Yale criticized for nixing Muslim cartoons in book

Are we being sensitive? Or bowing to the threat?

by JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN, Associated Press Writer

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Yale University has removed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from an upcoming book about how they caused outrage across the Muslim world, drawing criticism from prominent alumni and a national group of university professors.

Yale cited fears of violence.

Yale University Press, which the university owns, removed the 12 caricatures from the book "The Cartoons That Shook the World" by Brandeis University professor Jytte Klausen. The book is scheduled to be released next week.

A Danish newspaper originally published the cartoons — including one depicting Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban — in 2005. Other Western publications reprinted them.

The following year, the cartoons triggered massive protests from Morocco to Indonesia. Rioters torched Danish and other Western diplomatic missions. Some Muslim countries boycotted Danish products.

Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.

"I think it's horrifying that the campus of Nathan Hale has become the first place where America surrenders to this kind of fear because of what extremists might possibly do," said Michael Steinberg, an attorney and Yale graduate.

Steinberg was among 25 alumni who signed a protest letter sent Friday to Yale Alumni Magazine that urged the university to restore the drawings to the book. Other signers included John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, former Bush administration speechwriter David Frum and Seth Corey, a liberal doctor.

"I think it's intellectual cowardice," Bolton said Thursday. "I think it's very self defeating on Yale's part. To me it's just inexplicable."

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote in a recent letter that Yale's decision effectively means: "We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands."

In a statement explaining the decision, Yale University Press said it decided to exclude a Danish newspaper page of the cartoons and other depictions of Muhammad after asking the university for help on the issue. It said the university consulted counterterrorism officials, diplomats and the top Muslim official at the United Nations.

"The decision rested solely on the experts' assessment that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims," the statement said.

Republication of the cartoons has repeatedly resulted in violence around the world, leading to more than 200 deaths and hundreds of injuries, the statement said. It also noted that major newspapers in the United states and Britain have declined to print the cartoons.

"Yale and Yale University Press are deeply committed to freedom of speech and expression, so the issues raised here were difficult," the statement said. "The press would never have reached the decision it did on the grounds that some might be offended by portrayals of the Prophet Muhammad."

John Donatich, director of Yale University Press, said the critics are "grandstanding." He said it was not a case of censorship because the university did not suppress original content that was not available in other places.

"I would never have agreed to censor original content," Donatich said.

Klausen was surprised by the decision when she learned of it in July. She said scholarly reviewers and Yale's publication committee comprised of faculty recommended the cartoons be included.

"I'm extremely upset about that," Klausen said.

The experts Yale consulted did not read the manuscript, Klausen said. She said she consulted Muslim leaders and did not believe including the cartoons in a scholarly debate would spark violence.

Klausen said she reluctantly agreed to have the book published without the images because she did not believe any other university press would publish them, and she hopes Yale will include them in later editions. She argues in the book that there is a misperception that Muslims spontaneously arose in anger over the cartoons when they really were symbols manipulated by those already involved in violence.

Donatich said there wasn't time for the experts to read the book, but they were told of the context. He said reviewers and the publications committee did not object, but were not asked about the security risk.

Many Muslim nations want to restrict speech to prevent insults to Islam they claim have proliferated since the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, a world affairs columnist and CNN host who serves on Yale's governing board, said he told Yale that he believed publishing the images would have provoked violence.

"As a journalist and public commentator, I believe deeply in the First Amendment and academic freedom," Zakaria said. "But in this instance Yale Press was confronted with a clear threat of violence and loss of life."

(This version CORRECTS SUBS graf 17 to correct that author learned of decision in July, sted last week. Moving on general news and entertainment services.)

B

Molecular Decay Of Enamel-specific Gene In Toothless Mammals Supports Theory Of Evolution

enlarge

Extinct baleen whales, such as Aetiocetus weltoni (top; ~25 million years old) possessed teeth with enamel. Living baleen whales (bottom) lack teeth and feed on minute organisms with their brush-like baleen filters. Despite the absence of teeth, modern baleen whales retain copies of tooth-specific genes, such as enamelin, in their genomes; these unnecessary genes, which were inherited from toothed ancestors, show evidence of mutational decay, as predicted by evolutionary theory.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2009) — Biologists at the University of California, Riverside report new evidence for evolutionary change recorded in both the fossil record and the genomes (or genetic blueprints) of living organisms, providing fresh support for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

The researchers were able to correlate the progressive loss of enamel in the fossil record with a simultaneous molecular decay of a gene, called the enamelin gene, that is involved in enamel formation in mammals.

Enamel is the hardest substance in the vertebrate body, and most mammals have teeth capped with it.

Examples exist, however, of mammals without mineralized teeth (e.g., baleen whales, anteaters, pangolins) and of mammals with teeth that lack enamel (e.g., sloths, aardvarks, and pygmy sperm whales). Further, the fossil record documents when enamel was lost in these lineages.

"The fossil record is almost entirely limited to hard tissues such as bones and teeth," said Mark Springer, a professor of biology, who led the study. "Given this limitation, there are very few opportunities to examine the co-evolution of genes in the genome of living organisms and morphological features preserved in the fossil record."

In 2007, Springer, along with Robert Meredith and John Gatesy in the Department of Biology at UC Riverside, initiated a study of enamelless mammals in which the researchers focused on the enamelin gene. They predicted that these species would have copies of the gene that codes for the tooth-specific enamelin protein, but this gene would show evidence of molecular decay in these species.

