John Timmer

Although avian flu viruses have infected humans in the past (often with lethal effect), so far, these infections have come directly from birds. Over this past summer, however, researchers presented disturbing results at a scientific meeting. By growing the avian H5N1 virus in mammals for several generations, they had evolved a strain that can spread among mammals (ferrets, in this case) simply through the air. Additionally, researchers identified the mutations that enabled the virus to do so–the kind of information that would be enough to allow any competent molecular biologist to create an exact duplicate.

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In 2006, scientists announced a provocative finding: a retrovirus called XMRV, closely related to a known virus from mice, was associated with cases of prostate cancer. But other labs, using different sets of patients, found no evidence of a viral infection. Before the controversy could be sorted out, another research group published a 2009 paper containing an even more intriguing claim. XMRV, it said, was associated with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), a disorder that some had claimed was purely psychosomatic.

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For thousands of customers of Subway restaurants around the US over the past few years, paying for their $5 footlong sub was a ticket to having their credit card data stolen. In a scheme dating back at least to 2008, a band of Romanian hackers is alleged to have stolen payment card data from the point-of-sale (POS) systems of hundreds of small businesses, including more than 150 Subway restaurant franchises and at least 50 other small retailers. And those retailers made it possible by practically leaving their cash drawers open to the Internet, letting the hackers ring up over $3 million in fraudulent charges.

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The copyright trolling firm Righthaven hit a new low on Monday when one of its targets sought to have a US Marshal drag Righthaven officers into court to explain their failure to comply with a previous court order.

When we began covering Righthaven last year, the firm seemed like it could pose a serious threat to fair use online. But 2011 hasn’t been kind to the company, as it has experienced setback after setback in the courts. At this point, there’s little question that Righthaven will be driven into bankruptcy. The only question is how soon it will happen.

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Another six weeks have gone by, and another version of Firefox has been released. Still not officially "live," Firefox 9 improves on Firefox 8 with a JavaScript engine that’s up to 30 percent faster and, well, not a whole lot else. Mac OS X users will have a little more to gain, as Firefox 9 also includes two-finger gestures for backward and forward navigation on that platform.

The new version includes a number of bug fixes to improve stability and security, better support for HTML5, CSS, and MathML, and some improvements to its Do Not Track feature to allow scripts to know if tracking is enabled or not. All told, the new release includes more than one thousand bug fixes and improvements.

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A decade after MIT began to put its teaching materials and lectures online via the OpenCourseWare platform, the university has announced that it will leverage these materials to provide an online certification program, currently termed MITx. Although these certificates won’t have the same weight as an MIT degree, they will indicate mastery of specific subject areas. The whole system will be built on top of an open-source software platform, which may enable other universities to follow in MIT’s footsteps.

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In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a controversial exhibition entitled “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt,” in which works considered to be genuine Rembrandts were displayed alongside those done by his students and admirers. (These lesser paintings are often dismissed as “the school of Rembrandt.”) The point of the exhibition was to reveal the fine line between genius and imitation, authenticity and fakery.

A hundred years ago, about 700 works were attributed to Rembrandt. Over the course of the 20th century, that number declined by 50 percent, as critics and historians began searching for those tell-tale marks that distinguish the old master from his young pupils. Such critical distinctions have massive financial consequences: While a painting by celebrated Rembrandt pupil William Drost might sell for a few hundred thousand dollars — his best canvases can go for a couple million — a genuine Rembrandt is worth many times more. In 2009, a lesser Rembrandt portrait sold for $33 million.

What accounts for this staggering difference in value? One possibility, of course, is that there’s something inherently special about a real Rembrandt, that the Dutch painter filled his art with discernible flourishes that can be detected by observers. Although we might not be able to explain these minor differences, we still appreciate them at an unconscious level, which is why we hang Rembrandts in the Met and consign his imitators to the basement. Great art is not an accident.

