From Nature:

So what kinds of enhancement are people thinking about?

There was a talk at this conference on ‘virtue engineering’ by James Hughes of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Hartford, Connecticut. He spoke about the idea of using technology to enhance moral behaviour. A lot of people have trouble with impulse control, for example, and they might benefit from pharmaceutical help.

In the context of marriage, an interesting possibility is the use of pharmaceuticals to regulate the pair-bonding mechanism. There are a small number of hormones, such as vasopressin and oxytocin, that might help us form bonds with others. It could be possible to prevent the levels of these chemicals from trailing off, and to infuse romance into fading marriages — like a technological form of counselling.

More here.

“Robert Hughes, the celebrated art critic reveals how his life was deeply scarred by the dark side of the Swinging Sixties.”

From the London Times:

When I was 28, an Australian living in late Sixties London, I launched into a marriage that brought me, along with early episodes of great delight and even a small ration of enlightenment, the most extreme and durable misery I had ever felt.

Her name was Danne: Danne Patricia Emerson. For a long time I believed I could not possibly exist without her; that there was no other woman on earth who could offer me the same sexual and emotional intensity. Erratically and episodically, she cherished the same fantasy about me.

And it was just that: a mutual fantasy. If there was ever a misalliance between two emotionally hypercharged and wolfishly immature people, it was our marriage. I was as unsuited to her as she was to me. The result was a disaster so complete that even now, 40 years and two marriages later, I shudder inwardly when I think about it, though I can’t and wouldn’t deny that we had some good times together — at first.

More here.

Greg Ross at American Scientist:

Oscar Wilde said, “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” But how do we learn where to draw these lines? It’s commonly understood that moral rules are instilled in church, school and home, but Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser believes that they have a deeper source—an unconscious, built-in “moral grammar” that drives our judgments of right and wrong.

Widely known for his studies of animal cognition (see “What Do Animals Think About Numbers?” in the March-April 2000 American Scientist), Hauser has long been intrigued by the nature of human moral judgment (interested readers can take his Web-based Moral Sense Test). He says the human sense of right and wrong, which evolved over millions of years, precedes our conscious judgments and emotions, providing a hidden engine of moral intuition that’s shared by people around the world. “Our moral instincts are immune to the explicitly articulated commandments handed down by religions and governments,” he writes. “Sometimes our moral intuitions will converge with those that culture spells out, and sometimes they will diverge.” In Moral Minds (Ecco, available August 22) Hauser draws ideas from the social and natural sciences, philosophy and the law to support his own findings for an unconscious moral instinct.

More here.

From the Boston Review:

Deadline: October 1, 2006
Judge: George Saunders
First Prize: $1,000

Complete guidelines: The winning author will receive $1,000 and have his or her work published in the May/June 2007 issue of Boston Review. Stories should not exceed 4,000 words and must be previously unpublished. Manuscripts should be submitted with a cover note listing the author’s name, address, and phone number; names should not appear on the stories themselves. Note that simultaneous submissions are not eligible. A $20 processing fee ($30 for international submissions), payable to Boston Review in the form of a check or money order, must accompany each story entered. Entrants will receive a one-year print subscription to the Review beginning with the May/June 2007 issue. Submissions must be postmarked no later than October 1, 2006. Manuscripts will not be returned. The winner will be announced no later than May 1, 2007, on the Boston Review Web site.

Get more info and read winning stories from previous years here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Like many parasites, a species of bacteria called Wolbachia takes charge of its own fate. Wolbachia can only survive inside the cells of its hosts–invertebrates such as this lovely common eggfly. This way of life limits Wolbachia’s opportunities for long-term survival. If Wolbachia lives inside a female insect, it can infect her eggs. When those eggs hatch and mature into adult insects, they will be infected by Wolbachia as well. But if Wolbachia should find itself in a male, it has reached a dead end. It cannot infect sperm cells, and thus it has no escape from a male host. When a male host dies, Wolbachia dies as well.

Wolbachia’s solution: kill the males before they kill you.

More here.

