From Nature:

The first people to colonize the Americas were a band of just 70 hardy explorers and their families, a genetic study suggests. Analysis of Native Americans’ genes shows that their ancestors represented just a tiny fraction of the Asian population at the time. This intrepid group is thought to have made the arduous journey across a long-lost land bridge between Siberia and Alaska about 14,000 years ago. The research suggests that this entire group might have numbered just 200 people, since experts generally expect populations to be about three times the size of the group that ultimately pass on their genes.

“The number of founders might be a surprise to some, although we knew that there was a bottleneck of some magnitude,” says Jody Hey of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, who carried out the study. The fact that the most plausible way on to the American continent involved a trek through the frozen north probably meant that few attempted the journey.

More here.

From Nature:

Female redback spiders are not the most sympathetic of lovers: they routinely begin to eat their suitors before they’ve had a chance to finish mating. And now research shows that their internal anatomy also helps them get one over males, by influencing which mates get to fertilize their eggs. The female redback (Latrodectus hasselti) has two organs for storing sperm, called spermathecae, explain Lindsay Snow and Maydianne Andrade, of the University of Toronto in Canada. Although biologists already knew about these twin sperm sacs, they had not investigated how they affect the issue of paternity when a spider mates with more than one male. The two sperm sacs help to prevent a male from stealing a mating advantage simply by being the first to court a female, Snow and Andrade suggest. A male has two sperm-depositing organs, called palps, that correspond to the female’s two sperm sacs, although he can use only one palp in a mating session. A male tends to break off the end of his mating palp inside the female’s sperm sac, partly blocking its entrance, the researchers say. “This functions as a plug, a kind of chastity belt,” explains Paul Hillyard, curator of arachnids at the Natural History Museum in London. Having two sperm sacs may therefore give females extra choice over who fathers her young, Snow and Andrade say. If one of the sacs is blocked by a mate, a subsequent partner can still be given the opportunity to deposit his sperm in the other.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A new study backs the obvious notion that a song can evoke strong memories. It also reveals that you don’t even have to hear a song for the past to come flooding back. In fact, most people have an amazing ability to effectively hear songs that aren’t even being played. The new study involved 124 people, average age 19, who were asked to choose from a list of old songs and pick the one that evoked the strongest memory. One group just saw the title, another saw the lyrics, the third saw the album cover or a photo of the artist. A fourth group heard a snippet of the song.

The participants ranked the vividness of their memories. The recollections were extremely clear for each group, said researcher Elizabeth Cady. “Music is a big cue,” she concludes. You can test the power of song titles right now. But beware, one of these could ruin your day:

• “The Theme from Gilligan’s Island”
• “Mission: Impossible”
• “We Will Rock You”
• “The Macarena”

These ditties, along with “Small World,” were cited in a 2001 study by James Kellaris at the University of Cincinnati as among the most common that get stuck in peoples’ heads. 

More here.

Virginia Quarterly Review on Leaves of Grass 150 years later. The following from Diane Ackerman’s contribution:

Whitman really wrote only one poem, although he added to it throughout his life and sometimes made separate books of it. It was the great poem of being, the great epic of life in America in the 19th century, in the solar system, in the Milky Way, in the infinite reaches of space. He began with a microscopic eye focused on the beauty of the lowliest miracle, say a leaf of grass, and then stretched his mental eye out to the beauty of the farthest nebulae. An earth-ecstatic, he was not a churchgoer, but deeply religious. If there is no choired Heaven in his poems, there is also no death: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” He taught his contemporaries and his latter-day children, such as Loren Eiseley, a new way of prayer.

Having witnessed the spaz bacchanal of New York’s regional Air Guitar Championship, I’d like to see a statistical graph of the relative fortunes of performance art and air guitar. My hunch is that factor analysis would reveal a strong negative correlation between the two. That is, as performance art declined into masturbatory irrelevance in the 1980s and ’90s, air guitar—a far more honest type of masturbatory irrelevance—rose like David Lee Roth in midair split. Take the politics out of performance art, after all, and you’re left with untrammeled histrionics, potential nudity, and indiscriminate fluids (bodily or otherwise)—and you can get all that from an air guitar competition.

