From Scientific American:

Stem cells created from unfertilized mice eggs are successfully transplanted without immune rejection. In the future individual egg cells may serve as the source for stem cells that doctors can transplant back into people if necessary to treat nerve damage and debilitating diseases, if researchers can extend a new procedure used on mice for making transplantable stem cells.

“This is just a small step along the way, but it’s an important one,” says stem cell researcher Paul Lerou of Children’s Hospital Boston and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Lerou and his colleagues extracted stem cells from embryolike clusters of cells grown from the unfertilized eggs of female mice that the researchers coaxed into dividing. They injected the stem cells back into related mice, where they grew without being rejected by immune cells.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom (via Pharyngula):

Thanks to PZ Myers for calling attention to this superb video of Corydceps, a parasitic fungus that drives its insect host up a plant before growing a spike out of its head. Leave it to David Attenborough, master of the nature documentary, to bring the beauty of this parasite to video. I’ve seen photographs of Cordyceps before, but I never knew it made such a graceful entrance.

What’s particularly cool about Cordyceps is that it is not alone. Other parasites drive their hosts to bizarre heights. Another fungus, called Entomophthora muscae, drives houseflies and other insects upwards, climbing screen doors in some cases, before springing out of its host’s body.

In the case of Entomophthora and Cordyceps, hosts go up so that parasites can come back down again–specifically, down on potential insect hosts living on the ground. But other parasites have another direction in mind. The lancet fluke drives its insect hosts up to the tops of plants so that grazing mammals may eat them. Only in the gut of a cow or some other grazer can the flukes mature and reproduce. These creatures are like the birds, bats, and pterosaurs of the parasitic world, hitting on the same brilliant solution again and again.

(Here’s the place where I write about these parasites in my book, Parasite Rex.)

Walter Benn Michaels in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true. Everybody has a household income; everybody’s descended from somebody; everybody’s male or female or some combination of the two. But one of the things that thinking seriously about race makes possible is not just the imbrication of race with class, but the disarticulation of class from race. We live in a society where the struggle to achieve racial equality is not the most profound of the challenges that face us. A program in African-American studies that helps us to understand not just the importance of race but its limits (not just its relevance but its irrelevance) will be well worth the money Princeton plans to spend.

More here.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. in the New York Times:

Circumcision appears to reduce a man’s risk of contracting AIDS from heterosexual sex by half, United States government health officials said yesterday, and the directors of the two largest funds for fighting the disease said they would consider paying for circumcisions in high-risk countries.

The announcement was made by officials of the National Institutes of Health as they halted two clinical trials, in Kenya and Uganda, on the ground that not offering circumcision to all the men taking part would be unethical. The success of the trials confirmed a study done last year in South Africa.

AIDS experts immediately hailed the finding. “This is very exciting news,” said Daniel Halperin, an H.I.V. specialist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development, who has argued that circumcision slows the spread of AIDS in the parts of Africa where it is common.

More here.

Fron Healthbolt (via Mtanga):

Have you ever wondered why Coke comes with a smile? It’s because it gets you high. They took the cocaine out almost a hundred years ago. You know why? It was redundant.

• In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
• 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
• 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.

Even more here.

What I’ve come to cherish most of all in Blake, as I’ve grown older, is a quality that (to use his own term) I have to call prophetic. It is prophetic in two senses: it foretells, and, like the words of the Old Testament prophets, it warns, it carries a moral force. Furthermore, without being a Blakeian (except in the sense that I follow his own proclamation “I must create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”), I admit that the words of Blake have joined a very small number of other texts as the best expression of the most important things I believe. If I didn’t believe them, I wouldn’t be able to work. How I came to believe them is another story, but I seem to have been feeling my way towards the principles set out below all my life. When I needed to find words for them, I found that Blake had already said what I wanted to say more clearly and powerfully than I ever could.

. . . and shew you all alive

The world, where every particle of dust

breathes forth its joy.

more from The New Statesman here.