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Brian Palmer

Writer, philosopher, gadfly, and Slate contributor Chrisopher Hitchens died on Thursday of complications from esophageal cancer. While drinking and smoking may have contributed to his untimely passing, Hitchens didn’t regret either habit: “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that—or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation—is worth it to me.” After Steve Jobs died, we explained how LSD may enhance creativity among innately creative people. Does alcohol improve your writing?

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Recent advances have boosted parents’ hopes, but great uncertainties remain.

Jerome Groopman

The entryway to the neonatal intensive-care unit in my hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, is lined with photographs of children who were born prematurely. Jeremiah, delivered at twenty-four weeks, sixteen weeks early, weighed one pound six ounces. In the picture, he’s a robust teen-ager, seated at a piano. Nearby is a photo of Caroline, a blond ten-year-old in a blue uniform, holding a lacrosse stick. She was born at twenty-five weeks, when her mother’s placenta abruptly tore apart. Caroline has cerebral palsy, and wears an ankle-and-foot brace on her right leg, but she “is able to dance, swim, ride a two-wheel bike, play lacrosse,” and “is very social,” according to the caption below the photo. Across the hall is a photograph of Jackie, who’s on a swing. Her mother’s placenta became infected at twenty-four weeks, and she was delivered “blue,” with collapsed lungs. Jackie was not expected to live through the first twenty-four hours. She’s now eight years old, with a lingering lung problem, but her mother describes her as “a very beautiful girl with lots of energy. Her favorite food is everything.” A few steps away, there is a drawing of a tree with leaves made of paper. On each leaf is the name of an infant who did not survive.

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Ruth Franklin

The short story is an amuse-bouche: luscious, glittering, to be consumed in a single bite. It should be artfully conceived, but not so dainty that you can’t sink your teeth into it. It should restrain itself to the confines of its setup rather than spilling out messily over the edge of the page. Most important, it should satisfy the reader’s immediate appetites while making him or her hope for more. What it is not, in other words, is a shrunken novel. The story seizes a moment of emotion and captures it under a bell jar. The novel takes the long view, working extended magic through patterning and repetition, more like a multi-course meal: formal or informal, paced leisurely or at a rapid clip, but always exhaustive.

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Best American Short Stories 2011
edited by Geraldine Brooks and Heidi Pitlor (Mariner, £9.35)

Ladies and Gentlemen
by Adam Ross (Jonathan Cape, £12.99)

Alexander Linklater

In 1988, Christopher Hitchens wrote a characteristically scintillating essay for the American magazine, Grand Street, which was, uncharacteristically, about himself. Though his public arguments have always been driven by a powerful urge to self-advertise, this article has remained, until now, his only directly autobiographical piece of writing. In it he turned the business of self-disclosure into a warning about the pitfalls and deceptions of identity politics.

Entitled “On Not Knowing the Half of It,” the essay told the story of how his younger brother, Peter, had discovered that their late mother had been Jewish—a fact unknown even to their father. Hitchens then uses this as material with which to examine the problem of “thinking with the blood”; of the curiosity of ethnic identity and of its relevance, and irrelevance, to one’s political ideas. He describes his irritation at an editor who had suggested that this discovery would make his life easier, because “Jewish people are allowed to criticise Israel.” Had it really come to this, he wonders, that who you are might either justify or undermine your arguments?

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Rebel with a cause: Christopher Hitchens on a picket line in the 1960s

Hitch 22: a Memoir
by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic Books, £20)

Vanity Fair’s editor said those who read him felt they knew him

British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62.

He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he had, at a Texas hospital.

Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would "never be another like Christopher".

He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar".

"Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and graduated from Oxford in 1970.

He began his career as a journalist in Britain in the 1970s and later moved to New York, becoming contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November 1992.

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Mayur Ranchordas, a senior lecturer and performance nutritionist at Sheffield Hallam University, carried out studies on footballers using caffeine and carbohydrates combined in a drink. Along with improvements in endurance caused by ingesting carbohydrate, the athletes’ skill level improved after taking caffeine and carbohydrate together.

