Any day now Craig Venter – geneticist, yachtsman and Vietnam veteran – will announce that he has achieved one of the greatest feats in science: the creation of artificial life. He talks to Ed Pilkington.

From The Guardian:

For a room in which one of the most astonishing experiments in modern science is being conducted, the laboratory in the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is understated. It is divided into wooden workstations reminiscent of a school science lab. There are stacks of glass test tubes and pipettes, and one wall is lined with air-controlled boxes containing Petri dishes. Petri dishes! The mere sight of them sparks memories of interminable, soporific biology lessons.

But there is nothing soporific about what is going on inside these Petri dishes. If all goes according to plan – and the full expectation is that it will – their surface will bloom imminently with an array of small white spots that will herald a giant leap in scientific and human potential. Each spot will contain up to 10m bacterial cells, and in each cell there will be a chromosome that has been painstakingly stitched together by humans from lab-made chemicals.

In short, those schoolboy Petri dishes will contain the first artificial life form ever created.

Casting a paternal eye over the proceedings, like an expectant father pacing the delivery room, is the imposing figure of Craig Venter – the scientist variously described as a rebel, maverick, outsider, and the Bono of genetics.

More here.

“This is the kind of reporting we so desperately need: free of false bravura, free of agenda, free of inflated urgency. Gilbertson … shows us personally and incontrovertibly what it has been like for him coming of age in Iraq during the last five years.

“For this reason, the book belongs less with other histories of the war than on the same shelf with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This is not trumped-up news coming live from Iraq but the straight story with harrowing snapshots of the American soul. When future generations look back and wonder where we went wrong, where we failed ourselves and them, it will not be hours of television and radio broadcasts that they pore over. It will be a select few texts, and Gilbertson’s book deserves to be one of them.”

Ted Genoways, Mother Jones

More here.

Via American Scientist:

MIT’s OpenCourseWare project began in 1999, when provost Robert Brown charged the school’s Council on Education Technology with finding a space in the distance learning market. Spearheaded by computer science professor Hal Abelson, the project launched a pilot site in 2002 with 32 courses, and a year later the university published its 500th course online. Today the total count approaches 2,000.

The initiative, which provides reading lists, lecture notes, homework assignments and sometimes even streamed video lectures, stops well short of providing a full free MIT degree, but it supports the school’s mission to advance knowledge and to serve the nation and the world.

It’s an amazingly rich and generous resource. Users can access the courses online, download them for offline use, adopt them as teaching resources and even modify and redistribute them (noncommercially, and with credit). The course list ranges from history and literature to statistical thermodynamics and computational geometry—nearly all the courses in the catalog—and many are even offered in translation. MIT’s program is a leader in the open educational resource movement, which seeks to create a global intellectual commons, and it’s an example to be admired.

Browse the courses here.

Ruchira Paul in Shunya’s Notes:

The history of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in North America….is widely believed to be of relatively recent vintage.  Until now I was under the impression that the earliest group of small but ethnically significant number of Indians to settle in the US were the Sikh farmers of Yuba valley in central California in the early part of the twentieth century. The next wave of Indians (and Pakistanis) to arrive were mostly doctors, scientists and other professionals in the 1960s when immigration laws were loosened to admit more non-Europeans into the US. Since then Indians have emigrated to the US in steady numbers, their demographics changing gradually to include small businessmen, financiers, bankers and IT personnel. Unlike some other groups of immigrants who have fled their countries due to dangerous political / ethnic /religious strifes, Indian immigration to the US has been and continues to be voluntary – largely undertaken for economic reasons. Until now I was not aware of “involuntary” transportation of south Asians to America. It was therefore extremely surprising to discover that Asian Indians were present in American colonies as early as the beginning of the 17th century, brought here by British colonists as their indentured servants or personal slaves.

More here.

Daniel Titinger in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

I explain that few people are even aware that Suriname exists, yet, far away, kicking a ball about the firmament where the stars of European soccer shine, Edgar Davids, Patrick Kluivert, Clarence Seedorf, Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard are famous names. They have Suriname in their past, but the jerseys they wear, or did wear, are Dutch. Suriname doesn’t have much, but the gods of today wear shorts, kick balls, and bask in the aura of the flat screen: Who in Europe hasn’t seen Davids, Kluivert, Seedorf, Gullit or Rijkaard on tv? There are countries twice the size of Suriname without half its number of celebrity names. Those who do know Suriname know it only because somewhere they heard its key legend: Suriname produces soccer players the way Venezuela produces oil.

