Month: December 2013

Dana Smith gets excited about a study suggesting that fear memories may be heritable through little-understood epigenetic processes:

In the study, mice were trained to be afraid of acetophenone, a fruity smell that’s used in cherry, jasmine, honey-suckle and almond flavorings. The researchers paired this fragrance with a foot shock so that it soon became a warning signal to the mice, instilling fear and alerting them to an impending attack. The mice’s noses and brains also adapted accordingly, generating additional M71 neurons—cells receptive to this particular scent—so that they would be extra sensitive to the smell. So far, this is all basic Pavlovian conditioning and neural adaptation, nothing special yet.

However, the crazy part is that the offspring of these mice, who had never before been exposed to that smell, also showed increased fear and startle responses to the scent. This suggests that the learned association, connecting the smell with danger, was passed down from one generation to the next. And this second group’s offspring also showed heightened sensitivity to the odor. Thus, three generations of mice were affected by the conditioning, even though only one of them had actually experienced it. Behind these behavioral effects were similar changes in the noses of each of these offspring groups, with larger M71 receptors present and an increase in the number of M71 neurons available.

Joe Hanson rains on her parade:

It’s possible that there was an epigenetic change passed down. But it’s not for sure. Beyond that, the way that statistics are applied to mouse behavior studies make it possible that the differences they see are just due to sample sizes, or not including certain controls, or some other random factor like that the humidity on a particular day happened to make the mice very jumpy. There’s also the fact that there is no known way for nerve cell changes or chemical responses within the olfactory bulb to be communicated to the testes, where sperm are made (there’s literally a blood-testis barrier to prevent that kind of thing). … “More work needed” as they say!

Virginia Hughes provided a more in-depth look at the study earlier this month:

There are still some unanswered questions, [MIT research fellow Tomás] Ryan notes. For example, the researchers didn’t do a control experiment where the F0 animals are exposed to the fruity odor without the shock. So it’s unclear whether the “memory” they’re transmitting to their offspring is a fear memory, per se, or rather an increased sensitivity to an odor. This is an important distinction, because the brain uses many brain circuits outside of the olfactory bulb to encode fear memories. It’s difficult to imagine how that kind of complicated brain imprint might get passed down to the next generation. Ressler and Dias agree, and for that reason were careful not to refer to the transmitted information as a fear memory. “I don’t know if it’s a memory,” Dias says. “It’s a sensitivity, for now.”

A reader in India joins the debate over whether yoga should belong in public schools in that country:

I am an atheist. Of my parents, one is a Hindu but not terribly ritualistic, while the other comes from a Hindu tradition but more Buddhist than Hindu in outlook. My wife, I think, would call herself “spiritual but not religious.” Not quite atheist, but uncomfortable with Hinduism as well as with other religions.

We take our son to a yoga class once a week, where parents practice too, and we are both quite comfortable with that. The class begins and ends with a prayer (“sloka”), but that is about the only religious component. The prayer and a translation are here and, other than its being addressed to an unspecified supernatural being (arguably Hinduism is monotheistic and it is addressed to that being, but it would take too long to get into that), seem entirely secular to me. I regard the rest of the yoga as a sort of time-tested exercise system (in fact, one version of the “surya namaskara” or prostration to the sun being taught to us is quite similar to the American “burpee”).

When I took my parents to the Notre Dame de Paris and other churches there, my mother made a point of lighting a candle. Many Hindus (and, I think, many followers of Eastern religions) don’t regard religions as mutually exclusive – none of the “thou shalt have no other gods before me” stuff. Presumably many Western practitioners of yoga don’t, either.

However, there is no denying that many yoga schools and practices in India are much more overtly religious than the one I take my son to. So I think India’s Supreme Court has a tough job ruling on this one.

Another notes a similar case unfolding in the US:

I’m sure you will receive many emails about this, but a school district in southern California recently put a yoga exercise program into place, and a local family sued claiming it violated their religious rights. A trial court judge disagreed and found for the school district, saying that the program was just calisthenics that had been separated from any religious content, and now the case is on appeal.