"Mammals without enamel are descended from ancestral forms that had teeth with enamel," Springer said. "We predicted that enamel-specific genes such as enamelin would show evidence in living organisms of molecular decay because these genes are vestigial and no longer necessary for survival."

Now his lab has found evidence of such molecular "cavities" in the genomes of living organisms. Using modern gene sequencing technology, Meredith discovered mutations in the enamelin gene that disrupt how the enamelin protein is coded, resulting in obliteration of the genetic blueprint for the enamelin protein.

Results of the study appear in the Sept. 4 issue of the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

Darwin argued that all organisms are descended from one or a few organisms and that natural selection drives evolutionary change. The fossil record demonstrates that the first mammals had teeth with enamel. Mammals without enamel therefore must have descended from mammals with enamel-covered teeth.

"We could therefore predict that nonfunctional vestiges of the genes that code for enamel should be found in mammals that lack enamel," Springer said. "When we made our predictions, however, we did not have sequences for the enamelin gene in toothless and enamelless mammals. Since then my lab worked on obtaining these sequences so we could test our prediction."

Previous studies in evolutionary biology have provided only limited evidence linking morphological degeneration in the fossil record to molecular decay in the genome. The study led by Springer takes advantage of the hardness of enamel and teeth to provide more robust evidence for the linkage.

"The molecular counterpart to vestigial organs is pseudogenes that are descended from formerly functional genes," Springer explained. "In our research we clearly see the parallel evolution of enamel loss in the fossil record and the molecular decay of the enamelin gene into a pseudogene in representatives of four different orders of mammals that have lost enamel."

Broadly, the research involved the following steps: First, Meredith collected the DNA sequences for the enamelin gene in different mammals. Next, the researchers analyzed sequences using a variety of molecular evolutionary methods, including new approaches developed by Springer's group. Finally, the group used the results of their analyses to test previous hypotheses and generate new ones.

"Currently, we are actively engaged in deciphering the evolutionary history of other genes that are involved in enamel formation," Springer said.

Authors of the study are Springer; Meredith, a postdoctoral scholar in Springer's lab; Gatesy, an associate professor of biology; William Murphy of Texas A&M University; and Oliver Ryder of the San Diego Zoo's Institute for Conservation Research, Calif. Meredith, the first author of the research paper, performed all the lab work and, under guidance from Springer and Gatesy, ran most of the computer analyses.

The research was supported in part by an Assembling the Tree of Life grant to Springer and Gatesy from the National Science Foundation.

Death Calculator Predicts Your Odds of Kicking the Bucket

Death Calculator Predicts Your Odds of Kicking the Bucket

LiveScience Staff

LiveScience.comWed Aug 26, 4:51 pm ET

A new web site claims to give the odds on you dying next year, or for whatever period you select, based on a few simple questions.

The site, DeathRiskRankings.com, is the brainchild of researchers and students at Carnegie Mellon University. It provides answers based on publicly available data from the United States and Europe, comparing mortality risks by gender, age, cause of death and geographic region. Put your info in, and it produces the probable causes of your demise and provides insight on the timing of that unfortunate event.

The site can compare such things as the odds of death next year by breast cancer for, say, a 54-year-old Pennsylvania woman or her counterpart in the United Kingdom.

Of course the results produced by the web site speak to groups of people and cannot predict with accuracy when you might actually kick the bucket. The timing of your own end is based on many uncharted factors, from heredity to lifestyle to untimely accidents.

But noodling around with the interface can be enlightening, if not frightening.

"It turns out that the British woman has a 33 percent higher risk of breast cancer death. But for lung/throat cancer, the results are almost reversed, and the Pennsylvania woman has a 29 percent higher risk," explained Paul Fischbeck, site developer and professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon.

"Most Americans don't have a particularly good understanding of their own mortality risks, let alone ranking of their relevant risks," said David Gerard, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon who is now an associate professor of economics at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.

The researchers found that beyond infancy, the risk of dying increases annually at an exponential rate.

A 20-year-old U.S. woman has a 1 in 2,000 (or 0.05 percent) chance of dying in the next year, for example. By age 40, the risk is three times greater; by age 60, it is 16 times greater; and by age 80, it is 100 times greater (around 1 in 20 or 5 percent).

"The risks are higher, but still not that bad," Gerard said. "At 80, the average U.S. woman still has a 95 percent chance of making it to her 81st birthday."

Other results for queries about dying within the year:

For every age group, men have a much higher annual death risk than women. For 20-year-olds, the risk is 2.5 to three times greater for men. Men are much more prone to accidents, homicides and suicides, and the risk of dying from heart disease is always higher for men than women, peaking in the 50s when men are 2.5 times at greater risk of dying.

Women's cancer risks are higher than men's in their 30s and 40s.

For heart disease and cancer, U.S. blacks have a much higher death risk than U.S. whites. Overall, blacks in their 30s and 40s are twice as likely to die within the year as their white counterparts. Only for suicides, do whites consistently exceed blacks, where whites typically have two to three times greater chances of dying.

For 20-year-old males, 80 percent of their death risks are from accidents, homicides and suicides. By age 50, however, these causes make up less than 10 percent and heart disease is No. 1, accounting for more than 30 percent of all deaths.

Obesity-related death risks are much higher in the United States than in Europe. For example, the annual diabetes death risk in the United States is three times that found in northern Europe for 60 year olds.

Fischbeck and Gerard hope the site will add information to the U.S. healtchcare debate.

"We believe that this tool, which allows anyone to assess their own risk of dying and to compare their risks with counterparts in the United States and Europe, could help inform the public and constructively engage them in the debate," Fischbeck said.

