Louis_J_Sheehan

The anti-HIV gel Ushercell is not effective at stopping HIV transmission, an international research team reports in the July 31 New England Journal of Medicine. The gel also appears not to increase rates of HIV transmission as earlier results had suggested. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com

A clinical trial testing the effectiveness of the gel in preventing HIV infection was stopped early last year after an analysis not only showed a lack of effectiveness, but also linked the gel to higher HIV transmission rates.

But in a detailed analysis of the results, scientists showed that the supposed increased risk of contracting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, when using the gel is not statistically significant. The new study clarifies the 2007 interim findings.

The phase III clinical trial was launched in 2006 and initially enrolled 1,398 women living in Africa and India. These women were randomly assigned so that half received the experimental gel and half received the placebo.

In 2007, an independent committee reviewed the trial’s interim results and found that 24 women using the experimental gel became infected with HIV, while only 11 women using the placebo gel contracted the virus. Because of this finding, the committee recommended the trial be terminated early. The researchers complied.

Later data that took into account newfound infections, however, shows that the trend to contract the virus was still higher in the experimental group. But the increase was not statistically significant, so the difference could have been due to chance, says Lut Van Damme, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit health agency CONRAD.

“The key message is that this data analysis shows that the gel doesn’t appear to be unsafe, just ineffective at preventing HIV transmission,” says Wafaa El-Sadr, a clinical epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. El-Sadr was not involved in this study, but did help conduct one of the many earlier trials to ensure that the gel was not harmful to women’s health.

The full results of the trial are “most disappointing because researchers in this field have been waiting, hoping and promising that this gel would be a success,” El-Sadr adds.

When the trial was stopped in early 2007, 706 women had been given the experimental gel and 692 women received a placebo gel. Women who already had HIV were not allowed to participate. The participants, from South Africa, Benin, Uganda and India, were instructed to use the gel one hour before having sex and to use condoms, although participants did not always adhere to instructions. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com

Judging from the data collected in interviews, women were more likely to use the gel with or without a condom when with new or intermittent partners, but less likely to use any HIV-prevention method when having sex with their primary partners, says Van Damme.

Women who tested positive for HIV after the trial began were given antiretroviral treatment and access to medical care. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com

Sociocultural norms make it difficult for women living in Africa and parts of India to persuade men to wear condoms during sex, El-Sadr says, so women there desperately need ways to protect themselves against HIV.

Currently there are 14 other compounds in advanced development and 41 in discovery, or early development, that might fill that need, Vann Damme notes.

Before plucking the hearts from humans and tossing the bodies into the sacred cenote, the sacrificial well, the Maya of Chichén Itzá painted their offerings blue—Maya blue. The process for making the unusual pigment, also found on pottery, sculpture, and murals from roughly 400 to 1519, has long puzzled researchers. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com

Now an analysis of a 600- to 700-year-old pot (above) found in the well suggests that the pigment was made on the spot during ceremonies honoring the rain god Chaak. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com Indigo and palygorskite, a mineral clay, were probably heated over a fire of copal, a gummy incense derived from tree resin, says Dean Arnold of Wheaton College in Illinois, who led the study, which appears in the March Antiquity

For years, police have been using breath to tell when people have had a little too much to drink, by taking Breathalyzer readings to determine their blood alcohol levels. Now, some scientists are hoping that your breath could say a lot more about you than how much you’ve had to drink or what you ate for lunch.

Science News reported recently on Joachim D. Pleil, a scientist with the Environmental Protection Agency who is developing technology to learn more about a person’s health by analyzing their breath. An average breath, Pleil says, contains 200 different chemicals. In total, scientists have identified more than 3,000 different compounds coming out of our mouths. If researchers figure out what the makeup of a person’s breath says about their health, Pleil says, the benefits to medicine could be great.

The main problem for breath researchers is knowing what to look for. A patient may have 200 different compounds in their breath, but that’s just a jumble of data. However, patterns are beginning to emerge. Normal breath registers a pH of about 7.5, according to John Hunt of the University of Virginia Children’s Hospital, but a person with respiratory disease might be exhaling a much more acidic mixture, as low as a pH of 3. And scientists have even had some success identifying the chemicals in a lung cancer patient’s breath that aren’t present in a healthy person’s—a skill that could perhaps aid in diagnosis down the road. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Even if researchers know what to look for, reliable breath-testing won’t be easy to achieve. While a person’s breath could contain a mix of hundreds of different molecules, they come only in minuscule amounts—99 percent of each breath is just water, so scientists are hunting for tiny clues. A patient must breathe into the collector for five minutes just to accumulate one milliliter of a sample, which then must be capped and analyzed. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

So it might be a while before your doctor tests your breath rather than your blood or urine. But on behalf of all of us who don’t care for needles, it couldn’t come fast enough.

Phoenix Mars Lander’s robotic arm has successfully drilled into the concrete-hard Martian soil in a trench informally known as Snow White.

Using a pinky-sized rasp, the arm loosened material that was then collected with the lander’s scoop. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com The NASA craft’s team is testing the rasp’s ice-drilling ability in order to prepare samples for possible analysis by Phoenix’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA.

