Harvard researchers find longevity, restricted diet link

From The Harvard Gazette:

Longlife Researchers believe they’ve found the cellular link between extremely restricted diets and dramatically lengthened lifespan and hope to use the knowledge to develop new treatments for age-related diseases. The research, conducted by scientists at Harvard Medical School, Cornell University Medical School, and the National Institutes of Health, illuminates for the first time the cellular processes triggered by extremely low-calorie diets. Scientists have known for about 70 years that extremely restricted diets — where caloric intake is 30 percent to 40 percent below normal — can extend lifespan by as much as a third. In addition, those years are healthier and relatively free of common age-related debilities such as cancer, heart problems, and type 2 diabetes. The longer, healthier lives have been seen in a host of animals maintained on a very low-calorie diet, including mice, rats, and monkeys. What scientists haven’t been able to figure out, until now, is why eating a lot less makes one live a lot longer.

The answer, it turns out, lies in tiny bodies inside each cell that act as cellular battery packs. As one ages, cells lose these battery packs — called mitochondria — and slow down. Extremely restricted diets, it turns out, revs them back up again. The research, published in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal Cell, shows that calorie restriction sparks a chain reaction within cells that creates two enzymes called SIRT3 and SIRT4. The enzymes cross into mitochondria, making them grow stronger and increase energy output.

More here.

Once More Into the Fray

From Science:

Meerkat Whereas most animals run away from the dangers of the African savannas, meerkats, brave little souls that they are, race toward them. Large groups run headlong at venomous snakes and other potential predators, harassing them with jeering noises and pokes from their tiny claws. Scientists have long thought the meerkats were somehow protecting their colony, but new research suggests that the odd behavior may also be a way for younger meerkats to learn more about their enemies. If so, then it may lead biologists to take a second look at other social species, such as prairie dogs and vervet monkeys, which behave similarly.

Biologists Beke Graw and Marta Manser of the University of Zurich in Switzerland studied meerkats in the wild. When they released cobras and other predators near the colony, the meerkats mobbed the snakes and became aggressive. They also mobbed innocuous critters, such as moles and squirrels–even empty cages–but eventually lost interest and drifted away. Meerkats responded differently according to their age. Adults between 1 and 2 years of age mobbed intruders longer and growled, barked, and poked more intensely than did younger and older animals, the team reports in this month’s issue of Animal Behaviour.

More here.

To Form a More Perfect Hitchens

There’s an entire micro-economy based on the pursuit of betterment. The author—58, full-figured, and ferocious in his consumption of cigarettes and scotch—agreed to test its limits, starting with the Executive De-Stress Treatment at a high-end spa.

The Hitch in Vanity Fair:

Screenhunter_31_sep_27_1140I’d noticed a touch of decline here and there, but one puts these things down to Anno Domini and the acquirement of seniority. A bit of a stomach gives a chap a position in society. A glass of refreshment, in my view, never hurt anybody. This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for? Smoking is a vice, I will admit, but one has to have a hobby. Nonetheless, when my friends at this magazine formed up and said they would pay good money to stop having to look at me in my current shape, I agreed to a course of rehabilitation. There now exists a whole micro-economy dedicated to the proposition that a makeover is feasible, or in other words to disprove Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Objectives: to drop down from the current 185 pounds, to improve the “tone” of the skin and muscles, to wheeze less, to enhance the hunched and round-shouldered posture, to give some thought to the hair and fur questions (more emphasis perhaps in the right places and less in the wrong ones), to sharpen up the tailoring, to lessen the booze intake, and to make the smile, which currently looks like a handful of mixed nuts, a little less scary to children.

More here.

Dung from mammoths sends warming signal

Dmitri Solovyov at MSNBC:

Screenhunter_30_sep_27_1136For millennia, layers of animal waste and other organic matter left behind by the creatures that used to roam the Arctic tundra have been sealed inside the frozen permafrost. Now climate change is thawing the permafrost and lifting this prehistoric ooze from suspended animation.

But Zimov, a scientist who for almost 30 years has studied climate change in Russia’s Arctic, believes that as this organic matter becomes exposed to the air it will accelerate global warming faster than even some of the most pessimistic forecasts.

“This will lead to a type of global warming which will be impossible to stop,” he said.

When the organic matter left behind by mammoths and other wildlife is exposed to the air by the thawing permafrost, his theory runs, microbes that have been dormant for thousands of years spring back into action.