Meanwhile, another reader rolls his eyes at Dreher, who wrote, “I don’t see how it is possible to separate yoga from religious practice – and as a practicing Christian, I would not participate in it”:

To my ears this sounds a lot like those fundamentalist nutjobs who won’t let their kids read Harry Potter. What is it he thinks will happen when he assumes a Downward Facing Dog over at L.A Fitness in the room next to the spinning class? What supernatural, mind-altering spirit is he resisting here? If Christians can utterly co-opt innumerable pagan traditions and worship practices (Yule logs, Winter Solstice, Vernal Equinox, Saturnalia) then what is the problem with the neutered practices of western Yoga?

Another reader:

“Yoga is in Religion. Religion is not in Yoga.” This is from some of the best commentary on the Yoga Sutras available. As a yoga teacher (not teaching currently), I am interested in the spiritual aspects of meditation. Many famous yogis experimented with religion. It is considered that the practice of a religion rather than the specific path is the more important aspect.

Another makes an important distinction:

Please! Call it hatha yoga. Yoga of itself refers generically to union with God and comes from the same root as yoke. But there are many kinds of yoga: hatha, rajah, bhakti, kundalini, tantra, and on and on. There are even many kinds of hatha yoga and the way they are practiced can vary from positional exercises to high spirituality. It is as if you were to refer to and criticize the practice of snake-handling evangelistic Christianity as the way all Christianity was practiced or claim that the Pope must speak for all Christians, since they are all the same. Strictly speaking, it can be taken even further than that: yoga can be thought of as really any form of religious or spiritual practice. And in the realm of the means becoming the end, it’s hard to distinguish between the ecstatic chanting in bhakti yoga, monastic singing, and the like.

Lastly, another yoga teacher offers some history:

I find the debate over what “counts” as yoga and can it be divorced from Hinduism very interesting. In short I have decided if something labeled as “yoga” unifies the body, breath, and mind it is yoga. Here is the longer version:

1. Yoga developed in parallel with Hinduism. There have always been Hindus who practice yoga as well as those who did/do not. Ancient Buddhists also practiced yoga. It is not the exclusive domain of the Hindu religion and never was, although it draws on many of the same traditions and stories

2. Yoga, for centuries, was focused on breathing/mediation and philosophical constructs be they from the eight limbs of yoga, Tantra, or Vedenta. The physical practice (Asana) as it we know it today is relatively new, dating back to the late 1800s. B.K.S. Iyengar, who turned 95 Saturday, is one of the men who greatly influenced the adoption of yoga as a physical practice in the US and Europe.

3. As practiced in the US, yoga is more spiritual then religious. Hindu texts, such as the Bhagavad Gita, can provide spiritual inspiration and a way to think about and discuss morality independent of one’s religion or lack thereof.

4. Whichever philosophical tradition you draw on, yoga can be used to deepen spirituality and religion of any stripe. I have had many devout Christians tell me they find yoga asana and breathing (pranayama) to be useful preparation for Christian prayer and meditation and as a tool for living their Christ-centered truth. I also have had atheists tell me it helps them create a context for living a moral life without believing in God. Personally, I grew up with one Catholic and one Presbyterian parent and hold no allegiance to one religion or another, so what I enjoy is seeing how concepts in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity (apologies to Muslins but Islam is not a religion I know enough about to speak to) can relate to each other in the context of yoga.

5. Yoga has been evolving for thousands of years, it seems only natural that Americans would put our own spin on it too. I understand that is offensive to many Hindus but perhaps they can take some solace in knowing their religion spawned such a useful tool for living. The growth of yoga will not damage the rich traditions of the Hindu religion, nor will it turn Dreher’s kids into practicing Hindus. If you start practicing yoga and find it challenging your belief system, you probably didn’t believe what you claimed to believe to begin with. It will strengthen you where you are strong, and challenge you where you are weak. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Ultimately it would be tragic to limit such a useful tool to a single religion. Much pain and suffering in the world could be reduced if everyone had a tool to be more aware of their breathe, mindful of their thoughts, and loving in their actions.

