Over at news@nature, Geoff Brumfiel looks at the issue:

If you were sucked into a black hole, you wouldn’t stand a chance. But new calculations suggest that some things might survive travelling to the heart of the Universe’s darkest objects.

‘Quantum information’ could make it through a black hole, says a group of theorists at Pennsylvania State University. If their calculation holds water, it would solve an important problem for quantum mechanics — and make the behaviour of black holes easier to predict.

Black holes have a dastardly reputation for devouring everything they come across. Anything that travels beyond a hole’s ‘event horizon’ — the boundary of the region where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape — will eventually fall into its centre.

And at the black hole’s centre lies the ‘singularity’, a single point where mass becomes infinite and the laws of gravity break down.

In the NY Sun, a review of The Post-Office Girl:

In his last, posthumously published novel, “The Post-Office Girl” (NYRB Classics, 272 pages, $14), translated by Joel Rotenberg, the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig describes the effects of this crushing bureaucratic wheel on one of its smallest cogs. Unlike Kafka, his contemporary, who made a nightmare parody of officialdom, Zweig is scrupulously realistic. The little post office where Christine Hoflehner toils in the desolate hamlet of Klein-Reifling — it is “two hours from Vienna,” but might as well be on the moon — is rendered in stifling detail. Christine’s life is as tabulated as the inventories she must compile. She is only 28 but “seems good for at least another twenty-five years of service,” and during those years to come:

Her hand with its pale fingers will raise and lower the same rattly wicket thousands upon thousands of times more, will toss hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of letters onto the cancelling desk with the same swivelling motion, will slam the blackened brass canceller onto hundreds of thousands or millions of stamps with the same brief thump.

///
Fire on the Hills
Robinson Jeffers

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.

///

From lensculture.com:

Few experiences are likely to affect us as profoundly as an encounter with death. Yet most deaths occur almost covertly, at one remove from our everyday lives. Death and dying are arguably our last taboos – the topics our society finds most difficult. We certainly fear them more than our ancestors did. Opportunities to learn more about them are rare indeed.

This exhibition features people whose lives are coming to an end. It explores the experiences, hopes and fears of the terminally ill. All of them agreed to be photographed shortly before and immediately after death. The majority of the subjects portrayed spent their last days in hospices. All those who come to such places realise that their lives are drawing to a close. They know there is not much time left to settle their personal affairs. Yet hardly anyone here is devoid of hope: they hope for a few more days; they hope that a dignified death awaits them or that death will not be the end of everything. The photographer Walter Schels and the journalist Beate Lakotta spent over a year preparing this exhibition in hospices in northern Germany.

More here.

From Scientific American:

In a boon to cancer treatment and regenerative medicine, scientists have discovered that a trick used by tumor cells that allows them to migrate around the body can cause normal, adult cells to revert into stem cell–like cells.

Large quantities of these reverted cells could be used to treat anything from spinal cord injury to liver damage without the risk of tissue rejection, said Robert Weinberg, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and co-author of a study appearing in Cell. Learning more about how cancer cells move around the body is also providing scientists with new insights that could thwart the spread of the disease.

The key to the process is a better understanding of developmental changes in the body’s two primary cell types: epithelial cells (those that constitute the skin and most internal organs) and mesenchymal cells (which make up connective tissue). The key difference between the two cell categories is that epithelial cells adhere very tightly to one another, making sheetlike layers, whereas mesenchymal cells are only loosely bound and can migrate within the body. In the developing embryo, an initial group of epithelial cells undergoes a shift called an “epithelial to mesenchymal transition” (EMT) to form bones, blood and cartilage as well as the heart.

More here.

Daniel Gross reviews Jeffrey D. Sachs’s new book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, in the New York Times Book Review:

The timing for Jeffrey D. Sachs’s new book on how to avert global economic catastrophe couldn’t be better, with food riots in Haiti, oil topping $120 a barrel and a gnawing sense that there’s just less of everything — rice, fossil fuels, credit — to go around. Of course, we’ve been here before. In the 19th century, Thomas Malthus teased out the implications of humans reproducing more rapidly than the supply of food could grow. In 1972, the Club of Rome published, to much hoopla, a book entitled “Limits to Growth.” The thesis: There are too many people and too few natural resources to go around. In 1978, Mr. Smith, my sixth-grade science teacher, proclaimed that there was sufficient petroleum to last 25 to 30 years. Well, as Yogi Berra once may have said, “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”

And yet. Even congenital optimists have good reason to suspect that this time the prophets of economic doom may be on point, with the advent of seemingly unstoppable developments like climate change and the explosive growth of China and India. Which is why Sachs’s book — lucid, quietly urgent and relentlessly logical — resonates. Things are different today, he writes, because of four trends: human pressure on the earth, a dangerous rise in population, extreme poverty and a political climate characterized by “cynicism, defeatism and outdated institutions.” These pressures will increase as the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world.

