Michael Schirber at Space.com:

The biggest starquake ever recorded resulted in oscillations in the X-ray emission from the shaking neutron star.  Astronomers hope these oscillations will crack the mystery of what neutron stars are made of.

On December 27, 2004, several satellites and telescopes from around the world detected an explosion on the surface of SGR 1806-20, a neutron star 50,000 light years away.  The resulting flash of energy — which lasted only a tenth of a second — released more energy than the Sun emits in 150,000 years.

Combing through data from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a team of astronomers has identified oscillations in the X-ray emission of SGR 1806-20.  These rapid fluctuations, which began 3 minutes after the starquake and trailed off 10 minutes later, had a frequency of 94.5 Hertz.

“This is near the frequency of the 22nd key of a piano, F sharp,” said Tomaso Belloni from Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics.

Just as geologists study the Earth’s interior using seismic waves after an earthquake, astrophysicists can use the X-ray oscillations to probe this distant neutron star.

More here.

There have been signs in the past days, but the new science blog Cosmic Variance will come as a pleasant surprise to many.  Founded by a friend and supporter of 3QD, Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe, and his colleagues (Mark Trodden of Orange Quark, JoAnne Hewitt, Risa Weschler, and Clifford Johnson), Cosmic Varaince:

“is a group blog constructed by some idiosyncratic human beings who also happen to be physicists. Sometimes we’ll talk about science, other times it will be food or literature or whatever moves us — I know I have some incisive things to say about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, for one thing. We’re not a representative collection of scientists, just some engaged individuals curious about our world.”

Check it out.

From The New York Times:

David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, proposed using software to create a computer simulation of the physical world, making it possible to map everything from traffic flow and building layouts to sales and currency data on a computer screen. Mr. Gelernter’s idea came a step closer to reality in the last few weeks when both Google and Yahoo published documentation making it significantly easier for programmers to link virtually any kind of Internet data to Web-based maps and, in Google’s case, satellite imagery.

Since the Google and Yahoo tools were released, their uses have been demonstrated in dozens of ways by hobbyists and companies, including an annotated map guide to the California wineries and restaurants that appeared in the movie “Sideways” and instant maps showing the locations of the recent bombing attacks in London.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Scientists have successfully sequenced the genomes of three deadly parasites that together threaten half a billion people annually around the globe. According to reports published in the current issue of the journal Science, the parasites responsible for African sleeping sickness, Chagas disease and leishmaniasis–illnesses with very different symptoms–share a core of a few thousand genes. Scientists hope that the results will prove useful for identifying novel drug or vaccine targets.

More here.

John Tierney has some extreme ideas as how to punish hackers who write viruses and worms and damage computers around the world. He relates to Steven Landsburg’s cost-benefit analysis of executing murderers which yields up to $100 million in social benefits. Referring to Landsburg’s views on hackers punishment Tirney writes:

“The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes – one in 500 hackers – would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.

I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They’re probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.”

More here

From CNN:

The charges were announced by Judge Raed Juhi, chief investigative judge of the tribunal. They are connected with a 1982 series of detentions and executions after an assassination attempt against Saddam in Dujayl. No trial date was announced, but under Iraqi law Saddam could stand trial as early as September, because of a minimum 45-day period following referral for trial. On July 8, 1982, a convoy carrying Saddam traveled through the town of Dujayl, a Shiite village north of Baghdad, and was attacked by a small band of residents. A series of detentions and executions in the town followed the incident. According to the tribunal, 15 people were summarily executed and some 1,500 others spent years in prison with no charges and no trial date. Ultimately, another 143 were put on “show trials” and executed, according to the tribunal.

Saddam has been in custody since December 2003, when he was captured by U.S. troops.

More here.

