From EGO Magazine:

“Study mathematics like a house on fire” – Charles Darwin

“We all stand on the shoulders of giants” – Isaac Newton

The two famous quotes by the founding fathers of biology and physics illustrates the crux of scientific inquiry. The first one was Darwin’s advice to young Francis Galton, a British polymath, geneticist and statistician, who later gave us some very useful statistical concepts such as correlation. The second quote is by Isaac Newton, who refers to the fact that science should not be a circular or lateral journey, but rather a cumulative progress: every scientist does not have to re-invent the scientific toolbox with each new question. Instead, science builds on the work and discoveries of those who went before us, while also constantly abstracting, refining and reordering of the components of the scientific framework.

But the lack of mathematics, or inability for biologists to stand on the shoulders of the mathematicians before them, and the resultant slow progress are precisely the characteristics that have become the bane of modern biology.

More here.

From Scientific American:

For the past few millennia, ants of the Attini tribe have tended gardens of fungus that they eat. Over the past few decades scientists have studied these agricultural insects, trying to understand how their gardens grew in the first place. Now a group of scientists have discovered that the ants carry a potent antibiotic bacteria in special pockets on their bodies that help control a parasite that can ruin their fungus harvest.

Entomologist Cameron Currie of the University of Wisconsin and his colleagues discovered the antibiotic bacteria in crescent-shaped pits on the exoskeletons of two species of Panamanian ants, Cyphomyrex longiscapus and C. muelleri, after scanning them with an electron microscope. The bacteria–of the Pseudonocarida genus–bloom on the individual face plates and other exterior parts of the ant, allowing it to rub the antiparasitic agent on its fungi crop. The ant also nurtures the microbe by secreting nutrients from special exocrine glands connected to the shallow pits.

More here.

In Words Without Borders, Marina Harss reviews one of my favorite novels, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966).

A first reading of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North can be a bewildering experience. The episodic manner in which the story is laid out means that important information about the characters and their past is left out, thus giving the reader a sense of being lost in a strange country where he has lost his bearings. In fact, the novel should probably be read in light of the ever-shifting political and cultural landscape of Sudan since 1899, the year in which the British took control. Salih’s book charts, through the experiences of its two central characters—the nameless narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed—two generations of the European-educated Sudanese elite through the period of domination by the British and into the early years of self-rule. At the time in which the book was written (it first appeared in Arabic in 1966), the country had just experienced yet another upheaval, the overthrow of the home-grown military government of General Ibrahim Abboud and the introduction of a parliamentary system. Salih writes in an introduction to the 2003 Penguin edition that “the general climate in Khartoum in those days was exhilarating. . . . For some reason my work became incorporated into this process of intellectual questioning.” This is, of course, not the end of the story, and since 1989, the Sudan has been ruled by the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation, a repressive Islamic government which has, among other things, banned the publication of Season of Migration.

Harry Magdoff, Marxist commentator and one of the co-editors of Monthly Review, died on New Year’s Day. John Bellamy Foster has this obituary in MRZine.

Harry Magdoff — coeditor of Monthly Review since 1969, socialist, and one of the world’s leading economic analysts of capitalism and imperialism — died at his home in Burlington, Vermont on January 1, 2006.

Harry Magdoff was born on August 21, 1913 in the Bronx, the son of working-class Russian Jewish immigrants. His father worked as a housepainter. He grew up in a New York immigrant community at a time when war and revolution were common topics of conversation. On one occasion, he overheard a debate in a local park in which it was pointed out that Britain “owned” India. He was shocked and began to explore the history of colonialism. In 1929, at the age of 15, he encountered Karl Marx for the first time, when he found a copy of Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy in a used bookstore. Reading the famous preface, he was stunned. “It blew my mind,” he was to recall. Marx’s “view of history was a revelation. I didn’t understand the rest of the book, which cost me a quarter, but that got me started reading about economics. We were going into the Depression then and I wanted to figure out what it all meant.” The “determining element” in his emerging radicalism, however, was what he witnessed at the demonstration of the unemployed in Union Square in March 1930.

Richard Sparks thinks about the best way to rebuild New Orleans, in Issues in Science and Technology.

New Orleans will certainly be rebuilt. But looking at the recent flooding as a problem that can be fixed by simply strengthening levees will squander the enormous economic investment required and, worse, put people back in harm’s way. Rather, planners should look to science to guide the rebuilding, and scientists now advise that the most sensible strategy is to work with the forces of nature rather than trying to overpower them. This approach will mean letting the Mississippi River shift most of its flow to a route that the river really wants to take; protecting the highest parts of the city from flooding and hurricane-generated storm surges while retreating from the lowest parts; and building a new port city on higher ground that the Mississippi is already forming through natural processes. The long-term benefits—economically and in terms of human lives—may well be considerable.

