Even though orbiters have eyed it from space and landers have rumbled across its surface, Mars still has more secrets to reveal. Two findings emerged this week: the possibility of a n active glacier far from the planet’s poles and evidence that sulfur–not carbon–was the element driving the planet’s warmer climate long ago. Both discoveries could force some rethinking about martian evolution and dynamics–and maybe even provide insights about Earth’s past.
The glacier discovery was announced Wednesday by the European Space Agency (ESA). A high-resolution stereo camera aboard ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft spotted the feature in a region called Deuteronilus Mensae, located in the mid-north latitudes of the planet. The Mars Express science team drew the preliminary conclusion that the material in the feature is water ice and that it accumulated as recently as 10,000 years ago, probably from an underground source. Other deposits of water ice have been mapped at the martian poles, but they’re much bigger and are millions of years old. The find is a surprise because the prevailing view is that any water reaching the martian surface from underground quickly evaporates and eventually drifts into space. Yet all of the physical characteristics of the feature are “consistent with that of a glacier,” says geologist and team member Ronald Greeley of Arizona State University in Tempe.
Critics of the Stern Review don’t think serious action to limit CO2 emissions is justified, because there remains substantial uncertainty about the extent of the costs of global climate change, and because these costs will be incurred far in the future. However, I believe that Stern’s fundamental conclusion is justified: we are much better off reducing CO2 emissions substantially than risking the consequences of failing to act, even if, unlike Stern, one heavily discounts uncertainty and the future.
Two factors differentiate global climate change from other environmental problems. First, whereas most environmental insults – for example, water pollution, acid rain, or sulfur dioxide emissions – are mitigated promptly or in fairly short order when the source is cleaned up, emissions of CO2 and other trace gases remain in the atmosphere for centuries. So reducing emissions today is very valuable to humanity in the distant future.
Second, the externality is truly global in scale, because greenhouse gases travel around the world in a few days. As a result, the nation-state and its subsidiaries, the typical loci for internalizing externalities, are limited in their remedial capacity. (However, since the United States contributes about 25% of the world’s CO2 emissions, its own policy could make a large difference.)
Thus, global climate change is a public good (bad) par excellence.
Tucked in among the many gems—culinary, historical, literary, religious, and otherwise—stashed throughout Gillian Riley’s new Oxford Companion to Italian Food is “The Pope’s Kitchen,” a luscious, whimsical sonnet by the nineteenth-century Roman poet Gioachino Giuseppe Belli, which I cannot bear to include here in anything but its entirety:
The cook wanted to show me, this morning, all the stuff he bought for the most holy kitchen. Kitchen? Some kitchen! You’d think it was a sea-port.
Piles of things, pots and pans and cauldrons, haunches of veal and beef, chickens, eggs, milk, fish, veg, pork, game and all kinds of choice cuts.
So I says: “Your Holy Father does himself all right!” He says: “You’ve not seen the sideboard, where praise be there’s as much again.” I says: “Pardon me, mate! There must be someone grand for dinner then?” “Come off it,” he says, “the Pope always eats on his own.”
So far, then, the archetypal romantic would be a pragmatist and pluralist, and so he actually was in earthly things. Spiritually, the human desire for a transcendent resolution found satisfaction in a many-sided religious revival. It was Catholic, Protestant, pantheistic, mystical and materialistic by turns, and passionate through and through. Like Lucretius, the materialists loved their universe of matter, and compared with them the classical Deists were palely Stoical. The pantheists, idealists and transcendentalists, far from deadening nature into uniformity, throve on inconsistencies for the sake of which they were prepared to find hidden compensations. The Neo-Catholics fed their artistic impulse as they worshipped, and merged the romantic sense of misery with the Christian doctrine of original sin. And all of them, including the new disciples of Oriental philosophies, recognized as basic the romantic (as well as Christian and democratic) notion of the equal worth of every living soul. Romanticism was full of disbelievers in every kind of creed, but it numbered hardly a single unbeliever. Fervor in search for God the Infinite was the complement of despair; and given man’s greatness as a thinking reed willing to wager his soul, man could find the light shining through the works of nature and her poets, through the geometry of Spinoza or through the counterpoint of Bach.
