Sarah Lyall in The Times of London:

In a nation of the chronically ill-at-ease, alcohol is the lubricant that eases the pain of frightening social encounters, an essential prelude to relaxation, to joie de vivre and even, at times, to rudimentary conversation. But because Britain has what is known as an “ambivalent alcohol culture” – which means the British haven’t worked it out completely – they can take their drinking too far, too fast, with corrosive consequences to health, happiness and productivity.

I have many British friends who in America would be considered functioning alcoholics – the equivalent of 1950s Cheeveresque businessmen from suburban Connecticut who greeted the end of the workday with a couple of predinner martinis before moving on to wine and whisky. Heavy drinking is part of the fabric of their lives and it would be considered rude to comment on it.

I had come from New York, a city where this kind of drinking is reserved for the weekend and drinking to the point of insensibility is an activity only for the very young or the very likely to be headed for AA. By contrast, Britons seemed to drink all the time. It was a shock to see how enthusiastically they knocked back the booze at Sunday lunches in the country and how high their tolerance was. It was a shock to see, after we’d had our first weekday dinner party (everyone stayed until 1am, never mind their jobs), that the table was covered in twice as many empty wine bottles as there had been guests.

More here.

Excerpts from Rose George's new book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, in Slate:

It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it's worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners' house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance, if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardiasis, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.

They used to be known as bhangi, a word formed from the Sanskrit for "broken," and the Hindi for "trash." Today, official India calls them the "scheduled castes," but activists prefer Dalits, a word that means "broken" or "oppressed" but with none of the negativity of bhangi. Most modern Indians don't stick to their caste jobs any more. There is more inter-caste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before. But the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India's animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement. Champaben is considered untouchable by other untouchables—even the tanners of animals and the burners of corpses—because she is a safai karamchari.

More here.

Roland Pease at BBC News:

Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.

The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables.

Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today.

These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time.

But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable.

The basic idea of quantum cryptography was worked out 25 years ago by Charles Bennett of IBM and Gilles Brassard of Montreal University, who was in Vienna to see the network in action.

More here.

Alan Cowell in the New York Times:

The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a cosmopolitan and prolific French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by many French readers and critics as one of the country’s greatest living writers.

Mr. Le Clézio has written more than 40 books, 12 of which have been translated into English, an exotic canon of novels, essays and children’s books depicted by the academy as distilled from experience in Mexico, Central America and North Africa and suffused with a quest for lost culture and new spiritual realities.

In its citation, the prize committee in Stockholm called him an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” The prize, won last year by the British author Doris Lessing, was worth $1.43 million.

More here.

///
Nine Little Goats
Nuala Ni Dhomnail

It's a cock's foot of a night:
If I go on hanging my lightheartedness
Like a lavender coat on a sunbeam's nail,
It will curdle into frogspawn.
The clock itself has it in for me,
Forever brandishing the splinters of its hands,
Choking on its middle-aged fixations.

Since the pooka fertilized the blackberries,
The year pivots on its hinges, breathing
Wintry gusts into our warmth.
Our bones grate like an unoiled
Rusty stable door,
Our teeth get pins and needles
As Autumn's looming tide drowns
The endless shores of Spring.

Darkness will be dropping in
In the afternoons without an appointment,
A wolf's bite at the windowpane,
And wolves too the clouds
In the sheepish sky.
You needn't expect the wind
To put in her white, white paws
Before you open the door,
For she hasn't the slightest interest
In you or your sore throat:
The solar system is all hers
To scrub like a floor if she pleases,
She's hardly likely to spare her brush
On any of us, as the poison comes to a head
In the brow of a year
That will never come back.

So we might as well put in a match
To the peat briquettes
That the summer gave the grate,
And draw the sullen curtains tight
On the Family's bad luck,
And sit with a library book,
Half-dozed by the television news,
Or roused by a game of chess,
Or a story, until
We are our own spuds,
Roasting in the embers.


Translated from the Irish by Medbh McGuckian From
Pharoaoh's Daughter (Wake Forest University Press, 1998)
///

From The Telegraph:

Evolution could already be at an end, leaving the human race more uniform than ever, argues Steve Jones:

Things ain't what they used to be - but when were they? Not in 18th-century Japan, when the poet Ejima Kiseki wrote: "The shrewd observer of the modern scene will note that sons are altogether inferior to their fathers, and that the grandson rarely offers hope for improvement." Plato felt much the same and Simon Heffer, the Plato de nos jours, agrees. Markets, crime, education; every day, in every way, things seem to get worse and worse. If the philosophers have it right, the human race is in decline - social, moral and, in the end, biological. Now science can test at least the last of those claims.

