From The Economist:

At the Miraflores lock on the Panama Canal it is possible to watch the heartbeat of international trade in action. One by one, giant ships piled high with multi-coloured containers creep through the lock’s narrow confines and are disgorged neatly on the other side. If it were not for the canal, these ships would have to make a two-to-three-week detour around South America. That would have a significant effect on the price of goods around much of the world. It is therefore sobering to consider that each ship requires 200m litres of fresh water to operate the locks of the canal and that, over the years, this water has been drying up.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, in Panama, think that reforesting the canal’s denuded watershed would help regulate the supply. One of them, Robert Stallard, a hydrologist and biogeochemist who also works for the United States Geological Survey in Boulder, Colorado, has operated in the country for two decades, and knows the terrain well. A deforested, grass-covered watershed would release far more water in total than a forested one, he admits, but that water would arrive in useless surges rather than as a useful steady stream. A forested watershed makes a lot more sense…

Viewed this way, any scheme to reforest the canal’s watershed is, in fact, an investment in infrastructure. Normally, this would be provided by the owner. But in this case the owner is the Panamanian government, and Panama is in debt, has a poor credit rating and finds it expensive to borrow money. And yet investing in the canal’s watershed clearly makes economic sense. Who will pay?

More here.

Michael Hopkin in Nature:

The season in which a woman is born influences the age at which she will go through the menopause, suggests a survey of northern Italians.

The survey, which looked at nearly 3,000 post-menopausal women at three clinics, revealed that those born in March showed the earliest menopause, at an average age of 48.9 years. At the other end of the scale, those born in October remained fertile until an average age of 50.3, with many lasting beyond 55.

More here.

Ilan Stavans in The New Republic:

The word “camouflage” is nowhere to be found in the canonical 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Is this yet another proof that lexicographers leave out, or otherwise disguise, clues in their dictionaries for users to notice?

Browsing a dictionary requires breath, curiosity, and patience. Every time I open one, I’m filled with expectation: What will I discover about the words I use on a daily bases that I didn’t know before? What kind of mysteries did the compiler set out for me to uncover? Dictionary makers approach their discipline–the deciphering, and characterization, of the entire vocabulary bank constituting a language–in a cold-blooded, objective fashion, assuring readers no prejudice goes unpunished. What folly! Dictionaries, after all, are catalogs of social misconceptions. Look up the word “Jew” in Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana, the first full-fledge lexicon of the Spanish language, published in 1611, and you’ll find a description of a people who “continue to profess the Mosaic Law, which is a shadow of the truth.” Or open the Trésor de la langue française to “amour” and you’ll find as oblique reference: “love is sometimes more than just love, but also sometimes less.”

More here.

Jim Holt reviews Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in the New York Times:

Levitt has strayed far from the customary paddock of the dismal science in search of interesting problems. How do parents of different races and classes choose names for their children? What sort of contestants on the TV show ”The Weakest Link” are most likely to be discriminated against by their fellow contestants? If crack dealers make so much money, why do they live with their moms? Such everyday riddles are fair game for the economist, Levitt contends, because their solution involves understanding how people react to incentives. His peers seem to agree. In 2003, Levitt was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, bestowed every two years on the most accomplished American economist under 40…

The trivia alone is worth the cover price. Did you know that Ku Klux Klan members affixed a ”kl” to many words (thus two Klansmen would hold a ”klonversation” in the local ”klavern”) or that the secret Klan handshake was ”a left-handed, limp-wristed fish wiggle”? In the mid-1940’s, a Klan infiltrator began to feed such intelligence to writers for the radio show ”The Adventures of Superman,” who incorporated it into the plotline, thereby making the Klan look ridiculous in the eyes of the public and driving down its membership. Levitt uses the rise and fall of the K.K.K. to illustrate the power of hoarded information.

More here.  Buy this book from Amazon with one click here.

“Paul Theroux planned to follow in Burroughs’s footsteps and experience the ultimate high in the rainforest, but instead he found oil prospectors, exploitation, and tourists in search of healing.” Theroux writes about it in The Guardian:

Drug tour was my name for it. “Ethnobotanical experience” was the prettified official name for it, and some others spoke of it as a quest, a chance to visit a colourful Indian village, a clearing in the selva tropical, where just a few decades ago American missionaries sought early martyrdoms among the blowguns and poison-tipped arrows of indignant animists resisting forcible conversion to Christianity.

The people who organised this drug junket characterised it as a high-minded field trip, eight days in the rainforest, to experience eco-awareness and spiritual solidarity, to learn the names and uses of beneficial plants. One of those plants was ayahuasca. There was no promise of a ritual yet heavy hints were dropped about a “healing”. We would be living in a traditional village of indigenous Secoya people, deep in Ecuador’s Oriente province, near the Colombian border, on a narrow branch of Burroughs’ Putumayo, where the ayahuasca vine clinging to the trunks of rain forest trees grows as thick as a baby’s arm.

