From MSNBC:

Bacteria have been programmed to behave like computers, assembling themselves into complex shapes based on instructions stuffed in to their genes. The work was led by Ron Weiss, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and molecular biology at Princeton University. The research could lead to smart biological devices that could detect hazardous substances or bioterrorism chemicals, scientists say. Eventually, the process might be used to direct the construction of useful devices or the growth of new tissue, perhaps restoring function to a severed spinal cord.

The study is detailed in April 28 issue of the journal Nature.

More here.

From Nature:

A coating of sugar could help nanoparticles deliver molecules to fight widespread tumours, according to research on mice. The team’s nanoparticles, which contain gene-silencing molecules that can inhibit cancerous growth, are designed to be injected into the bloodstream and taken up primarily by tumour cells. The nanoparticles also manage not to create troublesome reactions from the immune system. The nanoparticles, which are small enough to pass through blood vessels into the surrounding tissue, are taken up by cancerous cells because they carry a molecular tag that binds to receptors found on tumours. The agent consists of small interfering RNA (siRNA). When the agent is taken up by a tumor cell, it inhibits expression of the tumour-growth gene, and the cell stops multiplying. Other attempts to carry siRNA to tumours have used nanoparticles made of lipids. But in some mouse studies, these particles provoked an immune response, which would make the approach difficult to use in humans.

More here.

Zeina Nadine Assaf is a very talented young NYC artist. She wrote to tell me about H.O.A.S.T., which she is taking part in this weekend. Do try to make it there:

The Harlem Open Artist Studio Tour (H.O.A.S.T.) is a community-based arts organization that was established in 2004. Our mission is to foster artistic expression by uniting and promoting the visual artists of Harlem and to strengthen the community by stimulating awareness of the contemporary arts movement.

Our first project is the 1st Annual Harlem Open Artist Studio Tour – a two-day event that will accomplish our objectives by bringing the public into visual artists’ studios in historic Harlem on 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Saturday, April 30 and 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., Sunday, May 1, 2005. This event stands as a tribute to the art and culture that flourish in Harlem today.

There is more information here.  More info on Zeina here, and you can meet her personally on:

Saturday, April 30, from 11:30 – 4pm, and Sunday, May 1, from 1-5pm
At La Negrita, 999 Columbus Avenue, at the Northeast corner of 109th Street

Alessandro Petty writes for Domus Magazine (subscription needed) about Cairo’s growing cemetery population, only he is talking about living people:

“Contrary to modern urban-planning principles, the dictates of Islam, public hygiene rules and social conventions, people continue to live in Cairo’s cemeteries. This is a practice rooted in the funeral ceremonies of the Pharaohs and the religious beliefs of the Copts. The cemetery is a place of contemplation for the Sufis, a place of exile for impoverished nobles, a caravansary for pilgrims on route to Mecca and first homes for families newly arrived in the city from the countryside. “

Michael Balter in Smithsonian Magazine:

Archaeologists believe a 9,500-year-old Neolithic site in central Turkey may help solve the mystery of why humans first settled down in communities.

More here.

Alison Motluk in New Scientist:

Some mutant flies can get by on 30% less sleep than their normal counterparts, thanks to a single mutation in one gene.

The finding is important because it suggests the amount of sleep needed may be largely controlled by one gene, which may shed light on human sleep needs, says Chiara Cirelli at the University of Wisconsin, US. “This isn’t some obscure fly gene – there’s a homologue in mammals and humans.”

More here.

Terry Eagleton reviews The Literary Wittgenstein edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, in the Times Literary Supplement:

Why are artists so fascinated by Ludwig Wittgenstein? Frege is a philosopher’s philosopher, and Bertrand Russell was every shopkeeper’s idea of a sage; but Wittgenstein is the philosopher of poets and composers, novelists and movie directors. Derek Jarman made his last major film about him; Bruce Duffy plucked a novel from his tormented life in The World As I Found It; M. A. Numminem has set Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to music in his Tractatus Suite, and garbled fragments of the same text can be heard croaked in a hilarious stage-German accent by a Dutch pop group. The list is long.

