From The Harvard Gazette:

Nobody believed Judah Folkman when, in the 1960s, he claimed that the growth of cancers could be stopped, even reversed, by blocking the tiny vessels that feed them blood. Over the years, however, he has survived peer rejection of his theory, and gone on to develop drugs that did what he predicted they would do. In 1998, endostatin, one of several anti-blood-vessel growth drugs developed in his lab, was hyped by the media as a “cure” for many different cancers. A scant seven years later, Fortune magazine derided it as a “failure.” Both statements turn out to be high exaggerations.

A related drug, called Avastin, was approved for use in the United States in February 2004. Since then, 27 other countries have OK’d it for treating colon cancer. Avastin is also being tested on patients with kidney, breast, and ovarian cancers. In addition, another blood-vessel-growth blocker, Tarceva, has been approved for treatment of lung cancer in the United States.

More here.

From BBC News:

Given our planet’s rich biodiversity, “speciation” clearly happens regularly, but scientists cannot quite pinpoint the driving forces behind it. Now, researchers studying a family of butterflies think they have witnessed a subtle process, which could be forcing a wedge between newly formed species. The team, from Harvard University, US, discovered that closely related species living in the same geographical space displayed unusually distinct wing markings.

These wing colours apparently evolved as a sort of “team strip”, allowing butterflies to easily identify the species of a potential mate.

More here.

Hilary Spurling in the New York Review of Books:

By the start of the twentieth century Matisse was well on the way to inventing a new, disturbing, and at that stage virtually incomprehensible visual language. He was a familiar figure, loping about the streets of Montparnasse in a black sheepskin coat turned wrong side out—some said it looked more like a wolfskin—clutching a roll of crazy paintings no other artist could make head or tail of. But almost from one day to the next Matisse drew back from the brink of modernity and started turning out relatively conventional figure and flower pieces. This regression took place in 1902–1903, a phase often referred to by art historians following Barr as Matisse’s Dark Period. His behavior suggested on its face a character of bourgeois timidity: someone who, having stumbled on a potentially disruptive discovery, failed to follow it up because he lacked the courage of his convictions.

In fact, Matisse turned out to have been caught up without warning in a major political and financial fraud, the Humbert Affair, a scheme carried out by one of the Third Republic’s best-known power couples, Frédéric and Thérèse Humbert. The affair rocked France in 1902–1903, causing a trail of bankruptcies, suicides, and bank failures, even threatening at its height to bring down the government. By the time the scandal broke in May 1902, the villains had fled, leaving as scapegoats their housekeeper and her husband, an unsuspecting couple who had for years provided the Humberts with an innocent front. Their name was Parayre, and Matisse had married their daughter. Their public exposure, followed by the arrest and trial of his father-in-law, left Matisse as the sole breadwinner for an extended family of seven. This is why he switched to painting canvases that were at least potentially saleable.

More here.  [For Jack Barth.]

Stefan Lovgren in National Geographic News:

Alarmed by the deaths of eight North Atlantic right whales in the past 16 months, some scientists are calling for immediate protections. Listed as endangered by the U.S. government, the whales are now believed to total about 300.

Four of the right whales were killed by human activities—three by ship collisions and one by fishing gear. A fifth whale was probably also killed in a ship collision.

The deaths were particularly worrying to conservationists, because six of the whales were adult females, three carrying near-term fetuses.

More here.

Randy Kennedy in the New York Times:

If you are not the sort of person who cares deeply about the Old World subtleties of Fournier, the retro-hipster swirl of Ministry Script or the plain-vanilla, rock-ribbed dependability of Helvetica – nor the sort immediately able to identify the typeface you are reading right now as 8.7-point Imperial – then you were probably not aware that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared this week Type Week in New York City.

You also might have assumed that a group of a dozen people wandering around the Upper East Side on Thursday morning, snapping pictures of the unremarkable words “Public School 6” inscribed into stone above an unremarkable red door on East 81st Street were tourists in possession of a badly translated guidebook…

These pilgrims were among about 500 people, some from as far away as Brazil and Finland, who have converged on the city for TypeCon, a yearly gathering of typographers, printers, designers, calligraphers and assorted, self-described font freaks and type nerds who can argue about kerning into the wee hours.

More here.

Margaret Wertheim in LA Weekly:

Until very recently, artificial-intelligence researchers believed that modeling the mind was simply a matter of simulating rational cognition, an activity that was seen to be epitomized by strategical games such as chess and go — but over the past decade, computer scientists have come to understand that a virtual mind needs a virtual psychology. To “think” requires not just an ability to carry through a chain of logical inferences; it also requires a mental environment, or psychic context, in which such rationalizations can be given meaning.

More here.

