For historian David Hackett Fischer, the Frenchman was, above all, a ‘humanist’ A week from Monday, at McGill University in Montreal, the winner of the recently created, well-endowed ($75,000 U.S. to the winner) and exciting Cundill International Prize in History will be announced. If this were Britain, bookies would have already laid down odds on [...]
Archive for October, 2009
Champlain’s dream lives on in North America
Posted in History on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
The Lotus’s Clever Way Of Staying Dry
Posted in Natural sciences on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
An ancient Confucian philosopher once said, “I love the lotus because while growing from mud, it is unstained.” Now, almost one thousand years since Zhou Dunyi wrote these lines in China, scientists finally understand how the plant keeps itself clean and dry. It took an ultra high speed camera, a powerful microscope and an audio [...]
Drinking Coffee Slows Progression Of Liver Disease In Chronic Hepatitis C Sufferers, Study Suggests
Posted in Health on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
Patients with chronic hepatitis C and advanced liver disease who drink three or more cups of coffee per day have a 53% lower risk of liver disease progression than non-coffee drinkers according to a new study led by Neal Freedman, Ph.D., MPH, from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The study found that patients with hepatitis [...]
The Pilates prostitute and the blind lawyer
Posted in Weird cases on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
What is the difference between sex and Pilates? When a blind lawyer and a young actress fought each other in a recent lawsuit in Pennsylvania it was evident that not everyone can easily differentiate the two types of conduct. John Peoples, a property and negligence lawyer who is legally blind, started using the services of [...]
Barack Obama’s policy on brink of collapse as Tehran does last-minute nuclear stall
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Politics, tagged Iran on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
President Obama’s policy of diplomatic engagement with Iran is close to collapse as Tehran backtracks on a crucial deal aimed at cutting its stockpiles of nuclear fuel. Iran agreed a deal “in principle” at talks in Geneva to ship the majority of its low-enriched uranium overseas for reprocessing into nuclear fuel that could be used [...]
President Obama won’t talk climate change in Copenhagen
Posted in Energy and Environment, Politics on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
Barack Obama will be in Oslo for his Nobel ceremony, but not Copenhagen. President Obama will almost certainly not travel to the Copenhagen climate change summit in December and may instead use his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to set out US environmental goals, The Times has learnt. With healthcare reform clogging his domestic agenda [...]
Iberian Wolves Prefer Wild Roe Deer To Domestic Animals
Posted in Natural sciences on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
A wolf in the “Saw of the snake” area in Zamora. A Spanish researcher has analysed the preferences of wolves from the north east of the Iberian Peninsula to demonstrate that, in reality, their favourite prey are roe deer, deer and wild boar, ahead of domestic ruminants (sheep, goats, cows and horses). Wolves (Canis lupus) have [...]
Obama pushes clean energy as U.S. economic salvation
Posted in Energy and Environment, Politics on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
U.S. President Barack Obama holds up a t-shirt given to him by Mechanical Engineering Professor Alex Slocum (L) as Susan Hockfield, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), takes him on a tour of the institution’s research labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 23, 2009. Clean coal, safe nuclear and wind power all have a [...]
Vaccine frustration
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
Maybe we’re not so ready for a pandemic after all. AS VACCINATION efforts go, the one underway for the H1N1 virus (a.k.a swine flu) has not gone smoothly. Lower-than-expected vaccine yields have reduced the number of doses available, and this has led to the cancellation or scaling back of vaccination clinics across the country, including [...]
Metropolitan Glory
Posted in History on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
From Paris to Timbuktu, the urban places that have played illustrious roles in the world’s story John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of [...]
The Game That Trumps All Others
Posted in Arts and Entertainment, Living on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
Alexander McCall Smith loves bridge’s endless rules, carping partners and mental challenges I am not sure if there are clinics that will help you get over bridge, but if there are not, then perhaps some enterprising entrepreneur will take up the idea. I think it would work, but the problem is that we all know [...]
Beyond the Grave
Posted in Living on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
How visions of what awaits us after death have changed across the ages ‘O you who are still on earth and pass this stone, you who love life and hate death, make offerings of fruit, fowl and meats to Osiris on behalf of the child buried here.” This anonymous utterance from beyond the grave, inscribed [...]
A Soap Dish That Changed History
Posted in History on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
The enduring yet seldom-appreciated significance of a seventh-century emperor’s bath This fall marks the 1,341st anniversary of a watershed moment in history—though not likely one you’ve heard about before. It began with an event that would have been comical if not for the fact that a murder was involved. Even to those living through it, [...]
It Takes Two To Tutor A Sparrow
Posted in Natural sciences on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
A song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) lives up to his name. It may take a village to raise a child, and apparently it takes at least two adult birds to teach a young song sparrow how and what to sing. In the first study conducted in the field to examine how juvenile song birds learn their [...]
World’s Oldest Known Granaries Predate Agriculture
Posted in History on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
A new study coauthored by Ian Kuijt, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, describes recent excavations in Jordan that reveal evidence of the world’s oldest know granaries. The appearance of the granaries represents a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods. Anthropologists consider food storage to be [...]
