From MSNBC:

NASA scientists have joined the search for the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, long thought to be extinct but recently sighted in Arkansas. NASA used a laser-equipped research aircraft to fly over the Big Woods area of the Mississippi Delta to learn more about the big woodpecker’s potential habitat. NASA’s aerial effort is part of a quest that began in 2004 after a kayaker reported spotting the woodpecker along the Cache River in Arkansas. Before that, there had been no confirmed sightings of ivory-bills for half a century.

In 2005, researchers published a report in the journal Science that at least one male ivory-bill still survived, but this finding has been challenged.

More here.

From Yahoo! Picks via the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory:

Ancient Writings Revealed!
After figuring out the answer to a problem, the mathematician and engineer Archimedes once shouted “Eureka!” and ran naked through the streets. The enthusiastic Sicilian lived between 287-212 B.C., and is widely recognized today as one of the most important minds of ancient Greece. At some point along the way, the science whiz recorded some of his ideas on a papyrus manuscript. In the Middle Ages, though, a monk wrote over the manuscript to create a prayer book. It wasn’t until 1906 that the underlining layer of Archimedes’ writing was discovered. And it wasn’t until August 4, 2006 (today!) that an x-ray at the Stanford Synchotron Radiation Laboratory cut through the monk’s notations to read the Greek text below. Or so the Exploratorium, Stanford University, and the National Science Foundation hope. Follow along on their live webcast as the x-ray examines the 1,000-year-old document—and the results are transmitted simultaneously around the world. We’ll be listening for shouts of “Eureka!”

From Blue Tea:

There are several Body Art galleries at Flesh and Color, in categories like Metallic, Abstract, Blends, and Floral. Some nice stuff, particularly the blends.

Guido Daniele does professional bodypainting for advertising projects. The scope of the work ranges from a few strokes here and there to full coverage, from abstract prints to animals.

Philippo Ioco does excellent bodypainting for both commercial and personal projects. His extensive personal work is divided into a number of galleries, including Painted Fashion, Movement of Color, and Animal Kingdom. Beautiful stuff.

More here.

Benjamin Kunkel in The New Yorker:

We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?” one character asks another in Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play “Endgame.” It turns out to be a well-warranted concern. Beckett’s writings constitute probably the most significant body of work produced by a twentieth-century author, in that they’re taken to signify the greatest number of things. “You might call Beckett the ultimate realist,” one eminent critic says, while the title of Anthony Cronin’s fine 1997 biography calls him “the last modernist,” and, equally, thanks to his spiralling self-referentiality, he’s often accounted the first postmodernist. Emptying his books of plot, descriptions, scene, and character, Beckett is said to have killed off the novel—or else, by showing how it could thrive on self-sabotage, insured its future. A contemporary playwright suggests that Beckett will remain relevant “as long as people still die.” Introducing Beckett’s later novels in a new Grove edition of the writer’s work issued to mark his centenary this year, Salman Rushdie takes the opposite—or, life being what it is, perhaps the identical—view: “These books, whose ostensible subject is death, are in fact books about life.” One of the most purposely obscure writers of the last century has become all things to all people.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise:

The Israeli invasion is creating a huge anti-Israeli backlash and a surge in popular support for Hezbollah. Iran certainly has no incentive to curb its support for Hezbollah under these circumstances. On the contrary, Hezbollah wants to make Lebanon an Islamic state on the model of Iran. Hezbollah is the most powerful military force in Lebanon right now. So, if the Lebanese government falls, as many fear it will, Hezbollah is likely to come out on top.

As I’ve argued before, offline and in comments: Hezbollah is using Israel to create an Islamic Lebanon.

More here.

Alma Guillermoprieto in the New York Review of Books:

Bolivia, a country with an area approximately twice the size of France, has barely nine million inhabitants, most of whom identify themselves as members of one of the pueblos originarios: the Aymara, Quechua, and Guaranì Indians, who are descendants of the great nations that inhabited the Andes and the jungle before the Conquest, and who were subsequently condemned to lives of odious isolation and unimaginable servitude. Serfdom was abolished at last in 1945, and during the revolution of 1952 latifundio land was distributed to the peasants in the Andes, but the average income for members of the pueblos is still well below a thousand dollars a year. Most other Bolivians are racially indistinguishable from the proclaimed pueblos originarios, and are almost as poor; these are the mestizos and urbanized Indians widely and sometimes insultingly called cholos, who in the Bolivian Andes throng the cities of La Paz, El Alto, Oruro, and Cochabamba, and in the tropics, Santa Cruz.

