Cornelia Dean in the New York Times:

At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: “Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?”

Reaction from one of the panelists, all Nobel laureates, was quick and sharp. “No!” declared Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals.

Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, “this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race.”

But disdain for religion is far from universal among scientists. And today, as religious groups challenge scientists in arenas as various as evolution in the classroom, AIDS prevention and stem cell research, scientists who embrace religion are beginning to speak out about their faith.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in a very interesting column at ABC News:

How many times have you heard people exclaim something like, “First they tell us this is good or bad for us, and then they tell us just the opposite”?

In case you need more confirmation for the “iffy-ness” of many health studies, Dr. John Ioannidis, a researcher at the University of Ioannina in Greece writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, recently analyzed 45 well publicized studies from major journals appearing between 1990 and 2003. His conclusion: the results of approximately one third of these studies were flatly contradicted or significantly weakened by later work.

There’s the well-known story of hormone replacement therapy, which was supposed to protect against heart disease and other maladies, but apparently does not. A good part of the apparent effect may have been the result of attributing the well-being of upper middle class health-conscious women to the hormones.

Another bit of health folklore that “everybody knows” that has turned out to be unfounded is vitamin E’s protective effect against cardiac problems. Not so says a recent large study.

And how about red wine, tea, fruits and vegetables? Surely the anti-oxidant effect of these wondrous nutrients can’t be doubted. Even here, however, the effect appears to be more modest than pinot noir lovers, among others, had thought.

And certainly many lung patients who inhale nitrous oxide and swear by its efficacy will be surprised to learn that a larger study does not show any beneficial effect…

More here.

Lindsey Tanner at ABC News:

A review of medical evidence has found that fetuses likely don’t feel pain until the final months of pregnancy, a powerful challenge to abortion opponents who hope that discussions about fetal pain will make women think twice about ending pregnancies.

Critics angrily disputed the findings and claimed the report is biased.

“They have literally stuck their hands into a hornet’s nest,” said Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, a fetal pain researcher at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, who believes fetuses as young as 20 weeks old feel pain. “This is going to inflame a lot of scientists who are very, very concerned and are far more knowledgeable in this area than the authors appear to be. This is not the last word definitely not.”

The review by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco comes as advocates are pushing for fetal pain laws aimed at curtailing abortion. Proposed federal legislation would require doctors to provide fetal pain information to women seeking abortions when fetuses are at least 20 weeks old, and to offer women fetal anesthesia at that stage of the pregnancy. A handful of states have enacted similar measures.

But the report, appearing in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association, says that offering fetal pain relief during abortions in the fifth or sixth months of pregnancy is misguided and might result in unacceptable health risks to women.

More here.

Robert G. Kaiser in the Washington Post:

Finland is a leading example of the northern European view that a successful, competitive society should provide basic social services to all its citizens at affordable prices or at no cost at all. This isn’t controversial in Finland; it is taken for granted. For a patriotic American like me, the Finns present a difficult challenge: If we Americans are so rich and so smart, why can’t we treat our citizens as well as the Finns do?

Finns have one of the world’s most generous systems of state-funded educational, medical and welfare services, from pregnancy to the end of life. They pay nothing for education at any level, including medical school or law school. Their medical care, which contributes to an infant mortality rate that is half of ours and a life expectancy greater than ours, costs relatively little. (Finns devote 7 percent of gross domestic product to health care; we spend 15 percent.) Finnish senior citizens are well cared for. Unemployment benefits are good and last, in one form or another, indefinitely.

On the other hand, Finns live in smaller homes than Americans and consume a lot less. They spend relatively little on national defense, though they still have universal male conscription, and it is popular. Their per capita national income is about 30 percent lower than ours. Private consumption of goods and services represents about 52 percent of Finland’s economy, and 71 percent of the United States’. Finns pay considerably higher taxes — nearly half their national income is taken in taxes, while Americans pay about 30 percent on average to federal, state and local governments.

Should we be learning from Finland?

