Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

Two American astronomers who uncovered evidence about the origin of the universe and how it grew into galaxies were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics today.

The researchers, John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, will split the prize of 10 million Swedish kroners, about $1.37 million.

Dr. Mather and Dr. Smoot led a team of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and technicians that built and launched the Cosmic Background Explorer, or Cobe, satellite in 1989 to study a haze of microwave radiation that is believed to be a remnant of the explosion that, according to the Big Bang theory, started the universe.

Cobe’s measurements of the temperature and distribution of the microwaves, including the detection of tantalizingly faint irregularities from which things like galaxies could have grown, were a resounding confirmation of the theory of a universe that was born in a terrific explosion of space and time 14 billion years ago and in which the ordinary matter that makes up stars and people is overwhelmed by some mysterious “dark matter.”

More here.

Last year, at her investiture ceremony as the Gladys Smith Martin Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusettes Medical Center, my sister (and fellow 3QD editor) Azra introduced me to her friend and colleague Craig C. Mello. I spoke with him about his RNAi work then, so it was with great excitement and pleasure that I read the news yesterday that for this work, along with Andrew Z. Fire, he has won this year’s Nobel prize in Medicine. All of us at 3QD send Drs. Mello and Fire our warmest congratulations. UMass Worcester rocks!

Nicholas Wade in the New York Times:

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to two American researchers, Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello, for a far-reaching discovery about how genes are controlled within living cells.

The discovery was made in 1998, only eight years ago. It has been recognized with unusual speed by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, which sometimes lets decades elapse before awarding its accolade. The foundation’s caution, born of the fear of giving immediate recognition to research that may prove unfounded, may have been dispelled this year by the evident promise of the new field, several scientists said.

The finding by Drs. Fire and Mello made sense of a series of puzzling results obtained mostly by plant biologists, including some who were trying to change the color of petunias. By clarifying what was happening, they discovered an unexpected system of gene regulation in living cells and began an explosive phase of research in a field known variously as RNA interference or gene silencing.

This natural method of switching genes off has turned out to be a superb research tool, allowing scientists to understand the role of new genes by suppressing them. The method may also lead to a new class of drugs that switch off unwanted processes in disease. Two gene-silencing drugs designed to treat macular degeneration are already in clinical trials.

More here.  And you can read more and watch a 15 minute Nova program about RNAi here.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll has a longer version of his review of Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics in New Scientist.

There is plenty to worry or complain about when it comes to string theory, but Smolin’s concerns are not always particularly compelling. For example, there are crucially important results in string theory (such as the fundamental fact that quantum-gravitational scattering is finite, or the gauge/gravity duality mentioned above) for which rigorous proofs have not been found. But there are proofs, and there are proofs. In fact, there are almost no results in realistic quantum field theories that have been rigorously proven; physicists often take the attitude that reasonably strong arguments are enough to allow us to accept a claim, even in the absence of the kind of proof that would make a mathematician happy. Both the finiteness of stringy scattering and the equivalence of gauge theory and gravity under Maldacena’s duality are supported by extremely compelling evidence, to the point where it has become extremely hard to see how they could fail to be true.

Smolin’s favorite alternative to string theory is Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), which has grown out of attempts to quantize general relativity directly (without exotica such as supersymmetry or extra dimensions). To most field theorists, this seems like a quixotic quest; general relativity is not well-behaved at short distances and high energies, where such new degrees of freedom are likely to play a crucial role. But Smolin makes much of one purported advantage of LQG, that the theory is background-independent. In other words, rather than picking some background spacetime and studying the propagation of strings (or whatever), LQG is formulated without reference to any specific background.

It’s unclear whether this is really such a big deal. Most approaches to string theory are indeed background-dependent (although in some cases one can quibble about definitions), but that’s presumably because we don’t understand the theory very well. This is an argument about style; in particular, how we should set about inventing new theories. Smolin wants to think big, and start with a background-independent formulation from the start. String theorists would argue that it’s okay to start with a background, since we are led to exciting new results like finite scattering and gauge/gravity duality, and a background-independent formulation will perhaps be invented some day. It’s not an argument that anyone can hope to definitively win, until the right theory is settled and we can look back on how it was invented.

Over at Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein reconsiders the Madrid rule on the weight of models at this years Cibeles fashion show.

The Madrid Regional Government’s rationale for the new law is very troubling. Their main argument is that fashion shows should be regulated because they present an unhealthy ideal of beauty to the public and therefore constitute a public health risk. I have no doubt this is true, but I don’t want the government to suppress ideas just because the larger society considers those ideas to be destructive. I certainly wouldn’t want the US government taking any greater liberties on the censorship front.