For its entire post-Conquest existence, Bolivia has survived through one principal export: first the silver from the mountain of Potosì that made the Spanish Golden Age possible; rubber from the Amazon region; then tin from the mines of Potosì and Oruro; coca paste for cocaine, briefly; and now gas from subterranean reserves that are estimated to be the second-largest in South America.

More here.

From Slate:

In August 2003, 30-year-old Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad and asked the British Foreign Office for a job. The Farsi-speaking former diplomat soon found himself appointed deputy governor of Maysan province in southern Iraq. His new book, The Prince of the Marshes, describes his experiences in Maysan and Nasiriyah. This week we are publishing five excerpts from the book detailing episodes from Stewart’s early days in Maysan, as he attempted to understand the system, the region, and the players, particularly tribal leader Karim Mahood Hattab, the “Prince of the Marshes.”

Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2003
If the province was to remain reasonably quiet, I believed I would have to build a close relationship with the Prince of the Marshes and since I had failed to make an impression in his house, I invited him to my office. He drove his small Japanese car right into the compound—no one dared to search him—parked beside an armored personnel carrier, returned the policeman’s salute and strode down the path, lifting his fine gold-braided cloak out of the dust.

More here.

Alex Chadwick at NPR:

Renowned wildlife photographer Frans Lanting has unveiled a new project with an unexpected new partner — acclaimed American composer Philip Glass. Their collaboration is Life: A Journey Through Time, a multimedia presentation that’s a feast for both the eyes and ears.

The genesis of the project was sparked years ago while Lanting was taking pictures of horseshoe crabs — a life form that has remained basically unchanged over hundreds of millions of years. Lanting realized that the creatures offer a window into the past, and that there exist many other examples of how time tempers the shape of life on Earth, and how the Earth is in turn changed by the life it harbors.

More here.

James C. McLane III in The Space Review:

To put a human on Mars within the lifetime of America’s current generation, only one scheme is feasible, and this feasible concept challenges our traditional thinking about risk and the value of life. The mission must be a one-way trip. It’s possible that the crew might consist of only one person. For the first manned landing on Mars, there can be no provision for the space traveler to return to Earth. We should call such a solo mission the “Spirit of the Lone Eagle” in honor of Charles Lindbergh, the original “Lone Eagle” who flew solo across the Atlantic. The manned Mars mission (which could be arranged to occur in 2017, just 90 years after Lindbergh’s famous flight) will require a person of special ability who can accept a great challenge.

Return to Earth from the Martian surface is a daunting technical problem for which current technology offers no obvious solution. Realistically, there aren’t even any schemes based on futuristic technology that are likely to be perfected within the next 20 years. When we eliminate the need to launch off Mars, we remove the mission’s most daunting obstacle. Huge engineering challenges remain, but without a Mars launch, we can reasonably expect to devise a program that may be accomplished within the scope of current technology.

More here.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein at Edge:

Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a thing of inestimable worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and compassion. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it in the 17th century, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a godless immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out to create a government the likes of which had never before been seen on this earth.

Spinoza’s dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem hopelessly quixotic at this moment, with religion-infested politics on the march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our sorry world would have been without it.

More here.

Philip Nobel in the New York Times:

From afar — say across the plastic-shrouded expanse of a Manhattan hotel lobby, under construction and crowded with architects, builders, photographers, a documentary film crew and associated hangers-on — Julian Schnabel looks a lot like Philippe Starck. He moves the same way, parting the crowd with a brooding glance when in private thought, or drawing it to him (and then dispatching it with new purpose) when he has a point to make. Mr. Schnabel, the painter, sculptor, director of films and creator of music, shares an impatient intensity, a commanding bulk and a guru’s ineffable charisma with Mr. Starck, the legendary French designer of everything from ear swabs to spaceports. They even have the same wild hair.

