Hello,

The period for nominating entries is over.

To see a full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

To see details of the prize, go here.

Good luck to all!

The voting round closes on Monday, June 7, 2010, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

From Science:

Millions of people worldwide use acupuncture to ease a variety of painful conditions, but it’s still not clear how the ancient treatment works. Now a new study of mice shows that insertion of an acupuncture needle activates nearby pain-suppressing receptors. What’s more, a compound that boosts the response of those receptors increases pain relief—a finding that could one day lead to drugs that enhance the effectiveness of acupuncture in people.

Researchers have developed two hypotheses for how acupuncture relieves pain. One holds that the needle stimulates pain-sensing nerves, which trigger the brain to release opiumlike compounds called endorphins that circulate in the body. The other holds that acupuncture works through a placebo effect, in which the patient's thinking releases endorphins. Neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York state was skeptical about both hypotheses because acupuncture doesn’t hurt and often works only when needles are inserted near the sore site. Nedergaard instead suspected that when acupuncturists insert and rotate needles, they cause minor damage to the tissue, which releases a compound called adenosine that acts as a local pain reliever.

More here.

From Nature:

Freeloading crows start to contribute to group efforts when hardworking birds become handicapped, a study shows. Carrion crows (Corvus corone) form stable groups that share the responsibilities of breeding and caring for the young. Dominant breeders rely on helpers to feed chicks, but they also tolerate individuals that don't seem to help at all. Puzzled about the reasons for this leniency, scientists have suggested that dominants may indirectly benefit from the survival and future reproduction of lazy relatives, and that larger groups — even those filled with dallying birds — may have a lower risk of predation or be more efficient at foraging. Evolutionary biologist Vittorio Baglione at the University of Valladolid in Palencia, Spain, and colleagues now reveal an unexpected role for the laziest members of the group. They report their findings today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The research team used camouflaged video cameras to collect data on how often 61 wild crows from 17 social groups in northern Spain fed chicks. They recorded for 12 hours across three days, then trapped and clipped the wings of one breeding bird from each group and repeated the data collection. When clipped crows reduced their chick feeding by about 30%, only non-breeders intensified their care-giving efforts. What's more, the laziest birds increased their helping behaviour the most. Five out of eight crows that had previously refused to visit the nest suddenly began feeding the chicks.

More here.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on June 8, 2010. Winners of the contest, as decided by Richard Dawkins, will be announced on June 21, 2010.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

Cheers,

Abbas

P.S. If you notice any problems, such as, a nominee is missing from the list below, please leave a comment on this page. Thanks.

