Robert S. Feranec in American Scientist:

Between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, during the final millennia of the Pleistocene Epoch, roughly 100 genera of megafauna (animals weighing more than 100 pounds) became extinct worldwide. Among them are such well-known creatures as mammoths and saber-toothed tigers and the more obscure, though no less significant, Diprotodon (an Australian marsupial the size of a hippopotamus) and Coelodonta (a woolly rhinoceros found in Europe). Whether their disappearance was caused by changes in climate or by “overkill” (being hunted to extinction by humans) has been hotly debated for the past 40 years. In Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America, Paul S. Martin reviews the end-Pleistocene extinction, arguing that overkill is the more likely explanation.

More here.

From Science:

A desert beetle that wrings water from fog has inspired scientists to create a nanomaterial that literally plucks moisture from the air. The invention could boost water supplies in the driest regions, say experts, and a similar setup could be used to precisely control the flow of tiny amounts of fluids for sensitive diagnostic tests.

Stenocara beetles live in the Namib Desert, one of the driest places on Earth. Located on the southwest coast of Africa, the region has scarce, unpredictable rainfall and no streams. On mornings when thick fog drifts in from the Atlantic Ocean, the insect climbs to the top of a dune and does a headstand, tilting its back into the breeze. Water droplets collect on the tops of smooth bumps until they spill into waxy, water-repellent grooves studded with smaller bumps that shunt the water down the insect’s shell into its mouth.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his brilliant blog, The Loom:

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a book on Escherichia coli (more on that later). To get a feel for how scientists work with the bug, I’ve been spending some time at the lab of Paul Turner at Yale. He sets up experiments to observe microbes evolve. His lab is full of freezers and incubators and flasks full of suspicious goo. One of his students gave me my first Petri dish of E. coli, which I brought home and put by my desk, where I could observe the colonies spread and then fade.

In addition to his work on Escherichia coli, Turner also studies viruses called phi-six that infect another species of bacteria. He experiments with them to watch how viruses shift hosts, cheat on one another, and go through other fascinating evolutionary changes. I’ve written an article on Turner’s work with viruses–and what it means for everything from flu pandemics to the tragedy of the commons– in the new issue of Yale’s alumni magazine.

More here.

David Roberts in Smithsonian Magazine:

The Grand Canyon occupies such an outsize place in the public imagination, we can be forgiven for thinking we “know” it. More than four million tourists visit the canyon each year, and the National Park Service funnels the vast majority of them through a tidy gantlet of attractions confined to a relatively short stretch of the South Rim. Even people who have never visited America’s greatest natural wonder have seen so many photographs of the panorama from Grandview Point or Mather Point that the place seems familiar to them.

But the canyon is a wild and unknowable place—both vast (the national park alone covers about 1,902 square miles, about the size of Delaware) and inaccessible (the vertical drops vary from 3,000 feet to more than 6,000). The chasm lays bare no fewer than 15 geological layers, ranging from the rim-top Kaibab Limestone (250 million years old) to the river-bottom Vishnu Schist (as old as two billion years). The most ecologically diverse national park in the United States, the Grand Canyon embraces so many microclimates that hikers can posthole through snowdrifts on the North Rim while river runners on the Colorado below are sunbathing in their shorts.

More here.

John D. Kasarda in The Next American City:

Across from Schiphol’s passenger terminal, one finds the World Trade Center, which contains conference facilities as well as the regional headquarters of such firms as Thomson-CFS and Unilever. Two five-star hotels adjoin this complex. Within a ten-minute walk is another complex of class-A office buildings that house financial and consulting firms which serve the aviation industry. Clustered along the A4 and A9 motorways linking the airport to downtown Amsterdam are large business parks for companies in industries that make intensive use of the airport, such as telecommunications, logistics, and distribution. With the airport and its immediate area serving as a multimodal transportation and commercial nexus, a new economic geography is taking shape: property near the airport commands premium office rental prices for the Amsterdam area, even above those in Amsterdam’s central business district.

Schiphol is but one example of how major airports are beginning to drive business siting and urban development in the 21st century, much as highways did in the 20th, railroads in the 19th, and seaports in the 18th. As aviation-oriented businesses cluster at and near major airports, a new urban entity is emerging: the Aerotropolis. Similar in shape to the traditional metropolis of a central city and its commuter-heavy suburbs, the Aerotropolis consists of an airport city core and an outlying area of businesses stretching fifteen miles along transportation corridors.

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1822, Thomas De Quincey published a short book, “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” The nature of addiction to opiates has been misunderstood ever since.

