John Ballard writes about this story from Wired:

Across campus, in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It’s a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.

More here.

Marie Arana for the Washington Post:

Spring is here, and books, like plants, are emerging in clumps, as if the seeds of a few notions had proliferated madly during winter. Last year saw a remarkable run of novels written as memoirs: Ha Jin’s War Trash, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Ward Just’s An Unfinished Season. Clearly the memoir, which had so dominated nonfiction shelves during the past decade, broke free and penetrated novelists’ imaginations. This year, the dominant idea continues to be 9/11, which has fueled nonfiction books since 2001 but now spreads copiously into the realm of the novel. In his latest work, Saturday, Ian McEwan gives us a portrait of a beleaguered neurosurgeon in nervous, post-9/11 London. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer imagines a precocious boy whose father is lost in the conflagration of the twin towers. We will see more on this theme as the year progresses: The Writing on the Wall, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz; The Good Priest’s Son, by Reynolds Price; A Little Love Story, by Roland Merullo; Incendiary, by Chris Cleave; and many others. Here is a list of books you may find reviewed in our spring and summer pages. Look to our reviewers to tell you the rest.

NON-FICTION

Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, by Brooke Shields (Hyperion, May). A celebrity’s bout with a syndrome that affects millions.

Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon, April). From the author of the comic-strip memoir Persepolis, a foray into the private lives of Iranian women.

A Lotus Grows in the Mud, by Goldie Hawn (Putnam, May). An ugly duckling grows up to become America’s darling.

No Mountain High Enough : Raising Lance, Raising Me, by Linda Armstrong Kelly (Broadway, April). A pregnant teenager, banished from home, becomes the mother of the indefatigable Lance Armstrong.

Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey (Penguin, May). The founding editor of McSweeney’s tells of his zany childhood among the rich and famous.

FICTION

Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo (Knopf, May). First world meets third, in this story about relief workers trying to reverse the famine in Sudan, by the author of A Rumor of War.

Alibi, by Joseph Kanon (Holt, April). In post-World War II Venice, a war crimes investigator falls in love with an enigmatic woman and finds himself implicated in a violent murder.

The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman, by Nedjma (Grove, June). A young widow tells the secrets of her erotic life in this presumably autobiographical novel.

More here.

Brian Hayes in the American Scientist:

The story begins with a loose end from my column on the Lambert W function in the March-April issue of American Scientist. I had been looking for a paper with the curious title “Rumours with general initial conditions,” by Selma Belen and C. E. M. Pearce of the University of Adelaide, published in The ANZIAM Journal, which is also known as The Australia and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal.

“The stochastic theory of rumours, with interacting subpopulations of ignorants, spreaders and stiflers, began with the seminal paper of Daley and Kendall. The most striking result in the area—that if there is one spreader initially, then the proportion of the population never to hear the rumour converges almost surely to a proportion 0.203188 of the population size as the latter tends to infinity—was first signalled in that article. This result occurs also in the variant stochastic model of Maki and Thompson, although a typographic error has resulted in the value 0.238 being cited in a number of consequent papers”.

I was intrigued and a little puzzled to learn that a rumor would die out while “almost surely” leaving a fifth of the people untouched. Why wouldn’t it reach everyone eventually? And that number 0.203188, with its formidable six decimal places of precision—where did that come from? I read on far enough to get the details of the models. The premise, I discovered, is that rumor-mongering is fun only if you know the rumor and your audience doesn’t; there’s no thrill in passing on stale news. In terms of the three subpopulations, people remain spreaders of a rumor as long as they continue to meet ignorants who are eager to receive it; after that, the spreaders become stiflers, who still know the rumor but have lost interest in propagating it.

Read more here.

Timothy Garton Ash and Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books:

Last autumn, Ukraine imprinted itself on the political consciousness of the world for the first time in its history. In what was christened the “orange revolution,” vast crowds wearing orange scarves gathered in subzero temperatures in Kyiv’s Independence Square to demand a fair election for president. They won. Observers have placed Ukraine’s “orange revolution” in a sequence of peaceful democratic revolutions stretching from the “velvet revolutions” of 1989 in Central Europe, through the “rose revolution” in Georgia in 2003, to what some are already calling the “cedar revolution” in Lebanon. Yet we must look beyond the news headlines to discover how and why this change has come about, and what its consequences may be.

More here.

From CNN:

To create buzz about an otherwise arcane subject, the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed off a tiny speck of zircon crystal believed to be the oldest known piece of Earth at about 4.4 billion years old.