On Monday night, John Podhoretz stormed out of a debate in New York on what it means to be “pro-Israel”, following a question about the American Studies Association’s decision to participate in an academic boycott of the Jewish state:

The discussion touched on the recent Pew survey of American Jewry, the decision by the Hillel at Swarthmore College to include anti-Zionists among its invited speakers and other much-debated recent events. But after an audience member asked the panelists’ opinions of the boycott vote, things went beyond the merely testy. Mr. Ben-Ami criticized the boycott, but then turned the discussion to Israeli policies that, in his view, made it difficult for some Americans to believe that Israel really did want peace with the Palestinians. Mr. Podhoretz then accused Mr. Ben-Ami of blaming Israel for the boycott. When some audience members started booing, Mr.Podhoretz suggested they also hiss, before abruptly leaving the stage in a move that, according to Ha’aretz, “took the debate-hardened audience entirely by surprise.”

And that wasn’t all. Within an hour, the event’s moderator, Jane Eisner, editor of The Jewish Daily Forward, had taken to the Forward’s blog to write that Mr. Podhoretz had, “mystifyingly,” provoked the audience into hissing him before “wagging his finger at Ben-Ami in a manner at once threatening and condescending.” “I was stunned by what I can only describe as a temper tantrum,” she said, calling Mr. Podhoretz “a rude, angry man.”

Fisher explains why these conversations can get so sensitive:

The controversy was not over the boycott itself, or the merits of the “BDS Movement,” which advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions to change the Israeli government’s behavior with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The most telling fact of this incident is that all four people on stage agreed about the issue at hand: that BDS campaigns such as the academic boycott are harmful and counterproductive. But if they agreed, why did they argue so vehemently that one of the participants marched off mid-event? …

In debates about Israel, disagreements that might seem minor on the surface – the “tyranny of small differences,” as one Israel-watcher put it to me – are often something much graver. If you know what to watch for, you can observe somber, serious people like these four panelists talk around underlying issues so sensitive they are rarely addressed or even acknowledged. Issues that are almost always below the surface, but too deep to come out except in moments of the most heated candor, often surprising even the people naming them.

Fisher criticizes Obama’s decision to nominate Montana Senator Max Baucus as his next ambassador to China:

Baucus is not an obvious choice. He is not completely new to China; he’s traveled there to promote trade, something he’s advocated since at least the mid-1990s. But there’s little on his resume that screams “China,” which is unusual both in that there are lots of more obviously qualified candidates and that most U.S. ambassadors to Beijing have had significant ties to the country.

Past ambassadors to China have often spoken fluent Chinese. This includes Obama-appointed Ambassador John Huntsman; Obama’s second ambassador, Gary Locke, did not speak Chinese but is Chinese-American, which turned out to be a diplomatic asset in its own way. There are lots of countries where the U.S. ambassadors do not speak the language. But China, owing to its challenge as a diplomatic post and its importance to the United States, has traditionally been different. Baucus would be the first non-Chinese-speaker to hold the post in 13 years. The office was has been held by fluent Chinese-speakers from 1981 through 1995 and again from 2001 through 2011.

Of course, speaking Chinese does not in and of itself determine whether or not someone will be a good ambassador to China. George H.W. Bush did not speak Chinese when he took the job in 1974. But the point is that it’s not like becoming, say, U.S. ambassador to Australia, which typically goes to political allies or major campaign fundraisers. It’s not the gold watch you get at the end of your career. It is your career.

However, Keating notes that Baucus has talked tough on China in the past and won’t necessarily be a lightweight:

[W]hile he’s not exactly a China hand, Baucus does have something of a track record on U.S.-Chinese relations over the 35 years he’s spent in congress.

During the early 2000s he was chair (and is still a member) of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a group that’s generally extremely critical of China on human rights and economic policy. He has recommended that the United States strongly advocate for human rights in China and urged President Bush during a 2002 visit to “urge Chinese authorities to perform a comprehensive review of those imprisoned for counterrevolutionary crimes, to release unconditionally all prisoners of conscience, to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and to invite the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Religious Freedom to visit China.” As Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he recently co-authored a letter accusing China of undervaluing “its currency, providing an unfair advantage to Chinese exporters and harming U.S. manufacturers and their workers”.  Ahead of WTO meetings in March 2012, he wrote. “China will not end its currency undervaluation unless the U.S. seizes opportunities like this to insist it does.”