BEWARE: We have various independent ways of keeping track of attempts at voting multiple times, which I am deliberately not revealing publicly. Any attempts at fraud will be thoroughly investigated, and anyone caught trying to vote multiple times will be instantly disqualified.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Mesothelioma as Metaphor
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Sigmund Freud – “A Dream of Undying Fame”
3. 3 Quarks Daily: The [Non-] Theory of Psychological Testing
4. A Primate of Modern Aspect: So… Did knuckle walking evolve twice?
5. Anecdotal Economics: Slouching Toward Despotism
6. Archive Fire: Breakdown, Or a Degree of Difference
7. A Schooner of Science: Chemistry of Kissing
8. Bad Astronomy: A lunar illusion you’ll flip over
9. Cocktail Party Physics: All in the Family
10. Code for Life: GMOs and the plants we eat: neither are “natural”
11. Code for Life: The Inheritance of Face Recognition
12. Cognition and Culture: camphor – ammonia = anniseed X peppermint
13. Cosmic Variance: Free Energy and the Meaning of Life
14. Cosmic Variance: Non-Normalizable Probability Measures for Fun and Profit
15. Daylight Atheism: A Sense of Kinship
16. Denim and Tweed: Dethroning the Red Queen?
17. EcoTone: Fire ant decapitating flies take hold in Florida, one head at a time
18. Evolving Thoughts: Apes and Evolution in the News
19. Evolving Thoughts: Social dominance hierarchies
20. Facto Diem: Prime Years of Life
21. Gene Expression: Experiments in cultural transmission and human cultural evolution
22. Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP: The World is Digital
23. Health Net Navigation: Reflections of Med 2.0 Conference
24. In the Dark: The Academic Journal Racket
25. Mad in America: A Schizophrenia Mystery Solved
26. Mental Floss: Everybody Hurts (Even Crabs)
27. My Growing Passion: The Evolution of Chloroplasts
28. NeuroDojo: The princess and the perfume, a hermit crab fairy tale
29. Neuron Culture: Does depression have an upside? It’s complicated
30. Neurotopia: The Hyena Mating Game
31. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Caterpillars use bacteria to produce green islands in yellowing leaves
32. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria
33. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Pigeons outperform humans at the Monty Hall Dilemma
34. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Power breeds hypocrisy
35. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Raptorex shows that T. Rex body plan evolved at 100th the size
36. Not Exactly Rocket Science: The evolution of the past tense – how verbs change over time
37. Observations of a Nerd: Ancient Sex Scandals: Did We Get It On With Neanderthals?
38. Observations of a Nerd: Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs
39. Observations of a Nerd: Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur
40. Oscillator: Knowledge is Power
41. Pharyngula: It’s ALIVE!
42. Postcards from an intellectual odyssey: The mysterious love child of geology and biology: Hydrothermal Vents – Part 2
43. Professor Astronomy: In Defense of Wasteful Science
44. Ramblings: The Neotony Hypothesis – How did human intelligence evolve?
45. Rangle: The Science Education with makeshift equipment
46. Sandwalk: Human Y Chromosome Mutation Rates
47. SarahAskew: A blast from a black hole’s past
48. Science Cheerleader: The Lightning Grief
49. Science Life: Slot Machines: Neuroscience in Action
50. Scientific Blogging: MSL: Mars Action Hero
51. Scientific Chick: Cell phones: Curing brain diseases since 2010
52. Scientific Chick: To panic or not to panic: An interview with the Swine Flu
53. Skepsisfera: A New Dark Age
54. Small Things Considered: Paleovirology
55. Southern Fried Science: Are sandbar sharks more like bowhead whales or cod?
56. Southern Fried Science: The Cove, Dolphins, and Mercury
57. Southern Fried Science: The Menhaden of History
58. Surprising Science: The World’s Strangest Scientific Names
59. The Artful Amoeba: Killer Yeast from South America
60. The Artful Amoeba: The Seafaring Killer Bacterium
61. The Astronomist: Dark Matter Confronts Observations
62. The Atavism: Nucleotide diversity – what two new African genomes mean
63. The Chicken or the Egg: The complicated genetics of human eye color inheritance
64. The Language of Bad Physics: The Language of Science – it’s “just a theory”
65. The Loom: Linux Versus E. coli
66. The Loom: Skullcaps and Genomes
67. The Loom: The X-Woman’s Fingerbone
68. The Loom: Why Madagascar’s Tapeworms Matter–To You
69. The Primate Diaries: Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play to Reaping an Unjust Reward
70. The Science Essayist: On Seeing Yourself
71. The South Asian Idea Weblog: The World Is Too Big to Fail But…
72. The Thoughtful Animal: Does oral sex confer an evolutionary advantage? Evidence from bats
73. The Thoughtful Animal: Path Integration in the Desert Ant
74. The Thoughtful Animal: The Russian Fox Study
75. Tom Paine’s Ghost: Swimming in Ethanol’s Ethos
76. University of Oxford Science Blog: Oxford and the Royal Society’s Origins
77. Unruled Notebook: Laminar Flow Reversibility: Why Does the Blob Rewind?
78. Virology Blog: Influenza Virus in the Toilet
79. Weird Things: Why we’re stuck with dark energy
80. Why Evolution Is True: The Evolutionary Calculus of Depression

To vote, click here.

