The Senate system, political and otherwise, is not designed to stop producing much of anything -- let alone weapons -- especially in a lousy economy. The 58-40 vote to put the F-22 out of it misery offers a ray of hope that intelligent defense decisions can be made in Congress, even if it takes a massive effort by a determined secretary of defense, the president, and arm twisting by Rahm Emanuel. Perhaps the single individual to credit most for this important success is John McCain. Without him, and even with Gates, the vote would have been purely partisan, supplemented by pork crazed Democrats, such as Murray, Boxer, Feinstein, Byrd, and many others.

Important as it is, the vote should not be misinterpreted as a manifestation of Gates' "reform" agenda. Put simply, reform is not his agenda; reorientation is. Clearly he wants to focus on fighting the wars at hand, and he is having some real success at that, but only inside the Pentagon. And, reform it is not.

Transparent aluminium, a sci-fi material brought to 20th century Earth by the crew of The Enterprise in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, turns out to exist after all - if you see in X-rays.

To create this exotic state of matter, researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg, Germany, took a thin piece of aluminium foil and blasted it with an X-ray laser that can generate about 10 million gigawatts of power per square centimetre.

At standard temperature and pressure, solid aluminium is a lattice of ions, with a sea of free electrons in between. The FLASH beam had enough energy to knock an electron out of each ion and set it free, while the photon got absorbed in the process.

Principled, consistent left-wingers do not base their politics on the unprincipled, inconsistent geo-political manoeuvres of western powers. We stand with the oppressed against their oppressors, regardless of what the west (or anyone else) demands or threatens.

US sabre-rattling against Iran is worrying. A military attack must be resisted. However, opposition to Washington's war-mongering and neo-imperial designs is no reason for socialists, greens and other progressives to go soft on Tehran.

Iran is an Islamo-fascist state – a clerical form of fascism based on a confluence of Islamic fundamentalism and police state methods. It differs, of course, from traditional European-style fascism, being rooted in religious dogma and autocracy. This makes it no less barbaric. Iran under the ayatollahs has a history of repression that is even bloodier than Franco's clerical fascist regime in Spain. Sadly, it merits far less outrage by the left.

Identifying, correcting and averting our memory errors are part of a cognitive process called memory monitoring. Incorrect associations can be tough to change, but we can use techniques to retrain our brain.

When strong habits impede our ability to acquire a desired new habit or association, we experience a common phenomenon known as proactive interference. Wrong associations appear in common spelling errors such as "wierd" for "weird" and "neice" for "niece." Persistent mistaken connections also can cause embarrassing errors, such as calling a man's second wife by the name of his first. Interference is stronger the more previous wives you've had to deal with, and it is more difficult to overcome the stronger the habits are.

New York New York: What a time for Iconomania, none of it critical, none of it questioning, none offering deeper perspective or leading to very revealing coverage.

Politicians may rule but celebrities dominate in a culture where every pol dreams of shaping an aura that inspires hero worship and adoration. That was Barack Obama's trump card with his eloquence often blinding us to the substance of his stances.

First there was Michael Jackson's death with wall-to-wall coverage dominated by our info-tainment media where show biz and news biz merges more easily than media companies.

Michael's Moon Walk excited many more of us than even Neil Armstrongs' 40 year ago. The gloved one transcended the planet of the strange to join the pantheon of the adored, achieving in death what he failed to achieve in life, despite his fans, impact and commercial success. He became larger than life, at least for now, until all the details of his tragic death emerge as they surely will.

One analyst, Chris Hedges says the media that made him so big also tore him down, writing, "In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitation of Michael Jackson's death was orchestrated by the corporate forces that rendered Jackson insane."

And now, joining him on that astral plane of idol worship, is Walter Cronkite who rocketed from a life of a journo journeyman into the hero's circle. His many media-mates and wannabes pumped the airwaves with non-stop nostalgia, and testimonials, but paid little attention to his dismay with the direction "his" industry had taken, and the colleagues who hijacked it.

In the early days, Cronkite referred to his operation as the CBS NEWS CONTROL CENTER---and yes, the big nets did CONTROL what we saw, and who we saw. There is a reason that the room most TV shows take place are out of is called the CONTROL Room. From there, the signal goes to MASTER CONTROL. Control is still the metaphor or media mediation.

