Jamie Talan in Newsday:

When it comes to skin cells, everything is location, location, location.

Scientists at Stanford University have found that fibroblasts — cells that produce collagen, reticulin and other elastic fibers contained in skin — behave differently in every part of the body, a discovery that one day may be useful in tissue engineering.

Like a Global Positioning System, fibroblasts in tissue from the head to the toes send out different signals that basically act like signposts, telling skin cells where they reside. It’s a mapping system that had never been seen so clearly until the Stanford discovery — and it could have implications for understanding the genetic codes that make skin cells on the head grow hair and those on the palm remain smooth and hairless throughout a lifetime.

“It’s very interesting,” said Craig Crews, an associate professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale. “Now that we know there is a system like this, we can start to tease out what the signals are.”

More here.

Jane Perlez in The Scotsman:

Across Indonesia’s most religious of provinces, the sight of brown uniformed policemen has come to signify one thing. The brutal enforcement of Sharia law which is raising fears about the future of the world’s most populous Muslim country.

They haul unmarried couples into precincts and arrest people for drinking or gambling. Increasingly, many of the cases are pushed to the ultimate conclusion, public canings at mosques in front of excited crowds.

In mid-July, a 27-year-old man sentenced to 40 lashes fainted on the seventh stroke of a rattan cane from a hooded man in the yard of a mosque here in the provincial capital.

The caning was televised nationally, with a presenter saying that the man, who had been arrested for drinking at a beachside stall, would receive the remainder of his punishment once he had recovered.

Battered by the Asian tsunami 19 months ago, Aceh is undergoing a profound transformation that is likely to have considerable impact on the nature of Islam in Indonesia.

More here.

Damien Cave for NYT about cellphone culture in Iraq:

“The cool kids in Iraq all want an Apache, the cellphone they’ve named after an American military helicopter. Next on the scale of hipness comes a Humvee, followed by the Afendi, a Turkish word for dapper, and a sturdy, rounded Nokia known as the Allawi — a reference to the stocky former prime minister, Ayad Allawi.

Even more telling are the text messages and images that Iraqis share over their phones. From all over the city, Baghdad cellphones practically shout commentary about Saddam Hussein, failed reconstruction and violence, always the violence. One of the most popular messages making the rounds appears onscreen with the image of a skeleton.

“Your call cannot be completed,” it says, “because the subscriber has been bombed or kidnapped.”

More here

(and thanks Tristam Sparks for the link)

From CeasefireCampaign.org:

Right now a tragedy is unfolding in the Middle East. Hundreds of civilians have died in the bombings in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine and the death toll is rising every day. The situation is volatile and could escalate into a catastrophic regional conflict.

Despite the bloodshed, our leaders have been slow to act. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for an immediate ceasefire and the deployment of international troops to the Israel-Lebanon border. This is the best proposal yet to stop the violence, but the US, UK and Israeli governments are opposed, and — for it to succeed — global leaders need to get behind it immediately.

Now is the time to act. People around the world must tell their leaders to speak out and support Kofi Annan’s proposal. If we can persuade our governments to unite in demanding a ceasefire, all sides in this conflict will be pressured to stand down. Please sign this petition and ask your friends, family and colleagues to do the same.

The petition will be sent to key regional and global leaders and publicized in major newspapers in the Middle East, US and Europe. With enough signatures we can help pressure our leaders to stop the violence.

Click here to sign the petition.  [Thanks to Zeina Assaf.]

Rashid Akmaev in Scientific American:

The short answer is yes, and at various times this question of lunar tides in the atmosphere occupied such famous scientists as Isaac Newton and Pierre-Simon Laplace, among others. Newton’s theory of gravity provided the first correct explanation of ocean tides and their long known correlation with the phases of the moon. Roughly a century later it was also used to predict the existence of atmospheric tides when Laplace developed a quantitative theory based on a tidal equation now bearing his name. Laplace’s equation describes the motions of an ocean of uniform depth covering a spherical Earth [see illustration].

More here.

