From BBC:

Long-snouted aardvarks will rub shoulders with skunk-like zorillas in an ambitious plan to provide a virtual snapshot of life on Earth. The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to detail all 1.8 million known plant and animal species in a net archive. Individual species pages will include photographs, video, sound and maps, collected and written by experts.

The archive, to be built over 10 years, could help conservation efforts as well as being a useful tool for education. “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the $100m (£50m) project. “[It] will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level.” The vast database will initially concentrate on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow. Fossil species may eventually be added.

More here.

The letters of writers offer a strangely public view of their private selves. Most people put on a show in their correspondence, but for a writer that show involves a professional display. How much they decide to invest in it says a great deal about them – about how deeply they have been stained by work. It may be a sign of more important virtues if a writer writes boring letters, for it proves that he doesn’t take his literary self too seriously, that he is willing, at times, to let it drop. Henry James’s correspondence presents a particularly interesting test of that willingness. As a novelist, he created a kind of prose that was most remarkable, perhaps, for its finish. His style gave his characteristic colour to whatever it touched on. Part of the attraction of his letters lies in the fact that they allow us to question how consistently, as a friend, a brother and a son, he managed to keep it up.

more from the TLS here.

In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Tek Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing just inside the National Museum’s basement was Tony Freeth, a sixty-year-old British mathematician and filmmaker, watching as workers in white T-shirts wrestled the Range Rover-size machine through the door and up the ramp into the museum. Freeth was a member of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project—a multidisciplinary investigation into some fragments of an ancient mechanical device that were found at the turn of the last century after two thousand years in the Aegean Sea, and have long been one of the great mysteries of science.

more from The New Yorker here.

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it. In the rallying cry that served as an introduction to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, he professed his boredom with the literary, epiphanic “New Yorker short story,” longing for the days when masters such as Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, and Henry James wrote “ripping yarns” packed with “plot and color.” In the “lost genres”—horror, romance, detective, adventure—Chabon saw a tradition of “great writers writing great short stories.” Genre fiction, he argued, is simply fun to read, but it also enables a democratic reading experience, a necessity to the public that most contemporary writers have despaired of attaining. What Chabon seemed to long for most was a culture in which fiction, in whatever form, could permeate the national conversation and be essential to people’s daily lives.

more from Slate here.

From Colbert Nation:

For much more on Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his work, click here; and for more on the debates surrounding his new book, The Black Swan, go here.

Gina Kolata in the New York Times:

It was 1959. Jules Hirsch, a research physician at Rockefeller University, had gotten curious about weight loss in the obese. He was about to start a simple experiment that would change forever the way scientists think about fat.

Obese people, he knew, had huge fat cells, stuffed with glistening yellow fat. What happened to those cells when people lost weight, he wondered. Did they shrink or did they go away? He decided to find out.

It seemed straightforward. Dr. Hirsch found eight people who had been fat since childhood or adolescence and who agreed to live at the Rockefeller University Hospital for eight months while scientists would control their diets, make them lose weight and then examine their fat cells.

More here.  [Thanks to Susan Valentine.]

Trevor Butterworth in the Financial Times:

The wit of Oscar Wilde is often more clever than insightful, but when he declared that “one’s first duty in life is to assume a pose”, he may have been on to something: clothes don’t just make the man; they can, if unchanging in style and sufficiently de trop, make him look ageless.

This, at least, is the impression left by Tom Wolfe as he blazes through the culinary empyrean of Café Boulud on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, trailing dash and élan among the stolidly well-heeled and sourly superannuated diners.

The writer who pioneered reporting with the intensity of literature, who gave what resulted the appearance of a movement (the “new journalism”), who chronicled the restless American spirit to the stars (The Right Stuff) and then back down into the gutter (The Bonfire of the Vanities) is, astonishingly, 77; and yet, he is still every bit the “Tom Sawyer drawn by Beardsley”, that Elaine Dundy excitedly sketched for Vogue readers in the 1960s.

More here.

Alan S. Binder in the Washington Post:

I’m a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I’m being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades. In fact, I think offshoring may be the biggest political issue in economics for a generation.

When I say this, many of my fellow free-traders react with a mixture of disbelief, pity and hostility. Blinder, have you lost your mind? (Answer: I think not.) Have you forgotten about the basic economic gains from international trade? (Answer: No.) Are you advocating some form of protectionism? (Answer: No !) Aren’t you giving aid and comfort to the enemies of free trade? (Answer: No, I’m trying to save free trade from itself.)

More here.

From the BBC:

Pakistan’s nuclear authority has said there is no cause for concern after it published press adverts for information on “lost” radioactive material.

The adverts urged members of the public to inform officials if they found any “lost or stolen” radioactive material.

They were published in major Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan.

A spokesman for the nuclear authority said that there was a “very remote chance” that nuclear materials imported 40-50 years ago were unaccounted for.

