bacteria don't have species

Astrobiology | AM: You have argued that bacteria don't have species. I wonder if you could explain that idea.

Lynn Margulis: Bacteria are much more of a continuum. They drop their genes all the time. Like we say in What is Life?, it's like going swimming in a swimming pool, going in blue-eyed and coming out brown-eyed, just because you've gulped the water. Obviously, animals don't do that. But that's what bacteria do, all the time. They just pick up genes, they throw away genes, and they are very flexible about that.

Say you have a bacterium like Azotobacter. This is a nitrogen-fixing bacterium. It takes nitrogen out of the air and puts it into useable food. Nitrogen fixing is a big deal. It takes a lot of genes. If you put a little something like arsenium bromide in a test tube with these organisms, and put it in a refrigerator overnight, lo and behold, the next day the cells can't do this anymore, they can't fix nitrogen. So by definition you have to change them from one genus to another.

I'll give you another example: E. coli. It's a normal inhabitant of the human gut. If you put a particular plasmid into E. coli, all of a sudden you have Klebsiella and not E. coli. You've changed not only the species, but the genus. It's like changing a person to a chimpanzee. Can you imagine doing that, putting a chimpanzee in the refrigerator, and getting him out the next morning, and now he's a person?

Sorin Sonea, who was the chair of the microbiology department at the Université de Montreal, in Canada, has been saying for 25 or 30 years that you either have to consider all the bacteria on Earth as one species, or you have to consider them as no species at all. The criteria we use for species, which are good ones for animals and plants and fungi, do not apply, because bacteria can change overnight. You have all sorts of gradations, where adding or removing a few genes will change an organism's name, because those genes are what define the organism.

bacterial intelligence

Astrobiology | AM: Can you explain how you view bacteria as being intelligent?

LM: If you look up consciousness in the dictionary, it says, "awareness of the world around you," and that's because you lose it somehow when you become unconscious, right? Well, you can show that microorganisms, or bacteria, are certainly conscious. They will orient themselves, they will work together to make structures. They'll do a lot of things. This ability to respond specifically to the environment and to act creatively, in the sense that that precise action has never been taken before, is a property of life. Of course, it has to be moving life, or you can't tell. You can't tell if a plant is thinking, but in organisms that move, you can tell their intelligence.

For example, take Foraminifera - they're single-celled sea creatures, protoctists. The Egyptian pyramids are built of their shells. A colleague of mine put one of these forams in a dish with a small crustacean animal, like a water flea. He was going to watch the crustacean eat the foram. The foram's a single cell, and smaller, right? And he saw the foram kill, trap, and completely destroy and eat the animal. He's got beautiful movies of it. So that group of organisms not only can eat animals, but they can make hunting towers, and they can hunt from the top of the towers.

There's a group of them, called agglutinating forams, these have offspring that look exactly like the parent, with multi colors. But every generation they construct their coloration from pebbles. This single-celled blob - it would look to you like a blob of snot, probably - can pick up pebbles of the different colors. You have to have some red ones and some white ones and some black ones in order to get an offspring that looks like a parent. They will make appropriate choices such that when you see the offspring next to the parent, it looks like they just came about by dividing in half. You can't believe that the newer one, the offspring one, was naked, and then it spent a lot of time plastering and remolding and rearranging pebbles on the surface of itself, so that it now looks indistinguishable from its parent. Those kinds of activities are rampant.

Are humans the master of tools? No, enter the chimp. Are humans the master of language? Ask the dolphin...or a dog. Rico, a dog with an approximately 200-word "vocabulary," can learn the names of unfamiliar toys after just one exposure to the new word-toy combination.

People think that if you can't talk, you can't be intelligent. But you know that's not true if you have a dog. You can communicate with them without talking. If you define intelligence as speaking American English, well maybe they're not. But if you define it in the much more broad sense of behaviors that are modified on the individual level, that involve choice and change and response to the environment, there's every bit of evidence that intelligence is a property of life from the very beginning. It's been modified, of course, and changed and amplified, even, but it's an intrinsic property of cells.

our predicament - she pushed the button...,

The Box

Martin Teague: Sir? If you don't mind my asking... why a box?
Arlington Steward: Your home is a box. Your car is a box on wheels. You drive to work in it. You drive home in it. You sit in your home, staring into a box. It erodes your soul, while the box that is your body inevitably withers... then dies. Where upon it is placed in the ultimate box, to slowly decompose.
Martin Teague: It's quite depressing, if you think of it that way.
Arlington Steward: Don't think of it that way... think of it as a temporary state of being.

gut bacteria cause overeating in mice

Wired | The connection between gut bacteria and obesity has gained some weight, with new findings demonstrating links in mice among immune-system malfunction, bacterial imbalance and increased appetite.

