From Nature:

Cancer cells can be destroyed from within, by injecting them with nanotubes and then zapping the tubes with radio-frequency waves. Steven Curley at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and his colleagues have taken the first step in proving the technique by injecting carbon nanotubes into liver tumour cells in rabbits, then heating up the carbon with radio waves to kill the cancerous cells. Similar work has been done in cultured cells, but this is the first time that the technique has been used in tumours in live animals.

Researchers are keen to find a form of radiotherapy that is more selective than those currently used on in cancer treatment, as the high-energy radiation also kills off some innocent cells, causing hair loss and other more serious symptoms. One way to do this is to find a material that reacts to a frequency of radiation that leaves the rest of the body alone. If this material is embedded in cancerous cells, then only the cancerous cells would be targeted. Carbon nanotubes have been used before because, unusually, they can absorb near-infrared radiation, which penetrates human tissue without causing damage.

More here.

Michael Tomasky reviews The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books:

Difficult as it is to remember now, there was a time in the United States, as recently as fifteen or so years ago, when we were not engaged in constant political warfare. In those days Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in a war, would not have been visually equated with Saddam Hussein in a television ad, something the Republicans did to him in 2002. The release of a declaration by, for example, the National Academy of Sciences was for the most part acknowledged as legitimate, and not attacked as a product of so-called liberal bias as its 2005 report on global warming was.

We can regret, as it is customary to do, the loss of civility in political discourse (although such laments tend to assume a golden era that wasn’t quite as civil in reality as it is in the memories of those who mourn its passing). But the nakedness of the modern right’s drive for political power and of the Bush administration’s politicization of so many aspects of governance and civic life has, paradoxically, given us one thing to be grateful for. Liberals and Democrats now understand much more plainly the nature of the fight they’re in.

More here.

From the History Channel:

Imagine a big new house with free heating—and cooling. Mike Sykes’ Enertia Building System relies on thick wooden walls and a natural convection current to even out temperature extremes.

More here.  And hear an interview with Michael Sykes at CBC’s Quirks and Quarks here.

From Slate:

Niho Kozuru. Luna Rising, and Pistil.

Cast rubber.

More on this interesting Boston artist here and here.

Current show at Boston Sculptors Gallery.

Over at Public Reason, Robert Talisse asks:

I’m writing here to try to get some help on the meaning of a comment by Bernard Williams frequently cited approvingly in the value pluralist literature.

In his introduction to Berlin’s *Concepts and Categories*, Williams claims that “if there are many and competing values, then the greater the extent to which a society tends to be single-valued, the more genuine values it neglects or suppresses. More, to this extent, must mean better.”

Maybe I’m just being thick-headed about this, but I don’t see how “more must mean better”…

Tariq Ali in Counterpunch:

For anyone marinated in the history of Pakistan yesterday’s decision by the military to impose a State of Emergency will hardly comes as a surprise. Martial Law in this country has become an antibiotic: in order to obtain the same results one has to keep doubling the doses. What has taken place is a coup within a coup.

General Pervaiz Musharraf ruled the country with a civilian façade, but his power base was limited to the Army. And it was the Army Chief of Staff who declared the emergency, suspended the 1973 Constitution, took all non-government TV channels off the air, jammed the mobile phone networks, surrounded the Supreme Court with paramilitary units, dismissed the Chief Justice, arrested the President of the Bar association and the civil rights activists of the Human Right Commission of Pakistan, thus inaugurating yet another shabby period in the country history.

Why? They feared that a Supreme Court judgement due next week might make it impossible for Musharraf to contest the elections.

Rafal Kicinger and Tomasz Arciszewski in American Scientist:

To create dramatically new kinds of structures, engineers can mine many different sources of inspiration, but the natural world offers perhaps the richest lode. Indeed, engineers have probably drawn ideas from nature for millennia: A fallen log may have inspired the first bridge; a cave entrance, the first archway. And as scientists gradually began to understand the mechanisms governing various biological processes, engineers of all stripes were able to apply this knowledge to building complex devices. (The most famous example of such “biomimicry” may be Velcro fasteners, the idea for which came from the observation of sticky burdock seeds.)

We hope to heighten civil engineers’ appreciation for biology by suggesting that they go one step further, not only imitating natural shapes and forms but simulating nature’s evolutionary and developmental processes to arrive at their designs. Below we describe some computational methods that we have developed to design the support structures for buildings by imitating the action of genes and DNA.

More here.

Via NoUtopia.com:

Social Security

by Terrence Winch

No one is safe. The streets are unsafe.
Even in the safety zones, it’s not safe.
Even safe sex is not safe.
Even things you lock up in a safe
are not safe. Never deposit anything
in a safe-deposit box, because it
won’t be safe there. Nobody is safe
at home during baseball games anymore.

At night I go around in the dark
locking everything, returning
a few minutes later
to make sure I locked
everything. It’s not safe here.
It’s not safe and they know it.
People get hurt using safety pins.