Keith Thomas in the London Times:

Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other’s saliva and dirt! — Tsonga people of southern Africa on the European practice of kissing, 1927

In what must still be the longest single work devoted to the kiss — Opus Polyhistoricum . . . de Osculis — the German polymath Martin von Kempe (1642-83) assembled 1,040 closely packed pages of excerpts from classical, biblical, legal, medical and other learned sources to form a sort of encyclopaedia of kissing. He listed more than 20 types of kiss. These included the kiss of veneration, the kiss of peace, the kisses bestowed by Christians on images and relics, and by pagans on idols, the kissing of the Pope’s foot, the kiss bestowed by superiors on inferiors, the kiss used in academic degree ceremonies, the lovers’ kiss, the lustful and adulterous kiss, the kiss exchanged by couples sealing their marriage vows, the kiss of reconciliation, the kiss carrying contagion, the hypocritical kiss and the kiss of Judas.

More here.

From The Edge: A talk with Dan Sperber:

How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro structure of culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses, the small elementary processes of interest, are both those which happen inside individuals’ mind — the cognitive psychological processes, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the interactions among individuals through the changes they bring about in their common environment, and in particular, communication.

Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying process from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be an unproblematic copying system, a transmission system, biased only by social interest, for instance, almost in intentional distortion but that otherwise would guarantee a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that communication, imitation, provide a robust replication system.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Inspired by real events in the life of JM Synge, Joseph O’Connor imagines the playwright in love: There is a part of the garden, by the cluster of sycamores, near the bend in the drive where the gravel is wearing thin. If he stands there, quietly, on a still Sunday morning, when none of the servants is around to annoy him, and when Mother is up in her room at her scriptures, he can hear the distant approach of the train from Dublin: the windborne shush-and-chug that means she might be coming to him again. He is thirty-six now, already very ill. Painful years have passed since he stopped believing he could be loved. The power of what is happening terrifies him.

More here.

From CNN News:

From July 2002 through June 2004, the hospitals improved as much as 33 percent on 18 indicators of quality care, though some went up just 3 percent, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations found. Those indicators include urging patients to quit smoking; giving heart attack victims aspirin and clot-busting drugs quickly; promptly prescribing antibiotics to people with pneumonia; and checking how well the heart’s main pumping chamber was working in heart-failure patients.

More here.

From Science:

Nuclear bomb testing in the 1960’s is providing a way for researchers to tell when cells in the brain were “born”. The bombs released large amounts of carbon-14, which was quickly taken up as CO2 by plants and animals. Measurements of this isotope indicate that neural cells in the cerebral cortex are as old as the individual, researchers report in the 15 July issue of Cell, providing further proof that neurons in adult brains do not regenerate. (Photo credit, (abomb) clipart.com; (brain) corbis).

More interesting news here.

From The New York Times:

Edward Klein’s new book, ”The Truth About Hillary,” is not a biography, to be evaluated in terms of how well or poorly it relates to real events or a real person; it is something much more revealing — a kind of cultural dreamwork, like that in 18th-century penny ballads that linked real political figures to folklore, giving them supernatural traits. In the stories that Klein tells, we can clearly see the collective unconscious of our culture at work, throwing up vivid, even lurid fantasies that emerge out of the shifting balance of power between women and men.

It is in his subtext about lesbianism that Klein’s id-projections veer into truly illuminating hysteria: he sees a lesbian under every bed. One of Clinton’s advisers ”looked like the Marlboro man in drag.” Another is a ”dominatrix.” ”Melanie” — actually Melanne — Verveer is called ”her dark-haired mannish-looking chief of staff.” (All of these women are heterosexuals, but never mind.) Klein quotes rumors about Donna Shalala and Janet Reno’s sexuality — ”their orientations are shrouded in deep ambiguity.” Twice, he manages to assign lesbianism to Hillary while never claiming she is attracted to or involved with women: ”To Arkansans, she walked like a lesbian, talked like a lesbian and looked like a lesbian. Ergo, she was a lesbian,” he writes.

More here.

Aatish Bhatia of Swarthmore College has brought to my attention that “today is the anniversery of US congress branding the events in Sudan a genocide.” He also points out the site beawitness.org which has a video and other information on the Darfur crisis. Check it out.

Also, from today’s Sudan Tribune:

Leading non-governmental organizations in the United States, France and Great Britain are urging their countries to immediately sponsor a United Nations Security Council resolution that will mandate peace enforcement operations in Darfur, Sudan.

“This joint declaration is important because it recognizes the influence that the US, the UK and France can have in urging the international community to get involved in stopping the genocide in Darfur,” said Dr. Antonios Kireopoulos, Associate General Secretary of the National Council of Churches USA for International Affairs and Peace.