Mice with altered immune systems developed metabolic disorders and were prone to overeating. When microbes from their stomachs were transplanted into other mice, they also become obese.

“This supports the notion that some of the increase in obesity may be because of changes to gut bacteria,” said Andrew Gewirtz, an Emory University immunologist and co-author of the study, published March 4 in Science.

The findings are the latest in a growing body of research about the long-unappreciated role of bacteria in our bodies. Bacterial cells actually outnumber human cells in the body: From an outside perspective, people are not so much individual organisms as symbiotic human-bacteria collectives.

Disturbances to internal bacteria have been linked to asthma, cancer and many autoimmune diseases. Gut flora have also been linked to obesity. In 2006, researchers led by Washington University microbiologist Jeffrey Gordon documented bacterial changes in the stomachs of mice who became obese on high-fat diets.

When transplanted, their gut bugs turned other mice obese, suggesting that altered bacteria were not only an effect of weight gain, but a cause. The Science findings complement those, but also emphasize the immune system’s role and the possibility of appetite change.

“The reason why people are eating too much may not simply be because unhealthy food is cheap and available, but that their appetites may be driven by changes in gut bacteria,” said Gewirtz. Fist tap Dale.

bacterial observations: a rudimentary form of intelligence?

ScienceDirect | Genome sequencing has revealed that signal transduction in bacteria makes use of a limited number of different devices, such as two-component systems, LuxI–LuxR quorum-sensing systems, phosphodiesterases, Ser-Thr (serine-threonine) kinases, OmpR-type regulators, and sigma factor–anti-sigma factor pathways. These systems use modular proteins with a large variety of input and output domains, yet strikingly conserved transmission domains. This conservation might lead to redundancy of output function, for example, via crosstalk (i.e. phosphoryl transfer from a non-cognate sensory kinase). The number of similar devices in a single cell, particularly of the two-component type, might amount to several dozen, and most of these operate in parallel. This could bestow bacteria with cellular intelligence if the network of two-component systems in a single cell fulfils the requirements of a neural network. Testing these ideas poses a great challenge for prokaryotic systems biology.

WorldScience | To properly assess if bacterial signals constitute intelligence, whether of a social or individual brand, Hellingwerf and some other researchers work from the inside out.

Rather than focusing on the behaviors, which are open to differing interpretations, they focus on the systems of interactions followed by the molecules. These systems, it is hoped, have distinct properties that can be measured and compared against similar interactions in known intelligent beings.

For instance, if these bacterial systems operate similarly to networks in the brain, it would provide a weighty piece of evidence in favor of the bacterial intelligence.

Hellingwerf has set himself a more modest goal, comparing bacterial signaling not to the brain, but to the brain-like, human-made neural network devices. Such an effort has a simple motivation. Demonstrating that bacterial signaling possesses every important feature of neural networks would suggest at least that microbial capabilities rival those of devices with proven ability to tackle simple problems using known rules of brain function—rather than robot-like calculations, which are very different.

To understand how one could do such a comparison requires a brief explanation of how neural networks work, and how they differ from traditional computers.

Computers are good at following precise instructions, but terrible at even simple, common-sense tasks that lack definite rules, like the recognition of the difference between male and female.

Neural networks, like humans, can do this because they are more flexible, and they learn—even though they can be built using computers. They are a set of simulated “brain cells” set to pass “signals” among themselves through simulated “connections.”

Some information that can be represented as a set of numbers, such as a digitized photograph, is fed to a first set of “cells” in such a way that each cell gets a number. Each cell is then set to “transmit” all, part or none of that number to one or more other cells. How big a portion of the number is passed on to each, depends on the simulated “strength” of the connections that are programmed into the system.

Each of those cells, in turn, are set to do something with the numbers they receive, such as add them or average them—and then transmit all or part of them to yet another cell.

Numbers ricochet through the system this way until they arrive at a final set of “output” cells. These cells are set to give out a final answer—based on the numbers in them—in the form of yet another number. For example, the answer could be 0 for male, 1 for female.

Such a system, when new, will give random answers, because the connections are initially set at random. However, after each attempt at the problem, a human “tells” the system whether it was right or wrong. The system is designed to then change the strength of the connections to improve the answer for the next try.