The planet is a ball, I explain, and its movements are governed by strange laws. Why does Suriname produce brilliant soccer players? Why is there no professional soccer in Suriname? It’s hard to say. If the legend’s true, Suriname sires gods who are worshipped in the stadiums of Holland. However, the soccer back home is strictly amateur and no better known than Suriname itself. This could be the country’s greatest paradox: its prize exports kick soccer balls and carry Dutch passports. If these sons of Suriname were true ambassadors for their home country, the nation would shed its anonymity on the strength of what it no longer owns.

More here.

Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:

Die-hard fans of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series—the randy, highbrow hordes who storm bookstores for midnight-release parties dressed in Zuckerman’s signature turtleneck and loafers—should prepare to be heartbroken. In Exit Ghost, the series finale, Roth kills off everyone’s favorite character: the upstanding hero of his entire oeuvre, divining rod of his fictional vision, gushing fountainhead of the famous vitality, pulsing column of strength at the center of his books’ elaborate architecture, perpetually pumping piston of his ever-thrusting narrative engine—the main vein, if you will, of the author’s fully engorged imagination. But before I get myself blocked by your spam filter, let me just whip it out: Zuckerman’s mighty penis, conqueror of professional ballerinas and Hollywood beauties, is dead. After 71 years, literature’s most venerable tube steak has been reduced to “a spigot of wrinkled flesh.” The shaft has been given the shaft. There had of course been hints that this was coming—we knew he’d had prostate surgery—but nothing so vividly final as this…

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

For most American fans of classic Western cinema, Delmer Davies’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) is simply a cult favorite, one recently rescued from obscurity by the $55 million remake that is packing multiplexes from coast to coast. In Cuba, however, the original 3:10 to Yuma has had a major impact on everyday conversation. Take a walk down any of Havana’s main thoroughfares and you’ll hear American visitors hailed as yumas, while the United States itself is affectionately dubbed La Yuma. You won’t find those phrases in any state-issued dictionary, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro stubbornly opts for the more derisive yanqui in his own public speeches, but outside of bureaucratic circles it’s yuma that holds sway.

How on earth did this happen?

more from Slate here.

Why is hot so hot? The conventional explanation is that the nation has an increasingly adventurous palate. Immigration and prosperity have made Americans more sophisticated eaters, pushing wasabi peas into the mainstream, along with chili-Thai lime cashews, cayenne chocolate bars, and other high-octane combinations.

But some food scientists and market researchers think there is a more surprising reason for the broad nationwide shift toward bolder flavors: The baby boomers, that huge, youth-chasing, all-important demographic, are getting old. As they age, they are losing their ability to taste – and turning to spicier, higher-flavor foods to overcome their dulled senses.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Science:

In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers–women who work in strip joints and, for cash, gyrate in the laps of seated men–earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear.

Women, unlike many mammals, don’t come into heat or estrus, a state of obvious fertility that attracts potential mates. Common wisdom has it that estrus was lost as humans evolved. The notion is that women evolved “concealed ovulation” along with around-the-month sexual receptivity the better to manipulate males by keeping them in the dark, says Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. But now Miller and colleagues have found evidence that a woman’s state of fertility may not be so secret after all.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, have spent 14 years observing the Moremi baboons. Through ingenious playback experiments performed by themselves and colleagues, the researchers say they have worked out many aspects of what baboons use their minds for, along with their limitations. Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”

Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth are well known for a 1990 book on vervet monkeys, “How Monkeys See the World,” in which they showed how much about the animals’ mental processes could be deduced from careful experiments. When a baby vervet’s call is played to three females, for instance, the mother looks to the source of the sound. The two others look to the mother, evidence that vervets know whose baby is whose.

More here.

Jane Bown. Torrey Canyon disaster, Cornwall, 1967.

Photograph.

More and here and here.