Arendt’s conceptual daring has been the object of admiring awe, but also of intense pro-and-con partisanship, for over a half century. First, of course, came The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Having fled Germany in 1933 at the age of twenty-seven, and later Paris, after internment in southern France, Arendt arrived as a refugee in New York and spent eight years researching a book that would eventually, through much revision in dialogue with unfolding world events, yoke the regimes of Hitler and Stalin together to illuminate the ghastly new form of government they had in common. Today, scholars agree that Arendt wasn’t the first to use the term totalitarian or to compare the two seemingly opposite systems. But her study’s momentous flow of provocative assertions and its bewildering yet somehow literarily skillful juxtaposition of abstraction with the starkest facts fixed the idea in readers’ memories. Thereafter, Arendt moved intermittently among New York intellectuals and continued to blur categories that had hitherto been seen as opposed. She was a philosopher who offered notes on the very latest world affairs; she was a sometimes-obscure, elitist champion of political freedom.

more from Bookforum here.

In a brief 1996 memoir on his artistic development, the German painter Sigmar Polke wrote what amounts to a love letter to the potato. His description of the sprouting tuber is almost worthy of Albrecht Dürer. Polke talked of going to his cellar one day, and finding there “the very incarnation of everything art critics and teachers imagine when they think of a spontaneously creative subject with a love of innovation: the potato!” He went on to ask: “Why doesn’t the public turn its attention to the potato, where ultimate fulfilment awaits?” Why indeed. Certain of Polke’s images are hymns to the potato. In 1967 he built a Kartoffelhaus, or Potato House, based on the scientific principal of Faraday’s Cage.

more from The Guardian here.

Asad Raza wrote here at 3QD about 11 Spring Street a few weeks ago. Now Randy Kennedy picks up the story at the New York Times:

Depending on your point of view, the hulking 19th-century brick building at 11 Spring Street in NoLIta, a former stable and carriage house, was either a stunning eyesore or one of the most famous canvases and lodestars in the world for urban artists. When those of the latter view heard recently that the building had been sold and would soon be gutted and converted into condominiums, they considered it the end of an era. Bearing their cameras, they began showing up at the building over the last few weeks in a kind of mournful procession.

But inside the building over those same weeks, an unlikely tribute to 11 Spring’s history — and a brief reprieve for its artwork — was also quietly taking shape.

After buying the building several months ago, the new owner-developers, Caroline Cummings and Bill Elias, wanted to find some way to bid an appropriate farewell to its past.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

THE CLASSICAL WORLD: An Epic History From Homer to Hadrian By Robin Lane Fox.Greek and Latin may long since have lost their central place in Western education, but the influence of the classical world on our own culture remains very strong. It’s there in language and law, and far more vividly present in ideas and ways of thinking about the world. Both the name and concept of democracy came from the Greeks (even if in practice ancient democracies varied massively from each other and their modern counterparts). A century ago, people were fond of comparing the British Empire to that of Rome, and nowadays it is common to look at America in the same way. The great Greek historian Thucydides would have been delighted but not surprised by such analogies; when he chronicled the struggle between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century B.C., he claimed that the events he described would be “repeated in much the same way in the future.”

In reality, the parallels are rarely so neat, and all too often people twist the past to confirm their own preconceptions.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

This previously unknown squid was among 80,000 deep-sea organisms collected from the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a chain of undersea mountains halfway between Europe and North America.

The species, dubbed Promachoteuthis sloani, was caught along with around 50 other types of squid during trawls as deep as 1.2 miles (3 kilometers) by a Census of Marine Life team. The team, from the Norwegian-led MAR-ECO program, is investigating life along the world’s ocean mountain ranges. The new species has unusually small, semi-opaque eyes and large numbers of suckers on its arms. The shape of its beak suggests the squid is a powerful chewer, MAR-ECO researchers say.

Around 60,000 of the organisms collected during the Mid-Atlantic Ridge survey were fish, which experts are working to document and identify.

More here.

Philip Gourevitch made his name reporting the genocide in Rwanda. Since taking over as editor of the Paris Review, he is bringing reportage to ‘the biggest little magazine in history’.

James Campbell in The Guardian:

In a Paris Review interview almost half a century ago, Ernest Hemingway offered a tip to the would-be writer in search of material: “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down with mercy … At least he will have the story of the hanging to go on with.”