Maureen Freely in the New York Times Book Review:

Elif Shafak is a Turkish novelist who has spent much of her life in Europe and the United States. She fills her books with characters who defy all orthodoxy, and in her journalism she lives by the same code, mixing feminism and nuanced political analysis with a deep interest in Ottoman culture. She has been much criticized by literary purists for using words of Arabic and Persian origin that the reformers of the early republic worked so hard to expunge, and for drawing on Sufi traditions that continue to inform popular culture 80 years after those same reformers banned Turkey’s dervish sects. She has a particular genius for depicting backstreet Istanbul, where the myriad cultures of the Ottoman Empire are still in tangled evidence on every family tree…

In February 2005, when Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous novelist, said in passing to a Swiss journalist that “a million Armenians had been killed in these lands, and I am the only one who talks about it,” he was branded a traitor and prosecuted for “denigrating Turkishness.” Shafak must have known that she was risking the same, as she has frequently challenged Turkey’s treatment of its minorities.

More here.

Like Salman Rushdie and John Irving, authors who have broken ranks to support him in his hour of outcry, Günter Grass is a fabulist. He is, with his flounder and snail and fizz powder and drumsticks, both Aesop and Marquez, with a touch of deSade. He wraps his heroes in fetish like a costumer with extra velveteen.

This is his gift to literature—an unwavering devotion to myth. His gift to cultural conscience is a frank application of those myths against the ills of society. For anyone to be shocked to learn that Grass was once less controlled in his embrace of ancient calls, fabulous and taboo, is to display an ignorance of his work or of human nature or both.

Betrayal, also, is an emotion of curious origin in this matter. I’m hesitant to comment on how Grass’s generation might feel about what could be a surprising unmasking, for their collective experience is not mine. I do find, however, among all the responses—journalistic, analytical, and vituperative—that those that ring truest are those that remind us that a small inner circle knew of Grass’s secret long ago. And did not raise a hue and cry.

But the silence! insist the critics, unwavering in their condemnation. And I wonder what a half-century of silence does to the coda of a scream. Call it an occupational perversion, but some of us consider the mortal and moral flaws seen in this affair as the crux of a great character—fictional or non. And yes, we are all the more eager to hear Grass break his loudmouth silence and show us the peeled onion.

more from Elizabeth Kiem at The Morning News here.

The prime duty of the ancient Mayan kings was to assume the mantle of the gods, especially the Maize God, and through ecstatic dancing to spark a yearly rebirth of fertility. For the Maya, a good harvest was crucial, and the paraphernalia connected with these rituals — stelae, vessels, ornaments, murals and more, now on display in “Treasures of the Maya Kings” at the Metropolitan Museum — were of the highest significance.

Focusing on the many symbols of cosmic power and supernatural might, “Treasures of the Maya Kings” includes items that are spare and elegant, like small jadeite masks, and others that are more robust, like a limestone divination figure (150-350 AD) in which a king is in the midst of transforming himself into a jaguar, his animal spirit companion. What the pieces all share is a pulsing energy.

more from Artnet Magazine here (just saw this exhibit, worth seeing).

Peruse an 1814 sketchbook by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and eventually you’ll come across a bashful, wide-eyed octopus. You’d never guess that the innocent creature leads a secret life of debauchery. But a few years later, there he is on a woodblock print, still wide-eyed, now presented by Hokusai in a moment of infamous passion�his bulbous head pushed between the legs of a young woman, delivering a rather well-received session of cunnilingis. Hilarious and startling, it’s just one example of the explicit shunga, or “pictures of spring,” in an exhibition at the Museum of Sex surveying four centuries of Japan’s cartoonish pornography.

more from the Village Voice here.

The Fields Medal has indeed gone to Grigory Perelman for his solution to the Poincaré conjecture. He’s pulled a Sartre and has declined the award. Andrei Okounkov of Princeton, Terence Tao of UCLA (age 31) and Wendelin Werner of the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay also won Fields Medals, which are awarded every four years.

Grigory Perelman, a reclusive Russian mathematician who solved a key piece in a century-old puzzle known as the Poincaré conjecture, was one of four mathematicians awarded the Fields Medal today.

