Erika Check in Nature:

This January, Harvard University president Larry Summers incited a near riot by suggesting that men might be better than women at science. The resulting pandemonium has revealed few genuine insights into male and female mental abilities — although it has shown that old prejudices linger on campus, and beyond.

In contrast, biology presents a challenge to those who still believe women are better off at home than in the hallowed halls of universities. As geneticists search for the roots of humanity’s unique mental abilities, they are beginning to pay close attention to the ‘feminine’ X chromosome. Women have two copies of this chromosome, whereas men have only one. And the complete sequence of the X chromosome, published in Nature this week¹ (see also News and Views, page 279), confirms that an unusually large number of its genes code for proteins important to brain function.

Why this should be the case is sparking debate among evolutionary biologists. And some are even suggesting that the X chromosome will tell us why we are different from our closest relatives — why we can write poetry and design nuclear weapons, but chimpanzees can’t. In a sense, they argue, the feminine chromosome could hold the secrets of humanity.

More here.

Michelle Pauli in The Guardian:

According to Waterstone’s, the baddies have the edge over the good guys every time if you’re after a gripping read, and the bookshop chain has launched a campaign celebrating great fictional villains and anti-heroes. It has compiled a list of the top 20 novels it believes feature the best villains, from Lord of the Flies and Fight Club to The Catcher in the Rye, American Psycho and Lolita…

1. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Penguin)
The devil goes down to Moscow.

2. Perfume by Patrick Suskind (Penguin)
A vile crime carried out by an eloquent criminal makes for moral confusion.

3. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Faber)
The thin line between human reason and animal instinct is crossed.

4. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (Vintage)
Much nastier than the film. A cocktail of hatred, anger and destruction.

5. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (Penguin)
The ultimate novel of teenage delinquency…

More here.  And click here to submit your own nomination for top villain in 50 words or less, to win all 20 books.

Short review of The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind by Steven Rose, in The Economist:

“The 21st-Century Brain” promises, in its subtitle, to explain how neuroscience will allow the mind to be mended and manipulated, and to categorise what the possible implications of this mending and manipulation may be. This is a fascinating topic; indeed, there are few more interesting questions in science today. It is a shame, then, that Mr Rose waits until the last quarter of his book to begin addressing the subject in earnest. And when he does, it is in prose that somehow manages to be both hurried and laggardly at the same time, jumping back and forth between scientific research papers, television popularisations of neuroscience, and apocalyptic novels (primarily Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”) in such a way that the thread of his argument is all too often lost.

More here. There is a rosier review in The Times:

Rose’s timely book warns of the self-fulfilling prophecies of reductionist explanations of human nature for future policy in mental-health and the criminal-justice system. In order to behave freely and responsibly, he argues, it is crucial we believe we are free. We have to grasp the authenticity, scope and limits of human freedom. The spread of “neurogenetic” determinism (the idea that everything is fated in our genes and brain chemistry), he warns, could lead to a state of affairs in which a Twinkie Defence could be invoked for any and every human action and circumstance. This is not a matter, as Rose points out, of merely excusing crimes: it could result in the not too distant future in our locking up as “dysfunctional” individuals diagnosed genetically or through brain scans before they have done anything deemed to be dangerous. “Our ethical understandings may be enriched by neuroscientific knowledge,” he asserts, “but not replaced.” Rose insists that only through confirming our belief in freedom and moral agency can we “manage the ethical, legal and social aspects of the emerging neurotechnologies”.

More here.

Shamai Leibowitz in The Nation:

After years of failed political efforts by the Israeli and international human rights community aimed at ending the occupation, it is clear that new approaches must be implemented. It is time for American civic institutions to support a multi-tiered campaign of strategic, selective sanctions against Israel until the occupation ends. Since the Israeli government is flagrantly disobeying the ICJ decision, international law mandates the use of sanctions to force Israel to comply with UN resolutions and human rights treaties.