It is safe to assume the advice was meant to be taken loosely, but Philip Gourevitch entered into the spirit more boldly than most when, in May 1995, he skipped the hanging and went straight to a genocide. “I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom,” Gourevitch writes in the opening chapter of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, his book about the “100 days” of killings of Tutsi people by the dominant Hutus in Rwanda. “At least 50 mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing … Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.” A few paragraphs on, the awestruck reporter, who had never seen dead people before, reacts angrily when his guide steps blithely on skulls as he walks across the grassy courtyard. “Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too.”

Gourevitch is now the editor of the Paris Review, “the biggest little magazine in history”, as Time magazine called it. The journal is known and admired for its consistent literary talent-spotting and the party-giving panache of its co-founder and editor George Plimpton who died in 2003.

More here.

From the New York Times Magazine:

This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine looks back on the passing year from a distinctive vantage point: that of ideas. Our editors and writers have located the peaks and valleys of ingenuity — the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good and bad, purposes serious and silly, consequences momentous and morbid. The resulting intellectual mountain range extends across a wide territory. Now it’s yours for the traversing in a compendium of 74 ideas arranged from A to Z.

The Aerotropolis

Air-Index Impressionism

The Ambient Walkman

The Ballot That Is Also a Lottery Ticket

The Beer-Gut Flask

Patrick Cockburn in CounterPunch:

Few Chinese emperors can have been as impervious to bad news from the front as President George W Bush. His officials were as assiduous as those eunuchs in Beijing 170 years ago in shielding him from bad news. But even when officials familiar with the real situation in Iraq did break through the bureaucratic cordon sanitaire around the Oval Office they got short shrift from Mr Bush. In December 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad said that the insurgency was expanding and was “largely unchallenged” in Sunni provinces. Mr Bush’s response was: “What is he, some kind of a defeatist?” A week later the station chief was reassigned.

A few days afterwards, Colonel Derek Harvey, the Defence Intelligence Agency’s senior intelligence officer in Iraq, made much the same point to Mr Bush. He said of the insurgency: “It’s robust, it’s well led, it’s diverse.” According to the US political commentator Sidney Blumenthal, the President at this point turned to his aides and asked: “Is this guy a Democrat?”

More here.

Linda Baker in Seed Magazine:

Portland’s so-called “festival street,” which opened two months ago, is one of a small but growing number of projects in the United States that seek to reclaim streets used by cars as public places for people, too. The strategy is to blur the boundary between pedestrians and automobiles by removing sidewalks and traffic devices, and to create a seamless multi-purpose urban space.

Combining traffic engineering, urban planning and behavioral psychology, the projects are inspired by a provocative new European street design trend known as “psychological traffic calming,” or “shared space.” Upending conventional wisdom, advocates of this approach argue that removing road signs, sidewalks, and traffic lights actually slows cars and is safer for pedestrians. Without any clear right-of-way, so the logic goes, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.

More here.

Emily Watson in Slate:

The Iliad and The Odyssey excite more historical curiosity than most works of literature. To be sure, the poems contain elements that are obviously mythical. In The Odyssey, there are the fabulous, ever-fertile gardens of Alcinoüs, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, or the bow that nobody but Odysseus can string. Although The Iliad has fewer monsters and marvels, its mode is hardly that of realism. Historians’ accounts of the fortunes of war do not usually include the councils of the gods, who may whisk a favored hero from battle or blind the soldiers with divine mist.

But both poems include details that apparently reflect ordinary life in archaic Greece. There are princes who co-sleep on windy verandas, royal houses with only one chair, babies frightened by war gear, princesses who do the laundry and like playing catch. Ordinary domestic life gets mixed up with mythical exploits. What, then, of the Trojan War itself? Did it ever take place at all? Modern scholarship suggests that the poems do, indeed, reflect historical events—but in a complex and unhistorical way. Rediscovering Homer—a new book by an independent scholar, Andrew Dalby—offers a concise account of the evidence, including ancient Hittite and Egyptian documents, archaic Greek art, and archaeology. His book is helpful as a more-or-less reliable guide and summation of modern Homeric historical study, which should be accessible to readers with no specialist knowledge.

More here.