From The Guardian:

In his novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, published today by Simon & Schuster, Ken Kalfus has produced perhaps the most penetrating response to September 11 and its aftermath to date: a satire on the psychological and domestic effects of the current state of perpetual conflict. The terrible events of the day and the subsequent war on terror are seen through the eyes of Marshall and Joyce, a New York couple in the throes of divorce. To their mutual regret, both survive the attacks on the city, but as the months pass, and events at home begin to echo those on the international stage, it seems unlikely that they will be as fortunate when it comes to the battle of their separation. In this exclusive extract from the opening of the novel, the city looks on in horror as the twin towers collapse.

“After a while one of the towers, the one further south, appeared to exhale a terrific sigh of combustion products. They swirled away and half the building, about fifty or sixty stories, bowed forward on a newly manufactured hinge. And then the building fell in on itself in what seemed to be a single graceful motion, as if its solidity had been a mirage, as if the structure had been liquid all these years since it was built. Smoke and debris in all the possible shades of black, gray and white billowed upward, flooding out around the neighboring buildings. You had to make an effort to keep before you the thought that thousands of people were losing their lives at precisely this moment.”

More here.

From Nature:

The type of ultrasound used to scan babies in the womb disturbs brain cells in mouse fetuses, say researchers. The finding fuels a debate about the safety of the technique for unborn babies. Babies in the womb are routinely scanned using high-frequency sound waves. The scans allow doctors to check on growth rates and spot developmental abnormalities.

Pasko Rakic of Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut and his team were similarly scanning experimental mice, to help inject dye into embryos. When later studying the brain development of these mice, the team noticed that certain neurons in the growing cortex were not behaving normally. Rakic says that he has no evidence that ultrasound scanning disrupts the brains of human fetuses. The affected mice in his study were exposed to continuous ultrasound for 30 minutes or more; a baby’s brain would be exposed for only a fraction of this time during a 30-minute scan of its entire body. And a narrow ultrasound beam will hit and affect far more of a small mouse brain than a larger human one.

More here.

There are two works that seem to me telling of the 1970s: Sigmar Polke’s sardonic Carl Andre in Delft, ca. 1968 — an important year for the counterrevolution against sociopolitical orthodoxy, as the May riots in Paris, the riots provoked by the Chicago Seven, and the Vietnam protests in the United States indicate — and Judy Chicago’s feminist The Dinner Party (1974-79). However different, both rebel against the tyranny of Minimalism, the purest — and emptiest — abstract art ever made. For Chicago it was a symbol of masculine as well as esthetic authoritarianism. For Polke it was a symbol of America’s absolutist rule of modern art. For both the American female artist and the German male artist Minimalism was the inexpressive dead end of art. Both vehemently attacked it, Polke using irony, Chicago using ideology, to assert a new individuality — woman’s individuality and independence in Chicago’s case, German individuality and independence in Polke’s case. Thus the oppressed rose up against the art and social establishment. They questioned and demystified — indeed, discredited and debunked — the official system of dominance and exclusivity. What had hitherto been uncritically accepted as esthetically and culturally superior was unceremoniously relegated to irrelevance. A supposedly major art was shown to be minor, and the vanquished Germans no longer humbly emulated the victorious Americans. It was a truly great moment in modern art and social history.

more from Donald Kuspit at Artnet Magazine here.

MORAL PHILOSOPHERS and academics interested in studying how humans choose between right and wrong often use thought experiments to tease out the principles that inform our decisions. One particular hypothetical scenario has become quite the rage in some top psychological journals. It involves a runaway trolley, five helpless people on the track, and a large-framed man looking on from a footbridge. He may or may not be about to tumble to his bloody demise: You get to make the call.

That’s because in this scenario, you are standing on the footbridge, too. You know that if you push the large man off the bridge onto the tracks, his body will stop the trolley before it kills the five people on the tracks. Of course, he will die in the process. So the question is: Is it morally permissible to kill the man in order to save five others?

In surveys, most people (around 85 percent) say they would not push the man to his death.

Often, this scenario is paired with a similar one: Again, there are five helpless people on the track. But this time, you can pull a switch that will send the runaway trolley onto a side track, where only one person is standing. So again, you can reduce the number of deaths from five to one-but in this case most people say, yes, they would go ahead and pull the lever. Why do we react so differently to the two scenarios?