More here.  And check out the photo galleries here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Everyone knows that kids get their brains, or lack of them, from their parents. But it now seems that the reverse is also true. Stray stem cells from a growing fetus can colonise the brains of mothers during pregnancy, at least in mice.

If the finding is repeated in humans, the medical implications could be profound. Initial results suggest that the fetal cells are summoned to repair damage to the mother’s brain. If this is confirmed, it could open up new, safer avenues of treatment for brain damage caused by strokes and Alzheimer’s disease, for example.

This is a long way off, but there are good reasons for thinking that fetal stem cells could one day act as a bespoke brain repair kit. It is already well known that during pregnancy a small number of fetal stem cells stray across the placenta and into the mother’s bloodstream, a phenomenon called microchimerism. They can survive for decades in tissues such as skin, liver and spleen, where they have been shown to repair damage.

More here.

Traci Watson in USA Today:

The culture inside the space shuttle program remains arrogant, sloppy and schedule-driven, says a scathing statement published Wednesday by a faction on the panel that oversaw NASA’s efforts to return the shuttle to space.

The statement, which was not endorsed by the majority of the oversight panel, comes three weeks after NASA put shuttle flights on hold until it can keep debris from falling off the fuel tank. Such foam debris triggered the disintegration of shuttle Columbia in 2003 and plagued the flight of shuttle Discovery, which landed Aug. 9.

The main report says NASA fulfilled 10 of 13 safety goals the agency accepted after the accident, which were laid out by the accident investigators and included steps such as development of a technique to fix the ship in orbit. The main report does not comment on the shuttle program’s culture, which was not part of the panel’s official purview. The minority statement is included as an annex to the main report, as are statements from other panelists praising NASA.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Ross Douthat in The New Republic:

The appeal of “intelligent design” to the American right is obvious. For religious conservatives, the theory promises to uncover God’s fingerprints on the building blocks of life. For conservative intellectuals in general, it offers hope that Darwinism will yet join Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of pseudoscience. And for politicians like George W. Bush, there’s little to be lost in expressing a skepticism about evolution that’s shared by millions.

In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives. Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle–today, stem-cell research, “therapeutic” cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering–as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism. There’s already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the “scientific” position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.

And intelligent design will run out of steam…

More here.

The triumphs and travails of Syrian photographer Issa Touma make for pretty gripping stories in themselves. But above and beyond that, he has taken some truly amazing and beautiful photographs. Touma’s account of his struggles with the Baath party in Syria while trying to run his gallery and an international photography exhibit can be found at Joshua Landis’ site here.

More information about Nazar: Photographs from the Arab World, can be found here.

Some amazing pictures from Touma’s series, Sufi, can be found here.

By the time Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, took over from his father as the absolute ruler of North Korea, the country was a slave society, where only the most trusted caste of people were allowed to live in sullen obedience in Pyongyang, while vast numbers of potential class enemies were worked to death in mines and hard-labor camps. After Kim Il Sung’s death, in 1994, the regime suspended executions for a month, and throughout the following year it committed relatively few killings. Since this was at the height of a famine, largely brought on by disastrous agricultural policies, hundreds of thousands were already dying from hunger. Then word spread that Kim Jong Il wished to “hear the sound of gunshots again.” Starving people were shot for stealing a couple of eggs.

More from the admirable Ian Buruma in The New Yorker here.

From The New York Times:

Two brains are better than one. At least that is the rationale for the close – sometimes too close – relationship between the human body’s two brains, the one at the top of the spinal cord and the hidden but powerful brain in the gut known as the enteric nervous system.

For Dr. Michael D. Gershon, the author of “The Second Brain” and the chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia, the connection between the two can be unpleasantly clear. “Every time I call the National Institutes of Health to check on a grant proposal,” Dr. Gershon said, “I become painfully aware of the influence the brain has on the gut.” In fact, anyone who has ever felt butterflies in the stomach before giving a speech, a gut feeling that flies in the face of fact or a bout of intestinal urgency the night before an examination has experienced the actions of the dual nervous systems.

More here.

