Very interesting post by Carl Zimmer at The Loom:

Are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people? The question emerged a few years ago, and it shows no signs of going away.

I first encountered this idea while working on my book Parasite Rex. I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It’s in the fluke’s interest to get eaten, because only by getting into the gut of a sheep or some other grazer can it complete its life cycle. Another fluke, Euhaplorchis californiensis, causes infected fish to shimmy and jump, greatly increasing the chance that wading birds will grab them.

Those parasites were weird enough, but then I got to know Toxoplasma gondii. This single-celled parasite lives in the guts of cats, sheddding eggs that can be picked up by rats and other animals that can just so happen be eaten by cats. Toxoplasma forms cysts throughout its intermediate host’s body, including the brain. And yet a Toxoplasma-ridden rat is perfectly healthy. That makes good sense for the parasite, since a cat would not be particularly interested in eating a dead rat. But scientists at Oxford discovered that the parasite changes the rats in one subtle but vital way.

More here.

Hannah Beech in Time Magazine:

For the past couple of years, Li has kept a blog—written under the pen name Muzi Mei—that has chronicled everything from her penchant for orgies and Internet dating to her skepticism toward marriage when it means staying faithful to one man. This fall the Beijing resident posted a recording of her own lovemaking sounds that would make Paris Hilton blush. More than 50,000 people simultaneously tried to download the 25-minute podcast, crashing the host server. Despite government attempts to censor it, the sex diary is so popular that Li’s pen name is intermittently the most searched keyword on China’s top search engine. “I express my freedom through sex,” says Li, unapologetically. “It’s my life, and I can do what I want.”

Freedom in the bedroom is a novel concept in China, where for decades communist minders dictated most aspects of people’s private lives. Dressed in baggy Mao suits—hardly outfits to set the pulse racing—citizens of the People’s Republic had to ask permission from local officials on everything from whom to marry to what kind of birth control to use. But these days many Chinese are walking on the wilder side. Sparked by the easing of government control over individual lifestyle choices and the spread of more permissive, Western attitudes toward sex, Chinese are copulating earlier, more often and with more partners than ever before. Today 70% of Beijing residents say they have had sexual relations before marriage, compared with just 15.5% in 1989, according to Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

More here.

Flaubert is pitiless with his wretched creations, allowing them no moment of joy, or even ease. It is enough for them to turn their hands to a project for it to expire in chaos and slapstick, and after a while this, too, shows the shortcomings of the unpolished, because we can hear the sound of collapsing scenery before the stage has even been set. True bathos requires a slight interval between the sublime and the ridiculous, but no sooner have our clowns embarked on a project than we see the bucket of whitewash or the banana skin. The story is set in motion by their rash decision to quit Paris for the Norman countryside: it was a rule of fiction before Flaubert that city clerks attempting agricultural improvements would end up with smellier sewage, thinner crops, sicker animals and more combustible hayricks than even the dullest peasant. A hinge event in Flaubert’s writing is the revolution of 1848. If he ever read Marx and Engels’s manifesto of that year, with its remark about “the idiocy of rural life,” he evidently decided to go it one better. In his bucolic scheme, every official is a dolt, every priest a fool or knave, every milkmaid diseased and unchaste, every villager either a boozer or a chiseler. (I am influenced here, perhaps, by Pollizzotti’s use of American idioms like “Are you putting me on?”)

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

[O]utrage at genocide is tragically difficult to sustain. There are only a few groups that are trying to do so: university students who have led the anti-genocide campaign and formed groups like the Genocide Intervention Network; Jewish humanitarian organizations, for whom the word “genocide” has intense meaning; the Smith College professor Eric Reeves, who has helped lead the campaign to protest the genocide; some US churches; and aid workers who daily brave the dangers of Dar-fur (like the one who chronicles her experiences in the blog “Sleepless in Sudan”[2] ). Some organizations, like Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, have also produced a series of excellent reports on Darfur—underscoring that this time the nations of the world know exactly what they are turning away from and cannot claim ignorance.