Of all the challenges Conan O’Brien faces on his nationwide “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” tour (translating his talk-show aesthetic into a live comedy performance; avoiding coming off as a sore loser), the biggest challenge might be self-inflicted: having to step onstage every night in the wake of his opening act, Reggie Watts. Watts, a star of New York’s alt-comedy scene, is the kind of comedian who tends to close shows. His sets are loud, disorienting bouts of improvised anti-comedy. He is, in many ways, the opposite of O’Brien, as both a performer and a being. O’Brien is gangly and pale; Watts is chubby and dark. O’Brien has an ironic post–Tonight Show beard and that signature little flip of orange hair; Watts has a huge asymmetrical Afro that blends into a beard as thick and dark as good-quality garden loam. O’Brien approaches comedy, famously, as a writer, spending hours preparing each moment onstage. Watts improvises his act so thoroughly that, if a hard-core fan were ever to request a favorite old bit, Watts would probably have no idea what he was talking about. Over the past seventeen years, Conan has established himself as one of America’s most stable comic voices. Watts builds his comedy out of radical instability: He switches so fluidly among different accents and personae (soprano, baritone, Californian, Cockney) that it’s hard to tell what the real person even sounds like. Conan, in other words, is a recognizable type of comedian: a subspecies of the genus Letterman. Watts is like a character Conan might have invented—half-man, half-astral-funk Muppet.

more from Sam Anderson at New York Magazine here.

The geologic record as we know it thus suggests that climate is a profoundly grander thing than energy. Energy procurement is a matter of engineering and keeping the lights on under circumstances that are likely to get more difficult as time progresses. Climate change, by contrast, is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself. The earth doesn’t include the potentially catastrophic effects on civilization in its planning. Far from being responsible for damaging the earth’s climate, civilization might not be able to forestall any of these terrible changes once the earth has decided to make them. Were the earth determined to freeze Canada again, for example, it’s difficult to imagine doing anything except selling your real estate in Canada. If it decides to melt Greenland, it might be best to unload your property in Bangladesh. The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we’re gazing into the energy future, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s beyond our power to control.

more from Robert B. Laughlin at The American Scholar here.

William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, famously asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, and proceeded to plunder them for his own missionary purposes. In his stimulating new book, Terry Eagleton seems to have asked himself why theologians should have all the best metaphors, and has proceeded to plunder them in his campaign to bring greater realism to an understanding of contemporary politics. Without repudiating the possibility of a supernatural dimension to Christian doctrine, his purpose in this book is to demonstrate how it can be used to express and interpret the human condition. Using technical theological language, his book could be described as an exercise in realised eschatology: ‘while there could no more be anyone “in” hell than there could be anyone in a material location called debt or love or despair’, hell is real enough, he says – and it’s not just other people. Central to Eagleton’s use of theology in this book is the doctrine of original sin, the only doctrine for which there is an abundance of empirical evidence. Christian anthropology, properly understood, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic – it is realistic; and in that triangulation, which is very important to Eagleton, there are the makings of a whole political philosophy. The human is a tragic animal, aware of the complexity of its own condition, yet never in complete control of it. Claiming to be free, we also know that our choices in life are largely determined by circumstances we had no part in creating.

more from Richard Holloway at Literary Review here.

Gabriel Winant in Salon:

It's never easy to make guesses about what will happen in Middle East politics. But I think we're blowing the event out of proportion — not in its moral gravity, but in its likely immediate political consequences.

First of all, the most crucial relationship Israel has is with the United States, and there isn't much indication yet of that this will alter that relationship. The hard consensus at the elite level in favor of tolerating whatever Israel wants to do rests on a soft consensus in American public opinion. Both are likely to survive this in some slightly diminished form, as they've survived the two Lebanon wars (complete with thoroughly unprovoked massacres), the small Gaza war and the formation of an Israeli government including a quasi-fascist foreign minister.

• Continue reading

Plus, even though Israeli commandos Israel boarded the ships as part of a broad, explicit, and indefensible effort to keep basic supplies out of a desperately needy Gaza, Israel's supporters are aggressively pushing a blame-the-victims counternarrative. There were clubs and knives on board the aid ships, they note, and there's now video of passengers chasing and attacking soldiers. This is likely to muddy the waters enough to keep Americans from reacting with outrage.

American conservatives are already doubling down on their attacks on the ship passengers.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The bestselling Swedish author Henning Mankell was on board a convoy of Gaza-bound aid boats stormed by Israeli forces today, resulting in the deaths of at least 10 activists and injuries to dozens of others. With the ships out of communication since the attack early this morning, it is not yet known whether he is among the injured. Mankell had decided to join the aid-delivering flotilla – also believed to include Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire – in a gesture of solidarity towards Palestinians currently living under the Israeli blockade. The Free Gaza Movement and a coalition of activist groups have been attempting to circumvent import restrictions imposed by the country since 2008.