“The team is totally focused on getting a rasped-up icy sample to TEGA,” says mission specialist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis. “We went to Mars to follow the water, and until TEGA tastes it, there will always be a doubt in some people’s minds that the planet has water ice.”

Arvidson is known as the “dig czar” and controls the robotic arm that collects samples for the lander’s instruments. He says collecting the desired icy sample is like trying to sample the sidewalk in front of his house. “The soil is that hard,” he says.
access
Drilling for iceNASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander’s Surface Stereo Imager took this image on July 15, the 50th Martian day of the Phoenix mission. At the top sit two divots created by the robotic arm’s motorized rasp tool. The holes are about one centimeter apart. The scientists are testing the ability of the rasp to loosen the hard, ice-laden soil to send to the lander’s “tasting” instrument, TEGA.NASA, JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona, Texas A&M University

But the rasp, which looks like a tiny drill and protrudes at a slight angle from an opening on the back of the lander’s scoop, can bust through the hard Martian layer. After the rasp finishes drilling, the scoop shifts to collect and slide the shavings to the front of the scoop. In coming days, the team will instruct the arm to use the same drilling method to gather a sample to place in one of TEGA’s seven remaining ovens.

One oven was already filled with a soil sample on June 10.

The soil particles delivered to that oven were so clumpy that they clogged the sieve screen covering the oven opening. Vibrating the screen periodically during a four-day period eventually let some soil fall into and fill the oven. But engineers think the use of a motor to create that vibration may also have caused the oven to short-circuit, Arvidson says.

So, for the past two weeks the Phoenix team has suspended sending samples to TEGA because of the threat of a short circuit and also because of potential trouble with TEGA’s mechanical operations. When Phoenix scientists commanded doors for a second TEGA oven to open in mid-June, the doors only opened part way. The team later established that mechanical problems may prevent doors on that oven and three others from opening fully.

Because of these setbacks, the team wanted to plan the next sample “dig and dump” as if it was its last, Arvidson says. And, just in case there are problems with several of the ovens, the team has made testing the ice sample its first priority. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com

During the week of July 13, the scientists worked to ensure that they could rasp loose grains of the hard soil, scoop it and deliver it to the oven before the sample changed or, if it contains ice, melted. The entire process should take one to one and a half hours, Arvidson says.

If the oven bakes the sample without short-circuiting, the Phoenix team could have, for the first time, direct, experimental evident that water-ice exists on Mars, he notes.

I have in recent years been receiving vast quantities of jokes but hearing fewer of them: The Internet, which has become as common a vehicle for purveying jokes as bland fish is for purveying sauce, may be slowly killing the oral transmission of humor. Granted, this is not a problem up there in significance with world-wide terrorism and global warming, but for those of us with a taste for good jokes it represents a genuinely sad subtraction from the richness of everyday life.

Old-fashioned joke-telling, done face to face, is a species of performance art, in which intonation, timing and often the use of foreign accents are decisive. You can’t do a parrot with a Yiddish accent joke via email. Nor can you gage the response of your audience and know when to speed up or slow down the pace of a longish joke. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com
Jokes on the Internet too easily achieve overkill, so that one is sent 11 jokes about proctologists in a swoop when just one proctological joke every third decade will do nicely, thank you.

Jim Holt, who takes in so much about the history and philosophy of joke-telling in his concise and amiable conspectus of the subject, “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This,” does not mention the effect of the Internet on joke-telling, but that’s about his only omission. He recounts the careers of the odd men through history who have taken upon themselves the job of collecting and classifying jokes. He discusses why we laugh at what we do. He sets out competing theories about the motivation behind joke-telling: the superiority theory, rooted in mockery and derision; the incongruity theory, in which whimsicality disrupts logic; and the relief theory, holding jokes to be a way of breaking down inhibitions. Freud thought most jokes were acts of aggression. Some are, but many more aren’t. Most people who tell jokes do so in the hope that they will bring their recipients pleasure, a brief escape from the tediousness of the day.

“It is an oft-registered complaint that philosophers do not devote enough attention to laughter,” Mr. Holt notes. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com
This is not a complaint you will hear registered chez Epstein. The most famous philosophic treatise on the subject is Henri Bergson’s “On Laughter,” which is two stages beyond dull and three beyond helpful. As a younger man, I used occasionally to use M. Bergson’s lucubrations on laughter as an aid to increased amorous endurance but could never think of any other profitable purpose for it. As Max Beerbohm wrote, anyone attempting “to determine from what inner sources mankind derives the greatest pleasure in life would agree with me that only the emotion of love takes higher rank than that of laughter.”

Laughter is not a gift given evenly to everyone, and some people have been able to dispense with it nearly altogether. Among famous non-laughers, Mr. Holt cites Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift (though the cause of laughter in others), Josef Stalin, William Gladstone, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Margaret Thatcher. I don’t know if this fair to Ms. Thatcher and Justice Ginsberg — though, true enough, one does not easily imagine approaching either woman by saying: “I wonder if you’ve heard the one about the two nuns, the Rumanian barber and the Pekinese?”