As a by-product they emit carbon dioxide and — even more damaging in terms of its impact on the climate — methane gas.

More here.

Rembrandt Is Eyes

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Screenhunter_29_sep_27_1107One of the virtues of the current exhibit “The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is that you can see Rembrandt among his contemporaries. You can see the milieu he was working within and what was different and unique about him. One thing that is confirmed in this comparison is that, like no one else, Rembrandt is eyes. (This is a different point than that made by Simon Schama in his Rembrandt’s Eyes, but not necessarily an incompatible one). By eyes I mean the whole “eye area” — the brow, the lids, the entire fleshy region immediately surrounding and containing the eyes. Contrary to the popular saying, it is not just the eye that is the window to the soul. It is the aforementioned “eye area” that really does it. The wrinkles and furrows, the black bags, and the heavy lids — these are essential aspects of the eye. They tell of a person and who that person has been so far.

Rembrandt was a true master — of that there is no doubt and so nobody bothers to. Everyone who looks at a Rembrandt, especially the portraits, is soon struck by the humanism of it all, by the uncanny closeness you feel toward the human faces that emerge out of the characteristic Rembrandtian gloom. And no matter the person — man or woman, powerful merchant, or outright commoner — Rembrandt portrays them as suddenly vulnerable. Plain and simple, these people can be wounded, they have been wounded. That is the humanism of Rembrandt, his ability to see everyone as a potential wound, as barely prepared for the next blow, whatever it may be. And it is always in the eyes.

More here.

the liberal state dilemma

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In 1976 Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde presented the following dilemma: “The liberal secular state lives on premises that it is not able to guarantee by itself. On one side it can subsist only if the freedom it consents to its citizens is regulated from within, inside the moral substance of individuals and of a homogeneous society. On the other side, it is not able to guarantee these forces of inner regulation by itself without renouncing to its liberalism.” What answers can the liberal state offer to questions of social cohesion and ethical deficit that are affecting secularized democracies? Are we living in a secular or a post-secular society? Reset put these questions to some of the most influential international intellectuals.

more from Reset here.

We need a music worth our time

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File under Dionysus the feelings a rock concert aims to induce: careless ecstasy and careless unity, dissolving in the careless crowd. Is Dionysus all-embracing, or is he instead all-consuming, all-digesting, reducing all to homogenous shit-stink? Why has no one mentioned that John Lennon’s “I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one” is a sentiment suitable for chanting at a Nuremberg rally?

The solution to mass-market Dionysianism is the obvious corrective tilt toward the Apollonian. Apollo is the contrary principle of form, clarity, precision, and individuation. Sculpture is the art of saying No to the rest of the mountain.

Apollo and Dionysus need one another, but only Apollo seems to understand this; Dionysus is busy vomiting into the toilet.

more from n+1 here.

One Does Not Escape Jewishness

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Ultimately, Hannah Arendt’s achievements and biases, her creativity and inner conflicts must be seen as part of the quite extraordinary history of post-emancipation German-Jewish intellectuals as they confronted German culture and its later breakdown, the experience of totalitarianism, and Jewish attempts at reconstitution. Her involvement with the Jewish world was always intense and complex, but so too was her simultaneous engagement in other cultural and political spheres. Precisely because she acutely and distinctively embodied the tensions and contradictions of these manifold worlds, she was able – sometimes more, sometimes less successfully – to grasp critically their interconnections and plumb both the despair and the possibilities of her fractured time.

more from the TLS here.

Triumph from disaster

From The Guardian:

Book_2 Like Salman Rushdie, Indra Sinha used to be an adman. Best leave the comparison there: the parallels are so close that Sinha prefers not to think about them. Both were born in Bombay, went to the Cathedral School for Boys, came to Britain, went to Cambridge, wrote ads about cream cakes (as well as The Satanic Verses, Rushdie is credited with the “Naughty but Nice” campaign), and abandoned advertising to write fiction. Sinha, the son of an Indian naval officer and an Englishwoman who wrote short stories, doesn’t dwell on the similarities because he doesn’t want to think too hard about the latest one. Rushdie went on to win the Booker prize; now Sinha has been shortlisted for his second novel, Animal’s People, a powerful fictionalisation of the Bhopal disaster of 1984 in which a gas escape from a US-owned chemical factory killed thousands in the central Indian city.

