From Science:

In the 2 October issue of Science, an international and multidisciplinary team co-led by Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled the oldest known skeleton of a potential human ancestor as well as information about its living environment. Found in the Middle Awash in the Afar region in Ethiopia, the 4.4-million-year-old skeleton became known as Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi for short. The discovery of the fossils was reported in 1994, but it was 15 years before the team presented its results to the world in 11 research papers.

Some of that work, at the time of the discovery and since, has been done by early-career scientists, which raises some interesting career-related questions: How do you become involved in such important research? What's it like? And how does working on such a project affect your career? To investigate these questions, Science Careers profiles two scientists involved in the Ardi project.

Faysal Bibi: Launching your own excavation team

Born in Beirut, Faysal Bibi, 29, traveled extensively as a child. His travels sparked an early interest in “the discovery of cultures, as well as the history and the diverse biological backgrounds” of people, he says. While an anthropology undergraduate at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, Bibi took an interest in the search for the most ancient human origins and the study of human bones, volunteering for archaeological fieldwork in Honduras and learning how to analyze vertebrate fossils in the lab of Anthony Barnosky. When “I got my hands dirty for the first time with fossils, I discovered something that I really enjoyed,” he says.

More here.

Paul West in the Baltimore Sun:

[Dr. Michael] Gloth and [Dr. Zaneb] Beams differ sharply over how best to fix a system that each sees as badly broken. Perhaps surprisingly, given their opposing views, they have more than a little in common.

Idealistic and hard-working, they grew up in local households tied to the business of medicine. Somehow, each finds time to fit political activism into a busy life as a full-time doctor and parent of young children.

Beams, 37, a pediatrician from Ellicott City, is trying to mobilize practicing physicians – individuals not normally given to political activism – around issues such as changing the way doctors are paid.

“Obviously, I get to solve small problems here every day,” she said in an interview at her Columbia office. “But I've always been interested in the bigger picture as well.”

Last winter, she joined Doctors for America, an outgrowth of a physicians group from Barack Obama's presidential campaign. She e-mailed her personal contact list, asking physician friends to sign an online petition that was designed to draw them into the political process. When more than 1,000 replies came back within 36 hours, the group gave her a leadership position. She's now organizing doctors in Maryland and eight other states as a deputy field director.

More here.

“A Noiseless Flash” is how journalist John Hersey titled the first chapter of Hiroshima, his much-praised 1946 account of the detonation of the atomic bomb. Though witnesses some twenty miles away claimed that the explosion was as loud as thunder, none of the survivors interviewed by Hersey recalled hearing “any noise of the bomb.” Rather, they experienced a blinding flash of light and sudden swells of pressure. Destruction has its ready-made catalogue of images, but we rarely think about the acoustics of a mushroom cloud or falling towers. Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare is a vital contribution to how we theorize the relationship between sound and politics, and its central argument echoes Hersey’s reportage: You need not hear a sound in order to feel it. Dissatisfied with traditional examinations of politicized sound pegged to music—a catchy protest song, a discordant blast of countercultural noise—and the role of human perception, Goodman focuses on frequencies, rhythms, vibrations, sonic-boom-inducing “sound bombs,” and in-audible, high-frequency repellants used to quell rowdy teens. For Goodman, discussing the politics of sound demands that we move beyond conventional ideas of audience and reception. Even the ugliest song is recognizable as music—good or bad. Goodman is interested in sound as force.

more from Hua Hsu in Bookforum here.

Who could resist the charms, or doubt the importance, of a liberal, secular, Turkish Muslim writing formally adventurous, learned novels about the passionate collision of East and West? Orhan Pamuk is frequently described as a bridge between two great civilisations, and his major theme – the persistence of memory and tradition in Westernising, secular Turkey – is of a topicality, a significance, that it seems churlish to deny. His eight novels, the most recent of which, The Museum of Innocence, has just appeared in English, perform formal variations on that theme. Though his work fits into a Turkish tradition most closely associated with the mid-20th-century novelist Ahmet Tanpinar, one needn’t know anything about Tanpinar, or even about Turkish literature, to appreciate Pamuk, who writes in the Esperanto of international literary fiction, employing a playful postmodernism that freely mixes genres, from detective fiction to historical romance. Much of Pamuk’s fiction reads like a homage to his Western models: Mann, Faulkner, Borges, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust and – in The Museum of Innocence, the tale of a doomed, obsessional love affair between a man in his thirties and an 18-year-old shop girl – Nabokov. Indeed, his affection for the European tradition is as crucial to his appeal as his Turkishness, and his books pay tribute to values deeply embedded in the liberal imagination: romantic love freed from the fetters of tradition; individual creativity; freedom and tolerance; respect for difference.

more from Adam Shatz at the LRB here.