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Joe Garofoli in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Untangling the brain’s biological instincts from the influences of everyday life has been the driving passion of Brizendine’s life — and forms the core of her book. “The Female Brain” weaves together more than 1,000 scientific studies from the fields of genetics, molecular neuroscience, fetal and pediatric endocrinology, and neurohormonal development. It is also significantly based on her own clinical work at the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF 12 years ago. It is the only psychiatric facility in the country with such a comprehensive focus.

A man’s brain may be bigger overall, she writes, but the main hub for emotion and memory formation is larger in a woman’s brain, as is the wiring for language and “observing emotion in others.” Also, a woman’s “neurological reality” is much more deeply affected by hormonal surges that fluctuate throughout her life.

Brizendine uses those differences to explain everything from why teenage girls feverishly swap text messages during class, to why women fake orgasms to why menopausal women leave their husbands.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who have long studied income distribution, have recently looked at the data and calculated that during this one-year period the real incomes of the richest 1 percent, those making at least $315,000 annually, grew by almost 17 percent. Furthermore, this growth in income not only eluded the lower- and middle-income classes, but by and large passed up the upper middle class as well.

The income increases of even those whose incomes were greater than 95 percent of other Americans were quite minimal. The huge increases in income went to those with already huge incomes. In fact, half of the increased income going to the top 1 percent of households went to the top tenth of the top 1 percent!

And the minimum wage? The lowest in real terms that it’s been since the 1950s. And the income of the typical college graduate? Down in 2004.

More here.  [Photo of Paulos from National University of Singapore.]

Here is a sentence that struck me last week from the Times:

NOTHING is perfect, but at times that most unlikely and hyperbolic of words does pop into my head. It did so repeatedly as I played Tekken: Dark Resurrection, a martial arts game from Namco Bandai that is a shining example of what works best on the PlayStation Portable hand-held game console.

Why is this bit of prose funny?  Well, like much funny stuff, it’s the result of a collision of usually disparate things.  In this case, the things are: 1) a video game with a campy, gothic name, and 2) the New York Times’ magisterial house style for criticism.  Note that the repeated references to an opinionated “I” (“pop into my head”) license the writer’s generalizations (“a shining example of what works best”).  Note also that the writer is fully aware of the ironic juxtaposition of the concept of perfection and the wares of Namco Bandai, and yet all the same desires to communicate just how good a video game this is.  And note, lastly, that despite the author’s self-aware use of mild irony, that the amusement we derive from reading it seems somehow to exceed the author’s intention.  Don’t you think?

This tone of bemusement, so familiar to coffee-mug wielding Times readers (“I read it for the crossword!”  “Me?  For the Style section.”), exists in a symbiotic relationship to the more po-faced tone the Times reserves for journalism.  By taking liberties with meaning, by using writerly effects in its criticism, the Times implies that such usages are restricted to those language artisans who populate the entertainment and opinion sections.  The great figures for this type of writing are probably A.O. Scott and Frank Rich, but there are many critics whose voice complicates and plays with the simpler tones of reportage: Frank Bruni, David Pogue, Virginia Heffernan (hmmm – these three all have Times blogs).  How can I draw together so many diverse writers, you ask?  Well, I think house style is among the least appreciated and most powerful forces in journalistic writing: ever notice how, upon beginning to write for the New Yorker, a writer’s distinctive voice seems to be waffle-ironed into conformity with that august publication’s trademark tone? 

Of course, the Times is a sophisticated complex of styles, but the founding opposition of the paper’s rhetorical identity is that between the “name” critics and the trustable, unplayed-with language of the straight reportage.  The bemusement that characterizes the criticism and the seriousness that characterizes the reportage imply two different ways of using language, as a pleasurable end and as a means to truth, respectively.  Yet underneath that opposition lies a greater commonality.  This is the drive to produce the historical record, a text that will be authoritative even when read years later.  Of course, the straight journalistic tone also produces surprising new juxtapositions, but they usually come off as striking rather than funny, as in this sentence also from last week:

Scott W., 64, a retired school teacher and real estate agent, relieved his occasional need for homosexual sex with anonymous encounters on East Hampton Beach without quite labeling himself as gay or bisexual.