On the morning of July 8, 1980, Raymond Carver wrote an impassioned letter to Gordon Lish, his friend and editor at Alfred A. Knopf, begging his forgiveness but insisting that Lish “stop production” of Carver’s forthcoming collection of stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts––two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten––and he was unnerved to the point of desperation. A recovering alcoholic and a fragile spirit, Carver wrote that he was “confused, tired, paranoid, and afraid.” He feared exposure before his friends, who had read many of the stories in their earlier versions. If the book went forward, he said, he feared he might never write again; if he stopped it, he feared losing Lish’s love and friendship. And he feared, above all, a return to “those dark days,” not long before, when he was broken, defeated. “I’ll tell you the truth, my very sanity is on the line here,” he wrote to Lish.
more from The New Yorker here, with the original letters between Lish and Carver here, Lish’s edited version of “Beginners” here, and Carver’s original version here.
Tom Hanks plays “Good Time” Charlie Wilson, a go-along-to-get-along Democratic congressman from a rural district in Texas. A hard-drinking womanizer with a sharp eye for foreign affairs, Charlie sits on the congressional committee responsible for funding covert military actions abroad. One debauched evening in 1980, soaking in a Vegas hot tub with a gaggle of coke-snorting strippers, he watches Dan Rather on TV covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Soon after, a fervently anti-Communist Houston socialite, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), invites Charlie to a fund-raiser for the cause of the mujahideen. The two skip out of the party for some (off-screen) Texas lovin’, and by way of pillow talk, Joanne convinces Charlie to take a meeting she’s arranged with the president of Pakistan, Zia ul-Haq (Om Puri).
Converted to the freedom fighters’ cause—or maybe just in love with the idea of bringing down the Red Army on his own—Charlie mobilizes a clandestine campaign to funnel resources and weapons to the Afghan rebels. With one well-placed phone call, he manages to double the appropriations budget, but even $10 million is a paltry sum when it comes to shooting down Soviet helicopters.
A couple of million years ago or so, our hominid ancestors began exchanging their lowbrow looks for forehead prominence. The trigger for the large, calorie-hungry brains of ours is cooking, argues Richard W. Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He hit on his theory after decades of study of our closest cousin, the chimpanzee. For the Insights story “Cooking Bigger Brains,” appearing in the January 2008 Scientific American, Rachael Moeller Gorman talked with Wrangham about chimps, food, fire, human evolution and the evidence for his controversial theory. Here is an expanded interview.
The breakthrough of this year has to do with humans, genomes, and genetics. But it is not about THE human genome (as if there were only one!). Instead, it is about your particular genome, or mine, and what it can tell us about our backgrounds and the quality of our futures. A number of studies in the past year have led to a new appreciation of human genetic diversity. As soon as genomes are looked at individually, important differences appear: Different single-nucleotide polymorphisms are scattered throughout, and singular combinations of particular genes forming haplotypes emerge. A flood of scans for these variations across the genome has pointed to genes involved in behavioral traits as well as to those that may foretell deferred disease liability. And more extensive structural variations, such as additions, deletions, repeat sequences, and stretches of “backwards” DNA, turn out to be more prevalent than had been recognized. These too are increasingly being associated with disease risks.
High-throughput sequencing techniques are bringing the cost of genomics down. The few “celebrity genomes” (e.g., Watson’s and Venter’s) will soon be followed by others, we hope in an order not determined by wealth but by scientific need or personal medical circumstance. Our natural interest in personal genealogy, accompanied by worries about our health, will create an incentive structure that even now is creating a sometimes dubious niche market for having one’s genome “done.”
