Men Sense ‘Scent of a Woman’: ‘Could love truly be in the air?
Researchers in Texas believe men become especially attuned–and
attracted to–female body odors during the most fertile stage of the
menstrual cycle.

“These findings raise serious doubts about conventional scientific
wisdom that human female ovulation is concealed…and that men cannot detect when women are
ovulating,” according to Drs. Devendra Singh and P. Matthew Bronstad, psychologist researchers
at the University of Texas in Austin.’ Reuters Health

Update: A reader asked what’s new about this news, given the well-known phenomenon of women’s menstrual cycles synchronizing when they live together. Several things. First, menstrual synchronization may be because of subliminal awareness of menstruation, not ovulation. That’s not so surprising, given that menstruation provides external, overt or subliminal, clues. Second, this study shows not only subliminal awareness, but that, as with our primate forebears’ behavior around oestrus, men find women more sexually attractive at precisely the time they are most fertile. As such, it is of evolutionary biological interest.

Scientists boost fruit fly lifespan: Humans next? The Times of India

São Paulo’s ‘Roofless’ Seize Downtown Buildings. Squatting, Brazilian-style; some estimates indicate that more than 50% of São Paulo’s population of 10.5 million live in “irregular circumstances.” New York Times

How to Harvest a Live Organ. Not the stuff of the urban legend about the victim who wakes up in an ice-packed bathtub in a strange hotel room after a night of oblivious carousing to find a note and an incision in his/her flank, but the real thing. New York Times Magazine

Mars Odyssey Scheduled for Liftoff: “NASA will
try to snap its losing streak and send
another spacecraft to Mars on Saturday
after two humiliating failures.” New York Times

“Ginsberg
talking is like Charlie Parker
taking his saxophone out for
a spin at the far reaches of
harmony and rhythm…” A Yale English professor reviews Spontaneous Mind: selected interviews 1958-1996 by Allen Ginsberg. The reviewer is rhapsodic that “Ginsberg’s
uniquely frank and vivid voice, silent now
these past four years, seems to sound
again in its deftly edited pages.” Ironically, with the passing of the last major Beat figures Ginsberg and Corso, the immediacy at the core of the Beat Generation is reduced to static words on a page for now and forever.

The candor and passion are to be expected, but the stereotype of
Ginsberg as a semiliterate primitive leaves one unprepared for his
erudition and intellectual brilliance. A question about his youthful
discovery of Cézanne elicits six long pages on the transcendental
implications of the painter’s ostensibly workmanlike notation of optical
phenomena, and the relevance of those implications to Blake, haiku
and the composition of ”Howl.” Elsewhere, belying dismissals of the
Beats as willfully ignorant of literary history, Ginsberg details the ways
the movement placed itself within both American and modernist
traditions, as well as within the mystical tradition that leads back
through Gnosticism to the ancient mystery cults. Other passages remind
us of the courage and prescience of the man who was proudly,
publicly gay over a decade before the Stonewall uprising. We find
him talking about global warming in 1968. Above all, we find him
continually challenging settled ideas, especially his own. Yes, as a
1976 interview shows, he eventually questioned some attitudes of the
60’s left, but the fact is that, as we see in a 1963 interview, he
questioned many of them almost before there was a 60’s left…

Each
interviewer tries to elicit the Ginsberg of his or her imagination —
William F. Buckley Jr., the dangerous radical; Playboy, the
homosexual crusader; fellow dropouts, the mocker of squares — and
each time, Ginsberg performs judo flips on their expectations, handing
back complex, nuanced versions of the attitudes with which they’ve
tried to saddle him. Indeed, he helps us appreciate the great
difference between a celebrity and a public figure — one the creation
of the media, the other a full human character seeking to act within the
public sphere — as well as why we don’t really have any of the latter
anymore.

New York Times Book Review

In conjunction with the review of this book, Ginsberg is the Times’ “featured author.” Here is a collection of links to reviews of his other works, articles by and about him, a link to a streaming audio of a reading he gave at the 92nd St. Y in New York in 1977 (42 min.), and a slide show.

Harry Potter and the Court Battle Over Creativity: “…(A) growing
parade of aggrieved writers and artists
… have helped to turn intellectual
property litigation into a burgeoning
cottage industry, with its own small plaintiffs
bar and even insurance policies to protect
successful writers and musicians from the
high cost of fending off claims.

Blockbuster books, movies, plays and songs
have always provoked anger and legal
actions on the part of little-known artists who
say their work has been usurped. The vast
majority of lawsuits are as improbable as
one New York designer’s unsuccessful claim
that the best-selling “Goosebumps” series of
children’s books stole a graphic he designed
for the Lithuanian basketball team.” New York Times Business

How world religions view homosexuality

Are You in Anthropodenial?

After finishing Frans de Waal’s
engaging history of primate
studies, The Ape and the Sushi Master, I
wasn’t surprised, a day later, to come
across a Web site called ”Bush or
Chimp?” The juxtaposition of head shots
of the new president alongside
chimpanzees, in poses ranging from
slack-jawed joviality to goofy hooting,
plays off a timeworn joke.

The laughter depends on the underlying
assumption that while apes may look like
humans, akin even to the most powerful
leader in the world, there still must be a
quantum leap from them to us. But the
laughter grows thinner by the year as
one by one the supposed bellwether
differences between apes and humans, like toolmaking, fall away.
Chimpanzees use leaves as seats, as it turns out; they fashion a kind of
footwear to protect themselves from thorns; they ”fish” for termites with
twigs and reeds they strip and cut for the occasion. New York Times

This is not, as far as my searching could reveal, on the ‘net, but is a shocking and important enough finding that I thought I’d post it:

Homicide a Leading Cause of Death in Pregnant Women :

The leading cause of death among pregnant women is homicide, according to a
study published in the current issue of the Journal of Midwifery and Women’s
Health.

The study’s authors reviewed 651 autopsy charts from the District of Columbia’s
Chief Medical Examiner’s Office for cases from 1988 until 1996. The researchers
discovered 13 homicides of pregnant women that had not been reported with the
21 maternal deaths from medical causes (eg, hemorrhage and infection). These 13
unreported deaths account for 38% of pregnancy-associated deaths…

Other findings include:

Pregnant homicide victims are more likely to have been killed early in the
pregnancy, which can make it difficult to identify the pregnancy and link it
with the homicide.

Pregnant homicide victims are more likely to be killed with a gun.

Pregnant teenagers (aged 15-19 years) were more at risk.

… “What pregnant women do not know,” said American College of Nurse-Midwives
Executive Director Deanne Williams, “is that instead of facing joyful
celebration at the announcement of pregnancy, too many face violence and death.
We have got to do a better job of identifying this problem and helping the
women and their partners not end up with such a horrific outcome.”

The authors note that the deaths in the study, although not officially reported
within maternal mortality ratios, may truly be pregnancy-related in that the
violence might not have escalated to result in death had the women not become
pregnant.

A reader provided me with a link to a related study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.