To understand the risks that New Orleans faces, three sources need to be considered. They are the Atlantic Ocean, where hurricanes form that eventually batter coastal areas with high winds, heavy rains, and storm surge; the Gulf of Mexico, which provides the water vapor that periodically turns to devastatingly heavy rain over the Mississippi basin; and the Mississippi River, which carries a massive quantity of water from the center of the continent and can be a source of destruction when the water overflows its banks. It also is necessary to understand the geologic region in which the city is located: the Mississippi Delta.

“Russia!” is an exhibition well worth seeing. Visitors who know little about Russian art will see many important works and come away with a more complex view of the country and its culture. But the question remains: What “new perspective” has been provided on the “new Russia”? An unpleasant suspicion hovers over the exhibition that the art and its history were secondary considerations for the organizers and that the main point was that the “exhibition was realized under the patronage of Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation.” Was it all, in effect, a big advertising campaign, a mammoth photo-op designed to establish the bona fides of the new Russian patrons of the new Guggenheim global museum while providing America’s former rival with a glamorous opportunity to exorcise fifty years of stereotypes (unsmiling commissars, the Gulag, the KGB, bad teeth, long lines, admirable but irritating dissidents, mafioso “New Russians” in leisure suits dripping with gold jewelry, commandos in black masks, tanks on city streets…)? . . . The patrons and sponsors of “Russia!” were no doubt pleased with the publicity as well as the exhibition; those concerned about the accurate presentation of art and history, which should be the Guggenheim Museum’s mission, will feel differently.

more from The New York Review of Books here.

GP: In which he [Hitchens] took me to task for various things. And then he said something slighting about me to the New York Observer. Later he sent me an email basically expressing regret. And that was enough. And now if I see him—I invited him to the book party—if I see him it will be pleasant. That’s the kind of guy he is. If you are Christopher Hitchens you have to let go of some of your grudges, otherwise all of humanity will eventually be your lifelong enemy. [laughs]

RB: It’s interesting about how some people respond to him. When they agreed with him, they loved him, as usual, and when they disagreed, they found him to have all sorts of flaws. I don’t agree with him on the war, [but] I still admire him and think he must be paid attention to. He is an amusing stylist.

GP: He’s at his best writing about literature and history, I think, better than his political writing, which lately has suffered from certain excesses of partisanship.

RB: He’s under siege.

GP: And he will not back off. That’s it: He’s under siege and he is backed up and he is going to keep digging in.

RB: Which is why I was surprised by his blurb—but then again, I think he is intellectually honest.

GP: Yes, and some of the criticisms in my book of even people like him, or certainly of his new friends in the administration, although he wouldn’t make those criticisms, he is honest enough to accept them. The book has been far better-received on the right then on the left. I expected a little of that. It ranges from essentially a positive reception that’s closed around a critique that I am not sufficiently apologetic or have not seen the total folly of ever supporting such an enterprise. That’s in a couple of reviews in liberal left publications. They were respectful but critical. Then you move toward the blogosphere and even some well-known writers who, because my book was getting some attention, zeroed in on me as the Second Coming of Hitchens.

The rest of the excellent interview here.

From Harvard Magazine:

In a room where somber faces are the norm, Steve Cappiello is beaming. The tall, muscular 36-year-old points to his feet with a kid’s delight and declares, “Today was the first day I tied my shoes in a year. It sounds small, but it was big for me. I never thought a hunk of plastic would change my life as much as it has.” Cappiello is referring to the prosthetic left arm he has been awaiting for months, since losing his limb to cancer. For this once-hardworking day laborer from Brockton, Massachusetts, the “hunk of plastic” offers a chance to regain independence, support his family, and feel useful again. No longer will he need to ask for help buttoning his pants or tying his laces.

On one level, “Living with Life-Threatening Illness” is about the simplest of concepts: how to say hello, say goodbye, and listen. But by tackling issues so often avoided, the course also helps at least a handful of trainees become more comfortable with death and dying as they begin evolving from laypeople into doctors. This comes at a time when patients and families increasingly seek better end-of-life and palliative (comfort) care for themselves and their loved ones.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Researchers have deciphered the structure of a harpoonlike protein some viruses use to enter cells and begin infection. The protein is known as fusion (F) protein and is found on the outer surface of parainfluenza virus 5, a so-called “enveloped” virus that fuses its membrane with the membrane of its host cell before infection. Once the membranes are fused, the virus dumps its genetic content into the healthy human cell’s interior, hijacking the cell’s replication machinery to clone itself. The research, led by Hsien-Sheng Yin of Northwestern University, is detailed in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

More here.

“New research indicates that gas-guzzling cars are a much less important factor in climate change than the huge amounts of food devoured by carnivorous ‘burger man’. Jonathon Porritt on the geopolitics of food.”