A book about jokes is made or broken by the quality of jokes its author uses by way of illustration. “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This” passes this test — it contains many delightful jokes, even if connoisseurs are likely to have heard several of them before. One I hadn’t heard is about the cabdriver who takes a man from Manhattan to the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, with the route described in intricate detail; as the man emerges from the cab in front of the hotel in Chicago, two women get in and one of them gives the cab driver an address on Flatbush Avenue, to which the cabbie replies: “Uh-uh, lady, I don’t go to Brooklyn.”

I did not fall from my couch at this joke but chortled agreeably. (”No printed page, alas,” Beerbohm writes, “can thrill us to extremities of laughter.”) Mr. Holt’s taste in jokes runs to the subtle, not the raucous. None of his book’s jokes caused what Mel Brooks has referred to as “dangerous laughter,” by which he meant laughter so intense that it might just end in heart attack. Some jokes — often, I regret to report, coarse and adolescent ones — have caused dangerous laughter in me: “Tonto, you idiot, I said posse!” is the punch line of one. Other jokes earn not a shock but a sweet nod of recognition: “Oy, was I thoisty!” is the punch line of a joke in this line.

This last example is a reminder that, just as there is dangerous laughter, so there are there dangerous jokes. Ethnic lines, for example, are usually crossed only at the joke teller’s peril. Mr. Holt, owing to a deficiency of personal ethnicity that is beyond his control, includes only a small number of Jewish jokes. He does provide a few American Jewish Princess jokes that could get him a stern letter from the women’s division of the Anti-Defamation League. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com
The comedian Sarah Silverman, hiding behind the mask of a faux naïve Jewish American Princess, specializes in telling dangerous jokes — about black teenage pregnancy, the Holocaust, the crucifixion — and has lived not only to go on telling them but to collect handsome fees for doing so.

Bordering on the dangerous are nationality jokes, those mini-sociologies of customs and mores. An example of the genre is: What is an Irish homosexual? To which the answer is: “A man who prefers women over whiskey.” One of the best such jokes, if not the gentlest, asks what the difference is between a Hungarian and a Rumanian. Each, of course, will sell you his grandmother, but the Rumanian won’t deliver.

Jokes often serve as political commentary. All that is left of decades of murder and misery in the Soviet Union are a small number of jokes about the envy, anti-Semitism and inefficiency in the Russia of commissars and comrades. An example is the joke about the Soviet citizen who buys an ill-designed gray car with no extras and, when told that the wait for delivery is 10 years, asks whether the dealer could deliver the car in the afternoon 10 years hence — because he has the plumber is coming that morning.

Well-told jokes are works of art, as Mr. Holt rightly suggests, most of them by anonymous authors. They are short stories in miniature, with subjects and themes, often an epiphany, and occasionally a useful moral. They can be charming, offensive or sweet, and sometimes comforting in the face the world’s abundant injustices. And funny — did I neglect to mention funny?

People often compare dating to interviewing for a job. In the Orthodox Jewish world, this notion is taken almost literally.

Upon returning from post-high-school studies in Israel, young Orthodox women (such as myself) meet with recruiters, commonly known as shadchanim (matchmakers). After determining whether the young woman wishes to marry a “learner” (a man studying full time in yeshiva), an “earner” (a professional) or a combination of the two, the shadchan collects the prospective bride’s “shidduch résumé,” detailing everything from education and career plans to dress size, height, parents’ occupations and synagogue memberships. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com
The shadchan then approaches a suitable single man or, most likely, his parents — who add the woman to their son’s typically lengthy “list.”

Before agreeing to a noncommittal first date, the man’s parents begin a thorough background check that puts government security clearance to shame. Phoning references isn’t enough — of course they’ll say good things — so they cold-call other acquaintances of the potential bride, from camp counselors to college roommates. The questions they ask often border on the superficial: “Does she own a Netflix account?”; “Does she wear open-toed shoes?” (The correct response may vary depending on how Orthodox a woman the man is looking for.)

Just as the economy is headed to recession, the shidduch system is in crisis mode. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com
Or so the rabbis moan, noting the surplus of women eager to marry and the corresponding shortfall in the quality and quantity of available Jewish men. It’s not that there are more Orthodox women than men out there; experts instead attribute the shortage to the broader sociological trend of postponing marriage, which works to the disadvantage of women looking for spouses their own age or just a few years older. Men who are 30 will date women as young as 18 and may turn their noses up at dating any woman past the age of 25. The 20% or 30% of women who don’t get hitched right away begin to worry they’ll be left out in the cold for good.

Sensing this shift of power, mothers of sons who remain in the matchmaking system increase their demands: Any prospective daughter-in-law must be a size two, or a “learner” son must be supported indefinitely by the girl’s parents. For men, “it’s a buyer’s market,” says Michael Salamon, a psychologist and author of “The Shidduch Crisis: Causes and Cures” (2008). “And the pressures of dating are creating all kinds of social problems, such as eating disorders and anxiety disorders. It’s frightening.”

I used to shrug off this talk. Genocide in Darfur is a crisis; being single at 23 is not. But the communal pressure is hard to ignore. Orthodox Judaism, like most traditional faiths, is geared to families; singles lack a definitive role.