Because we understand how evolution happens, we can also guess where it will go next. It is, in Darwin's words, "descent with modification" - genetics plus time. The process turns on differences: in genes themselve, and on natural selection - on inherited variation in the ability to copy them. Isolation helps changes to build up and, in time bears, Bushmen and Britons evolve from a common ancestor. Human diversity is so great that every sperm and egg ever made is unique.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too? And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence. According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)

More here.

Jonathan Amos at the BBC:

Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura made it possible to exploit the genetic mechanism responsible for luminosity in the marine creatures.

Today, countless scientists use this knowledge to tag biological systems.

Glowing markers will show, for example, how brain cells develop or how cancer cells spread through tissue.

But their uses really have become legion: they are now even incorporated into bacteria to act as environmental biosensors in the presence of toxic materials.

Jellyfish will glow under blue and ultraviolet light because of a protein in their tissues. Scientists refer to it as green fluorescent protein, or GFP.

Shimomura made the first critical step, isolating GFP from a jellyfish (Aequorea victoria) found off the west coast of North America in 1962. He made the connection also with ultraviolet light.

Meanwhile in the 1990s, Chalfie demonstrated GFP's value "as a luminous genetic tag", as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described it in the Nobel citation.

More here.

[Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]

From The Guardian:

Norman is the first Lennon biographer to be granted access to the private papers of Lennon's celebrated Aunt Mimi, who took the troubled youngster in when his parents' ill-fated marriage finally imploded. He has also made good use of the notebooks the singer filled with his often scabrous musings and the cassettes on to which Lennon fitfully recorded his random thoughts, opinions and memories. The tabloids have already provided some invaluable pre-publicity for Norman's book by homing in on the 'revelation' that John may have harboured secret homosexual longings for Paul. Imagine! Macca, though, is having none of it. 'John never tried anything on,' he said recently. 'I slept with him a million times.' Lest there be any doubt about their laddishness, he added that had Lennon had 'a little gay tendency', he would 'have caught him out'.

There has been much conjecture about Lennon's sexuality in the past, most of it centred on his intense love-hate relationship with the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein. Norman refutes the oft-repeated rumour that the two slept together during a holiday in Spain in the summer of 1963. He concludes that Lennon's 'gay tendency' was aesthetic rather than carnal, and 'based on the principle that bohemians should try everything'.

The book's other big revelation, this time culled from a 1979 audio confession, is that, when he was a hormonally charged 14-year-old, Lennon harboured incestuous desires for his mother Julia. Her death in a car accident, when John was 17, was to haunt him for the rest of his life. Likewise, it would seem, the heightened moment in his adolescence when he lay down beside her and accidentally touched her breast. 'I was wondering if I should do anything else,' he mused later in a bout of post-therapy soul-baring. 'I always think I should have done it. Presumably she would have allowed it.'

Though Norman does not pick up on it, it's the word 'presumably' that intrigues here. Did Lennon assume his mother had no moral scruples and would have reciprocated his advances? Or that her love for him was as fearsomely all-consuming as his for her? Or was it the case that he had transformed this fleeting moment of intimacy between them into something more transgressive in the emotional upheaval that followed her sudden death? Either way, Julia is an abiding presence in this book, just as she was in her son's life, having, in his eyes, abandoned him when she gave him up to the care of her childless sister Mimi and then died on him while he was still trying to come to terms with that first perceived betrayal.

Though he always insisted that 'Help' was 'the only honest song I wrote', it is still deeply affecting to listen to the Freudian cri de coeur that is 'Mother' on his first solo album. It begins with the line: 'Mother, you had me, but I never had you' and is as naked an expression of hurt and longing as anything in popular music.

More here.

From Science:

Humans are hard-wired to notice race. The average person registers the race of another human face in less than 100 milliseconds, according to past studies. This instantaneous perception clashes sharply with the American cultural taboo against using race to identify someone. Watch people at a party trying to describe another person, says Michael Norton, a marketing researcher at Harvard Business School. "They'll launch into these long explanations until someone in the group might eventually say, 'Oh, you mean the Asian guy?'" To measure the impact of such verbal gymnastics on cognition, Norton, Sommers, and colleagues employed a modified version of the children's game "Guess Who?" Cards depicting people of different genders and races are laid face-up on a table, and one player mentally selects a card. The second player has to figure out as quickly as possible which card the first player picked using as few yes-or-no questions as possible, such as "Is your person blonde?"

Past studies have suggested that children internalize social taboos about discussing race at about age 10. The researchers compared the performances of 51 kids that were 8 to 9 years old with a similarly sized group of 10- to 11-year-olds. Both groups were equally composed of girls and boys, and the participants were predominantly white. In this game, asking about race was perfectly legitimate, because it could help the child pick the target card faster, Sommers says. Whereas almost 77% of the younger children asked about race, only 37% of the older children did. Consequently, the younger group guessed the target card after an average of 7.4 questions, but the older students averaged 8.3 questions, the team reports online this week in Developmental Psychology.

More here.