Maggie McKee in New Scientist:

A new study of distant galaxies is adding a fresh perspective to the debate over whether a fundamental physical constant has actually changed over time. The work suggests the number has not varied in the last 7 billion years, but more observations are still needed to settle the issue.

The controversy centres on the fine-structure constant, also called alpha, which governs how electrons and light interact. Alpha is an amalgam of other constants, including the speed of light. So any change in alpha implies a change in the speed of light – and indeed in the entire standard model of physics – with string theories touting extra spatial dimensions stepping in to fill the breach.

More here.

A few days ago I posted something about a breakthrough in decoding the the Oxyrhynchus Papyri here. Now that story from The Independent is being questioned. Hannibal writes at Ars Technica:

When a fellow Ars staffer asked me on IRC a few days ago if I’d heard the big news about the recent startling discoveries coming out of Oxyrhynchus, my response was a dismissive “no,” with some comments to the effect that if there were any such big finds it would be really strange if I hadn’t heard about them, since I’m currently taking a papyrology seminar at University of Chicago with the head of the SBL papyrology group and we’re working on texts from Oxyrhynchus. Then he sent me a link to a sensational story in The Independent that’s making the rounds right now.

More here.

Nigel Hawkes in The Times of London:

Being a smoker at the age of 30 cuts a man’s life expectancy by 5½ years, and a woman’s by more than 6½, according to life tables produced by the Institute of Actuaries. At any age up to 80, the chances of dying in the next year are virtually doubled by being a smoker, the tables indicate. A man aged 60 who is a smoker has a risk of dying in the next year of 106 in 10,000 (1.06 per cent), but if he is a non-smoker the risk is only 48 in 10,000.

More here.

John Banville at Bookforum on Lovecraft and Houellebecq. He asks the question:

Who is Howard Phillips Lovecraft—whom Stephen King, in a lively introduction to Houellebecq’s essay, describes as the “Dark Prince of Providence” (Providence, Rhode Island, that is; not the Lord who rules over us all)—and what has he to tell us about the work of Houellebecq?

Philip Roth and Saul Bellow hangin’ out.

On a summer afternoon in 1998, while I was visiting Saul Bellow and his wife, Janis, in their rural Vermont home, I proposed to Saul that he and I do an extensive written interview about his life’s work. We had been talking for hours on the deck at the rear of the house, along with other friends who’d driven to Vermont to see the Bellows—the Romanian writer Norman Manea and his wife, Cella, who is an art restorer, and the writer and teacher Ross Miller. The four of us tried to get up to Vermont for three or four days every summer because Saul demonstrably enjoyed our visits, and we had a good time together staying at a nearby inn. The conversation was sharp and excited, lots of lucid talk directed mostly at Saul—whose curiosity was all-embracing and for whom listening was a serious matter—and much hilarity about the wonders of human mischief, particularly as we evoked them around the dinner table at the Bellows’ favorite local restaurant, where Saul would throw back his head and laugh like a man blissfully delighted with everything. The older Saul got—and in ’98 he was eighty-three and growing frail—the more our annual pilgrimage resembled an act of religious devotion.

‘Mahler recreates the city as it was in 1977, giving only what background information is necessary and sparing us an over-lengthy analysis of anything after that year’s World Series. This story happens, for the most part, over one hot summer, when New York was still dirty. (Really dirty, and in more than one sense of the word.) As in any summer there is baseball, and the racially-charged enmity between Yankees manager Billy Martin and Yankees superstar Reggie Jackson forms the core narrative of this book. Mahler builds a parallel narrative from the ’77 mayoral race, in which wonkish mayor Abe Beame went head to head with doublewide personality Bella Abzug and the then unknowns, fumbling idealist Mario Cuomo and successful pragmatist Ed Koch. Baseball and politics are usurped by two frightening interludes: the July blackout that led to devastating looting in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and the Son of Sam serial killings, which put all disco-dancing brunettes on guard.’

From Anna Godbersen’s Esquire review of Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bronx is Burning by Jonathan Mahler.

Dennis Overbye writes about Fred Kavli in the New York Times:

The world found out what a sophisticated shopper Mr. Kavli was when scientists affiliated with his institutes won three of the eight Nobel Prizes given for science in 2004: Dr. David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara; Dr. Frank Wilczek of the new Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Dr. Richard Axel of the equally new Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia.

Now Mr. Kavli is planning his own version of the Nobel Prizes.

More here.

From MSNBC:

If your ears are burning it’s said someone is talking about you, but Australian scientists say its more likely you’re having a brainwave. Two researchers in Canberra have developed a high-tech hat that monitors brain activity via changes in ear temperature — offering a cheap way to assess risks for patients ahead of brain surgery.

“If an area of the brain is more active it needs more blood, which flows up the carotid artery on either side of the neck,” said Nicolas Cherbuin, one of the psychology researchers involved in the project at the Australian National University.  “This blood is shared between the brain and the inner ear, so by measuring the ear temperature we can work out which side of the brain is more active,” Cherbuin said in a statement. The researchers said the hat could be used to cheaply monitor brain activity to gauge risks before a patient underwent surgery.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

People who are overweight but not obese have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight, federal researchers are reporting today. The researchers – statisticians and epidemiologists from the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – also found that increased risk of death from obesity was seen for the most part in the extremely obese, a group constituting only 8 percent of Americans. And being very thin, even though the thinness was longstanding and unlikely to stem from disease, caused a slight increase in the risk of death, the researchers said.

