Journalist and blogger, Laila el-Haddad, on the Palestinian elections and Hamas’ victory in The Gaurdian’s news blog.

The latest events can only be described as a political earthquake, both locally and regionally. Not only are these the first truly democratic and hotly contested elections in the Arab Middle East, but also the first time an Islamic party has come to power through the system and the popular will of the people.

To say we are entering a new stage is an understatement. Everyone knew Hamas would do well in these elections and that they would constitute a significant challenge to the ruling party. But this well?

Voters in Gaza were shocked.

“I cast a sympathy vote for Hamas but truthfully I did not expect them to win at all. It was a surprise to everyone; no one expected this to happen,” a young college student said.

Even Hamas members and supporters were surprised.

“We thought we’d get at most 50% of the votes,” one Hamas insider told me.

“We didn’t expect the security forces and the upper classes to vote for us, but it seems they might have tipped the balance. I guess we’re more popular than we realised.”

How the new government will take shape and whether western positions towards it will evolve have all yet to answered. It’s likely that Hamas will form a kind of national unity government, or a coalition of some sort, with a mixture of other parties. The burden of the sudden and overwhelming responsibility for running a state and answering to their constituents’ long and varied list of demands may be more than they can deal with alone at the moment.

Gary North on the economics of a Ph.D. (via Political Theory Daily Review).

Ph.D. students are a lot like gamblers. They expect to beat the odds. The gambler personifies odds-beating as Lady Luck. The Ph.D. student instead looks within. “I am really smart. These other people in the program aren’t as smart as I am. I will get that tenure-track job. I will make the cut. I will be a beneficiary of the system.”

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Also, if ego were marketable, all Ph.D. graduates would get tenure…

At $20,000 or more per year in tuition and living expenses, plus the $35,000+ not earned in the job market, trying to earn a Ph.D. is a losing proposition.

In some departments, the years invested are horrendous. Breneman’s dissertation went into the grim details, department by department. Anyone seeking a degree in philosophy was almost doomed to failure, yet the Ph.D. degree took on average over a decade beyond the B.A. to earn. There were almost no college teaching jobs when they finished. That was before the glut.

Earning a Ph.D. may pay off if your goal is status, although I don’t understand why anyone regards a Ph.D. as a status symbol that is worth giving up five to ten years of your earning power in your youth, when every dime saved can multiply because of compounding. If the public understood the economics of earning a Ph.D., people would think “naïve economic loser” whenever they hear “Ph.D.”

A word to the wise is sufficient.

In The Guardian, James Buchan reviews two new books on the Cold War, The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis and The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times by Odd Arne Westad.

Gaddis is glad the cold war was fought as it was fought and won by the side that won it. Like some primary-school teacher, he hands out prizes for effort to pretty well everyone: Eisenhower, Nixon, Walesa, Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul, Deng Xiaoping and, above all, Gorbachev, who managed to defuse the whole contraption without it blowing up in his face.

Odd Arne Westad, the Norwegian-born scholar who heads the Cold War Studies Centre at the London School of Economics and has hitherto concentrated on China and the Far East, is less sanguine. He believes that the cold war, far from being a conflict necessary to clear the ideological air, was a continuation, under new management, of the old European colonial enterprise. Westad, too, gives out prizes but only to the tragic failures: Lumumba, Cabral, Guevara, Gorbachev.

Each approach has its charm. It is pleasant, on reading Gaddis, to see the public events of one’s childhood or youth gathered into a lucid and elegant narrative and, as it were, put away out of sight. Westad offers a philosophy of history that, though not wholly free of leftese, better accommodates 9/11 and the US occupation of Iraq. There is no wasteful overlap. Westad ignores Berlin 1948, Gaddis has nothing on Katanga 1964.

From The London Times:

Because we are mammals and blessed with body hair, three middle ear bones, and the ability to nourish our young with milk that females produce in modified sweat glands called mammary glands. Although females have the mammary glands, we all start out in a similar way in the embryo. During development, the embryo follows a female template until about six weeks, when the male sex chromosome kicks in for a male embryo. The embryo then begins to develop all of its male characteristics. Men are thus left with nipples and also with some breast tissue.