Note here the impassive recording of a non-judgmental, just-the-facts stance towards anonymous hookups.  A stance that is a historically new entrant to mainstream public discourse arrives disguised as mere reportage.  This is the Times’ claim to distinctiveness: its prose, of both varieties, gives off the sense of being responsible to history (the success of this endeavor being, of course, rather questionable).  Thus a taxonomy emerges by which “serious” events, conflicts, and social shifts are reported unironically and with apparent recourse to facts, while restaurants, movies, and fashion trends are mediated by the clever and literary voices of critics.

Please don’t think that I take very seriously the Times’ self-seriousness – if nothing else, reading it demonstrates the importance of form (placement of article, size of accompanying photo, choice of headline and title) over what gets covered.  Actually, the standards of what constitutes magisterial, authoritative language shift constantly, with the entrance of new locutions and words and the obsolescence of others.  The house style of the Times, therefore, might be seen as purposely moving more slowly than the culture-at-large, in order to preserve the impression that it is an unchanging institution of prose, a bulwark against “lol” and “what up, dawg!”  (Of course, if Frank Bruni or Tony Scott ended a piece with “LOL” it would be a fully controlled laugh line – omg, Bruni just wrote “LOL” – lol!  rotfl!).

But this last point, about the Times and similar organs’ desire to retain a sense of unchangingness, to be our reference points, even as they record the daily newness of life, gets me back to Tekken: Dark Resurrection.  The reason that sentence was so funny to me was that it exceeded intentions: sure, it painted a chuckle-worthy portrait of a computer-game lover trying to find a way to express his delight for the great accomplishments in his field to a world that considers that field to be adolescent and silly.  Don’t you guys get it, these games are the real works of art our culture is producing today, etc., etc.  And of course, the ironic tone is a way to hedge these same claims as just a literary device.  But it’s funnier than that.  It’s funny because it’s such a perfect reenactment of the New York Times formula: the pretensions of the prose combined with the absurd and prosaic real.  All purported maturity aside, the Times needs Namco Bandai and Scott W.: they are the bolt of electricity that vivifies it.  A dark resurrection indeed.

See other Dispatches here.

Bruce Nauman. 3 Heads Fountain (3 Andrews). 2005.

Resin, epoxy, tubing.

More on this influential artist here, here, and here.

Joseph Kahn in the New York Times Book Review:

Mr. Chen and Ms. Wu describe the publication of their book as having been “compared to a clap of thunder.” The statement, like the book, is brassy. But they were prescient. China’s peasant problem has burst into the open with a surge of rural protests that have made the country look less politically stable than at any time since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy uprising in 1989. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s top adviser on rural problems said in an interview in 2004 that he kept a copy by his bedside to remind himself of the task ahead.

The two spent three years traveling the countryside in Anhui province in central China. They were only a few hundred miles from Shanghai, the glittering commercial center on the coast, but experienced poverty and frustration that they argue grew worse throughout the 1990’s.

They collected a dozen anecdotes of operatic pungency. A village chief murders the man who tries to audit the village books. A township leader conspires to get rich by forcing peasants to plant mulberry trees, for which he sells the seeds. A mendacious county Communist Party boss concocts an excuse to send armed troops to crush a tax revolt.

More here.

Josh Braun in Seed Magazine:

Though a sudden agreement gave hope for peace in Darfur, the lack of support from small anti-government groups, the spillover of refugees into Chad and the opposition of the central government to UN peacekeepers mean that the conflict drags on. Lost in discussions about ending the Sudanese government’s attacks on its people, however, is the acknowledgment of how the dispute began: Darfur may well be the first war influenced by climate change.

In recent years, increasing drought cycles and the Sahara’s southward expansion have created conflicts between nomadic and sedentary groups over shortages of water and land. This scarcity highlighted the central government’s gross neglect of the Darfur region—a trend stretching back to colonial rule. Forsaken, desperate and hungry, groups of Darfurians attacked government outposts in protest. The response was the Janjaweed and supporting air strikes.

More here.

Nelofer Pazira in the Toronto Star:

They hadn’t seen anything like it — a film about their own town projected onto a big screen. In the background yawned the infamous 52-metre-high empty niche where once the larger of two standing Buddhas in Bamiyan looked upon the valley. The Taliban destroyed the pair of statues five years ago.

For centuries this valley has been the crossing path of monks, travellers, tourists, invading armies and wanderers — the once-famous Silk Road, connecting China to the Mediterranean Sea, passed through here.