From MSNBC:

When given a choice between steady rewards and the chance for more, monkeys will gamble, a new study found. And they’ll keep taking risks as the stakes rise and dry spells get longer. The research, in which scientists also pinpointed brain activity during the gambling, could provide insight into the human penchant for risk. In humans, it’s thought that low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin might make one more risk-prone and impulsive. Perhaps, the scientists say, future work will shed light on the source of pathological gambling, obsessive-compulsive disorder and even depression.

More here.

Slavoj Zizek in the London Review of Books:

Why is the flourishing genre of ‘what if?’ histories the preserve of conservative historians? The introduction to such volumes typically begins with an attack on Marxists, who allegedly believe in historical determinism. Take this latest instalment, edited by Andrew Roberts, who has himself contributed an essay on the bright prospects that would have faced Russia in the 20th century had Lenin been shot on arriving at the Finland Station. One of Roberts’s arguments in favour of this kind of history is that ‘anything that has been condemned by Carr, Thompson and Hobsbawm must have something to recommend it.’ He believes that the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité ‘have time and again been shown to be completely mutually exclusive’. ‘If,’ he continues, ‘we accept that there is no such thing as historical inevitability and that nothing is preordained, political lethargy – one of the scourges of our day – should be banished, since it means that in human affairs anything is possible.’

This is empirically not the case. Roberts ignores the central ideological paradox of modern history, as formulated by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In contrast to Catholicism, which conceived of human redemption as being dependent on good deeds, Protestantism insisted on predestination: why then did Protestantism function as the ideology of early capitalism? Why did people’s belief that their redemption had been decided in advance not only not lead to lethargy, but sustain the most powerful mobilisation of human resources ever experienced?

More here.

From The New York Times:

In 2001, President Bush restricted federal financing for stem cell research. The decision, which was shaped at least partly by the Republican Party’s evangelical Christian base, and which disappointed many American scientists and businessmen, provoked joy in India. The weekly newsmagazine India Today, read mostly by the country’s ambitious middle class, spoke of a “new pot of gold” for Indian science and businesses. “If Indians are smart,” the magazine said, American qualms about stem cell research “can open an opportunity to march ahead.” Just four years later, this seems to have occurred. According to Ernst & Young’s Global Biotechnology Report in 2004, Indian biotechnology companies are expected to grow tenfold in the next five years, creating more than a million jobs.

In the meantime, the poor may be asked to offer themselves as guinea pigs. In an article on biotechnology last year, India Today asserted: “India has another gold mine – the world’s largest population of ‘naïve’ sick patients, on whom no medicine has ever been tried. India’s distinct communities and large families are ideal subjects for genetic and clinical research.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

IT’S one of those fantasies, I think, that Fitzgerald is a glamorous and romantic figure,” said the author and film historian David Thomson, speaking of the Jazz Age legend F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Not that I think in real life he was, but his life has come down to us that way. And Hollywood therefore feels that he ought to be graspable.” Like an unrequited love, the surprisingly ungraspable dream of translating Fitzgerald’s doomed romanticism to the big screen has gotten under moviedom’s skin yet again.

More here.

From USA Today:

The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University’s Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, scholars said Saturday.

The handwritten manuscript titled “Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas” was dated December 1924. Considered one of Einstein’s last great breakthroughs, it was published in the proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in January 1925.

High-resolution photographs of the 16-page, German-language manuscript and an account of its discovery were posted on the institute’s Web site.

“It was quite exciting” when a student working on his master’s thesis uncovered the delicate manuscript written in Einstein’s distinctive scrawl, said professor Carlo Beenakker. “You can even see Einstein’s fingerprints in some places, and it’s full of notes and markups from his editor.”