Then there’s what social worker Shaya Ostrov calls the “popcorn effect.” During the first two to three years following high-school graduation, 70% to 80% of Orthodox women get married; weddings then peter off. “The system works for a very limited period of time,” says Mr. Ostrov, the author of “The Inner Circle: Seven Gates to Marriage.” Friends of mine compare dating to musical chairs; nobody wants to end up an “old maid,” and so they get engaged, hoping doubts will prove unfounded. “Young women,” notes Sylvia Barack Fishman, professor of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University, “are often made to feel that they are damaged goods if they have not married — and married well — by their early 20s.”

Part of the problem is the increased number of “serial daters” who, as Ms. Fishman says, are “shopping for perfection.” When Mr. Ostrov runs workshops, he asks male participants in their early 30s how many girls they have dated. “One hundred seventy-five is not an unusual number,” he says. “Dating” in these cases usually ends after just one or two meetings with each girl.

Many men admit that their refusal to commit themselves to a woman stems from fear of making a mistake. The only thing worse than being an “older single” male, it seems, is being a 25-year-old divorcé with two children. It is women, though, who are usually more stigmatized by a split. Indeed, one big problem in the Orthodox community is the “Post-Shidduch Crisis.”

“We’re seeing more and more recently married, young Orthodox Jews getting divorced,” says Mr. Salamon, who estimates that the divorce rate among the Orthodox has risen to an alarming 30% in the past five to 10 years. (Hard data are difficult to come by, Mr. Salamon says, because the Orthodox shun research studies for fear of harming their own or their children’s shidduchim.)

The core of the problem is that young marrieds don’t know how to accommodate each other, says Mr. Salamon. And singles need to start asking the right questions. “Family history has nothing to do with whether you’ll make a good husband or wife,” he says. The rigid, interview-style questioning is only wreaking havoc: “They’re looking for some sort of guarantee. But who can guarantee happiness?” http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com

At first, some neighbors thought the wooden boxes tucked into the bushes behind Omid Ghayebi’s house were rabbit hutches.

That was just fine with Mr. Ghayebi, a fledgling beekeeper who didn’t intend to advertise the pastime he took up in 2006. “I didn’t want anyone getting all worked up,” he says.
As honeybees mysteriously abandon commercial hives, nature lovers around America are trying to replenish the bee population with backyard hives, stirring up trouble with their neighbors. WSJ’s Rob Tomsho reports.

In a neighborhood of closely built homes and tiny backyards, the 31-year-old engineer’s hobby didn’t stay a secret. Soon, he was caught up in a far-reaching debate over where beekeepers are meant to be and not to be.

Honeybees add an estimated $15 billion annually to the value of the nation’s agricultural production. Every year hundreds of thousands of colonies are trucked around the country to pollinate everything from apples to almonds.

But these are tumultuous times in beekeeping. Rural areas that once served as home base have been gobbled up by development. For the past two years, a mysterious syndrome dubbed “colony collapse disorder” has led honeybees to abandon commercial hives in droves. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said that beekeepers lost about 35% of their managed hives in 2007, up from 31% in 2006. Scientists still don’t know the cause of CCD but suspect it may be due to some combination of factors, including pathogens, parasites and pesticides.

As experts work to solve that mystery, more nature lovers have taken up backyard beekeeping in hopes of bolstering the ranks of European bees, the breed used commercially to make honey and pollinate crops. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com
Bee Culture magazine estimates the number of beekeeping hobbyists has risen by about 10% to 100,000 in the past year or so.

The boom hasn’t been without mishaps. Last month , a number of residents of Marblehead, Mass., were stung by bees that swarmed out of a hobbyist’s hive as it was being moved from a backyard to a farm.

Fears of raging bees and bumbling hobbyists have helped prompt dozens of communities to put the clamps on beekeeping. The city of Rancho Mirage, Calif., bans it outright and Garden City, Mich., now requires beekeepers to live on at least a quarter acre. Bill Lewis, president of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association, says restrictions throughout the L.A. region have become so tight that some beekeepers have gone underground. “Many actually keep bees in the cities and just don’t tell,” he says.

Omid Ghayebi (pronounced: oh-MEED goy-e-BEE) isn’t the first to raise bees in South Portland, a coastal community of 24,000. Fred Hale, reputed to be the world’s oldest man at the time of his 2004 death at age 113, was a well-known local beekeeper who sometimes attributed his longevity to a daily dose of honey. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com

But through the years, the city has also struggled with its agricultural roots. Although its shopping mall is built on the site of a former pig farm, the city bans all farm animals from residential neighborhoods. Or at least it did until last year when a 10-year-old gained overwhelming public support for her successful campaign to win the right to raise chickens.

Mr. Ghayebi didn’t think his buzzing pets would get the same reception. After determining that South Portland had no ordinance that mentioned beekeeping, in the spring of 2006 he put two hives with about 24,000 bees in his backyard without telling a soul.

“I was kind of trying to live a quiet life with the bees,” says Mr. Ghayebi, who has been enthralled with them since childhood, when his parents kept hives on their farm in Iran.