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James Davidson in the London Review of Books:

What needs to be confronted is not so much the juxtaposition of intra-sex with inter-sex pairings but the imposition of the homophobic (properly speaking) notion that the one is an imposture – a threatening parody – of the other, Black Odile distracting the Prince from White Odette, a ‘pretended family relationship’ in the words of Section 28, which undermines the authentic coinage. In case that seems like homophobophobia on my part, let us remember what Norman Stone foresaw for Denmark when it legalised gay marriage in 1989: ‘Its population will consist of golden oldies watching porn videos. The only people to get married will be the gays, and the only people to have children will be the Kurdish immigrants.’ No wonder American voters were so worried about gay marriage. The Kurds are coming! Remember the Danes!

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David Adam in The Guardian:

Dr Shamay-Tsoory, a psychologist at the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa and the University of Haifa, said: “Sarcasm is related to our ability to understand other people’s mental state. It’s not just a linguistic form, it’s also related to social cognition.”

The research revealed that areas of the brain that decipher sarcasm and irony also process language, recognise emotions and help us understand social cues.

“Understanding other people’s state of mind and emotions is related to our ability to understand sarcasm,” she said.

More here.

John Roach in National Geographic:

Can the moon cause earthquakes? …James O. Berkland is a Glen Ellen, California-based geologist and editor of Syzygy—An Earthquake Newsletter. He believes the gravitational tugs of the moon, sun, and other planets can influence earthquake activity. Berkland said he has accurately predicted tremors based on factors such as syzygy…

Using syzygy and other factors—such as the number of cats and dogs listed in the lost and found in newspaper classified advertisements—Berkland said he accurately predicted several earthquakes, including the October 17, 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, California. Berkland said the number of cats and dogs reported missing goes up prior to an earthquake. The numbers went up significantly prior to the 1989 San Francisco quake, he said.

More here.

Karen Epper Hoffman in MIT’s Technology Review:

As a future fuel source, hydrogen inspires a lot of hope — and more than a little wariness. But one New Jersey startup has developed a hydrogen-powered fuel cell technology for portable devices that it’s promising can be as safe and even longer-lasting than today’s batteries.

Millennium Cell of Eatontown, N.J. has developed a proprietary process that uses sodium borohydride — a chemical synthesized from borax, a mineral commonly found in laundry detergents — to produce hydrogen. Stored in its liquid form, the sodium borohydride solution is passed through a chamber containing a proprietary catalyst, and hydrogen is released as needed. Millennium Cell doesn’t make the actual fuel cells, but instead partners with different fuel cell manufacturers that license its system.

More here.

Jacquie van Santen in ABC News:

When can cheesy feet smell like roses? When they’re labelled with a pleasant name.

In a finding that could bring relief to sweaty locker rooms around the world, researchers have demonstrated that the brain can be tricked into believing an odour is pleasant just by giving it a more appealing name.

The research was carried out by team of UK and Swiss researchers and is published in the latest issue of the journal Neuron.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens reviews The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd edition, edited by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth and Imre Szeman, in the New York Times:

A professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure is popularly supposed to have said: ”I agree that it works in practice. But how can we be certain that it will work in theory?” In the course of the past few years, sections of the literary academy have had to endure a good deal of ridicule, arising from this simple jest. The proceedings of the Modern Language Association, in particular, have furnished regular gag material (gag in the sense of the guffaw, rather than the less common puke reflex) for solemn papers on ”Genital Mutilation and Early Jane Austen: Privileging the Text in the World of Hampshire Feudalism.” (I paraphrase only slightly.) The study of literature as a tradition, let alone as a ”canon,” has in many places been deposed by an emphasis on deconstruction, postmodernism and the nouveau roman. The concept of authorship itself has come under scornful scrutiny, with the production of ”texts” viewed more as a matter of social construct than as the work of autonomous individuals. Not surprisingly, the related notions of objective truth or value-free inquiry are also sternly disputed; even denied.