“I love it,” said Dr. Steven Blair, president and chief executive of the Cooper Institute, a research and educational organization in Dallas that focuses on preventive medicine. “There are people who have made up their minds that obesity and overweight are the biggest public health problem that we have to face,” Dr. Blair said. “These numbers show that maybe it’s not that big.”

More here.

Samir El-youssef in The Guardian:

Contrary to the views of those who see suicide missions as some sort of dark ritual, or those who dismiss them as irrationally criminal actions, the authors show us that they are often the result of cold calculations. For one thing, they are more effective than the non-suicidal forms of political violence which those same groups themselves have carried out. According to one contributor, Luca Ricolfi, writing on “Palestinians 1981-2003”, suicide attacks had “10 to 15 times the destructive power of ordinary terrorist attacks”. Yet they are not only meant to be instrumental actions, but symbolic too, and sometimes both at the same time. The Japanese army and the Tamil Tigers aimed at achieving military victory, while 9/11 could be seen as more symbolic than instrumental. As for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they have had many different aims: fighting military occupation, showing an extreme level of commitment to their cause and destroying the peace process in order to regain their former place at the centre of Palestinian politics.

More here.

Alex Ross in The New Yorker:

Beware of conductors who compose. They often produce what is known in the business as Kapellmeistermusik, or conductor’s music, in which interesting orchestration goes in search of original themes. Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote endless quasi-Brucknerian disquisitions, including a seventy-minute-long, brain-emptying Piano Quintet. Lorin Maazel, whose opera “1984” premières next month at Covent Garden, has some high-gloss Kapellmeistermusik to his credit. Michael Tilson Thomas recently presented a cycle of Emily Dickinson settings with the San Francisco Symphony, and although he doesn’t yet have a distinctive voice he has at least found an elegant and uncluttered style. Leif Segerstam, a Finnish conductor, has generated a hundred and twenty-two symphonies and counting. I’d like to report on them, but life is only so long.

Esa-Pekka Salonen is a different case.

More here.

Grant McCool at Planet Ark:

Zoologist Ha Dinh Duc, one of Hanoi’s best-known characters and world famous in his field for tracking the huge turtle living in the centre of Vietnam’s capital, is retiring soon.

But he is not giving up his quest for recognition of the turtle as a unique species after 15 years of following its movements in the murky green water.

“I call the turtle great-grandfather,” said Duc, 65, who displays an obvious attachment to the 2-metre (6 ft 7 in) long and 1.1-metre (3 ft 7 in) wide endangered turtle he named after an emperor.

More here.

Thomas Bleha in Foreign Affairs:

Once a leader in Internet innovation, the United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly. By outdoing the United States, Japan and its neighbors are positioning themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, and a better quality of life.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Andrew Steptoe and his colleagues at University College London studied the emotional and physical well-being of more than 200 middle-aged Londoners recruited for the Whitehall II psychobiology study in the mid-1980s. The participants underwent stress tests, along with blood pressure and heart rate monitoring, and they were asked to record their feelings of happiness throughout their daily lives. The team found that those people who reported feeling happier more often also had on average lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which is linked with hypertension and type II diabetes, than did people who recounted fewer moments of joy. The findings are published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Photography, X-rays, CAT scans and newer imaging technologies have replaced the artist in helping scientists understand the human form. Artists haven’t given up, however; they’ve moved on. One result is “Visionary Anatomies,” an exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington through May 20 (information at nationalacademies.org/arts). It includes paintings, prints, collages and other works by 11 artists who use anatomical and medical concepts to illustrate their own ideas.

More here.

He has a good post on his very good new blog Orange Quark:

A pharmacist in California refuses to fill the prescriptions of AIDS sufferers, because that would be interfering with God’s plans for gays. Another pharmacist, in Michigan, won’t provide arthritis medication, because gnarled hands are God’s way of stopping masturbation…

The rest of the post is here.  And no, John Stewart, we don’t like all and only blogs with the word “quark” in their name!

Sean Carrol of Preposterous Universe has a very nice essay-like post on the temptations of money in academic life. After a bit of understandable see-sawing, Sean has made the right decision, and we at 3 Quarks applaud him for that, as well as for writing about it honestly (and providing much interesting information about Charles Townes, the Templeton Foundation, etcetera). And a salute, as well, to Mark Trodden for giving Sean good advice.

Read more about Sean’s moral dilemma here.

‘Wartime London is a great literary subject. The ravages were so terrible (pieces of children littered the bomb sites), so poignant (treasures such as the Guards’ Chapel and the Great Synagogue lost, five million books destroyed in a single night in a bombing raid), and so surreal (walking back from lunch at Simpson’s, an editor of the Evening Standard noticed that the blast from a V-1 flying bomb had stripped the leaves from the trees and replaced them with human flesh).’

From Benjamin Schwartz’s Atlantic review of London 1945 by Maureen Waller.

Kurt Kleiner in New Scientist:

Whether it’s driving too fast, bungee-jumping or reckless skateboarding, young men will try almost anything to be noticed by the opposite sex. But a study of attitudes to risk suggests that the only people impressed by their stunts are other men.

More here.

Sara Wheeler reviews The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, in The Guardian:

The Hall of a Thousand Columns is the second volume of a trilogy in which Tim Mackintosh-Smith trails Ibn Battutah, the Tangier-born adventurer who voyaged over most of the known world between 1325 and 1355 — a period when Islamic culture was travelling fast. Taking up where his first book left off, and with his hallmark combination of irreverence and empathy, Mackintosh-Smith again peers at the Battutian landscape across a gulf of seven centuries. He has confected a curiously addictive blend of history, travel and jokes. But above all he engages with ideas, and his aim is that of the novelist — to send a bucket down into the subconscious.

More here.