But Dr. Perelman refused to accept the medal, as he has other honors, and he did not attend the ceremonies at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

Dr. Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, which is holding the conference, told The Associated Press that he did not think Dr. Perelman’s decision to turn down the award was intended as a snub. “I am sure he did not mean it that way,” he said.

And in the BBC:

Perelman gained international in 2002 and 2003 when he published two papers online that purported to solve the Poincare Conjecture.

The riddle had perplexed mathematicians since it was first posited by Frenchman Henri Poincare in 1904.

It is a central question in topology, the study of the geometrical properties of objects that do not change when the they are stretched, distorted or shrunk.

The hollow shell of the surface of the Earth is what topologists call a two-dimensional sphere. If one were to encircle it with a lasso of string, it could be pulled tight to a point.

On the surface of a doughnut however, a lasso passing through the hole in the centre cannot be shrunk to a point without cutting through the surface meaning that spheres and doughnuts are different from a topological point of view.

Since the 19th Century, mathematicians have known that the sphere is the only enclosed two-dimensional space with this property. But they were uncertain about objects with more dimensions.

The Poincare Conjecture says that a three-dimensional sphere is the only enclosed three-dimensional space with no holes. But proof of the conjecture has so far eluded mathematicians.

Günter Grass’s revelation that he was in the Waffen-SS has created a small tempest. Norman Birnbaum in The Nation:

What Grass did is clear. He has just published an autobiography of his youthful years, Peeling the Onion. For years he maintained that he was drafted as an ordinary conscript, that he had been wounded fighting against the advancing Soviet Army and taken prisoner by the United States. (He recalled being in prison camp with another member of his generation, Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI.) Now, Grass identifies the unit into which he was conscripted in 1944 at age 17 as the Tenth SS Armored Division, the “Jorg von Frundsberg” Division. He describes the SS formations as having a European aura: Volunteers from other European nations joined them “in saving the west from the Bolshevik tide.” He added, “so it was said”–but at the time he was not skeptical. He was attracted by Nazism’s war on bourgeois routine, its own version of permanent revolution. In fact, he had tried unsuccessfully to join the submarine fleet earlier. He described the historic figure after whom the SS division was named as a leader in the sixteenth-century Peasants’ War–a freedom fighter. He was actually a mercenary in princely service against the peasants, and it is grotesque that Grass should describe him as if he were a forerunner of Che Guevara. Jens Jessen of Die Zeit, the German weekly, has it right: Grass was a Nazi of the left.

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance has a great post detailing evidence for dark matter.

What we really want is to take a big cluster of galaxies and simply sweep away all of the ordinary matter. Dark matter, by hypothesis, doesn’t interact directly with ordinary matter, so we can imagine moving the ordinary stuff while leaving the dark stuff behind. If we then check back and determine where the gravity is, it should be pointing either at the left-behind dark matter (if there is such a thing) or still at the ordinary matter (if not).

Happily, the universe has done exactly this for us. In the Bullet Cluster, more formally known as 1E 0657-56, we actually find two clusters of galaxies that have (relatively) recently passed right through each other. It turns out that the large majority (about 90%) of ordinary matter in a cluster is not in the galaxies themselves, but in hot X-ray emitting intergalactic gas. As the two clusters passed through each other, the hot gas in each smacked into the gas in the other, while the individual galaxies and the dark matter (presumed to be collisionless) passed right through. Here’s an mpeg animation of what we think happened. As hinted at in last week’s NASA media advisory, astrophysicists led by Doug Clowe (Arizona) and Maxim Markevitch (CfA) have now compared images of the gas obtained by the Chandra X-ray telescope to “maps” of the gravitational field deduced from weak lensing observations. Their paper is available here in pdf, and will appear on astro-ph this evening. And the answer is: there’s definitely dark matter there!

From The New York Times:

“To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said Kaysar Ridha, 26, of Irvine, Calif., a recent favorite of fans of the popular CBS reality series “Big Brother.” “It’s strange and twisted, because when that attention does come, the irony is you want more privacy.”

For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.