From The London Times:

No wonder Irshad Manji has received death threats since appearing on British television: she is a lipstick lesbian, a Muslim and scourge of Islamic leaders, whom she accuses of making excuses about the terror attacks on London. Oh, and she tells ordinary Muslims to “crawl out of their narcissistic shell”. Ouch. Manji is a glamorous Canadian television presenter whose book, The Trouble with Islam, has made her so famous in America that she won something called the Oprah Winfrey Chutzpah award.

The underlying problem with Islam, observes Manji, is that far from spiritualising Arabia, it has been infected with the reactionary prejudices of the Middle East: “Colonialism is not the preserve of people with pink skin. What about Islamic imperialism? Eighty per cent of Muslims live outside the Arab world yet all Muslims must bow to Mecca.” Fresh thinking, she contends, is suppressed by ignorant imams; you can see why she has been dubbed “Osama’s worst nightmare ”.

More here.

From BBC News:

The science of complexity is perhaps the greatest challenge of all, Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees believes. The biggest conundrum is humanity and how we came to be. One man who is set on trying to unfold the complexity of life and how we are made up and came to be in order to understand our future is Craig Venter. He was one of the masterminds behind the sequencing of the human genome – the genetic code that creates life. His next big challenge is to create living, artificial organisms from a kit of genes, and he is well on his way. He says an artificial single cell organism is possible in two years.

To unravel the complexity of life on our planet in order to understand more about where humans come from, Dr Venter embarked on a round the world ocean voyage to take samples of seawater every 200 miles. At every stop they found new species. At one location, one barrelful contained 1.3 million new genes and 50,000 new species. One certainty in an uncertain world is clear to Prof Rees: “Whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate in the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth.”

More here.

WatchingAmerica.com is a web site that tracks online newpapers from around the world.  It focuses on how the US is viewed and reported on abroad.  Side by side, the stories paint a diverse, contradictory, disturbing, and rich image of how we’re seen and understood.

Kavkaz Center, July 8, Lithuania

Strange Bedfellows: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization Challenges America
Edited English Text
Original Article (English)

“For Iran, it is more convenient to be at odds with the U.S. in the company of Russia and China than to be so alone.”

Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, July 7, U.K.

As America Sinks Into the Mud, Iraq’s Neighbors Breathe a Sigh of Relief
Edited English Text
Original Article (Arabic)

“All the peoples and regimes in the region have had … a single goal: to sink the Americans in the Iraqi mud, and to bury them and their ‘democracy’ with them.”

The Nation, July 13, Pakistan

The Fourth of July Through Pakistani Eyes
Edited English Text
Original Article (English)

“It made me marvel at the American way of life, that despite their different ethnic backgrounds, they are one in espousing their Declaration of Independence.”

Azzaman, June 29, Iraq

Columbus’ Discovery of America: History’s ‘Biggest Mistake’
Edited English Text
Original Article (Arabic)

The service translates the stories into English, but here is an interview with its founder.

(Hat tip: Elke Zuern)

I remember reading about the exceptionlly long and healthy lives that natives of the mountain regions of Pakistan and Turkey enjoy. The two common features about their lifestyles turned out to be the water they drink being thousands of times richer in its calcium content and the fact that each community spends at least 8 hours in the sun everyday. The following story in News Target explains why they live longer:

Taking a daily 10 to 15 minute walk in the sun not only clears your head, relieves stress and increases circulation – it could also cut your risk of breast cancer in half. At least that’s what Esther John, an epidemiologist at the Northern California Cancer Center, recommends. In The Breast Cancer Prevention Diet, Dr. Robert Arnot claims that national rates of breast cancer inversely correlate to solar radiation exposure. In other words, breast cancer occurs at a much higher rate in colder, cloudier northern regions than in sunnier southern regions.

How does this work? There is in fact a scientific answer. The sun stimulates production of a hormone in your skin. Vitamin D3 isn’t exactly a vitamin, but rather a type of steroid hormone that can drastically improve your immune system function. Vitamin D3 also controls cellular growth and helps you absorb calcium from your digestive tract. Most importantly, this hormone/vitamin inhibits the growth of cancer cells. 