Harsh Mander in The Hindu (via bookforum):

“In so many ways, I feel reduced to a second class citizen in my own country, only because of my Muslim identity. I fear we are losing every day the India we love.”

These words, with small variations, echoed in many diverse voices from far corners of the country. In a national meet on the status of Muslims in India today, organised by Anhad in Delhi from October 3 to 5, 2009, many individuals and representatives of organisations gathered from several parts of India. They spoke of negotiating life, relationships, work and the State as members of the largest religious minority in India. The predominant mood in these intense deliberations, which continued late into the evenings, was of sadness and disappointment, and of growing despair. Muslim citizens shared their mounting disillusionment with all institutions of governance, and more so with the police and judiciary, as well as with political parties and to some extent the media, and of a sense of fear that never goes away.

There is, on the one hand, the constant dread of being profiled as a terrorist, or of a loved one being so profiled, with the attendant fears of illegal and prolonged detention, denial of bail, torture, unfair and biased investigation and trial, and extra-judicial killings. There is, on the other hand, the lived experience of day-to-day discrimination, in education, employment, housing and public services, which entrap the community in hopeless conditions of poverty and want. This is fostered in situations of pervasive communal prejudice in all institutions of the State, especially the police, civil administration and judiciary; and also the political leadership of almost all parties; large segments of the print and visual media; and the middle classes, and the systematic manufacture of hate and divide by communal organisations.

From The Telegraph:

The top 100 authors dominate sales. As The Bookseller has explained, some 100,000 titles are published every year, but these authors account for £1 in every £6 spent on books and a fifth of revenue. J K Rowling, who has seven of the decade’s top 10 bestsellers, sold 29 million books with a sales value of £215 million, but Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was the bestselling book of the decade, selling 5.2 million copies to 4.4 million for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Nielsen has also charted the top 100 books of the decade. After Rowling and Brown, Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, two million copies) was the most successful author, followed by Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything, 1.75 million), Robert Atkins, and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the highest book selected by Richard and Judy. Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves was in the top 10 non-fiction bestsellers and Gillian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat outsold Jamie Oliver’s highest seller.

Author Volume sold Value

1 J K Rowling 29,084,999 £225.9m

2 Roger Hargreaves 14,163,141 £26.6m

3 Dan Brown 13,372,007 £74.1m

4 Jacqueline Wilson 12,673,148 £69.9m

5 Terry Pratchett 10,455,397 £77.2m

6 John Grisham 9,862,998 £65.9m

7 Richard Parsons 9,561,776 £49.2m

8 Danielle Steel 9,119,149 £51m

9 James Patterson 8,172,647 £53.8m

10 Enid Blyton 7,910,758 £31.2m

More here.

From MSNBC:

Cloud science? Solar-power primacy? Affordable clean-energy cars? Space colonies? Super-centenarians galore? These are some of the visions put forward for the next 50 years in science and technology. The past 50 years have set a precedent of sorts for the next half-century: Back in 1960, folks may have assumed their children would be riding rockets to other planets, finding signs of alien life and interacting with intelligent machines – all of which are featured in Arthur C. Clarke's “2010: Odyssey Two” as well as the film based on the book.

The issues that scientists and engineers faced from then up to now have turned out to be more complex than they seemed in 1960. Getting to the moon wasn't a sustainable proposition, and right now it's not clear when anyone will ride a U.S.-made rocket out of Earth orbit again. The evidence for life or even livability beyond Earth is still not in hand, although there have been tantalizing hints from Mars. And for better or worse, machines have not yet reached anything close to HAL 9000's level of intelligence. That doesn't mean scientists have been standing still: In some ways, we've come farther in the past half-century than we did in any previous century – as evidenced by this 50-year timeline of discovery. Among the leading fields have been medicine and genetics, information technology and cosmology.