The work that recently brought Mr. Schnabel to the chaotic center of the lobby in question marks another point of overlap with Mr. Starck: both have now designed the design-intensive interiors of Ian Schrager hotels.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In May, the London’s Science Museum’s Dana Café played host to a unique event in which writers were invited to meet and talk with four leading scientists about their research. The participants were then invited to write a short story that touched on some of the science they had heard about, and enter it into the Subtle Science Short Story challenge, a competition judged by a panel led by the author and former writer-in-residence at the Science Museum, Lavinia Greenlaw.

The entries were assessed on the skill with which they combined scientific ideas or settings with elegant, high-quality writing. Here are the winners.

Alexis Clements has been writing fiction for several years and is currently working towards a masters in philosophy and history of science at the London School of Economics. In her story, the actions of the unnamed narrator and her partner in the field of research science are given ominous resonance through the fact that they are never fully disclosed.
Lane Ashfeldt has had her short fiction featured in the 2005 anthology Tell Tales II, and is currently completing her first novel. Her story considers the working lives of scientists.

More here.

From Nature:

For some people, it just takes a taste of peanut to induce a sudden and possibly fatal allergic reaction. Now researchers have unpicked the mechanism behind this anaphylactic shock, and have managed to protect mice against the condition. Many allergic reactions settle down of their own accord, or respond to antihistamine treatment. Should severe anaphylactic shock kick in, however, the only effective treatment is a quick injection of adrenaline (epinephrine). “The adrenaline contracts blood vessels and increases heart rate, combating low blood pressure. But it doesn’t interfere with the mechanism of the anaphylactic shock.”

That mechanism, however, has been a bit of a mystery. An allergic reaction occurs when an allergen, such as a peanut protein, triggers the release of histamines and other molecules that cause swellings and pain. But the biochemical pathways that then lead to severe anaphylactic shock have been unknown. Previous research in mice, which have a similar immune system to humans, had hinted that extreme amounts of nitric oxide (NO) throughout the body might be responsible. So Brouckaert and colleagues took a closer look. They induced anaphylactic shock in mice in two ways: by injecting a molecule to deliberately lower blood pressure, and by creating an allergic reaction much like that experienced in humans.

By injecting nitric-oxide blockers into some of the mice before attempting to give them anaphylactic shock, the researchers were able to confirm that nitric oxide was indeed the culprit. But, they report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, it was coming from an unexpected source.

More here.

No situation can continue to exist for long without an ideological reason. That’s how when once it was clear that it was not achieving its aims, an unsuccessful military campaign was upgraded with the wave of a magic wand to the level of a war of survival. When everyone understood that a moral reason had to be found both for the dimensions of the destruction sowed in Lebanon and the killing of the civilian population there, and for the Israeli dead and wounded (nobody is even talking about the exposure of the entire civilian population in the North of Israel to enemy fire while people are kept in disgraceful conditions in bomb shelters), a war of survival was invented, which by nature must be long and exhausting.

That is how a campaign of collective punishment that was begun in haste, without proper judgment and on the basis of incorrect assessments, including promises that the army is incapable of fulfilling, turned into a war of life and death, if not some kind of second War of Independence. In the press there have even been embarrassing comparisons to the struggle against Nazism, comparisons that are not only a crude distortion of history, but disgrace the memory of the Jews who were exterminated.

more from Ze’ev Sternhell at Haaretz here.

It is the details that delight. Donne hated milk. Mortally sick, about to celebrate his death by sitting for his portrait in a shroud, he was urged by his doctor that “by Cordials, and drinking milk twenty days together, there was a probability of his restoration to health”. Donne would have none of it. The doctor (a Dr Fox, son of the author of the ‘Boke of Martyrs’) insisted that his patient should at least try. Donne thereupon drank milk — but for ten days only. Then he told Dr Fox that he would not drink the stuff for another ten days even “upon the best moral assurance of having twenty years added to his life”.

more from Literary Review here.

TEL AVIV—Where is Hassan Nasrallah? On Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s most popular satire show, the elusive Hezbollah leader suddenly bursts into the news studio, shimmying with Israeli folk dancers and baffling news anchors by showing off his talent as a crooner. “What, don’t you understand?’’ asks an actor playing the Shiite cleric turned televangelist. “I was born to be on television! I’m a ratings magnet! I’m the biggest star you’ve had!” The sketch is less a lampoon of some crazy foreign leader than a statement about Israelis’ burgeoning national neurosis. Since the beginning of a conflict that has so far driven a million Israelis into bomb shelters, Sheik Nasrallah—to an extent unequalled by any other figure in the Arab world—has become a national anti-star.

more from the NY Observer here.