De Quincey took opiates in the form of laudanum, which was tincture of opium in alcohol. He claimed that special philosophical insights and emotional states were available to opium-eaters, as they were then called, that were not available to abstainers; but he also claimed that the effort to stop taking opium involved a titanic struggle of almost superhuman misery. Thus, those who wanted to know the heights had also to plumb the depths.

This romantic nonsense has been accepted wholesale by doctors and litterateurs for nearly two centuries. It has given rise to an orthodoxy about opiate addiction, including heroin addiction, that the general public likewise takes for granted: To wit, a person takes a little of a drug, and is hooked; the drug renders him incapable of work, but since withdrawal from the drug is such a terrible experience, and since the drug is expensive, the addict is virtually forced into criminal activity to fund his habit. He cannot abandon the habit except under medical supervision, often by means of a substitute drug.

In each and every particular, this picture is not only mistaken, but obviously mistaken. It actually takes some considerable effort to addict oneself to opiates: The average heroin addict has been taking it for a year before he develops an addiction. Like many people who are able to take opiates intermittently, De Quincey took opium every week for several years before becoming habituated to it. William Burroughs, who lied about many things, admitted truthfully that you may take heroin many times, and for quite a long period, before becoming addicted.

More here.

From the BBC:

The Simpsons is more than a funny cartoon – it reveals truths about human nature that rival the observations of great philosophers from Plato to Kant… while Homer sets his house on fire, says philosopher Julian Baggini.

With the likes of Douglas Coupland, George Walden and Stephen Hawking as fans, taking the Simpsons seriously is no longer outre but de rigeur.

It is, quite simply, one of the greatest cultural artefacts of our age. So great, in fact, that it not only reflects and plays with philosophical ideas, it actually does real philosophy, and does it well.

How can a comic cartoon do this? Precisely because it is a comic cartoon, the form best suited to illuminate our age.

More here.

Jeff Madrick reviews American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips, in the New York Review of Books:

In Kevin Phillips’s view, the Bush energy policy is a prime example of America’s failure to confront its most difficult challenges. Phillips, once a member of the Nixon administration, has written a timely book that argues that America is very different from the independent and omnipotent nation portrayed by President Bush and his administration. Dependency on oil is one of three major tendencies that will seriously undermine America’s future, he writes, the other two being the influence of radical religion and the growing reliance on debt to support the economy. For Phillips, these constitute “the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century,” and he offers little hope that the US will avoid the consequences. Since he wrote his widely read The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969, Phillips has published several books lamenting how poorly the Republicans have handled their responsibilities. American Theocracy is his most pessimistic work to date.

Phillips is concerned with problems that all nations have to contend with in one form or other as they grow older. The very sources of national success, whether in resources or industrial innovation, eventually reach their limits; what lasts is a structure of power and influence that inhibits reform. But by limiting the scope of his book to oil, religion, and debt—although they can be connected with practically every other issue—Phillips has only partially described what is wrong with the US.

More here.

The BBC reports of a double amputee’s climb up Everest and the ethical cliff he fell off of along the way.

Experienced climber David Sharp, 34, of Guisborough, Teesside, was on his way down from the world’s highest mountain when he got into difficulties.

New Zealander [and double amputee] Mark Inglis, said his party saw Mr Sharp as they climbed the 29,028ft (8,500m) peak.

He said there was nothing they could do for him.

Sharp apparently managed to get to a cave before dying. The “ethicist” Daniel Sokol (who knew Randy Cohen could look so good) offers some strange thoughts on the decision, which mostly consist of distinctions to be kept in mind when making moral evaluations, although not much by way of which ones really apply in this instance and the reasons they do. Instead he offers a simple defense: they really, really wanted to reach the top of the mountain. In the BBC:

At 8,500m and -38C, in considerable physical and emotional discomfort, in a group of 40 climbers whose life ambition is to reach the top, and with maybe only enough oxygen for a direct climb to the summit, it is perhaps excusable that no-one volunteered to stay behind.

These extreme meteorological, psychological and social conditions should be taken into account when evaluating the climbers’ decision. It is too easy to lay blame on the climbers by appealing to abstract moral principles and high-sounding virtues.

Decisions are not made in a vacuum, but in specific circumstances, and few can be as adverse and traumatic as those faced by the climbers.

(The current issue of Democratiya reprints Judith Shklar’s famous piece on cruelty and liberalism, “Putting Cruelty First“, which for some reason the whole Everest story reminded me of.)

From CNN:

Could you locate the Cambrian Mountains on a map? Twelve-year-old Bonny Jain could and his knowledge made him the winner Wednesday of the 2006 National Geographic Bee.