It was not always this way.
Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of wingèd dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

From Acephalous:

My Teacher,

I appreciate you taking your inconvenience to instruct us but I really had some problems in your class and I would like to explain them to you now.  Every day I wanted to discuss with you about the way you grade my papers and the way you teach the class, but I could not because the things you say in class and your words disturb me so much I can not.  You make me completely uncomfortable with the little things you say in the class like how you talk about television or how you talk about when you are grading our papers and trying to be fair.  You do not seem to care about our grades only that they are up to your too high standards and I can not talk to you because you make me completely uncomfortable.  For example, you say you will talk to us about our grades but you really will not because of how uncomfortable you make me feel with your words and what you say.

More here.  [Thanks to Elatia Harris.]

There is a discussion of Charles Taylor’s new book A Secular Age at The Immanent Frame, which is a blog of the Social Science Research Council. Charles Taylor himself is posting there:

1. One great problem is that the term “secular” is a western term, and corresponds to a very old distinction within Christendom. Then it goes through a series of changes in order to surface in such neologisms as “secularization,” and “secularism.” But even so, some of the original meanings carry over. These terms are then applied unreflectingly to what are seen as analogous processes and ideas elsewhere, and the result can be great confusion. (Example: discussion of Indian “secularism”, whether or not the BJP is “secular”, etc.)

My way of dealing with this has been a prudent (or cowardly) approach of trying to examine the processes we call secularization primarily in the Western context. This however is not a clean and simple solution either, because a) the religious life of other cultures has impacted on the developments in the West (as Peter van der Veer has pointed out), and also one of the facets of contemporary religious life in the West is the borrowing of forms of devotion, meditation and worship from other parts of the world; and b) there has also been borrowing in the other direction, that is by non-Western societies from the West (hence the fact that certain arrangements of the Indian constitution are captured under the cover name “secularism”).

More here.

I believe it was George Berkeley who famously declared, “We are not assured of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our senses.”

Thanks a lot, Mr. Berkeley. Now can you please explain that to all these jerks who keep mistaking me for a golden-rumped lion tamarin?

People, I am a human being. I have hands and feet and feelings.

Yes, perhaps I occasionally enjoy the atmosphere of lowland tropical forests, especially semi-deciduous inland forests and humid coastal-plain forests. But that is simply because I have a penchant for bromeliads. Would you deny me that right—the right to munch on a little bromeliad using my specialized long-fingered hands?

more from McSweeney’s here.

As the biopic comes back into fashion — think Kinsey, think A Beautiful Mind — somebody might consider the life of Roman Polanski as perfect big-screen material. Its component elements are the stuff of box-office dreams. Holocaust survival, dodgy sex, motiveless murder, a liberal sprinkling of celebrity, plenty of photogenic locations — the Oscar-winning script is in the bag. Its star, as Christopher Sandford’s biography suggests, boasts unfathomable reserves of chutzpah, and his recent epiphany at the Venice Film Festival was a reminder of how much life the old dog still has left in him.

Polanski’s resilience was tested early, with the dispatch of his Jewish parents to Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Slipping out of Nazi-occupied Krakow, nine-year-old Roman fled to a village in the Tatra mountains, where he slept in a cowshed and lived off rat pie and boiled tree-bark. The postwar communist culture of relentless agitprop and uplift, in which Warsaw theatres staged plays with titles like The Workers’ Hearts Sing Out Like the Locomotive Whistle, made further demands on his survival skills. While still a student at film school in Lodz, he began plotting to ‘get the f*** out of Poland, grow a beard and become a writer’, but not before he had made his earliest screen masterpiece, Knife in the Water (1962).

more from The Spectator here.

The first time I saw the work of Lari Pittman was at the multiple-careers-making “Helter Skelter” show at MOCA in 1992, and I didn’t care for it. This was the era of his menacing sexualized owls, meticulously built-up psychedelic reliefs of dripping white candles, and circus-font repetitions of the number 69. In spite of their obvious craftsmanship and manifest fluency with a wide swath of the history of visual culture, the paintings’ sense of contained (if provocative) energies — not to mention the unironic deployment of such a conventional medium as acrylic and enamel on rectangular mahogany panels — made them seem out of step with such eruptive gestures as Paul McCarthy’s tree-fucking robot and Nancy Rubins’ roof-high mushroom-cloud tangle of trailers and hot-water heaters. Pittman’s work seemed a quirky vestige of the previous decade’s Reaganomic love affair with “New Image” painting, not the shape of things to come…. But Pittman’s 1996 Howard Fox–curated survey show at LACMA was a real epiphany.

more from the LA Weekly here.