More here.

Also by Kunstler: In Memoriam: My Dog, Chloe

Inside this unnaturally elevated head of ours are crammed organs and orifices that interact in complex ways with the world beyond. “I want to celebrate the mystery of the fact that we are embodied,” he writes; also, that our consciousness is beyond us, in every way. “We are not to be understood, as animals may be understood, as stand-alone organisms; even less are we to be understood as stand-alone brains.”

Of course, what has already drawn attention to the book in some quarters are its delightful discussions of the head’s various disgusting secretions (snot, saliva, ear wax), and its under-appreciated everyday activities such as smiling, yawning, masticating foodstuff, vomiting it up again, and breathing. Making strange the familiar is a special gift, and Tallis seems to know which facts we will sniff at, which we will swallow, which will inspire nausea, and which will make us simply stretch our eyes. We produce a quart of mucus every 24 hours, apparently. We will yawn, in the course of our lives, a quarter of a million times. If our hair had feeling, we’d have to have a local anaesthetic when we had it cut. The mouth is “the anus of the face” (or so says Samuel Beckett). Drink a cold glass of orange, and you feel its progress beyond the windpipe and gullet: “It is a torch, momentarily lighting up the darkness within the body.”

The surprises begin right away in “Nixonland.” The book opens with the Watts riots, a singularly unconventional starting point for a narrative built around Richard M. Nixon, who was not in office and not involved with the 1965 events or their aftermath. But these passages in Rick Perlstein’s rambunctious, ambitious, energetic tour through the Nixon era set both the tone and approach that distinguish this remarkable work.

As the initial setting makes clear, Perlstein is after something other than biography here. And wisely so. The world almost certainly has enough Nixon biographies; few subjects have tantalized writers more than the troubled soul of Yorba Linda’s favorite son. Instead, he tells the story of Nixon’s America, a country of division and resentment, jealousy and anger, one where politics is brutal and psychological, where victors make the vanquished suffer. Perlstein, who covered some of this ground in “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,” aims here at nothing less than weaving a tapestry of social upheaval. His success is dazzling.

more from the LA Times here.

Stephen Marche in the Toronto Star:

For Him Magazine, and the other lad mags like Maxim and Umm, occupy a strange, liminal place in the territory of contemporary male desire. They exist to allow men to look at women’s bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn’t pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They’re all white. They all have long hair and they’re almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on – her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

More here.

To open one of Charles Simic’s collections of poetry — this is, incredibly, his 19th — is to enter with renewed delight an instantly familiar neighborhood. Delight may not be the first word you’d associate with his shabby rooming houses, seedy movie theaters, empty restaurants on lonely side streets, dusty stores about to go out of business, bare trees. But if the scenery comes out of Edward Hopper, complete with the aura of loneliness and of ordinary things made strange by odd slants of light, the people who live there are nothing like Hopper’s doughy American depressives. They’re characters from Eastern European folk tales or Kafka, boiling with energy, nicely poised between the comic and the sinister and prone to metamorphosis: an opera singer keeps “a monkey dressed in baby clothes,” a woman “turned into a black cat / and I ran after you on all fours.” Even Grandmother — and Simic’s poems are full of grandmothers — “knitted / With a ball of black yarn.” The fun — and Simic’s poetry is nothing if not amusing — comes from the way he puts together the whimsical, the earthy, the banal and the transcendent. There are a lot of chickens in his poems and a lot of angels, too.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From The Daily Mail:

Yasmin Hai is an acclaimed journalist who has worked on BBC2’s Newsnight and Channel 4 documentaries. In a wonderfully honest new book, she describes the challenges of growing up as the daughter of Pakistani parents – and a father who yearned for her to be accepted as English.

Grasping the door handle, I steadied myself against the walls of the moving railway carriage.

“Now!” my father called out. “Squeeze it hard, go on, squeeze it!”

