From Scientific American:

Stem cells can transform into whatever cell the body tells them to. Unfortunately, scientists have yet to master that particular gift of gab. But investigators at Stanford University may soon crack the language with tiny “chat rooms” for stem cells. In their natural milieu, stem cells have a variety of neighbors that pass on chemical messages at exact spots at particular times in specific amounts to guide the cells’ development into a given cell type. In today’s laboratory, however, researchers often bathe the whole cell with chemicals–kind of like out-of-control beer keggers compared with the sophisticated cocktail parties the body normally throws for stem cells. To uncover the mostly unknown placement, timing and identity of the cues, Stanford materials scientist Nicholas A. Melosh and his colleagues are re-creating the niche where stem cells normally dwell. They are developing a microscopic lab on a silicon chip that surrounds a stem cell with as many as 1,000 cavities, each 500 nanometers wide.

More here.

From Nature:

Ever think your spouse is turning you grey before your time? Well things are very different for a beetle being studied by Swedish evolutionary biologists. They have found that some male bean weevils can slow down the ageing process in their mates simply by having sex with them. Female weevils (Acanthoscelides obtectus) live longer when mated with males that have been bred to reproduce later in life, report researchers at Uppsala University. By supplying a cocktail of age-defying chemicals with their sperm, the males stop their mates dying off before they have had the chance to produce a large family. “The males are promoting their own selfish interests by being the good guys in this case,” explains Göran Arnqvist, a member of the study team. “It benefits males if their mates live longer.”

More here.

Speaking of the James Cohan gallery (previous post), they are invloved, along with The Whitney and others, in finally realizing Robert Smithson’s dream of having a tugboat carry an island around the island of Manhattan. Links to various articles and so forth can be found here.

And here‘s something from New York Magazine:

New Yorkers enjoy the unexpected gesture, the extravagant folly, the existential leap. This fall, Minetta Brook (a nonprofit arts organization) and the Whitney Museum will realize a whimsical idea of this kind by the earthworks artist Robert Smithson. In a drawing made in 1970, three years before his death, Smithson conjured up a ‘floating island’ that would circle the fixed island of Manhattan like a slow-moving planet. Built on a barge and pulled by a tugboat, it consisted of a tailored landscape of rocks, trees, and pathways. It looked like something carved from Central Park.

Occupying the territory between Lee Friedlander’s formal elegance and Gregory Crewdson’s over-the-top American Gothic, Bill Owens has been using photography to pry into the American psyche for almost four decades. This show includes work from his best known series—”Suburbia,” 1972, “Our Kind of People,” 1976, “Working, I do it for the money,” 1978, and “Leisure,” 2004—as well as unpublished photographs from the late ‘60s that point toward Larry Clark’s vision of debauched American youth.

more from Artforum here.
a link to the James Cohan gallery where the Owens exhibit can be found is here.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writes in this week’s NYTBR:

In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears – Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most “people of faith” belong to the religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal.

Schlesinger asks if we are “Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr.” As usual, on political issues my friend Alan Koenig already had a bead on this some time ago. Here’s an excerpt from his Beliver essay “Where are the Real Niebuhrians?”:

In noting America’s unease and odd naïveté in wielding power for universal ideals, Niebuhr cautioned that, “Consistent with the general liberal hope of redeeming history, the American Messianic dream is vague about the political or other power which would be required to subject all recalcitrant wills to the one will which is informed by the true vision.”

In the present circumstances, something about that seems awfully timely.

From Harvard Magazine:

Harvard Medical School researchers have applied a new microscopy technique in a living animal brain that for the first time reveals highly sophisticated time-lapse images of many neurons coordinating to produce complex patterns of activity. The approach will open up new avenues for analyzing neurodegenerative diseases and other aspects of the brain. “Put simply, this technique allows us to see the brain seeing,” said R. Clay Reid, HMS professor of neurobiology, a member of the HMS Systems Neuroscience initiative, and principal investigator on the project. “It’s an entirely new way of looking at brain function.”

The method, the first to track the responses of all the neurons in a visual circuit simultaneously, promises to rapidly advance our understanding of how the brain is wired for complex image processing. Lessons learned by studying the visual system may eventually apply to other brain functions like movement, thinking, and learning, as well as neurodegenerative diseases.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air. Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Young children will memorize the illicit inventory long before they can grasp its sense, said John McWhorter, a scholar of linguistics at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “The Power of Babel,” and literary giants have always constructed their art on its spine.

More here.

