From Nature:

In a discovery that rips up the rulebook of genetics, researchers in France have shown that RNA, rather than its more famous cousin DNA, might be able to ferry information from one generation of mice to the next. DNA has long been credited with the job of passing traits from parent to child. Sperm and egg deliver that DNA to the embryo, where it ultimately decides much of our looks and personality.

The new study in Nature thrusts RNA, DNA’s sidekick, into the limelight. It suggests that sperm and eggs of mammals, perhaps including humans, can carry a cargo of RNA molecules into the embryo – and that these can change that generation and subsequent ones. “It’s a very exciting possibility,” says Emma Whitelaw who studies patterns of inheritance at Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia. “DNA is certainly not all you inherit from your parents.”

More here.

Brilliant report by 3QD’s own Ker Than, in LiveScience.com:

Adam and Eve lost it, alchemists tried to brew it and, if you believe the legends, Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon was searching for it when he discovered Florida.

To live forever while preserving health and retaining the semblance and vigor of youth is one of humanity’s oldest and most elusive goals.

Now, after countless false starts and disappointments, some scientists say we could finally be close to achieving lifetimes that are, if not endless, at least several decades longer. This modern miracle, they say, will come not from drinking revitalizing waters or from transmuted substances, but from a scientific understanding of how aging affects our bodies at the cellular and molecular levels.

Whether through genetic tinkering or technology that mimics the effects of caloric restriction—strategies that have successfully extended the lives of flies, worms and mice—a growing number of scientists now think that humans could one day routinely live to 140 years of age or more.

More here.

Jennifer, as ever, offers some insightful observations, this time in her review of An Inconvenient Truth and on climate change.

We can quibble all we like about minor instances of massaging the data to make an emphatic point, but the underlying core message, and the science that supports it, is certainly very sound indeed. And frankly, maybe we need to be a bit more willing to use the tools of propaganda in such a crucial debate. After all, those tools have proved highly effective for those who have exploited them in the past, and our very survival may be at stake. The Gore film has attracted its share of critics, at least one of whom poked fun at the many meditative profile shots of Gore, claiming he looked like he was campaigning for Druid-In-Chief. (In all honesty, Jen-Luc could have done with a few less of those shots as well.)

And so the inevitable backlash begins. Is it merely coincidence that this past Sunday, the Washington Post ran a feature article about former NASA scientist Roy Spenser and his Web site spoofing the global warming “alarmists”? I’d say it’s about as much a coincidence as the fact that Spenser gets paid to write for TCS Daily, a Web site partially funded by ExxonMobil. (Interestingly, even Spenser, when pressed, admits that human activities have “likely” contributed to climate change, so he’s more honest than most naysayers.) Even more insidious is the onslaught of paid anti-climate-change advertisements that will be blanketing the airwaves this week, courtesy of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of which makes the following ludicrous statement: “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.” By now the entire blogosphere has probably seen both DarkSyde’s commentary on Daily Kos and Chris Mooney’s hilarious spoofs of that tagline, but far be it for me to buck the linkage trend. Per Mooney: “Water. They call it drowning. We call it life.”

‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them or they will break you.’ True to his word, on 17 May 1649, Oliver Cromwell had the ringleaders of the Leveller revolt marched out of Burford church in Oxfordshire and executed. These disgruntled Civil War soldiers had demanded political as well as religious rights and Cromwell was having none of it.

Yesterday, I joined Tony Benn and a large crowd in the Cotswolds to commemorate these martyrs to democracy. Organised by the Workers’ Educational Association, the Levellers’ Day festival remains one of the few living monuments to Britain’s hidden heritage of democracy. But why does Burford hold such a lonely place in our history calendar? Why are we still so shy of our radical past?

Last week saw a welter of commentary on Education Minister Bill Rammell’s call for teaching ‘British values’ in schools. The left took it as a cue for more historical self-flagellation; the right for cultural triumphalism. Yet, disappointingly, what Rammell had, in fact, urged was the anodyne incorporation of ‘modern British cultural and social history into the citizenship curriculum’. What he should have demanded is a vigorous exploration of our democratic heritage in schools and communities alike.

more from The Observer here.

