The Retrun of Science Tuesday!

Some new research on the settlement of The Americas, human and otherwise...

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Bees’ Migration Holds Clues to Geologic History
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 24, 2011

Two new bee species shed light on Panama’s history as a land bridge between South and Central America, scientists are reporting.

The two sister species, one from Coiba Island in Panama and one from northern Colombia, descend from a group of stingless bees that originated in the Amazon and moved north over millions of years, eventually to Mexico.

The bees have a limited migration range, since worker bees must build a new nest before a virgin queen will move in to form a new colony.

“It’s really impossible for them to get across a water barrier," said David Roubik, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and one of the researchers who discovered the bees.

So it must have been a land connection, presumably the Panama isthmus. that allowed for this migration, he said. (The findings appear in the journal Systematic Entomology.)

( Read more... )

A Big-Game Hunt by Early North Americans
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 20, 2011

For many years, it was thought that the Clovis people were the first humans to populate North America, about 13,000 years ago.

But recently, evidence has suggested that other settlers arrived earlier, and a new study lends support to that hypothesis.

The study, in the journal Science, finds that a mastodon rib with a bone point lodged in it dates back 13,800 years.

“It’s the first hunting weapon found pre-Clovis," said the lead author, Michael R. Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University. "These people were hunting mastodons."

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And some interesting medical articles:



Mammogram’s Role as Savior Is Tested
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, October 24, 2011

Has the power of the mammogram been oversold?

At a time when medical experts are rethinking screening guidelines for prostate and cervical cancer, many doctors say it’s also time to set the record straight about mammography screening for breast cancer. While most agree that mammograms have a place in women’s health care, many doctors say widespread Pink Ribbon campaigns and patient testimonials have imbued the mammogram with a kind of magic it doesn’t have. Some patients are so committed to annual screenings they even begin to believe that regular mammograms actually prevent breast cancer, said Dr. Susan Love, a prominent women’s health advocate. And women who skip a mammogram often beat themselves up for it.

“You can’t expect from mammography what it cannot do," said Dr. Laura Esserman, director of the breast care center at the University of California, San Francisco. "Screening is not prevention. We’re not going to screen our way to a cure."

A new analysis published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine offers a stark reality check about the value of mammography screening. Despite numerous testimonials from women who believe "a mammogram saved my life," the truth is that most women who find breast cancer as a result of regular screening have not had their lives saved by the test, conclude two Dartmouth researchers, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch and Brittney A. Frankel.

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Still No Relief in Sight for Long-Term Needs
By GARDINER HARRIS and ROBERT PEAR, The New York Times, October 24, 2011

The law that many Americans had hoped would transform the nation’s dysfunctional system of long-term care for the swelling ranks of people with disabilities and dementia quietly died this month, a victim of its own weaknesses, a toxic political environment and President Obama’s re-election campaign focus on jobs.

Its demise came as an intense disappointment to people like Alison Briolat, a chemist for a pharmaceutical company, whose family is staggering under the burdens of caring for her bedridden parents.

“Everybody at work is very glib about how they’ll never be a burden to their children and how I’m such a saint," she said. "But unless you have millions sitting in the bank, there’s no other way."

Unlike the rich, who can afford to pay for services themselves, or the poor, who get help through Medicaid, the federal and state program for low-income people, many members of the middle class have to look after disabled relatives themselves, or pay someone to do it. Polls show that many people believe that Medicare, the federal health program for those 65 and older, pays for such care. Actually, Medicare stops paying nursing home bills after 100 days.

More than 10 million people in the United States already have long-term care needs, and two-thirds of the costs are paid for by government programs, mostly Medicaid. Studies estimate that unpaid family members deliver an even larger share of the care, and the cost of nursing home care averages $72,000 a year.

( Read more... )

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Cool stuff!



Smooth Desert Boulders May Be Quakes’ Work
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 24, 2011

Across the Atacama Desert in Chile are thousands of peculiar boulders that look as if they were rubbed smooth across their midsections.

How did it happen? Normally rocks become smooth by rubbing against one another in a body of water, but the Atacama is one of the driest places on the planet. Now a team led by Jay Quade, a University of Arizona geologist, has suggested an answer.