The first step for American institutions is to engage in selective divestment–withdrawal of their investments from companies that are, directly or indirectly, funding the occupation.

More here.

Sarah Graham in Scientific American:

Wallace H. Yokoyama of the United States Department of Agriculture and his colleagues fed a group of hamsters a diet with a fat content similar to that of typical American fast food–that is, with about 38 percent of its calories derived from fat–for four weeks. A second group of animals ate a low-fat diet with 11 percent of the total calories coming from fat. At the end of the study period, the high-fat eaters developed insulin resistance–a precursor to diabetes–whereas the control animals did not. The initial results corroborated previous findings in similar studies. But when the scientists repeated the experiment with the addition of a cellulose derivative known as hydroxypropylmethylcellulose (HPMC) to the high-fat food, the animals on that diet did not develop insulin resistance.

More here.

The NSF is soliciting grant proposals for a new program.

“Researchers in the social and behavioral sciences and computer and information sciences have many important synergistic relationships.One way in which this is manifest is in the development and utilization of data. On the one hand, social and behavioral scientists find new ways to create and analyze data in their endeavors to describe human and organizational behavior. On the other hand, computer and information scientists conduct research that yields new ways to improve both domain-specific and general-purpose tools to analyze and visualize scientific data — such as improving processing power, enhanced interoperability of data from different sources, data mining, data integration, information indexing and data confidentiality protection – or what we have termed cybertools.

This solicitation invites proposals for ‘information infrastructure testbeds’, each of which would include the development of the next generation of cybertools applied to data from various sources collected in two areas of research fundamental to social and behavioral scientists: organizations and individuals. The tools that are developed on these platforms must not only change ways in which social and behavioral scientists research the behavior of organizations and individuals, but also serve sciences more broadly.”

Amit Asaravala in Wired:

Olavi Kajander didn’t mean to discover the mysterious particles that have been called the most primitive organisms on Earth and that could be responsible for a series of painful and sometimes fatal illnesses.

He was simply trying to find out why certain cultures of mammalian cells in his lab would die no matter how carefully he prepared them.

So the Finnish biochemist and his colleagues slipped some of their old cultures under an electron microscope one day in 1988 and took a closer look. That’s when they saw the particles. Like bacteria but an astonishing 100 times smaller, they seemed to be thriving inside the dying cells.

Believing them to be a possible new form of life, Kajander named the particles “nanobacteria,” published a paper outlining his findings and spurred one of the biggest controversies in modern microbiology.

More here.

Alan G. Brake in Architecture Magazine:

It took no time for pundits to joke about the cantilevered form of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center. Its namesake, while universally acknowledged for his intelligence, charisma, and broad appeal, has always been prone to potshots. But politics and personality aside, the Clinton Center is a major work of American architecture that fuses building, landscape, program, and site into a dynamic urban composition…

An exoskeleton of V-shaped trusses connects the sleekly modern museum to the formal vocabulary of the bridge. The downtown-facing side of the building is clad entirely in glass, allowing unbroken views of city, park, and river. A fritted-glass brise soleil protects this side of the building from the elements. The 420-foot-long building cantilevers 90 feet over the sloping landscape, echoing the adjacent bridge and, to an extent, the highways, while dramatizing the views out and leaving the riverbank untouched.

More here.

AFP report in the Beirut Daily Star:

Around 300 Arab publishing houses will take part in a 10-day book fair in the Jordanian capital this week aimed at restocking Iraqi libraries, victim of UN sanctions and wars. The fair opening Thursday is aimed at “rebuilding Iraqi libraries which have long been isolated from the rest of the world … as a result of international sanctions between 1990 and 2003,” the organizers said in a statement.

Moex International Exhibitions said U.S., British and Indian publishing houses will also take part in the fair.

More here.