International concern over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear programme was expressed in 2004, when the country’s top nuclear scientist, AQ Khan, confessed to leaking secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

Dr Khan was subsequently placed under virtual house arrest, and is now suffering from pancreatic cancer.

More here.

Mona Simpson in The Atlantic Monthly:

The 20th century left us the work of two particularly somber artists, one of whom would have hesitated to call himself an artist at all. I’m speaking of W. G. Sebald and Primo Levi, whose homemade genres emphasized the lability of the line between fiction and history. Levi lived 64 of his 67 years in Turin. He lived a year and a half in Milan. And he lived one year in Auschwitz. After the war, he returned not only to Turin, but to the flat in which he’d grown up. He worked as an industrial chemist for the next 30 years, writing nights and weekends in what had been his childhood bedroom.

He writes about a small child in Auschwitz who was paralyzed from the waist down, who could not speak, and who had no name:

Hurbinek [the name the prisoners called the child], who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm — even his — bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.

More here.

From Nature:

Most physicists at Illinois-based Fermilab, home to the world’s most powerful particle collider, share a dream. They hope against hope that the Tevatron will find the long-sought Higgs particle before the much more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN — the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland — comes along in a year or so and eats their lunch. Bruce Knuteson, though, has a fear. What if the LHC finds something even more exotic than the Higgs —and the tell-tale traces of that novelty turn out to have been lurking, unrecognized, in Fermilab’s data for years?

It is to rule out the chance of his worst fears coming true, among other things, that Knuteson and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fermilab have taken a new sort of particle-hunting software to a new level. Rather than looking only at data in which a new particle is expected to be found, as the experiments at Fermilab normally do, it looks at a much broader swath of data without any preconceptions.

More here.

From the website of Denis Darzacq:

“When the social elevator is broken you have to know how to bounce. Between the take off and the fall, the man parachuted in the city learns to control his trajectory.

In the rough manner of architecture, he opposes the elasticity between his body and his desires. This gravitation exercice requires Discipline, even if it’s not the one we’ve learned in classrooms. After the riots of last autumn, the photograph Denis Darzacq realized 16 of those perilous shots, that says the turbulences and the life in precarious balance.”

More here.

Richard Wagner in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (translated in signandsight.com):

In December 2006 a group of Romanian intellectuals submitted a petition to the Culture Ministry in Bucharest requesting the rehabilitation of the writer Vintila Horia. Among the signatories of the petition were poet Ana Blandiana, the Paris-based writer and dissident Paul Goma, literary critic and editor Monica Lovinescu, and Ion Caramitru, an actor and cultural policy maker.

Who is Vintila Horia? In 1960 the Prix Goncourt jury selected him to receive the Prize for “God Is Born in Exile,” his novel about Ovid (published well before Christoph Ransmayr’s “The Last World” – review). Horia’s book was translated into 14 languages, including German, and ultimately appeared in Germany as a Goldmann paperback. But the Prix Goncourt was never actually awarded to Horia. Shortly after the jury’s selection was announced, the newspaper L’Humanité, mouthpiece of France’s Communist Party, launched a campaign against the Romanian author, who wrote in Romanian, French and Spanish.

Mariana Baabar in Outlook India:

Just the other day Tahera Abdullah was driving down the spiffy Margalla Road in Islamabad, the windows rolled down to enjoy the evening breeze. A development worker, her silvery hair could tell anyone she’s 50 plus. Tahera stopped at the traffic signal; an eight-year-old boy accosted her: didn’t she know Islam required her to cover her head? Tahera immediately rolled up the window. “How do you argue with an eight-year-old?” she asks. But the encounter with Pakistan’s religious extremism, at once frightening and puerile, has prompted Tahera to choose sweating inside the car over letting in the breeze. “We women are feeling more threatened today,” she says.

The streets of Islamabad are menacing women, compelling them to be what they are not, what they have never been. Consultant Sara Javeed realised this when she lit a cigarette in her car recently. “I quickly stubbed it. I don’t want strangers asking me why I’m smoking. This is the new me,” she says dolefully. Sara feels the emerging extremism could Talibanise Pakistan. “I don’t want to live in such a state,” she declares.

You can hear the winds of extremism whistle eerily even in Parliament. This week, Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader Sherry Rehman, as progressive as she’s glamorous, wrote to the speaker of the lower house asking him to stop her monthly stipend as she wasn’t anyway being allowed to speak on vital issues. “I’d never want to wait for anything to happen to me personally before I stood up to speak for women who are today in a far more dangerous situation than even during Zia-ul Haq’s times,” she says.

Via Seed:

In his first foreign-policy declaration, president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy has named climate change France’s “first battle,” but analysts warn that the combat is long-term and complex.

Sarkozy nailed his green colours to the mast on Sunday in a victory speech after emphatically winning France’s top job against Socialist rival Segolene Royal.