At the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis, Dr. Quade and his colleagues Peter Reiners and Kendra Murray reported that the boulders rolled down from the hills above, dislodged by earthquakes.

Over millions of years, the large boulders, each up to 10 tons, accumulated across the desert and began rubbing against one another during earthquakes, resulting in the smooth midsections.

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The Weight of Memory
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, October 24, 2011

Q. When an e-reader is loaded with thousands of books, does it gain any weight?

A. "In principle, the answer is yes," said John D. Kubiatowicz, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

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And of course, HISTORY!



Next for Newport Preservation: Gilded-Age Beeches
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, October 24, 2011

In the Gilded Age, the rich built marble palaces here, surrounding them with exotic trees they acquired with the same ardor they brought to assembling their fabulous collections of art.

Their favorites were European beeches - green, copper and weeping beeches - trees they prized for their dramatic shapes and colors. Soon the streets of Newport’s mansion district were filled with the trees.

Today, many of them tower as high as 80 feet. "They are icons of Newport, the signature trees of the Gilded Age," said John R. Tschirch, an architectural historian who directs conservation programs at the Preservation Society of Newport County, which owns many of the mansions.

But the trees are in trouble. Planted more or less all at once about 120 years ago, they are aging all at once now, a process hastened by insect and fungus infestations they can no longer fight off. Though the mansion district’s main street, Bellevue Avenue, looks almost as elegant as ever, here and there stands a skeleton tree, bereft of leaves, or a stump perhaps five feet across, all that remains of a vanished giant.

Throughout the city, people are practicing what Lillian Dick, president of the Newport Tree Society, calls "geriatric arboriculture," treating ailing beeches with pesticides, keeping people from walking on their shallow roots, or pampering them with water and fertilizer. Often the efforts fail, so in many lawns where mighty trees once grew, replacement saplings stand, as gawky as adolescents at a ball.

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How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code
By JOHN MARKOFF, The New York Times, October 24, 2011

It has been more than six decades since Warren Weaver, a pioneer in automated language translation, suggested applying code-breaking techniques to the challenge of interpreting a foreign language.

In an oft-cited letter in 1947 to the mathematician Norbert Weiner, he wrote: "One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’"

That insight led to a generation of statistics-based language programs like Google Translate - and, not so incidentally, to new tools for breaking codes that go back to the Middle Ages.

Now a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century. They described their work at a meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Ore.

Discovered in an academic archive in the former East Germany, the elaborately bound volume of gold and green brocade paper holds 75,000 characters, a perplexing mix of mysterious symbols and Roman letters. The name comes from one of only two non-coded inscriptions in the document.

Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to decipher the first 16 pages. They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.

( Read more... )

cognitive disconnect

Clark wrote this great piece on the Zanesville story, Terry Thompson, Exotic Animals and Store-bought Chicken Parts:

[UW-Madison English Grad student, Emily Clark, reflects on the recent Zanesville animal tragedy in light of her research in Critical Animal Studies.  Emily is currently completing her dissertation on the ethics of representing bodies that can not or will not speak for themselves with the support of an AAUW fellowship. In 2008-09, she co-organized the Mellon Workshop, "What is the Posthuman? " at the Center for the Humanities.]

The final paragraph of an Oct. 21, 2011 New York Times article about the Zanesville animal tragedy, in which Terry Thompson released 56 animals on the grounds of his home and then killed himself, ends with a question: “In addition to the mystery of why he let his animals loose knowing they would probably be killed, Mr. Thompson left behind another puzzle: store-bought chicken parts, which he fed his animals, were left in the driveway not far from his body. Friends said he usually fed the animals while they were in their cages .” Reading this, I thought about that 62 year-old, white, male, human body, lying on a driveway alongside chicken bodies disassembled into parts, and very soon to be joined by lion, tiger, bear and monkey bodies, and was reminded that in the end we all become “meat.” Some of us, however, are undeniably more meat than others. Those puzzling chickens, whose description as “store-bought parts” manages in less than a breath to deny them status even as animals, much less a part in the tragedy of this story, are most definitely meat, at least according to overwhelming force of our cultural logic. How bodies become “meat” and our responses to that process or event is a primary indicator of the value we ascribe to various lives. Thompson shot himself, taking his own life, an act that will certainly be mourned by many. The exotic animals he owned were shot by Muskinghum County police officers, who have expressed both sadness and outrage at the animals’ deaths and at their own role as executioners. National reactions to the story have been, similarly, sadness and outrage, along with a certain fascination and morbid voyeurism. But how did those chickens die? Is their death a tragedy? It’s difficult to imagine anyone shedding tears over reports of a “chicken part” appearing in a grocery store. But the deaths of these exotic animals, or “beasts” as one report called them, is a tragedy, or at the very least, deserves notice. Why?