One of my writing students handed in a story based around a mysterious lie, and so I found myself describing the Vallotton to my class. A man and a woman sit in a late 19th-century interior: yellow and pink striped wallpaper in the background, blocky furniture in shades of dark red in the foreground. The couple are entwined on a sofa, her rich scarlet curves bedded between the black legs of his trousers. She is whispering in his ear; he has his eyes closed. Clearly, the woman is the liar, a fact confirmed by the smiling complacency of the man’s expression and the way his left foot is cocked with the jauntiness of the unaware. All we might wonder is which lie he is being told. The old deceiver, “I love you”? Or does the swell of the woman’s dress invite that other favourite, “Of course the child is yours”?

more from The Guardian here.

From Ego:

Preet Srivastava was born in India, lives and works in New York. She grew up on the West Coast, in a family of artists, at a time when India seemed very far way. Time has changed that and her connection with India is evident. She has a “relationship with bindis” and you see at least one dot in each of her canvases, sometimes obvious and sometimes hidden. After an undergraduate degree in Biology, Preet went to Johns Hopkins to study Medical Illustration but soon realized that she wanted to do something “less confining”. She subsequently joined the ART Academy in San Diego. Though grateful to Art School for teaching her the fundamentals she recognized that she was being forced to throw away her heritage and become a “European Painter”. “As long as we don’t lose something that is inherently our own, it’s okay.”

She loves Bollywood movies and finds them romantic but adds that they “could take a stronger turn towards different looking actors”. In that light she read an essay about art and Bollywood by Indian cultural theorist, Ranjit Hoskote, that “hit her in the stomach”. It talks in essence about how artists works “should not be about negation but negotiation”.

More here.

From lensculture.com:

The seeds of Observance began then, with a suspicion that a powerful image is capable of connecting people across time and space in a way that is visceral and real. Religions have tapped into this possibility. Throughout history imagery has played an important role in many faiths. Often, followers of a faith possess an image of their leader, their guru, or their teacher. They have them in their homes, on their altars, or tattered in a wallet. In countries where certain forms of religion are not tolerated, such as Tibet, to possess such an image can put one’s life at risk.

Why do people put such faith in the power of a photograph? What does this kind of image hold that is so precious? Observance raises these questions, and explores how a sense of connection is created through the directness of contact that an image can provide, particularly with the sitter gazing out of the image.

More here.

Let us visit the realm of a specialised art form that some might refer to as “naive art”. It is certainly not the kind of artistic production that attracts much criticism, deriving from the stress and strain of proletarian existence. It is an art that is familiar to the African continent, west, east, or central, and a genre that I have always considered more profoundly political than much of the art that is born of western middle-class radicalism. While post-colonial ideologues argue over what is committed or uncommitted in art, these artists appear never to have been in any doubt.

I often describe this genre as “mobile murals”, or travelling illuminated manuscripts – to borrow from the work of those medieval monks of Europe who spent their lives decorating divine manuscripts for the edification of the faithful and seduction of unbelievers or sceptics.

more from the New Statesman here.

The Painting of Modern Life, the first show at the Hayward Gallery curated by its American director, Ralph Rugoff, is an ambitious attempt to see how this artistic project stands nearly 150 years after Charles Baudelaire proposed it in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863). There the poet called for a shift in subject matter – already begun in the practice of Manet and others – away from the grand themes of myth and history, and towards the everyday activities of urban life, especially of middle-class leisure. Such a shift in content implied a shift in form, even in medium; for example, to capture the mobility of bourgeois types on the town, the sketch might be more useful than other means (the exemplar in the essay is not the great Manet but Constantin Guys, who was then known for his quick studies). What better vehicle to convey ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’ – key qualities of the metropolitan kaleidoscope, according to Baudelaire – than the photograph? Yet the poet remained suspicious of the new medium, in part because he did not see its potential for imaginative invention, in part because he did not deem it suited to the ‘other half’ of his mandate for art, which was to extract ‘the eternal and the immutable’ from this protean modernity. The other half was still the province of painting, and so painting – perhaps pressured by photographic attributes – remained the essential medium.

more from the LRB here.

This year in France, the “rentrée littéraire” – the publishing equivalent of going back to school – is bigger than ever; some 727 literary novels have been published since August. The rentrée is a peculiarly French phenomenon which turns on the fact that the big literary prizes (Goncourt, Renaudot, Interallié, Femina, Académie Française, Médicis) are awarded between October and November. Of this year’s novels, 234 are translations from another language, mostly English or, to be precise, American. This is an astonishing figure, especially when compared with the small number of translated works published in Britain, but it still leaves nearly 500 French novels to choose from.

The problem with this tidal wave of new novels has been that only the most powerful publishing houses and the biggest names are heard; the few French writers who are known in the United States or the United Kingdom – Michel Houellebecq, Amélie Nothomb, Marie Darrieussecq – are the stars of the French scene as well. And yet the rentrée does ensure that literature remains at the heart of French cultural life; it is discussed and dissected at length in the press and on radio and television. It may take only two hours by train from London, but Paris is still a world away.

more from the TLS here.