A new language or ”discourse” is often considered necessary for this pursuit, and has been supplied in part by Foucault and Derrida. So arcane and abstruse is the vernacular involved that my colleague James Miller, dean of the graduate faculty at the New School, wrote a celebrated essay inquiring ”Is Bad Writing Necessary?”

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Edward N. Luttwak reviews Barbed Wire: An ecology of modernity by Reviel Netz in the Times Literary Supplement:

Invented and patented by Joseph F. Glidden in 1874, an immediate success in mass production by 1876, barbed wire, first of iron and then steel, did much to transform the American West, before doing the same in other prairie lands from Argentina to Australia. Actually, cheap fencing transformed the primordial business of cattle-raising itself. Solid wooden fences or even stone walls can be economical enough for intensive animal husbandry, in which milk and traction as well as meat are obtained by constant labour in stable and field to feed herbivores without the pastures they would otherwise need. Often the animals are tethered or just guarded, without any fences or walls. But in large-scale raising on the prairie or savannah, if there are no fences then the cattle must be herded, and that requires constant vigilance to resist the herbivore instinct of drifting off to feed – and also constant motion. As the animals eat up the vegetation where they are gathered, the entire herd must be kept moving to find more. That is what still happens in the African savannah of the cattle herdsmen, and what was done in the American West as in other New World prairies, until barbed wire arrived to make ranching possible.

More here.

Ross Douthat in The New Republic:

There is no project more evergreen, and more quixotic, than the conservative quest to tug American higher education rightward. It’s a movement traditionally longer on rhetoric than on tactics–tactics being hard, and taking potshots at lefty academics being easy. But lately there have been stirrings of an actual strategy for remaking academia–a mix of government action, intervention by alumni and trustees, and the use of the left-wing “diversity” mantra to press for greater conservative representation in the one-party state that is the American university.

Much of this newfound assertiveness is the work of the indefatigable David Horowitz, whose proposed “Academic Bill of Rights”–currently being considered in the legislatures of 16 states–offers a case study in how the promotion of diversity can be turned to the right’s advantage. Denounced by academics as a McCarthyite outrage, the bill is written in the language of liberalism–there are guarantees for free speech on campus, provisions to allow students and professors to file grievances if they sense political persecution, a requirement that schools consider “intellectual pluralism” in selecting speakers and disbursing funds to student groups. But there’s no question which professors and students are expected to file most of the grievances, nor which end of the political spectrum stands to benefit most from more intellectual pluralism in the lecture hall…

More here.

From The BBC News:

The £480,000 award is handed down by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and supports a research field that is overlooked by the Nobel Prizes. The 79-year-old mathematician is based at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York, US. His work has provided new approaches to partial differential equations, which are used to describe non-linear systems such as the motion of gases. He constructed explicit solutions, identified classes of especially well-behaved systems, introduced an important notion of entropy, and, with US mathematician James Glimm, made a penetrating study of how solutions behave over a long period of time.

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From Science Daily:

Using computer simulations, a team of scientists led by Carol B. Post has found the likely reason why a WIN compound – a prototype drug for curing colds – is showing so much promise. The flexible molecule’s structure may allow it to shimmy inside the proteins that form the virus’ outer shell and alter them to the point where they cannot complete the infection process. An animated video of the computer simulation illustrates some of the results the team describes in its research paper, which appears in Tuesday’s (May 24) issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Flexibility appears to be an important characteristic for a drug to possess if it is to be successful at neutralizing rhinoviruses, which often cause the common cold,” said Post, who is a professor both of medicinal chemistry in Purdue’s College of Pharmacy, Nursing and Health Sciences and of biological sciences in the College of Science.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists are fond of running the evolutionary clock backward, using DNA analysis and the fossil record to figure out when our ancestors stood erect and split off from the rest of the primate evolutionary tree. But the clock is running forward as well. So where are humans headed? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says it’s the question he’s most often asked, and “a question that any prudent evolutionist will evade.” But the question is being raised even more frequently as researchers study our past and contemplate our future. Does evolutionary theory allow for circumstances in which “spin-off” human species could develop again? (See all five possible future humans here).