I just finished When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917, by Jeffrey Brooks, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Russian cultural history. It describes the kind of thing people without much education liked to read in the final decades of tsarist Russia and the production and distribution networks that got it to them, and besides resurrecting many long-forgotten writers, publishers, and stories (Brooks must have done a tremendous amount of reading for this project, and clearly enjoyed it judging by the brio with which he summarizes the tales of knights, maidens, ambitious peasants, and wicked foreigners) he brings to light a whole world that's been forgotten in the canonization of High Culture. What I particularly like, besides the information itself, is his democratic take on it; he dislikes as much as I do those nanny types who want to control what the "little people" read and think, and is forthright in his belief that people should be able to have the kind of cultural input they prefer. I'll quote a passage from his Epilogue:

The existence of cheap popular reading material was a prerequisite for the spread of literacy in Russia. Such material had to be of a sort that the newly literate were eager and able to read. In the Russian case, the market proved an effective means for identifying and satisfying the demand of the common reader. Ordinary people showed their preference for commercial popular literature by spending their hard-earned and very few rubles to obtain it. What was extraordinary about Russian popular commercial literature in contrast to Western European and American was its peasant character. Written for peasants and former peasants by people who were close to their world and concerns, it served these often first-generation readers with information and ideas they could readily absorb as they sought to make sense of the changing world around them. To create such a literature, popular writers had to develop a new language for ordinary people, with a shared if limited vocabulary and a common stock of clichés, symbols, and ideas. The establishment of this language of popular communication meant that many ordinary people were able to receive and exchange information through the printed word for the first time. The popular commercial materials in particular contained a fund of shared information that ordinary people could seek out as they needed it. To peasants and former peasants with new expectations and unfamiliar problems to solve, reading about fanciful characters and situations was a crude but simple way of acquiring useful ideas and symbols.

In her 1972 Russian Journalism and Politics, 1861-1881: The Career of Aleksei S. Suvorin, Effie Ambler (who never seems to have written anything else) writes "One must bear in mind that most present-day studies of the mid-19th century press commence from a conceptual framework derived from the views of the radical publicists of the time"; after Brooks's work, one cannot commence from that conceptual framework without ostentatiously putting on blinders.

In the days when Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud dominated thinking about child development, small children were thought to be irrational, incoherent, and solipsistic in their thinking and both easily distractible and unfocused in their awareness of the world. Recent work in developmental psychology offers a sharply contrasted picture. "Children are unconsciously the most rational beings on earth," says Alison Gopnik, "brilliantly drawing accurate conclusions from data, performing complex statistical analyses, and doing clever experiments." And not only does empirical work reveal this about babies and small children, but what is thus revealed throws light on some of philosophy's more intriguing questions about knowledge, the self, other minds, and the basis of morality.

Such are the claims made by philosopher and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik in this fascinating account of the growth of child minds. Gopnik's affectionate and sympathetic enjoyment of the way children think in their first five years is manifest throughout her book, but so too is her sensitivity to the deeper philosophical implications of what their way of thinking can teach us. The result is absorbing and educative. This is despite the fact that, at times, it seems as if developmental psychology provides arduous scientific confirmation for what parents and preschool teachers have always long known; but Gopnik is skilled at producing the rabbit of insight from an apparently old hat. And there is also much that is new and surprising in the field, all of it promising to change our understanding of mind in general.

Between 1982 and 1992, NASA launched 11 shuttle flights with classified payloads, honoring a deal that dated to 1969, when the National Reconnaissance Office—an organization so secret its name could not be published at the time—requested certain changes to the design of NASA’s new space transportation system. The NRO built and operated large, expensive reconnaissance satellites, and it wanted a bigger shuttle cargo bay than NASA had planned. The spysat agency also wanted the option to fly "once around" polar missions, which demanded more flexibility to maneuver for a landing that could be on either side of the vehicle's ground track.

"NRO requirements drove the shuttle design," says Parker Temple, a historian who served on the policy staff of the secretary of the Air Force and later with the NRO's office within the Central Intelligence Agency. The Air Force signed on to use the shuttle too, and in 1979 started building a launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in northern California for reaching polar orbits. Neither the Air Force nor the NRO was ever comfortable relying exclusively on NASA’s vehicle, however. Delays in shuttle launches only increased their worry; even before the 1986 Challenger accident, they were looking for a way off the shuttle and back onto conventional rockets like the Titan.

