Deborah Hutton in The Observer:

I count myself the luckiest and unluckiest woman in London. The luckiest because I have a great husband, a fabulous family with kids on track and growing up, a beautiful house, more friends than I deserve and as much interesting work as I want. This time a year ago, I’d put the dog on the lead and walk over to the local shops in the sunshine, marvelling at my own good fortune, thinking I wouldn’t swap places with anyone in the world. Then, at a stroke, this lovely run of luck ran out. On 26 November 2004, at the age of ‘just’ 49-and-a-half, which my kids think is ancient but seems pretty young to me, I discovered that the irritating, niggly cough I had had for the past two months was no trivial chest infection but an aggressive adenocarcinoma that had already spread well beyond the organ of origin – my lungs – to my bones, lymph nodes and possibly my liver as well. The irony of my situation was apparent to everyone who knew me. I was never ill, never down, a runner of half-marathons, and a yoga freak and nutrition nut to boot.

I knew how to look after myself big time. After all, it was my job. I had been writing about women’s health for more than a quarter of a century, first as health editor of Vogue and then for a range of magazines and newspapers. I was the published author of not one but four books about preventive health. Since giving up smoking 23 years ago, I had joined the ranks of those fanatically intolerant antismoking ex-smokers. And yet here I now was, struck down by lung cancer, with its serves-you-right stigma.

More here.

From MSNBC:

LONDON – National Gallery experts using infrared techniques have discovered a Leonardo da Vinci sketch hidden underneath a painting by the Italian master, conservationists said Friday. The sketch — the first unknown Leonardo image to be found in decades — is beneath the delicate brushstrokes of the artist’s “Virgin on the Rocks,” a powerful scene of Christ’s mother in a dusky cavern, which hangs in the London museum. The concealed image shows a woman with one hand clutched to her breast, the other outstretched, kneeling before what experts said was planned to be an infant Jesus. Leonardo apparently was planning a picture of the adoration of the Christ child, a scene popular with Renaissance artists, but changed his mind.

More here.

T.A. Frank in The New Republic:

The last few weeks have not been without challenges, but, on the whole, news from the outposts of tyranny is positive. From a successful “clean-up operation” across Zimbabwe to a book fair in Libya, progress has been continual. Despite hostility from without and subversion from within, the outposts of tyranny remain upbeat, with happy, if silent, majorities.

Syria. We begin with Syria, whose news agency, SANA, fronts a report that “Syria, Jordan and Lebanon celebrate Wednesday launching a joint regional project of integral administration of rubbish resulted from olives’ pressing.” It clarifies: “Minister of Environment and Local Administration Hilal al-Atrash underlined that this project aims at offering an integral administration of industrial deflation resulted from olives’ mills in all participating countries, pointing out at the economic significance of producing olives’ oil in Syria.” Experts agree that the report, while incomprehensible, is the first to openly discuss the issue of olives’ role in industrial deflation.

SANA also spotlights the plight of youth in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The article carries a grim headline: “Syrian Children of Golan are Depraved from Their Simplest Rights.” Whether the depravity is acquired or congenital is not discussed.

More here.

Robert Adler in New Scientist:

Surfing the web and making free internet phone calls on your Wi-Fi laptop, listening to your iPod on the way home, it often seems that, technologically speaking, we are enjoying a golden age. Human inventiveness is so finely honed, and the globalised technology industries so productive, that there appears to be an invention to cater for every modern whim.

But according to a new analysis, this view couldn’t be more wrong: far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead. His study will be published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

More here.

“What’s in a pink rose? Or a plate of fish? AS Byatt traces the metaphors and illusions that make still lifes so much more than paintings of everday things.”

From The Guardian:

The Old Testament prohibits the making of images of God. Early Christianity saw the whole world of the senses as a snare and a delusion, distracting the soul from the higher world of the Spirit. Plato saw art as an imitation of particular things that were themselves already imitations of some divine and unchanging order of archetypes, the idea of a tree, the idea of a table.

The Stuff of Life, opening at the National Gallery, is an exhibition about the representation of objects, full of surprises both visual and intellectual. It asks the basic question: why make careful representations of things, especially “ordinary” things? And it considers various answers – from things as religious metaphors or symbols, to things as metaphors of human identity, to things as art objects to be studied and things as metaphors of material transience.

More here.

‘Bravery was being cool under fire. Bravery was going back to rescue the wounded. Bravery was proved, exclusively, in war and made one a man.’