In a bold move for a newcomer to the world’s top political table, Sarkozy notably accused the United States of hampering efforts to tackle climate change.

While telling “our American friends” that France would stand by its side whenever it was needed, Sarkozy also said: “Friendship is accepting that one’s friends can think differently.

“A great nation like the United States has the duty to not create obstacles in the struggle against global warming. Quite the contrary, it should take the lead in this battle.

“What is at stake is the fate of all humanity,” warned Sarkozy. “France will make this battle its first battle.”

In Natural History:

Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two and a half million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson’s enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity’s place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated. By those measures, most citizens of industrialized nations do quite well.

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.

In 1914, von Frisch demonstrated that honey bees—whose livelihood after all depends on flowering plants—are able to discriminate by color, despite being red-blind. A few years later, he worked on bees’ sense of smell. His work on the “language of bees” starts in the 1920s at the Institute for Zoology at Munich University, where he became a professor in 1925. Although beekeepers and naturalists had known for centuries that bees communicated the location of food sources to each other, no one knew how. Von Frisch was the first to make the distinction between what he called the “circle dance” and the “waggle dance” performed by bees returning to the hive. He tracked the movements of their bodies and realized that communication of some kind was taking place. Initially, he thought that bees used the dances to indicate different kinds of food, but when he resumed his experiments in 1944, he realized that both dances communicate location. When the food was more than 100 meters away, the bees used the waggle dance to indicate the far more complex information of location. This communication required a bee to register the details of its flight, recall its content hours afterwards, and, of course, translate and perform its significant information to a comprehending audience. It’s a complex and beautiful thing. The bee has to figure out how to use the sun as her directional reference while dancing in complete darkness inside the hive!

more of the conversation with Hugh Raffles about bees at Cabinet here.

Michael Herr’s brilliant, bitter, and loving book was hailed as a masterpiece when it was published in 1977, and the critical consensus has held steady ever since. Somehow, a young journalist whose previous experience consisted mostly of travel pieces and film criticism managed to transform himself into a wild new kind of war correspondent capable of comprehending a disturbing new kind of war. “Herr is the only writer I’ve read who has written in the mad-pop-poetic/bureaucratically camouflaged language in which Vietnam has lived,” wrote playwright and Vietnam draftee David Rabe. John le Carré called Dispatches “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.” It created enough of a sensation to prompt me to shell out $8.95 for the hardcover, a lot of money for a college undergraduate in 1978. That was less than three years after North Vietnamese troops had marched into Saigon, during the odd political lull between Richard Nixon’s resignation and Ronald Reagan’s election. I read Dispatches then through particularly rose-colored glasses, confident that we had learned the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate. In the ensuring 29 years, my awe at Herr’s achievement has never lessened, but each of the three times I’ve re-read it, I’ve found new things. The book hasn’t changed, of course, but I have.

more from The American Scholar here.

It is a bus stop like none you have ever seen. Curved and gleaming like a Frank Gehry structure, it anchors a neighborhood like a piece of public art. Its shape can adapt to fit different needs, emphasizing more shelter in bad weather areas or more seating in high-usage zones. The shelter is wrapped in an LED “skin” that can play video. It’s wired to a larger communications network. It features displays that tell when, exactly, the next bus will arrive. It is, in a word, intelligent.

This Jetsonian bus stop is only a prototype, built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a recent exhibition on the history of bus transport, but it’s emblematic of a very real, almost seismic, shift in thinking about the possibilities of the humble motorbus. In 2005, Seattle began outfitting some long-haul buses with wireless Internet access (other cities have followed). Los Angeles built America’s largest fleet of clean-burning “green” buses and initiated traffic-signal priority on many of its routes. Bus riders in Curitiba, Brazil, pay their fares at bus stops before they board, thus reducing the average stop time to about 17 seconds.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The Washington Post:

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES By Roberto Bolaño.

Not since Gabriel García Márquez, whose masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, turns 40 this year, has a Latin American redrawn the map of world literature so emphatically as Roberto Bolaño does with The Savage Detectives. The Chilean-born Bolaño moved with his parents to Mexico in 1968, returned to Chile in 1973 only to be caught up in the Pinochet coup d’etat, and settled eventually in Catalonia, Spain. Much of the time before his untimely death in 2003, at the age of 50, he was obsessed with being an outcast. His turn has come to be an icon.

Bolaño not only wrote exactly what and how he pleased; he also viciously attacked figures such as Isabel Allende and Octavio Paz, accusing them of being conformists, more interested in fame than in art. In poems, stories (some of them included in his Last Evenings on Earth), novellas (such as Distant Star and By Night in Chile), two mammoth narratives (one under review here and 2666, scheduled for publication next year in English translation), and an essay collection (called, in Spanish, Entre paréntesis), he cultivated such a flamboyant, stylistically distinctive, counter-establishment voice that it’s no exaggeration to call him a genius.

The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality.

More here.