The decline of the Roman Empire has been discussed for centuries, and it could be that the discussion about the decline of Europe will last as long. Decline often does not proceed as quickly as feared; there are usually retarding circumstances. But it is also true that, for better or worse, the pulse of history is beating quicker in our time than before.

There is also a danger that we will throw up our hands in despair and accept with resignation Europe’s future role as a museum of world history and civilization, preaching the importance of morality in world affairs to a nonexistent audience. Surely decline offers challenges that ought to be taken up, even if there is no certainty of success. No one can say with any confidence what problems the powers that now appear to be in the ascendancy will face in the years to come. And even if Europe’s decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.

There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe’s traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over.

more from The Chronicle Review here.

(Via Political Theory Daily Review) in The Scientist:

Amanda lies flat on her back, clad in a steel blue hospital gown and an air of anticipation, as she is rolled headfirst into a beeping, 10-ton functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) unit. Once inside, the 20-something blonde uses a handheld device to respond to questions about the playing cards appearing on the screen at the foot of the machine. With each click of the button, she is either lying or telling the truth about whether a card presented to her matches the one in her pocket, and the white-coated technician who watches her brain image morph into patterns on his computer screen seems to know the difference.

It’s unlikely anyone would shell out $10,000 to exonerate herself in a dispute over gin rummy. But Amanda, the model in a demo video for Tarzana, Calif.-based No Lie MRI, is helping to make a point: lie-detection is going high-tech. No Lie MRI claims it can identify lies with 90% accuracy. The service is meant for “anybody who wants to demonstrate that they are telling truth to others,” says founder and CEO Joel Huizenga. “Everyone should be allowed to use whatever method they can to defend themselves.”

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:

Hiasl, a 26-year old Austrian-based chimpanzee, is petitioning the courts for human status, and let me be the first to extend him a warm welcome to our species. My animal rights activism has never gone beyond the cage-free eggs’ stage; it’s the human possibilities raised by Hiasl’s case that caught my attention. If a chimpanzee can be declared a person, then there’s nothing in the way of a person becoming an ape–and I’m not just talking about a retroactive status applied to ex-husbands. In fact, I predict a surge in trans-specied people, who will eagerly go over to the side of the chimps.

The transition need not involve costly, time-consuming, surgical arm extensions and whole-body Rogaine treatments, since we are practically chimpanzees already. We share 99 percent of our genome with them, making it possible for chimps to accept human blood transfusions and kidney donations. Despite their vocal limitations, they communicate easily with each other and can learn human languages. They use tools and live in groups that display behavioral variations attributable to what anthropologists recognize as culture.

And we may be a lot closer biologically than Darwin ever imagined. Last May, paleontologists reported evidence of inter-breeding between early humans and chimps as recently as 5 million years ago, and proposed that modern humans are the result of this ancient predilection for bestiality.

In New Scientist:

Brain structures in primates have developed due to different pressures on males and females to keep up with social or competitive demands, a new study suggests.

A comparison of brains from 21 primate species, including gorillas and chimps, suggests that those with greater male-on-male competition have more brain matter devoted to aggression and coordination. Whereas those species in which there is more social mixing between males and females have evolved bigger brains with higher-level thinking.

Competition for status and mates among primates might have influenced brain evolution, the researchers say. They add that contrasting brain types resulting from behavioural differences between the sexes might be a factor in other branches of mammalian brain evolution beyond anthropoid primates.

In The Independent:

A typical Sarkozy voter was a male shopkeeper in his sixties in a rural town in eastern or southern France. A typical Royal voter was a young woman student in a west or south-west city.

The sociological and regional division of France into the tribes of “Sarko” and “Ségo” is fascinating – and defies some of the conventional wisdom about the presidential campaign.

Mme Royal, the Socialist candidate, dismissed by the Right as the candidate of the past, scored heavily among the young and the middle-aged (with the exception of those aged 25 to 34). In an election restricted to French voters aged 18 to 59, Mme Royal would have won handsomely. M. Sarkozy owes his victory to a “wrinkly” landslide with an overwhelming triumph among French voters in their sixties (61 per cent of the vote) and a jackpot among the over-seventies (68 per cent).