Saturday’s daylong celebration was to be capped with “The Rock Concert” by jazz musicians who composed music to try to answer the question: What does 4.4 billion years old sound like?

“This is it — the oldest thing ever. One day only,” said Joe Skulan, director of the UW-Madison Geology Museum, where the object was displayed under police guard. “The idea of having a big celebration of something that’s so tiny — we’re playing with the obvious absurdity of it.”

More here.

What is the one thing everyone should learn about science? Spiked asked 250 scientists – here we bring you some of the most provocative responses:

Richard Dawkins Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford, and a science writer and broadcaster

I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of “design”. The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

Susan Blackmore Science writer and broadcaster, and visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol

Frighteningly, most people do not understand Darwin’s great insight. What people miss is the sheer inevitability of the creative process. Once you see it —copy, vary, select; copy, vary, select —you see that design by natural selection simply has to happen. This is not like Isaac Newton’s laws, or quantum physics, or any of the other great theories in science, where one can ask “why is this so?” It simply has to be the case. Then, the scary implications follow. If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe.

Read more here.

Christopher Hitchens reviews Olivier Todd’s newest biography, ”Malraux: A Life” in The New York Times:

ISAIAH BERLIN once described someone whom I will not name as ”that very rare thing: a perfect charlatan.” Admit that this ostensibly lethal criticism contains a note of reluctant admiration, and you have the tone of Olivier Todd’s newest biography, ”Malraux: A Life” (which has been translated from the French by Joseph West). André Malraux was one of the most prolific self-inventors of the 20th century, and it is ”the Malrucian legend,” as much as the life itself, that is Todd’s subject.

And in the end:

The end was not glorious. Malraux’s facial tic was accompanied by a black dog of depression, and he became dependent first on alcohol and then on a succession of medications. His family life deteriorated horribly. When the end came, in November 1976, two sprays of red flowers were delivered to the cemetery. One was from the French Communist Party, which he had fawned upon in the 1930’s and turned upon in the 1940’s. The other was from the restaurant Lasserre: grand scene of many of his dinner-table revolutions. On his bedside table, after his death, it was found that he had scrawled the words: ”It should have been otherwise.” A more apt, if lenient, epitaph might be located in ”La Condition Humaine”: ”Ce n’était ni vrai ni faux, c’était vécu.” ”It was neither true nor false, but what was experienced”.

Read more here.

Derek E.G. Briggs in American Scientist:

The recent surge in interest in the origins of multicellular animals (metazoans) is fueled by new evidence from three major sources: molecular sequencing, the study of evolutionary development and the discovery of exceptionally preserved fossils of Precambrian and Cambrian age, particularly from China. Genetic sequences provide a means of analyzing how the major animal groups are related and of estimating their time of origin (using the molecular clock)—a means that is independent of morphological data and the record of evolutionary events the fossils reveal. The study of developmental processes in an evolutionary framework (“evo-devo”) provides the link between genetics and morphology. These new approaches have prompted molecular biologists to join forces with paleontologists to focus on the sequence of events leading to the origin of body plans before and during the Cambrian Period (543 to 500 million years ago).

Few if any authors can embrace these fields with the experience and authority of James W. Valentine, professor emeritus of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been publishing novel and provocative ideas on the origin and nature of phyla for more than 30 years. His most recent book, On the Origin of Phyla, is an homage to the greatest biologist who ever lived by one of the greatest living paleobiologists.

More here.

In the battle of the big babe versus the anorexic boygirl, women can’t win for losing. In one of the strongest passages in Fat Girl, Moore fuses the emotional and physical hungers, grinding and voracious, that impelled her when young to slip into the empty houses of people who had shown her kindness and touch their things and eat their food. In doing so, she defines not just her own fat-fear and loathing, but the culture’s: “I believed that inside every fat person was a hole the size of the world; I believed that every fat person wanted to fill that hole by eating the world. It wasn’t enough to eat food. You had to swallow air, you had to chew up everyone who got near you. No wonder, I thought, that nobody liked me or liked me all that much.”

Alley’s lusty, vulgar exuberance feels like the antidote to Fat Girl’s pain. Fat Actress is a revenge comedy, which is why satire suits it and whimsy doesn’t. The form has antecedents—just about everything Mae West did, for example.

Read more here.

