Brian Handwerk in National Geographic:

Grasses and other green growth may produce 10 to 30 percent of Earth’s annual methane output, a new study reports, making plants a surprising—and potentially significant—contributor to global warming.

Until the data were unveiled in this week’s Nature, scientists had believed that plant-related methane formed only in oxygen-free environments, such as bogs.

But a team of European researchers identified a large range of plants that release methane under normal growing conditions. The gas also seeps from dead plant material.

David Lowe is an atmospheric chemist with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Wellington, New Zealand. He wrote a review article accompanying the study.

According to Lowe, “We now have the specter that new forests might increase greenhouse warming through methane emissions rather than decrease it by being sinks for carbon dioxide.”

“The identification of a new source should prompt a re-examination of the global methane budget.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Last December was a special month for U.S. executions. North Carolina gave a lethal injection to Kenneth Boyd, making him the 1,000th person to be executed since the 1976 Supreme Court decision to allow the reinstatement of the death penalty. Soon thereafter, on December 13, California put to death Crip gang founder Stanley “Tookie” Williams. The U.S. remains the only developed Western nation to permit executions despite serious flaws in the system. No need for any pacificist proclivity or liberal leaning to see that–just look at the science.

First, there’s DNA evidence. Although it cannot prove guilt beyond all doubt–who can forget O.J. Simpson?–it can definitively prove innocence. The first DNA exoneration occurred in 1989, and since then many on death row have been set free because of it–the Death Penalty Information Center counts 122 exonerations since 1973. It showed that too many convictions resulted from sloppy or overzealous police work and prosecution, or incompetent defense attorneys. It helped convince then Republican governor George Ryan of Illinois in 2003 to declare the death penalty “arbitrary and capricious” and to commute the sentences of all 157 inmates on the state’s death row.

But DNA isn’t the only contribution from science to this issue.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Move over, Mrs. Robinson. The new public enemy is the bespectacled babe who teaches our kids math in the classroom and sex in the parking lot. Dozens of female teachers have been caught with male students in recent years, and the airwaves are full of outrage that we’re letting them off the hook. On cable news, phrases like “double standard” and “slap on the wrist” are poured like pious gravy over photos of the pedagogue-pedophile-pet of the month. “Why is it when a man rapes a little girl, he goes to jail,” CNN’s Nancy Grace complains, “but when a woman rapes a boy, she had a breakdown?”

I hate to change the subject from sex back to math, but this frenzy—I’m trying hard not to call it hysteria—reeks of overexcitement. Sex offenses by women aren’t increasing. Female offenders are going to jail. And while their sentences are, on average, shorter than sentences given to male offenders, the main reason is that their crimes are objectively less vile. By ignoring this difference, we’re replacing the old double standard with a new one.

More here.

Shanaz Ramzi in Newsline:

Q: How is it that from graduating in something as prosaic as business, you began to write novels?

A: I’ve been writing for a long time; in fact, I began years before I went to business school or got a job. Everybody is multi-faceted, but not everyone gets the opportunity to exercise their whims. I’ve been lucky enough to both have a job and write.

Q: Do you think your exposure to world politics has given you an insight into political realities, which come to the fore in your books?

A: I think it is not my career that has given me a political insight but the conversations I’ve grown up with, the focus on following world events in the news and also my exposure to living in the heart of Karachi in the eighties, even if for a limited time. It was like I had a finger on the pulse of everything – I lived on Guru Mandir, and would drive all over the Site area, Korangi, Orangi and Malir, absorbing everything I could. I would watch the cricket match in Khudadad Colony every Friday.

I thought I had a sense of how things were and what was their logical trajectory, and followed my instincts on that trajectory. For instance, I wrote that a dictator would take over the country in a military coup, and in the name of eradicating fundamentalism, he would get rid of all opposition. I mentioned that Pakistan would be the darling of the west – particularly the general – and would be the new emerging economy because of its coalition against fundamentalism. When my father read the book prior to its publication, he insisted that I delete this portion as such a scenario of coups and martial law regimes were a thing of the past. Am I glad I didn’t listen to my dad on that occasion!

More here.

Dorothy Roberts reviews Postcolonial Melancholia by Paul Gilroy, in The Boston Review:

It was not so long ago that the biological meaning of race seemed to be on its way out: the Human Genome Project discredited the genetic basis of racial groupings just as social scientists were declaring that race is a social construction. Apparently, reports of the demise of race as a scientific concept were premature. In June 2005, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first race-specific pharmaceutical, BiDil, to treat heart failure in African-Americans. The drug is just one example of a burgeoning scientific and commercial interest in genetic racial differences. Some scientists have even claimed that clusters of genetic similarity correspond to antiquated racial classifications.