In the Boston Review, Marc B. Haefele on Agrentina’s attempt to grapple with its past.

On the 30th anniversary of the coup the Naval Mechanics School (known by its Spanish acronym, ESMA) reopened as “The Space for Memory.” …The ESMA memory space is a key part of this swerving new democracy’s campaign against its past. There once was talk of leveling the place, but President Nestor Kirchner decreed that it should become a museum, a memorial. Kirchner is the first Argentine president to dare wield history against his opposition, which includes a merchants’ organization that prospered during the dictatorship and the Catholic Church, which supported the dictatorship and ratted out dissident clerics. On the 30th anniversary of the coup, Kirchner hosted a memorial that was duplicated in all Argentine consulates and embassies. Some have argued that he was playing politics with this most shameful episode in the nation’s history, that the “dirty war” should be recalled only in silence. But others say that Kirchner’s somber ceremonials were far better for the country than what one scholar called the “percepticide” of official forgetting by two previous presidents, Raul Alfonsin and Carlos Menem.

The forgetting was not confined to presidents or to the police, navy, army, and air force. Didn’t the 12th-floor tenants on Libertador’s 8000 block see the headlights every night, see the gate open, hear the car doors slam, hear the screams of the abducted and the curses and blows? Didn’t they smell the improvised crematoria? Probably. Did they draw the curtains, turn on the air conditioner? Perhaps. What about the night shift at the Gillette plant that used to be across the street? Did the workers take sidelong glances out the window? Kids at the polytechnic high school next door said they heard loud music from the ESMA during the day, apparently played to drown out the screams.

For all of Tim Hawkinson’s entertaining use of sound and movement in his work, his sculpture’s stunning inventiveness and the way it responds to the history of media and technology, he is ultimately interested in some very old questions. Hawkinson connects the more recent influences of conceptualism, kinetic art, sound and installation work to a tradition of philosophical speculation and religious thought deeply embedded in American culture and most famously articulated in the 19th-century literature of Emerson, Whitman, and especially Herman Melville. But his work is far from “literary” in its experience and instead drops you in the middle of an age-old puzzle about the nature of our world and our place in it—forcing you to grapple with the meaning of all the strange sounds, intricate constructions and whirring machines that surround you. The recent retrospective of his work at LACMA, designed and installed by Hawkinson himself, presents a self-portrait of the artist as engaged in an obsessive, philosophical quest, in which anything, from manila envelopes to model ships, can take on special significance. To get at some of the fundamental issues in Hawkinson’s varied sculptural practice, I will focus here on the parallels between a few pieces which use the nautical as a metaphor for a mode of philosophical inquiry that is present in much of his other work.

more from X-TRA here.

The contrast between neat self-containment and eruptive gesturalism — between uptight small figures and spontaneous nature, indeed, figures banalized by their inhibitions and nature flaring into unpredictable sublimity in moments of uninhibited self-expression — informs all of Katz’s ‘60s paintings, giving them a dialectical intensity, even feverish tension, never associated with the “cool” Katz. I am suggesting that Katz’s paintings are emotionally dense — not to say romantic — despite themselves. One wonders if his gestural energy is a residue of the abstract gestural sublime in Pollock’s all-over paintings, deliberately tilting it away from its superficial rhythmic crust toward the chaotic depths below. Indeed, Katz’s gesturalism is mischievously discomforting, even subversive of what seem to be socially proper human relationships. But then there is tension between Don and Marisol in the two 1960s paintings devoted to them, and the tension leaks out in the handling.

more from artnet here.

In Outlook India, a few pieces on quotas (affirmative action for lower castes and “Other Backward Classes”), including one on lessons from the US.

Sixteen years ago, it was college students from Delhi and neighbouring states who took to the streets protesting then prime minister V.P.

Singh’s decision to reserve 27 per cent seats in government jobs for Other Backward Classes (OBCs). In the hot sweaty summer of 2006, it is medical students of Delhi, Calcutta and Mumbai who arespearheading the protest against Union human resources development minister Arjun Singh’s decision to extend the same percentage of quota in centrally funded colleges.