The centre-right candidate promised to put France “back to work” and create a new, more dynamic future. His greatest appeal – paradoxically – was to people over retirement age. They were swayed not by his promises of a New France but his appeals to the “moral” values of an Old France, and especially his tough rhetoric on crime, immigration and national identity.

[H/t Alex Cooley]

From Nature:

New York’s Tribeca Film Festival wrapped up last weekend, after providing an eyeful of science-based films coming soon (maybe) to a theatre near you; and an earful of how Hollywood sees the role of science changing in the movies. The Tribeca fest — named after the neighbourhood where it is held (short for ‘Triangle Below Canal Street’, that famous avenue where a fake Rolex watch will cost you ten bucks and the jostling is free) — is the creation of actor Robert De Niro and producer Jane Rosenthal, started as a mechanism to bring vitality back to lower Manhattan after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.

But science nerds such as myself flock to it because of its partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, which spends a healthy chunk of money, in the words of its head Doron Weber, “to challenge leading artists in film theatre and television to create more realistic, more compelling and more entertaining stories about science and technology”. How can filmic depictions of scientists be both realistic and entertaining, when most science consists of long days of work and incremental advances? I went to the fest to find out (and to catch a glimpse of Christopher Walken).

My verdict? All in all, science on film still feels a bit awkward.

More here.

From BBC:

Long-snouted aardvarks will rub shoulders with skunk-like zorillas in an ambitious plan to provide a virtual snapshot of life on Earth. The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to detail all 1.8 million known plant and animal species in a net archive. Individual species pages will include photographs, video, sound and maps, collected and written by experts.

The archive, to be built over 10 years, could help conservation efforts as well as being a useful tool for education. “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the $100m (£50m) project. “[It] will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level.” The vast database will initially concentrate on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow. Fossil species may eventually be added.

More here.

The letters of writers offer a strangely public view of their private selves. Most people put on a show in their correspondence, but for a writer that show involves a professional display. How much they decide to invest in it says a great deal about them – about how deeply they have been stained by work. It may be a sign of more important virtues if a writer writes boring letters, for it proves that he doesn’t take his literary self too seriously, that he is willing, at times, to let it drop. Henry James’s correspondence presents a particularly interesting test of that willingness. As a novelist, he created a kind of prose that was most remarkable, perhaps, for its finish. His style gave his characteristic colour to whatever it touched on. Part of the attraction of his letters lies in the fact that they allow us to question how consistently, as a friend, a brother and a son, he managed to keep it up.

more from the TLS here.

In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Tek Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing just inside the National Museum’s basement was Tony Freeth, a sixty-year-old British mathematician and filmmaker, watching as workers in white T-shirts wrestled the Range Rover-size machine through the door and up the ramp into the museum. Freeth was a member of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project—a multidisciplinary investigation into some fragments of an ancient mechanical device that were found at the turn of the last century after two thousand years in the Aegean Sea, and have long been one of the great mysteries of science.

more from The New Yorker here.

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it. In the rallying cry that served as an introduction to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, he professed his boredom with the literary, epiphanic “New Yorker short story,” longing for the days when masters such as Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, and Henry James wrote “ripping yarns” packed with “plot and color.” In the “lost genres”—horror, romance, detective, adventure—Chabon saw a tradition of “great writers writing great short stories.” Genre fiction, he argued, is simply fun to read, but it also enables a democratic reading experience, a necessity to the public that most contemporary writers have despaired of attaining. What Chabon seemed to long for most was a culture in which fiction, in whatever form, could permeate the national conversation and be essential to people’s daily lives.

more from Slate here.

From Colbert Nation:

For much more on Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his work, click here; and for more on the debates surrounding his new book, The Black Swan, go here.

Gina Kolata in the New York Times:

It was 1959. Jules Hirsch, a research physician at Rockefeller University, had gotten curious about weight loss in the obese. He was about to start a simple experiment that would change forever the way scientists think about fat.

Obese people, he knew, had huge fat cells, stuffed with glistening yellow fat. What happened to those cells when people lost weight, he wondered. Did they shrink or did they go away? He decided to find out.