· 10 Easy Paths to Self Destruction

· Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years

· Health Care Debate Based on Lack of Logic

· Original Story: Death Calculator Predicts Your Odds of Kicking the Bucket

LiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our communityto debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.

What is evolution?

by Michael Crichton (excerpt from PREY)

Most people imagined evolution to be a one-time-only process, a confluence of chance events. If plants hadn’t started making oxygen, animal life would never have evolved. If an asteroid hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs, mammals would never have taken over. If some fish hadn’t come onto land, we’d all still be in the water. And so on.

All that was true enough, but there was another side of evolution, too. Certain forms, and certain ways of life, kept appearing again and again. For example, parasitism-one animal living off another-had evolved independently many times in the course of evolution. Parasitism was a reliable way for life-forms to interact; and it kept reemerging.

A similar phenomenon occurred with genetic programs. They tended to move toward certain tried-and-true solutions. The programmers talked about it in terms of peaks on a fitness landscape; they could model it as three-dimensional false-color mountain range. But the fact was that evolution had its stable side, too.

And one thing you could count on was that any big, hot broth of bacteria was likely to get contaminated by a virus, and if that virus couldn’t infect the bacteria, it would mutate to a form that could. You could count on that the way you could count on finding ants in your sugar bowl if you left it out on the counter too long.

Considering that evolution has been studied for a hundred and fifty years, it was surprising how little we knew about it. The old ideas about survival of the fittest had gone out of fashion long ago. Those views were too simpleminded. Nineteenth-century thinkers saw evolution as “nature red in tooth and claw,” envisioning a world where strong animals killed weaker ones. They didn’t take into account that the weaker ones would inevitably get stronger, or fight back in some other way. Which of course they always do.

The new ideas emphasized interactions among continuously evolving forms. Some people talked of evolution as an arms race, by which they meant an ever-escalating interaction. A plant attacked by a pest evolves a pesticide in its leaves. The pest evolves to tolerate the pesticide, so the plant evolves a stronger pesticide. And so on.

Others talked about this pattern as coevolution, in which two or more life-forms evolved simultaneously to tolerate each other. Thus a plant attacked by ants evolves to tolerate the ants, and even begins to make special food for them on the surface of its leaves. In return the resident ants protect the plant, stinging any animal that tries to eat the leaves. Pretty soon neither the plant nor the ant species can survive without the other.

This pattern was so fundamental that many people thought it was the real core of evolution. Parasitism and symbiosis were the true basis for evolutionary change. These processes lay at the heart of all evolution, and had been present from the very beginning. Lynn Margulies was famous for demonstrating that bacteria had originally developed nuclei by swallowing other bacteria.

By the twenty-first century, it was clear that coevolution wasn’t limited to paired creatures in some isolated spinning dance. There were coevolutionary patterns with three, ten, or n life-forms, where n could be any number at all. A cornfield contained many kinds of plants, was attacked by many pests, and evolved many defenses. The plants competed with weeds; the pests competed with other pests; larger animals ate both the plants and the pests. The outcome of this complex interaction was always changing, always evolving.

And it was inherently unpredictable.

Oldest Animal Fossils Found in Lakes, Not Oceans

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090727/sc_livescience/oldestanimalfossilsfoundinlakesnotoceans

Charles Q. Choi

Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.comMon Jul 27, 5:12 pm ET

Conventional wisdom has it that the first animals evolved in the ocean.

Now researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China have found that the first animal fossils are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not in marine sediments as commonly assumed.

These new findings not only raise questions as to where the earliest animals were living, but what factorsdrove animals to evolve in the first place.

For some 3 billion years, single-celled life forms such as bacteria dominated the planet. Then, roughly 600 million years ago, the first multi-cellular animals appeared on the scene, diversifying rapidly.

The oldest known animal fossils in the world are preserved in South China's Doushantuo Formation. These fossil beds have no adult specimens - instead, many of the fossils appear to be microscopic embryos.

"Our first unusual finding in this region was the abundance of a clay mineral called smectite," said researcher Tom Bristow, now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "In rocks of this age, smectite is normally transformed into other types of clay. The smectite in these South China rocks, however, underwent no such transformation and have a special chemistry that, for the smectite to form, requires specific conditions in the water - conditions commonly found in salty, alkaline lakes."

The researchers collected hundreds of rock samples from several locations in South China. All their analyses suggest these rocks were not marine sediments.

"Moreover, we found smectite in only some locations in South China, and not uniformly as one would expect for marine deposits," Bristow said. "Taken together, several lines of evidence indicated to us that these early animals lived in a lake environment."

This discovery raises questions as to how and why animals appeared when they did.

"It is most unexpected that these first fossils do not come from marine sediments," said researcher Martin Kennedy, a geologist at the University of California at Riverside.

"Lakes are typically short-lived features on the Earth's surface, and they are not nearly as consistent environments as oceans are," he explained. "So it's surprising that the first evidence of animals we find is associated with lakes, which are far more variable environments than the ocean. You'd expect the first appearance of animals to be in the most conservative, stable environments we could imagine."

It remains possible, Kennedy noted, that animal fossils of similar or older age exist that remain to be found that are marine in origin. However, at the very least, this work suggests "that animals had already taken on the ability to deal with the environmental fluctuations one sees in lake environments," he said. "That suggests that their evolutionary response is much more rapid that I would have supposed, and that the earliest animals were far more diverse than imagined."