A spokesperson for Ship to Gaza-Sweden said he had last spoken to someone on board Mankell's ship just before 5am Swedish time (4am BST). “They were telling us then about the Israeli soldiers climbing into the neighbouring ship, and they heard shooting aboard it. I was not speaking to Henning but to one of his friends. The Swedish ship was attacked a bit later, 10-15 minutes later. The whole attack was done between 4-5 o'clock Swedish time,” said Mikael Löfgren.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

When J. Craig Venter announced at a news conference the other day that he and his co-workers had created the first “synthetic cell,” he displayed the savvy graciousness of an actor accepting an Academy Award. Dr. Venter, the renowned genome wrassler and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, praised his two dozen team members and described the long years of struggle that preceded their moment of triumph. He called out important figures in the audience: his editor, his literary agent, the celebrity diet doctor Dean Ornish. And he acknowledged that none of his group’s work would have been possible without a lot of help from the parents — Mother Nature and Father Time.

After all, that stalwart pair was responsible for designing and gradually refining the real cells that brought the Venter team’s synthetic constructs to life. There is, as yet, no escaping the cell. Every past and present lodger on the twisted bristlecone tree of life is built of cells, every cell is a microcosm of life, and neither the Venter team nor anybody else has come close to recreating the cell from scratch. If anything, the new report underscores how dependent biologists remain on its encapsulated power.

More here.

The Rarest Thyme

R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American:

At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art lovers for centuries—inside the body of God.

This is the conclusion of Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo, in their paper in the May 2010 issue of the scientific journal Neurosurgery. Suk and Tamargo are experts in neuroanatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1990, physician Frank Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association deciphering Michelangelo’s imagery with the stunning recognition that the depiction in God Creating Adam in the central panel on the ceiling was a perfect anatomical illustration of the human brain in cross section. Meshberger speculates that Michelangelo surrounded God with a shroud representing the human brain to suggest that God was endowing Adam not only with life, but also with supreme human intelligence. Now in another panel The Separation of Light from Darkness (shown at left), Suk and Tamargo have found more. Leading up the center of God’s chest and forming his throat, the researchers have found a precise depiction of the human spinal cord and brain stem.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Altaf.]

Robert P. Baird in Digital Emunction:

For nearly four decades, there’s been an open ques­tion about the 1971 coup that brought dic­ta­tor Hugo Banzer Suárez to power in Bolivia: was the U.S. gov­ern­ment involved? Thanks to newly declas­si­fied doc­u­ments, we now have an answer.

Banzer was a dic­ta­tor of Bolivia from 1971-8 and a demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected pres­i­dent from 1997-2001. His three-​day coup in August 1971 was sig­nif­i­cant not only for the fight­ing that accom­pa­nied it, which left 110 dead and 600 wounded, but for the seven-​year regime that fol­lowed, one of the most repres­sive in Bolivia’s his­tory. Under Banzer’s rule, more than 14,000 Boli­vians were arrested with­out a judi­cial order, more than 8,000 were tortured—with elec­tric­ity, water, beatings—and more than 200 were exe­cuted or dis­ap­peared.

More here.

Ben Zimmer in the New York Times Magazine:

The Times Literary Supplement, the erudite British weekly, isn’t the first place you would expect to find an outbreak of cool. But for a recent stretch of a few months, its letters page was home to a protracted debate over exactly how cool got cool.

It all started in January, when Toby Lichtig reviewed “Journey by Moonlight,” a 1937 novel by the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb that has recently been translated into English by Len Rix. Lichtig gave a thumbs up to Rix’s rendering, but he complained about the text’s occasional anachronisms, particularly the use of cool “in its contemporary sense” — that is, in the “stylish” or “admirable” meaning popularized by the cool cats and chicks of the postwar era and exemplified by the all-purpose expression of appreciation or approval, “That’s cool.”