The renewed acceptance of inherent racial differences has gone hand in hand with intensified state surveillance of inner-city communities: racial profiling, mass incarceration, welfare restructuring, and the removal of children from families into foster care. As its lineage foreshadows, the biological definition of race provides a ready rationale for this disenfranchisement of black citizens and complements colorblind policies based on the claim that racism is no longer the cause of social inequality.

Given this alarming convergence, black intellectuals today face a critical question: how can we fight systemic racism without relying on the idea that biology divides human beings into races?

Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia is a deeply engaging exploration of this question.

More here.

Ker Than (of 3 Quarks Daily) in Space.com:

Astronomers have traced the source of mysterious high-energy X-rays and gamma rays in space to a little known star cluster in the Milky Way.

The cluster sits about 19,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Scutum. It contains about 20,000 stars, most of which are hot, young blue stars.supernovae.

Astronomers had known about the star cluster before, but it was only recently that they confirmed the number of stars it held.

In the late 1990’s, several observatories detected very high-energy X-rays and gamma rays coming from the region but astronomers were uncertain about their source. It was thought the blasts might have originated from distant galaxies or from pulsating stars known as pulsars, which typically emit radio waves but can send out other wavelengths of energy as well.

A team of researchers is now proposing that the blasts are the result of massive stars known as red supergiants in the cluster that exploded cataclysmically as

More here.

Clay Risen in The New Republic:

It was early 2003, and the newly created Department of Homeland Security was looking for someone to help oversee its vast computer network. The department soon found a candidate who appeared to be a perfect match: Laura Callahan. Not only had Callahan been working with federal IT systems since the mid-’80s, but she came with outstanding academic credentials: bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science, topped by a Ph.D. in computer information systems. In April 2003, Callahan was brought on as the department’s senior director in the office of the chief information officer, pulling down a six-figure salary. 

But Callahan didn’t last long. A few weeks after her hiring, the Office of Personnel Management opened an investigation into her resumé following the publication of articles questioning her degrees’ provenance. It turned out that Callahan’s vaunted academic achievements were anything but–all three degrees had come from Hamilton University, a now-defunct degree mill operating out of a former Motel 6 in Evanston, Wyoming, that claimed religious affiliation. In June 2003, she was placed on administrative leave. By the time she resigned, in March 2004, a new picture of Callahan had emerged: not a skilled IT executive, but an unqualified hack.

More here.

Mike Peplow in Nature:

Conventional computers do their ‘thinking’ by shuttling electrons through arrangements of transistors called logic gates. But in order for those thoughts to be stored as computer memories, the electrical signals have to be translated by bulky components into magnetic fields on the metallic grains that cover your hard drive. This additional step takes up extra room in a computer.

What’s more, transistors get so hot that it is becoming increasingly difficult to pack more of them on to silicon chips without melting something important.

The solution? Space-saving, cool-headed, magnetic logic gates.

More here.

Over at the Valve, a book event:

[A] series of short essays and comments on Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, an event similar to those past on Theory’s Empire and The Literary Wittgenstein. Several Valve regulars will contribute, and we also hope to have pieces from Cosma Shalizi and Scott McLemee. Anyone who has read or would like to read Moretti’s book and/or the essays in the NLR from which it is drawn and who has an idea for a guest-post for the event is welcome to contact me with a proposal. Before too long, we hope to be able to make PDFs of Moretti’s NLR articles available to interested readers for a limited time.

Franco Moretti is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford and also the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World, Modern Epic, and Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. Graphs, Maps, Trees is an ambitious work, seeking to “delineate a transformation in the study of literature” through “a shift from close reading of individual texts to the construction of abstract models.” These models come from quantitative history, geography, and evolutionary theory, areas which Moretti suggests have had little interaction with literary criticism, “but which have many things to teach us, and may change the way that we work.”

Explanation before interpretation, a materialist conception of form, and “a total indiffierence to the philosophizing that goes by the name of ‘Theory’ in literature departments,” which should be “forgotten, and replaced with the extraordinary array of conceptual constructions–theories, plural, and with a lower case ‘t’–developed by the natural and by the social sciences” are what Moretti proposes for a “more rational literary history.”

PAMUK The good years are over now. When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.