First Read argues that Baucus ending his term early could help the Democrats in next year’s election:

Ever since Baucus said he wasn’t running for re-election — and after former Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) took a pass on running — Montana has become a clear pick-up opportunity for Republicans, giving them a do-able shot at netting the six seats needed to win back the Senate next year. But yesterday’s news means that the state’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, gets to appoint a replacement for Baucus, and most observers believe the replacement pick will be Lt. Gov. John Walsh (D), who is already running for Baucus’ seat. Putting someone like Walsh in the Senate would boost his name ID, give him the benefits of incumbency (staff, official duties), and potentially clear the Democratic primary (although it seems like fellow candidate John Bohlinger is someone who isn’t easily persuaded to get out of a race). At a minimum, Walsh — as an appointed senator — basically moves this race from Lean Republican to Toss Up.

Juliet Eilperin and Sean Sullivan note another reason Obama might be glad to ship the senator overseas:

It removes a credible critic of the Affordable Care Act from the scene. Baucus had expressed frustration with how the Administration was implementing its landmark health care law for months, suggesting in February it could be “a huge train wreck” if the government did not have enough money to spend on outreach to consumers. A month after the launch of HealthCare.gov the senator compared the federal health care marketplace to Humpty Dumpty, questioning whether the White House could repair the complicated online enrollment system. Baucus, who has chaired the Finance Committee since 2007 (and served as ranking member for the previous six years), has sought to conduct oversight of the Administration’s health care efforts for months, and it is less likely that the panel can do this aggressively — especially in the next few months — if he’s gone.

Ed O’Keefe previews the game of musical committee chairs that will follow Baucus’s retirement from the Senate:

Baucus, who already announced plans to retire after next year, has been the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Finance Committee since 2001. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is the panel’s second-ranking Democrat, but he already chairs the Senate Commerce and Transportation Committee and also is retiring after next year. So the Finance Committee gavel is expected to go instead to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who currently chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, but is eager to lead a more prominent panel, according to several senior Senate aides.

So once Wyden goes, who takes over Energy? Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) is next in line, but he already chairs the Senate Banking Committee and also plans to retire after next year. So here again, Democrats are likely to turn to the third-ranking member, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). Landrieu faces a tough reelection battle next year and her leadership of Energy might put her at odds next year with the Obama White House, which is reportedly planning to take a series of executive actions regarding energy policy and climate change. If Landrieu takes over Energy, she would need to relinquish her leadership of the Senate Small Business Committee. On this panel, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) ranks second, but she already chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. So if Cantwell opts to lead the Small Business Committee and drop her chairmanship of the Indian Affairs panel, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) — Baucus’s home state colleague — would become a committee chairman for the first time.

Artists don’t always see eye-to-eye with their patrons, but when the patron is NASA and the artwork is the first sculpture on the moon, things get especially tricky:

At 12:18 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Aug. 2, 1971, Commander David Scott of Apollo 15 placed a 3 1/2-inch-tall aluminum sculpture [by artist Paul Van Hoeydonck] onto the dusty surface of a small crater near his parked lunar rover. At that moment the moon transformed from an airless ball of rock into the largest exhibition space in the known universe. Scott regarded the moment as tribute to the heroic astronauts and cosmonauts who had given their lives in the space race. Van Hoeydonck was thrilled that his art was pointing the way to a human destiny beyond Earth and expected that he would soon be “bigger than Picasso.”

In reality, van Hoeydonck’s lunar sculpture, called Fallen Astronaut, inspired not celebration but scandal. Within three years, Waddell’s gallery had gone bankrupt. Scott was hounded by a congressional investigation and left NASA on shaky terms. Van Hoeydonck, accused of profiteering from the public space program, retreated to a modest career in his native Belgium. Now both in their 80s, Scott and van Hoeydonck still see themselves unfairly maligned in blogs and Wikipedia pages – to the extent that Fallen Astronaut is remembered at all.

And yet, the spirit of Fallen Astronaut is more relevant today than ever. Google is promoting a $30 million prize for private adventurers to send robots to the moon in the next few years; companies such as SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are creating a new for-profit infrastructure of human spaceflight; and David Scott is grooming Brown University undergrads to become the next generation of cosmic adventurers. Governments come and go, public sentiment waxes and wanes, but the dream of reaching to the stars lives on. Fallen Astronaut does, too, hanging eternally 238,000 miles above our heads.