Not so, according to war correspondent Anthony Loyd, who has written a very moving piece about the death of his mother for the Times of London. Loyd has reported from Bosnia, Chechnya, and Iraq – his book My War Gone By, I Miss It So is one of the best books on war reporting I have ever read. I was pointed to this essay by reading Laura Rozen’s fine site War and Piece.

From MSNBC:

Until now, scientists could not explain why ice cubes in your drink melt. They’ve known the basics, but the details remained elusive. A breakthrough new study, announced today, supports a leading theory that melting starts when the fundamental structure of matter begins to crack.

The problem is that the earliest phase of melting has never been seen. Scientists can’t see the atoms involved because they are so small and because they are hidden in the structure of solid material. So the team made some big atoms. Specifically, they made see-through crystals that are like small beads and are visible in an optical microscope.

“The spheres swell or collapse significantly with small changes in temperature, and they exhibit other useful properties that allow them to behave like enormous versions of atoms for the purpose of our experiment,” said Ahmed Alsayed, a University of Pennsylvania doctoral student and lead author of a paper on the results in the July 1 issue of the journal Science.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Clonal or asexual reproduction is not unique to little fire ants. Some lizard species, for example, produce female offspring clonally from adult females. In most ants, females are typically produced by sexual reproduction, while males develop from unfertilized eggs. But the small fire ant (Wasmannia auropunctata), which is considered an invasive pest in tropical habitats, is different, scientists found. They have determined that queens and males each produce offspring with genes identical to their own, except when reproducing the sterile worker ants.

The findings are reported in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature.   

More here.

I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but your mother has taught you wrong. That’s not how you should fold a T-shirt. First found floating around the internet about a year or so ago, there’s an inspired new Japanese technique that will shake off our tired western concept of folding. A quick Google search will find the video I’m raving about.

From The Guardian. The video is to be found here and is pretty frickin lovely.

It’s kind of a dumb and opaque sounding name, but The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a pretty interesting place. The website contains all of their documentation about the way that land is being used on this planet today. It’s also a great place to find out about various projects in Land, Earth, Environment, Art, etc.

From Harvard Magazine:

In 1911 the little Fogg Art Museum mounted the only one-man museum exhibition to occur during his lifetime of works by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834-1917). It was a daring departure from practice. The artist was not a dead Old Master. His subjects, realistically represented—jockeys, ballet girls, laundresses, and what a critic called “creatures whose chief pre-occupation seems to be…the taking of baths”—seemed to some viewers unworthy of attention.

Although the loan show consisted of only 12 works, was up only nine and a half days, and generated expenses of $178.70 (more than the $158.98 raised to fund it), Edward W. Forbes, A.B. 1895, who had become director of the Fogg in 1909, judged the exhibition a success. A high-Brahmin Bostonian with a penchant for early Italian pictures, he wrote a disdainful patron: “I think this show is an excellent thing for the Fogg Museum. It is bringing hundreds of people into the building who would never come before and who, perhaps, could have been reached in no other way except by a modern show.” Attendance totaled 550.

Thus began the museum’s keen and continuing interest in this artist, now celebrated in an exhibition, Degas at Harvard, which encompasses 62 works in many media (including a book of sonnets) gathered from the Fogg, the Houghton Library, and Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard’s research library and art collection in Washington, D.C. It will run from August 1 to November 27, filling the galleries of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. 

More here.

Phil Hirschkorn at CNN:

“The Freedom Tower,” will retain the height of the earlier design — at 1,776 feet, symbolizing the year the United States declared its independence.

But it will also include reminders of the twin towers it will replace.

The roof above the public observation deck will be at 1,362 feet, the height of old South Tower, while a glass wall will rise 1,368 feet, the height of the old North Tower.

“In subtle but important ways this building recalls what we lost,” said architect David Childs.

The building will bear a spire that will emit light at night to echo the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

More here.

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

The astounding popularity of the Vermeer exhibition in Washington a number of years ago, where people actually stood in line in the snow for hours, suggested that the passion for beauty in art is still very much alive, at least on the part of ordinary museumgoers. But who would have thought that it would continue to persist among art-savvy insiders? Then I remembered a show at the Sonnabend Gallery in the late ’80s, where Koons’s life-size, Italian-crafted, painted porcelain figures–Michael Jackson and Bubbles, Pink Panther, and all the rest–were first shown, and I remembered being told by a usually thoughtful collector, “Sure, they’re stupid, but look at the craftsmanship.” And then there was the time a preternaturally sensitive art-dealer friend of mine instructed me in the subtle difference between a Warhol Brillo Box where the silk-screen process was slightly off register as opposed to more perfectly aligned ones. He told me that an off-register box was more “beautiful”–that was the word he used–since such blurs and smudges showed the human touch, and it was more valuable to boot.