However, Amanda raises a compelling counterargument at Pandagon. As she notes, the industry standard in modeling is an occupational health risk. A designer’s right to design clothes for emaciated models doesn’t necessarily guarantee her right to hire actual people to wear these clothes under dangerous conditions.

The average fashion model has a BMI of 16, which well below what most medical experts consider a normal weight for a well-nourished adult. Only a fraction of post-pubescent women have a BMI below 18 for any reason (CDC).

Calum Cashley spots this irony.

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451” [because it contains profanity] came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence. “Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read” is observed during the last week of September each year, according to the American Library Association Web site, www.ala.org. The week celebrates the freedom to choose or express one’s opinion, even if it might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them, according to the Web site. Jerilynn Williams, Montgomery County Memorial Library System director, said Banned Books Week keeps the public aware that it is imperative to have access to information in a democratic society. Banning books causes libraries to limit access to information by withholding a person’s right to explore a wide variety of opinions to form their own opinions, Williams said.

For all its incidental comic felicities, a reader could finish reading Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog (2003) feeling that too much had been sacrificed to the jokes; it is not that Amis’s distinctive gifts have ever been self-effacing ones, but there were moments in that book when the world was being just too deliberately shrunk to fit the satire’s demands. Darius the “seven-foot Seventh Day Adventist” couldn’t be six-foot-eleven, or indeed five-foot-six, just as Clint Smoker had to live in the geographically impractical location of Foulness – not in the interests of plot or character, but in order to feed the punchline. To move from such Technicolor knock-about to the sombre grey-scale in which House of Meetings lives is to encounter an almost completely different author, to negotiate a shift between moral worlds as well as palettes.

more from the TLS here.

In the autumn of 1910, a little exhibition was held at the Grafton Galleries in London, entitled Manet and the Post-Impressionists, with works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. These were wild, rough-edged paintings, vertiginous with hazards in perspective and form. The curator was a talented critic and connoisseur, Roger Fry, who also played a grandfatherly role in the family romance that was Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf, in her often moving biography of Fry (one of the last things she wrote), gives an amusing sketch of the public reaction to the exhibition: stiffly upholstered old ladies tried to stifle their laughs and then gave way to helpless guffaws of abuse; portly gentlemen redly tut-tutted; letters of complaint to newspapers were written; prominent chiefs of the art establishment and paralytic academicians were wheeled out to condemn the “lunatics” who painted this way; a famous doctor judged Fry to be clinically insane.

more from James Wood at the Guardian here.

Any minute now Michel Houellebecq, the bad boy of French literature, is going to do something very, very bad. It’s true I’ve been on the road with him all week and his behavior has been impeccable, but something’s got to give. There’s too much history. What about his purported obsession with sex clubs and prostitutes? What about his penchant for hitting on female journalists, explaining that only one night with him will guarantee the real story? What about the time he called Islam “the stupidest religion”? Surely, the man’s going to bust out with something reprehensible, and now, in his smoke-filled semi-suite at the Bel Age in L.A., is as good a time as any. He flies back to Europe tomorrow.

Houellebecq, forty-eight, is a slight man, fragile-seeming, handsome in his way. There’s a boyish gleam to him that calls to mind that terrible disease where children age rapidly. I have to stop and remind myself that he’s just a forty-eight-year-old man. Right now he slouches in a swivel chair while a woman he’s met tonight, a well-known book critic, kneels before him. They speak in low tones about the possibility of love in a loveless universe, or something like that.

more from The Believer here.

SOMETIMES THE SMALLEST things create the most arresting aesthetic experiences—an observation resoundingly reconfirmed for me at “No Limits, Just Edges,” the Jackson Pollock works-on-paper exhibition recently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (and before that at the Guggenheim Foundation’s outposts in Berlin and Venice). As I walked through the show’s expansive last room, my eyes gravitated, almost magnetically, to the lower right-hand corner of an untitled 1951 drawing, where, beneath the slashing arrows and scrawled numerals soaked into the fibers of the absorbent Japanese paper Pollock favored that year, lay one of the artist’s most remarkable, if diminutive, passages: the letters P-o-l-l-o-c-k fashioned out of his trademark drips. I have long had a special interest in post-1950 Pollock, and although I was familiar with this particular work, the crystal-clear logic with which the artist applied his signature style to his signature itself remained striking. Indeed, the dripped signature, strangely, seemed less the result of an artist’s simply working within his own given mode than an act of self-conscious appropriation. That is, the way Pollock used his painterly mark to play on the technique he made famous looked almost like one artist parodying another’s style. Here, at the crucial juncture of his career, when he was moving beyond the dripped abstractions so indelibly associated with his name, Pollock seemed to step outside himself, to begin to address issues of artistic authorship and individual style with an amazing acuity and critical distance. This sly gesture, which is, in fact, typical of Pollock in these years and yet very much at odds with the popularly accepted image of him as an unintellectual, intuitive shaman, reminded me again of how unexplored the artist’s late works are, even now, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

more from Artforum here.