From The Guardian:

Of all the seasonal homilies about “green” Christmases and “sustainable” new year pledges – an oxymoron if ever I’ve heard one – only one stuck in my mind: each of us could make a bigger contribution to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by becoming a vegan than by converting to an eco-friendly car.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have calculated the relative carbon intensity of a standard vegan diet in comparison to a US-style carnivorous diet, all the way through from production to processing to distribution to cooking and consumption. An average burger man (that is, not the outsize variety) emits the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more CO2 every year than the standard vegan. By comparison, were you to trade in your conventional gas-guzzler for a state of the art Prius hybrid, your CO2 savings would amount to little more than one tonne per year.

This may come as a bit of a shock to climate change campaigners. “Stop eating meat” is unlikely to be the favourite slogan of the new Stop Climate Chaos coalition.

More here.  [Thanks to Don Lawson.]

From a very interesting article by Jim Rossignol at his weblog (also in PC GAMER UK):

“So this guy has a lot of fans?” I say, knowing the answer but nevertheless incredulous.

“Hundreds of thousands in his fan club,” says Yang. “Impossible to track the number of people who watch him play.”

Impossible, because the man on the stage is on Korean television almost every day. He is about to sit down and play what is close to becoming Korea’s national sport: Starcraft. His name is Lee Yunyeol, or in game [RED]NaDa Terran. He is The Champion. Last year his reported earnings were around $200,000. He plays a seven year-old RTS for fame and fortune and to many Koreans he is an idol. Every night over half a million Koreans log on to Battlenet and make war in space, many of them with dreams of becoming like Yunyeol. But his skill is almost supernatural. Few people who play all day long will be able to claim a fraction of his split-second timing and pitiless concentration. Practicing eight hours a day, Yunyeol’s methods and tactics are peerless. Well, almost peerless. In fact there are two or three other players who command similar salaries. They might not hold the crown now, and one of them will probably take it from him soon, but for now at least, Yunyeol is king.

The existence of people like Lee Yunyeol ensures that South Korea is unlike any other gaming culture on Earth.

More here.

Following up on Paul Theroux’s, er, insights(?) on African development, here’s a piece by Binyavanga Wainaina on how to write about Africa in Granta.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular. . .

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with.

District and Circle

Tunes from a tin whistle underground
Curled up a corridor I’d be walking down
To where I knew I was always going to find
My watcher on the tiles, cap by his side,
His fingers perked, his two eyes eyeing me
In an unaccusing look I’d not avoid,
Or not just yet, since both were out to see
For ourselves.
As the music larked and capered
I’d trigger and untrigger a hot coin
Held at the ready, but now my gaze was lowered
For was our traffic not in recognition?
Accorded passage, I would re-pocket and nod,
And he, still eyeing me, would also nod.

*

Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts
Of escalators ascending and descending
To a monotonous slight rocking in the works,
We were moved along, upstanding.
Elsewhere, underneath, an engine powered,
Rumbled, quickened, evened, quieted.
The white tiles gleamed. In passages that flowed
With draughts from cooler tunnels, I missed the light
Of all-overing, long since mysterious day,
Parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay
On body-heated mown grass regardless,
A resurrection scene minutes before
The resurrection, habitués
Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer. . . .

The rest of the poem from the TLS here. Good stuff.

There is a peculiar pleasure that comes to a critic who has badly underestimated the capacities of a particular novelist. Peculiar, because one hates to look like a fool; but pleasure, because it is always good to find the number of excellent novels in the world enlarged. With his new book, Arthur & George, Julian Barnes has increased that tally by one, and I am left feeling suitably chastened by my failure to foresee this turn of events. (But before I proceed with my mea culpa, a quick caveat emptor: To champion Barnes, I can’t help giving away the plot. So, click away now if you’re planning to read Arthur & George, and come back when you’re done.)

more from Slate here.

For those who aren’t familiar with Shazia Sikander’s work and the traditions she comes from, this set of videos (here, here, here and here) and essays from the PBS series “Art in the 21st Century” provides an introduction.

Sikander specializes in Indian and Persian miniature painting, a traditional style that is both highly stylized and disciplined. While becoming an expert in this technique-driven, often impersonal art form, she imbued it with a personal context and history, blending the Eastern focus on precision and methodology with a Western emphasis on creative, subjective expression. In doing so, Sikander transported miniature painting into the realm of contemporary art. Reared as a Muslim, Sikander is also interested in exploring both sides of the Hindu and Muslim “border,” often combining imagery from both—such as the Muslim veil and the Hindu multi-armed goddess—in a single painting. Sikander has written: “Such juxtaposing and mixing of Hindu and Muslim iconography is a parallel to the entanglement of histories of India and Pakistan.” Expanding the miniature to the wall, Sikander also creates murals and installations, using tissue paperlike materials that allow for a more free-flowing style. In what she labeled performances, Sikander experimented with wearing a veil in public, something she never did before moving to the United States. Utilizing performance and various media and formats to investigate issues of border crossing, she seeks to subvert stereotypes of the East and, in particular, the Eastern Pakistani woman.