Sad to say, one of the best books for understanding the lame international response is Samantha Power’s superb “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide[3]—even though it was written too early even to mention Darfur. But when you read Power’s account of international dithering as Armenians, Jews, Bosnians, and others were being slaughtered, you realize that the pattern today is almost exactly the same. Once again, the international response has been to debate whether the word “genocide” is really appropriate, to point out that the situation is immensely complex, to shrug that it’s horrifying but that there’s nothing much we can do. The slogan “Never Again” is being transformed into “One More Time.”

more from The New York Review of Books here.

From The New York Times: ‘Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again,’ by Norah Vincent.

Don’t judge this book by its cover. It features two photographs of the author, Norah Vincent. In the first, she’s a brassy, attractive woman with short, upswept hair and a confident smirk on her face. In the second, she’s done up in man drag, with poindexter eyeglasses, a day’s worth of stubble and a necktie. There’s your premise in a nutshell: assertive, opinionated Vincent, best known as a contrarian columnist for The Los Angeles Times, goes undercover as a man to learn how the fellas think and act when them pesky broads ain’t around. Flip the book open, and the first thing you come to is its dedication: “To my beloved wife, Lisa McNulty, who saves my life on a daily basis.” Yes, ladies and gents, the author is a self-proclaimed “dyke.”

Ned lands a thankless job going door-to-door selling “entertainment books” filled with coupons for discounts at local businesses. The raw, malevolent arrogance of Ned’s fellow salesmen, who actually psych themselves up by shouting out such idiotic motivational acronyms as Juice (for Join Us In Creating Excitement), can’t hide their desperation. Vincent scares herself when, dressed up in one of Ned’s power blazers, she submits to the Juice mentality and actually succeeds at being a feral-jerk saleswolf, earning her boss’s praise as “a highly motivated type a guy.”

More here.

From BBC News:

The Science Learning Centre in London asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists. Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as “normal young and attractive men and women”. The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did “very important work” and 70% thought they worked “creatively and imaginatively”. Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did “boring and repetitive work”.

Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were “really brainy people”. The research is being undertaken as part of Einstein Year. Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: “Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family”, and “because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female”.

More here.

David Levering Lewis reviews the final installment of Taylor Branch’s three-volume chronicle of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil-rights movement, in The New Yorker:

In one of his more bizarre Oval Office confidences, Lyndon Johnson said that he didn’t want to “follow Hitler” but that Hitler had the right idea: “Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn’t true, why, people accept it.” Johnson was speaking by telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, about how to convince Southern whites that Southern blacks deserved the franchise. The curious political-science tutorial came on the afternoon of January 15, 1965, King’s thirty-sixth birthday. Whatever he may have thought of Johnson’s inaccurate analogy, King had already begun repeating, on television, in the press, and from church pulpits, the moral necessity of a guaranteed vote for every American, regardless of color. Two weeks earlier, King had publicly announced that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the alliance of Baptist preachers he led, would launch voter-registration protests in Selma, where fourteen thousand four hundred whites had, by legal ruse and naked force, limited fifteen thousand blacks to one per cent of the registration rolls.

More here.

From an interview by Robert Birnbaum in The Morning News.

RB: …. Any thoughts of your next step?

BEE: Um, yeah, and every time I start to talk about it, I—

RB: It doesn’t work for you.

BEE: When I was in L.A. I reread Less Than Zero on its 20th anniversary, which was this last May, and this [was] a very sentimental thing. I don’t know why I am telling you. I would not tell an audience of readers this—oh, whatever, I don’t care. I knew the publishing date. I knew it was in May 1985, so I picked up the book that night and opened a bottle of wine, I was in L.A. and I decided to reread it. I hadn’t read it in 19 years and so I read the book and, you know, a 41-year-old writer has issues. Some problems. But I also realized if the 41-year-old writer had written that book or rewrote that book it would be much worse. It would not be a good book. The reason that it works—it’s that the guy wrote it at that age and it obviously still resonates to people that age. Something was caught there that I wasn’t aware of. The book is valid and I get why it is what it is. That’s not the problem. But I was—I started to wonder where those characters were now. They would be my age, approaching early middle age. They would probably be married, have kids, the ages that they were in Less Than Zero, and I really started thinking about doing a follow-up to that book. I also think it’s a terrible idea and it could really backfire and it could undermine everyone’s fondness for that book. But that doesn’t matter. I don’t care. If this is what is announcing itself to me, well then I am going to ultimately involuntarily pursue it and I am not going to be able to help myself.