From the plane into Edmonton International, I could see the city to the north, this treasure chest metropolis sprung up in the middle of nowhere. I was flying in with a four-year plan. Big skies, big bucks, live simple, get out. A job with Sirius Gas. Maybe you know it. A little travel, not much. Calgary mostly. Fort McMurray. Basically a desk operation downtown paying two and a half times what I was worth. I liked the people. I find it refreshing working with straight arrows. The problem was, at the end of the day they went home to their families in suburbs called Spruce Grove or Sherwood Park and I went back to my bachelor suite on Sask Drive. Not that my building didn’t live up to its motto: A Nice Place for Nice People. I’ll fit right in, I thought. That was before I got so lonely I was ready to slit my wrists. Before a madman became my best friend. Before I found out how good a pretty blonde can look in a strap-on.
This exhibition of late paintings of Jules Olitski, who died earlier this year at age 84, is subtitled “A Celebration” — an apt name for such festive and colorful paintings. But these works equally bring to mind volcanic eruptions or intergalactic collisions. Worked with impasto so intense that the encrusted surfaces appear to belong as much to bas relief as to paint on canvas, they emulate geological formation both in physical fact and suggested scenes. Even if the world ends with a whimper, Jules Olitski departed with a bang.
The subtitle is also apropos for a gentle giant of an abstractionist who adopted as his personal, anti-entitlement motto: “expect nothing, do your work, and celebrate.” “Bathsheba Reverie — Yellow and Black” (2001), like all works here in acrylic paint on canvas, has at its base a disintegrating orb in fiery yellow, which dominates the composition, and is cracking, seemingly under the sheer weight of its drying pigment. It inhabits a rich but ambiguous pocket of space that is itself contained by a monochrome purple ground just spied around its edges. Roughly an oval shape, this space looks like a puddle still in formation, perhaps about to submerge the entirety of the purple ground: Lush and painterly, it has an atmospheric quality that recalls a sky by Constable or Turner.
Buffon’s contemporary influence was massive. Not only did he sell vast quantities of books, but his approach deeply influenced the most famous eighteenth-century publication, Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Some entries in the Encyclopédie were simply taken from Buffon, and Diderot followed Buffon’s lead in considering that natural history provided a key for understanding the whole of the world. Diderot also agreed about the importance of the comparative method – one of the foundations of Buffon’s epistemology. With this kind of intellectual pedigree, and a superb style – Rousseau said of him, “C’est la plus belle plume de son siècle” – Buffon should be more widely read.
The best bits of Buffon have now been condensed by Stéphane Schmitt and Cédric Crémière, and bound in the dark blue leather of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Schmitt is also the driving force behind the ambitious project from Éditions Honoré Champion – republishing the whole of L’Histoire naturelle for the first time in over a century. The first wrist-spraining volume has just appeared, and it is a marvellous monument to Buffon’s vision, and to Schmitt’s scholarship.
Toxic components of discarded electronics are ending up overseas:
Chris Carroll in National Geographic:
Israel Mensah, an incongruously stylish young man of about 20, adjusts his designer glasses and explains how he makes his living. Each day scrap sellers bring loads of old electronics—from where he doesn’t know. Mensah and his partners—friends and family, including two shoeless boys raptly listening to us talk—buy a few computers or TVs. They break copper yokes off picture tubes, littering the ground with shards containing lead, a neurotoxin, and cadmium, a carcinogen that damages lungs and kidneys. They strip resalable parts such as drives and memory chips. Then they rip out wiring and burn the plastic. He sells copper stripped from one scrap load to buy another. The key to making money is speed, not safety. “The gas goes to your nose and you feel something in your head,” Mensah says, knocking his fist against the back of his skull for effect. “Then you get sick in your head and your chest.” Nearby, hulls of broken monitors float in the lagoon. Tomorrow the rain will wash them into the ocean.
People have always been proficient at making trash. Future archaeologists will note that at the tail end of the 20th century, a new, noxious kind of clutter exploded across the landscape: the digital detritus that has come to be called e-waste.
Instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world—of having a unity in which scholarship includes science and technology along with literature and art—the official culture has kicked them out. Science and technology appear as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities have nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum—and out of the minds of many young people, who, arriving at their desks at the establishment media, have so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action. Clueless, they don’t even know that they don’t know.
But science today is changing our understanding of our universe and species, and scientific literacy is indispensable to dealing with some of the world’s most pressing issues. Fortunately, we live in a time when third culture intellectuals—scientists, science journalists, and other science-minded writers—are among our best nonfiction writers, and their many engaging books have brought scientific insight to a wide audience.