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Dec.16, 1832: Gustave Eiffel is born in Dijon, France. His innovative metal-structure design still supports buildings, bridges and even statues.

Eiffel was graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1855. He began his career by supervising railway construction in southwest France. He set himself up as an independent “constructor” in 1866.

To avoid a long, circuitous rail route, Eiffel designed a huge, vaulting bridge across the River Truyère in France’s Massif Central. Completed in 1884, the Garabit viaduct on the rail line from Paris to Marseilles jumps the river on a parabolic arch spanning 530 feet. The truss is ingeniously narrow and deep at the crown to support the tracks, but wide and shallow at the abutments to reduce wind resistance.

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Earlier this week, Slate technology columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote an essay championing Amazon over local bookstores. Bookstores, according to Manjoo, are “frustrating,” “difficult to use,” and “economically inefficient.” Amazon, on the other hand, has “ignite[d] a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books.”

The backlash against Manjoo’s piece was immediate and, in many cases, intensely emotional. (The headline in the New York Observer—“Everybody in New York Hates Slate Reporter Who Complained About Indie Bookstores”—was only somewhat hyperbolic.) Novelist Salman Rushdie, no stranger to criticism himself, tweeted, “Book lovers are ‘cultists’? Maybe, but this man is a moron.” Algonquin Books, an independent publisher, called Manjoo’s piece the “Dumbest article of 2011” (perhaps an allusion to the question Slate posed last week). Slate commenter Alvin Orloff, in the fine tradition of schoolyard taunts, retorted, “Farhad Manjoo is expensive, inefficient, and doesn’t deserve to be saved.”

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Brian Palmer

A new ad from a liberal advocacy group shows Mitt Romney speaking in French while intentionally mistranslated subtitles make the case that he’s a flip-flopper. Surrogates for George W. Bush accused John Kerry of "looking French" during the 2004 campaign. Why do Americans hate the French?

Some of it comes from the British. From the first years of the French Republic, Americans depicted France as everything the United States was not and did not wish to become. Alexander Hamilton said, “There is no real resemblance between what was the cause of America and what is the cause of France.” (He identified the former as liberty and the latter as licentiousness.) Still, much of our anti-French bias can be traced back to merry England, which had been fighting its cross-channel rival for centuries. Today, when American critics link a politician to France, they are exploiting a variety of long-held stereotypes, some of which are no longer accurate, and many of which were unfair to begin with. Nevertheless, the perceptions seem unshakeable.

The French are effeminate and cowardly…

The French are corrupt and lack idealism…

The French are too theoretical…

France is elitist…

France is collectivist, and doesn’t respect liberty…

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Here are two surprising holiday shopping season success stories. They’re even more surprising because they seem to directly contradict each other.

First, Amazon, which has historically kept its sales figures for Kindle e-readers tightly under wraps, announced that it’s sold more than a million Kindle devices each week for the past three weeks. Priced between $79 for the new entry-level Kindle and $199 for the Kindle Fire tablet, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every week for the Kindle division, not counting books, videos and apps.

Second, brick-and-mortar bookstores, many of whom expected to take a steep hit from the boom in e-readers, are instead reporting substantial year-over-year gains this holiday season — big chains like Barnes & Noble and indie booksellers alike. (Major factors here include the demise of Borders as well as the success of tentpole titles like Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.)

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Paracetamol is a widely-used analgesic (painkiller) and the main ingredient in everyday medications such as cold and flu remedies. Although discovered in the 1890s and marketed as a painkiller since the 1950s, exactly how it relieves pain was unknown.

This study, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and recently published in Nature Communications, shows for the first time the principal mechanism of action for one of the most-used drugs in the world.