If animals did first develop in lakes, one aspect of lake environments that could have spurred on their evolution is how much easier it is for air to percolate through them, given how much shallower they typically are than the ocean.

"The most popular explanation for the evolution of animals has to do with the increase in oxygen in Earth's atmosphere at that time," Kennedy told LiveScience. "It's possible that lakes were the first to benefit from that increase in oxygen."

The scientists detailed their findings online July 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

· Greatest Mysteries: How Did Life Arise on Earth?

· Image Gallery: Dinosaur Fossils

· Image Gallery Darwin on Display

· Original Story: Oldest Animal Fossils Found in Lakes, Not Oceans

LiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our communityto debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.

The Man in the Mirror -

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/the-man-in-the-mirror.html

By James Howard Kunstler
on June 29, 2009 6:01 AM

As America entered the horse latitudes of summer, befogged in a muffling stillness on deceptively calm seas, we were distracted for a while by visions of a pale death angel moonwalking across the deck of collective consciousness. Eerie parallels resound between the sordid demise of pop singer Michael Jackson and the fate of the nation.

Like the United States, Michael Jackson was spectacularly bankrupt, reportedly in the range of $800-million, which is rather a lot for an individual. Had he lived on a few more years, he might have qualified for his own TARP program -- another piece of expensive dead-weight down in the economy's bilges -- since it is our established policy now to throw immense sums of so-called "money" at gigantic failing enterprises (while millions of ordinary citizens wash overboard, without so much as a life-preserver). Anyway, Michael Jackson was on the receiving end of one huge bank loan after another long after his pattern of profligacy was set and obvious. They threw money at him for the same reason that the federal government throws money at entities like CitiBank: the desperate hope that some miracle will allow debt servicing to resume. Michael could burn through $50-million in half a year. It didn't seem to affect his credibility as a borrower. When his heart stopped last week, he was living in a Hollywood mansion that rented for several hundred thousand dollars a month. You wonder how the landlord cashed those checks.
Like the USA, Michael Jackson was a has-been. He hadn't recorded a song worth listening to in over two decades. He had done almost nothing but spin his wheels, hop around the globe from one place to another at enormous expense, and make himself available for award ceremonies to stoke his ego (and give advertisers a reason to promote some televised award show). He existed strictly on image, an anorectic figure nourished by moonbeams of attention, famous for saying that he loved his worshippers when the truth was he merely sucked the life out of them. In his last years, he even looked a bit like Nosferatu, the personification of the un-dead, and his fascination with ghouls was the basis for his biggest hit way back in the last century. A zombie nation deserves a zombie mascot.

He was a poseur, vamping in weird military outfits as though he were a five-star general in the Honduran army, or a character from a melodrama by the reprobate Jean Genet. He once materialized during halftime at the Superbowl in a shower of sparks, thrilling the multitudes while grabbing and stroking his sex organs, as though that was a heroic activity -- and indeed the nation seemed to emulate him as its culture became dedicated more and more to acting out masturbation fantasies. America was a fat man jerking off on the sofa watching a vampire of no particular sex vogue deliriously on the boob tube.

More than once the authorities tried to pin charges of child molestation on him for suspicious activities at his boy-trap, Neverland Ranch, with its carnival rides, private zoo, video game galleries, and inexhaustible supplies of sugary treats. The first time he settled with the alleged victim's family for $22-million. They just walked away with the loot and happily shut up. The second time, he moonwalked out of a court-of-law while weeks later jurors mysteriously went on TV to say, well, they did kind of think after-the-fact that he really did those things he was accused of, but, you know.... The defendant himself behaved as though his trial were a TV celebrity challenge show on another planet, arriving on one occasion twenty minutes late in pajamas with some lame excuse about a backache. He spent the last years of his life wandering a few steps ahead of his creditors, gulling concert promoters into "comeback" schemes (with walking-around money up front), and with three bought-and-paid-for children, obviously not his own, for consolation.

When he dropped dead last week, the nation's morbidly maudlin response suggested a cover story for the relief of being rid of him and all the embarrassment he provoked. One CNN reporter called him a genius the equal of Mozart. That's a little like calling Rachel Maddow the reincarnation of Eleanor Roosevelt. A nation addicted to lying to itself tells itself fairy tales instead of facing a pathology report. Yet, like Michael Jackson, the undertone of horror story still pulses darkly in the background. The little boy who grew up to be the simulation of a girl was really a werewolf. The nation that defeated manifest evil in World War Two woke up one day years later to find itself stripped of its manhood, mentally enslaved to cheap entertainments, and hostage to its own grandiosity. Maybe in grieving so exorbitantly over this freak America is grieving for itself. All the loose talk about "love" from the media and the fans gives off the odor of self-love. America is "the man in the mirror," the gigantic, floundering Narcissus, sailing into the stormy seas of history.

Argentine glacier advances despite global warming

Global warming? What global warming?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By JEANNETTE NEUMANN, Associated Press Writer Jeannette Neumann, Associated Press Writer 2 hrs 38 mins ago

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier is one of only a few ice fields worldwide that have withstood rising global temperatures.

Nourished by Andean snowmelt, the glacier constantly grows even as it spawns icebergs the size of apartment buildings into a frigid lake, maintaining a nearly perfect equilibrium since measurements began more than a century ago.

"We're not sure why this happens," said Andres Rivera, a glacialist with the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, Chile. "But not all glaciers respond equally to climate change."

Viewed at a safe distance on cruise boats or the wooden observation deck just beyond the glacier's leading edge, Perito Moreno's jagged surface radiates a brilliant white in the strong Patagonian sun. Submerged sections glow deep blue.