Animals such as lions, tigers, bears and most primates maintain a certain kind of celebrity status. They generate human interest; crowds visit zoos to see them. Children’s movies personify them. Exotic animals are also valuable possessions, in part because they are in limited supply. Exotic animal owners collect these possessions, joining a community of other collectors, some of whom have altruistic interests. Often these collectors, like the Thompson’s, take in animals that have been abandoned by owners who lost interest in or the ability to care for the animals once they were no longer cute babies but instead teenage and mature tigers, lions, monkeys, and so on. Regardless of their motives, however, these animal owners are part of a community that exists because of the commodification of animal bodies, and that perpetuates that commodification. In some ways it is better if this commodification is overt; humans who own exotic animals with the purpose of displaying them for profit are regulated to a greater degree; humans who own exotic animals and do not display them for money, like the Thompson’s, are frequently left alone. 

Regulations, or stricter regulations, while an appealing moral to want to append to this story, would not in fact have made much of a difference. Much has been made of Terry Thompson’s recent release from prison, yet that was for weapons licensing violations and had nothing to do with the animals. Much has also been made of his supposed history of abuse, but in fact the main charges involved his working animals (horses and cows) and their apparent disregard for the boundaries between his and his neighbors’ yards, and did not involve the dozens of large animals that spent their lives living in cages on his property. In fact Thompson had recently been observed by veterinarians and experts from the nearby Columbus Zoo, who “found nothing wrong " according to county prosecutor Michael Haddox. Haddox told the Zanesville Times Recorder after the 2008 inspection: "I'm not going to tell you that the animals out there are taken care of like you or I might take care of one of our pets, but there is no one that can say their conditions are violating any statues of law. " Implicit in Haddox’s statement is the prioritization of pets; they receive the gold standard of care, a standard which does not apply to the vast majority of animals. Of course Haddox’s belief in there being a way that “you or I” would take care of our pets ignores the extremely broad spectrum of pet ownership. Domestic animals like dogs and cats may live in a caring home where they are supposedly part of the family but they may also live in situations where they are being raised to breed, to fight, to race, or simply to be an emotional resource for their owners. This last purpose is not limited to companion species like dogs and cats; Thompson’s wife is reported as feeling that the many caged animals on their property were “like her kids.” 

 It seems extremely likely that the lions, tigers, bears, and monkeys that the Thompson’s clearly cared about would perhaps have preferred not to spend their lives being drafted into the simulation of a parent-child relationship with this rural Ohio couple. The photos released of the crowds of dead animal bodies stacked up next to and on top of one another are not necessarily more disturbing than the photos of those animals who did not escape their cages, or who were tranquilized and retrieved. Staring out from behind the bars that define the overwhelming majority of their “life” it is difficult to decide whose fate is worse: the 49 animals that were killed relatively quickly, or those that remain in captivity, incarcerated. And to return to those chickens again: who among us wants to think about how they spent their lives? What cages constrained them? What did their death scene look like? 

What this story reveals, and what is being obscured by coverage that focuses on Thompson’s individual pathology (which seems troubled, at the very least), or by polemics about the need for stricter regulations for exotic animal owners (which seems practically necessary), is that this case is exemplary of the cognitive disconnect that we human animals voraciously defend regarding our relations to other animals, be they exotic possessions, household pets, and most especially store-bought chicken parts. This cognitive disconnect is made possible both by the stories we tell ourselves about those relations and by the blindness we impose on ourselves, all signs of hypocrisy, bad faith, and schizophrenia, to the contrary.