A parade of nine T.L.S. readers questioned how modern the “contemporary sense” of cool actually is, pulling out 19th- and early-20th-century quotations from writers as diverse as Wilkie Collins and T. E. Lawrence to support the idea that our current understanding of cool is not so new after all. E. D. Hirsch Jr., the American author of “Cultural Literacy,” even chipped in with a line from Abraham Lincoln (“That is cool”). The whole discussion, unfortunately, drifted into a muddle of anecdotes without any firm grip on the semantics of cool.

More here.

I am afraid of airplanes. I am afraid of boats. I am afraid of automobiles, especially as a passenger and especially at night. I am afraid of heights, and elevators, and cliff faces. I am afraid of any seat in a theater more than one away from an aisle. I am afraid of the dark, and of snapping twigs in a forest. I am afraid of murky water, of depth, currents, sharks. I am afraid of snakes. I am afraid of dogs. I am afraid of teenaged boys who travel in groups. I am afraid of anyone at any time with a gun. I am afraid of my heart and the million and one blood vessels that connect it to every part of my body, I am afraid of my freckles and pimples and glands, swollen or otherwise, and I am afraid of my brain. I monitor every scrape for signs of gangrene, and believe that every wheezing breath, whether induced by exercise or panic, is a sign of my weakness, if not of body then of mind: if I don’t die then I will kill myself, over and over and over again. There are moments when I forget to be afraid, and when I remember those moments later, I am afraid of them most of all. As I write this I sit on a moss- and fern-covered boulder in a place called Dutcher’s Notch, which is nothing more than a crossroads on the side of a mountain on the eastern edge of the Catskills.

more from Dale Peck at Threepenny Review here.

With no narrative through-line of political or literary development, Hitch 22 relies on the assumption that its readers will want to follow its author’s arbitrary recollections of family, friends, opinions and travels. He gives over whole chapters to [James] “Fenton,” “Salman” [Rushdie], and “Martin” [Amis]. But the more he writes about them, the less he seems to reveal. Fenton, he declares, was a marvellous poet who liked long walks and “the ancient buildings and antique trees and botany of Oxford.” Did that sentence really fall from the pen of Christopher Hitchens? The friend on whom he lavishes the purplest ink is Martin Amis, and there are mortifying hints that he has used Amis’s own masterpiece of memoir, Experience, as a model. Hence, perhaps, the leaps in theme and chronology, the lurches between private and public worlds, and the grizzly fumbling for comic self-exposure. Mutual masturbation at public school, or homosexual encounters at university—with future cabinet ministers in a Thatcher government—are referred to at once coyly (he withholds significant names) and tastelessly. He and his Oxford contemporary Bill Clinton, he reveals, were at different times involved “with a pair of Leckford girls who, principally Sapphic in their interests, would arrange for sessions of group frolic.”

more from Alexander Linklater at Prospect Magazine here.

In 1975, when I was a critic for the Times, an editor sat me down and told me that the paper was cutting back on reviews in favor of features. He added that there was a big future for a young man who wanted to be an investigative reporter in the art world. What story did he have in mind? The dealings of Leo Castelli. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. That year, a celebrated conviction of the dealer Frank Lloyd, for conspiring to plunder the estate of Mark Rothko, fed popular suspicions that the art world was a quasi-criminal enterprise zone, in which Castelli—who had a near-monopoly on the top artists and sold their work for prices that seemed fantastic—figured to be the gangster-in-chief. And what young journalist didn’t ache for the laurels of a Woodward or a Bernstein? I didn’t. I liked the art world, and I revered Castelli, though he made me nervous. Treated to the silken manners and melting gaze of the small, neat man from Trieste—with his unplaceable accent, which Tom Wolfe described as “soft, suave, and slightly humid, like a cross between Peter Lorre and the first secretary of a French embassy”—I felt like a farm boy with cow pies in my pockets. He sensed this, I’m convinced, and left me alone when I visited the holy of holies that was his gallery, first at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street and, after 1971, at 420 West Broadway, flashing me the odd quick knowing smile. Leo (almost no one who met him even once called him anything else) wielded custom-tailored ways of making people feel special—all people, because he crowned his Continental glamour with a faintly comic and completely endearing American-style openness.

more from Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker here.