The story is told by Animal, a 20-year-old whose spine was wrecked as a result of the leak and who has been reduced to walking on all fours. “I used to be human once. So I’m told,” he says at the outset. Animal curses, masturbates while spying on a naked woman from up a tree, and tries to poison the leader of the justice campaign. He is the anarchic centre of an angry, yet warm-hearted, book. It is a remarkable piece of ventriloquism by the cultivated, Cambridge-educated Sinha, a large, shambling, shaggy-haired bear of a man who speaks in disconcertingly perfect sentences and still frets about the amount of swearing in the book.

More here.

Tiny RNAs, big problems: Spread of breast cancer is linked to micro-RNA

From Nature:

Rna The smallest bit of genetic material may cause the deadliest of tumours. Researchers have implicated a tiny RNA molecule in the invasive spread of breast cancer — the factor responsible for most deaths from the disease. In 2007, around 179,000 people in the United States will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer and some 47,000 will probably die. RNA is one of the main players in human genetics; the most well studied type, messenger RNA (mRNA), is vital for translating the code of our DNA, allowing those instructions to be read and used to produce proteins. MicroRNAs — tiny strings of genetic code often just a couple of dozen nucleotides or ‘letters’ long — can block this translation process by binding to mRNAs, stopping the production of proteins. A spate of new research has found these diminutive molecules to be involved in crucial processes of development, metabolism and cell suicide.

Now, a team led by Robert Weinberg at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute in Cambridge has linked one of these up-and-coming molecules to invasive breast cancers. “I think that these microRNAs are going to be involved ubiquitously in regulating a wide variety of cellular processes, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Weinberg says.

More here.

Did TV Destroy the Possibilty of Socialism?

Regis Debray in the New Left Review:

Consider the debt owed by socialist writing to the epistolary art: Marx and Engels worked out half their theories in letters, and virtually all their political activity had to pass through a pillarbox; the First International was conceived by Marx as a central correspondence bureau of the working class. Nowadays the militants socialize more and know less of each other’s ideas. More conversation means less controversy. The telephone destroyed the art of correspondence, and in the process diminished the moral stature of attempts at rational systematization; email has not restored it. Rarely do we pick up the phone to impart a complex sequence of principles and themes: we use it to chat. The general discourse has become indexed to the trappings of intimacy and private life. The cellphone, internet, laptop and plane are good for internationalization, but they render solidarity less organic—lethal for internationalism. They enlarge the sphere of individual relations but privatize them at the same time; they particularize even as they globalize. The cellphone is a permanent one-to-one. It drives the universal from our heads.

The crisis for socialism, then, is that even if it can resume its founding principles it cannot return to its founding cultural logic, its circuits of thought-production and dissemination. The collapse of the graphosphere has forced it to pack up its weapons and join the videosphere, whose thought-networks are fatal for its culture. A practical example: to find out what is going on one has to watch tv, and so stay at home. A bourgeois house arrest, for beneath ‘a man’s home is his castle’ there always lurks, ‘every man for himself’. The demobilization of the citizen begins with the physical immobilization of the spectator.

A New Solution to the God and Evolution Conundrum?

Sarah Coakley in the Harvard Divinity Bullentin:

What then are the three problems that confront us when we try to see a coherent relation between a good, providential deity and the unfolding created process? First, there is the issue of how we should understand the relation of God’s providence to prehuman dimensions of creation and their development. Second, there is the issue of how God’s providence can relate to the specific arena of human freedom and creativity. Then third, there is the problem of evil, the question of why what happens in the first two realms manifests so much destructiveness, suffering, and outright evil, if God is indeed omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent.

Why does modern evolutionary theory intensify these problems? They were, after all, already confronted and tackled with some sophistication in classical Greek philosophy and in early Christian thought, and refined further in the much-ramified discussions of high scholastic medieval theology. But modern Darwinian evolutionary theory appears: (a) to underscore the contingency or randomness of evolutionary “mutation” and “selection,” and thus to render newly problematic the possibility of a coherent divine guidance of precultural revolution; (b) to bring further into question the compatibility of divine providence with the human “freedom” of the “cultural evolution” stage, given the deterministic and reductive assumptions of much evolutionary theory, bolstered more recently by genetic accompaniments to the original Darwinian vision (“freedom” now looks little more than an “elbow room” within a predetermined nexus—so Daniel Dennett; yet, paradoxically, one represented in much modern thought as straining toward an autonomous “will to power” that would precisely compete with, and cancel, an undergirding divine impetus); and thus (c) modern evolutionary theory appears to intensify the problem of evil intolerably. If God is, after all, the author and “sustainer” of the destructive mess and detritus of both precultural and cultural evolutionary processes, why is she so incompetent and/or sadistic as not to prevent such tragic accompaniments to her master plan? If intervention is an option for God, why has he not exercised it?