Christopher de Bellaigue in the New York Review of Books:

It is now clear that Turkey, a country to which Western visitors have often applied adjectives such as “timeless” and “slothful,” is changing profoundly, and with un-Oriental speed. To the many Turks who welcome this transformation, it holds out the promise of a free public culture, equally open to devout Muslims, secularists, and critics of Turkey’s past politics—something the country has never known. A smaller but nonetheless considerable number see the changes as a Trojan horse for Islamism as severe as one finds in Iran or Saudi Arabia. These two views come into sharp conflict on the subject of Abdullah Gül, whom the Turkish parliament recently elected president.

Abdullah Gül is a conscientious Muslim. He says his prayers and observes the Ramadan fast. His wife appears in public with a silk scarf wound tightly around her head. Although he was once associated with Islamism of a rather virulent kind and was a member of the Welfare Party, whose stated goal was to challenge Turkey’s secular traditions, Gül gives the impression of having mellowed. As foreign minister in the mildly Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan from 2003 until his election to the presidency, Gül directed his energies mainly at promoting Turkey’s claims to EU membership. As president, he has promised to safeguard Turkey’s secular regime.

More here.

John Derbyshire in The Wilson Quarterly:

Who is the greatest mathematician of all time? In 1937, Eric Temple Bell, the most widely read historian and biographer of mathematics, placed Archi­medes, Isaac Newton, and Karl Friedrich Gauss at the top of the list, adding, “It is not for ordinary mortals to attempt to arrange [these three] in order of merit.” This judgment, widely known among mathematicians, stirred a protest in 1997 from Charlie Marion and William Dunham in Mathematics Magazine. The protest was in eight stanzas of verse, of which the fourth and fifth ­read:

Without the Bard of Basel, Bell,
You’ve clearly dropped the ­ball.
Our votes are cast for Euler, ­L.
Whose Opera says it ­all.

Six dozen ­volumes—­what a feat!
Profound and deep ­throughout.
Does Leonhard rank with the ­elite?
Of this there is no ­doubt.

Marion and Dunham were paying tribute to the mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83), one of the great yet little-known figures from Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. Euler’s discoveries continue to influence such disparate fields as computer networking, harmonics, and statistical analysis, and they did nothing less than transform pure mathematics. Children still learn Euler’s lessons in school. It was Euler, for instance, who gave the name i to the square root of –1. To mark his tercentenary, admirers are holding symposiums, concerts, and a two-week Euler tour, which will stop in St. Petersburg and Berlin, the two cities where he spent his working life, as well as Basel, Switzerland, the city of his birth. There is even an Euler comic book, A Man to Be Reckoned With, in German and English editions.

More here.

D. T. Max in the New York Times Magazine:

When you think of England, Rupert Redesdale is who you think of. He has a slanting forehead, a nose shaped like an adze and the pink face of an aristocrat from the Georgian era. But in fact his family is far older: it is one of five in Britain that can trace its roots directly back to William the Conqueror, the last successful invader of England, in 1066. “Our original name was Bertram,” he told me recently. “We were Normans.” Redesdale, a 40-year-old baron, can stand on a Northumberland hilltop and see the Rede Valley, with the Rede River running through it. He is able to say things like, “Our family had a castle in Mitford, but Robert the Bruce, the sod, knocked it down.”

I first met Lord Redesdale one day in August in the Lake District, about 80 miles southwest of his home in the Rede Valley. The Lake District, in the north of England, is on the front lines of a new Hundred Years’ War. It is a war between rodents. Since the 19th century, gray squirrels, an American import, have been overtaking Britain’s native red squirrels and claiming their territory.

More here.

Via NoUtopia.com:

Machines
Michael Donaghy

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsicord pavane by Purcell
And the racer’s twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell’s chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsicordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

PD Smith on Ted Nield’s Supercontinent, a book that shows us a world in which 250 million years is but the blink of an eye.