Margaret Atwood reviews Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro, in Slate:

Never Let Me Go is the sixth novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his chilling rendition of a bootlickingly devoted but morally blank English butler, The Remains of the Day. It’s a thoughtful, crafty, and finally very disquieting look at the effects of dehumanization on any group that’s subject to it. In Ishiguro’s subtle hands, these effects are far from obvious. There’s no Them-Bad, Us-Good preaching; rather there’s the feeling that as the expectations of such a group are diminished, so is its ability to think outside the box it has been shut up in. The reader reaches the end of the book wondering exactly where the walls of his or her own invisible box begin and end.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt in LiveScience:

Scientist said this week they had drilled into the lower section of Earth’s crust for the first time and were poised to break through to the mantle in coming years.

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) seeks the elusive “Moho,” a boundary formally known as the Mohorovicic discontinuity. It marks the division between Earth’s brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle.

The depth of the Moho varies. This latest effort, which drilled 4,644 feet (1,416 meters) below the ocean seafloor, appears to have been 1,000 feet off to the side of where it needed to be to pierce the Moho, according to one reading of seismic data used to map the crust’s varying thickness.

More here.

Carey Goldberg in the Boston Globe:

A decade after the first postmenopausal mothers began making headlines, the rights and wrongs of having a late-in-life baby are still under live discussion — particularly in the wake of a new wave of age records and headlines. In January, a 66-year-old Romanian, Adriana Iliescu, gave birth to a 3.2-pound baby girl, Maria Eliza, conceived using donor eggs and sperm. In November, a New York motivational speaker named Aleta St. James gave birth to twins just before turning 57.

”It is never too late,” she declared then. ”You are never too old.”

These days, the debate is informed by considerably more medical data. Over the last decade, more than 1,000 American women in their 50s — and a handful in their 60s — have given birth to donor-egg babies, implanted in women with in vitro fertilization. In 2002, American women in their early 50s reported 286 births, and new mothers in their late 40s numbered more than 5,000.

More here.

Terry Eagleton looks at The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova, in The New Statesman:

We think of literature as a set of uniquely individual works, as randomly distributed as the stars. From time to time, however, a critical study comes along that steps back from Dante and Goethe, Balzac and Woolf, and views them, in a powerfully distancing move, as part of a meaningful con- stellation. Such is the virtuoso achievement of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Georg Lukacs’s The Historical Novel and Northop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. Although Pascale Casanova’s new study is not exactly in this league, it is certainly in this dis- tinguished lineage.

The World Republic of Letters is concerned with what one might call the geopolitics of literature. Literary works, so it claims, are never fully intelligible in themselves; instead, you have to see them as belonging to a global literary space, which has a basis in the world’s political landscape, but which also cuts across its regions and borders to form a distinctive republic of its own. Like geopolitical space, this literary republic has its frontiers, provinces, exiles, legislators, migrations, subordinate territories and an unequal distribution of resources. It is a form of intellectual commerce in which literary value is banked and circulated, or transferred from one national currency to another in the act of translation.

More here.

From Columbia Journalism Review Daily’s Hidden Angle:

“We got a lot of entrants in the competition for the coveted MIPSY — the Most Inane Pope Story our news media could come up with. After all, as reader Larry Green points out, the Associated Press reported that, world-wide, 35,000 new stories appeared about the pope on the day after his death. And that was in just 24 hours.

. . .

Two more quick ones before we award the big prize: Karen Zachary emails a teaser from WashingtonPost.com for Robin Wright’s rumination on the pope, “For Vatican Press Corps, Pontiff Remembered as the Human Pope.” (A similar line appears in the story.) Zachary just wanted to thank the Vatican Press Corps for confirming her longstanding suspicion that the pontiff was indeed human. And our own New York office submits this story from the business section of Tuesday’s USA Today, ‘Business Leaders Can Learn From Pope.’ What, you might wonder, can they learn? To ‘be knowledgeable,’ for one thing, which admittedly does help when trying to run a business. The piece reads as if USA Today was concerned there might be too many pope-free pages in the paper, so they got their in-house Steven Covey to gin up The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pontiffs.”

Number one is not to be missed.

The tsunami devastated much of Sri Lanka, killing an estimated 38,000 people on an island with a population of 20 million, but it may have also provided an opportunity for progress on ending the decades long civil war.  The Hindu interviews Ram Manikkalingam, Senior Adviser to the Sri Lankan President.

“[The Hindu] Post-tsunami, is there a change in the decades-long positions held by the Government and the rebels?

[RM] Usually in the peace processes in Sri Lanka, the leadership of both parties — the LTTE and the Government — come to a decision that there needs to be a ceasefire and talks should begin. They have been top-down processes.