To do this, the system calculates to what extent a change in strength of each connection previously contributed to giving a right or wrong answer. This information tells the system how to change the strengths to give better results. Over many attempts, the system’s accuracy gradually improves, often reaching nearly human-like performance on a given task.

Such systems not only work quite well for simple problems, many researchers believed they capture all the key features of real brain cells, though in a drastically simplified way.

The devices also have similarities to the messaging systems in bacteria. But how deep are the resemblances? To answer this, Hellingwerf looked at four properties that neural-network experts have identified as essential for such devices to work. He then examined whether bacterial signaling fits each of the criteria.

The four properties are as follows.
First, a neural network must have multiple sub-systems that work simultaneously, or “in parallel.” Neural networks do this, because signals follow multiple pathways at once, in effect carrying out multiple calculations at once. Traditional computers can’t do this; they conduct one at a time. Bacteria do fit the standard, though, because they can contain many messaging networks acting simultaneously, Hellingwerf observes.

Second, key components of the network must carry out logical operations. This means, in the case of a neural network, that single elements of the network combine signals from two or more other elements, and pass the result on to a third according to some mathematical rule. Regular computers also have this feature. Bacteria probably do too, Hellingwerf argues, based on the way that parts of their signaling systems add up inputs from different sources.

The third property is “auto-amplification.” This describes the way some network elements can boost the strength of their own interactions. Hellingwerf maintains that bacteria show this property, as when, for example, some of their signaling systems create more copies of themselves as they run.

The fourth property is where the rub lies for bacteria. This feature, called crosstalk, means that the system must not consist just of separate chain reactions: rather, different chain reactions have to connect, so that the way one operates can change the way another runs.

Crosstalk is believed to underlie an important form of memory called associative memory, the ability to mentally connect two things with no obvious relationship. A famous example is the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov’s dog, who drooled at the ring of a bell because experience had taught him food invariably followed the sound.

Crosstalk has been found many times in bacteria, Hellingwerf wrote—but the strength of the crosstalk “signals” are hundreds or thousands of times weaker than those that follow the main tracks of the chain reactions. Moreover, “clear demonstrations of associative memory have not yet been detected in any single bacterial cell,” he added, and this is an area ripe for further research. If bacteria can indeed communicate, it seems they may be holding quite a bit back from us.

bacteria drive electric mud

The Scientist | Underwater mud can conduct electricity, possibly with the help of bacteria in the sediment -- a result that helps explain the large amount of electrical activity researchers have detected in ocean sediments, a study published in this week's in Nature reports.

The finding could change how researchers think about microbes' contributions to geochemical processes.

"It's an interesting and important contribution," said Dirk de Beer from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, who was not involved in the study. The findings show that processes crucial for life in underwater environments, such as oxidation and reduction reactions, "run faster than we think they can, and in places where we don't expect them," said de Beer.

Researchers made the discovery, because, like many great scientist, they got lazy about cleaning their petri dishes, said lead author Lars Peter Nielsen from Aarhus University in Denmark. "We had some stinky mud standing in the lab," said Nielsen, and they noticed that the sulfides -- "the stinky part" in the upper centimeter of the mud -- changed color over time, indicating that the sulfide had been oxidized. Sulfides are present in mud that lacks oxygen, which should have been true of all the mud in Nielsen's petri dish save that at the very surface, and yet as far as a centimeter down, the sulfur had been converted into elemental sulfur -- a process that requires an electron acceptor like oxygen.

When they depleted oxygen from the surface water, sulfide levels in the mud rose, and when oxygen was bubbled back into the water, the sulfide levels dropped. Oxygen can't diffuse into the mud as quickly as this fluctuation took place; instead, the researchers showed a link between this change and the movement of electrons.

Nielsen and his colleagues believe that conductance is driven by bacteria stratified in different layers of the sediment. The bacteria at the surface, with access to oxygen, respire, consuming the electrons. Those electrons are produced by the bacteria in the sulfur rich lower sediments as they convert food into energy. "One will eat, the other will breathe and together they will share the energy," said Nielsen. Fist tap Dale.

darwin foes add warming to targets

NYTimes | Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.

In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss “the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories,” including “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”

The bill, which has yet to be voted on, is patterned on even more aggressive efforts in other states to fuse such issues. In Louisiana, a law passed in 2008 says the state board of education may assist teachers in promoting “critical thinking” on all of those subjects.

Last year, the Texas Board of Education adopted language requiring that teachers present all sides of the evidence on evolution and global warming.

