From Scientific American:

An organic compound found in grapes, berries and some nuts extended the life span of fish in a recent study. Nothobranchius furzeri lives an average of nine weeks in captivity but lacing its food with resveratrol boosted longevity by more than 50 percent.

Previous research had shown that resveratrol prolongs the life span of yeast and insects, but this study marks the first proof of its antiaging effects in a vertebrate. Neuroscientist Alessandro Cellerino and his colleagues at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, tested different doses of the compound on more than 150 fish. Thirty fish received a small dose in their regular food, 60 received a medium dose and 20 received a large helping; meanwhile, 47 control fish enjoyed their insect larvae meals sans resveratrol. The control and low-dose fish saw no benefits, but even the fish who received only a middling amount of the compound lived up to 27 percent longer.

More here.

From MSNBC:

To sharpen their competitive edge, some of the U.S. Olympic athletes have been playing brain-controlled video games. Others have gotten room makeovers. Still others are wearing tighter clothing. And almost all of them have been caught on video. Believe it or not, this is serious stuff: Such technological tricks could make an athlete a fraction of a second faster, or just a little more alert — potentially spelling the difference between a medal-winner and an also-ran. But how do you separate the winning formulas from the high-tech hoohah?

Bill Sands, head of sport biomechanics and engineering for the U.S. Olympic Committee, has seen both sides of the high-tech equation: He says he’s sitting on some not-yet-publicized innovations in training that have yielded “staggering results,” but he’s also turned down plenty of “hare-brained ideas” that he feels aren’t worth the athletes’ time.

Consider the somewhat less baggy uniforms that the U.S. hockey team will be wearing this year at the Turin Olympics. Nike redesigned the jerseys to cut down on aerodynamic drag, developed lighter and better-fitting skates and even reduced the weight of the socks by 40 percent, said company spokesman Nate Tobecksen. During testing, the tighter uniforms made skaters ever-so-slightly speedier: “From red line to red line, it’s like a blade’s-length difference in speed,” Tobecksen told MSNBC.com. “So it could mean the difference for getting to the puck as opposed to being taken off the puck.”

More here.

John Banville in the New York Review of Books:

T.S. Eliot observed toward the end of his life that he could not be called a great poet because he had not written an epic. This was a sly piece of false modesty on the part of Old Possum, implying as it did that had he turned his pen to the epic form he would of course have been up there with Homer, Virgil, and Dante. His stricture also served, backhandedly, to withhold greatness from other poets of what he thought of as his culturally debased time, such as Yeats and Wallace Stevens. In the Age of Prose, Eliot was saying, even the finest poet can be expected to manage no more than the small thing. To all this Philip Larkin would likely have answered with his accustomed epistolary expletive: bum.

Larkin had the reputation of being the most costive of artists. In his writing lifetime—from the late 1930s until the middle of the 1970s, when the muse left him, returning only for brief and infrequent trysts—he published five short volumes of verse, with long intervals of silence between each appearance.

More here.

Ker Than in LiveScience.com:

Scientists have long known that some fish are able to switch their sex, either spontaneously or when exposed to steroids. This led them to suspect that a subset of the population of cells in male fish that normally become sperm, called spermatogonia, might be stem cells that have the potential to become either sperm or eggs.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers isolated spermatogonia from the testes of adult rainbow trout and transplanted them into newly hatched trout of both sexes. In male hatchlings, the transplanted cells developed into sperm, while in females they developed into eggs.

The scientists are currently looking into whether eggs could be transformed into sperm. Other researchers have successfully produced sperm from mice stem cells.

The technique could be used to rapidly breed inbred strains of domestic or research animals with desired genetic traits, the researchers write.

More here.

Christopher Solomon in the New York Times:

For Serb nationalists trying to carve an ethnically pure country out of the former Yugoslavia, Sarajevo was an obstacle — a storied crossroads whose success and strength lay in its famously multiethnic fabric. In 1992 the former Yugoslav Army, headed mostly by Serbs, encircled Sarajevo with heavy weapons, inaugurating a siege that was longer even than the torture of Stalingrad. Fighting and shelling killed some 11,000 people in the city, including more than 1,500 children, before NATO air strikes finally ended the horror.