And when the wind blows in a cloud cover, the 3-mile-wide (5 kilometer) glacier seems to glow from within as the surrounding mountains and water turn a meditative gray.

Every few years, Perito Moreno expands enough to touch a point of land across Lake Argentina, cutting the nation's largest freshwater lake in half and forming an ice dam as it presses against the shore.

The water on one side of the dam surges against the glacier, up to 200 feet (60 meters) above lake level, until it breaks the ice wall with a thunderous crash, drowning the applause of hundreds of tourists.

"It's like a massive building falling all of the sudden," said park ranger Javier D'Angelo, who experienced the rupture in 2008 and 1998.

The rupture is a reminder that while Perito Moreno appears to be a vast, 19-mile-long (30 kilometer) frozen river, it's a dynamic icescape that moves and cracks unexpectedly.

"The glacier has a lot of life," said Luli Gavina, who leads mini-treks across the glacier's snow fields.

Are You Suffering From Affluenza?

By Alexander Green

In his 1997 film Affluenza, producer John de Graaf claims there is a virus loose in society that threatens our wallets, our friendships, our families, our communities and our environment.

Each year it costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, wastes our precious time, ruins our health and adversely affects our quality of life.

What is affluenza, exactly?

De Graaf defines it as “a painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”

He argues that too many of us are working ourselves to death to accumulate an endless array of goods and services we don’t really need.

This creates stress. Stress, in turn, creates health problems, including headaches, stomachaches, ulcers, depression, even heart attacks.

Medical research shows that people in industrial nations lose more years from disability and premature death due to stress-related illnesses than other ailments.

Affluenza drives up health care costs, tears at the fabric of families, and shortens our stay on the right side of the daisies.

Before you mistake me for the national scold, however, let me make a couple of confessions.

First off, I’m a libertarian. I realize that personal consumption – roughly two-thirds of all economic

activity – drives the economy. Moreover, if someone really wants to devote his life to accumulating

more, more, more, that’s his right.

As John Maynard Keynes put it, “It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens.”

(Personally, though, I’ve never met anyone who obtained lasting satisfaction with a Visa or MasterCard.)

Secondly, I’m not immune to the occasional bout of affluenza myself.

I rarely pass a bookstore or record shop, for example, without poking my head inside. And whenever I leave Barnes & Noble, the clerk at the register always asks the same thing:

“Would you like us to double-bag that for you?”

We all have to consume to survive, of course. But Madison Avenue is right there beside us, aiding us, abetting us... giving us a not-so-subtle push.

Marketers want to convince us that our lives would be so much better if we would only just drive this car, drink this light beer, use this antiwrinkle cream or fly these friendly skies.

Every day we are bombarded: billboards, Internet banners, TV and radio commercials, newspaper and magazine ads. Go to a busy public beach and single-engine planes criss-cross the sky trailing banners, “Joe’s Crab Shack: All You Can Eat $17.99” or “2-for-1 Drinks All Day at Bennigan’s.”

Advertisers are getting more sophisticated, too. The new science of neuromarketing is designed to help retailers unlock the subconscious thoughts, feelings and desires that drive our purchasing decisions.

Marketers now strive to create products that actually stimulate the production of dopamine.

Today psychologists routinely talk about “retail therapy,” where consumers shop just to get a shortterm

high to ward off boredom or the blues.

How do we resist?

First by recognizing our limits, both financial and material. After all, it doesn’t really take a lot of money to meet our needs.

Many of the other things we covet don’t hold our attention long. Recognize that and you may conclude that they aren’t worth the time and trouble it takes to acquire them.

As the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness ... He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

A well-lived life cannot just be about competing against others for resources. He who dies with the most toys doesn’t win.

As Laurence G. Boldt writes in “The Tao of Abundance”:

“The psychology of plenty differs fundamentally from the psychology of scarcity. If I view my life as a struggle to sustain my existence in an unfriendly world, then intimidation, competitiveness, and greed make sense. If I view life itself as a gift, attitudes of praise, thanksgiving and responsibility naturally follow.”

It’s only human to want to better our material conditions, of course. But the relentless quest for more often undermines our quality of life. Successful lives are built not bought. And an overconsumptive

lifestyle only limits our choices.

As Russell said, “It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”

Curing affluenza means dropping the chains of mindless consumption. It means recognizing that lives based on having are less free than those based on doing or being. Wise men and women have known this for millennia.

In 400 B.C., the Greek philosopher Diogenes taught that no man needed much – and that we shouldn’t complain of material loss. When he went to Athens with a slave named Manes, Manes ran off. Diogenes shrugged off his ill fortune saying, “If Manes can live without Diogenes, why not Diogenes without Manes?”

In “It’s All in Your Head,” Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine relate another story about the

famous ascetic:

“Diogenes is sitting on the side of the road eating his simple meal of porridge. A court philosopher sees him and comes over to chat. ‘You know, Diogenes, if you learned to play up to the king like the rest of us, you wouldn’t have to live on porridge.’ Diogenes doesn’t even glance up from his bowl; he just says, ‘If you learned to live on porridge, you wouldn’t have to play up to the king.’”

Reasonable, affordable consumption means less struggle, less debt, less hassles, less stress. It also grants us more time – and with it the opportunity for new experiences, better relationships

and greater personal freedom.

As Oscar Wilde said, “The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man

is.”

What Matters Most

by Alexander Green

Thanksgiving, Anne, a family friend, looked and sounded great.