From National Geographic:

Poor Rapunzel. Not only did she get locked up in a tall tower, but she literally risked her neck by allowing a prince to climb up her hair. Such dilemmas had long bothered Sue Stocklmayer, director of the National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science (CPAS) at the Australian National University in Canberra. Stocklmayer resolved to do something about it, so she and fellow CPAS staff member Mike Gore, a retired professor, channeled their frustrations over fairy tale physics into a traveling science show.

Rapunzel’s conundrum is one of the highlights of the show. “We ask how it is that Rapunzel didn’t lose her skull, given the weight of what she’s [supporting],” Stocklmayer said. “You might notice some of the enlightened [storybook] artists have cottoned on to this and show her wrapping her hair around something, like a bedpost, first. “A small object”—such as a cooped-up princess—”can bear a lot of weight if the connecting device [her hair] is wrapped around something.” The prince is then technically hanging on to the bedpost rather than Rapunzel’s scalp. “So long as Rapunzel wraps her hair first, then the prince and she are Ok,” Stocklmayer said. “So in her case, yes, it could happen.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Female hormones circulating in the brain determine masculine behavior, at least in mice. Estrogen–the quintessential female hormone responsible for regulating the reproductive cycle–turns lady mice into wannabe male mice when it is allowed to penetrate the brain during development, according to new research.

Neuroscientist Julie Bakker of the University of Liege in Belgium and her colleagues proved this in the course of solving one of the longstanding riddles of brain development. Although it had long been known that a certain protein–alpha-fetoprotein (AFP)–plays a key role in mouse brain development by binding to estrogen, it was unclear whether AFP facilitates the development of female brains by carrying the hormone or simply by blocking it from entering the brain.

More here.

Ian Buruma reviews Beyond Glory by David Margolick, in the New York Review of Books:

Even after Schmeling was adopted by the new regime after 1933 and turned (with his own cooperation) into a Nazi poster boy, he never lost his glamour for the old Weimar bohemians. One of the fascinating bits of information provided by Margolick’s account of the legendary fights between Schmeling and Joe Louis is the list of people who congratulated him on his first victory against the Brown Bomber in 1936. Even as almost all black people, Jews, white liberals, and also some nonliberals in America were in deep sorrow over Louis’s defeat, even as the Nazi press was crowing over this great racial triumph over the Negro Untermensch, Schmeling received congratulatory telegrams from the Führer himself, naturally, but also from George Grosz, Marlene Dietrich, and Ernst Lubitsch, all of whom were living in the US at the time.

But then Schmeling was a very canny operator. While hobnobbing in Berlin with the Nazi elite—he and his wife, Ondra, were frequent guests at the homes of Joseph and Magda Goebbels —Schmeling made sure he retained his Jewish manager in New York, the indefatigable, cigar-chomping Joe “Yussel” Jacobs. As long as Schmeling won his fights and brought in enough foreign currency for the Fatherland, the Nazis were prepared to overlook this indiscretion.

More here.  [For Alan Koenig.]

Roger Highfield in The Telegraph:

Investing money, changing jobs, getting married: all big decisions that can mark a leap into the unknown. Now, a new brain-imaging study finds that the higher the level of uncertainty, the more likely it is that emotion and gut insinct, not logic, will rule.

This insight into what goes on in the brain when decisions are made in the face of missing information sheds light on how people save for retirement, how companies price insurance and how countries evaluate risks, ranging from climate change to terrorist attack.

Even ordering a strange-sounding dish at an exotic restaurant will summon the help of the same centre of the brain, one linked with handling emotions, which is different to the centre used when the brain weighs up known risks, such as the probability that a tossed coin will land heads up.

More here.

Luke Harding in The Guardian:

The century-old mystery as to whether a skull found in an Austrian basement is that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will be solved over the weekend when experts reveal the results of DNA tests.

Researchers said yesterday they would broadcast their findings on Sunday as part of a year of celebratory events marking the composer’s 250th birthday.

The tests were conducted by experts from Innsbruck’s institute for forensic medicine, who exhumed the remains of several of Mozart’s relatives last year from the family vault in Salzburg. They included the composer’s 16-year-old niece Jeanette and his maternal grandmother. DNA comparisons “succeeded in getting a clear result” on the skull, forensic pathologist Walther Parson told Austrian broadcaster ORF. But he refused to say whether the skull was that of the composer or someone else.

More here.