Aryn Baker in Time Magazine:

Nearly four years after the U.S.-led coalition overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan is still stumbling on the path to peace and stability. The country is nowhere near as violent as it was before; it has a new constitution that enables the establishment of civil institutions like an independent judiciary; and foreign investment is trickling in. Outside the capital Kabul, however, much of the hinterland remains poor and lawless, often controlled by rival warlords and drug barons who do not answer to the central authorities. The presidential election that Hamid Karzai won last year should have given the divided country a unifying leader. But Karzai has been hamstrung by the lack of a parliament or local government bodies, and many Afghans derisively call him “mayor of Kabul.”

Afghanistan will only become a true democracy when citizens can turn for help to locally elected leaders, rather than armed warlords. That’s why this week’s polls are potentially so important.

More here.

From LiveScience.com:

Nobody knows how many people sit wrongfully convicted in prison due to errors in fingerprint matching. But a new study suggests there could be a thousand or more unknown identification errors a year in the United States.

Criminologist Simon Cole of the University of California at Irvine examined all 22 known cases of fingerprint mistakes made since 1920.

Most of the 22 cases were revealed only through “extremely fortuitous circumstances,” such as a post-conviction DNA test, the intervention of foreign police and in one case a deadly lab accident that led to the re-evaluation of evidence, Cole said today.

One highly publicized example was the case of Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer held for two weeks as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings in 2004. FBI investigators matched prints at the scene to Mayfield, and an independent examiner verified the match. But Spanish National Police examiners insisted the prints did not match Mayfield and eventually identified another man who matched the prints.

The FBI acknowledged the error and Mayfield was released.

Cole thinks the high-profile cases are the tip of an iceberg of wrongfully accused, cases that are sometimes swept under the rug or lead to convictions. Other studies have shown an error rate of 0.8 percent in matching prints. Multiplied across all cases processed by U.S. crime labs in 2002, that would b e 1,900 mistaken fingerprint matches.

More here.

From New Scientist:

Certain questions define the way we see the world. How did the universe begin? What is matter made of? What shaped our planet? How did the amazing diversity of life arise? We take many of the answers for granted, but maybe we shouldn’t.

When we asked 10 of the biggest names in science to explain the significance of their discipline we were surprised by their response: who would have thought understanding quantum theory was relevant to the abortion debate? Or that a diamond ring can take you back to Pangaea? Set your mind spinning with our guide to the World’s 10 Biggest Ideas…

1. The big bang

2. Evolution

3. Quantum mechanics

4. The theory of everything

5. Risk

6. Chaos

7. Relativity

8. Climate change

9. Tectonics

10. Science

Carl Limbacher in NewsMax:

The Vatican is sending investigators to each of the 229 Catholic seminaries in the U.S. to search for “evidence of homosexuality.”

The Vatican probe was revealed in a document, obtained by the New York Times, meant to guide investigators who visit the seminaries.

It surfaced as Catholics await a Vatican ruling on whether homosexuals should be barred from the priesthood.

At each seminary, investigators will conduct confidential interviews with faculty members and seminarians, as well as everyone who graduated in the last three years, the Times reports.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Douglas Martin in the New York Times:

Stanley Burnshaw, a consummate man of letters who was not only a poet, critic, translator, editor, publisher and novelist, but also skilled at setting type by hand, died yesterday on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 99.

Mr. Burnshaw roamed the peaks of the literary world, famously dueling with Wallace Stevens over poetry and politics; publishing and editing work by his friend Robert Frost; writing a biography of Frost; and publishing important books by Lionel Trilling.

His own creative career spanned more than 70 years: five of his poems were published in 1927 in “The American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature,” of which Lewis Mumford was an editor, and he published his final book, a poetry anthology, in 2002.

More here.

Lewis Beale in the Los Angeles Times:

Rushdie says the idea first came to him in 1999. “The germ of the book came in two bits,” he notes. “One was this image of the murder scene with which the book begins. It then connected for me with having been in Kashmir and having met a group of traveling players not unlike the one in the book. Somehow, I realized this murderer was Kashmiri, he might come from that village and, somehow, that might give me a way of uniting the two worlds.”

Yet Rushdie had to set “Shalimar” aside for a while because it wasn’t coming together. He picked it up again partly, he says, because of Sept. 11. “What that made me see was this idea that the world was interconnected and is one of the things that everyone saw in this city on that day,” Rushdie says. “And it made me think that what was wrong with my original conception was that I hadn’t made the canvas big enough. You have to go back into Strasbourg, back into India. By enlarging the story, you get to see how different bits of the world connect.”