The eighth-grader from Moline, Illinois, won a $25,000 college scholarship by correctly naming the mountains that extend across much of Wales, from the Irish Sea to the Bristol Channel.

It was Bonny’s second appearance at the national bee. Last year he came in fourth place.

His victory was the culmination of a four-year effort — the first time he entered the contest, he got only second place in his local school’s geography bee.

More here.

In Sign and Sight, an abreviated transcript of the April 28th signandsight.com/PEN International roundtable on multiculturalism, featuring Kwame Anthony Appiah (moderator), the Turkish German sociologist Necla Kelek, the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, and the Mexican-American essayist Richard Rodriguez.

Richard Rodriguez: My impression is that multiculturalism comes into the United States from the north – and is therefore suspect – illegally across the Canadian border. It was invented by Pierre Elliot Trudeau. So to speak of it as I do tonight is already to acknowledge that I am a child of Trudeau. It is honourable, as a Canadian idea. All Canadian ideas are honourable. It is however not very erotic. Canadians are not famous for their eroticism. It posits the dignity and the specialness of individuals and individual communities. By comparison, there is another philosophy, another way of understanding civic life that is pushing up from the south. In the 16th century, the Indian and the Spanish conquistador met in Mexico. His name was Antonio Banderas. her name was Marina la Malinche. The nature of their eroticism is not clear to this day. The male version has it that he raped her. But there is a sizeable opinion among feminists in Mexico that in fact she had designs on him. And that rather like Pocahontas here in the United States, she begins a sexual drama that the male history is unable to compete with…

Kwame Anthony Appiah: One thing that’s struck me so far is that we can focus on two different kinds of questions. One has to do with the response of majorities to the fact of pluralism. The other, especially in Necla’s and Pascal’s bits, was the question of – either explicitly or implicitly – what it is that makes minorities close themselves off. I mean, what Necla Kelek was talking about in Germany is in part a problem created – for whatever reason – by a sense that some of these Turkish German communities are closing themselves off to the wider Germany. And clearly there’s a sense of self-enclosure in some of the French banlieus. I’m wondering whether from the point of view of the minority, the story is: well we closed ourselves off because you didn’t open to us. And now you tell us – because it’s causing you problems – that we should be open. But if you’d been open when we first arrived, we wouldn’t be closed now. Now I think there’s a real challenge of how to answer Pascal’s question, which is: how do we maintain this openness?

An audio of the talk can be found here. A summary article is also available.

In The Jewish Week, the story behind Amir Taheri’s, er, story of Iran’s new dress code law. (Via TPM Cafe)

Taheri’s column reported that a law passed by Iran’s parliament on May 15, “mandates the government to make sure that all Iranians wear ‘standard Islamic garments’ designed to remove ethnic and class distinctions … and to eliminate ‘the influence of the infidel’.”

“It also envisages,” stressed Taheri, “separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zorastrians, who will have to adopt distinct color schemes to make them identifiable in public. … They will also have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faiths.”

For Iran’s 25,000 Jews: “A yellow strip of cloth in front of their clothes,” he wrote, “Christians will be assigned the color red. Zorastrians end up with Persian blue.”…

But within hours after the National Post of Canada hit the streets Friday morning, it became clear the story had serious problems. By 7:41 a.m., a Montreal news radio station, AM940, had an interview with Israeli Iran expert Meir Javedanfar of Middle East Economic and Political Analysis debunking it..

“It’s absolutely factually incorrect,” he told the station. “Nowhere in the law is there any talk of Jews and Christians having to wear different colors. The Iranian people would never stand for it. The Iranian government wouldn’t be stupid enough to do it.”

Indeed, the law’s text and parliamentary debate, available in English from the BBC Service, discloses no provision mandating that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress.”

In The Nation, John Gray reviews Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice.

That Rawls’s theory has little to say on many of the issues that are currently most politically contested has not prevented his heirs from trying to extend his work to precisely these questions. Martha Nussbaum’s most recent book, Frontiers of Justice, is the latest such effort. She aims to widen the reach of Rawlsian theory by addressing questions it has thus far largely neglected, such as the role of distributive justice in international relations, the claims of disabled people and the moral status of nonhuman animals. Nussbaum’s resourceful and imaginative exploration of Rawls’s work displays a command of the longer tradition of political philosophy that matches and even surpasses that of Rawls, along with a notably richer sensitivity to the history and variety of constitutional arrangements. The result is a notable contribution to philosophical inquiry that merits the most careful study by all who try to think seriously about public policy.