Hydrogen and nitrogen combine only with difficulty. Since the reaction N2 + 3H2 <–> 2NH3 is reversible, you need just the right conditions to drive it forward to produce significant quantities of ammonia (NH3). If the temperature is too low, the formation of ammonia is favoured but the reaction goes slowly. If the temperature is too high, the reaction goes faster, but any ammonia produced tends to dissociate into its elements. Pressure is another relevant variable: higher than atmospheric pressures favour ammonia formation. So, if ammonia is what you want, you need very cleverly to manipulate temperature, pressure, a catalyst and the design of the reaction vessel. In 1909, the academic physical chemist Fritz Haber and the industrial metallurgical engineer Carl Bosch succeeded in doing this, and they patented the process the following year. Within four years, the process had become commercial, the foundation of a huge German-dominated industry centred on ammonia works in Oppau and, from 1917, in Leuna. Haber became famous and wealthy. The giant chemical firm Badische Anilin und Soda-Fabrik (BASF) – later folded into I.G. Farben – had been funding Haber’s research, doubling or tripling his already generous professorial salary at Karlsruhe, on the condition that he obtain company permission before publishing any details, and the terms of the BASF patent gave him 1.5 pfennigs for every kilo of ammonia produced using his process. In the last year of the war, the factories in Oppau and Leuna produced 115,000 tons, and Haber’s royalty payments were worth the present-day equivalent of about $4 million. Haber won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918; Bosch became chairman of BASF, which made huge amounts of money from the process, and he too eventually won the Nobel Prize (in 1931). All this represented an early milestone in the formation of what came to be called the military-academic-industrial complex.

more from The London Review of Books here.

Michelle Pauli in The Guardian:

Ulysses, James Joyce’s classic 1922 novel which chronicled the perambulations through the streets of Dublin of its main character, Leopold Bloom, in groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness style, has topped a poll of the most valuable works of fiction of the 20th century.

According to the poll, which was published in this month’s issue of the Book and Magazine Collector magazine, the 1922 first edition of Joyce’s account of Bloom’s day in Dublin is now worth £100,000.

The novel was written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921. In July 1920, when Joyce was living in Paris, he met Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop. She agreed to publish the book, and the first documented mention of it was made in 1921 on a rare four-page prospectus (itself now worth more than £2,000).

More here.

Leigh E. Schmidt in The Wilson Quarterly:

Detractors of American religious seeking have been building their case for a while now. A bellwether was Habits of the Heart (1985), the best-selling, multiauthored sociological study of the corrosive effects individualism was having on American civic and religious institutions. The authors deeply lamented “liberalized versions” of morality and spirituality and argued that the old romantic ideals of self-reliance and the open road were now undermining the welfare of community, family, and congregation. “Finding oneself” and “leaving church” had, sadly enough, become complementary processes in a culture too long steeped in the expressive individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and their fellow wayfarers. More and more Americans were crafting their own religious stories apart from the rich moral vocabularies and collective memories that communities of faith provided. The social costs of such disjointed spiritual quests were evident not only in the fraying of church life but in eroding commitments to public citizenship, marriage, and family.

All this criticism of the “new spirituality” has obscured and diminished what is, in fact, an important American tradition, one in which spiritual journeying has long been joined to social and political progressivism. Emerson’s “endless seeker” was, as often as not, an abolitionist; Whitman’s “traveling soul,” a champion of women’s rights; Henry David Thoreau’s “hermit,” a challenger of unjust war. A good sense of the continuing moral and political import of this American vocabulary of the spirit comes from Barack Obama, the recently elected Democratic senator from Illinois. Obama has said that, despite the results of the 2004 election, it “shouldn’t be hard” to reconnect progressive politics with religious vision: “Martin Luther King did it. The abolitionists did it. Dorothy Day did it. . . . We don’t have to start from scratch.”

More here.

From CBS News:

A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds.

“These types of discoveries give us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors, the world they lived in and the things they feared,” Lee Berger, a paleo-anthropologist at Johannesburg’s University of Witwatersrand, said as he presented his conclusions about a mystery that has been debated since the remains of the possible human ancestor known as the Taung child were discovered in 1924.