Today she is dying of cancer. In the last few weeks she has lost her eyesight. Half her face is paralyzed. And she has refused more chemo, describing the results of last week’s MRI as “just horrible.”

When I walked into Hallmark, I told the clerk I was looking for a special kind of card.

“It’s for someone who isn’t well,” I said. “And she knows she isn’t going to get better.”

The clerk nodded, said she knew just what I needed and led me to a special section with headings like “Hope,” “Strength,” and “Serious Illness.”

Standing there reading the messages in those cards, thinking of all the grief-stricken people out there selecting them – or (worse) receiving them – is enough to make you want to sob.

I finally settled on, “May you gather strength from the love of those around you,” scrawled a note about how I’d love to stop in if she felt like visitors, and dropped it in the mailbox.

When he began teaching at Cornell, the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov said he knew just two things: One, life is beautiful, and two, life is sad. The reason life is sad, he said, is because it’s going to end.

Yet death, our most unwelcome visitor, can also do us a favor. It can remind us, the mourners, what’s most important.

As Jack Kerouac observed, “Pondering on death, with or without wine – brings enlightenment.”

Too many of us spend our days moving with the hustling crowd, mindlessly doing more or less what everyone else is doing, acting like we have all the time in the world. That is, until we get a wake-up call and learn that someone close to us has had a bad accident or is suddenly very ill.

Increased awareness of our own mortality needn’t lead to fear and anxiety, however. We can use it as an opportunity to answer the question posed by poet Mary Oliver, “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Do you know? Or are you so consumed with projects, deadlines and responsibilities that you haven’t given it much thought lately?

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. And this realization is a good thing.

Viewed from the prospect of eternity, we are really no more durable than the mayfly. Many spend their time just as frivolously. Others are bored. As author Susan Ertz quipped, Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

Greek mythology, on the other hand, gives us the story of Tithonus, a Trojan who was granted immortality by the gods but grew to hate his life.

Whatever path he chose, he could always take it later. Whatever options he faced, ultimately he could have them all. Time became meaningless, oppressive even. He lost his ardor for life. In the end, he petitions Zeus to release him from eternity. He begs for mortality so that, once again, his choices might matter.

Each of us has been granted an incomparable gift, a brief stay on this little blue ball. How will you spend it? To what end will you use it?

These are the most important questions we can ask ourselves. And the answers can be read in the way we live our lives.

“Death is not the greatest loss,” Norman Cousins warned. “The greatest loss is what dies
inside us while we live.”

Doctors generally observe that terminal patients who have truly lived their lives – who
have strived and loved and taken risks – generally have an easier time with their dying.

Patients in nursing homes routinely express more regret for the chances they never took than the ones that worked out poorly.

Singer Bono, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and granted numerous awards for his
activism for world poverty, said in a recent interview, “I’m tired of dreaming. I’m into doing at
the moment.”

He is someone who has chosen to live life on his own terms and in service to the values that
matter to him most. It is unlikely that you or I will ever accomplish as much. But that’s okay.

For most of us, born without the immense talents of a da Vinci or Beethoven or Lincoln, the
true measure of our lives is not what we achieve – and certainly not what we accumulate – but rather who we are, the number of people we touch, and what is grieved in our absence.

As the novelist E.M. Forster observed, “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves
him.”

Robot scientists can think for themselves

Looks like Isaac Asimov is a true visionary.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By Ben Hirschler Ben Hirschler – Thu Apr 2, 2:30 pm ET

LONDON (Reuters) – Watch out scientists -- you may be replaced by a robot.

Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.

Such robo-scientists could be put to work unraveling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modeling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.

For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.

At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.

It is the world's first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery -- in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker's yeast.

"On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we've checked that it's got the results correct," King said in an interview.

"People have been working on this since the 1960s. When we first sent robots to Mars, they really dreamt of the robots doing their own experiments on Mars. After 40 or 50 years, we've now got the capability to do that."

Their next robot, Eve, will have much more brain power and will be put to work searching for new medicines.

King hopes the application of intelligent robotic thinking to the process of sifting tens of thousands of compounds for potential new drugs will be particularly valuable in the hunt for treatments for neglected tropical diseases like malaria.

King published his findings in the journal Science, alongside a second paper from Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt of Cornell University in New York, who have developed a computer program capable of working out the fundamental physical laws behind a swinging double pendulum.

Just by crunching the numbers -- and without any prior instruction in physics -- the Cornell machine was able to decipher Isaac Newton's laws of motion and other properties.

Lipson does not think robots will make scientists obsolete any day soon, but believes they could take over much of the routine work in research laboratories.

"One of the biggest problems in science today is finding the underlying principles in areas where there are lots and lots of data," he told reporters in a conference call. "This can help in accelerating the rate at which we can discover scientific principles behind the data."

(Additional reporting by Stuart McDill; editing by Maggie Fox and Tim Pearce)

Gene-engineered viruses build a better battery

Green energy is the way to go, this should be the next internet. Not NanoTech.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor - Thu Apr 2, 2009 4:25PM EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

Researchers who have trained a tiny virus to do their bidding said on Thursday they made it build a more efficient and powerful lithium battery.

They changed two genes in the virus, called M13, and got it to do two things: build a shell made out of a compound called iron phosphate, and then attach to a carbon nanotube to make a powerful and tiny electrode.

Such an electrode could conceivably make more powerful memory devices such as MP3 players or cellular telephones, and are far more environmentally friendly than current battery technologies, said Angela Belcher, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology materials scientist who led the research.