It seemed straightforward. Dr. Hirsch found eight people who had been fat since childhood or adolescence and who agreed to live at the Rockefeller University Hospital for eight months while scientists would control their diets, make them lose weight and then examine their fat cells.

More here.  [Thanks to Susan Valentine.]

Trevor Butterworth in the Financial Times:

The wit of Oscar Wilde is often more clever than insightful, but when he declared that “one’s first duty in life is to assume a pose”, he may have been on to something: clothes don’t just make the man; they can, if unchanging in style and sufficiently de trop, make him look ageless.

This, at least, is the impression left by Tom Wolfe as he blazes through the culinary empyrean of Café Boulud on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, trailing dash and élan among the stolidly well-heeled and sourly superannuated diners.

The writer who pioneered reporting with the intensity of literature, who gave what resulted the appearance of a movement (the “new journalism”), who chronicled the restless American spirit to the stars (The Right Stuff) and then back down into the gutter (The Bonfire of the Vanities) is, astonishingly, 77; and yet, he is still every bit the “Tom Sawyer drawn by Beardsley”, that Elaine Dundy excitedly sketched for Vogue readers in the 1960s.

More here.

Alan S. Binder in the Washington Post:

I’m a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I’m being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades. In fact, I think offshoring may be the biggest political issue in economics for a generation.

When I say this, many of my fellow free-traders react with a mixture of disbelief, pity and hostility. Blinder, have you lost your mind? (Answer: I think not.) Have you forgotten about the basic economic gains from international trade? (Answer: No.) Are you advocating some form of protectionism? (Answer: No !) Aren’t you giving aid and comfort to the enemies of free trade? (Answer: No, I’m trying to save free trade from itself.)

More here.

From the BBC:

Pakistan’s nuclear authority has said there is no cause for concern after it published press adverts for information on “lost” radioactive material.

The adverts urged members of the public to inform officials if they found any “lost or stolen” radioactive material.

They were published in major Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan.

A spokesman for the nuclear authority said that there was a “very remote chance” that nuclear materials imported 40-50 years ago were unaccounted for.

International concern over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear programme was expressed in 2004, when the country’s top nuclear scientist, AQ Khan, confessed to leaking secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

Dr Khan was subsequently placed under virtual house arrest, and is now suffering from pancreatic cancer.

More here.

Mona Simpson in The Atlantic Monthly:

The 20th century left us the work of two particularly somber artists, one of whom would have hesitated to call himself an artist at all. I’m speaking of W. G. Sebald and Primo Levi, whose homemade genres emphasized the lability of the line between fiction and history. Levi lived 64 of his 67 years in Turin. He lived a year and a half in Milan. And he lived one year in Auschwitz. After the war, he returned not only to Turin, but to the flat in which he’d grown up. He worked as an industrial chemist for the next 30 years, writing nights and weekends in what had been his childhood bedroom.

He writes about a small child in Auschwitz who was paralyzed from the waist down, who could not speak, and who had no name:

Hurbinek [the name the prisoners called the child], who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm — even his — bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.

More here.

From Nature:

Most physicists at Illinois-based Fermilab, home to the world’s most powerful particle collider, share a dream. They hope against hope that the Tevatron will find the long-sought Higgs particle before the much more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN — the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland — comes along in a year or so and eats their lunch. Bruce Knuteson, though, has a fear. What if the LHC finds something even more exotic than the Higgs —and the tell-tale traces of that novelty turn out to have been lurking, unrecognized, in Fermilab’s data for years?

It is to rule out the chance of his worst fears coming true, among other things, that Knuteson and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fermilab have taken a new sort of particle-hunting software to a new level. Rather than looking only at data in which a new particle is expected to be found, as the experiments at Fermilab normally do, it looks at a much broader swath of data without any preconceptions.

More here.

From the website of Denis Darzacq:

“When the social elevator is broken you have to know how to bounce. Between the take off and the fall, the man parachuted in the city learns to control his trajectory.

In the rough manner of architecture, he opposes the elasticity between his body and his desires. This gravitation exercice requires Discipline, even if it’s not the one we’ve learned in classrooms. After the riots of last autumn, the photograph Denis Darzacq realized 16 of those perilous shots, that says the turbulences and the life in precarious balance.”

More here.