We are pleased to present a list of books published in 2007 by Edge contributors (and others in the science-minded community) for your holiday pleasures and challenges.
The word “big” doesn’t do justice to whales. Humpback whales can weigh up to 40 tons. Fin whales have been known to reach 80 tons. Blue whales, the biggest animals to have ever lived, reach 160 tons — the same mass as about 2,000 grown men or 5 million grown mice.
It takes a lot of food to build such giant bodies, but how exactly the biggest whales get so much has long been a mystery. “We don’t have much of a sense of these animals in their natural environments,” said Nick Pyenson, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. For decades, whale experts had only indirect clues. “It’s primarily from dead animals or from a few people standing on a ship seeing whales come to the surface,” he said.
With so little information, scientists have struggled to make sense of several enigmas about the biggest whales. “It’s always been a mystery why they have really short dives for their body size,” Mr. Pyenson said. The bigger a marine mammal is, the longer it should be able to dive for food, because it has more muscle tissue in which it can store oxygen. Other species follow this pattern, but the biggest whales do not.
Mr. Pyenson and his colleagues may have solved some of the gastronomical mysteries of these leviathans by creating the first detailed biomechanical model of a feeding fin whale. In essence, they have created the world’s biggest gulp.
KARACHI: In an incident that shocked art lovers and a legion of admirers, the country’s most celebrated artist Ismail Gulgee, along with his wife and maid, was found strangled to death at his home in Clifton on Wednesday. The bodies were three days old and the artist’s driver and other servants were missing. A case was lodged at the Boating Basin police station on the complaint of the son of the deceased, the well-known sculptor Amin Gulgee.
Imagine taking the industrial design smarts behind the iPod and applying it to the far more basic technology needs of the extremely poor. In the past, few top designers would have bothered. But that’s changing.
At MIT, Stanford, and other universities, young design and engineering talents are eagerly enrolling in courses that teach them how to meet the technology needs of the developing world. Stanford offers a course called “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability.” One of the teachers, David Kelley, is the founder of IDEO, the industrial design firm behind such tech classics as the Palm V PDA and the first production mouse for the Lisa and Macintosh computers from Apple.
Amy B. Smith, an inventor who lectures at MIT, said her course on design for the developing world gets about a hundred applicants, but she can only take 30.
Smith was a lead organizer behind the International Development Design Summit (www.iddsummit.org), held at MIT this summer and planned again for next year. Mechanics, doctors and farmers from around the developing world teamed up with top design talents to come up with “pro-poor” technologies that are inexpensive and effective. One, an off-grid refrigeration unit, uses PVC piping, tiny water drips, and an evaporation-based cooling method to store perishable food in rural areas.
Mustafa Barghouthi, member of the Palestinian parliament and former candidate for president of the Palestinian Authority, and a founder of the Palestinian National Initiative, in The Baltimore Sun (reprinted in electronic intifada):
As one who for decades has supported a two-state solution and the nonviolent struggle for Palestinian rights, I view the recent conference in Annapolis with a great deal of skepticism — and a glimmer of hope.
Seven years with no negotiations — and increasing numbers of Israeli settlers, an economic blockade in Gaza and an intricate network of roadblocks and checkpoints stifling movement in the West Bank — have led us to despair and distrust. Any commitment must be made not only to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008 but also to end Israel’s occupation.
The Palestinians must also heal their internal divisions. This must include institutional reform to root out corruption and nepotism. The first step in that process is democratic elections at all levels of government.
We must rid ourselves of the false dichotomy between Fatah and Hamas. These are not the only options. My movement, the five-year-old Palestinian National Initiative, offers an alternative emphasizing democratic elections, transparent government and institution-building. Our goal is to democratize and engage the Palestinian national movement in a unified strategy to confront Israel’s ongoing occupation and seizure of our land and resources. We strive to achieve our national rights in our homeland and to establish social justice to uphold the rights of the underprivileged and marginalized, including women, children and people with disabilities.