More here.

David Leavitt in The New York Times:

When I learned that after more than 30 years in business, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York — which claimed to be the world’s first gay and lesbian bookshop — was supposed to close its doors, the news provoked a pang of nostalgia. In 1983, I worked there for exactly one day. I was six months out of college, wanted to be a writer, had recently come out, and needed a part-time job. The Oscar Wilde seemed like a good fit.

Once it was revolutionary to publish a gay novel, or open a gay bookshop, but now the time may be upon us when the revolutionary thing to do is to retire the category altogether. I’m for stepping into the post-gay future — which is why, every time I go into a Borders, I move a few books from the gay fiction shelf to the general fiction section, restoring them to their rightful place in the alphabetical and promiscuous flow of literature.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Confused young men, torn between cultures, are easy prey for preachers of hatred. Britons must bind their own wounds and be more aware of the impact of their government’s policies – on Iraq, Palestine etc – on Muslims everywhere. But Pakistanis must tackle their own problems. We live in one world: anyone who cares about what happens in Rochdale or Leeds needs to worry about Rawalpindi and Lahore as well.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise:

The Guardian reports that immigration officials at New York’s JFK International airport refused to allow Professor Zaki Badawi, a world authority on Islamic theology and noted ecumenist, to enter the United States.

Dr Badawi has visited the US several times, most recently in 2003. He was given an honorary knighthood, and in 2003 was a guest of the Queen at a state banquet for the US president, George Bush. Earlier this week, Dr Badawi joined other British religious leaders, including Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, in publicly condemning the London bomb blasts, which killed at least 54 people. […]

The US Customs and Border Protection office said Dr Badawi had been refused entry to the country based on information indicating that he was “inadmissible”.

As the unofficial spiritual leader of the Britain’s Muslims, the 82-year-old Bawadi has a spiritual stature comparable to that of the Archbishop of Canterburry. He is also a vocal opponent of Islamic extremism:

When Bin Laden issued a fatwa on Americans, he dismissed it as being without religious authority and declared acerbically: “Fatwas have become a cheap business. Since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his against Salman Rushdie, everyone has opened a fatwa shop.”

More here.

Following censorship in the 1980s and vociferous scalding by critics, Richard Serra has transcended all odds with a mammoth installation entitled “The Matter of Time” at the Bilbao Guggenheim. As part of the museum’s permanent collection, this installation consists of five Torques, and three other pieces: Snake, Between the Torus and Sphere, and Blind Spot Reversed. This suite of eight sculptures features coiling undulating lines of convex and concave surfaces that somehow move the space within and around the gallery. “The Matter of Time,” an appropriately weighty title for such a massive work, has the feel of a magnus opus: it marks the culmination of ideas that Serra has been working on for the past twelve years.

more here.

On the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a book review race is on, on the blogosphere:

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will finally be released to the muggle world at one minute past midnight tonight. . .

And so Culture Vulture will be covering it, in the muggle form of Arts editor Andrew Dickson and me. We’ll be joining the over-excited ankle-biters in our local branches of Waterstone’s – Notting Hill and Brighton – to report on the atmosphere in the bookshops as the frenzied hordes of youngsters up well past their bedtimes and their long-suffering parents queue to get their sticky mitts on the first copies of the book.

Then we will be speedreading the book through the night – blogging as we go – to produce the first review of the book anywhere in the world (we hope. If we can stay awake).”

(Hat tip: Maeve Adams)

Michael LeBossiere, at The Philosophers’ Magazine Online, looks at the morality of eating foie gras.

“The debate over the morality of mistreating animals and eating them is clearly philosophically interesting. However, this situation also raises another matter of concern: this debate has clearly revealed that philosophical ignorance is rather widespread among those discussing the matter. This ignorance, one may safely assume, probably extends beyond this issue. A May 2, 2005 article, ‘A Flap Over Foie Gras,’ in Newsweek nicely reveals the nature of the ignorance-all quotes below are taken from that article (page 58).