From Time:

You don’t have to be a biologist or an anthropologist to see how closely the great apes–gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans–resemble us. Even a child can see that their bodies are pretty much the same as ours, apart from some exaggerated proportions and extra body hair. Apes have dexterous hands much like ours but unlike those of any other creature. And, most striking of all, their faces are uncannily expressive, showing a range of emotions that are eerily familiar. That’s why we delight in seeing chimps wearing tuxedos, playing the drums or riding bicycles. It’s why a potbellied gorilla scratching itself in the zoo reminds us of Uncle Ralph or Cousin Vinnie–and why, in a more unsettled reaction, Queen Victoria, on seeing an orangutan named Jenny at the London Zoo in 1842, declared the beast “frightful and painfully and disagreeably human.”

It isn’t just a superficial resemblance. Chimps, especially, not only look like us, they also share with us some human-like behaviors. They make and use tools and teach those skills to their offspring. They prey on other animals and occasionally murder each other. They have complex social hierarchies and some aspects of what anthropologists consider culture. They can’t form words, but they can learn to communicate via sign language and symbols and to perform complex cognitive tasks. Scientists figured out decades ago that chimps are our nearest evolutionary cousins, roughly 98% to 99% identical to humans at the genetic level. When it comes to DNA, a human is closer to a chimp than a mouse is to a rat.

Yet tiny differences, sprinkled throughout the genome, have made all the difference.

More here.

From Nature:

Two US geneticists who discovered one of the fundamental mechanisms by which gene expression is controlled have received a Nobel prize for their achievement. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who revealed the process of RNA interference (RNAi) in 1998, will share the US$1.4-million award. Fire, then working at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore, Maryland, and Mello, who was at the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester, made the discovery when studying the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a much used workhorse for research geneticists.
Fire, Mello and their team wanted to see whether they could influence the production of muscle protein in the worms by tinkering with the mRNA transcribed from the relevant gene. When they injected more of the naturally produced mRNA, it had no effect. Likewise, when they injected a tailor-made ‘antisense’ sequence to bind to the natural ‘sense’ sequence, nothing happened to the worms.

But when they injected double-stranded RNA made up of both sense and antisense sequences bound together, the worms displayed twitching behaviour similar to that of genetic mutants with no muscle gene at all. They had silenced the gene. Subsequent investigation showed that injecting specific double-stranded RNA can silence any gene, and that you only need to inject a few molecules to do it. When Fire and Mello published their findings in Nature in 1998, a new world was opened to geneticists.

More here. (I am deeply proud of Dr. Mello, who is a colleague and fellow scientist at UMass, Worcester).

Magali Nougarede. Blind.

Photograph, C-print.

More here and here.   

The controversy over Flavor Flav’s VH1 reality show, in The New York Times.

[Flavor Flav’s] reality series, “Flavor of Love,” a ghetto-fabulous spoof of the dating series “The Bachelor,” has been a colossal hit for VH1. The show’s first-season finale in March drew nearly six million viewers, making it the highest-rated show in the cable channel’s history. More than three million people tuned in to watch the second-season premiere early August.

No one seems to be enjoying the success more than Flav, as he is known to one and all.

“I’m the king of VH1,” he crowed over a surf-and-turf dinner at a soul food restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. “Your man Flavor Flav is doing his thiiiiing.”

That thing has made the show as polarizing as it is popular. On blogs and at the office, on message boards and in op-ed columns, viewers are both riveted and repelled by “Flavor of Love.”

Fans of the show call it a harmless guilty pleasure, and its star a lovable and unlikely Romeo. Critics have accused the show of trafficking in racial stereotypes and have called Flav everything from a sellout to a modern-day Stepin Fetchit.

Via Lindsay Beyerstein, the House moves to make the exercise of rights harder.