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Shocking news spread in August this year. Al Quaida, a terror organization, was reported to be producing bombs containing the poison ricin to attack shopping centers, airports, or train stations. Since the First World War, ricin has had a gruesome reputation as a bioweapon. It is one of the deadliest plant based poisons in the world. Even a tiny amount can kill a person within two to three days after getting into the bloodstream. And it comes from the humble castor oil bean, available in many health food shops or online.

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"Your interpersonal experiences with your mother during the first 12 to 18 months of life predict your behavior in romantic relationships 20 years later," says psychologist Jeffry A. Simpson, the author, with University of Minnesota colleagues W. Andrew Collins and Jessica E. Salvatore. "Before you can remember, before you have language to describe it, and in ways you aren’t aware of, implicit attitudes get encoded into the mind," about how you’ll be treated or how worthy you are of love and affection.

While those attitudes can change with new relationships, introspection, and therapy, in times of stress old patterns often reassert themselves. The mistreated infant becomes the defensive arguer; the baby whose mom was attentive and supportive works through problems, secure in the goodwill of the other person.

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My husband gave me a Kindle for my birthday. (Forgive him, O Indie booksellers. He is an engineer who knows not what he does.)
At first I protested. As a writer, avid reader, and patron of indie bookstores with cats curled on floral armchairs, what did I want with this devilish contraption?
"Give it a try," my husband suggested. "A lot of the books are free."
Did he say free? As the daughter of a Do-It-Yourself-Or-Die-Trying gerbil farmer, "free" is my middle name, whether I’m surfing for curbside antiques or checking out sample cheeses at Market Basket. How could I resist?

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Amazon just did a boneheaded thing, and it deserves all the scorn you want to heap on it. Last week, the company offered people cash in exchange for going into retail stores and scanning items using the company’s Price Check smartphone app. If you scanned a product and then purchased it from Amazon rather than the shop you were standing in, Amazon would give you a 5 percent discount on the sale. (Disclosure: Slate is an Amazon affiliate; when you click on an Amazon link from Slate, the magazine gets a cut of the proceeds from whatever you buy.)

I’m generally a fan of price comparison—like everyone else, I hate spending more than I should—but I can understand physical retailers’ fear of the practice becoming widespread. When you walk into Best Buy and get a salesperson to spend 10 minutes showing you a television, then leave empty-handed so you can buy the TV for less on Amazon, you’ve just turned Best Buy into Jeff Bezos’ chump. The Price Check promotion (which lasted only one day) was, like Amazon’s aggressive efforts to dodge the collection of sales tax, a brazen attempt to crush local retailers, and I (as did many others) found it distasteful. Sure, I’m a fan of Amazon and devote a substantial portion of my income to its coffers—but does it have to be so wantonly callous about destroying its competitors?

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Annie Lowrey

Shirataki

In the past decade, pasta has slowly disappeared from many American plates, banished for its starchy carbo-load along with bread, rice, cereal, potatoes, and corn. But what if dieters could have as much delicious pasta as they wanted? And what if this pasta not only came carb-free, but calorie-free?

That is the heady promise of a little-known Japanese noodle called shirataki, much beloved and whispered about among the ketosis-obsessed. “These miracle noodles will quickly fill you up, and keep you that way all day,” one partisan writes. (Does she eat them for breakfast?) “I love them! They are so low in calories and so filling that it makes me feel secure just to know that if I’m hungry, I have those in the refrigerator,” crows another. Hungry Girl, the Pepto-pink diet blog, swears by them too. It was a marathon-runner-type who tipped me off to shirataki, having read an endorsement on a Dukan Diet blog.

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‘Arms Race’ Exists Between Snakes and Humans

Sarah C. P. Williams, ScienceNOW

At sunset on 13 March 1973, a reticulated python (Python reticulatus) slithered into a thatched hut in the Philippines and killed two siblings: a 4-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy. The third child in the family was saved when his father returned to the hut and killed the reptile with a bolo knife.