Men can even get breast cancer and there are some medical conditions that can cause male breasts to enlarge. Abnormal enlargement of the breasts in a male is known a gynecomastia. Gynecomastia can be caused by using anabolic steroids. So, if your favourite athlete suddenly develops man boobs and starts winning gold medals, you know the reason why.

More here.

From Nature:

Scientists have had a smashing idea that could help them explore beneath Mars’s dusty surface. Slamming a hefty chunk of copper into the planet should excavate enough material to reveal water ice or carbon-based chemicals lurking underground, according to a proposed NASA mission. The idea follows the success of Deep Impact, a mission that fired a copper ‘impactor’ into comet Tempel 1, while its delivery craft recorded the whole show with an array of sensors. The new mission takes exactly the same approach to Mars. Called THOR (Tracing Habitability, Organics and Resources), it would be the second of NASA’s Mars scout missions, low-cost probes that are designed and built in just a few years. The first scout, Phoenix, is due to launch in August 2007.

THOR has been proposed by Phil Christensen, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University, Tempe, and David Spencer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Christensen estimates that the impactor should be about 100 kilograms or so, and hit the planet at more than 15,000 kilometres per hour. It is hoped this would make a crater roughly 50 metres in diameter, and up to 25 metres deep. Meanwhile, its mother ship would look for ice, minerals and organic compounds thrown out by the crash.

More here.

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine:

The problem with the N.P.T. is that it legitimates the wrong thing – not just the peaceful use of nuclear energy but the “inalienable right” to produce your own nuclear fuel. The solution, then, is to eliminate, or at least circumscribe, that right. And this is what Washington has spurned. Last year, Kofi Annan’s “high-level panel” on U.N. reform endorsed the Proliferation Security Initiative and suggested that more nations join. It also proposed that the International Atomic Energy Agency would act as “guarantor for the supply of fissile material to civilian nuclear users.” Nations would no longer be able to argue, as Iran now does, that they need to produce their own enriched fuel in order to ensure a steady supply for peaceful purposes. The proposal wouldn’t have stopped the rogue states, but it would have delegitimated them.

The Bush administration apparently accepts the idea; it just doesn’t want to see an international agency empowered to execute it. The White House has proposed that the countries that currently produce nuclear fuel – led, presumably, by the U.S. – band together to guarantee a steady and low-cost supply of uranium enriched for civilian purposes. Neither the Iranians nor other recipients are likely to accept such an arrangement. But maybe there’s something halfway, or a quarter of the way, between the two systems. So far, however, the administration won’t even try.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in The New Statesman (via One Good Move):

It’s been a week of handling fallout from The Root of All Evil?, my TV documentary about religion. Of course religion is not the root of all evil. No single thing is the root of all anything. The question mark was supposed to turn an indefensible title into a debatable topic. Gratifyingly, title notwithstanding, the e-mails, letters and telephone calls to Channel 4 have been running two to one in favour. The pros mostly praise Channel 4’s courage in finally saying what many people have been thinking for years. The antis complain that I failed to do justice to “both sides”, and that I interviewed fundamentalist extremists rather than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The balance is (over-) provided by Thought for the Day, Prayer for the Day, Songs of Praise, the Daily Service, Faith to Faith, Choral Evensong, Sunday Half-Hour, The Story of God, Belief, Beyond Belief, and others. Mine was a brief opportunity to put the other side. As for my “extremist” interviews, would that Pastor Ted Haggard were extreme. In neo-con America, he is mainstream. President of the 30 million-strong National Association of Evangelicals, he has a weekly phone conversation with Bush. My other “extremist”, Yousef al-Khattab (Joseph Cohen) of Jerusalem, was supposed, as an American Jew turned Israeli settler turned Muslim, to see both sides and give a balanced perspective. Wrong!

More here.