INTERVIEWER
When you say the previous generation, whom do you have in mind?

PAMUK
The authors who felt a social responsibility, authors who felt that literature serves morality and politics. They were flat realists, not experimental. Like authors in so many poor countries, they wasted their talent on trying to serve their nation. I did not want to be like them, because even in my youth I had enjoyed Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Proust—I had never aspired to the social-realist model of Steinbeck and Gorky. The literature produced in the sixties and seventies was becoming outmoded, so I was welcomed as an author of the new generation.

After the mid-nineties, when my books began to sell in amounts that no one in Turkey had ever dreamed of, my honeymoon years with the Turkish press and intellectuals were over. From then on, critical reception was mostly a reaction to the publicity and sales, rather than the content of my books. Now, unfortunately, I am notorious for my political comments —most of which are picked up from international interviews and shamelessly manipulated by some Turkish nationalist journalists to make me look more radical and politically foolish than I really am.

more in the Paris Review here.

It’s been a year since Harvard President Larry Summers uttered some unfortunate speculations about why so few women hold elite professorships in the sciences. During Summers’s speech, a biologist, overwhelmed by the injustice of it all, nearly collapsed with what George F. Will unkindly described as the vapors. Since that odd January day, Summers has been rebuked with a faculty no-confidence vote, untold talk-show hosts have weighed in, and 936 stories about the controversy have appeared in newspapers and magazines (according to LexisNexis). Impressive response, especially considering the modest number of these professorships available.

more from TNR here.

Everybody’s a critic, but not everybody is a professional critic, and very few are professional art critics. One of the best of the few is now the subject of an unusual and unusually interesting exhibition at Ronald Feldman Gallery in SoHo.

She is Kim Levin, who has been writing smart, clear, stylish, spiritually generous and politically urgent art criticism for The Village Voice and other publications for more than 25 years. Organized with the assistance of John Salvest, an artist interested in systems of accumulation, “Notes and Itineraries, 1976-2004” is a kind of career retrospective seen through the lens not of Ms. Levin’s published writings but of the tools of her trade: exhibition announcements, press releases and handwritten lists and notes that she has saved over the years.

more from the NY Times here.

From MSNBC:

A couple of years ago, when dot-com millionaire Joe Firmage first floated his idea for an expert-based “Encyclopedia Galactica” that would knit together all realms of knowledge in a clickable online world, you might have wondered whether the whole idea was just a science-fiction gimmick. Then Wikipedia, the community-based online encyclopedia, blossomed on the Web. Google Earth, the search engine company’s map-based interface for global imagery, made a huge splash. Looking back, Firmage’s idea might have just been ahead of its time.

Firmage and his collaborators say the Encyclopedia Galactica vision is ready for a pilot tryout, if not for prime time. On Tuesday, they officially took the wraps off their software project, now known as the Digital Universe. Will it turn out to be a nonprofit “PBS of the Web,” as Firmage and his collaborators hope? Stay tuned: Even Firmage admits it might take years for the idea to catch on.

More here.

Trish Carney in Lens Culture:

The photographs are of animals found dead; the majority is of road-killed animals that I encountered on a two-mile stretch of road near where I used to live. The catalyst for this work came from a couple of things. One is my ongoing interest in how animals are thought about, how animals are looked at, and how we co-exist with animals. Another is reading a Barry Lopez essay called Apologia. In this essay Lopez explored the moral and emotional upheaval he experienced during a cross-country road trip where he frequently stopped and removed road-killed animals from the roadways.

So these photographs represent my technique of awareness, a gesture of respect toward the animals I encountered on the roads. Instead of averting my eyes in sadness or indifference I found that I wanted to look closer. I wanted to focus my attention toward the animals. I photographed them, not so much as a document of their passing but more as an acknowledgement of their existence, an acknowledgement that the lives and the remains of animals are very much a part of our landscape, a part of our day to day world.

More here.

Giorgio Agamben’s work has come to be widely read in American universities in the last ten years. The former Autonomia theorist Antonio Negri and the American academic Michael Hardt have enjoyed a more public success with their two books Empire and Multitude, where, with catch-all verve and unstable prose, they continued poststructuralist efforts to explain globalization and the contemporary international order. But Agamben’s work makes a different kind of claim to immediate political significance among recent attempts by “high theory” to deal with a globalized and post-9/11 world. He is more lucid than some colleagues, better able to summarize the insights of predecessor intellectuals without distortion, and, through a set of recent events, seemingly more prophetic about the governmental and juridical realities of the moment.