Ten years after the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995 ended the war, this famously picturesque city of 388,000 people, now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has slowly begun to lure tourists again. In 2004 Paddy Ashdown, a former British member of Parliament and the country’s then-top civilian peace administrator, even toured Europe touting Bosnia-Herzegovina as the continent’s last great undiscovered tourism destination.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

“This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they were watching the Super Bowl ads.”

“The Story of an Instant-Science Experiment”, from Edge.org:

Commercials are a part of our lives. We watch them, enjoy them, and discuss them with our friends. Do commercials make us buy the product they advertise? Nobody really knows. The most anticipated ‘ad experience’ is watching the Super Bowl ads. After the game, there is a flurry of opinions from marketing experts and focus groups of what was the most effective Super Bowl ad. This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they watched the Super Bowl ads.

More here.

Michael Hopkin in Nature:

Researchers in India have discovered that a single sniff is enough for a rat to locate the source of an enticing aroma.

Their work shows that rats can effectively smell in ‘stereo’: their two nostrils work independently in much the same way as our ears, with contrasting signals to the brain creating a spatial understanding of sensory information.

The team at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore tested the ability of rats to discriminate between smells coming from their left or their right.

More here.

Alessandra Sanguenetti. The Adventures of Guilles and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams.

Cibachrome print. 1998-2002.

More on the artist here, here, and here.

From The Guardian:

He was born, obscurely, Samuel Clemens in 1835, the year Halley’s comet appeared in the Victorian skies. When, as Mark Twain, he died in 1910, the comet was once again describing a fiery track through the heavens, and he was now more famous than any American writer had ever been.

As Ron Powers puts it in his exhilarating new biography: ‘His way of seeing and hearing things changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things … he was the Lincoln of American literature.’

‘Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.’

‘If you must gamble your lives sexually, don’t play a lone hand too much.’

‘Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.’

‘Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.’

‘It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and the prudence never to practise either.’

More here.

From The New York Times:

“PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor,” the writer Malcolm Gladwell said recently. “People who are busy doing things — as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops — don’t have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.” Slight, shoeless and sporting the large head of curly hair that’s become his trademark, Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was sitting at the kitchen table of his apartment in a West Village town house. In tones at once laid-back and precise, he was discussing his best-selling books: “The Tipping Point” argues that small actions can spark “social epidemics” — a term he gives a positive connotation; and “Blink” a paean to intuitive thinking, makes a case for “thin-slicing,” paring down our information intake so we can tune out the static and make fast, sound decisions. Gladwell said his goal in those two books was simple: In a culture with too much information and not enough time, he offers “organizing structures” for people’s lives.

Their success has given Gladwell an active, and extremely lucrative, second career as a public speaker. Much in demand, he is paid in the neighborhood of $40,000 per lecture. He’s also on the recommended reading list at many companies and business schools, and has spoken at West Point and the National Institutes of Health, among many other institutions. Last year, Time magazine named him one of its “100 most influential people.” Fast Company magazine called Gladwell “a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud.” Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of multiple-thread narrative movies like “Traffic” and “Syriana,” is developing a movie based on “Blink.” That book is also the subject of a clever sendup, “Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All,” by the pseudonymous Noah Tall, which will be out this month.

More here.

In the BBC, a modest proposal to reduce carbon dioxide emission and a related website.

Listening to most politicians, you would think the world’s energy problems can be solved only by building ever bigger power stations and burning ever more fuel.

Not so; and it certainly cannot solve the coming climate crisis.

After turning off unnecessary pieces of equipment, improved energy efficiency is the cheapest way for developing countries to maximise their use of limited energy supplies, and for developed countries to achieve cuts in their carbon dioxide emissions.

One quick and simple option for improving energy efficiency would be to make greater use of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Each one of these bulbs produces the same amount of light as an incandescent light bulb whilst being responsible for the emission of 70% less carbon dioxide.

It also saves money; about £7 ($12) per year in the UK, more or less in other countries depending on electricity prices.