That’s one of many observations described in a new analysis of snake attacks on the Agta Negritos, a rural hunter-gatherer culture that thrived in the isolated mountain regions of Luzon island until the 1990s. The new data, based on interviews with Agta adults, reveal that snakes were more than just a rare nuisance to the people. They were prey, predator, and competitor all at once. The complex relationship helps reveal the evolutionary pressures that humans and snakes once put on each other.

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An Oregon judge has ruled that a Montana blogger is not eligible for the legal protections afforded to journalists, letting stand a $2.5 million defamation verdict.

The blogger, a Montana woman named Crystal Cox, had become a thorn in the side of an attorney named Kevin Padrick. Padrick is the principal of a firm named Obsidian Finance Group. Cox styles herself an "investigative blogger," and has created numerous websites with names like "obsidianfinancesucks.com," "bankruptcytrusteefraud.com," and "oregonshyster.com," in which she accused Padrick and Obsidian of misconduct in their handling of a bankruptcy case.

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A quartet of hackers based in the Philippines have allegedly bilked AT&T and possibly other telecommunications companies out of millions, which they channeled to their own bank accounts and to accounts associated with a terrorist organization. And apparently, AT&T helped them collect the money.

On November 24, the Philippine National Police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group and the FBI staged raids in Manila, arresting Macnell Gracilla, Francisco Manalac, Regina Balura, and Paul Michael Kwan. The CIDG said in a statement that the hackers had been financed by Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist group that the FBI has said funded the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai. While few details have been offered up by AT&T or law enforcement, at least one of the the four has been involved in previous "phreaking," or phone hacking, of telecom customers’ private branch exchanges (PBXs) in the past—and in fact was indicted in the US in 2009 for a similar crime. The arrests are part of an FBI effort to crack down on PBX hacking that dates back to 1999.

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If there’s any doubt how social networks have presented hackers with a wealth of social engineering tools, a Brazilian security researcher recently demonstrated how he could "friend" even allegedly more wary Facebook users in less than 24 hours. At the Silver Bullet security conference in São Paulo, UOLDiveo chief security officer Nelson Novaes Neto showed how he leveraged LinkedIn, Amazon, and Facebook to convince a target—a Web security expert he called "SecGirl" using social engineering.

Novaes created a fraudulent Facebook account, "cloning" the identity of the manager of the target. He then sent friend requests to friends of friends of the manager from the cloned account—sending out 432 requests. In just one hour, 24 of those requests were accepted, even though 96 percent of them already had the legitimate account of the manager in their contact list. He moved on to 436 direct friends of the manager, using his connections from LinkedIn—getting acceptances from 14 of them in an hour. Seven hours into the experiment, his cloned account’s friend request was granted by SecGirl.

With the information obtained by friending someone, it’s possible, Neto said, to then take over a legitimate Facebook account using Facebook’s "Three Trusted Friends" password recovery feature. Through the password recovery tool, a hacker can change both the password and the contact e-mail address for an account. The hacker could then use that hacked account for social engineering attacks on other accounts.

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Seventy years ago this week, hundreds of Japanese fighters and dive bombers unexpectedly appeared on a clear Sunday morning over the North Shore of the main Hawaiian island of Oahu and prepared to drop their bomb loads on Pearl Harbor. Within minutes the U.S. Pacific fleet was decimated and the door appeared open for a complete Japanese conquest of the Pacific basin and the establishment of an enduring Japanese hegemony over the Asia-Pacific region.

As we now know, this great Japanese victory was a pyrrhic one, as its architect and main protagonist, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, had predicted it would be. Long before his bombers materialized over Hawaiian waters, Yamamoto had warned Japan’s leaders against the attack. He would succeed with the initial assault and would "run wild" for the first year of an ensuing war, he told them. However, he emphasized, if the war continued beyond a year, Japan would not be able to match America’s enormous productive power and would inexorably ground down be ground down and defeated.