Oklahoma introduced a bill with similar goals in 2009, although it was not enacted.

The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

Yet they are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming, particularly among political conservatives who oppose efforts to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases. Fist tap Nana.

the debate

The Debate.

climate change and environmental education

ClimateandCapitalism | Probably many of the scenarios presented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most recent reports on the natural and social impacts of global warming will take place not in the year 2100 or even 2050. It seems they will occur much sooner than that. Actually, we can already see several examples of environmental collapse. Therefore, it is critically urgent to adopt policies which truly address the environmental problems we face. Environmental education is a vital part of this call to action. As an intellectual mechanism, environmental education serves both as a means of persuasion and a way to bring about behavioral change.

But first we need to clarify the kind of environmental education that can actually achieve this goal, since, in general, government policies regarding environmental protection have been superficial and do not focus on the true causes of the ecological crisis. This is not a surprise. Governments today are simply incapable of preventing the ecological suicide which the prevailing capitalist logic is paving the way for. This superficial approach, however, is not due to a lack of understanding of the environmental crisis; rather it is an inherent consequence of the functioning of the capitalist economy.

Profit is the main driving force behind capitalism, and this requires unlimited expansion, unlimited accumulation and commodification. These conditions are essential for the continuous reproduction of the capitalist system. Aside from all other technicalities, this is the main ideological aspect of the climate issue: Capitalism is incapable of dealing with the global warming issue in a serious and responsible way.

Therefore, environmental educators must formulate a program of instruction which both holds the capitalist economy responsible for the global ecological crisis, while at the same time pointing out new directions in the fight against the ecosystem’s collapse.

g.i. gurdjieff

Wikipedia | Gurdjieff argued that many of the existing forms of religious and spiritual tradition on Earth had lost connection with their original meaning and vitality and so could no longer serve humanity in the way that had been intended at their inception. As a result humanity were failing to realize the truths of ancient teachings and were instead becoming more and more like automatons, susceptible to control from outside and increasingly capable of otherwise unthinkable acts of mass psychosis such as the 1914-18 war. At best, the various surviving sects and schools could only provide a one-sided development which did not result in a fully integrated human being. According to Gurdjieff, only one dimension of the person - namely, the emotions, the physical body or the mind - tends to be developed in such schools and sects and generally at the expense of the other faculties or centers as Gurdjieff called them. As a result these paths fail to produce a proper balanced human being. Furthermore, anyone wishing to undertake any of the traditional paths to spiritual knowledge (which Gurdjieff reduced to three - namely the path of the fakir, the path of the monk, and the path of the yogi) were required to renounce life in the world. Gurdjieff thus developed a Fourth Way which would be amenable to the requirements of modern people living modern lives in Europe and America. Instead of developing body, mind, or emotions separately, Gurdjieff's discipline worked on all three to promote comprehensive and balanced inner development.

In parallel with other spiritual traditions, Gurdjieff taught that one must expend considerable effort to effect the transformation that leads to awakening. The effort that one puts into practice Gurdjieff referred to as "The Work" or "Work on oneself". According to Gurdjieff, "...Working on oneself is not so difficult as wishing to work, taking the decision." Though Gurdjieff never put major significance on the term "Fourth Way" and never used the term in his writings, his pupil P.D. Ouspensky from 1924 to 1947 made the term and its use central to his own teaching of Gurdjieff's ideas. After Ouspensky's death, his students published a book titled The Fourth Way based on his lectures.

Gurdjieff's teaching addressed the question of humanity's place in the universe and the importance of developing latent potentialities — regarded as our natural endowment as human beings but rarely brought to fruition. He taught that higher levels of consciousness, higher bodies, inner growth and development are real possibilities that nonetheless require conscious work to achieve.

In his teaching Gurdjieff gave a distinct meaning to various ancient texts such as the Bible and many religious prayers. He claimed that those texts possess a very different meaning than what is commonly attributed to them. "Sleep not"; "Awake, for you know not the hour"; and "The Kingdom of Heaven is Within" are examples of biblical statements which point to a psychological teaching whose essence has been forgotten.

Gurdjieff taught people how to increase and focus their attention and energy in various ways and to minimize daydreaming and absentmindedness. According to his teaching, this inner development in oneself is the beginning of a possible further process of change, the aim of which is to transform people into what Gurdjieff believed they ought to be.

Distrusting "morality", which he describes as varying from culture to culture, often contradictory and superficial, Gurdjieff greatly stressed the importance of conscience. This he regarded as the same in all people, buried in their subconsciousness, thus both sheltered from damage by how people live and inaccessible without "work on oneself".