First, consider the position of American-French chef Rick Tramonto. In response to chef Charlie Trotter’s decision to stop serving foie gras (but to keep serving other meat dishes), chef Tramonto said ‘Either you eat animals or you don’t eat animals.’ While this is a good example of a tautology (a claim that is true in virtue of its logical structure), it also nicely expresses the fallacy known as false dilemma. The idea is that a person present two alternatives, rejects one and then asserts that the remaining one must be correct. This reasoning is fallacious when there are, in fact, more than two alternatives-both of the presented alternatives could be incorrect/false, while a third (or twentieth) alternative is correct/true.

While it is true that one either does or does not eat animals, there certainly are many alternatives lying between not eating animals at all and eating any animal.”

Cass Sunstein in The American Prospsect on the problem of having a Supreme Court justice whose opinions are entirely predictable:

“Right-wing activists have made it all too clear that they want President George W. Bush to appoint Supreme Court justices who are ‘predictable.’ The longtime refrain of ‘No more David Souters’ has been joined by ‘No more Anthony Kennedys.’ Some groups demand a nominee who does not believe that the Constitution protects abortion or gay rights or even privacy; others insist that the next justice should reliably protect economic interests of which they approve. The activists, and according to some reports the White House itself, do not want surprises.

In the law, predictability is usually important. People need to know the rules, and they cannot plan their lives unless they know the law in advance. We expect predictability from our trial court judges, who are meant to follow the law far more than to make it. And of course we want to be able to predict that Supreme Court justices will not ignore the Constitution, or refuse to protect free speech, or permit racial segregation. But in the hard cases that come to the Supreme Court, complete predictability is terrible, because it compromises judicial independence.”

Maya Jasanoff reviews Gautam Chakravarty’s new book on the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857 and how it was woven into the British imagination, in The London Review of Books.

“From the outset, British writers infused the mutiny with ideological and emotive significance. East India Company administrators made a point of stressing its military origins, pointing the finger at the army. Officers, in turn, sought to blame administrators for enacting policies that led to wider discontent, such as the unpopular annexation of Awadh in 1856. Many British commentators condemned the company, continuing a long tradition of Whig criticism; while the Muslim reformer Syed Ahmad Khan, in his 1858 Causes of the Indian Revolt, attributed the rebellion to the company’s unwillingness to incorporate Indian voices in its legislative council.

Apportioning blame for what had happened was one thing. Describing what happened was another.”

Also from Evolutionary Psychology, an evolutionary explanation for dreams.

“This paper presents an evolutionary argument for the role of dreams in the development of human cognitive processes. While a theory by Revonsuo proposes that dreams allow for threat rehearsal and therefore provide an evolutionary advantage, the goal of this paper is to extend this argument by commenting on other fitness-enhancing aspects of dreams. Rather than a simple threat rehearsal mechanism, it is argued that dreams reflect a more general virtual rehearsal mechanism that is likely to play an important role in the development of human cognitive capacities. This paper draws on current work in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind in developing the argument.”

Via Political Theory Daily, Nigel Baber offers evolutionary explanations for societal differences in single parenthood in Evolutionary Psychology.

“The new research strategy presented in this paper, Evolutionary Social Science, is designed to bridge the gap between evolutionary psychology that operates from the evolutionary past and social science that is bounded by recent history. Its core assumptions are (1) that modern societies owe their character to an interaction of hunter-gatherer adaptations with the modern environment; (2) that changes in societies may reflect change in individuals; (3) that historical changes and cross-societal differences are due to the same adaptational mechanisms, and (4) that different social contexts (e.g., social status) modify psychological development through adaptive mechanisms. Preliminary research is reviewed concerning historical, societal, and cross-national variation in single parenthood as an illustration of the potential usefulness of this new approach. Its success at synthesizing the evidence demonstrates that the time frames of evolutionary explanation and recent history can be bridged.”