The Taung child’s discovery led to the search for human origins in Africa, instead of in Asia or Europe as once theorized. Researchers regard the fossil of the ape-man, or australopethicus africanus, as evidence of the “missing link” in human evolution.

Researchers had speculated the Taung child was killed by a leopard or saber-toothed feline. But 10 years ago, Berger and fellow researcher Ron Clarke submitted the theory the hunter was a large predatory bird, based on the fact most of the other fossils found at the same site were small monkeys that showed signs of having been killed by a predatory bird.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling on assisted suicide. On Wednesday, it handed down a ruling on abortion. As Justice Antonin Scalia has often observed, judges are supposed to stick to principles, not change them to suit personal preferences from one issue to the next. But evidently, that advice doesn’t apply to Scalia.

Scalia didn’t file a separate opinion in the abortion case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. To find his principles of abortion jurisprudence, you have to go back to three prior cases: Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and Stenberg v. Carhart (2000).

More here.

Joseph Braude in The New Republic:

It is commonly hoped that the Internet will help save Iran from its theocratic rulers. Five million Iranians are online and Persian is now the third most common language in the global village of blogs, according to Stanford researchers. “Those guys … don’t know what has hit them yet,” Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford, says of the effect the Internet will have on Tehran’s mullahs. The Times of London has dubbed Iran’s feisty blogosphere, now over 100,000 strong, “a new species of protest that is entirely irrepressible” and that “may be a harbinger of revolution.” The Nation has heralded “a fierce debate about the country’s future [that] is underway in the blogosphere” and speculated that it “could help open up that society.” Even an Iranian politician has spoken of the Internet’s transformative power: Former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a prolific blogger himself, told an American journalist last fall, “The net is influential and will bring more pressure for change. … [N]ow that young people consider themselves members of a worldwide movement, they have higher expectations.”

All this optimism has the effect of cooling international calls for urgent action to thwart Iran’s nuclear armament. If you believe, for example, that two more years of Iranian exposure to the Internet will spur a political transformation from within, then you might worry less about a nuclear weapons program that could take, say, three years to become operational.

But such optimism fails to take account of one key factor: The Internet may actually impede political change in Iran as much as it facilitates it.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Since last summer, Japanese waters have been inundated with the massive sea creatures, which can grow 6.5 feet (2 meters) wide and weigh up to 450 pounds (220 kilograms). Though the jellyfish are more common in Chinese and Korean waters, their numbers have grown a hundredfold in some areas off Japan, causing a crisis in the local fishing industry. The invertebrates are choking fishing nets and poisoning the catch with their toxic stingers, fishers say. And although reports of serious human injury are rare, there are records of people dying from the creature’s noxious sting.

More here.

From MSNBC:

For thousands of years, people have wondered if the basics of geometry came naturally to all humans or if they were something you had to learn through instruction or cultural experiences. According to Plato’s writings, Socrates attempted to determine how well an uneducated slave in a Greek household understood geometry, and eventually concluded that the slave’s soul “must have always possessed this knowledge.”

While a slave in a Greek household would have been introduced to aspects of geometry through the Greek language and culture, the Mundurukú villagers who participated in the new study did not have this head start. Nevertheless, the 14 Mundurukú children, as young as 6 years old, and the 30 adults who were quizzed by anthropologist Pierre Pica from Paris VIII University did well on the basic geometry test. Even if you never learned the difference between a triangle, a rectangle and a trapezoid, and you never used a ruler, a compass or a map, you would still do well on some basic geometry tests, according to a new study.

This research appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

More here.

Warren E. Leary in the New York Times:

NASA launched mankind’s first space mission to Pluto today when a powerful rocket hurled the New Horizons spacecraft away from the Earth and off on a nine-year journey to the edge of the solar system.

A Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket rose from a launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 2 p.m., Eastern Time. That was almost an hour later than planned because of low clouds that obscured a clear view of the flight path by tracking cameras.

“We have ignition and liftoff of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on a decade long voyage to visit the planet Pluto and then beyond,” said Bruce Buckingham, NASA’s launch commentator.

Less than an hour later, all three stages of the booster rocket worked as planned and the 1,054-pound spacecraft separated from them and sprinted away toward deep space.