In the next 50 years, we may well fall short of the breakthroughs we expect – but unexpected discoveries will pop up to keep life interesting. Here are a few of your predictions for the next decade and the next half-century:

Jeff Simmons, San Diego: Augmented reality (textual/graphical information superimposed over reality) will become an integral part of our lives. Once interfaces such as glasses, windshields and other mobile surfaces become display technologies connected wirelessly to mobile devices (think smartphones on steroids) we will come to depend on this flow of just-in-time information: Want to work on your car's engine? View a schematic that gives you the part's location and the steps to carry out. Looking at a product? See comparative pricing and reviews. Looking at a piece of art? Learn more about the artwork and the artist. Looking at a person you've met before? See their name, where you last met, birthdate, etc. … and the list goes on.

More here.

Men and Death

Men charge around on earth, in air,
smashing Death to smithereens,
and yet pretending It's not there,
sun-struck, forever in their teens.

Women, to propagate the race,
love foolish men (and so they must),
have mud more often in their face,
go down more easily to dust.

by Luann Landon

publisher: Mezzo Cammin, Val 4, Issue 1

Francine Prose in Lapham's Quarterly:

Long before Muhammad, St. Ambrose forbade women to teach in church and John Chrysostom suggested that women be veiled in public. One early Christian philosopher after another (quite a few of them saints, such as St. Jerome) emphasized the fact that woman’s only purpose on earth, indeed her only route to salvation, was to provide her husband with children. For anything else that was necessary, for work or companionship, advice or entertainment, he would sensibly and naturally choose another man. In St. Augustine’s essay “On Marriage and Concupiscence,” the author of Confessions sounds remarkably like the Southern Baptist Convention. “Nor can it be doubted that it is more consonant with the order of nature that men should bear rule over women, than women over men. It is with this principle in view that the apostle says, ‘The head of the woman is the man,’ and ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands.’”

More here.

Fractals made of circles do funny things to mathematicians.

Dana Mackenzie in American Scientist:

The program drew an endless assortment of fractals of varying shapes and ingenuity. Every couple minutes the screen would go blank and refresh itself with a completely different fractal. I have to confess that I spent a few idle minutes watching the fractals instead of writing.

One day, a new design popped up on the screen (see the figure above). It was different from all the other fractals. It was made up of simple shapes—circles, in fact—and unlike all the other screen-savers, it had numbers! My attention was immediately drawn to the sequence of numbers running along the bottom edge: 1, 4, 9, 16 … They were the perfect squares! The sequence was 1-squared, 2-squared, 3-squared, and so on.

Before I became a full-time writer, I used to be a mathematician. Seeing those numbers awakened the math geek in me. What did they mean? And what did they have to do with the fractal on the screen? Quickly, before the screen-saver image vanished into the ether, I sketched it on my notepad, making a resolution to find out someday.

As it turned out, the picture on the screen was a special case of a more general construction.

More here.

Louis Menand in The New Yorker:

Arthur Koestler was arrested by Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces in the city of Málaga on February 9, 1937. Koestler had come to Spain, in the midst of the Civil War, as a correspondent for a British paper called the News Chronicle, and although Málaga had been abandoned by Republican troops and most of its inhabitants several days earlier, and although the reporters Koestler was travelling with had fled, he had stayed behind. Why is not clear. Michael Scammell, in his compendious new biography, “Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic” (Random House; $35), suggests a number of possibilities: Koestler felt loyal to the acting British consul, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, who had a house in the city and with whom he had become friendly; he was disgusted by the cowardice of the deserters and wanted to show bravery himself; he couldn’t face the thought of leaving his typewriter behind; and he hoped to get a really big scoop. These motives—loyalty, courage, obsessiveness, and ambition—are all plausible, because they are all characteristic of the man.

He paid a price. The officer who arrested him, Captain Luis Bolin, had sworn, based on things that Koestler had already published about the Franco insurgency, “to shoot K. like a mad dog” if he ever got hold of him. Koestler was taken first to the Málaga jailhouse, which was crammed with prisoners picked up in the city and the surrounding villages during the Fascist advance. From his cell he could hear men being escorted outside to be shot, sometimes fifty at a time. In the week following the fall of the city, six hundred prisoners were executed. After a few days, he was transferred to Seville, to a prison that had been built by the Republican government and was now in the hands of the Nationalists.

More here.