james wood starts up at the new yorker, with god

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What is God like? Is he merciful, just, loving, vengeful, jealous? Is he a bodiless force, a cool watchmaker, or a hot interventionist, a doer with big opinions, a busy chap up in Heaven? Does he, for instance, approve of charity and disapprove of adultery? Or are these attributes instead like glass baubles that we throw against the statue of his invisibility, inevitably shattering into mere words? The medieval Jewish thinker Maimonides thought that it was futile to belittle God by giving him human attributes; to do so was to commit what later philosophers would call a category mistake. We cannot describe his essence; better to worship in reverent silence. “Silence is praise to thee,” Maimonides wrote, quoting from the second verse of Psalm 65.

Whatever one thinks of Maimonides’ chilly rigor, it is cannily paradoxical that even as he advises silence he quotes from the noisiest book in the Hebrew Bible. And, not only that, but from the very book that dramatizes, again and again, the gap between our language and the indescribable God, between our certainty that God is with us and our anxiety that he has abandoned us, between his cosmic proportions and our comic littleness.

more from The New Yorker here.

Fénéon

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In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac did not agree. Five months later, the best-known image of Fénéon emerged: in left profile, holding top hat and cane, presenting a lily to an off-canvas recipient (homage to an artist? love-gift to a woman?) against a circusy pinwheel of dashing pointillist colour. Fénéon, whether from vanity or critic’s pique at the artist’s disobedience, strongly disliked the image, commenting that ‘the portraitist and the portrayed had done one another a cruel disservice.’ He accepted the picture, however, and kept it on his walls until Signac died some 45 years later. But neither that event, nor the passing of time, mellowed his judgment: in 1943 he told his friend and future literary executor, the critic Jean Paulhan, that it was ‘the least successful work painted by Signac’.

more from the LRB here.

‘The irony of my life’

Trevor Butterworth in the Financial Times:

Louisauchincloss050103_175I get writers to sign their books,” says Louis Auchincloss, reaching up to a shelf of immaculate first editions. Just shy of his 90th birthday, he is now the “grand old man” of American letters – older than Norman Mailer (84), Gore Vidal (82), Tom Wolfe (77), John Updike (75) and Philip Roth (74) – and in rude health, apart from his hips, the only act of betrayal wrought by age. He is alone – his wife Adele, an artist and a commissioner of New York’s public parks, died in 1991. Their three sons are grown up, and he has a granddaughter just starting at Yale.

He is confined to his apartment atop a solid 14-storey building on 90th and Park Avenue, one of the red-brick repository boxes of old money and old New York. The Upper East Side, the golden mile of American power and privilege, is to his south and west. It is this world, the locus of power and privilege for much of America’s history, that he has chronicled and dissected for 60 years, and now he is shut off from it until after his surgery. Bored, and decidedly irritated by his confinement, he turns energetically to the past.

“There’s the Bonfire,” he says, taking down Wolfe’s tumultuous novel of financial decadence and racial tension in 1980s New York, and opening the cover to reveal a dedication as outsize as the dandified author – a florid script of copperplate curls and Gothic abutments written with a nib the size of a small paintbrush. “It’s a marvellous book,” Auchincloss says in a patrician accent of broad “a”s and reedy “r”s that in its natural, inherited form has all but disappeared from America, “but not everyone thinks so.”

More here.

Bombs We Can Stop

Matthew Bunn in American Scientist:

Screenhunter_28_sep_26_1536William Langewiesche has the reputation of being one of America’s best investigative reporters. Unfortunately, he has written a very bad book on nuclear proliferation. Although The Atomic Bazaar does include some useful reporting, it is marred by substantive errors and misjudgments. There are no footnotes, and almost all the quoted sources are anonymous, making it difficult for the reader to judge the credibility of Langewiesche’s conclusions and of his interlocutors’ statements. Worse, if policy makers were to accept his major theme—that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable and there is little hope in trying to stop it—they would not take the actions needed to make the world a safer place.

The Atomic Bazaar is a modest elaboration on three articles by Langewiesche that appeared this past winter in The Atlantic Monthly. If you have read the articles—which discuss nuclear terrorism and outline A. Q. Khan’s role in building Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and in leading a global black-market network that supplied dangerous nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea—you will not gain a great deal from the book.