A wiry man with a ready smile, Mr. Ghayebi and others like him strictly breed bees as a hobby. They think doing so is good for the insects, but most don’t have the resources to travel around the country pollinating crops. When farmers hire beekeepers for pollination purposes, they typically “rent” hundreds or thousands of hives.

In the spring of 2007, Mr. Ghayebi’s bees began familiarizing themselves with a neighbor’s backyard. One day, a half dozen of them landed and began drinking rainwater from the track of Mark Tinkham’s sliding glass door. After they flew away, other bees took their places. No one was stung, and for a time, the Tinkham family got a kick out of the little flying parades. But soon there were bees in the puddles, bees in the birdbath and bees in the kiddie pool.

Mr. Tinkham couldn’t figure it out until one day, from his deck, he noticed Mr. Ghayebi in his own backyard wearing a net-covered beekeepers’ helmet. “I said, ‘You got to be kidding me,’” recalls Mr. Tinkham, who contacted City Hall.

Pat Doucette, the city’s code-enforcement officer, told Mr. Ghayebi that his beekeeping amounted to farming in a residential area and asked him to move the hives. He said she had no legal basis to make such a request. Ms. Doucette recalls that she “tried to get some kind of compromise, but there wasn’t any.”

While the bees were dormant last winter, Ms. Doucette reviewed other cities’ beekeeping ordinances and began drafting one for South Portland. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com
The proposal that evolved called for $25 annual registration permits, hive limits based on acreage and tall barriers to dissuade bees from flying into neighbors’ yards. Violators could be fined up to $1,000 a day.

Mr. Ghayebi sought backup from the Maine State Beekeepers Association, which had gone to bat for a similarly besieged beekeeper in a neighboring town a year earlier. Erin Forbes, the group’s newsletter editor, says most of its 300 members are still so leery of attention that she advises them to paint their hives to look like compost bins.

When the city council debated the bee ordinance in public hearings, Mr. Ghayebi was usually joined by at least a half-dozen beekeeping brethren. City officials say few local residents spoke up in favor of the ordinance.

In March, Ms. Forbes drafted a letter to city officials and posted it on BeeSource.com, a beekeeping Web site. She said the proposed ordinance “sends a message to potential beekeepers and the public that beekeeping is something to be feared and regulated.”

Beekeepers from around New England and beyond took up the cause. “Make South Portland a city that can say ‘We are Honey Bee Friendly’ and ‘We Support Pollination,’” wrote one Massachusetts beekeeper. City officials “were inundated with emails” against the ordinance, recalls Ms. Doucette. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com

Even so, on May 19, the City Council adopted the ordinance by a vote of 5-to-2. Not that they’ve used it so far.

These days, there is only one registered beekeeper in South Portland and it is not Mr. Ghayebi. By the time the ordinance finally passed, he’d mended fences with his neighbor and moved his hives to a friend’s farm in a rural area outside of town.

The half-hour drive has become a chore and, after all the aggravation, Mr. Ghayebi says he has grown tired of the taste of his own honey. But the beekeeper says he is still committed to his hives. “I’m not going to take up golfing instead,” he vows. “We need more bees.” http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com

Luminaries of the American Revolution are much revered and endlessly biographied. But in the South reverence only goes so far when it comes to Thomas Paine. Paine, an Englishman who helped design the American revolution and wrote, in “The Rights of Man”, the best defence of the revolution in France, was a freethinker who scorned organised religion as well as kings: not a recipe for popularity in the Bible Belt.

Last year Lindsley Smith, an Arkansas legislator, tried to establish a Thomas Paine Day in her state. Forty-six lawmakers supported her (20 said no), but she needed 51 votes for her bill to pass, and 34 legislators did not vote at all—probably because they had no idea who Paine was. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
She will try again in January and, in the meantime, plans to educate Arkansans in general, and the state’s politicians in particular, about what Paine did and why he should be honoured.

The push in Arkansas coincides with an effort to institute a Paine day in all 50 states before the 200th anniversary of his death next year. So far nine states have passed such resolutions, including Nebraska and Missouri. Virginia, the first, introduced its Paine day in 1998.

Paine proponents quote John Adams: “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.” Paine did not argue merely for the ending of slavery and monarchy but for public education, animal rights, women’s rights, a guaranteed minimum income and a pension for the elderly.

Unfortunately for his cause, he also held strongly anti-Christian opinions. Mark Wilensky, a Paine scholar, recommends that his present-day promoters should concentrate less on his later writings, which raise hackles, and more on his contribution to the struggle for independence. But Arkansas already honours a clutch of people with eyebrow-raising beliefs: Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate army, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, Thomas Jefferson, who slept with his slaves—and Abraham Lincoln who, in his day, held opinions much less congenial to the South than Paine’s ever were. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com

Ask a roomful of readers about Lampedusa’s “Leopard” and more often than not you’ll find a few who will put hand to heart and say it’s their favorite book, and a few others who will simply shrug — never heard of it — or ask if it has anything to do with the Visconti movie starring Burt Lancaster (yes, it does). http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com
I suppose it’s a coincidence that a roomful of travelers will poll in a similar fashion if you ask them about Sicily, the marvelous, maddening island disparaged and adored in “The Leopard”: it’s either a favorite place, or they haven’t even thought of going there.