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

From The London Times:

Salman Rushdie has emerged from the dark Satanic years, happier and more buoyant than he has been in decades. Here, he talks to Ginny Dougary about the war on terror, wonderful women – and why he thinks Joanna Trollope is cool. From beginning to end, the whole encounter was both magical and undeniably real. It was slightly startling to find that none of the receptionists or bar staff in the fashionable New York club where we meet had heard of one of their more famous members, but it was also the first welcome sign that his name is no longer an automatic  byword  for “terrorist death sentence”. To see him, leaning over the rooftop swimming pool embracing his eight-year-old son, Milan, a beautiful dark-haired boy, slippery as a seal – with no security, no bodyguards, not even a flicker of interest from the other Manhattanite parents – is evidence that there is, indeed, the possibility of normal life after the fatwa.

But beyond this, quite contrary to expectation, there is an ineffable lightness about Salman Rushdie. He has the gift of making you feel happy. As a master storyteller, it is no surprise that his conversation is pricked with telling and entertaining anecdotes. He is also so relaxed, funny and beguiling that it is easy to understand why gorgeous women, among them Marie Helvin, Kylie Minogue, Nigella Lawson, not to mention his model-actress-filmmaker wife number four, Padma Lakshmi, flock to his side. Is it because I have just been reading his fantastical novels that I imagine the ghost of his old, hunted self banished by the force of this resolutely sanguine, free man?

More here.

From MSNBC News:

They’re called “synthetic biologists” and they boldly claim the ability to make never-before-seen living things, one genetic molecule at a time. They’re mixing, matching and stacking DNA’s chemical components like microscopic Lego blocks in an effort to make biologically based computers, medicines and alternative energy sources.  The rapidly expanding field is confounding the taxonomists’ centuries-old system of classifying species and raising concerns about the new technology’s potential for misuse. Though scientists have been combining the genetic material of two species for 30 years now, their work has remained relatively simplistic. So a new breed of biologists is attempting to bring order to the hit-and-miss chaos of genetic engineering by bringing to biotechnology the same engineering strategies used to build computers, bridges and buildings.

More here.

Daniel B. Wood in the Christian Science Monitor:

Through Aug. 21, some of the best athletes from 52 countries are competing in the first World International Badminton Federation Championships to be held in the United States.

As they do, two stories unfold.

One: This is not your father’s backyard-barbecue badminton – played with racquet in one hand, lemonade or hotdog in the other. Top Olympic-quality athletes who have trained five to six hours daily, six to seven days a week for decades, are exhibiting peak form and concentration.

For those in the know, it turns out, this is not exactly fresh news. But, officials say, the vast majority of Americans, locked into the cultural-norm sports of baseball, basketball, and football – are not in the know.

Two: The very fact that the US is hosting its first world championship is – as several officials, participants, and audience members repeat ad infinitum – a very big deal.

More here.

It seems that pornography can make you go blind, sort of. From The Economist:

“IT’S true. Pornography can make you blind. Look at a smutty picture and, according to research by Steven Most, of Yale University, and his colleagues, you will suffer from a temporary condition known as emotion-induced blindness.

Dr Most made this discovery while studying the rubbernecking effect (when people slow down to stare at a car accident). Rubbernecking represents a serious lapse of attention to the road, but he wondered if the initial reaction to such gory scenes could cause smaller lapses. The answer is, it does. What he found was that when people look at gory images—and also erotic ones—they fail to process what they see immediately afterwards. This period of blindness lasts between two-tenths and eight-tenths of a second. That is long enough for a driver transfixed by an erotic advert on a billboard to cause an accident.”

In The Economist, a review of Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Anna Akhmatova.

“THE extraordinary misery of her life and the extraordinary merits of her poems make Anna  Akhmatova one of the great literary figures of modern times. Elaine Feinstein’s comprehensive and accessible biography evokes contradictory pity and gratitude in the reader. The pity makes one wish that Akhmatova’s life had been easier. If only she had had one nice man in her life (her friendship with Isaiah Berlin aside), instead of many horrible ones. If only she had emigrated before the revolution. If only she had enjoyed better health. If only Soviet Russia had not been run by monsters who persecuted genius.

But then gratitude kicks in. It is through Akhmatova’s eyes, queuing at the prison gate in the hope of handing in a food parcel to her imprisoned son, that we read the finest poetic depiction of the horrors of Stalinism.”