Despite the urgency in his voice, I held back. The train didn’t look as if it had dropped enough speed for me to open the door.

The faces of the passengers standing on West Hampstead station platform were still fuzzy blurs.

“What are you waiting for?” my father shouted impatiently. “Come on, come on.”

This time, I clasped hold of the lock and with gentle pressure attempted to slide it to the right. Despite my clammy hands, it gave way.

I had done it – the train door was open! A small achievement, but for me, at the age of 11, a significant one.

This was the third day in a row that my family had made the train journey from our home in Wembley across London to Camden.

The mission: to familiarise me with the new school journey that I would be making from next Monday. Nothing could be left to chance.

More here. (Note: I just finishes reading this moving book and recommend it).

From Nature:

The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong. Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics, quantum mechanics creates several paradoxes that still make some physicists uncomfortable, says Valentini. So far it’s been impossible to pick apart quantum mechanics from bohmian mechanics — both predict the same outcomes for experiments with quantum particles in the lab. But Valentini thinks that the stalemate could be broken by analysing the cosmic microwave background — the relic radiation left behind after the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background contains hot and cold temperature spots that were generated by quantum fluctuations in the early Universe and then amplified when the Universe expanded.

Using the principles of quantum mechanics, cosmologists have calculated how these spots should be distributed. However, Valentini’s calculations show that the hidden-variables theory might give a different answer. “Any violation of quantum mechanics in the early Universe would have a knock-on effect that we could see today,” says Valentini. Almost all measurements of the cosmic microwave background seem to fit well with the predictions of quantum mechanics, says Valentini. But intriguingly, a distortion that fits one of Valentini’s proposed signatures for a failure of quantum mechanics was recently detected by Amit Yadav and Ben Wandelt at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That result has yet to be confirmed by independent analyses, but it is tantalizing, Valentini adds.

More here.

///

Turtle Soup
Marilyn Chin

You go home one evening tired from work,
and your mother boils you turtle soup.
Twelve hours hunched over the hearth
(who knows what else is in that cauldron).

You say, “Ma, you’ve poached the symbol of long life;
that turtle lived four thousand years, swam
the Wet, up the Yellow, over the Yangtze.
Witnessed the Bronze Age, the High Tang,
grazed on splendid sericulture.”
(So, she boils the life out of him.)

“All our ancestors have been fools.
Remember Uncle Wu who rode ten thousand miles
to kill a famous Manchu and ended up
with his head on a pole? Eat, child,
its liver will make you strong.”

“Sometimes you’re the life, sometimes the sacrifice.”
Her sobbing is inconsolable.
So, you spread that gentle napkin
over your lap in decorous Pasadena.

Baby, some high priestess has got it wrong.
The golden decal on the green underbelly
says “Made in Hong Kong.”

Is there nothing left but the shell
and humanity’s strange inscriptions,
the songs, the rites, the oracles?

///

from The Pheonix Gone, The Terrace Empty

///

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer gives a top 10 list of events at the World Science Festival so that I don’t have to:

So, yesterday I was chatting with my pal Lee Kottner (personal stylist to Jen-Luc Piquant, and an occasional guest blogger at the cocktail party), who lives in New York City, and I asked her which of the myriad of events she was planning to attend at the upcoming World Science Festival. Her response: “Festival? There’s a science festival?”

Hell, yeah, there’s a World Science Festival! It takes place May 29 through June 1, and it is going to be teh awesome. It worries me that Lee, of all people, hadn’t yet heard of it, because she’s pretty plugged into that sort of thing. Time to get the word out people! Alas, I will not be able to attend the festival personally, but here’s my Top Ten list of the events I would be attending, if I lived anywhere within easy driving (or Amtrak/subway/bus) distance of NYC (and could split myself into multiple clones since many of them directly conflict with each other). You can see a complete schedule of all events here; there’s even a blog.

1. Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, Thursday, May 29th, 6 – 8:30 PM, The Paley Center for Media. Any fans of the multiverse out there?

Sebastian Gießmann in Atopia:

Having moved from downtown Paris to the forest ridges of the pastoral Ménilmontant in 1832, a group of young men under the name of Saint-Simonians sets out for new goals. Their name derives from the Earl of Saint-Simon (1760–1824), who tends to be recognized mostly as an economist by now. His biography, however, is abundant with twists and turns. The royalist soldier who fights in the independence wars of North America and Mexico in the 1770’s turns into a carpetbagger after the French Revolution of 1789, earning a fortune through deals with the former church estates. Saint-Simon then becomes a patron of art and science, squandering all his money between 1795 and 1805.