Andrew Sullivan in his blog, The Daily Dish:

The Daily Dish nominates not Ben Bernanke but Neda Agha-Soltan. Neda was just one young woman, eager to protest the coup that rigged and then stole the June elections in Iran. She was shot in the street by the coup regime, as shown in the grueling video….that electrified the Iranian people. Wiki tells us that

Nedā (ندا) is a word used in Persian to mean “voice”, “calling,” or “divine message,” and she has been referred to as the “voice of Iran.”

The most remarkable event of this past year, it seems to us, was the uprising for freedom, sanity and peace in Iran. We witnessed it thousands of miles away but the miracle of technology meant we also lived it alongside those far braver than we will hopefully ever have to be. Neda remains the symbol of that uprising and her awful secular martyrdom will never leave the psyche of the Iranian people.

We saw them this year as we hadn't before: like us, eager for change, confident in their own capacities, able to see through the lies and the certainties and the violence that marks the vicious regime they live under. We saw this movement as a spontaneous revolt against transparent injustice, but also as a response in a way to the American people, who also rose up in 2008 to demand new leadership, less confrontation, and less fundamentalism in government.

Next year will be a crucial one.

As the Ashura holiday approaches and as the death of Montazeri has infused Iranians with yet more courage to face down the neo-fascist goons who police this comically inept regime, the Green Movement faces yet another test.

More here.

From Vice Magazine:

Before The Wire, David Simon was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. During his time there, he wrote two meticulously researched and richly human books about his city. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) was the result of a year spent with the murder police of a town where murder seems to be a major mode of employment. The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997, with writing partner Ed Burns) was the result of a year spent among the families, addicts, and dealers of one of Baltimore’s more infamous drug corners. Homicide resulted in the long-running cop show Homicide: Life on the Street, which was cool and everything, better than most cop shows, but also kind of just a cop show. The Corner resulted in an HBO miniseries that was pretty much a direct antecedent to what The Wire would end up tackling.

After The Wire, Simon and Ed Burns, who is a former Baltimore cop and schoolteacher, adapted Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill into an HBO miniseries. It stands as the most effective document yet produced on the daily reality of the life of marines in the current Iraq war.

And now, today, as I type this, Simon is filming his new HBO series down in New Orleans. It’s called Tremé, and it is said to take as its center the lives of local musicians. But I have a feeling that would be like saying that The Wire took as its center the Baltimore drug trade. Sure, it started there. But given Simon’s obsessions with the American city and the decreasing institutional value of life in this great country of ours, we’re pretty much guaranteed that Tremé will have the same reach and impact as The Wire. In other words, I wish I could be cryogenically frozen until the day this show debuts, because I can’t fucking wait.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.

That time is now.

To err on the side of caution, I am stuffing the rest of this post below the fold. My tale is rich with deep scientific significance, resplendent with surprising insights into how evolution works, far beyond the banalities of “survival of the fittest,” off in a realm of life where sexual selection and sexual conflict work like a pair sculptors drunk on absinthe, transforming biology into forms unimaginable. But this story is also accompanied with video. High-definition, slow-motion duck sex video. And I would imagine that the sight of spiral-shaped penises inflating in less than a third of second might be considered in some quarters to be not exactly safe for work. It’s certainly not appropriate for ducklings.

So, if you’re ready, join me below the fold.

More here.

Losing Track

Long after you have swung back

away from me

I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore

on the tide

and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:

am I a pier

half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion

I lose track,

the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before

I know I'm

alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black

timbers of me,

a light growth of green dreams drying.

by Denise Levertov

From Harvard Magazine:

What if the stem cells in our bodies live on, even as we age? What if they are just asleep, quiescent, like forgotten sentinels nodding off at remote outposts, waiting for orders? If only scientists could discover how to send them messages, could they be reawakened? “When you’re little and fall off your bike,” says Cabot professor of the natural sciences Douglas Melton, “you barely remember it the next day and a week later you don’t remember it at all. I ride my bike all the time, and if I fall off now, I remember it for weeks.” Bruises last longer when you get older. But is the slowness of repair due to some deficiency that arises with age, that stops normal processes from working well? Or is it due to the absence of some youthful factor?

Amy Wagers, an associate professor of stem-cell and regenerative biology, has begun to answer this most provocative of questions—could we marshal the body’s own repair mechanisms to slow the process of aging?—with a simple experiment. Using mice that have been surgically joined so that their bloodstreams become shared, Wagers investigated whether the blood of a young animal might awaken the muscle stem cells in an old one and enhance muscle repair.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.”

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

More here.