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. [...] Since this faint light is linked with the body's metabolism, this finding suggests cameras that can spot the weak emissions could help spot medical conditions, said researcher Hitoshi Okamura, a circadian biologist at Kyoto University in Japan.

Carbon nanotubes are ultra-thin fibres of carbon and a nanotechnologist's dream.

They are made from thin sheets of carbon only one atom thick – known as graphene – rolled into a tube only a few nanometres across. Even the thickest is more than a thousand times thinner than a human hair.

Interest in carbon nanotubes blossomed in the 1990s when they were found to possess impressive characteristics that make them very attractive raw materials for nanotechnology of all kinds.

"They have unique properties," explains Professor Pertti Hakonen of Helsinki University of Technology. "They are about 1000 times stronger than steel and very good thermal conductors and good electrical conductors."

Hakonen is coordinator of the EU-funded CARDEQ project (http://www.cardeq.eu/) which is exploiting these intriguing materials to build a device sensitive enough to measure the masses of atoms and molecules.

Generally put, and commonly understood the State of Love in the West is: boy and girl meet (or sometimes boy and boy, or girl and girl, dependent upon codified legal norms in a given state), they 'fall in love' with one and other (and no other from here-on-in), they act on their love by disciplining themselves to the codified laws of the state and/or religious norms into a marriage bond, and forsaking Love in this way for all others (think of the Christian religious proscriptions of: "do you take him/her, forsaking all others" or "till death do you part"), they live happily ever after (unless subject to state or religious forms of reversing this process which is initiated on an individual level, that is: the break-up, separation and divorce).

There are two items of note within the State of Love that must be addressed.

First, the legalistic inclusion of homosexual love into the State of Love in some states clearly marks it as part of the rule, part of the State of Love, rather than some sort of bold rupture with established norms. It is not an exception, a fundamental break - whatever the religious and/or political right might think; it does not affirm a truth, but rather merely expands and encompasses more individuals (who do not by this act become subjects) within the State of things. In one sense, legalistic exclusion of groups based on their specific particularities does fundamentally matter: prohibitive laws against homosexuality are reprehensible and must be combated wherever they exist. But inclusion into the State of Love - outside of practical considerations such as pensions and benefits, a right not to be discriminated against or subject to harassment - does not correlate to Love as truth, as the ability to affirm a truth, to become subjects as bearers of a truth. This is why we have separated wholly our discussion into two points - affirmations and particularisms.

Second, and this is of fundamental importance: there is no relation to love under the State of Love, and fidelity to Love as a truth. Through the latter one becomes an immortal subject, ones' address is universalizable, and holds absolutely without wavering in ones' fidelity to it ("it is never shattered"), and is part of something that is in excess of oneself through unity with others; with the former, one is regulated, submits to a pre-described definition of love that is particular and filled with proscriptions of various kinds, and most importantly, one does not hold that love with unwavering fidelity. In the State of Love, in the states of the West, the love "commitment" - for it is wholly different from an affirmation which can only be used in reference to a truth - can be broken by individual or "natural" occurrence: break-up or divorce in the first instance; death in the latter. Alain Badiou is fundamentally clear on this point: death/dissolution is never an event, at least with reference to love, and thus bears no relation to a truth.

What becomes clear is that in addition to there being no relation between the State of Love, and Love as a Truth - and I will argue, the Truth - on Badiou's topology of ethics, the State of Love in the West, including those states that recognize homosexual love as being part of it, is an established and proscribed state sanctioned legal-religious ethical Evil. What is posited as an event of love, is really a simulacrum of a possible event, as it is neither universal in address nor conforms to particularities. What is posited as fidelity is contingent, temporary (either till death or break-up), and has built in religious or legal procedures to actualize betrayal. I should note that I am clearly not arguing against the right to divorce or break-up, but identifying a lack of subjective fidelity, that fidelity must be sanctioned and enforced by legal, religious or normative procedures. Finally, the State of Love forces the unnameable, the truth of love, to conform to particularisms and smothers it under layers of rites and norms into a unitary form. In states which recognize homosexual unions, they are subject to the same legalistic framework as their heterosexual counterparts; and in all states, the State of Love is unitary in forcing non-subjects - for they do not affirm a truth - into the model accepted, marked and named by the state or religious particularism in question.