As the government tries to work out a solution to the highly emotive issue, the anti-quota voices have become shrill, their symbols of protest often taking on a distinct caste overtone. Take, for instance, students sweeping the floors of their campuses, as if to suggest quotas would leave them with no choice but to take to menial jobs. “Why must the protesters always take to a broom or shoe-brush? Why don’t they milk cows? Are they not the preserve of certain castes?” asks a Dalit [“untouchable”] student.

From The Guardian:

Alan Bennett’s latest bestseller was shortlisted last night for the leading book award in its field, the BBC Four Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. He is tipped to beat the other five works nominated. But if he does, the last thing he will need is the £31,000 prize money. For Bennett’s Untold Stories has already sold more than 10 times as many copies as the rest of the shortlist put together. And he has sold more than 400 times the number of the title regarded as most likely to pip him, Jerry Brotton’s The Sale of the Late King’s Goods.

Untold Stories has shifted 333,268 copies in hardback in the eight months since it was published, considered an extraordinary performance for a work with literary qualities. It sold more than £150,000 worth of copies at Christmas alone. Sales figures for the shortlist’s other titles are: 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro, 18,201 copies; Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt, 5,303; The Orientalist, by Tom Reiss, 1,221; Bad Faith, by Carmen Callil, 1,108; The Sale of the Late King’s Goods, by Jerry Brotton, 796.

More here.

From Nature:

An Inconvenient Truth, a feature film starring former vice-president Al Gore as Al Gore giving his PowerPoint presentation on climate change, opens in New York and Los Angeles on 24 May and elsewhere throughout the summer. [email protected] tackles the big questions surrounding this much talked-about film.

Climate-change scientists who have seen it say that the main thrust of the presentation is correct, although they do disagree with details here and there. Some of his more melodramatic moments might make those used to the cautious language of scientific papers a bit uncomfortable. The wretched chaos in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina gets a lot of screen time, for example. Most climate scientists are very scrupulous about explaining that individual hurricanes can never be said to be ’caused’ by global warming, although climate change may tend to increase storm numbers or severity. Gore never actually makes a causal link, but a lay viewer could easily infer it.

More here.

Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books:

On April 5, 2006, a New Jersey jury found that Merck’s arthritis drug Vioxx caused John McDarby, a seventy-seven-year-old retired insurance agent, to suffer the heart attack that left him debilitated in 2004. (The drug was not blamed for the heart attack of a second plaintiff in the same case.) The jury also found Merck guilty of consumer fraud for not warning doctors and the public of the drug’s cardiovascular risks. McDarby and his wife were awarded $4.5 million, plus another $9 million in punitive damages because the company was found to have misled the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Merck now faces about ten thousand similar lawsuits, and has vowed to fight every one of them. So far, there have been verdicts in four cases—two for Merck and two against (the McDarby case and an earlier one in Texas, in which the plaintiff was awarded $253.5 million, which under Texas law must be cut to $26.1 million).^[1] If there are more losses, and the chances are there will be, Merck, despite its defiant talk, may ultimately have to try to reach a settlement instead of fighting each case.^[2]

The defeat was not just a loss for Merck, but for the industry as a whole, which has seen its reputation plummet in the past few years. Polls show that among American businesses, the pharmaceutical industry now ranks near the bottom in public approval—above tobacco and oil companies, but well below airlines and banks and even insurance companies. This situation contrasts sharply with the generally high regard in which the industry was held just a few years ago.

More here.

Michael Hochman in Science:

Most organisms can tell the difference between night and day simply by taking a look outside. But some may rely on more subtle clues. A few years ago, scientists discovered that corn plants release a different set of chemicals into the air in the morning and evening. Might the M. separate caterpillars, which live on corn plants throughout Asia, use these odors to plan their schedules?

A group of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan decided to test the theory by collecting gas from the plants during the day and at night. They then exposed one set of caterpillar larvae to the daytime fumes and another set to the evening fumes and observed the larvae for several hours. The creatures were almost 50% more likely to go into hiding–which they typically do during the daytime–after being exposed to the “day” fumes than they were when exposed to the “night” fumes. Night fumes made the caterpillars come out of hiding to feed on leaves, their typical evening activity. Surprisingly, changing the lighting conditions had no effect on the caterpillar behavior, indicating that the insects use plant scent alone as an alarm clock, says study co-author Junji Takabayashi.