When R. K. Narayan died, in the spring of 2001 at the age of ninety-four, his legacy seemed assured. Over seven decades of literary activity, he had produced fourteen novels, countless essays, and dozens of stories, the majority of his fiction set in a South Indian town that he called Malgudi. No more a feature of atlases than Trollope’s Barchester, Narayan’s Malgudi put modern Indian writing on the map. For although a handful of Indian novels had been written in English during the nineteenth century, and both Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand had found readers for their novels in English by the nineteen-thirties, it was Narayan—two generations before Salman Rushdie—who began to produce the first world-renowned body of work not rendered in any of India’s many vernacular languages. As such, there seemed little risk of hyperbole when Narayan’s obituary in the Guardian said that he was held to be “India’s greatest writer in English of the twentieth century.”

And yet if Narayan’s standing was consistently described in the most vigorous terms, assessments of his writing were less robust. His work was called “charming,” “simple,” “gentle,” “harmless,” “lightly funny,” and “benign”—applause so placid that it was unlikely to wake anyone dozing in the audience. V. S. Naipaul, in a tribute to Narayan in Time, recalled having been “immediately enchanted” by Narayan’s early work, but he seemed perplexed that Narayan, a writer of realist fiction, “was not interested in Indian politics or Indian problems”—that he did not see the India that Naipaul had dubbed “a wounded civilization.”

more from The New Yorker here.

Unless one is a poet, a war hero or a rock star, it is a mistake to die young. James Clerk Maxwell – unlike Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, the two giants of physics with whom he stands – made that mistake, dying in 1879 at the age of just 48. Physicists may be familiar with Maxwell, but most non-scientists, when they switch on their colour TVs or use their mobile phones, are unlikely to realize that he made such technology possible. After all, in 1864 he gave us “Maxwell’s equations” – voted by Physics World readers as their favourite equations of all time – from which radio waves were predicted.

Suppose Maxwell had lived one year beyond the biblical three score and ten. He would then have been alive on 12 December 1901, the day when Guglielmo Marconi, in St John’s, Newfoundland, received the first transatlantic radio signal from a transmitter in Cornwall, UK, designed by Maxwell’s former student Ambrose Fleming. Or consider relativity: mention it and everyone thinks of Einstein. Yet it was Maxwell in 1877 who introduced the term into physics, and had noticed well before then how the interpretation of electromagnetic induction was different depending on whether one considers a magnet approaching a wire loop or a loop approaching a magnet. It was from these “asymmetries that do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena” that Einstein began his work on special relativity.

more from Physics Web here (via TPM).

I must declare an interest. We owe the precarious survival of Georg Büchner’s works to the inspired perspicacity of my great-great-uncle, the Galician-Jewish novelist and publicist Karl Emil Franzos. It was he who began publishing Büchner’s writings in 1878, in the periodical Mehr Licht! – a characteristic homage to Goethe’s mythical last words. Franzos’s editorial labours began in 1875. Virtually no minutiae of textual, biographical, historical information, no particles in the history of Büchner’s reception to this day (there will be one glaring omission) seem to elude Henri and Rosemarie Poschmann, editors of these two volumes. Their edition of Büchner’s Dichtungen, Schriften, Briefe und Dokumente runs to some 2,300 pages on thin paper. Yet, so far as I can make out, they do not tell us how or why Büchner’s fragmentary, often scarcely legible “foul papers” came into Franzos’s caring hands. Nor do they elucidate the awesome clairvoyance which it must have taken at that date to recognize something of Büchner’s stature. My mother, a Viennese grande dame if ever there was, affirmed that it was an apothecary in Lemberg who drew Franzos’s attention to the material, when it ran the risk of becoming waste paper. This may be a family legend. But it would not be out of tune. Büchner’s resurrection is as miraculous as are his creations.

more from the TLS here.

From The National Geographic:

A biblical figure gets a controversial image makeover. A famous TV personality is killed by a stingray. A far-flung planet gets a demotion. These are just a few of the big stories covered this year by National Geographic News. Reload the year in nature, science, and exploration with the most popular news stories of 2006.

1. Lost Gospel Revealed; Says Jesus Asked Judas to Betray Him (April 6)
Hidden for 1,700 years, the Gospel of Judas now offers a surprising take on Christianity’s most reviled man.

More here.