The change with the tsunami has been that there has been a pull from the bottom for cooperation. There was, in a sense, the pull factor, which is very, very strong unlike the previous peace processes, and the leadership is catching up with the demand on the ground for cooperation.

Could you elaborate on the [joint] mechanism?

The mechanism consists of three tiers. There is a three-member high-level committee with a nominee each by the Government, the LTTE and the Muslim parties. This will be essentially involved with the policy of allocating resources.”

In addition to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), a traditional Rwandan system of dispute resolution is being used to try those who committed atrocities during the genocide a decade ago. It differs from the ICTR and operates by a different logic, stressing reconciliation, since many perpetrators will have to be reintegrated into society to live along side survivors.

From African Studies Quarterly:

“In response to the ineffectiveness of the [ICTR] tribunal and the incapacity of its national court system, the Rwandan government has revived a traditional form of dispute resolution called Gacaca (ga-CHA-cha).  10,000 Gacaca courts will try genocide suspects in the communities where their crimes were committed.  They will be tried and judged by their neighbours.

Gacaca represents a model of restorative justice because it focuses on the healing of victims and perpetrators, confessions, plea-bargains, and reintegration. It is these characteristics that render it a radically different approach from the retributive and punitive nature of justice at the ICTR and national courts. Great hope has been placed in the ability of restorative justice to contribute to reconciliation at the individual and community level.  Gacaca justice is meant to be as intimate as the genocide itself: If it is unable to provide for reconciliation it will come at a high cost for Rwandan society.”

From today’s New York Times:

“With his discovery of special relativity, Einstein upended the familiar, thousands-year-old conception of space and time. To be sure, even a century later, not everyone has fully embraced Einstein’s discovery. Nevertheless, say ‘Einstein’ and most everyone thinks ‘relativity.’

What is less widely appreciated, however, is that physicists call 1905 Einstein’s ‘miracle year’ not because of the discovery of relativity alone, but because in that year Einstein achieved the unimaginable, writing four papers that each resulted in deep and formative changes to our understanding of the universe. One of these papers – not on relativity – garnered him the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. It also began a transformation in physics that Einstein found so disquieting that he spent the last 30 years of his life in a determined effort to repudiate it.”

Here is the accompanying slide show.

Myrna Blyth reviews “French women don’t get fat” and “Perfect Madness”:

Maybe this book should have been called “French Girls Don’t Dare Get Fat,” which is probably a bit closer to the truth. Madame Guilano, who is the CEO of Veuve Clicquot and peddles this very pricey champagne in America, tells us only what anybody, French or American, who doesn’t have much problem with his weight, already knows: That it is better to eat what you want but not eat too much, to eat only when you are hungry, and to walk more. Not exactly le revelation!

But hey, I can stomach 200 pages of self-congratulatory chauvinism and yogurt recipes a lot more than Judith Warner’s snappish assault on American moms in Perfect Madness, a book that rated a cover story in Newsweek and a front-page review in The New York Times Book Review. Warner, by the way, just happens to be the co-author of Howard Dean’s screed Take Back Our Country and Return Democracy to America. This author, when she first had children, lived in France. She insists French mothers have it good and get it right because France is simply a “paradise.” It’s a contrast to “most of America,” which she found upon returning home to Washington, D.C. is “competitive,” “rapacious,” “amoral,” “moralizing and just plain mad. ” Merci, Judith.

Read more here.

John Noble Wilford in the New York Times:

The toothless skull of an early human ancestor discovered in the Caucasus may attest to evolution’s oldest known example of compassion for the elderly and handicapped, scientists report today.

Other experts agreed that the discovery was significant, but cautioned that it might be a stretch to interpret the fossil as evidence of compassion.

The well-preserved skull, found in Georgia, belonged to a male Homo erectus about 40 years old. All his teeth, except the left canine, were missing. Regrowth of bone indicated that the man had been toothless for at least two years before he died at what was then an old age.

More here.

James Owen in National Geographic:

Unlike most flowers, roughly a third of the approximately 30,000 orchid species in the world don’t rely on the lure of food to achieve pollination. Instead, the orchids trick insects into performing the task without reward.

Most of these orchids are “food deceptive.” Using bright colors and sweet perfumes, they falsely advertise a free meal of pollen and nectar to attract bees, beetles, butterflies, and other pollinators. (Other of these orchids are even more elaborate in their cunning, mimicking the appearance and sex pheromones of female insects to lure males looking for a mate.)

More here.  (Thanks  Margit.)