The wars that have wracked the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996, killing well over 5 million people (International Rescue Committee, 1/08) in what may be the deadliest conflict since World War II, are officially over. A peace agreement was signed in 2002, and general elections were held in 2006.

But conflict and the humanitarian crisis continue. The most recent survey (IRC, 1/08) estimated that 45,000 people are dying each month from conflict-related causes (primarily hunger and disease), nearly the same shocking rate as during the war itself. And with the recent flare-up of violence in Congo’s volatile east, things don’t seem to be getting any better.

To put the death rate in perspective, at the peak of the Darfur crisis, the conflict-related death rate there was less than a third of the Congo’s, and by 2005 it had dropped to less than 4,000 per month (CRED, 5/26/05). The United Nations has estimated some 300,000 may have died in total as a result of the years of conflict in Darfur (CRED, 4/24/08, SSRC.org, 3/25/09); the same number die from the Congo conflict every six and a half months.

And yet, in the New York Times, which covers the Congo more than most U.S. outlets, Darfur has consistently received more coverage since it emerged as a media story in 2004 (Extra!, 1–2/08). The Times gave Darfur nearly four times the coverage it gave the Congo in 2006, while Congolese were dying of war-related causes at nearly 10 times the rate of those in Darfur.

As the global economic crisis expands, a rapidly increasing number of people are seeking ways to combat unemployment, marginalization, corruption, repression and other problems. Such challenges have faced millions of Latin Americans for decades, and as a result, many successful grassroots solutions to economic crisis have been developed by people in communities across the continent. In this essay, I propose that strategies from Latin American social movements can be applied elsewhere in the world to build better societies.

Rather than continuing the flow of generally destructive policies, tactics and advice from the north to the south - via entities such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, US embassies, corporate board rooms and so on - I am suggesting that the flow of knowledge be reversed, from the south to the north. This reversal should focus on liberating, revolutionary strategies and tactics for social change, rather than neoliberal policies focused on looting resources and repressing people.

I am not suggesting that these movements' strategies be copied and applied directly to other communities and countries, or forced onto a situation without considering the very specific conditions of each community. I am suggesting that these strategies and experiences from Latin America be considered and studied by activists elsewhere, as these movements may shed light on new tactics and approaches, and developed upon when moving ahead with community-specific work toward building a new society. While it is important to share tactics and experiences between various movements from around the globe, this essay focuses specifically on Latin America in part because the region has recently been home to some of the most powerful and successful movements in the world.

It's an interesting variation on a palm-held device, tried out by some orchestras a few years ago, that texted program notes as a performance was in progress. There were skeptics then, and I can imagine there will be howls and scowls from some corners about the Twitter application, but you just know this was bound to happen. And what a great thing this will be for those folks who can't go more than a minute or two without staring down at some sort of electronic device in their hands.

Whatever the outcome of the recent troubles, Iran sees itself as a natural leader in the region. It is determined to follow an independent foreign policy, and regards the nuclear question as a matter of national pride, and nobody elses business. With war raging all around it, we ask: is Iran a regional influence, or an international threat?

Empire examines a country torn between traditional values and modernity, between its imperial past and its relations with the region, between its universal pretentions and its moderate means, between its highly educated and globalised urban youth and its more conservative hinterland.

Foster + Partners has been given a second chance to masterplan the $2.7 billion West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong The British starchitect, together with Rem Koolhaas and local designer Rocco Yim Sen-kee, make up the three-strong team named as consultants on the conceptual plans for the cultural and artistic hub.

Seventy-four thousand years ago, humanity nearly went extinct. A super-volcano at what's now Lake Toba, in Sumatra, erupted with a strength more than a thousand times that of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Some 800 cubic kilometers of ash filled the skies of the Northern Hemisphere, lowering global temperatures and pushing a climate already on the verge of an ice age over the edge. Some scientists speculate that as the Earth went into a deep freeze, the population of Homo sapiens may have dropped to as low as a few thousand families.

The Mount Toba incident, although unprecedented in magnitude, was part of a broad pattern. For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language.