"It has some of the same capacity and energy power performance as the best commercially available state-of-the-art batteries," Belcher said in a telephone interview.

"We could run an iPod on it for about three times as long as current iPod batteries. If we really scale it, it would be used in a car," she added. Such scaling is not even close, Belcher cautioned.

The technology is inherently green because it involves a live virus. "We are having organisms make the materials for us," Belcher said. "We are confined to temperatures and solvents -- water -- that organisms can live in. It's a clean technology. We can't do anything that kills our organisms."

Reporting in the journal Science, Belcher's team said their genetically engineered viruses were designed to grow shells of amorphous iron phosphate.

The material is generally not a good conductor, but makes a useful battery material when patterned at the nanoscale -- a microscopic molecular scale.

Lithium batteries are powerful and light, but they do not release their electrons very quickly. The virus-made material did, however. This translates into more battery power.

"My students hate it when I say we sit back and let them (the viruses) do the work. We put a lot of work in too," Belcher said.

"But once you have the right genetic sequence and have the right proteins then you just put them in solution with water and ions and they template the battery in the same way an abalone templates a shell. They build little shells around themselves."

The team is already working on a second-generation battery using materials with higher voltage and electrical capacity, such as manganese phosphate and nickel phosphate, said Belcher. This new technology could go into commercial production, she said.

(Editing by Eric Beech)

Dinosaur find raises debate on feather evolution

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter, Ap Science Writer Wed Mar 18, 6:15 pm ET

NEW YORK – A small dinosaur that once roamed northeastern China was covered with a stiff, hairlike fuzz, a discovery that suggests feathers began to evolve much earlier than many researchers believe — maybe even in the earliest dinosaurs. Scientists had previously identified feathers and so-called "dinofuzz" in theropods, two-legged meat-eaters that are widely considered the ancestors of birds.

But the Chinese creature is only distantly related to theropods, and the hollow filaments of its fuzz may be primitive feathers, say the scientists who report the find in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Dinosaurs split into two branches early on, more than 235 million years ago. Theropods belong to one branch, and the Chinese creature is a primitive member of the other branch. Maybe both branches inherited primitive feathers from common ancestors before or at the split — in other words, the first dinosaurs, the researchers suggest.

Some other experts said they're not ready to buy that argument.

No fossils from the first dinosaurs are known, while the fossil record for feathers goes back about 150 million years.

The dinosaur find is reported by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, both in Beijing, and elsewhere.

The creature lived sometime between 144 million and 99 million years ago. It walked on two legs and had a long tail. The discovered specimen — apparently not an adult — measured only about 28 inches long overall. It's not clear what the creature ate with its fang-like teeth.

The study authors named the creature Tianyulong confuciusi. The name comes from the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in Shangdong Province, which houses the specimen, and the philosopher Confucius.

Tianyulong's remains, laid out on the surface of a stone slab, show three patches of hair-like fuzz. The filaments were generally about 1.5 inches long, but those on the tail were a bit more than 2 inches long.

While the study authors argue that primitive feathers may have been found in the earliest dinosaurs, they suggest that some later species lost them during evolution.

In a Nature commentary, Lawrence Witmer of the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine said it's not yet certain whether Tianyulong's filaments are part of the evolution of feathers.

"Perhaps the only clear conclusion that can be drawn ... is that little Tianyulong has made an already confusing picture of feather origins even fuzzier," Witmer wrote.

Mark Norell, a prominent dinosaur researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said he'd already believed that the first dinosaurs had primitive feathers. He believes most dinosaurs had something related to feathers, but that lack of preservation has hidden that in the fossil record.

But Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who has written about the origin of feathers, said he doubts that feathers evolved outside of theropods and birds. Interpreting Tianyulon's filaments as early feathers is questionable because of their appearance, he said.

Moreover, Chiappe said, given the apparent lack of feathers in many dinosaur species, "I don't see any reason why you're going to conclude that feathers must have originated before the origin of dinosaurs or (at) about the same time."

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On the Net:

Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature

Italy dig unearths female 'vampire' in Venice

By ARIEL DAVID, Associated Press Writer Ariel David, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 13, 4:34 pm ET

ROME – An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire.

The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancient vampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythical bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseases spread and what happens to bodies after death, experts said.

The well-preserved skeleton was found in 2006 on the Lazzaretto Nuovo island, north of the lagoon city, amid other corpses buried in a mass grave during an epidemic of plague that hit Venice in 1576.

"Vampires don't exist, but studies show people at the time believed they did," said Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist at Florence University who studied the case over the last two years. "For the first time we have found evidence of an exorcism against a vampire."

Medieval texts show the belief in vampires was fueled by the disturbing appearance of decomposing bodies, Borrini told The Associated Press by telephone.

During epidemics, mass graves were often reopened to bury fresh corpses and diggers would chance upon older bodies that were bloated, with blood seeping out of their mouth and with an inexplicable hole in the shroud used to cover their face.

"These characteristics are all tied to the decomposition of bodies," Borrini said. "But they saw a fat, dead person, full of blood and with a hole in the shroud, so they would say: 'This guy is alive, he's drinking blood and eating his shroud.'"

Modern forensic science shows the bloating is caused by a buildup of gases, while fluid seeping from the mouth is pushed up by decomposing organs, Borrini said. The shroud would have been consumed by bacteria found in the mouth area, he said.

At the time however, what passed for scientific texts taught that "shroud-eaters" were vampires who fed on the cloth and cast a spell that would spread the plague in order to increase their ranks.