But never before had a film — a documentary film about the Buddha statues, declared a UNESCO heritage site after they’d been turned to rubble — been shown here.

More here.

John Lee Anderson in The New Yorker:

This spring, a friend of Castro’s, a veteran Party loyalist, told me that the Cuban leader was angustiado—literally, “anguished”—over his advancing years, and obsessed by the idea that socialism might not survive him. As a result, Castro has launched his last great fight, which he calls the Battle of Ideas.

Castro’s goal is to reëngage Cubans with the ideals of the revolution, especially young Cubans who came of age during what he called the Special Period. In the early nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a precipitous end to Cuba’s subsidies, and the economy imploded. The crisis forced Castro to allow greater openness in the island’s economic and civil life, but he now seems determined to reverse that. In a speech last November, Castro said, “This country can self-destruct, this revolution can destroy itself.” Referring to the Americans, he said, “They cannot destroy it, but we can. We can destroy it, and it would be our fault.” And in May, during an angry, seven-hour televised panel discussion that he convened to protest his appearance on the Forbes list of the world’s richest leaders (the magazine estimated his net worth at nine hundred million dollars), Castro said, “We must continue to pulverize the lies that are told against us. . . .This is the ideological battle, everything is the Battle of Ideas.”

More here.

Carlos Rojas in The Naked Gaze:

In an intriguing hypothesis sketched out in Plagues and Peoples (1976), William McNeill speculates that Europe’s 14th century Black Death plague may have had its origins in the Eurasian Steppes, where the virus may have been endemic among the region’s burrowing rodents for centuries before finally being transmitted to China, then the middle East and Europe by horse-riding Mongols as they established the Mongol Empire (1206-1368).

Although many scholars (including Graham Twigg, Susan Scott, and Christopher Duncan) now question whether the Black Death was actually a case of bubonic plague, or any bacterial disease, or was even necessarily any single disease at all, it is nevertheless acknowledged that the last world-wide pandemic of bubonic plague (known as the “third pandemic”) did in fact have its origins in central China before eventually spreading to Hong Kong in 1894, and then (like the SARS outbreak threatened to do a century later) on to trading ports around the world. While the worst of the 1894 Hong Kong epidemic was controlled relatively quickly, the global pandemic which it precipitated dragged on for decades, and was not officially conquered (according to the WHO) until 1959.

More here.

Umberto Eco writes for The Guardian on “on why we should beware mad scientists” :

“…Symmes believed that at the north and south poles there were two apertures that led to the interior of the globe. He attempted to raise funds for an exploration of the polar regions to locate these entrances. The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences still has a wooden model he used to explain his theories…

…It is widely rumoured on the internet that the hollow earth theory was taken seriously by top-ranking Nazis who believed in the occult sciences. In some circles of the German navy it was purportedly believed that the hollow earth theory would make it easier to pinpoint the exact position of British ships because, if infrared rays were used, the curvature of the Earth would not have obscured observation.”

More Here

The Register about futuristic visions becoming reality

“Tom Cassin, head of the technology, media and telecommunications practice at Deloitte, predicts that although we won’t be watching holographic TV or travelling to work in flying cars by 2010, “technology [in the future] will be far more involved in our everyday lives than ever before”. Cassin has outlined the growing use of technology in several scenarios, such as in the classroom, through entertainment, and while travelling…

While the concept of personal flying machines may still be far off, we may get the chance to walk up walls if transatlantic aerospace and defence company BAE Systems has anything to do with it. The firm is currently working on what the media has dubbed “Spiderman suits”, which will allow soldiers of the future to scale sheer vertical surfaces.

Referred to as “infantry climbing suits” by the company, they are reportedly made from a material that closely mimics the feet of a gecko lizard. Gecko feet are themselves covered with hairs so tiny they merge with the very molecules they touch.

Dr Jeff Sargent, a research physicist at BAE Systems’ Advanced Technology Centre in Bristol told reporters: “We wanted to mimic this ability…We have made a small amount of this material and we have demonstrated that it will stick on glass surfaces to demonstrate that it’s got some potential.

“Having a Spiderman glove is a long way down the road, but in principle, you might have something like that,” he added”