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Brian Palmer

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA’s recommendation that emergency contraception be made available over the counter to patients of all ages on Wednesday. Her argument was that its effects on 11-year-olds have not been thoroughly studied. Critics pointed out that many over-the-counter drugs are far more dangerous than emergency contraceptives. What’s the most dangerous drug you can buy without a prescription?

It’s hard to say. As far as the Explainer can tell, no researcher has ever compared the fatality rates of every drug available over the counter—probably because the number of deaths from overdose of antacids and many other products is so small as to make the study a waste of time. There is, however, a large body of research on pain relievers. Analgesic overdoses are pretty common in the United States. In 2000, poison-control centers received more than 130,000 calls from people who believed they had taken a dangerous amount of an over-the-counter painkiller. Nearly one-half of those calls concerned acetaminophen, best known as the active ingredient in Tylenol.

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Robert Kowalski

THE idea of machines that think and act as intelligently as humans can generate strong emotions. This may explain why one of the most important accomplishments in the field of artificial intelligence has gone largely unnoticed: that some of the advances in AI can be used by ordinary people to improve their own natural intelligence and communication skills.

Chief among these advances is a form of logic called computational logic. This builds and improves on traditional logic, and can be used both for the original purpose of logic – to improve the way we think – and, crucially, to improve the way we communicate in natural languages, such as English. Arguably, it is the missing link that connects language and thought.

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After a hard day hunting and gathering, humans 77,000 years ago could count on a good night’s mosquito-free sleep on a comfy bed of grass and leaves. Archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of humans using plant bedding, 50,000 years before it appears anywhere else.

Many animals make beds for themselves, says lead author Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, but what’s interesting in the new find is the way the owners managed their bedding. To keep it clean and pest-free, they burned it.

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By Adam Marcus of Nature magazine

A long-running question about how the largest species of birds achieve erect penises seems to have been settled. In a study published this week in the Journal of Zoology, researchers report that male ostriches and emus enlarge their penises using a burst of lymphatic fluid rather than a blood vascular system like that found in reptiles and mammals.

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The rise of Newt Gingrich, Ph.D.— along with the apparent anti-intellectualism of many of the other Republican candidates — has once again raised the question of the role of intellectuals in American politics.

In writing about intellectuals, my temptation is to begin by echoing Marianne Moore on poetry: I, too, dislike them.  But that would be a lie: all else equal, I really like intellectuals.  Besides, I’m an intellectual myself, and their self-deprecation is one thing I really do dislike about many intellectuals.

What is an intellectual?  In general, someone seriously devoted to what used to be called the “life of the mind”: thinking pursued not instrumentally, for the sake of practical goals, but simply for the sake of knowing and understanding.  Nowadays, universities are the most congenial spots for intellectuals, although even there corporatism and careerism are increasing threats.
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Posted by Ann Kjellberg

On April 13, 1904, Pablo Picasso and his friend the Catalan painter Sebastià Junyer Vidal travelled from Barcelona to Paris and installed themselves in Montmartre in the studio just vacated by the Basque ceramicist and sculptor Paco Durrio. Junyer Vidal paid the rent. Called “La Maison du Trappeur” (The Trapper’s House), later renamed Le Bateau Lavoir by its denizens, this ex-piano factory and ex-locksmith shop converted to a congeries of studios in 1889 could be entered on the first floor from the rue Ravignan, but plunged in the rear down three storeys to the rue Garreau. Various Spanish artists had preceded Picasso in the building, including his older friends Ricard Canals and Joaquim Sunyer. In the 1880s it had been a popular haunt for anarchists, Gauguin had visited often, and the poet-dramatic Paul Fort had lived there while directing his Symbolist Théâtre de l’Art across the square. Poet Max Jacob, who visited every day and later lived there for a while, evoked it often. In a lecture in 1937 he remembered: “Picasso returned with what the dealers have called the Blue Period paintings, vaguely imitative of El Greco. He led me to the crown of the Butte Montmartre. We scorned all previous art and all the schools, and in the evenings, to amuse ourselves, we improvised plays, without spectators, which we never wrote down and which concluded in wild bursts of laughter.