To provide conditions in which inner attention could be exercised more intensively, Gurdjieff also taught his pupils "sacred dances" or "movements", later known as the Gurdjieff movements, which they performed together as a group. He also left a body of music, inspired by what he heard in visits to remote monasteries and other places, written for piano in collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann. Gurdjieff also used various exercises, such as the "Stop" exercise, to prompt self-observation in his students. Other shocks to help awaken his pupils from constant day-dreaming were always possible at any moment.

women equality and Islam...,

AsianNews | In the Koran there is plenty of discrimination. More specifically there is no equality in principle, that men and women have equal rights. This is not surprising. In the Bible we find, perhaps even greater, inequality between men and women. It is normal, because God speaks to men according to their language and their mentality, but it is up to men to understand the intent of the revealed text.

In Islam, there is the same principle that consists of finding "the purpose of the Sharia" (maqâsid al-shari'ah). Muslims who read the Koran as if it were an immutable text literally applicable to all times and in all places, create the problem. It is their way of understanding the Koran, and of applying laws, which poses problems.

Is it possible to reinterpret the Koran? Of course! But it is easier said than done. We must establish criteria for interpretation, ie a "hermeneutics." This is what exegetes of the Koran are lacking today. The reason? For at least seven centuries, no one has done so: thinking has been blocked. The more time passes, the more difficult this task becomes. Today, some Muslims are trying to do so academically, but are immediately accused of ignorance in religious matters or indeed, of heresy. As for the learned in religious matters (the ulamâ ' or "ulema"), they only serve to repeat the comments of the ancient classical interpretations (tafsîr).

Only a cultural problem?

It is often said that the problem is not the Koran, which is perfect. The problem is the ignorance of the faithful, ancestral traditions, or the culture of the various Islamic countries. Which is also true. But the question, without resolving the problem, results in another: where does this ignorance, these traditions, this culture come from? Why do so many Muslims attribute to these traditions and this macho culture an Islamic religious value? But if the problem is the traditions and cultures in which it is interpreted, then by what right are they transformed into divine laws?

The argument that it is only a problem of some countries and some cultures is not correct: it is a very general problem in the Islamic world. Taking Tunisia and Syria as examples of equality between the sexes, is rather the anti-demonstration. Indeed, in Tunisia or Syria if there is more freedom for women and more equality between the sexes, it is not because of Islam, but for the fact that these two countries have made moderate secular choices. In the 1950’s under the influence of President Bourguiba, Tunisia adopted secular law to solve this problem, and Syria did the same with the secular ideology of the Baath.

In fact, where there is a secular, not Muslim, system there is a certain freedom. Every time a country tries to be more "Muslim", to "return to authentic Islam," it is the woman who pays the consequences! However, where Sharia law is not enforced, there is more freedom.

divorced before puberty

NYTimes | For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”

Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.

Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.

He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.

Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.

“I want to talk to the judge,” the book quotes Nujood as forlornly telling a woman in the courthouse.

“Which judge are you looking for?”

“I just want to speak to a judge, that’s all.”

“But there are lots of judges in this courthouse.”

“Take me to a judge — it doesn’t matter which one!”

When she finally encountered a judge, Nujood declared firmly: “I want a divorce!”

Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre, and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an 8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces.

As a pioneer, Nujood came to the United States and was honored in 2008 as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Indeed, Nujood is probably the only third grader whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as “one of the greatest women I have ever seen.”

Nujood’s memoir spent five weeks as the No. 1 best-seller in France. It is being published in 18 other languages, including her own native language of Arabic.

the century of famine

Culture Change | Although, when discussing theories of famine, economists generally use the term “neo-malthusian” in a derogatory manner, the coming famine will be very much a case of an imbalance between population and resources. The overwhelming cause of the imbalance and famine will be fossil-fuel depletion, not government policy (as in the days of Stalin or Mao), warfare, ethnic discrimination, bad weather, poor methods of distribution, inadequate transportation, livestock diseases, or any of the other variables that have often turned mere hunger into genuine starvation.

The increase in the world’s population has followed a simple curve: from about 1.7 billion in 1900 to about 6.1 billion in 2000. A quick glance at a chart of world population growth, on a broader time scale, shows a line that runs almost horizontally for thousands of years, and then makes an almost vertical ascent as it approaches the present. That is not just an amusing curiosity. It is a shocking fact that should have awakened humanity to the realization that something is dreadfully wrong.

