Bok Yeop Ahn encountered while trying to manufacture titanium scaffolds for tissue engineering. He decided to try a different approach: Print a flat sheet, then roll it up into a spiral – or even fold it into an assortment of shapes.

Folding the printed sheets is not as easy as it would first seem.

More here.

From Scientific American:

A new study shows stress hormones make it easier for malignant tumors to grow and spread

A little stress can do us good—it pushes us to compete and innovate. But chronic stress can increase the risk of diseases such as depression, heart disease and even cancer. Studies have shown that stress might promote cancer indirectly by weakening the immune system's anti-tumor defense or by encouraging new tumor-feeding blood vessels to form. But a new study published April 12 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that stress hormones, such as adrenaline, can directly support tumor growth and spread.

For normal cells to thrive in the body, “they need to be attached to their neighbors and their surroundings,” says the study's lead author Anil Sood from The University of Texas M. D, Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Cells that detach from their environment undergo a form of programmed cell death called anoikis. “But cancer cells have come up with way to bypass this effect—they avoid anoikis,” Sood says. This allows cancer cells to break off from tumors, spread throughout the body (in blood or other fluid) and form new tumors at distant sites—a process called metastasis. So Sood wondered: Could stress affect anoikis? “It surprised us that this biology hadn't been studied before,” he notes. “Stress influences so many normal physiological processes. Why wouldn't it be involved in tumor progression?”

More here.

Kris Kotarski in The Guardian's Comment is Free:

The forests around Smolensk evoked dread in the Polish soul long before the tragic airplane accident that claimed the life of President Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria and 94 others at the weekend.

While it is impossible to overstate the significance of what is known as the Katyn massacre in Poland's collective memory, until 1989 this collective memory was officially suppressed and only maintained by thousands of families.

Unlike national narratives that often form when the essence of shared experiences is captured by a writer, poet or statesman, the Katyn memory was formed through the fragmented suffering of the families of the victims, so unlike the public outpouring which has characterised the aftermath of the recent accident.

My grandfather's story is not special – it is typical of the experiences of many in his generation. I wish to share it here not to evoke sympathy for him or for Poland, but to better explain why Kaczynski and a plane full of dignitaries and victim's families tried to touch down in the fog of Smolensk, and why recent Russian gestures, both before and after the plane accident, mean so much to the people of Poland and offer so much hope for reconciliation.

My grandfather, Jerzy, grew up in Lutsk in what is today a large Ukrainian city. In September 1939, Jerzy was nine years old, and one day his father, a reserve officer, did not return home after he was arrested in his office at the local police headquarters.

“We first received a card letting us know that he was in an internment camp in January 1940,” he recalls. “He said that he was in Ostashkov, and that he was feeling well despite the cold winter. He tried to raise our spirits and he believed that he would come back.”

On 12 April 1940, Jerzy, his mother and his three siblings were woken up at 3am by an NKVD officer and two soldiers who stood at their door.