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Oliver Bullough

Every one of the 277 players who visited Abkhazia for the three-day domino world championships in October was a criminal. By crossing the border from Russia, they were immediately liable to at least two years in a Georgian prison.

Abkhazia’s quarter of a million people live on a narrow strip of land between the Caucasus mountains and the Black Sea. The territory is called an independent country by Moscow, but part of Georgia by every other country in the world, bar five. During the Cold War, it was part of the Soviet Republic of Georgia, and today the Georgians, who lost a vicious war for control in the early 1990s, maintain that visiting without their permission is illegal.

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“A sort of Abkhazian Riverdance”: the opening ceremony of the domino world championships in Sukhum, 16th October

Pinterest feels like the least cynical place on the Web

At Slate’s annual retreat last summer, Holly Allen, one of the magazine’s Web designers, buttonholed me and exclaimed, “Have you heard of Pinterest? You’ve got to write about it!” I hadn’t heard about it, and rather than explain what it is—because while Pinterest is many things, easy to explain isn’t one of them—she rushed to get her iPad to show me the site.

Since then, I’ve noticed paeans to Pinterest everywhere I go. Several readers have exhorted me to write about it, calling it their favorite new thing on the Web. I’ve spotted Pinterest stickers on laptops at the offices of both Facebook and Google. And every day, my Facebook and Twitter feeds brim with links to Pinterest. This mania got me thinking that I really should write about why Pinterest is so wonderful, and how it’s the hottest new social site since Tumblr. There’s only one problem: I just don’t get it.

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Pathway from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala

We all have a ghoulish fascination with the Hannibal Lecters of this world. That’s because many of the most-publicized stories about psychopaths can be quickly banged into a Hollywood script. One of the most absorbing accounts that I’ve come across recently, however, was in an advance reading copy of a book by Paul J. Zak, due in May, called The Moral Molecule. The book, which deals largely with the hormone/neurotransmitter oxytocin and its role in social interactions, has a section on the psychopath.

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Early research on the sharpest octogenarians reveals unusually youthful brain regions

A nasty affliction sets into humans as they advance in years. The hair either disappears or thins into a fuzzy halo, the skin sags and bunches, while inside the brain, changes set in that slow our reaction times and cause our memories to fade. A steady, widespread thinning out of the brain’s cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, is thought to underlie some of this cognitive transformation.

But not everybody ages the same way—and not everyone, it turns out, suffers from memory decline and cortical thinning. The 48 octogenarians in the Northwestern University Super Aging Project were selected for having met or bested the average performance of a 50- or 60-year old on standard tests of recall. Magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains corroborate their superior abilities: not only do super agers act the same as their younger counterparts, their brains look the same. “To see no change whatsoever was really surprising,” says Theresa Harrison, one of the researchers who presented preliminary findings from the project at a poster session at the 2011 Society for Neuroscience conference.

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Sara Dickerman

Maybe it’s time you stopped stirring. For a couple of decades now, risotto has been the go-to sophisticated rice dish for homes and restaurants alike, and cooks have stood by the stove with a spoon in one hand and a ladle in the other, tending to their finicky rice. But there is another great European rice tradition that delivers even more oomph with less baby-sitting, and a recent cookbook, Paella, by Spanish-Parisian chef Alberto Herraiz, has reminded me just how good the dish can be.

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Yesterday, Toyota announced that they’re going to start exporting U.S.-built Camrys from Georgetown, Kentucky to South Korea.

Karl Smith wisely points out that this is a great example of what a recession isn’t. If the problem is years of "living beyond our means" the solution dictated by cosmic justice is years of laboring in auto plants building cars for South Koreans to drive. If the question is "why are we consuming so much less than we produced" the answer may be "it’s because in the past we consumed more than we produced." But right now the question facing America is "why are so many millions of people producing nothing at all." The answer can’t be simply that we had too much debt in the past or that we lived beyond our means. And the same thing applies to sky-high unemployment in Spain. Increasing the quantity of people who are sitting on the couch watching daytime TV and scanning the help wanted ads is not a useful step toward to rectifying structural imbalances in your economy. We’ll adjust faster, not slower, if we get fiscal and monetary policy that’s dedicated to waging war on unemployment.