Estimates for Darfuri Africans killed since February 2003, range from 180,000 to 400,000. Over 2.5 million have been displaced and remain at mortal risk today, facing continued violence, malnutrition and disease.

More here. There was also this article in The New Yorker last year. And there is a lot more information at the Human Rights Watch page on Darfur here.

A while ago Christopher Brown suggested to me that terrorism in democratic societies is aimed at its polity so that it can place pressure on its government.  I thought it was wrong at the time, and still do to a large extent.  But there seems to be some evidence that this logic holds for suicide bombings, which has been largely used in and against representative democracies.  Robert Pape discusses his research in The American Conservative.

“Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop—and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn’t completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.”

Also see this overview of the latest research, including Pape’s, in Slate. (Hat tip: Ram)

“Oxford ecologist Philip Stewart has designed a new periodic table of the elements, and it’s a hit. American schools are placing orders daily for Stewart’s table, and the Royal Society of Chemists recently sent a copy to every British secondary school. Stewart’s is the only remake to achieve widespread adoption since Dmitri Mendeleev invented the original periodic table in a fit of brilliance in 1869. “

More here, and don’t miss the slideshow.

From The Village Voice:

The most cosmopolitan cracker ever to play Santa Claus and Davy Crockett, Billy Bob Thornton is a walking contradiction, reconciling the conflicting aesthetics of Northern and Southern truth and fiction. In person, he seems to have fewer of those sharp, hillbilly angles than appear on screen. He has skin that could advertise an L.A. salon (despite the scrollwork of tattoos up and down his arms). And while he’s wearing cowboy boots, he bought them—as the cowboy sneers in the salsa commercial—in New York City!

More here.

From MSNBC:

In the animal kingdom, males typically get all the color, which they flaunt in the never-ending quest for sex. Males use color, size, antlers and other showy tactics to discourage males (or in some cases, to beat them up). Now and then, the reverse is true. Usually when females are the most colorful, however, it’s because sex roles have been reversed: The females are competing for mates and the males are tending the young.

So the parrot Ecletus roratus has been an enigma. The females stay in the nest while the males forage — a typical avian family setup. Females are well outnumbered, so they don’t have to show off to get a mate. Yet while the males are plain tree-leaf green, the females stand out like Fourth of July fireworks, brightly adorned with red and blue. Mom and Dad are so different that when scientists first found them in the Australian rainforest, they though it was two different species. A new study suggests an evolutionary logic for the odd coloring.

More here.

David Hambling in New Scientist:

Test results of a US microwave weapon have been made public under the Freedom of Information Act. Called the Active Denial System, the weapon fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam which is supposed to heat skin but leave no physical damage. Designed with crowd-control in mind, the beam causes pain in moments and becomes intolerable in under 5 seconds. To protect their eyes, test “rioters” were asked to remove contact lenses and glasses before being fired upon. They were also relieved of their loose change – everyone knows what happens to metal left in microwaves. But some experts wonder exactly how the amount of radiation a target receives can be controlled: what if someone in the crowd is unable to move away from the beam?

More here.

Peter Weiss in Science News Online:

The next time you get a letter, its stamp might have printed on it examples of one the greatest conceptual tools of modern physics. The tool is a kind of line drawing, and a bunch of those drawings appear on the face of a new U.S. postage stamp honoring a legendary physicist, the late Richard P. Feynman.

Those drawings are ubiquitous in physics today. “If you walk into a physics building anywhere in the world, you see those [drawings] on the blackboards,” says David I. Kaiser, a physicist and historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who recently wrote a book about the sketches.

Created by Feynman in the 1940s to solve one of the most vexing puzzles of theoretical physics at the time—a feat for which he would share the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics—the drawings give physicists a quick, intuitive way to organize and understand difficult calculations. As scientists were uncovering droves of new subatomic particles in the 1950s and 1960s, Feynman diagrams—as the drawings came to be known—offered a means for visualizing the unfamiliar entities and their interactions.

More here.

Sarah Lyall in the New York Times:

Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, reached far back into the past on Wednesday, telling a British court about an encounter he says he saw in Elaine’s restaurant in Manhattan in August 1969, between the filmmaker Roman Polanski and a Scandinavian model named Beatte Telle.

“He began to praise her beauty and speak to her, romance her,” Mr. Lapham recounted, speaking of Mr. Polanski and Ms. Telle, strangers until that moment. “At one point he had his hand on her leg and he said to her: ‘I can put you in the movies. I can make you the next Sharon Tate.’ “

Testifying in a libel case setting Mr. Polanski, 71, against Vanity Fair magazine, which reported the anecdote in an article in July 2002, Mr. Lapham said that the incident was embedded in his memory. “I was impressed by the remark, not only because it was tasteless and vulgar, but because it was a cliché,” he said.

More here.