Five Best Books on New York City
Posted in Other on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
Russell Shorto says these books on the history of New York City can make it anywhere. 1. Gotham By Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace Oxford University, 1999 New York is so superlative—so big, so fecund, so messy and ever-churning—that it squashes the life out of most books attempting to corral it. Not “Gotham.” Eschewing [...]
A critical question
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Health on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
Why fund war with debt but insist that health-care reform be deficit-neutral? A READER recently challenged us to explain what he sees as a contradiction in our editorial positions. We support the goal of universal health care, but argue that President Obama must keep his pledge not to pay for it with borrowed money. We [...]
Regulating Emotion After Experiencing A Sexual Assault
Posted in Health on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
After exposure to extreme life stresses, what distinguishes the individuals who do and do not develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? A new study, published in the October 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry, suggests that it has something to do with the way that we control the activity of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region thought to [...]
Ms.
Posted in On Language, tagged October 25 2009 on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
In the Nov. 10, 1901, edition of The Sunday Republican of Springfield, Mass., tucked away in an item at the bottom of Page 4, an unnamed writer put forth a modest proposal. “There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill,” the writer began. “Every one has been [...]
Stop Your Search Engines
Posted in Living on October 24, 2009 | Comments Off
Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. But before I began, I wondered about the [...]
White House Met Privately With Many Left-Wing Opinionistas
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Media, Politics on October 23, 2009 | Comments Off
Not surprisingly, Fox News wasn’t invited. The White House has berated Fox News for days now for purportedly pushing an agenda and calling it news. So Americans may have been surprised when, as reported by Noel Sheppard, Obama invited two of MSNBC’s most divisive liberal pundits–Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow–to the White House for an [...]
Denying the Green Revolution
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Politics, tagged Iran on October 23, 2009 | Comments Off
The State Department cuts off funding to support Iran’s democrats. You won’t hear it from the Obama administration, but there’s still a revolution going on in Iran. Massive protests—which began in June following the sham election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—persisted last month on Quds Day, when the government attempted to orchestrate nationwide anti-Israel marches. Refusing to [...]
Dickering Over Uranium
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Politics, tagged Iran on October 23, 2009 | Comments Off
Tehran should love the U.S. offer on enrichment. One sign that an adversary isn’t serious about negotiating is when it rejects even your concessions. That seemed to be the case yesterday when Iran gave signs it may turn down an offer from Russia, Europe and the U.S. to let Tehran enrich its uranium under foreign [...]
Rules for Presidents
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Media, Politics on October 23, 2009 | Comments Off
Obama tries to fight the system. One wonders when it’ll dawn on him that he is the system. Blogger Donald Sensing has a fascinating analysis of President Obama’s war against Fox News. He describes the effort as “directly out of the Saul Alinsky playbook.” Alinsky was the author of “Rules for Radicals,” bible of left-wing [...]
Today in History – October 23
Posted in This day in history, tagged October 23 on October 23, 2009 | Comments Off
Today is Friday, Oct. 23, the 296th day of 2009. There are 69 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History On Oct. 23, 1983, 241 U.S. service members, most of them Marines, were killed in a suicide truck-bombing at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon; a near-simultaneous attack on French forces killed 58 paratroopers. [...]
Operation Overlord
Posted in History on October 23, 2009 | Comments Off
How the Allied invasion of Normandy unfolded on a fearful day of destruction, missteps and heroism American soldiers wade ashore under German fire in northern France on June 6, 1944. Two Antony Beevor books on World War II published during the past dozen years—”Stalingrad” and “Berlin: The Downfall, 1945″—were classics of their kind. Both contained [...]
Bye Bye Birdie: Famed Fossil Loses Avian Perch
Posted in Natural sciences on October 23, 2009 | Comments Off
Paleontologists Determine the 150-Million-Year-Old Archaeopteryx Might Not Have Been Ancestor to Today’s Finches and Doves The feathered creature called archaeopteryx, easily the world’s most famous fossil remains, had been considered the first bird since Charles Darwin’s day. When researchers put its celebrity bones under the microscope recently, though, they discovered that this icon of evolution [...]
When Folly Is Forever
Posted in Other on October 23, 2009 | Comments Off
We once could improve ourselves by shedding our pasts. Now the past is always with us. Historians, accustomed to rummaging through document-stuffed archives, are now worrying about the future of the past. Our lives, they note, are ever more digitized: family joys and sorrows, work-place successes and setbacks, government directives and debates, are increasingly composed [...]
Obama’s Doctor Shortage
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health on October 23, 2009 | Comments Off
All of the president’s “fixes” will just create new problems. In his campaign for health-care reform, President Obama has repeatedly harped about a primary care doctor shortage. “The status quo is we don’t have enough primary care physicians,” President Obama said in an ABC interview in July. The president promises that his health-care reform proposal [...]