From The Guardian:

Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) grew up in Ripon, a part of Yorkshire blessed with a unique but rather alarming geology. Deep vertical pits are liable to appear without warning in the ground, swallowing up homes and gardens in seconds. It is quite possible that the memory of these holes inspired Alice’s fictional fall “down, down, down” the seemingly bottomless rabbit hole. After all, as Ted Nield points out, Carroll’s fantasy was originally titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. But Nield’s real interest lies in geology, not literature. Why, he asks, are the rocks of Ripon so prone to sudden collapse? To answer this, you have to drive out of Ripon and head west to the Pennines, the backbone of England. Gradually the fertile fields with their oak trees and hedgerows give way to moorland from where you can look down across the lowlands to Ripon. If you take a walk up the heathery slopes and stand on a rough lump of millstone grit, says Nield, “you are climbing the exhumed topography of Pangaea”.

Pangaea was the supercontinent that existed 250 million years ago. Our present continents are all that is left of this landmass: “the world we see today is no more than Pangaea’s smashed remains, the fragments of the dinner plate that dropped on the floor.” If you had stood on that same piece of millstone grit 250 million years ago, behind you would lie not the Pennines but 2,500 miles of mountain and desert that one day will be North America.

More here.

[Ted Hughes had started an affair with Assia Wevill around the time of his separation from Sylvia Plath in late summer, 1962. David Wevill, a Canadian poet, was her husband] Assia, I tried to ring you this morning. I wanted to see you. Nothing we said the other day was right.

If you & David are going to part, it must be easier for both of you now, than after a month more of general misery.

As things are, it is bad for all of us. If you come to me, David suffers.

If you go to him, you suffer, and does he stop suffering? I don’t see how it can make him happy again, just to hand yourself over to him as a prisoner or a body, unless he’s not at all concerned how you are feeling, and quite happy to have you even against your will.

more from the Telegraph here.

A tiny, slender woman with long hair tied back in a ponytail, regal posture, a shrewd expression and a forceful walk swept through the Pierre Matisse Gallery, an entourage of young men trailing behind her. She was dressed in black, and her presence acted on the room like a bolt of electricity. “Who is that?” I asked my husband. “Louise Bourgeois.” “Oh, of course,” I answered. A couple of years earlier, in 1982, the Museum of Modern Art had mounted a major show of her work. Curated by Deborah Wye, the exhibition brought the 71-year-old Bourgeois, who had been showing painting and sculpture in New York since the 40s, into the art-world limelight.

more from The Guardian here.

From Wired News:

Since 1974, Nikon has sponsored a yearly photo competition for images that delve into the worlds beyond the reach of the unaided human eye. The $3,000 first prize in Nikon’s 2007 Small World competition goes to Gloria Kwon of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York. Kwon’s composite image of a mouse embryo, captured in both visible and ultraviolet light, reveals the inherent biochemical differences between the embryo (fluorescent red) and its yolk sac (highlighter green).

The dozen images collected here (the top 10 images, plus two Wired News picks) capture facets of living organisms that have a technical meaning to the trained specialist, but appear to be pure art to the layperson.

More here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Himal Southasian:

Many of us in the left, particularly in Southasia, have chosen to understand the rise of violent Islamic fundamentalism as a response to poverty, unemployment, poor access to justice, lack of educational opportunities, corruption, loss of faith in the political system, or the sufferings of peasants and workers. As partial truths, these are indisputable. Those condemned to living a life with little hope and happiness are indeed vulnerable to calls from religious demagogues who offer a happy hereafter in exchange for unquestioning obedience.

American imperialism is also held responsible. This, too, is a partial truth. Stung by the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States lashed out against Muslims almost everywhere. America’s neoconservatives thought that cracking the whip would surely bring the world to order. Instead, the opposite happened. Islamists won massively in Iraq after a war waged on fraudulent grounds by a superpower filled with hubris, arrogance and ignorance. ‘Shock and Awe’ is now turning into ‘Cut and Run’. The US is leaving behind a snake pit, from which battle-hardened terrorists are stealthily making their way to countries around the world. Polls show that the US has become one of the most unpopular countries in the world, and that, in many places, George W Bush is more disliked than Osama bin Laden. Most Muslims see an oil-greedy America, in collusion with Israel, as a crusader force occupying a historic centre of Islamic civilisation. Al-Qaeda rejoices. Its mission was to convince Muslims that the war was between Islam and unbelief. Today it brags: We told you so!

More here.