To kill the undead creatures, the stake-in-the-heart method popularized by later literature was not enough: A stone or brick had to be forced into the vampire's mouth so that it would starve to death, Borrini said.

That's what is believed to have happened to the woman found on the Lazzaretto island, which was used as a quarantine zone by Venice. Aged around 60, she died of the plague during the epidemic that also claimed the life of the painter Titian.

Much later, someone jammed the brick into her mouth when the grave was reopened. Borrini said that marks and breaks left by blunt instruments on several among more than 100 skeletons found by the archaeologists show that the grave was reused in a later epidemic.

Such a reconstruction of events is plausible, as is the link to the superstitions about "shroud-eaters," said Piero Mannucci, the vice president of the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology.

"Maybe a priest or a gravedigger put the brick in her mouth, which is what was normally done in such cases," Mannucci said.

The anthropologist, who did not take part in Borrini's research, said that at a time when bacteria were unknown, such superstitions were a way for the terrified population to explain the waves of plague epidemics that killed millions during the Middle Ages. Jews were also often accused of spreading the disease.

Borrini said the discovery shows that vampires in popular culture were originally quite different from the elegant, aristocratic blood-drinker depicted in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula" and in countless Hollywood revisitations.

"The real vampire of tradition was different," he said. "It was just a decomposing body."

NASA telescope will hunt for Earth-like planets

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn, Ap Aerospace Writer Thu Mar 5, 4:45 pm ET

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA will soon be on the lookout for possible Earths in one faraway corner of the galaxy. A planet-hunting spacecraft, named Kepler after the German 17th -century astrophysicist, is scheduled to rocket away from Cape Canaveral late Friday night. Excellent launch weather is forecast.

The telescope will spend 3 1/2 years staring at roughly 100,000 stars, measuring their brightness and any winks in the light that might signify orbiting planets.

"We certainly won't find E.T., but we might find E.T.'s home by looking at all of these stars," Bill Boruki, Kepler's principal scientist, said Thursday.

Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for science, said Kepler is not just another science mission.

"It very possibly could tell us that Earths are very, very common, that we have lots of neighbors out there, or it could tell us that Earths are really, really, really rare," Weiler said at a press conference.

"Perhaps we're the only Earth. I think that would be a very bad answer because I, for one, don't want to live in an empty universe where we're the best there is. That's a scary thought to many of us."

Kepler will be scouting for Earth-size planets circling stars in the so-called habitable or Goldilocks zone. That's where planets are neither too close nor too far from their star, and where conditions could be ripe for liquid water on the surface. "Planets that are not too hot, not too cold, but just right," according to Boruki.

Once launched, Kepler will trail the Earth in an orbit around the sun. It will peer continuously at a large patch of sky near the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, looking for any winks against the brightness of the stars that could indicate passing planets.

The stars to be observed by Kepler are between 600 and 3,000 light years away.

Project manager Jim Fanson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said the level of precision needed to measure those winks is incredibly high.

"It's akin to measuring a flea as it creeps across the headlight of an automobile at night," Fanson said.

Over the past decade and a half, more than 300 planets have been found to be orbiting stars outside our solar system. But these are largely gas giants like Jupiter. Kepler is designed to zero in on smaller, rocky, Earth-like planets.

Scientists stress that Kepler — 15 feet high and 9 feet in diameter — will not be looking for life but rather potentially habitable planets. The mission costs $600 million, from start to finish.

The launch comes on the heels of a failed flight of a NASA science satellite from California, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, just over a week ago. It used a different rocket than the one for Kepler; nonetheless, engineers pored over every single detail to find any similarities and delayed Kepler's launch by one day.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090305/ap_on_sc/planet_hunter

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On the Net:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

Indonesia's psychedelic fish named a new species

By ROBIN McDOWELL, Associated Press Writer Robin Mcdowell, Associated Press Writer Sat Feb 28, 10:10 am ET

JAKARTA, Indonesia – A funky, psychedelic fish that bounces on the ocean floor like a rubber ball has been classified as a new species, a scientific journal reported. The frogfish — which has a swirl of tan and peach zebra stripes that extend from its aqua eyes to its tail — was initially discovered by scuba diving instructors working for a tour operator a year ago in shallow waters off Ambon island in eastern Indonesia.

The operator contacted Ted Pietsch, lead author of a paper published in this month's edition of Copeia, the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, who submitted DNA work identifying it as a new species.

The fish — which the University of Washington professor has named "psychedelica" — is a member of the antennariid genus, Histiophryne, and like other frogfish, has fins on both sides of its body that have evolved to be leg-like.

But it has several behavioral traits not previously known to the others, Pietsch wrote.

Each time the fish strike the seabed, for instance, they push off with their fins and expel water from tiny gill openings to jet themselves forward. That, and an off-centered tail, causes them to bounce around in a bizarre, chaotic manner.

Mark Erdman, a senior adviser to the Conservation International's marine program, said Thursday it was an exciting discovery.

"I think people thought frogfishes were relatively well known and to get a new one like this is really quiet spectacular. ... It's a stunning animal," he said, adding that the fish's stripes were probably intended to mimic coral.

"It also speaks to the tremendous diversity in this region and to fact that there are still a lot of unknowns here — in Indonesia and in the Coral Triangle in general."

The fish, which has a gelatinous fist-sized body covered with thick folds of skin that protect it from sharp-edged corals, also has a flat face with eyes directed forward, like humans, and a huge, yawning mouth.

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On the Net:

University of Washington: http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID47496