He decides to conduct his own research, starting mostly with physiological thoughts. Those already included a philosophy of sociability and community. Treatises like A Letter of an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries (Lettres d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporain, 1802) and Treatise on the Science of Man (Mémoire sur la science de l’homme, 1813) were often distributed in handwritten copies only. After the downfall of Napoléon, he manages to get a post as a librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. After a slow recovery from poverty, Saint-Simon earned success by publishing articles and newspapers. By focusing on political economy from then on, he became a preacher of industrial progress and peace in a capitalist Europe. Within that framework, social justice (not equity) is the main reference point. Saint-Simon’s final years bring a last and definitive turn to religion—a New Christianism—that was going to be continued by his adversaries.

Edward Miguel in The Boston Review:

While rising demand for commodities is one way that Asia’s economic boom helps to raise African living standards, China’s economic involvement in Africa now goes far beyond arms-length imports and exports. Chinese firms have begun investing directly in African oil and mineral producers and in roads, dams, and telecommunications infrastructure. It is estimated that annual Chinese foreign direct investment in Africa surpassed the one billion dollar mark in 2005 and has continued to rise since. Shuttered factories and mines have been brought back to life and severed roads restored. The spread of cell phone technology has allowed rural African grain markets to function more efficiently, probably improving the lives of consumers, farmers, and traders alike.

No one knows the exact figures, but hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers and entrepreneurs have also migrated to Africa in search of their fortunes. This new Afro-Chinese community—from telecom engineers to owners of small Asian restaurants and medicine shops—has been a striking new presence in my own recent travels in both West and East Africa.

Why have Chinese individuals and firms dived in when European and U.S. investors have largely shied away?

Kenneth Roth in Foreign Affairs:

These days, it seems, everyone wants to close Guantánamo. In January 2002, the Bush administration created a detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to imprison what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called “the worst of the worst” terrorism suspects. The facility has since become an embarrassing stain on the United States’ reputation. With some inmates now having endured more than six years of detention without charge or trial, and with no end to their ordeal in sight, Guantánamo has come to symbolize Washington’s flouting of international human rights standards in the name of fighting terrorism. Now, even President George W. Bush says he wants to shut it down.

Rumsfeld’s claim notwithstanding, more than half of the 778 detainees known to have passed through Guantánamo have been released, and many others deserve to be. But there is a hard-core group — the Bush administration speaks of some 150 — who have allegedly plotted or committed acts of terrorism or would do so now if they could. Shuttering Guantánamo would force the government to decide what should be done with these allegedly dangerous individuals. Should they be given criminal trials? Or should they, as a growing number of lawyers and scholars suggest, be subjected to a system that permits detention without charge or trial because authorities believe they might pose a future threat — a system known as administrative, or preventive, detention?

Over at Seed, Errol Morris and Marc Hauser discuss game theory, Stanley Milgram, and whether science can make us better people.

MH: Now take the Milgram experiments. About a year ago, there was a study done that replicated Milgram’s experiment. So you may think how is that possible? Aren’t those now deemed unethical?

Well they are but we can do them if they’re in virtual reality space. This group in London—led by Mel Slater—created the Milgram experiments in virtual reality. So you’re the subject and while you’re in the experiment, you’re hooked up to skin conductance gizmos, which look at the sweatiness of your palms and heart rate and track how revved up you’re getting.

EM: Right.

MH: And what you find is that all of the factors that Milgram uncovered in his original experiment—how close you are to the individual, how much you’ve interacted with him before, how dominant the experimenter is in pushing you forward—all of those get mapped onto the physiological response of the subject in exactly the same way as they did in the original experiment. And they know it’s not real. It’s like, why do men look at Playboy or Penthouse? It’s just a magazine. But the mind goes on automatic pilot in some cases, blind to reality.

So the interesting thing is that, of course, people know they’re in a completely fake environment, it’s virtual reality. And yet there are parts of the brain that don’t get it. To use a term from cognitive science, there’s a sense of encapsulation or insularity, so even though I know this is a visual illusion, I don’t give a hoot.

EM: I don’t care.

MH: Right. And that says something very important about the moral domain because there are parts of the brain that are just going to see the world in a particular way independently of rich belief systems.