The growing influence of the Italian philosopher’s work seems in many respects to depend on his remarkable sense of taste. Agamben allies himself with a line of intellectuals that goes back before World War II, and puts together figures who, though many had minor personal connections, seem antithetical. Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt regularly get historical rendezvous; so do Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojève. Heidegger stands on his own, usually arriving after the midpoint of books like mystic cavalry to illuminate and redeem them. The sense is that Agamben has an unusual, unforced sensitivity to the hidden affinities of early-20th-century thinkers—he’s arranging these assignations for the thinkers’ sakes, not his own. Beyond that are his many Talmudic, medieval, and ancient Roman anecdotes.

more from n+1 here.

Is it obligatory to revere the work of Richard Long? To read what is written about him you might well believe it. For almost 40 years Long has been walking the world in the interests of art, leaving occasional traces in the landscape, bringing fragments back, evoking the experience in photographs and texts. In these he is as prone to bathos as any other rambler, noting what he ate, how far he traipsed, descending from stupendous nature to the dampness of his socks. Yet everything he makes seems to bring on a swoon: it is sublime, shamanistic, transcendent.

more from The Observer here.

Santiago Calatrava, a Spaniard born in 1951 who is the spiritual heir to Gaudí, has recently skyrocketed into the ranks of the “starchitects” (Gehry, Hadid, Koolhaas, Libeskind, et al.). Like Gaudí, he insists that his projects are inspired by and founded in nature’s underlying geometric structures, both simple and complex, and in its visible forms. Calatrava, also like Gaudí, and like some of his celebrated colleagues, makes architecture distinguished by its aggressive, photogenic iconicity. His buildings project striking images, and they make good logos. (An aerial view of several of Calatrava’s buildings graces the official Spanish tourist bureau’s promotional materials.) For this reason, Calatrava’s buildings and projects raise an urgent question. Is iconicity integral to good architecture? Can it, in some hands, be a deterrent to good architecture? These architects, practicing what marketing directors admiringly call “branding,” are logging a staggering number of airplane hours; and in the process, they are transforming architecture’s role in the international political economy by creating universal and instantly recognizable trademarks. In this newly organized professional context, imagery rules.

more from TNR here.

From The New York Times:

Founded five years ago by Douglas Repetto, the director of research at Columbia University’s computer music center, dorkbot is an informal club of artists, techies and geeks who do “strange things with electricity,” according to their motto. In five years, chapters of the club have sprung up in nearly 30 cities around the world, from Seattle to Rotterdam to Mumbai.

This month’s meeting was held on what may or may not have been Sir Isaac Newton’s 363rd birthday, but the fact that history is unclear on that matter did not dissuade Mr. Repetto, 35, from enlisting him as the evening’s mascot. Slides of Newton and Newton-related arcana flashed across a screen before the lectures began.

But what would Sir Isaac have made of Mikey Sklar? Mr. Sklar, a UNIX engineer presenting at dorkbot for the second time, demonstrated how he had a $2 chip surgically implanted into his left hand – and why he did it. The Radio Frequency Identification tag under his skin uses the same technology that the E-ZPass system employs to identify cars on toll roads. Mr. Sklar, 28, said his tag unlocks his computer and accesses news feeds as part of an art project.

More here.

From Nature:

Leptin is famed for controlling our weight and appetite. But the hormone, which is released by fat cells and gives the brain a reading of our fat stores, is also thought to act in brain areas involved in emotion. To explore this link, Xin-Yun Lu and her colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio stressed rats by, for example, separating them from other animals. The rats’ leptin levels plunged at the same time that they showed behavioural changes such as losing interest in a sugary drink, the kind of apathy that is often associated with human depression.

The team found that injections of leptin into otherwise healthy animals were as good as at least one known treatment in a test widely used to screen for new antidepressants. Leptin shot to fame in the mid 1990s when scientists discovered that a strain of immensely fat mice that eat voraciously lack a working copy of the gene. They found that leptin injections could help the mice to shed weight, raising the prospect that the hormone might be a miraculous fat fighter for the obese. That hope was dealt a blow when leptin failed to fight flab for most people in clinical trials. Since then, scientists have realized that obese people often have high levels of leptin and seem to have become resistant to its effects.

More here.

Romare Bearden. Two Women in a Landscape, 1941.

More on this prolific and influential Harlem Rennaisance painter here, here, and here.