More here.

Mike Holderness and Maggie McDonald in New Scientist:

“One of the things about being an outsider is that you don’t have to think of anything to say.” With these words, Philip Ball accepted the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books at a ceremony at the Royal Society in London, UK, adding: “If only I’d put that money on myself at 8 to 1.”

His winning book Critical Mass considers the use of statistics in the attempt to discover new insights into group behaviour and the functioning of society. The book visits many unexpected corners of politics, economics and sociology, and offers a novel take on the links between the history of political philosophy, Newtonian physics and statistical mechanics.

More here.

Charlotte Abbott in Publishers Weekly:

As books like The Kite Runner and Reading Lolita in Tehran dominate the bestseller list, there are other signs that U.S. readers may be waking up to writers born abroad. The week-long PEN World Voices festival of international literature, which closed April 22, drew more than 8,000 people to 43 events in New York City. Many panels were sold out, forcing the organizers to turn away an estimated 2,000.

“We guessed the audience would be there, but it was a real thrill to see the response,” said Salman Rushdie, president of the PEN American Center, who attributed the diverse and youthful turnout to an “enormous amount of blogging” about the festival. With 75 foreign writers and 36 from the U.S., it was the largest international gathering of writers in New York since the PEN congress in 1986.

More here.  And there’s more, including audio archives of the conference, at PEN’s website here.

Clayton Collins reviews The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent by Richard Florida, in the Christian Science Monitor:

These days, the world’s rank-and-file creative workers can find plenty of nurturing environments in which conditions equal or trump America’s legendary offerings, Florida maintains. He calls the impending shift – not so much a mass migration as the cultivation of indigenous talent pools that attract a trickle of like minds – the greatest current threat to America’s global competitiveness. It is a bigger worry than China (and, presumably, than the outsourcing of low-wage jobs).

More here.  [For Alia Raza, who brought up this subject recently.]

Marcus du Sautoy in The Guardian:

This year we are celebrating the centenary of the most famous equation of all time. Einstein’s E=mc2 is probably at the top of most people’s list of memorable equations. Like all great equations, Einstein’s discovery has the quality of a magic trick: you start with something on one side of the equation and then by mathematical magic the formula transforms it into something that appears completely different. In Einstein’s case, the trick was to show how matter (the m in his equation) can be transformed into pure energy (the E), a magic trick that was put to devastating use in the creation of the atom bomb.

More here.

The only time I saw Joy Division, Ian Curtis collapsed on stage during the fifth song and the set ended abruptly amid confusion and conjecture. The venue was the Moonlight Club in north London; the date 4 April 1980, the final night of an Easter weekend showcase for Manchester’s Factory Records. Joy Division played only five more gigs. In the early hours of 18 May, Ian Curtis hanged himself, brought low by guilt, illness and acute depression.

More from The Observer.

By Mr. Fish in Harper’s:

Here.

From Nature:

Humans do it, bacteria do it, even viruses do it: they make copies of themselves. Now US researchers have built a flexible robot that can perform the same trick. It’s not the first self-replicating robot ever built, says Hod Lipson of Cornell University, who led the study. But previous machines with the capacity for copying themselves have been very simple, often spreading out in only two dimensions. And more complex devices existed only in computer simulations, not reality.
Lipson’s robot consists of four cubes, each 10-cm to a side, which are sliced diagonally into halves that can rotate against each other. This allows the robot to change shape, he reports in Nature. Provided it is fed with cubes, the robot can create a copy of itself within a few minutes.

More here.

Click here to watch the robot reproduce (amazing!).

From MSNBC:

Young male birds may break rigid rules for song structure, but they quickly shape up when it’s time to attract a mate. During the first half of their youth, male canaries raised alone in soundproof cages can learn to precisely imitate computer-generated songs. As spring nears, however, the canaries literally “change their tune” by reorganizing the structure of their songs so that they conform to the rules of adult canary songs and the expectations of potential mates. This new study appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

“Short of driving a Mercedes-Benz, it’s what a bird can do to say ‘I’m such a good finder of food that I have the time to make these long songs,’” explained Rockefeller University’s Fernando Nottebohm, another author of the Science research.

More here.

Zafar Abbas for The BBC:

The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) academy has been all-male for more than 55 years – but now it is going through major change. Women are now allowed to enrol on its aerospace engineering and fighter pilot programmes and are doing rather well. To the great surprise of many men, some of the female recruits will soon start flying jet-engine planes.