These yearnings can become more acute in life’s later years, as the opportunities for fame dwindle, “but the motive never dies, and when we realize we’re not going to make it in this lifetime, we find some other route: posthumous fame,” said Orville Gilbert Brim, a psychologist who is completing a book called “The Fame Motive.”

More here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists have discovered the fastest bite in the world, one so explosive it can be used to send the Latin American ant that performs it flying through the air to escape predators. Suarez and his colleagues focused on the trap-jaw ant, Odontomachus bauri. Suarez and Fisher, along with University of California at Berkeley researchers Sheila Patek and Joseph Baio, found the ant’s jaws accelerate at 100,000 times the force of gravity. This means they can snap shut 2,300 times faster than a blink of the eye to reach speeds up to 145 mph, exerting forces 300 to 500 times the ant’s body weight.

“Until recently, cameras were simply not fast enough to capture the movement of the mandibles,” Suarez said. He and his colleagues had to use high-speed video cameras capable of taking up to 250,000 frames per second to film the ant jaws, roughly 10,000 faster than speeds movies are usually shot at.

More here.

From Global Day for Darfur:

Despite the signing of a Darfur peace agreement on 5 May 2006, the violence in western Sudan has not stopped; in fact, in some parts of Darfur, the violence has grown worse.

People are still being killed and raped and displaced – every single day.

On September 17 people around the world will take part in the Global Day for Darfur to show world-wide support for the Darfuri people and to put pressure on our Governments to protect the civilians.

We hope that you will be able to join us on the Global Day for Darfur.

More here.  [Thanks to Veronica V. Mittnacht.]

And more info available here.

Julee Holcombe. Babel Revisited. 2004.

Iris print.

More on this fabulously talented artist here (do check out all the images – they’re really cool), and here, and here.

Yitzhak Laor in the London Review of Books:

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.

More here.

Did you recognize Fidel Castro? More portraits here.

William Saletan in Slate:

For thousands of years, we humans have lovingly mutilated our children. We give birth to them, swaddle them, and then cut their genitals. Some people condemn these rituals; others defend them. Now reports from Africa are shaking assumptions on both sides. Our mutilation of girls may be killing them. Our mutilation of boys may be saving their lives.

According to UNICEF, at least 100 million women, largely in Africa, have been genitally disfigured. Two months ago, the World Health Organization reported that these women, compared to their uncut peers, were up to 69 percent more likely to hemorrhage after childbirth and up to 55 percent more likely to deliver a dead or dying baby. For every 100 deliveries, the WHO estimates that female genital mutilation kills one or two extra kids.

More here.

[And in case you are wondering what the picture of watches is doing on this post, consider that Edward Said once told me the following story: Said was in Cairo when his watch broke and he needed to buy another one. He saw a shop window displaying some nice watches and walked in and asked the shopkeeper to show him some watches. The guy replied, “We don’t sell watches, we do circumcisions here.” Said asked him why he displayed watches in the window then. The guy said, “What would you rather have me display?”]

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has attracted widespread acclaim for her fiction about her native Nigeria. Christina Patterson meets a writer wise beyond her years.”

From The Independent:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie nearly missed the e-mail announcing that Africa’s greatest living novelist was her latest fan. “I was sitting in an internet café,” she explains, “and I was about to pass this one by, when I clicked on it and saw it was from Chinua Achebe’s son, Chidi. ‘Daddy read your Purple Hibiscus and loves it’ he said. I couldn’t believe it!”. When she heard his response to her second novel, she cried. “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners,” said Achebe, in a quote now emblazoned on the colourful cover of Half of a Yellow Sun, (Fourth Estate, £14.99), “but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers”. Adichie, he adds “came almost fully made”.

“He sent that quote to my editor in New York,” says Adichie. “Afterwards, he told her that he didn’t believe that a person that age could write that book.” I, too, am finding it quite hard to believe that the girl sitting opposite me is the author of this magisterial novel about one of the most painful episodes in Nigeria’s history, a novel that could – should – have made the Booker longlist this week. Adichie is 28, but she looks much younger.

More here.