Still, a puzzle remains as to why Nussbaum has chosen to view the issues with which she is concerned through the lens of Rawlsian theory, when she could–perhaps more profitably–have examined them in the light of her own views. As she is fully aware, applying Rawls’s theory to these areas is no easy matter. His vision of a scenario in which principles of justice are adopted is an idealized version of rational choice by competent human adults. Since the theory makes no reference to disabled persons, children or nonhuman animals, it is hardly surprising that the principles that emerge from it give no clear guidance as to how they are to be treated. Again, Rawls’s theory was constructed to apply within modern states. It was never meant to be a charter for global redistribution. In later work he tried to develop some account of morality in international relations, but he was clear that his conception of justice reflected a moral consensus that exists (so he believed) within nation-states and could be implemented only by nation-states. When Rawls failed to apply his theory to the issues Nussbaum raises, it was not an oversight. It was because the structure of the theory he constructed precluded it from being applied in these ways.

From The New York Times:

For a glimpse into the hungry hearts of young India, step inside a giant hulk of a studio here in the country’s film and television capital for the weekly taping of “Indian Idol 2.” This is where Indians come to be discovered: Antara Mitra from the remote eastern border in Bengal; Amey Date from a small third-floor walk-up in central Mumbai; Sandeep Acharya, from Bikaner, a small town in Rajasthan; and N. C. Karunya, on leave from an engineering college in the southern high-tech hub, Hyderabad.

Winnowed from some 30,000 contestants who lined up on the first day of auditions, these four contestants were among the show’s eight finalists this spring. They were all in their late teens and 20’s. None of them were low on grit or ambition. All had been studying music since they were children. Each dreamed of becoming a professional singer in the dog-eat-dog Indian movie industry. “Indian Idol” was their one chance of swimming straight to the top.

“Indian Idol,” a variation of the British “Pop Idol” and “American Idol,” is one among a spate of talent hunts that have mushroomed across the television landscape in the past couple of years. “The Great Indian Laughter Challenge,” a stand-up comedy contest, is in its second season. “Sa Re Ga Ma Pa,” a song contest named after the notes of the Indian musical scale, wrapped up its first season in February. “Nach Baliye,” a dance contest whose name means “Let’s Talk Dance,” is expected to begin its second season later this year.

More here.

From Nature:

In a discovery that rips up the rulebook of genetics, researchers in France have shown that RNA, rather than its more famous cousin DNA, might be able to ferry information from one generation of mice to the next. DNA has long been credited with the job of passing traits from parent to child. Sperm and egg deliver that DNA to the embryo, where it ultimately decides much of our looks and personality.

The new study in Nature thrusts RNA, DNA’s sidekick, into the limelight. It suggests that sperm and eggs of mammals, perhaps including humans, can carry a cargo of RNA molecules into the embryo – and that these can change that generation and subsequent ones. “It’s a very exciting possibility,” says Emma Whitelaw who studies patterns of inheritance at Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia. “DNA is certainly not all you inherit from your parents.”

More here.

Brilliant report by 3QD’s own Ker Than, in LiveScience.com:

Adam and Eve lost it, alchemists tried to brew it and, if you believe the legends, Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon was searching for it when he discovered Florida.

To live forever while preserving health and retaining the semblance and vigor of youth is one of humanity’s oldest and most elusive goals.

Now, after countless false starts and disappointments, some scientists say we could finally be close to achieving lifetimes that are, if not endless, at least several decades longer. This modern miracle, they say, will come not from drinking revitalizing waters or from transmuted substances, but from a scientific understanding of how aging affects our bodies at the cellular and molecular levels.

Whether through genetic tinkering or technology that mimics the effects of caloric restriction—strategies that have successfully extended the lives of flies, worms and mice—a growing number of scientists now think that humans could one day routinely live to 140 years of age or more.

More here.

Jennifer, as ever, offers some insightful observations, this time in her review of An Inconvenient Truth and on climate change.

We can quibble all we like about minor instances of massaging the data to make an emphatic point, but the underlying core message, and the science that supports it, is certainly very sound indeed. And frankly, maybe we need to be a bit more willing to use the tools of propaganda in such a crucial debate. After all, those tools have proved highly effective for those who have exploited them in the past, and our very survival may be at stake. The Gore film has attracted its share of critics, at least one of whom poked fun at the many meditative profile shots of Gore, claiming he looked like he was campaigning for Druid-In-Chief. (In all honesty, Jen-Luc could have done with a few less of those shots as well.)