Is the coincidence significant? I believe that if you love the novel (or the movie), you should start planning your trip right away, not because you’ll find Lampedusa’s Sicily waiting for you when you touch down (you won’t, believe me), but because the bitter, resigned romantic nostalgia that pervades “The Leopard” is also the sensibility that savors the decaying grandeur of an island burdened with layer upon layer of tragic history — and blessed also with startling beauty, much of it perpetually waning.

The test comes when you’re a little lost, nervously peering down a deserted backstreet in Palermo that’s crooked and gloomy, with litter strewn on the dusty pavement and a narrow slice of blue sky overhead. Right in front of you is the smudged and crumbling facade of a derelict Baroque palazzo, unheralded, or perhaps marked with only a tiny plaque bearing a forgotten name and a date (late 17th century, usually, or early 18th). The sight of this noble structure is dizzying, even if the ornate balconies are wrapped in netting to keep chunks of masonry from raining down, and there’s a scraggly shrub sprouting on the rooftop. You dream of what it once was and what it might be again, but mostly you like it just as it is, a glorious residence ravished by time and neglect, and probably still inhabited. Just imagine its fabulously tattered apartments, still clinging to the memory of vanished splendor! (Sicily does this, it inspires wildly impractical reveries.)

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) inherited a palace in Palermo (he was an aristocrat — a prince, no less), and had it not been demolished by an Allied bomb on April 5, 1943, the Palazzo Lampedusa would probably be scrubbed clean today, assiduously restored in honor of an author whose only novel, published posthumously in 1958, is one of Italy’s best-loved books.

“The Leopard” is about the decline of a noble Sicilian family. The patriarch, proud Fabrizio, Prince of Salina (based on Lampedusa’s great-grandfather, Prince Giulio), is acutely aware of this decline and seems almost to embrace it. Set in Palermo and deep in the interior in the early 1860s, during the tumultuous years of Garibaldi’s Risorgimento when Sicily was annexed to a united Italy, the novel could fuel a seminar’s worth of meditations on political and social transformation. (The famous line, which becomes a mantra of sorts for Don Fabrizio, is this: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”) But though it has sparked heated debates about Sicilian history, most readers respond to the book’s shimmering beauty, and to the towering figure of the Prince himself.

Wise and perplexed, stern and indulgent, loyal and essentially solitary, even in the midst of his crowded household, Don Fabrizio is the indispensable companion for traveling around Sicily. He’s one of those unforgettable literary characters who seem more real than people you’ve actually met (and easily more important than the neighbor who moved away or the great-aunt you last laid eyes on a dozen years ago). http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com
The trait that defines the Prince is his dignity, which stems in part from his clear-eyed sense of himself; he claims to be “without illusions” — he lacks, he says, “the faculty of self-deception.” He surveys himself, and Sicily, with unflinching honesty.

It’s not in fact possible to maintain an unruffled dignity as a tourist in Sicily, not unless you’re willing to spend a small fortune and steer clear of all but the most manicured resorts. (You could fly into Catania, say, have a chauffeur pick you up at the airport, ride in luxury to a five-star hotel high up in gorgeous, swanky Taormina, lounge by the side of a dramatic infinity pool with views of Mount Etna and the bay of Naxos, wander in the ruins of the ancient theater, then go home, again. But that’s bubble tourism.) The rest of us have to put up with haphazard service, accommodation that somehow just misses the mark, pungent urban odors and the horrors of Mafia-financed postwar construction. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com
The island’s dependable delights — brash summer sunshine; seafood fresh off the boat, simply, sometimes exquisitely prepared; excellent, inexpensive wine; churches galore, in every shape and size; and the best Greek ruins anywhere — fit comfortably in any travel budget.

To see Sicily honestly, the way the Prince of Salina would have you see it, you must start with the chaos of Palermo (or “the sloth of Palermo,” as he would put it) — the lawless traffic, the grime, the overflowing garbage, the noise, the hint of menace. Don’t be put off: it’s a beautiful city, crammed with architectural and artistic monuments from every century, squeezed between dramatic mountains and the Tyrrhenian Sea. (Lampedusa writes of “the scorched slopes of Monte Pellegrino, scarred like the face of misery by eternal ravines.”) http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com
However chaotic, Palermo is manageably small. In the heart of the city, on the cacophonous Via Roma, you can look north and see at the end of the avenue the silent “scorched slopes” that mark the edge of town. Turn and look south and you’ll see more of the same.

When Luchino Visconti wanted to film the magnificent ball at the end of “The Leopard,” he chose the Baroque Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi in the Piazza Croce dei Vespri, just two minutes’ walk from the Via Roma. Behind the monumental, almost sullen facade is the glittering ballroom where Burt Lancaster, magnificent as the Prince, waltzed with the radiant Claudia Cardinale while her fiancé, an impossibly young Alain Delon, looked on indulgently.

The Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi is not open to the public, alas (it remains a private residence), but to get a good idea of how the 19th-century Palermitan aristocracy lived, stroll through the backstreets toward the port to the Palazzo Mirto, just off the Piazza Marina. If you stop a moment and stand before the gates, you’ll see around you all the charm and frustration of Palermo, starting with the crest of the Princes of Mirto, a bold double-headed eagle carved in honey-colored stone above massive doors: a tangle of weeds is growing out of cracks in the mortar. (Were it the Prince of Salina’s crest, you would see the leopard, il gattopardo, rampant.) To the left of the doors, a high-tech security camera scans the scene; next to it, a line is draped with laundry drying in the brilliant Sicilian sun (some things never change). To the right stretches a typical, balcony-lined, stone-paved Palermo street, unusually clean, brightly festooned with laundry, with a refreshing clump of trees at the far end. Behind you, in the Piazza Marina, a shambolic Sunday flea market offers every unwanted knickknack and oddment you ever yearned to throw away, plus, of course, a few priceless treasures.

Inside the Palazzo Mirto — bequeathed to the state in 1982 by the family’s last heir — is a succession of sumptuously decorated rooms, at once lovely and ever so faintly ridiculous, like the grand ballroom Lampedusa describes with such a tender eye in “The Leopard”:

“The ballroom was all golden; smoothed on cornices, stippled on door-frames, damascened pale, almost silvery, over darker gold on door panels and on the shutters which covered and annulled the windows, conferring on the room the look of some superb jewel-case shut off from an unworthy world. It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of certain Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten. Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo flowers in a color so faint as to seem just an ephemeral pink reflected from the chandeliers.”

It’s easy to imagine that even 145 years ago, the apartments of the Palazzo Mirto reeked of the “slightly shabby grandeur” Lampedusa ascribes to the Prince of Salina’s household, and to Sicilian aristocracy in general, circa 1860. Today the rooms are preserved, yes, but dusty and dilapidated at the edges, unloved, as though the effort of caring for so much decorative fabulousness was too much for our modern age. I watched one museum guide helpfully point out to an Italian tourist the sepia photo of a whiskered gentleman: “il ultimo Principe” — the last Prince.

The palace that features most prominently in “The Leopard” is not in Palermo but 45 miles or so southwest, in a town Lampedusa calls Donnafugata. He based the town on Santa Margherita di Belice, where as a boy he spent his idyllic summer holidays in the Palazzo Filangeri-Cutò, a splendid 18th-century building that belonged to his mother’s family. The palazzo, a self-contained compound with three courtyards, seemed to him “a kind of Vatican,” and he remembered the garden as “a paradise of parched scents.”

In the first decade of the 20th century, when Lampedusa was a child, the journey from Palermo to Santa Margherita took 12 hours, half of it by train, the other half by horse-drawn carriage. In “The Leopard,” when the Prince and his family make the same trip in late August 1860, it’s an arduous three-day expedition in a convoy of five carriages over dismal roads no better than tracks. (The Prince travels in his top hat, of course.) “They had passed through crazed looking villages washed in palest blue; crossed dry beds of torrents over fantastic bridges; skirted sheer precipices which no sage and broom could temper. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com
Never a tree, never a drop of water; just sun and dust.”

The Wild West of the interior is more comfortably contemplated through the window of an air-conditioned 21st-century automobile. An outing to Santa Margherita now takes no more than an hour; the roads are good, nearly empty, and the views spectacular: a daunting, jagged landscape, desiccated and profoundly lonely. When the Prince looks out at what he considers “the real Sicily” — the landscape around Donnafugata — he sees it “aridly undulating to the horizon in hillock after hillock, comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy.” http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com

Lampedusa’s description is exaggerated for effect — poetic license — but it’s accurate in ways the author would have been horrified to discover. In 1968, a decade after his death, that petrified sea convulsed again: Santa Margherita was flattened by an earthquake.

When Lampedusa’s biographer, David Gilmour, visited the rebuilt town in the late 1980s — 20 years after the quake — the palace was still a scene of devastation: “Its wreckage remains undisturbed, the courtyards filled with beams and ruined masonry. … The front slumps down one side of the town’s piazza, displaying broken balustrades and twisted balconies.” Today, nearly 40 years on, the facade has been righted and restored, after a fashion. No longer a ruin, the palazzo is no longer lovely: the supremely elegant edifice we can admire in old photos is gone for good. The piazza is still under reconstruction, a bleached expanse of unfinished concrete.

Inside the restored portion of the palace is a small museum, the Parco del Gattopardo, devoted to Lampedusa, a room upstairs with manuscripts of “The Leopard” on display in tidy glass cases, along with foreign editions of the novel, family portraits, photographs of Santa Margherita before the cataclysm. Downstairs is a coffee shop — Il Caffé del Principe — perhaps the most drably ordinary coffee shop in all of Sicily, with freezers selling pre-packaged ice-cream cones and napkin dispensers primly arranged on the half-dozen empty tables. Don Fabrizio might weep.