More here.

From the Agha Khan Development Network:

An opinion poll reported recently that what American graduates want as their graduation speaker more than anyone is “someone they could relate to”. But that test, says the poll, showed the most popular university speaker in recent years was the Sesame street character, Kermit the Frog. I found it a bit intimidating to wonder just where the Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims would rank on the “relating” scale in comparison to Kermit the Frog.

Ceremonies of the sort we observe today are valuable because they help us to bridge the past and the future – to see ourselves as players in larger narratives. This School’s narrative is now sixty years old – embracing the whole of the postwar period. In that time you have dramatically broadened both the communities you serve and the programs through which you serve them.

Your history reflects a continuing conviction that the challenges of our times are fundamentally global ones – calling both for multi-disciplinary and multi-national responses.

Even as SIPA marks its 60th anniversary, I am approaching an anniversary of my own – the 50th anniversary next year of my role as Imam of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims.

While I was educated in the West, my perspective over these fifty years has been profoundly shaped by the countries of South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where the Ismaili people live and where they are largely concentrated. For five decades, that has been my world – my virtually permanent preoccupation. And it is out of that experience that I speak today.

For the developing world, the past half-century has been a time of recurring hope and frequent disappointment. Great waves of change have washed over the landscape – from the crumbling of colonial hegemonies in mid century to the recent collapse of communist empires. But too often, what rushed in to replace the old order were empty hopes—not only the false allure of state socialism, non-alignment, and single-party rule, but also the false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism.

More here.  [Thanks to Atiya B. Khan.]

Deyan Sudjic considers the ethics of architecture in light of Rem Koolhaas’ design of Central China Television’s new headquarters in Beijing, in Frieze.com.

[W]hen Koolhaas had the shrewdness to stay out of the race to secure New York’s Ground Zero master-plan commission but decided instead to take his chances in the competition to design the new headquarters of Central China Television (CCTV) in Beijing, he talked about the emptiness of American values, contrasting them unfavourably with the energy of Asia.

Asked about the ethical implications of the CCTV project, Koolhaas’ first response was to suggest that China’s system is changing so fast that by the time his building is completed CCTV will have been privatized, and China will have given up repression as a routine political tool. It’s unlikely that Mies van der Rohe would have had a very sympathetic hearing if he had won the 1933 competition for the Reichsbank in Berlin and come up with the same kind of arguments about the bright future promised by the imminent economic transformation of Hitler’s Germany. More recently Koolhaas has taken a more overtly political line: ‘What attracts me about China is that there is still a state. There is something that can take initiative on a scale and of a nature that almost no other body that we know of today could ever afford or contemplate. Everywhere else, and particularly in architecture, money is everything now. So that is blatantly not a good situation as it leads to compromises of quality. Money is a less fundamental tenet of their ideology.’ So there.

Lindsay Beyerstein’s recent posts on aesthetics and politics/ethics are also worth reading.

Via Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, an interesting clip from the movie Žižek!

Sean’s own response to the movie is worth reading.

The movie opens with a Žižek monologue on the origin of the universe and the meaning of life. We can talk all we like, he says, about love and meaning and so on, but that’s not what is real. The universe is “monstrous” (one of his favorite words), a mere accident. “It means something went terribly wrong,” as you can hear him say through a distinctive lisp in this clip from the movie. He even invokes quantum fluctuations, proclaiming that the universe arose as a “cosmic catastrophe” out of nothing.

I naturally cringed a little at the mention of quantum mechanics, but his description ultimately got it right. Our universe probably did originate as a quantum fluctuation, either “from nothing” or within a pre-existing background spacetime. Mostly, to be honest, I was just jealous. As a philosopher and cultural critic, Žižek gets not only to bandy about bits of quantum cosmology, but is permitted (even encouraged) to connect them to questions of love and meaning and so on. As professional physicists, we’re not allowed to talk about those questions — referees at the Physical Review would not approve. But it’s worth interrogating this intellectual leap, from the accidental birth of the universe to the richness of meaning we see around us. How did we get there from here, and why?