And so the inevitable backlash begins. Is it merely coincidence that this past Sunday, the Washington Post ran a feature article about former NASA scientist Roy Spenser and his Web site spoofing the global warming “alarmists”? I’d say it’s about as much a coincidence as the fact that Spenser gets paid to write for TCS Daily, a Web site partially funded by ExxonMobil. (Interestingly, even Spenser, when pressed, admits that human activities have “likely” contributed to climate change, so he’s more honest than most naysayers.) Even more insidious is the onslaught of paid anti-climate-change advertisements that will be blanketing the airwaves this week, courtesy of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of which makes the following ludicrous statement: “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.” By now the entire blogosphere has probably seen both DarkSyde’s commentary on Daily Kos and Chris Mooney’s hilarious spoofs of that tagline, but far be it for me to buck the linkage trend. Per Mooney: “Water. They call it drowning. We call it life.”

‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them or they will break you.’ True to his word, on 17 May 1649, Oliver Cromwell had the ringleaders of the Leveller revolt marched out of Burford church in Oxfordshire and executed. These disgruntled Civil War soldiers had demanded political as well as religious rights and Cromwell was having none of it.

Yesterday, I joined Tony Benn and a large crowd in the Cotswolds to commemorate these martyrs to democracy. Organised by the Workers’ Educational Association, the Levellers’ Day festival remains one of the few living monuments to Britain’s hidden heritage of democracy. But why does Burford hold such a lonely place in our history calendar? Why are we still so shy of our radical past?

Last week saw a welter of commentary on Education Minister Bill Rammell’s call for teaching ‘British values’ in schools. The left took it as a cue for more historical self-flagellation; the right for cultural triumphalism. Yet, disappointingly, what Rammell had, in fact, urged was the anodyne incorporation of ‘modern British cultural and social history into the citizenship curriculum’. What he should have demanded is a vigorous exploration of our democratic heritage in schools and communities alike.

more from The Observer here.

In the Boston Review, Marc B. Haefele on Agrentina’s attempt to grapple with its past.

On the 30th anniversary of the coup the Naval Mechanics School (known by its Spanish acronym, ESMA) reopened as “The Space for Memory.” …The ESMA memory space is a key part of this swerving new democracy’s campaign against its past. There once was talk of leveling the place, but President Nestor Kirchner decreed that it should become a museum, a memorial. Kirchner is the first Argentine president to dare wield history against his opposition, which includes a merchants’ organization that prospered during the dictatorship and the Catholic Church, which supported the dictatorship and ratted out dissident clerics. On the 30th anniversary of the coup, Kirchner hosted a memorial that was duplicated in all Argentine consulates and embassies. Some have argued that he was playing politics with this most shameful episode in the nation’s history, that the “dirty war” should be recalled only in silence. But others say that Kirchner’s somber ceremonials were far better for the country than what one scholar called the “percepticide” of official forgetting by two previous presidents, Raul Alfonsin and Carlos Menem.

The forgetting was not confined to presidents or to the police, navy, army, and air force. Didn’t the 12th-floor tenants on Libertador’s 8000 block see the headlights every night, see the gate open, hear the car doors slam, hear the screams of the abducted and the curses and blows? Didn’t they smell the improvised crematoria? Probably. Did they draw the curtains, turn on the air conditioner? Perhaps. What about the night shift at the Gillette plant that used to be across the street? Did the workers take sidelong glances out the window? Kids at the polytechnic high school next door said they heard loud music from the ESMA during the day, apparently played to drown out the screams.

For all of Tim Hawkinson’s entertaining use of sound and movement in his work, his sculpture’s stunning inventiveness and the way it responds to the history of media and technology, he is ultimately interested in some very old questions. Hawkinson connects the more recent influences of conceptualism, kinetic art, sound and installation work to a tradition of philosophical speculation and religious thought deeply embedded in American culture and most famously articulated in the 19th-century literature of Emerson, Whitman, and especially Herman Melville. But his work is far from “literary” in its experience and instead drops you in the middle of an age-old puzzle about the nature of our world and our place in it—forcing you to grapple with the meaning of all the strange sounds, intricate constructions and whirring machines that surround you. The recent retrospective of his work at LACMA, designed and installed by Hawkinson himself, presents a self-portrait of the artist as engaged in an obsessive, philosophical quest, in which anything, from manila envelopes to model ships, can take on special significance. To get at some of the fundamental issues in Hawkinson’s varied sculptural practice, I will focus here on the parallels between a few pieces which use the nautical as a metaphor for a mode of philosophical inquiry that is present in much of his other work.

more from X-TRA here.