More here.

G. Pascal Zachary asks whether calling Darfur a “genocide” makes it harder to stop the killing, in Salon.

[D]oes the conflict in Darfur, however bloody, qualify as genocide? Or does the application of the word “genocide” to Darfur make it harder to understand this conflict in its awful peculiarity? Is it possible that applying a generic label to Darfurian violence makes the task of stopping it harder? Or is questioning the label simply insensitive, implying that whatever has happened in Darfur isn’t horrible enough to justify a claim on the world’s conscience, and thus invite inaction or even the dismissal of Darfur altogether?

These questions — and the paradoxical nature of the G-word — lie at the heart of a much-needed new book by Gerard Prunier, a scholar of African affairs. In “Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide,” Prunier, a professor at the University of Paris, casts aside labels and lays bare the anatomy of the Darfur crisis, drawing on a mixture of history and journalism to produce the most important book of the year on any African subject. Clearly and concisely, he describes a complex civil war, where “Arabs” and “Africans” are often indistinguishable from one another to outsiders. Members of both groups can be dark-skinned, Muslim, poor and neglected. Indeed, this last characteristic of Darfurians, the extent of their neglect by Sudan’s central government, may be the most significant for understanding the roots of today’s conflict. (Although racism cannot be discounted; racial bias exists in Sudan with some people demonizing blacks and holding them as slaves.) Prunier emphasizes the legacy of Darfur’s isolation, which began under Britain, colonial ruler of Sudan until its independence in 1955. In 1916, the British incorporated Darfur, which had been an independent country for centuries, into colonial Sudan and then pathetically left it to crumble (as late as the 1930s there was not a single high school student in Darfur, and only four primary schools for younger kids).

Edward Castronova discusses whether the “Horde” in the enormously successful massive multiplayer online role playing game is genuinely “evil” and if choosing an evil avatar shows a moral failing.

To choose orc, it was said, does not carry with it any particular moral or ethical baggage. It was a matter of playstyles, tastes, personal interests.

Goodness, I could not disagree more. My view is that in a social game, these choices are laden with all kinds of implications for personal integrity. Avatar choice is fraught with broader meaning.

Two concrete examples of where the choice matters:

1. I am a father. A guild of colleagues chose to play Horde. I rolled an Undead. My son (age 3) was afraid of my character. He was afraid of the Undercity. And that’s just from the imagery – he would know nothing of what the Undead actually do in terms of kinapping, imprisonment, and torture. He’s afraid, and he should be afraid, and as his father, my only defense in this frightening choice would have to be that I am just trying out evil, just getting to know it, just using evil instrumentally for some greater purpose. He abviously can’t grasp that now, but even if he could, these are the only possible justifications for me to inhabit such a wicked being. And my point is that the inhabitation would indeed require justification. If my undead warlock were an extension of myself, something I was pursuing for mere enjoyment, then it ought to be a troubling question for me, sholdn’t it? Why am I finding pleasure in expressing myself in a form that frightens 3-year-olds? My assertion is that this is a genuine and significant moral issue that everyone who chooses an avatar needs to think about. Morally compulsory.

In Wired, more reasons to worry about widespread government surveillance.

There are few, if any, studies demonstrating the effectiveness of mass surveillance. People with something to hide are adept at speaking in codes. Teenagers tell their parents they are “going to the movies” when they are going to drink beer. Attackers know to misspell the victim’s name, as journalist Daniel Pearl’s kidnappers and murderers did, to evade e-mail surveillance. Meanwhile, modern filtering technology can’t distinguish between breast cancer websites and pornographic ones.

Any search algorithm, whether public or not, is unlikely to be able to distinguish between innocent and criminal communications.

Even if the technology works, it fails. Even if a TMS was 99.9 percent accurate, it will produce a false positive one in 1,000 times. Whether it’s facial recognition at the Super Bowl, or sifting through e-mail communications, TMS will inevitably produce an unacceptably high number of false positives. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people will not be allowed to board their planes, will have their houses searched, their bank accounts frozen — at least until the mistake can be cleared up. At best, a “hit” will require someone to look more closely at the information, and we’ll need more agents to do it than we currently have, or could have.