About that plaque next to the tiny sculpture:

On August 1, 1971, Fallen Astronaut was placed on the Moon by the crew of Apollo 15, along with a plaque bearing the names of eight American astronauts and six Soviet cosmonauts who had died:

• Theodore Freeman (October 31, 1964, aircraft accident)
• Charles Bassett (February 28, 1966, aircraft accident)
• Elliot See (February 28, 1966, aircraft accident)
• Gus Grissom (January 27, 1967, Apollo 1 fire)
• Roger B. Chaffee (January 27, 1967, Apollo 1 fire)
• Edward White (January 27, 1967, Apollo 1 fire)
• Vladimir Komarov (April 24, 1967, Soyuz 1 re-entry parachute failure)
• Edward Givens (June 6, 1967 automobile accident)
• Clifton Williams (October 5, 1967, aircraft accident)
• Yuri Gagarin (March 27, 1968, aircraft accident)
• Pavel Belyayev (January 10, 1970, disease)
• Georgy Dobrovolsky (June 30, 1971, Soyuz 11 re-entry pressurization failure)
• Viktor Patsayev (June 30, 1971, Soyuz 11 re-entry pressurization failure)
• Vladislav Volkov (June 30, 1971, Soyuz 11 re-entry pressurization failure)

Scott, Commander of the Apollo 15 mission, noted that “Sadly, two names are missing (from the plaque), those of Valentin Bondarenko and Grigori Nelyubov.” He explained that because of the secrecy surrounding the Soviet space program at the time, they were unaware of their deaths. Also not on the plaque are two US Air Force astronauts who died in 1967, Michael James Adams, in an X-15 accident and Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., the first African American astronaut and part of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory Program, in a training accident. They are remembered on the Space Mirror Memorial.

Planet Money graphed it. They had to start their chart at $3 trillion because otherwise “you wouldn’t even be able to see it”:

Matthew O’Brien approves of the Fed’s decision:

[T]he Fed will “taper” its purchases from $85 to $75 billion of bonds a month. And it will keep doing so in $10 billion increments next year as long as the recovery stays on track. But it will try to inject just as much monetary stimulus as it’s taking out by strengthening its promises. The Fed now says it will likely keep rates at zero “well past” the time unemployment falls below 6.5 percent, especially if inflation stays below its 2 percent target.

Markets approved. Stocks jumped, bonds didn’t fall, and expectations of future rates barely budged. In other words, Bernanke finally convinced markets that tapering isn’t tightening, even though he said it was a few months ago. Neat trick.

Daniel Gross’s take:

[T]he Fed isn’t really putting on the brakes. It is just taking its foot off the gas pedal a tiny bit. And as Bernanke passes control of the steering wheel to Janet Yellen, it’s still going at a very rapid clip.

Cassidy comments on the Fed’s other announcement, “that it would most likely keep interest rates at their current record-low levels even after the unemployment rate falls below 6.5 per cent—a figure it had previously identified as a possible threshold for rate hikes”:

That was a shift in the dovish direction. As if to emphasize it, Bernanke insisted that the taper itself did not signal a move toward a more restrictive policy, saying, “This is not intended to be a tightening…. We do not think there is an inflation problem, or anything like that.” To the contrary, Bernanke stressed that he and his colleagues were concerned about the inflation rate being too low: it’s currently running at about one per cent, well below the Fed’s target of two per cent. The Fed chairman even raised the prospect of the central bank further loosening its policy stance, saying, “If inflation does not show signs of returning to its target, we will take appropriate action.”

It was a bit like a mother warning a child that she would gradually reduce the number of bags of M&Ms he could eat every week, but, at the same time, reassuring the boy that his supply of Snickers bars would be uninterrupted, and might even be stepped up if he started to lose weight.

Ezra wishes that Congress had worked with Bernanke instead of working against him:

There’s an alternate history of the last three years in which Bernanke held rates low and Congress used the opportunity to rebuild America’s infrastructure, passed a huge tax cut for businesses that hire new workers, helped state and local government reinvest after the vicious cuts forced by the recession, and wiped out the payroll tax until further notice. That’s a world where millions more Americans have jobs today. And it’s a world Bernanke did everything he could to help Congress create.