Mankind is always prey to its own “exuberance,” to use Catton’s term [2]. That has certainly been true of population growth. In many cultures, “Do you have any children?” or, “How many children do you have?” is a form of greeting or civility almost equivalent to “How do you do?” or, “Nice to meet you.” World population growth, nevertheless, has always been ecologically hazardous. The destruction of the environment reaches back into the invisible past, and the ruination of land, sea, and sky has been well described if not well heeded. But what is even less frequently noted is that with every increase in human numbers we are only barely able to keep up with the demand: providing all those people with food and water has not been easy. We are always pushing ourselves to the limits of Earth’s ability to hold us.

Even that is an understatement. No matter how much we depleted our resources, there was always the sense that we could somehow “get by.” But in the late twentieth century we stopped getting by. It is important to differentiate between production in an “absolute” sense and production “per capita.” Although oil production, in “absolute” numbers, kept climbing — only to decline in the early twenty-first century — what was ignored was that although that “absolute” production was climbing, the production “per capita” reached its peak in 1979 [1].

The unequal distribution of resources plays a part, of course. The average inhabitant of the United States consumes far more than the average inhabitant of India or China. Nevertheless, if all the world’s resources were evenly distributed, the result would only be universal poverty. It is the totals and the averages of resources that we must deal with in order to determine the totals and averages of results. For example, if all of the world’s arable land were distributed evenly, in the absence of mechanized agriculture each person on the planet would have an inadequate amount of farmland for survival: distribution would have accomplished very little.

live from new york...,

new ghost towns

USAToday | Ravenswood, with 4,000 people and one big factory, is like many towns in the USA where things still are made: caught in a winter between recession and recovery, hoping the latter will arrive before the former kills the last decent blue-collar job.

If the rest of the aluminum works closed, "would this become a ghost town?" muses Jim Frazier, principal of the Henry J. Kaiser Elementary School.

Whether it's textiles in the Carolinas, paper in New England or steel in the Midwest, most industrial cities and mill towns "are on pins and needles," says Donald Schunk, an economist at Coastal Carolina University. "Day to day, week to week, any manufacturing facility seems vulnerable. People don't know if they'll be there." Fist tap Nana.

bankrupt

Fist tap Dale.

because neurotypical brains miss a lot...,

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.

can you blame him?

NYTimes | Jason R. Bourque grew up in a house full of crosses.

At his grandparent’s spacious home here, where he was raised, a small forest of crosses stands on a table by the front door, and one wall of the living room is filled with more than a dozen decorative crosses of wrought iron, ceramic and wood.

In a hallway leading to the 19-year-old’s bedroom, there is a picture of him graduating with honors from Van High School, where he was a state champion in debate, along with his framed Eagle Scout badge. He built a picnic area for a local church as his final scouting project. That good deed came after he had gone on several summer missions for his church to build housing for the poor.

But law enforcement officials say something went awry over the last year in Mr. Bourque’s sense of good and evil. He and a childhood friend, Daniel G. McAllister, 21, now stand accused of breaking into 10 churches since Jan. 1, piling hymnals and furniture up around the pulpits and pianos and then setting the churches ablaze, according to search warrants and arrest affidavits.

“This was not his character — he was raised Christian,” his mother, Kimberly Bourque, said.

belief in god relieves stress

WashingtonTimes | The "Big Man Upstairs" is getting accolades from mental health specialists who say they are finding that a belief in God plays a positive role in the treatment of anxiety and depression.

University of Toronto psychologists reported last year that "believing in God can help block anxiety and minimize stress," their research showcasing "distinct brain differences" between believers and nonbelievers.

Public opinion polls — from Gallup to the Pew Research Center — reveal that large majorities of Americans believe in God. It is a factor among the researchers as well.

Data released last year by sociologists from the University of California at Berkeley, in fact, revealed that 93 percent of the nation believes in God, a finding that has remained unchanged since 1988.

The Canadian researchers who found that belief in God lowers anxiety and stress also based their conclusions on measurements — monitoring the brain activities of believers and nonbelievers charged with some challenging tasks.

"We found that religious people or even people who simply believe in the existence of God show significantly less brain activity in relation to their own errors," said Michael Inzlicht, assistant psychology professor at the University of Toronto, who led the research.

"They're much less anxious and feel less stressed when they have made an error," he said. Fist tap Dale.

do intelligent people have novel values?

ScienceDaily | More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."

"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."

"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles." Fist tap Dale.