Philip Ball in [email protected]:

By transplanting their genomes, US scientists have converted one species into another.

John Glass and his co-workers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, have taken DNA from a bacterium called Mycoplasma mycoides and inserted it into cells of the closely related species Mycoplasma capricolum.

They find that the recipient cells with the new genome behave like those of the donor species, making protein molecules characteristic of the donor. It’s like re-booting a cell with a new operating system, says Glass.

“The method is very impressive,” says biomedical engineer Jim Collins of Boston University. “It’s surprising that they could get such a large piece of DNA into the bugs, and even more surprising that they could get the new genome jump-started.”

To swap the genomes, the researchers encased M. mycoides cells in a gel and used enzymes to break them apart and destroy their proteins, leaving only their naked DNA.

Over at Bloggingheads TV, Bruce Feiler and Reza Aslan on Iran, multiculturalism in Europe and Los Angeles, Salman Rushdie and Palestine.

Ryan Olson in Red Herring:

Corporate software maker Seriosity on Thursday released a lengthy report detailing some of the ways in which people who play massively multiplayer online role-playing games are developing skills vital to business success. And the company believes these types of games are shaping the next generation of corporate leaders.

While the idea isn’t new, the study provides a detailed look at some of the ways in which gamers are learning to collaborate, stay organized, and take risks. For dedicated players, it could prove that the hours they spend each week managing their fellow warriors, mages, and priests might actually help them conquer the corporate world as well…

The Palo Alto, California-based company, which teamed up with IBM and researchers from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the study, found that logic and visualization skills, as well as creative thinking and collaborative abilities, are widely applicable in both domains.

You can find the report here.

From 2001, Neil deGrasse Tyson over at the Hayden Planetarium:

What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rose in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.

For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes on May 30th this year, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight. The other day is July 13th.

Had Manhattan’s grid been perfectly aligned with the geographic north-south line, then our special days would be the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, the only two days on the calendar when the Sun rises due east and sets due west. But Manhattan is rotated 30 degrees east from geographic north, shifting the days of alignment elsewhere into the calendar.

[H/t Linta Varghese]

There are lots of things you can’t criticise Hirst for. You can’t complain about the fact that he doesn’t make his work by himself—neither did Rembrandt or Rubens or Warhol. You can’t complain that he’s made too many similar works—Pissaro, Magritte, Dalí and many others churned out substandard stuff on demand. The real difficulty with coming to a judgement on Hirst is that contemporary art theory does not permit one to assess whether an artist’s work is superficial or deep, because it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between a banal work of art and one that takes banality as its theme, or between a simple work of art and a simplistic one. A critic could spend hours trying to decide if something is superficially superficial or deeply superficial—and never come up with an answer.

The contemporary theory of the icon is also relevant. Icons were originally images of Christ and the saints. Warhol revived the icon, by making images of celebrities who were already icons in the media. Nowadays, an iconic work of art is something even simpler. If a series of works of art are acquired by a sufficient number of collectors, or achieve such a media presence that they are instantly recognisable, then they become, de facto, iconic. That’s why the world’s best historians of modern art, Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh of October magazine, have remarked contemptuously that, in the art of Hirst, the aura of artistic inspiration has been replaced by the auras of media celebrity and of luxury commodity.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

“Playful” is probably the last adjective one would think to use for the oeuvre of the Primo Levi who wrote Survival in Auschwitz, describing the ordeal he lived through but never left behind. And yet, on reading the latest collection of his stories to be translated into English, A Tranquil Star, on the anniversary of his death twenty years ago, one cannot avoid the impression of playfulness in these small stories written between 1949 and 1986, each of which seems to be an offspring of the question “What if…?”

What if a kangaroo were to go to a dinner party? What if the weekend’s entertainment were a gladiatorial battle between men and automobiles? What if there were a magic paint that brought good fortune to anyone covered with it? What if all the characters invented by novelists were to live in a theme park together?

more from the NYRB here.

In a hushed, darkened side gallery in a university exhibition space in Orange County, a series of simple glass display cases hold an array of intricately fashioned reliquaries — ornate housings for sacred objects such as slivers off the Bodhi Tree or a bone from the big toe of Mary Magdalene. The more than four dozen works on view display the gilded ornamental woodwork and oddly architectural forms that are the hallmarks of this rarely considered art-historical side stream, and they have a glow of musty intimacy and antiquarian mystery about them.

Until you look a bit closer. Then you start to see what exactly it is that’s been enshrined here: the broken neck and cap from a bottle of Orange Crush, a Jägermeister shot glass, a Morticia Addams bubblegum card, a red carpenter’s pencil, a pair of well-used black boxer shorts, a depleted can of Paul Mitchell Extra-Body Sculpting Mousse, various bits of dry wall and stucco, and a wide assortment of mass-produced touristy knickknacks and commercial premiums. What kind of religion is this, anyway?

more from the LA Weekly here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Tradition and the twenty-first century were tangled together in Barker Center’s Thompson Room on the afternoon of February 11, when Drew Gilpin Faust conducted her first news conference as Harvard’s president-elect. Faust sketched

elements of her childhood “in a privileged family in the rural Shenandoah Valley” of Virginia in “Living History,” an essay published in this magazine in 2003. “I was the only daughter in a family of four children,” she wrote, and subject to her community’s prevailing expectations for girls. As she noted in the bracing preface to her widely acclaimed 1996 book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War:

“When I was growing up in Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, my mother taught me that the term “woman” was disrespectful, if not insulting. Adult females—at least white ones—should be considered and addressed as “ladies.” I responded to this instruction by refusing to wear dresses and by joining the 4-H club, not to sew and can like all the other girls, but to raise sheep and cattle with the boys. My mother still insisted on the occasional dress but, to her credit, said not a negative word about my enthusiasm for animal husbandry.

Looking back, I am sure that the origins of this book lie somewhere in that youthful experience and in the continued confrontations with my mother—until the very eve of her death when I was 19—about the requirements of what she usually called “femininity.” “It’s a man’s world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that the better off you’ll be,” she warned. I have been luckier than she in that I have lived in a time when my society and culture have supported me in proving that statement wrong”.

More here

From Nature:

Domestic cats have been worshiped as gods, reviled as devils and cherished as companions. [email protected] looks at the feline family tree to find out when and where humans began to welcome cats into their homes. According to a new genetic analysis, modern-day housecats are descended from a population of domesticated wildcats that prowled the Middle East more than 100,000 years ago. Carlos Driscoll, a zoologist working at Oxford University and the US National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, and his colleagues surveyed 979 cats from around the globe, including wildcats, feral cats, various domesticated breeds, sand cats and Chinese desert cats.

By comparing genome sequences, the researchers worked out the relationships between the different animals. DNA shows that domestic cats are most similar to wildcats currently living in the deserts of Israel, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The results are published this week in Science. “We found five distinct lineages dating back 100,000 years prior to any archaeological record of cat domestication,” says David Macdonald, a zoologist at Oxford University and a co-author on the study. “These appear to come from at least five female cats from the Near East whose descendants have been transported across the world by humans.”

More here. (For Abbas, the cat-lover)

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