So why not just ban incandescent bulbs – why not make them illegal?

They waste so much energy that if they were invented today, it is highly unlikely they would be allowed onto the market.

Nobody would suffer; every energy-saving bulb would save money and help to curb climate change.

From Nature:

A strange, sleek bird will take to the skies this month in an attempt to fly further than any aircraft before it. The plane, called the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, last soared into the record books in March 2005, when aviator Steve Fossett successfully piloted it on the first solo, non-stop flight around the world. For Fossett and his team, though, the world is not enough. They plan to go one better: to take off from the United States, circle the globe eastwards and then cross the Atlantic a second time. They are awaiting a good window of weather, which could come as early as 7 February.

While the plane is a feat of engineering, Fossett’s new trip won’t pioneer or test any new technologies. Instead, the main challenge will be one of human endurance, says aeronautics curator Robert van der Linden of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Fossett will have to stay alert for roughly 80 hours. He plans to live on milkshakes, presumably since they are convenient, high on energy and low on toilet demands. “It’s a great testament to him as a pilot,” van der Linden says. Researchers have found that people show problems performing simple tasks after 24 hours without sleep, and the situation only gets worse the longer they stay awake. After 48 hours without shuteye, people tend to fall rapidly asleep even if they are trying to stay awake, says Kenneth Wright who studies sleep at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Adrenaline will certainly be helpful – but it might not be enough,” he says. On his first round-the-world flight, Fossett planned to take 30-minute power naps, but it was reported that he only ever grabbed a few minutes kip between looking at the controls.

More here.

From BBC News:

Oetzi, the prehistoric man frozen in a glacier for 5,300 years, could have been infertile, a new study suggests. Genetic research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, also confirms that his roots probably lie in Central Europe. Oetzi’s body was found in the melting ice of the Schnalstal glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991. Examination of his remains has already revealed the Copper Age man almost certainly died as a result of a fight. The assessment is based on the presence of an arrowhead that is lodged in his back and extensive cuts to his hands. The scientists behind the latest genetic research now speculate that Oetzi’s possible sterility could have been a factor that led to this violent end.

More here.

More here.  And also see this previous 3QD post for more details about Flux.  If you are in the NYC area this evening, come to this!

Opinion piece from Spiegel:

Best-selling author and Muslim dissident Ibn Warraq argues that freedom of expression is our western heritage and we must defend it against attacks from totalitarian societies. If the west does not stand in solidarity with the Danish, he argues, then the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest:

Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British Imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples.

On the world stage, should we really apologize for Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe? Mozart, Beethoven and Bach? Rembrandt, Vermeer,  Van Gogh, Breughel, Ter Borch? Galileo, Huygens, Copernicus, Newton and Darwin? Penicillin and computers? The Olympic Games and Football? Human rights and parliamentary democracy? The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. No, the west needs no lectures on the superior virtue of societies who keep their women in subjection, cut off their clitorises, stone them to death for alleged adultery, throw acid on their faces, or deny the human rights of those considered to belong to lower castes.

More here.

Seymour Mauskopf reviews biographies of Priestly and Lavoisier in American Scientist:

The story of the chemical revolution that took place at the end of the 18th century is one of the most compelling in the history of science. Nearly 60 years ago, this narrative was given particular dramatic force by James Bryant Conant in a case study titled The Overthrow of the Phlogiston Theory. In 1962, Conant’s formulation achieved iconic status in Thomas S. Kuhn’s seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn, like Conant, shaped his account as a duel between two heroic scientific protagonists, Joseph Priestley and Antoine Laurent Lavoisier.

The drama was heightened by the fact that Priestley, the apostle of the phlogiston theory, had discovered a gas that promoted combustion and respiration far better than ordinary air. He had named it dephlogisticated air (more on this later). This same gas, about which Lavoisier had learned from Priestley, became the centerpiece of Lavoisier’s new antiphlogistic theory and was given a new name by him: le principe oxygine (“acid maker”). The fact that we still call the gas oxygen and find dephlogisticated air an obsolete and mystifying name shows clearly who was the victor in this intellectual battle.