C. Claiborne Ray in the New York Times:

Some such pictures do show stars, and NASA offers a Web link to one that does here.

For the most part, however, pictures taken by astronauts are in the nature of snapshots, intended to capture some well-lighted object in the foreground, like Earth or another astronaut.

They employ neither the exposure time nor the film speed that would capture the faint light emitted by stars, which are still distant even from a foothold in space.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

In tomorrow’s New York Times I have an article about the origin of species–or rather, blocking the origin of species. The evolution of a new species can be a drawn out process, taking thousands or millions of years. First populations begin to diverge from each other. Later, those populations may become divided by significant reproductive barriers. Even after those populations have evolved into separate species, they may still be able to produce hybrids in the right conditions. In some cases, those hybrids may remain rare and the two species will remain intact. In other cases, the species may collapse back on each other.

The article looks at two animals in which speciation appears to be going in reverse. One is three-spined sticklebacks, which have evolved into two easily distinguished different species in 11,000 years in six separate lakes in Canada. (The papers are here and here.) In one lake, an introduced crayfish appears to be driving the two species into a single hybrid swarm.

The other example is Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos (paper here). The medium ground finch has, on some islands, diverged into two forms, one with a big beak and one with a small one. But where they have come into contact with humans, they are blurring back into a single spectrum of beaks. Hybrids with average size beaks appear to be thriving because they can eat rice and other foods left by humans.

More here.

Gautam Bhatia in the NY TImes Magazine:

One evening a few years ago, I found myself on the road that heads south out of Delhi, in the city’s fastest-developing suburb: Qutab Enclave. The area along the road was one big construction site. Many new structures sat between piles of rubble, and workers milled around concrete mixers on brown hot ground, half dug, half built. Pigs and stray dogs strolled near new plate-glass outlets for Reebok, Benetton and Levi’s.

As the head of a small architecture practice in Delhi, I had just made a routine visit to the site of a house under construction nearby when I decided to take a look at the newly-erected headquarters of a leading software company. This was one of the first so-called e-buildings in India — what its makers described as intelligent, user-friendly architecture. In my own practice, I try to conform to the ideals of hand craft, low cost and no maintenance, and having just examined the hand-applied mud plaster of the house I was working on, the idea of a peek into a high-tech extreme machine seemed all the more intriguing.

More here.

Nicholas Ostler review’s the book by David Crystal, in the New Statesman:

David Crystal is the prophet par excellence of the English language. With this book he has set his sights high, aiming not to write a history of a language (as he did in The Stories of English), nor a synopsis of worldwide languages (as in his monumental Cambridge Encyclo-paedia of Language), but to show, in a single volume, how language works.

The task is not a small one. Asking how something works implies that it can be revealingly viewed as a mechanism – which is why it makes sense to ask how a clock works but not, say, a rose or a grasshopper. With language, there is simply too much going on for there to be a single answer. So Crystal is forced to jump from one thing to another, with the result that the thing never quite forms into a workable whole. Still, he is in good company in this respect: Noam Chomsky has aimed all his life to characterise the properties of language – the “abstract organ” that develops in us all – but in practice has mostly confined himself to the mechanism of sentence structure.

Crystal casts an engaging eye over the linguistic horizon, giving us the fruits of others’ studies while building up an overarching framework into which most language questions fit. He wants to provide the interested non-expert with an outline of every major aspect of language as linguists understand it – rather as he might, say, in the course of a railway journey from London to Edinburgh.

More here.

In the recurring dream
my mother stands
in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac,
with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
Russell kissing her hands;
the house behind her is in ruins;
she is wearing an owl’s face
and makes barking noises.
Her minatory finger points.
I pass through the cardboard doorway
askew in the field
and peer down a well
where an albino walrus huffs.
He has the gentlest eyes.
If the dirt keeps sifting in,
staining the water yellow,
why should I be blamed?
Never try to explain.
That single Model A
sputtering up the grade
unfurled a highway behind
where the tanks maneuver,
revolving their turrets.
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
Where is my testing-tree?
Give me back my stones!

from, The Testing-Tree