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Forrest Wickman

New York City police officers called attendees of the Brooklyn’s West Indian Day   Parade “savages” and “animals” in a series of Facebook posts full of complaints about being assigned to the event. Some members of the online group warned others to watch their words, which could get them in trouble with “rats” from Internal Affairs, the New York Times reported on Monday. When did people start calling snitches “rats”?

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How do you publish a novel arguing that the unfit, weak or mentally infirm should not be allowed to breed, and only those deemed “high quality” be given the privilege of having children?

Well, you don’t. Francis Galton tried to in the first decade of the 20th century, but he died in 1911 before his eugenic novel Kantsaywhere could be published. His family promptly got hold of it and, horrified, destroyed almost all of it.

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(Image: British Antarctic Survey/BEDMAP consortium)

Antarctica is hiding something. It may look like a fairly flat, snow-covered wasteland, but the BEDMAP project has pulled back the ice sheet to reveal the mountainous bed topography of the continent underneath.

Only one per cent of this concealed rock makes its way to the surface of the frozen terrain. Although some of these mountains are as tall as the European Alps, reaching 3000 metres above sea level, they’re still obscured by 1000 metres of ice.

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EL Doctorow

We know too much about Ernest Hemingway to think of his work apart from his life. With the success of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), he became a public figure. He worked, usually on a short lead time, from his own experiences: the places he’d been, the people he knew. If a novel encodes the writer’s life, Hemingway’s code is easily deciphered.

He was at home everywhere in the world except the provincial Illinois town where he was born. He made of Europe and Africa and Cuba the territories of his imagination. He liked to kill things: he shot lion in Africa, pigeon in France, grizzly bear in the Rockies, grouse in Wyoming, and when he wasn’t busy personally killing things he went to the bullfights in Spain. From the waters off the Cuban coast he once brought in a 512-pound marlin. After celebrating and getting drunk with his friends, he went back to the dock where the great fish hung upside down and used it as a punching bag.

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Hemingway with wife number four, Mary Welsh, in 1959: “His values applied equally to birds, beasts, deep-sea fish and women”

David Waller

On the evening of Tuesday October 29, 1889, at around 10 o’clock, a young man wearing a monocle and evening suit jumped onto the stage of the Royal Aquarium Music Hall in Westminster. There was a moment of astonishment among the crowd, followed almost immediately by catcalls of derision, as the feeble-looking youngster with flaxen hair and girlish face declared in a voice barely audible against the hubbub, that he intended to prove himself the strongest man in the world.

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Neurons of the retina

Ray Kurzweil and other so-called transhumanists have promised that in coming decades we will be able to transfer a digital copy of the trillions of connections among nerve cells in our brains into a computer. We would essentially reincarnate ourselves as non-biological beings that persist for eternity inside a laptop, on the endless links of the Internet or as avatars inside a television set. After achieving the ultimate copy and paste, we would wave goodbye to death as we know it.

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Ferris Jabr 

On April 27, 1817, Jane Austen sat down and wrote her will, leaving almost all of her assets—valued at less than 800 pounds sterling—to her sister Cassandra. In May, the sisters moved to Winchester, England, so the bedridden Jane would be near her doctor. On July 18, only a few days after dictating 24 lines of comic verse to Cassandra, Jane died.

Since at least the 1960s Austen scholars, doctors and fans have tried to retrospectively identify the curious illness that killed the 41-year-old English author. Crime novelist Lindsay Ashford thinks she has finally solved the mystery. Austen, she proposes, died of arsenic poisoning. And scientists have the tools to find out if she is right.

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