Ann Hurst writes about Geoff Nunberg in Stanford Magazine:

Nunberg, who will be 60 in June, has forged an unorthodox path that has made him perhaps the second most famous linguist in the country after MIT’s Noam Chomsky, and he’s done it, remarkably, without the perch of a tenured university appointment. While his linguistics research over the years has been substantial, his primary intellectual mission has been to relate linguistics to society, a path considered both courageous and unthinkable to most academics. He manages to make linguistics not only palpable but attractive to the public, demonstrating that in language lie clues to understanding even the most divisive issues…

Prolific and accessible, Nunberg’s writing reflects broad knowledge of the humanities, a discerning ear for usage, an openness to different language forms, and disdain for self-appointed grammar police and traditionalists.

More here.

Mark Buchanan in New Scientist:

Over the past decade, experiments devised by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, among others, have shown that many people will cooperate with others even when it is absolutely clear they have nothing to gain. A capacity for true altruism seems to be a part of human nature. It is a heartening discovery, yet one that has also touched off a firestorm of debate.

The experiments at the centre of the controversy are as simple as they are illuminating. They ignore theory-based preconceptions about how individuals ought to behave and focus instead on finding out what they actually do when playing games in which there is real money at stake.

One of the most basic of these games is the “ultimatum game”.

More here.

Claire Ainsworth in New Scientist:

In a mammalian embryo, all cells are equal – or so biologists believed. But a series of studies suggest that the fate of individual cells might be determined much sooner after conception than previously thought.

In some non-mammals, such as fruit flies, there are different concentrations of certain molecules in different parts of the egg. When the egg cell divides, the “daughter” cells use this as a kind of grid reference to work out where in the egg cell they have come from and what they should become. This pattern is inflexible: split an insect egg by pinching it in the middle and you don’t get twins; you get a front end and a back end of the insect.

Mammalian embryos appear to be much more flexible. If you take a mouse embryo at the two-cell stage and destroy one of the cells, you still get a complete mouse. This originally led to the idea that cells in early mammal embryos are totipotent – able to form any cell type.

But recent studies have raised doubts. And now…

More here.

Youssef M. Ibrahim in The Washington Post:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates.

Listen to the conversations in the cafes on the edge of the creek that runs through this Persian Gulf city, and it is hard to believe that the George W. Bush being praised by Arab diners is the same George W. Bush who has been widely excoriated in these parts ever since he took office.

Yet the balmy breeze blowing along the creek carries murmurs of approval for the devoutly Christian U.S. president, whose persistent calls for democracy in the Middle East are looking less like preaching and more like timely encouragement.

Nowadays, intellectuals, businessmen and working-class people alike can be caught lauding Bush’s hard-edged posture on democracy and cheering his handling of Arab rulers who are U.S. allies. Many also admire Bush’s unvarnished threats against Syria should it fail to pull its soldiers and spies out of Lebanon before the elections there next month — a warning the United Nations reinforced last week with immediate effects. For Bush, it is not quite a lovefest but a celebration nonetheless.

More here.

I wish I had a cooler story about the first time I saw George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I’d like to say I snuck in to see it at a midnight show in Times Square back in 1978. I’d like to say I saw it in the gloriously appropriate surroundings of one of those cavernous shopping malls where the film was set. This simply isn’t the case, however. I was born in the West of England in 1974, so to be honest, even saying that I’d caught it at the infamous Scala Cinema in Kings Cross, London, would be a falsehood. My first viewing of Dawn of the Dead was on a bog standard VHS version put out by 4-Front video in the early ’90s. I watched it on a sunny afternoon in my bedroom after having rented it illegally from my local video shop. This was no random rental though. I was already sold.

More here.