Susan Lanzoni reviews Nerve Endings: The Discovery of the Synapse by Richard Rapport, and The War of the Soups and the Sparks: The Discovery of Neurotransmitters and the Dispute over How Nerves Communicate by Eliot Valenstein, in American Scientist:

Scientific style and personality loom large in Nerve Endings and The War of the Soups and the Sparks, two new books documenting discoveries about the neuron’s anatomical structure and its modes of transmitting nerve impulses. These volumes tell a story that begins in the late 19th century and is still being written today. Both accounts meld individual biographies of scientists with descriptions of experimental procedures and raise questions about the ways in which styles of research, creativity and intuition have contributed to the practice of experimental neuroscience.

In Nerve Endings, Richard Rapport, a neurosurgeon by training, focuses on the life and work of the Spanish artist and scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal and to a lesser extent on Cajal’s Italian rival, Camillo Golgi. Cajal’s late 19th-century conception of a discrete nervous cell, separated from other cells by a gap (later called a synapse), came to replace the older reticular theory, which postulated that nervous tissue comprised a seamless, continuous web—an unbroken network, or reticulum—through which nerve impulses could travel in any direction. Golgi’s adamant advocacy of the reticular theory was the source of his conflict with Cajal.

More here.

Bradley S. Klapper of the AP, in HappyNews.com:

Mature females of the Paedocypris progenetica, a member of the carp family, only grow to 7.9 millimeters (0.31 inches) and the males have enlarged pelvic fins and exceptionally large muscles that may be used to grasp the females during copulation, researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, published Wednesday by the Royal Society in London.

“This is one of the strangest fish that I’ve seen in my whole career,’ said Ralf Britz, zoologist at the Natural History Museum in London, who helped analyze the fish’s skeleton. “It’s tiny, it lives in acid and it has these bizarre grasping fins. I hope we’ll have time to find out more about them before their habitat disappears completely.”

The previous record for small size, according to the Natural History Museum in London, was held by an 8-millimeter species of Indo-Pacific goby.

More here.

More “quit complaining about your job” pictures here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Do men enjoy punishing evildoers? A study published last week in Nature suggests we do. Scientists planted actors among volunteers playing a game. Some actors played fairly; others played unfairly. Then the researchers delivered electric shocks to the actors while monitoring the brains of volunteers who looked on.

Men, like women, showed “empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas” when shocks were administered to actors who had played fairly. But when shocks were delivered instead to actors who had played unfairly, empathetic responses in men, unlike women, “were significantly reduced.” In fact, men showed “increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge.” Apparently, judgment controls men’s feelings more than women’s. It determines who gets our empathy and who gets our schadenfreude—the joy of watching the suffering of someone you dislike.

The study’s authors say we need more evidence before asserting differences in empathy and schadenfreude between men and women. But we already have such evidence, in the form of polls about crime, war, and torture. All you have to do is look for gender differences, or lack thereof, on questions that touch various dimensions of the psychology of punishment.

More here.

Ed Harriman on the economics of reconstruction in Iraq, in the London Review of Books:

The sums are simple. Reconstruction will cost considerably more than originally imagined. The American administration has committed most of its funds. The Iraqis have neither the money nor the expertise to run the projects that have been completed. There’s little transparency or accountability. To judge from the audits published so far, at least $12 billion spent by the Americans and by the Iraqi interim and transitional governments has not been properly accounted for. Almost three years after the fall of Saddam, the GAO reports, ‘it is unclear how US efforts are helping the Iraqi people obtain clean water, reliable electricity or competent healthcare.’ The Bush administration has decided to provide no more reconstruction funds.

The auditors who have discovered Iraq’s deepening financial crisis have been ignored. They asked the US ambassador and the US military commander in Iraq for their views. Neither replied. The US State Department was to submit estimates of how much it will cost to complete all American-funded projects in Iraq to the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Office won’t discuss the matter. Earlier this month, Brigadier-General William McCoy told reporters: ‘The US never intended to completely rebuild Iraq . . . This was just supposed to be a jump-start.’

More here.

Carl Zimmer has an article entitled “Fossil Yields Surprise Kin of Crocodiles” in the New York Times:

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History have discovered a fossil in New Mexico that looks like a six-foot-long, two-legged dinosaur along the lines of a tyrannosaur or a velociraptor. But it is actually an ancient relative of today’s alligators and crocodiles.