With little public attention or even notice, the House of Representatives has passed a bill that undermines enforcement of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. The Public Expression of Religion Act – H.R. 2679 – provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorneys fees. The bill has only one purpose: to prevent suits challenging unconstitutional government actions advancing religion.

A federal statute, 42 United States Code section 1988, provides that attorneys are entitled to recover compensation for their fees if they successfully represent a plaintiff asserting a violation of his or her constitutional or civil rights. For example, a lawyer who successfully sues on behalf of a victim of racial discrimination or police abuse is entitled to recover attorney’s fees from the defendant who acted wrongfully. Any plaintiff who successfully sues to remedy a violation of the Constitution or a federal civil rights statute is entitled to have his or her attorney’s fees paid…

[C]onservatives in the House of Representatives have now passed an insidious bill to try and limit enforcement of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, by denying attorneys fees to lawyers who successfully challenge government actions as violating this key constitutional provision. For instance, a lawyer who successfully challenged unconstitutional prayers in schools or unconstitutional symbols on religious property or impermissible aid to religious groups would — under the bill — not be entitled to recover attorneys’ fees. The bill, if enacted, would treat suits to enforce the Establishment Clause different from litigation to enforce all of the other provisions of the Constitution and federal civil rights statutes.

In the Village Voice’s Literary Supplement, Ed Park takes a look back at Kaavya Viswanathan’s debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life and the plagiarism scandal around it.

On his blog, Blink author Malcolm Gladwell essentially tells Kaavya cavilers to get over it already, that “calling this plagiarism is the equivalent of crying ‘copy’ in a crowded Kinkos [sic].” “It is worth reading, I think, the actual passages that Viswanathan is supposed to have taken from McCafferty,” he writes, with plummy condescension. “Let’s just say this isn’t the first twenty lines of “Paradise Lost.” (My gut tells me Blink isn’t, either.)

It is worth reading, I think, the actual books from which Viswanathan stole—worth overcoming an aversion to dust jackets with long expanses of shapely legs, worth paying attention to the work of the primary victim in this whole affair. The best place to start, if you are not currently a teenage girl, is the new Charmed Thirds (published last month), which follows heroine Jessica Darling through her years at Columbia. McCafferty satirizes dorm life, internships (Jessica gets to do unpaid work at a hip Brooklyn mag), academia, the literary world (the Times describes one mentor as “a gay Dave Eggers . . . only smarter, funnier . . . and better”), and more, while keeping the doings of its deeply backstoried cast of characters surprisingly fresh.

More of Martin Amis’, er, insights into Islamism, in the Guardian.

‘Well, I do have a solution,’ he says. ‘It’s basically consciousness-raising in Islamic women. There’s a huge sexual element in this. It’s about Islamic masculinity; it’s to do with powerlessness and humiliation. When the last Islamic king was booted out of Spain, his mother said, “Do not cry like a woman for what you cannot maintain.”

‘That goes to the heart of the existential crisis of the Islamic male. You go back into your past and you see that it was always there. Yes, there was that Pakistani girlfriend and, yes, there was that Iranian girlfriend … Ian Hamilton [the poet and critic who died in 2001] converted to Islam so he could marry. He didn’t buy it in his heart at all, but he went to Riyadh.

‘I remember him telling me about the social atmosphere in Saudi Arabia, how it was on the brink of violence all the time. You’re driving along, you’re in the back of the car with your wife, then someone cuts across four lanes of traffic to scream something at your driver: “Tell that bitch to put some clothes on.” But there was still a palpable feeling that we were getting more rational. Now, religion is back.’

While the West is ‘punch-drunk’ on 30 years of multicultural relativism, the extremists of the Middle East are enjoying an Osama-inspired ‘power rush’. It is, he believes, time for a revival of snobbery. ‘Not class and all that shit. Intellectual snobbery, aesthetic snobbery. Roger Scruton [the right-wing philosopher] says the West is suffering from a kind of moral obesity. It can’t act.’

The Economist has an interesting but bit odd obituary for Ann Richards, former governor of Texas.

Her best joke, told in that twang at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, commiserated with “Poor George” senior, “born with a silver foot in his mouth”. Mr Bush laughed gamely, sending her a silver-foot pin which she wore whenever he, as president, returned to Texas. (“A woman always wears the jewellery when the man who gave it to her comes to visit.”) But Barbara Bush seethed about “that woman”, and young George plotted, and got, eventual revenge.