Terry Castle in the London Review of Books:

No doubt hundreds (thousands?) of people knew Susan Sontag better than I did. For ten years ours was an on-again, off-again, semi-friendship, constricted by role-playing and shot through in the end with mutual irritation. Over the years I laboured to hide my growing disillusion, especially during my last ill-fated visit to New York, when she regaled me – for the umpteenth time – about the siege of Sarajevo, the falling bombs, and how the pitiful Joan Baez had been too terrified to come out of her hotel room. Sontag flapped her arms and shook her big mannish hair – inevitably described in the press as a ‘mane’ – contemptuously. That woman is a fake! She tried to fly back to California the next day! I was there for months. Through all of the bombardment, of course, Terry. Then she ruminated. Had I ever met Baez? Was she a secret lesbian? I confessed that I’d once waited in line behind the folk singer at my cash machine (Baez lives near Stanford) and had taken the opportunity to inspect the hairs on the back of her neck. Sontag, who sensed a rival, considered this non-event for a moment, but after further inquiries, was reassured that I, her forty-something slave girl from San Francisco, still preferred her to Ms Diamonds and Rust.

More here.

Patricia Thomas in Harvard Magazine:

Having an office that physically spans these two worlds is metaphorically perfect for Schreiber, Loeb professor of chemical biology and one of several Harvard scientists who have been chipping at the wall between chemistry and biology to make way for an interdisciplinary enterprise called chemical biology. One of Schreiber’s many contributions has been in helping to develop technology now used by nearly all chemical biologists: robotic equipment that rapidly screens thousands of “small molecules” to see if they perturb a specific biological activity. Small molecules are chemical compounds with a molecular weight of 500 Daltons or less — about one-fiftieth to one-hundredth the size of most proteins. Yet when a small molecule latches onto a receptive protein, the protein’s shape is changed in a way that can make it more — or less — able to carry out its mission in the cell.

More here.

Michael Hopkin in Nature:

Devastating epidemics that swept Europe during the Middle Ages seem to have had an unexpected benefit – leaving 10% of today’s Europeans resistant to HIV infection.

But epidemics of which disease? Researchers claimed this week that plague helped boost our immunity to HIV, but rival teams are arguing that the credit should go to smallpox.

What is clear is that something has boosted the prevalence of a mutation that helps protect against the virus. The mutation, which affects a protein called CCR5 on the surface of white blood cells, prevents HIV from entering these cells and damaging the immune system.

More here.

Wire story from Reuters:

A secret biography of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler commissioned by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin is to be published later this month, the book’s British publisher said on Friday.

Stalin’s “Hitler Book” was presented to the Soviet dictator in December 1949, in a limited edition of one, and was put in his personal archive before being discovered by German historian Matthias Uhl in 2004.

More here.

John Brockman at Edge.org:

In the early ’90s, I was visiting Cambridge and went out to dinner with the late Stephen Jay Gould. During a long evening of conversation we talked about his ideas concerning race, racial racial differences, racial equality, including his well-known writings on the use and misuse of IQ tests and other such measures. I came away from the conversation with the distinct sense that he believed there were some things better left unsaid, some areas of investigation that were out of bounds if he wanted to have a just society. Nothing strange here. His views were, and still are, consistent with the daily fare of the editorial pages of many of our important newspapers and magazines.

Armand Leroi, a biologist at Imperial College, feels differently. He loves what he calls “the problem of normal human variety”…

“Of course, there will be people who object. There will be people who will say that this is a revival of racial science”. Leroi argues that “there will always be people who wish to construct socially unjust theories about racial differences. And though it is true that science can be bent to evil ends, it is more often the case that injustice creeps in through the cracks of our ignorance than anything else. It is to finally close off those cracks that we should be studying the genetic basis of human variety.”

More here.

Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:

When the force of sound waves implode tiny bubbles within a liquid at room temperature, the surface of the bubble can reach temperatures at least 25,000 degrees Fahrenheit, more than twice as hot as the surface of the sun, scientists reported this month.

The center of such a bubble may be even more astonishingly hot…

Their finding supports the intriguing notion that it may be possible to compress these bubbles so violently that vapor molecules in them are heated to multimillion-degree temperatures.

The phenomenon of imploding bubbles, called sonoluminescence because it emits a flash of light as the bubble collapses, has been increasingly studied since it was discovered 15 years ago.

More here.