One source of the fascination, no doubt, is the fabular, riches-to-rags nature of the philosopher’s career. The child of one of the wealthiest industrialists of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wittgenstein gave away most of his fortune and spent much of his life in zealously Tolstoyan pursuit of sancta simplicitas.

More here.

The results of our reader survey (139 people responded) show roughly that:

• Most people want us to put up as many interesting items as we can find on a given day, but a significant minority wants only 1-5 posts at most.
• A great majority of people prefer the posts to be more than a sentence or two, but less than a screenful.
• Most people seem to like the pictures in the posts.
• Many people would like more original commentary from us, though about a quarter of respondents want the site to stay the same.
• Most people like the Monday column, but only a small number would like to see more such features.

In addition, a significant number of people left very helpful suggestions and comments, of which my personal favorite was:

• I love you and would like your hand(s) in marriage.

Many thanks to all of you for taking the time to tell us what you want, and for all the encouragement. We are always suckers for flattery.

For more detailed results, all the comments, and the exact numbers, click here.

Reported in The Guardian: Michael March talks to author Ahdaf Soueif about the war in Iraq and the west’s view of Islam:

MM: Name five points from Islam which could redirect history.

AS: If – rather than looking at what specific Muslims have done you look at what Islam says about itself – you find lots of ethical positions that one could build on. Diversity and equality are pretty good starting points: several texts celebrate diversity and affirm it as a positive good. And hand in hand with diversity comes equality. Putting a high premium on knowledge. Islam, until recent decadent times, has never set its face against science.

Encouraging you to simultaneously engage with the world and yet maintain a level of detachment: “Live for the next world as if you were to die tomorrow, and live for this world as though you were going to live forever.” There is a tradition of the prophet that says that if the end of the world were to come and you were carrying a seed in your hand go ahead and plant it.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Ever since physicists invented particle accelerators, nearly 80 years ago, they have used them for such exotic tasks as splitting atoms, transmuting elements, producing antimatter and creating particles not previously observed in nature. With luck, though, they could soon undertake a challenge that will make those achievements seem almost pedestrian. Accelerators may produce the most profoundly mysterious objects in the universe: black holes.

In the early 1970s Stephen W. Hawking of the University of Cambridge and one of us (Carr) investigated a mechanism for generating holes in the early universe. The realization that holes could be small prompted Hawking to consider what quantum effects might come into play, and in 1974 he came to his famous conclusion that black holes do not just swallow particles but also spit them out.

More here.

From Scientific American:

It turns out that male and female brains differ quite a bit in architecture and activity. On a gray day in mid-January, Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, suggested that innate differences in the build of the male and female brain might be one factor underlying the relative scarcity of women in science. His remarks reignited a debate that has been smoldering for a century, ever since some scientists sizing up the brains of both sexes began using their main finding–that female brains tend to be smaller–to bolster the view that women are intellectually inferior to men. To date, no one has uncovered any evidence that anatomical disparities might render women incapable of achieving academic distinction in math, physics or engineering. And the brains of men and women have been shown to be quite clearly similar in many ways. Nevertheless, over the past decade investigators have documented an astonishing array of structural, chemical and functional variations in the brains of males and females.

More here.

From MSNBC:

In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for planning movements. The cluster of cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but likewise when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. The cells responded the same way whether the monkey reached out to grasp a peanut, or merely watched in envy as another monkey or a human did. Because the cells reflected the actions that the monkey observed in others, the neuroscientists named them “mirror neurons.” Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans and revealed another surprise. In addition to mirroring actions, the cells reflected sensations and emotions.

“Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person’s mental shoes,” says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. “In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person’s mind.”

More here.

From The Telegraph, Calcutta.

Would Caliban have been more at home in the mangrove forests of the Sunderbans than on the island in The Tempest? Or was Puck a “pakhi” before he morphed into a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? The first few pages of Kalyan Ray’s debut novel Eastwords give a glimpse of an enticing land and a fascinating narrative. Here, Shakespeare pops up on Indian shores and hobnobs with our own Sheikh Piru, straight from the pages of Parashuram’s Ulot Puran. Eastwords is a novel that the professor of English literature in Morris College of the US has written between semesters and bundles of answer scripts.