Some think the rapid rise of genetic modification could be just such a circumstance. Others believe we could blend ourselves with machines in unprecedented ways — turning natural-born humans into an endangered species.

More here.

Finlo Rohrer at the BBC:

It is a behemoth of a machine that pits 32 linked processors against its flesh-and-blood opponents. Hydra’s backers claim it can analyse 200 million chess moves in a second and project the game up to 40 moves ahead.

Computer programmers have been pitting their wits in the Game of Kings for decades, but only recently have they truly taken the upper hand.

The chess world was stunned when, in 1996, the then world Number One, Garry Kasparov, lost a game to IBM’s Deep Blue. Kasparov went on to win the overall match but bigger losses lay ahead, in the rematch a year later. Then, the grandmaster was conclusively beaten. It was a decisive episode in the battle of Man v Machine.

More here.  [Thanks to Timothy Don.]

From the New York Times, Ismail Merchant has died.

“[Ismail] Merchant and [James] Ivory, an American, made some 40 films together and won six Oscars since forming their famous partnership in 1961 with German-born screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Their hits — especially E.M. Forster adaptations like ‘A Room With a View’ (1985) and ‘Howards End’ (1992) that won three Oscars apiece — helped revive the public’s taste for well-made, emotional period drama.

In an interview with The Associated Press last year, Merchant said Merchant-Ivory films worked because they captured great stories.

‘It should be a good story — speak about a time and place that is permanent,’ he said. ‘It should capture something wonderful with some great characters whether it’s set in the past or in the future.'”

In this week’s The Nation, Martha Nussbaum reviews Bart Schultz’s new biography, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe, An Intellectual Biography:

“Far from being a complacent egoistic philosophy, Utilitarianism was radical in both its methods (counting all people equally) and its results, which often urged sweeping change in existing social structures.

Nor were Utilitarians political conservatives, as their modern descendants in economics tend to be. On the contrary, in line with their philosophical convictions, they supported an end to religious establishments, the equality of women, a demanding globalism and, in the case of Mill and Bentham, a dedication to animal rights (since ‘each’ included all sentient beings). . .  Bentham condemned laws against same-sex relations, commenting, ‘It is wonderful that nobody has ever yet fancied it to be sinful to scratch where it itches, and that it has never been determined that the only natural way of scratching is with such or such a finger and that it is unnatural to scratch with any other.’

Henry Sidgwick is usually regarded as the tame Victorian among these radicals, the person who domesticated Utilitarianism and made it both academically and socially respectable, in the process smoothing its rough edges. . . [M]ost philosophers . . . would have thought that Sidgwick, unlike Mill, could not possibly have written anything that showed deep emotion or human insight, much less anything that issued a radical challenge to Victorian sensibilities.

Bart Schultz’s mammoth biography shows that we would have been entirely wrong.”

Partha Dasgupta looks at Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond, in the London Review of Books:

Diamond’s reading of the collapses is original, for nature doesn’t figure prominently in contemporary intellectual sensibilities. Economists, for example, have moved steadily away from seeing location as a determinant of human experience. Indeed, economic progress is seen as a release from location’s grip on our lives. Economists stress that investment and growth in knowledge have reduced transport costs over the centuries. They observe, too, the role of industrialisation in ironing out the effects on societies of geographical difference, such as differences in climate, soil quality, distance from navigable water and, concomitantly, local ecosystems. Modern theories of economic development dismiss geography as a negligible factor in progress. The term ‘globalisation’ is itself a sign that location per se doesn’t matter; which may be why contemporary societies are obsessed with cultural survival and are on the whole dismissive of our need to discover how to survive ecologically…

More here.