Frans de Waal:
Do Humans Alone ‘Feel Your Pain’? Empathy, sympathy and altruism among the rats. The Chronicle of Higher Education

‘For the first time, astronomers may have spotted energy coming out of a black hole, a spherical chasm in space and time from which nothing was thought to be able to escape.

The supermassive black hole lies in the heart of a galaxy 120 million light years away, where it spins in the middle of a gigantic disk of hot matter and energy. This “accretion disc” drags on the black hole, causing it to slow and lose energy, say researchers working with the orbiting XMM-Newton X-ray observatory.

The lost energy heats the inner edge of the accretion disk so that it produces telltale X-rays… Black holes that consume accretion disks are thought to power astronomical phenomena ranging from quasars to gamma ray bursts.’ New Scientist

Anthrax in a nutshell: Sen. Bill Frist (R.-Tenn.), a heart surgeon, discloses that mailed anthrax spores were milled to a size to facilitate aerosolization and inhalation (“weaponized”?); likely to be a military strain. Surgeon General David Satcher admits “we were wrong” not to move more quickly to protect postal workers once the fact of tainted mail was established. CDC recommends masks and gloves for mail handlers; the USPS considers irradiating all mail, the Postmaster General tells us there’s no need to stop mail delivery, for which some have called. Three more postal workers associated with the Daschle letter come down with symptoms of inhalation anthrax. Officials continue to find ‘rhetorical links’ between the anthrax attacks and the 9-11 terrorist attacks, but the FBI reports no hard evidence of a connection. Dubya continues to thrill and inspire us with vows that these actions “will not stand.” One Florida victim survives the acute phase of inhalation anthrax and is released after a 23 day hospital admission.

“…Osama bin Laden bought samples of anthrax by mail from shady laboratories in Eastern Europe and Asia for as little as $10,000, a former follower has told authorities in Egypt.” NY Post

‘These pictures are taken from the Al-Jazira satellite channel. They were broadcast on October 22, 2001. They show parts of what the Taliban say is a US helicopter that they shot down at Jabal Baba Sahib near Kandahar. The markings indicate that the parts came from a CH-47 Chinook manufactured by Boeing.

It is possible that the helicopter was merely damaged and the parts fell off. The Pentagon denies it has lost any helicopters in Afghanistan. “We have not lost any helicopters in Afghanistan. If they found helicopter wreckage, it wasn’t ours,” Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke told the media.’ From ali abunimah, “uncovering media myths about the middle east,” whose site prominently features the fact that he is referred to by one of his detractors as a “Chicago super-charged activist with few credentials but much malicious misinformation.” More on who he is here.

randomWalks has moved. Follow them there…

US and Bayer settle anthrax row: “The two sides held talks on Tuesday amid

pressure from the US Congress to disregard

Bayer’s patent and buy ciprofloxacin, the

generic name for Cipro, cheaper elsewhere.

Late on Tuesday, US health secretary Tommy

Thompson said he had won agreement from

Bayer to slash the price of Cipro to below $1

per tablet.” BBC [This is a dramatic reversal of Thompson’s position of last week, in which he said, shamefully, that he would respect Bayer’s patent rights [read: right to profit from a potential health emergency at the expense of human lives]. Anything other than today’s decision, which presumably results from Thompson’s threats to Bayer that he would allow competing companies to produce cheaper, ‘generic’ ciprofloxacin if he got no concession, would have been a travesty… ]

This is going the email rounds, supposedly written by Ted Nugent, rock singer and hunter, upon hearing that

California Senators B. Boxer and D. Feinstein

denounced him for being a “gun owner” and a “Rock Star”.

Am I a Bad American? Not clear if there’s been any confirmation that it really is by Nugent. I’ll probably get some mail from Fmh readers who know… [thanks, Pam!]

The ‘What-If’s’ of Sept. 11: “Since Sept. 11, the trivial pursuits of American politics have been set aside…(There’s) been little or no reflection about how the feckless behavior of Washington’s political-journalistic elites over the past decade contributed to the deadly crisis the world is now facing. There’s been little or no self-criticism for letting the problems of the Middle East fester while pundits and journalists romped through juicier stories of Paula, Monica, JonBenet and Chandra.” Consortium News [via Robot Wisdom]

Why Napster’s successors seem to have gotten it right, given that “information wants to be free.”

Israel planning ‘ethnic’ bomb: ‘In developing their “ethno-bomb”, Israeli scientists are trying to exploit medical advances by identifying distinctive genes carried by some Arabs, then create a genetically modified bacterium or virus.

The intention is to use the ability of viruses and certain bacteria to alter the DNA inside their host’s living cells. The scientists are trying to engineer deadly micro-organisms that attack only those bearing the distinctive genes.” Sunday Times of London I’m no geneticist but this seems to be an absurd claim whose promulgation serves only racist ends. (Parenthetically, I found the pointer to this on the increasingly lost, rabid Robot Wisdom.). There are no absolute genetic differences between races; in fact, most geneticists are adamant about the fact that race is a social and not a genetic construct at all. Even if one could develop ethnic-specific pathogens, they are not likely to be selective enough to distinguish Arabs from Jews, especially Semitic ones, given their ethnic similarities. Perhaps we ought to target an isolated and racially homogeneous population like the Inuit or the !Kung bushmen…