More here.

Abraham Verghese in the New York Times Magazine:

With the first busloads of Katrina refugees about to arrive in San Antonio, the call went out for physician volunteers, and I signed up for the 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift. On the way, riding down dark, deserted streets, I thought of driving in for night shifts in the I.C.U. as an intern many years ago, and how I would try to steel myself, as if putting on armor.

Within a massive structure at Kelly U.S.A. (formerly Kelly Air Force Base), a brightly lighted processing area led to office cubicles, where after registering, new arrivals with medical needs came to see us. My first patient sat before me, haggard, pointing to what ailed her, as if speech no longer served her. I peeled her shoes from swollen feet, trying not to remove skin in the process. Cuts from submerged objects and immersion in standing water had caused the swelling, as well as infection of both feet. An antibiotic, a pair of slip-ons from the roomful of donated clothing and a night with her feet elevated – that would help.

The ailments common among the refugees included diarrhea, bronchitis, sore throat and voices hoarse or lost. And stress beyond belief. People didn’t have their medications, and blood sugars and blood pressures were out of control.

More here.  [Thanks to Sughra Raza.]

From National Geographic:

The idea of mother and daughter, and possibly even grandmother, chasing the same male would repulse most humans. But to female greater horseshoe bats, sharing a strong breeding partner can ensure fit offspring and strengthen the social group. During their life span, most female greater horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum) revisit and breed with a specific male, according to a new study.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Being right isn’t enough, says Peter Preston. Here, in 20 graceful, witty, prophetic essays, is everything that’s good about American journalism ( and a rich slice of American society, too). The editor of Harper’s magazine writes like a dream, researches like a punctilious professor of classical history and finds his lonely judgments vindicated time and again. The difficulty – and it is a difficulty – is that that good side comes with a greyer side that readers outside America can’t ignore, a built-in impotence verging on tragic irrelevance. But let’s hit the high spots first.

More here.

From Newtopia Magazine:

The destruction of New Orleans represents a confluence of many of the most pernicious trends in American politics and culture: poverty, racism, militarism, elitist greed, environmental abuse, public corruption and the decay of democracy at every level.Katrina should become a metaphor for America’s failed representative democracy. Americans need to remember that government is a necessary good and not a necessary evil as right-wing conservatives and Republicans believe. When our corrupt or incompetent leaders fail and cause loss of life they should be prosecuted for criminal negligent homicide. In this case it means prosecuting the Mayor of New Orleans, the Governor of Louisiana, the head of FEMA, and President George W. Bush.

More here.

From The New York Times:

SOME fearless outside referee had to barge in and try to adjudicate the culture wars, so let us rejoice that it’s Zadie Smith. She brings almost everything you want to the task: humor, brains, objectivity, equanimity, empathy, a pitch-perfect ear for smugness and cant, and then still more humor. Born in 1975 – safely past the 1960’s, the birth of our blues – she’s not much burdened by heavy dogmatic baggage of her own. Being from England, she is one wry remove from the ground zero of these battles, America. She can’t reconcile the warring camps – no one can – but “On Beauty” is that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the left. (Not that they’ll necessarily be laughing in the same places.) Yet Smith is up to more as well: she wants to rise above the fray even as she wallows in it, to hit a high note of idealism rather than sink into the general despair. How radical can you be? Blame it on her youth.

More here, and see also this.

Francine Prose in Slate offers a bad review of Cotzee’s writing in his new book Slow Man.

“Here is Coetzee:

The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.

There’s nothing wrong with this, I suppose, except that it’s larded with clichés, starting with ‘bolt of electricity’ and continuing on to ‘flies through the air with the greatest of ease.’ The fact that writer and character recognize them as such hardly makes the passage more fun to read.”

I’ll still take a look.  And at the end, she leaves us with this trite but not so correct observation.

“I find myself coming up against the deceptively simple fact that if we are not interested in the language a writer uses, we find it hard to stay interested in the book . . .”

I find myself coming up against the not so deceptive and not so simple belief that style is not exactly just a matter of taste.  I may find a painting or work of art unappealing, but I have little doubt that Timothy Don can change my mind by helping to see it in a new way.  Justification in aesthetic judgment may be more complicated than in moral or scientific judgment.  But certainly it’s not a matter of “I like chocolate” and “you like vanilla”.

Steve Connor in The Independent:

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a “tipping point” beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.

More here.  [Thanks to Josh Smith.]