“In 1936, Fortune magazine sent the young writer James Agee to rural Alabama to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of “honest journalism” (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity, of social fearlessness, for money and for a reputation for crusading and unbias which, when skillfully enough qualified , is exchangeable at any bank for money . . . .”

The sentence, which contains eight more lines of caustic self-questioning, gives a good idea of why Agee’s magazine article and subsequent book were rejected by the editors who had contracted for them. Prefaced by more than sixty black-and-white photographs of chastening starkness by Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee’s study of three white sharecropping families, was published in 1941 and sold 600 copies. Reprinted in 1960, it came to be heralded as an ancestor of the New Journalism of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

more from the TLS here.

Delong looks at the worsening journalistic ethics of The New Republic, a magazine I haven’t been able to stomach in forever, and links to this claim in a piece by Second Lt. John Renehan in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education.

In 2004, shortly before I left for basic training, The New Republic ran a piece in which Peter Beinart, then the magazine’s editor, bemoaned the increasingly narrow demographics of those who serve and the consequent emergence of ‘two countries’ — one that serves, and a second, more-affluent one that thinks of service as a thing done by other Americans. Notably, Beinart admitted his own mixed feelings on being a member of the nonserving elite, wondering aloud what he might say when a child of his someday asks, ‘What did you do in the terror war, Daddy?’

Impressed, I wrote a letter to Beinart praising his frankness and noting my own decision to join the military — one prompted by similar callings of conscience. Then I offered him what I called a ‘public-spirited challenge’: One of The New Republic’s own should serve, and the magazine should write about it…It was a naïve sort of thing to write. My girlfriend took a look at the letter and said, ‘You know they’re never going to print this, don’t you?’ I did. But they did print it — with a notable omission. My ‘public-spirited challenge’ had been excised, leaving only praise for Beinart.

Delong goes on to wonder:

You know, if I had been sitting in Peter Beinart’s chair in June of 2004 and somebody had brought this proposed letter edit to me, I would have said: “We can’t do this. This is not moral. This substantially changes the points that the author of the letter was trying to make. We either preserve the author’s main points, or we don’t print the letter at all.” I would have gone to say: “Moreover, this would be stupid. Technology is changing very fast. If I were the author of the letter and if we posted this truncated version, I would be seriously pissed. It’s likely that the author’s being pissed will end up on the internet someday, in which case crazed persons in bathrobes accessing search engines will then be able to use it to give this magazine a real black eye.”

From The Village Voice:

What would our lives would be like if Dada’s radically anarchic aesthetic had taken over? Would people be proclaiming abstract sound poetry on street corners? Would they wander about, like the notoriously free-spirited Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, bizarrely arrayed in pilfered goods and castoffs—a bra made of two tin cans tied with string, rows of curtain-ring bracelets pinched from Woolworth’s, a bustle of electric lights? Perhaps they’d hole up, like Kurt Schwitters building his Merzbau, an installation cobbled together from bits of urban and natural detritus. Perhaps every public gathering would become a provocation.

Dada Triumphs!, a 1920 photocollage by Raoul Hausmann, includes a map with the word “DADA” emblazoned across the northern hemisphere, announcing this movement’s vast territorial ambitions.

More here.

From Commentary:

The more our health depends on their little pills, the more we seem to hate big drug companies. In The Constant Gardener (2000), John le Carré assigns to the pharmaceutical industry the role played by the KGB in his earlier novels. A villainous pharmaceutical company is using Kenya as a testing ground for a lethally defective drug, and people who find out about it die, too. Four recent, non-fiction indictments of the industry tell a similar story. Conflating the four into one, one might title them collectively How Big Pharma Deceives, Endangers, and Rips Us Off, with the Complicity of Doctors.

Two of these books are by former editors of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Slamming the drug companies, Marcia Angell argues that Big Pharma, as it has come to be called, “uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the U.S. Congress, the Food and Drug Administration, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.” Slamming the medical profession, academics, and professional organizations, Jerome P. Kassirer, Angell’s former boss, labels them Big Pharma’s “whores.”

More here.