By the time he did, ousting her from the governor’s mansion in 1994, Mrs Richards had made a fair amount of difference to her state. Over eight years as treasurer she had modernised cash management, shifting it from punch-card computers to electronic transfer, and earning an extra $1.7 billion a year in interest on investments. As governor, from 1990, she tried to clean up and open out the state commissions and agencies, starting proper audits and performance reviews and appointing more women and minorities than all the governors before her put together. And lest this was dismissed as typical woman’s stuff, she also oversaw the biggest prison-building programme in American history.

Some things she never tried to change. What would she do, she was asked once, if the legislature repealed the death penalty? “I would faint,” she replied. Texas schools remained glaringly unequal, despite a court order to share funds more evenly. Oil revenues were stagnant, but Mrs Richards knew better than even to mention a state personal income tax. Though Texas increasingly looked like a broad, bragging California, full of high-tech clusters and with the white Anglo culture besieged by Latinos and Asians, Mrs Richards was well aware of the unchanging lower layers. She lost in 1994, in part, because she opposed allowing Texans to carry concealed weapons. But then, as she said, what woman in Texas could possibly find a handgun among the clutter in her bag?

In the New York Times Magazine, Noah Feldman asks the question that everyone asks.

What’s the point of not talking, especially when others are talking for us? If politics is the art of compromise, then surely conversation is one of its methods. Of course, some enemies — a Hitler or a Pol Pot — may be so repugnant that the mere prospect of reaching a compromise with them would violate our deepest moral principles. The only time it would be right to hear them out is when they are proposing to surrender. There are radical jihadists who see us in similar terms: they find us repellent and see little point in speaking unless it is to warn us of our downfall if we don’t submit to their demands. Given their principled unwillingness to compromise, there is little point in talking with them.

And yet even intractable interlocutors may be worth engaging. Perhaps the conversation serves as a strategy of subterfuge and delay, maintaining a holding pattern or cease-fire until the time is ripe to restart hostilities. Talking can also reveal information about an adversary’s leaders — their preconceptions, their blind spots, their fixed beliefs.

Ultimately, however, the most fruitful negotiations are based on a different premise: under certain conditions, the motives that drive people and regimes can be changed. Properly carried out, diplomacy creates new incentives that alter countries’ underlying interests — and thus their behavior. Over 50 years, a slow and painstakingly negotiated process of economic integration has taught Western Europe’s traditional enemies to look upon one another as allies, then friends and now almost as parts of one big country. If there is ever to be a meaningful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it will involve something similar: putting both peoples in a position to gain more the closer they come together.

From Critical Lucidity:

On the way to the shows in London just hours after stepping off the New York Fashion Week catwalks, I had mixed feelings about Madrid’s move to ban ultra skinny models with a BMI of 18 or less. This could, potentially I thought, be good news for the likes of those “healthier” models like me. With a medically defined ‘normal’ BMI and a hip measurement that screams liability to designers, I’ve always found Fashion Week to be a tortuous experience – everything from public attempts to squeeze into a size 4 to sitting backstage with teenage waifs. But early on it became clear that London would not take Madrid’s lead. What follows is a field report of London Fashion Week with some thoughts on why skinny is still in, and why I’m okay with that.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

From Scientific American:

The male lion’s magnificent mane sets him apart from other cats–and it’s a great charmer for the ladies–so why would he do without it? That question has puzzled scientists since 1833, when the first reports of “maneless” lions trickled in from around the world. Now, a research team reports that lions from the Tsavo region of Kenya deliberately delay mane growth to cope with the region’s harsh temperatures.

Some researchers suggested that lions lost their manes because they were snagged too many times in Tsavo’s ubiquitous thorn scrub. But zoologist Thomas Gnoske at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, considered something these speculators didn’t: lions shipped to zoos in cooler climates grow longer manes. This made him wonder whether hot temperatures account for Tsavo’s thinning tomcats. To find out, Gnoske and colleagues studied museum specimens and conducted 10 years of fieldwork in Tsavo and in the Serengeti, which is about 10 degrees cooler. In an article published online this month in the Journal of Zoology, the team reports that lions in the Serengeti grow a full mane in 5 years–by the time they’re ready to breed–but that Tsavo’s lions don’t have much of mane until age 8, well past their reproductive prime.

Gnoske thinks smaller manes improve a young, vigorous lion’s ability to keep cool. Bushy manes probably evolved to attract females in cooler climates where heat stress was not an issue, Gnoske says, and lions can’t just turn off that program, now that they’re in a place like Tsavo. “They’re hard-wired to grow a mane, period, and they’ll develop as large of a mane as they possibly can.”

More here.