It’s while walking through the streets of Donnafugata early in the morning, taking note of the squalid poverty of the town’s residents, that the Prince, depressed, comes to a sour conclusion: “All this shouldn’t last; but it will, always; the human ‘always’ of course, a century, two centuries … and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards and Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”

You might think that standing in the dazzling late-morning sun, gazing at what’s left of the Palazzo Filangeri-Cutò, would be a dispiriting experience. The “human ‘always’ ” has proved more fragile than even the pessimistic Prince dared imagine. But Santa Margherita, assisted by what Lampedusa calls “the languid meandering stream of Sicilian pragmatism,” is clearly on the mend, a hill town refreshed by a cooling breeze even in the brutal summer months, a town where the view from almost any street is of crisp blue sky. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com
And beyond that, as the cherished novelist assures us, “the immemorial silence of pastoral Sicily.”

Unlike other cells in mammals, eggs lack centrosomes—crucial stabilizing structures that organize strandlike proteins called spindles, which pull chromosomes apart during cell division. How eggs form without centrosomes—a long-standing mystery—was solved in August by biologists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com

To create an egg, a progenitor cell called an oocyte divides into two daughter cells: a hulking egg cell and a wimpy polar body. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com The oocyte’s chromosomes must be carefully sorted so that a representative half goes to each daughter cell. If not, the egg can end up with too many or too few chromosomes, leading to infertility or developmental disorders like Down syndrome.

“Why is the division of egg cells—which is so important at the start of animal life—why is that not very reliable?” asks Jan Ellenberg, unit coordinator and senior scientist at EMBL.

Using a powerful microscope to observe mouse oocytes as they split, Ellenberg’s group found that the spindles assembled into two coherent structures, one for the future egg and one for the future polar body.At first, spindles appeared throughout the cell in a sort of mesh. Next, they began to attract each other, forming around 80 different organizing centers. After gathering into a big blob around the chromosomes, the many microtubule organizing centers then began to repel each other. The tug-of-war as the spindles attracted and repelled one another eventually gave rise—over several hours (compared with the 10 to 15 minutes it takes other body cells to divide)—to two distinct structures, yanking the chromosomes to opposite poles.

The team also noticed that during fertilization, the many organizing centers disassembled, re-creating the mesh throughout. This flexibility might help explain why eggs use such an unusual mechanism: Microtubule organizing centers are also critical for bringing together the egg and sperm nuclei after fertilization.

Can food additives affect children’s behavior? A study published in the November 3 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet suggests they can. http

A team from the University of Southampton in England measured levels of hyperactivity in 153 three-year-olds and 144 eight- and nine-year-olds. The children were put on a diet free of the additives used in the experiment. Then each day over a six-week period they were given one of two mixtures with artificial coloring and the preservative sodium benzoate, or a plain fruit juice placebo. All the drinks looked and tasted identical. http

Researchers observed the children in the classroom and analyzed reports of their behavior from parents and teachers. The older kids were also given a computer-based attention test. The results from all these tests were scored to produce a measure of hyperactivity known as a global hyperactivity aggregate (GHA). The higher the GHA, the greater the hyperactivity.

On average, the children who drank the additive concoctions showed a near doubling of GHA scores compared to those on the placebo. This was true for the younger and older children. Investigators also reported differences in the way individual children responded to the additives, with some becoming much more hyperactive than others.

“The study shows that, on average, children have higher levels of hyperactivity when taking a drink with additives in it compared to their behavior when taking fruit juices alone,” says Jim Stevenson, head of the study.

Birds have good vision, but their brains turn out to be even more eagle-eyed. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com Having previously found that molecules called cryptochromes embedded in birds’ retinas both respond to light and detect magnetic fields, scientists at the University of Oldenburg in Germany recently showed that avian brains incorporate clever mechanisms for processing the geomagnetic information.

By using tracer chemicals in experiments with live garden warblers, the researchers followed a circuit of neurons from the cryptochrome molecules to the “cluster N” area of the brain, which is active during navigation, showing for the first time that cluster N uses information from the retina. Scientists aren’t sure how such compass directions appear in the eyes of migratory birds, but team member Dominik Heyers has a guess. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com “If a bird looks north or south, it somehow has a light spot or a dark spot there,” he says.

Another navigational tool: birds’ beaks, which contain bits of magnetite, a mineral that may allow them to sense Earth’s magnetic field. Since the field is stronger near the poles, the magnetite gives birds crucial information about their latitude.

Macrophages are big, fuzzy-looking immune cells that move through the blood and tissues, engulfing and destroying any foreign invaders, such as bacteria and dead or damaged cells, they encounter.http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com

In July, Holger Kress and colleagues from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, reported that macrophages don’t just wait to bump into their victims. At the cell surface, they form thin protrusions, called filopodia, that wave around like fishing lines. If a filopodium bumps into an invader, the “line” retracts quickly, helping the cell swallow up the object. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com

Initially, Kress wasn’t looking at the filopodia at all. He was using microscopic beads to watch what happened when a macrophage encountered a foreign object. But he was focusing on the smooth regions of the membranes, where the analysis of that encounter would be straightforward. Then one of his beads bumped into a filopodium and—wham!—the protrusion retracted, taking the bead with it. With that, he saw the process in a whole new light.

Kress, now a postdoctoral researcher at Yale, thinks the cell uses filopodia to increase the size of the area it can explore in a given time. “The cells are likely able to capture more bacteria per period of time than if the membrane were completely flat,” he says.