But when one male cadet said the women should be shown compassion, female cadet Saman Ahmed was swift to say they were there to compete on equal terms. “We don’t expect compassion, we don’t get compassion, and we don’t want compassion,” she said. And this confidence is not without reason for Cadet Ahmed has already won praise in her engineering studies, beating both men and women. Her excellence is not confined to the classroom, either. During a rifle exercise, I watched as she shot all five bullets right in the bull’s eye.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

“Isn’t that a bit like a Catholic marrying a Protestant back where I’m from?” asks the Irish officer at the Canadian office as Amitava Kumar, a Hindu writer from India, and his soon-to-be wife, Mona, a Pakistani Muslim, submit their marriage application. It’s much worse, according to Kumar’s Husband of a Fanatic, the reciprocity of hate between South Asia’s Hindu and Muslim communities having reached new levels of hostility over the last decade or so. Inspired by Underground, Haruki Murakami’s book on Tokyo’s 1995 sarin gas attack, Kumar tries to get to the root of this animosity via the personal experiences of victims. He visits scenes of carnage and sites of remand and retribution, and attempts to discourse with casualties and aggressors in places as distant as India, South Africa, and Queens.

More here.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

On March 16, the Kansas Legislature heatedly debated a bill that would criminalize all stem-cell research in the state. Evangelical-Christian politicians and conservative lawmakers argued with molecular biologists and physicians from the University of Kansas’ medical school about the morality of therapeutic cloning.

Up against a substantial audience of vocal religious conservatives, William B. Neaves, CEO and president of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, a large, privately financed biomedical-research facility in Kansas City, began his impassioned defense of the new research by giving his credentials as “a born-again Christian for 30 years.” Barbara Atkinson, executive vice chancellor of the University of Kansas Medical Center, tried to articulate the difference between “a clump of cells in a petri dish” and what several hostile representatives repeatedly interrupted to insist is “early human life.” Clearly, in this forum, language mattered. Each word carried wagonloads of moral resonance.

I am a literature professor. I was at the hearing because I am also chairwoman of the pediatric-ethics committee at the University of Kansas Medical Center. I listened to the debates get more and more heated as the positions got thinner and more polarized, and I kept thinking that these scientists and lawmakers needed to read more fiction and poetry. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, apparently feels the same way. He opened the council’s first session by asking members to read Hawthorne’s story “The Birthmark,”and he has since published an anthology of literature and poetry about bioethics issues.

The fight in Kansas (the bill was not put to a vote) is in some ways a microcosm of what has been happening around the country.

More here.

200 researchers and numerous robots of different types have gathered together in GeorgiaTech for the 2005 RoboCup US open competition, where robot dogs play soccer, and humans on segways cooperate with robots to win games. The BBC reports:

“There is a serious side to the 2005 RoboCup US Open but there is also a lot of fun to be had watching robot dogs playing football. The event has become the robotic version of the football World Cup and is a fertile meeting ground for robot researchers. The software that drives the footballing canines has practical real-world applications as well. Organisers plan the ultimate human versus robot football game in 2050.”

James Surowiecki in The New Yorker:

In the summer of 1924, a Kansas City band called the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra did something unusual: it went on tour. Popular as live music was, bands in those days tended to serve as house orchestras or to play long stands in local clubs; there was hardly even a road to go on. But Jules Stein, a booking agent from Chicago, convinced the Nighthawk Orchestra that it could make more money by playing a different town every night. The tour, which lasted five weeks, was a smash. Soon, bands all over the country were hitting the road to play ballrooms and dance halls.

Stein’s original vision hasn’t changed much, despite some modifications over the years—parking lots, hair spray, the disposable lighter…

More here.

Larry Stewert reviews The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture by Mordechai Feingold, in American Scientist:

The exhibits of Newton’s works at Cambridge University Library in 2001 and at the New York Public Library from October 8, 2004, to February 5, 2005, were of note, among other reasons, for the attention they drew to a December 2004 auction of rare Newton manuscripts. Mordechai Feingold has, meanwhile, created a lavishly illustrated and immensely entertaining companion volume to the New York display of Newton’s great achievement. The book serves to demonstrate that the rationalism of the European Enlightenment, which was marked by upheaval in America and in France, was defined in such large measure by the conception and diffusion of Newton’s great works in mathematics and physics that the epoch could be viewed as the Newtonian Moment.

Here is a Newton deified, not only in a state funeral at Westminster Abbey (rare for a philosopher) but also by endless numbers of paintings and engravings of the great man—some of which Newton himself distributed. Gentlemanly experimental philosophers, even amateur ones, later took pains when having their own portraits painted to have apparatus and portraits of Newton and Bacon in the background. Thomas Jefferson was so smitten that he obtained one of the few copies of Newton’s death mask made in 1727. The colossus of Newton strode across the 18th century, subduing nature, even as Alexander Pope eulogized him with this couplet: “Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. / God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was Light.”

More here.

Will Knight in New Scientist:

A gun that spits out ball bearings after spinning them to extreme speeds is being developed by a US inventor. The novel design has already caught the imagination of some defence industry experts.

The weapon, called DREAD, was invented by Charles St George, a veteran of the US firearms industry who founded the company Leader Propulsion Systems to promote the idea. He claims a major US defence company has shown an interested in developing it further and has produced a promotional video showing a prototype in action, which can be seen here (Quicktime). He says a new prototype will be developed in August 2005.

More here.