The discovery is a striking example of how different animals can evolve the same kind of body over and over again.

For almost 60 years, the 210-million-year-old fossil has been hiding in plain sight. It was lodged in a slab of rock dug up in 1947 in New Mexico by a team led by Edward Colbert, a paleontologist at the museum.

More from the NYT here.  Benjamin Zimmer, Carl’s brother, has an interesting take on the title of Carl’s article and asks why the kin of crocodiles were so surprised? He writes in his blog, Language Log:

It’s a great example of the kind of ambiguous sentence that teachers of introductory syntax classes often present to their students (like the old standby, “I hate visiting relatives”). If this were a diagramming exercise in Syntax 101, the students would have to come up with phrase-structure trees to account for the structural ambiguity:

The ambiguous reading hinges on whether “yields” is understood as a noun or a verb. Once a reader decides to parse “yields” as a plural noun (with “fossil” understood as an attributive modifier), then the garden path has been established. The unusual headlinese of “surprise kin” further encourages the alternate parsing.

A similar ambiguous headline occasionally gets hauled out for the amusement of linguistics classes: “British Push Bottles Up German Rear.” Again, the key to the battling interpretations is whether a single word (in this case “push”) is parsed as a noun or a verb.

More from Benjamin here.  And last, Carl Zimmer also has a review of the Darwin show at the American Museum of Natural History in Discover Magazine:

Mounted on a carrot and a plum, two soldiers armed with swords and trumpets make war on one another. The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers is no ordinary child’s sketch. The artist was a young Francis Darwin, son of the celebrated Charles, and the drawing appears on the back of a manuscript page of his father’s most famous work, On the Origin of Species. Tucked away in a glass case in a corner of the American Museum of Natural History’s new Darwin exhibit, the page is one of only 28 to survive from the original manuscript of what many called “the book that shook the world.” It also succeeds in doing what all the fierce debates cannot. It shows Charles Darwin not as a figurehead in a great fight but as a real human and a devoted father, loath to waste paper, who gave his children discarded manuscript sheets to scribble upon.

Far from being an icon, Darwin was a man who led a dramatic life. He had adventures in exotic lands, fathered 10 children with his wife (and cousin), Emma Wedgwood, and conducted experiments on earthworms, barnacles, and insects (he once lay motionless on his couch to let a wasp drink from his eye).

More here.

Will Knight in New Scientist:

Japanese beer maker Asahi plans to give away 5000 personal bartending bots, each of which can store up to six cans of beer in a refrigerated compartment within its belly. At the push of a button the simple robots will open a can and pour the chilled contents into a glass for a thirsty owner.

To win one of the beer-bots, in a promotion for the company’s new low malt beer, contestants must collect 36 tokens found on the specially marked beers. But the competition, starting in February, is only open to those in Japan.

Some robotics experts see the promotion as a fun way to promote a wider interest in robotics. Others, however, say it is a gimmick that distracts from genuine robot research.

More here.

“Paracelsus was an alchemist, shaman and magician. But he was also the first scientist, a doctor whose influence is still felt today.”

Peter Ackroyd reviews The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science by Philip Ball, in the London Times:

“I am different,” Paracelsus wrote. “Let this not upset you.”

But it did. He was denounced as a fanatic or impostor and reviled as a drunkard. He was forced to wander from city to city in search of work and bread. He was considered coarse and vulgar, but replied characteristically that “I am a rough man born in a rough country, and what seems silk in my eyes may be but homespun to you.” This was the man who, according to his latest biographer, “started a medical revolution and founded a chemical tradition”.

The “rough country” was Switzerland, but he made all Europe his province. The year of his birth, 1493, can plausibly be seen as the beginning of the modern era. It might be described as the birth of the scientific era, but the word would have meant nothing to him. The term “scientist” was not coined until the 1830s. For Paracelsus and his contemporaries, magic, alchemy and astrology were absolutely embedded within natural philosophy and experimental procedure. Newton was an alchemist and numerologist who drew up arcane recipes for the transmutation of gold and dreamed of rebuilding the Temple of Solomon. Paracelsus predates him by 150 years, but the two philosophers shared the same vital mingling of experimental and transcendental, observed and occult.