I couldn’t help thinking, at the time and now, of what Arthur Danto has said about pop and conceptual art (and I am paraphrasing him here): To look at a Brillo Box with the eye of a connoisseur is to comically misclassify its artistic interest, which is conceptual and not aesthetic.

More here.

“His philosophy inspired a generation, then drifted out of fashion. Now, 100 years after his birth, the life and work of Jean-Paul Sartre are once again highly relevant – and bitterly controversial. John Lichfield explores his legacy.”

From The Independent:

Jean-Paul Sartre – philosopher, novelist, playwright, polemicist, political activist, the secular messiah of existentialism, the prototype of the “engaged” French intellectual – died 25 years ago this year. He was born 100 years ago next Tuesday.

His funeral in April 1980 provoked an outpouring of grief more usually associated with actors than with ugly, chain-smoking, foul-smelling, squint-eyed philosophers. More than 30,000 people took to the streets of Paris to follow his coffin and – in the phrase of one fan at the time – to “demonstrate against Sartre’s death”.

For the next two decades, Sartre’s standing fell (and Beauvoir’s, if anything, rose). Sartre’s many mistakes and inconsistencies – his support for Stalinism in the early 1950s, for Maoism in the 1970s, his defence of civilian massacres in Algeria and at the 1972 Munich Olympics – obscured the range, versatility and ambition of his writing.

His reputation as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century is now rising again, not so much in France as – paradoxically – in high academic circles in the United States, a country that he detested.

More here.

Sam Anderson writes a slide show essay about the most addictive comic on the web, in Slate:

Dorothy Parker once wrote that the characters in James Thurber’s cartoons looked like “unbaked cookies.” The Webcomic Toothpaste for Dinner tends to make even the doughiest Thurber look like photorealism. The characters all have oblong heads, three-fingered hands, and stacked eyes like flounders. They are noseless and earless and always on the brink of perspectival disaster. The handwritten text that sometimes dominates the drawings often flirts with illegibility. The art is so bad it suggests some kind of tragic and inspiring back story: an artist soldiering bravely on after losing his thumbs in a bear attack or a factory accident.

More here.  [Thanks to Maeve E. Adams.]

From Scientific American:

Previous investigations into the flight of the hummingbird had suggested that it could be employing the same mechanisms as insects, which often hover and dart in a manner similar to the bird. “But a hummingbird is a bird, with the physical structure of a bird and all of the related capabilities and limitations,” explains Douglas Warrick of Oregon State University. “It is not an insect and it does not fly exactly like an insect.” To unravel the hummingbird’s aerial secrets, Warrick and his colleagues used a technique called digital particle imaging velocimitry (DPIV). Usually employed by engineers, DPIV uses microscopic particles of olive oil that are light enough to be moved to and fro by the slightest changes in air currents. As a pulsing laser illuminates the droplets for short periods of time, a camera captures them on film. From the resulting images, the scientists determined exactly how the bird’s wings move the air around them.

More here.

Ethirajan Anbarasan at the BBC:

Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s bold decision to push through a deal to share international tsunami aid has restored hopes of a negotiated settlement to the island’s ethnic conflict.

In addition, analysts say, the president has scored a victory over her political rivals by being “firm and decisive” in bringing about the deal with the Tamil Tiger rebels.

Under the agreement, Sinhalas, Tamils and Muslims will share nearly $3bn in aid pledged after the December tsunami.

Representatives from all three communities will be responsible for reconstruction work at different administrative levels in the Tamil-dominated north and east.

The Tsunami Relief Council, as it is called, may not have considerable political or executive powers but in more than two decades of war this is the first time both sides have come together to work in an administrative structure for a common cause.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Most people think they know what mass is, but they understand only part of the story. For instance, an elephant is clearly bulkier and weighs more than an ant. Even in the absence of gravity, the elephant would have greater mass–it would be harder to push and set in motion. Obviously the elephant is more massive because it is made of many more atoms than the ant is, but what determines the masses of the individual atoms? What about the elementary particles that make up the atoms–what determines their masses? Indeed, why do they even have mass?

More here.