More here.

Negar Azimi in Slate:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fiery brand of rhetoric and his curious disdain for diplomacy are a gift to Iran’s critics. He has famously denied the Holocaust and asked why the state of Israel could not be moved to Europe or North America. Back home, however, his pronouncements are unremarkable. Such talk is standard fare in official Iranian circles—as is mandated lip service to the fate of the underdog Palestinians. In fact, the president’s comments hardly merited mention in most Iranian papers—despite the hysteria they sparked in editorial pages throughout the West.

More here.

PZ Myers in Pharyngula:

Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it’s really happening. Of course, it isn’t with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it’s the topic of ongoing debate. Let’s consider one recent example of such an experiment.

Down syndrome is a very common genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. That kind of genetic insult causes a constellation of problems: mild to moderate mental retardation, heart defects, and weakened immune systems, and various superficial abnormalities. It’s also a viable defect, and produces walking, talking, interacting human beings who are loved by their friends and families, who would really like to be able to do something about those lifespan-reducing health problems. We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them.

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.

More here.  [Thanks to Carl Shapiro.]

From Butterflies and Wheels (via One Good Move):

But toleration, which is often, although not always, a good thing, is not the same as relativism, which is never a good thing; and it is vital to understand the difference. In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion: in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force. The first great champion of toleration in this sense was John Locke, and his successors included not only famous liberals such as John Stuart Mill, but men with a rather more direct impact on human affairs, such as Thomas Jefferson. Toleration entered political life with the Enlightenment. It is a characteristically secular virtue: there has never been and never will be a theocracy that can wholeheartedly applaud it. For the religious mind, many sayings are not to be assessed at the bar of truth or falsity, but at that of blasphemy, and to hold that a person blasphemes is to hold that that person’s sayings at least, and the person for preference, must be suppressed.

Toleration gives us the dictum attributed to Voltaire, that I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Relativism, by contrast, chips away at our right to disapprove of what anybody says. Relativism names a loose cluster of attitudes, but the central message is that there are no asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and truth. There are two relativistic mantras: “Who is to say?” (who is to say which opinion is better?) and “That’s just your opinion” (your opinion is on all fours with any other). There are only different views, each true “for” those who hold them. Relativism in this sense goes beyond counselling that we must try to understand those whose opinions are different. It is not only that we must try to understand them, but also that we must recognize a symmetry of standing. Their opinions “deserve the same respect” as our own. So, at the limit, we may have western values, but they have others; we have a western view of the universe, they have theirs; we have western science, they have traditional science; and so on.

There have been many philosophical attempts to refute relativism, beginning perhaps with Plato’s encounter with sophists such as Gorgias or opponents such as Theodorus in the Theaetetus. Theodorus defends Protagoras’s doctrine that Man is the Measure of All Things, which Socrates takes to imply relativism. The central tactic Socrates uses is to query whether the relativistic doctrine applies to itself. If it does not, then it seems that there is at least one non-relative, absolute truth. If it does, then indeed relativism may be true for Protagoras, but remains untrue for Socrates and the rest of us who agree with him.

More here.

From CNN:

A senior United Nations aid official called on Thursday for a halt to arms sales to Africa, saying it would be more effective in addressing the continent’s poverty than charity rock concerts or debt relief.

Dennis McNamara, special U.N. adviser on internal displacement, slammed world powers for neglecting some 12.5 million Africans uprooted within their countries, who form half of the world’s internally displaced persons (IDPs).

He accused the West of supplying the weapons fuelling African conflicts which leave civilians homeless — and prey to war crimes, hunger, disease and rape — while greedy companies exploit the oil and mineral wealth.

“Guns are at the heart of the problem … There is one slogan I would like to suggest for 2006: No Arms Sales to Africa. Zero. Not an embargo, not a sanction, a voluntary cessation of all arms sales to Africa,” McNamara told a news briefing.

“The kids on the streets of Nairobi, Khartoum, Abidjan and Monrovia have guns in their pockets or up their sleeves … We provided the arms. We the West, we the G8,” he added, referring to the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

More here.