More here.

Barbara Forrest: Philosopher Activist

Ruchira Paul at Accidental Blogger:

1barbara20forrest20alleleWe are familiar with the evolution vs creationism (masquerading as Intelligent Design) debate that has plagued several school districts, resulting in the Kansas School Board injecting ID in the science curriculum and Dover, PA succeeding in keeping it out by taking the school board to court. What we may not know are the behind the scenes shenanigans mounted by creationists to push their religious agenda down the throats of an unwitting public. Dr. Forrest has worked tirelessly to fend off the efforts by religious extremists to corrupt science education in her own state of Louisiana and elsewhere. She appeared as an expert witness for the prosecution in the Dover, PA ID ( Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District) case where a group of parents took the school board to court to keep it from introducing religion based creationism in the science curriculum. The outcome happily was a verdict for sanity and against obscurantism. Dr. Forrest was recently honored with the American Society of Cell Biology’s Public Service award for her work in support of science education and biomedical research.

More here.

Through a Lens, Darkly

David Margolick in Vanity Fair:

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During the historic 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, 26-year-old journalist Will Counts took a photograph that gave an iconic face to the passions at the center of the civil-rights movement—two faces, actually: those of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, and her most recognizable tormentor, Hazel Bryan. The story of how these two women struggled to reconcile and move on from the event is a remarkable journey through the last half-century of race relations in America.

More here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

Self-hating Academics

Jeff Strabone in his eponymous blog:

AhmadinejadA lot of obvious arguments have been rolled out against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University yesterday: that he’s a hatemonger, a Holocaust denier, a homophobe, and so on. These are all valid criticisms of the man, for he is all those things. He certainly did his credibility no help yesterday with these remarks, reported by the BBC:

‘Asked about executions of homosexuals in Iran, Mr Ahmadinejad replied: “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”

Reacting to laughter and jeers from the audience he added: “In Iran we don’t have this phenomenon, I don’t know who you told this.”‘

Universities have a special place in public life. They are the one place where intellectual freedom is taken most seriously. That is not to say that universities ought to invite rude individuals with bad ideas to speak, but it is understandable that they sometimes do.

Despite all of that, Columbia was wrong to allow Ahmadinejad on its campus, and it’s not because he hates Jews, gays, and men with stylish haircuts. There are surely members of the Columbia community—faculty and students alike—who hold these and other prejudices. And it’s not because he has blood on his hands. If that were the rule, it would be hard to find an important figure in world politics who qualified. Besides that, we might not agree on which international bloodletters were terrorists and which were freedom fighters. No, there is an even more fundamental reason than that: Ahmadinejad is the enemy of universities.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Zuckerman Undone

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

Book Having assumed the title of this very slight novel to be drawn from the famous stage direction in Hamlet, I was quite braced for some Rothian reflections on the Oedipal, with plenty of reluctant and dutiful visits to wheezed-out Jewish fathers in the wilderness of postindustrial New Jersey, and to the grisly wives and mothers who had drained them dry and made them into husks. But the reference is actually to another sort of father figure: a dead and almost-forgotten writer called E. I. Lonoff, who had been a hero and mentor to the young Nathan Zuckerman. According to Lonoff’s relict, a terminal brain-cancer patient named Amy Bellette, the great man had once instructed her to take down the following aperçu: “Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era.”

By the time that he encounters this rather ordinary valediction, which occurs in the second half of the book, Zuckerman has been revealed as highly disposed to hear it. He has been stuck on the top of a Massachusetts mountain for 11 years, seeing almost nobody and ignoring the news and, by the sound of it, not getting much work done. His prostate has turned against him in a big way, forcing him to wear Pampers and to endure the regular humiliation of feeling sodden. Returning to New York in the hope of an operation to repair his urinary arrangements (a hope that proves vain), he is geezerishly astonished by the prevalence of cell phones and by the general cultural barbarity. But this feeling of nausea and alienation is by no means enough to quell his excitement when he notices one of those apartment-swap ads in the New York Review of Books, and sees that some young couple wants a place just like his in the rural fastnesses.

Am I by any chance boring you? I promise that I have done my best to put a light skip into this summary of a weary trudge. Roth’s own method of alleviation we can see coming a mile off: The female half of the want-ad couple will turn out to be a fox, offering the ghost of a chance that Zuckerman’s flaccid and piss-soaked member can be revived. And so it proves.

More here.