Ray’s debut has already been inducted in the popular culture studies syllabus at MIT in the US.

More here.

Lauren Gunderson at Deepen The Mystery:

Rachel Corrie was 23 year old Americn activist who was part of a peace group in Palestine who was crushed to death by a bulldozer while defended Palestinian housing from demoloition.

Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner have turned her journals and emails (beautiful, wise words from someone as young as 12) into a play.

More here.

From Neutopia Magazine:

In February of this year, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), a coalition of more than 800 peace and justice groups throughout the United States, held their second annual Assembly to hear and vote on proposals for a 2005 “action plan.” With the war in Iraq fast approaching its second anniversary, and the larger “War on Terror” crossing its third and half year, close to 500 delegates from 275 member groups traveled to St. Louis in the hopes that the “anti-war movement”—which emerged with unprecedented speed and size just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in spring of 2003—could be resuscitated. Despite impressive beginnings, the movement as a whole has yet to make any significant impact on US policy, or achieve any lasting public resonance. More disturbing is the fact that since Bush’s victory in November, it has gone completely MIA.

More here.

When the construction of a hydroelectric dam on Venezuela’s Caroni River was finally completed in 1986, it flooded an area twice the size of Rhode Island, creating one of South America’s largest human-made lakes: Lake Guri. As floodwaters turned hilltops into islands, a key group of animals—predators such as jaguars, harpy eagles, and armadillos—disappeared from the islands. Some swam or flew away. Others drowned or starved to death. In the predator’s absence, their prey—howler monkeys, iguanas, leaf-cutting ants—began multiplying. Soon these plant-eaters had devoured most of the once pristine forest.

More here.

Jina Moore in Harvard Magazine:

Like the poems Emily Dickinson stored in her attic, or John Steinbeck’s repeatedly rejected early manuscripts, one of America’s best-known paintings was almost lost. American Gothic, Grant Wood’s ubiquitous vision of Midwestern farmers posing before their home, wedged its way into history by winning third prize in a Chicago art competition, says Steven Biel, senior lecturer and director of studies in history and literature and the author of a new book, American Gothic: The Life of America’s Most Famous Painting. “If it hadn’t won anything,” he adds, “it would’ve gone home to Iowa, where no one but Wood’s friends would’ve seen it.” Instead, the image has become synonymous with America itself.

More here.

Roxanne Khamsi in Nature:

A decade-long investigation of childhood leukaemia has come to the conclusion that the disease is probably often triggered by common infections in toddlers, scientists announced today in London.

More here.

From New Scientist:

Scientists have already trained monkeys to move a robotic arm with the power of thought and to recreate scenes moving in front of cats by recording information directly from the feline’s neurons. But these processes involve implanting electrodes into their brains to hook them up to a computer.

Now Yukiyasu Kamitani, at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, and Frank Tong at Princeton University in New Jersey, US, have achieved similar “mind reading” feats remotely using functional MRI scanning.

More here.

Thomas Frank in the New York Review of Books:

For more than thirty-five years, American politics has followed a populist pattern as predictable as a Punch and Judy show and as conducive to enlightened statesmanship as the cycles of a noisy washing machine. The antagonists of this familiar melodrama are instantly recognizable: the average American, humble, long-suffering, working hard, and paying his taxes; and the liberal elite, the know-it-alls of Manhattan and Malibu, sipping their lattes as they lord it over the peasantry with their fancy college degrees and their friends in the judiciary.

Conservatives generally regard class as an unacceptable topic when the subject is economics—trade, deregulation, shifting the tax burden, expressing worshipful awe for the microchip, etc. But define politics as culture, and class instantly becomes for them the very blood and bone of public discourse. Indeed, from George Wallace to George W. Bush, a class-based backlash against the perceived arrogance of liberalism has been one of their most powerful weapons.

More here.