More here.

Padma Rao in Spiegel:

The walls of the country’s temples are decked with acrobatic friezes of copulating couples. Erotic fables tell of the Hindu God of Love flirting outrageously with naked milkmaids bathing in a river. And next to its philosophical considerations about happiness in marriage, the Kama Sutra also offers useful tips for the entire palette of sexual delight. India’s ancient history is studded with unabashed sex.

But what about a female tennis star who wears shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt? Or what happens when an actress so famous her fans dedicate temples to her begins to share her views on condoms and pre-marital sex? Smooching pairs in discotheques? Lovers holding hands on the beach?

By Krishna, no.

In recent months, political opportunists in India, acting in the name of “protecting the innocence of India’s youth” and “Indian morality,” have campaigned a crack-down against sexual liberation in the world’s largest democracy. They have brought the work of parliaments to a halt, they have incited mobs and they have successfully pushed for changes to the laws. In a country that has traditionally been better known for the pleasures of the flesh, enforced virtue is fast spreading.

More here.

From CNN: A man walks past a display of red lanterns, hung as a symbol of good luck, from a tree at Ditan (Temple of Earth) Park in Beijing, on January 23, decorated for a Lunar New Year temple fair. The tradition of temple fairs during the Spring Festival holiday dates back over a thousand years in Northern China and though it was banned by the Communists in the 1950s for promoting feudalistic superstition, the tradition slowly re-emerged in pace with China’s opening economy of the 1980s. Today, visits to the city’s various temple fairs remain one of the most popular ways for Beijingers to spend the weeklong public holiday. [I just liked this picture.]

From Science:

Researchers have discovered that a wide variety of stain-resistant products contain volatile compounds that can escape and break down into perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). This indestructible chemical has been accumulating in humans and wildlife, and it has been shown to harm laboratory animals. In related news, the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday asked major manufacturers of these compounds to cut their use by 95% over the next 4 years.

PFOA is used in the process of manufacturing polymers that can repel stains, keep grease on the inside of fast food wrappers, and improve the properties of polishes, paints, and hair-care products. Environmental scientists and regulators are worried because PFOA and related chemicals don’t break down, and they cause cancer and developmental effects in lab animals. The environmental puzzle is that PFOA itself is not found in consumer products.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Medicine usually progresses in incremental steps. One antidepressant or cholesterol-lowering drug follows another with only marginally improved therapeutic benefit. Vaccines are different. Disease prevention through immunization, whether for polio or mumps, has the potential to transform medical practice, sometimes eliminating illness altogether. Smallpox is now (we hope) confined to heavily protected freezers in Russia and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Vaccine developers appear to be on the verge of another remarkable achievement. Two vaccines that are nearing approval by the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S.–one from Merck, the other from Glaxo­SmithKline–have demonstrated in clinical trials that they can prevent infection from the two types of the human papillomavirus (HPV) that account for up to 70 percent of cervical cancers. That could make a big dent in a disease that is the second most common malignancy affecting women worldwide and that kills more than half of its victims. In the U.S., in excess of 10,000 women contract invasive cervical cancer annually and nearly 4,000 die of the disease.

More here.

Nicholas Lehmann in The New Yorker:

During the war, Murrow never had to play the role of the dispassionate reporter. He was an important player in the Allied war effort, and, under the circumstances, that did not conflict with his journalistic role. Murrow’s special significance was in making Americans see, through his broadcasts about the Blitz, that the European war was not something faraway and irrelevant. When Harry Hopkins, F.D.R.’s right-hand man, came to London for a visit, eleven months before Pearl Harbor, he met with three people on his first day in town: Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill, and Murrow. Churchill was a personal friend as well as a journalistic subject, and Murrow had a wartime affair with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby Churchill, who later married Averell Harriman.

More here.