“Origin of tentacled mollusk a mystery: ‘I know they don’t live in the river’.” —Peoria Journal Star

Taking Stephen King Seriously: “Critics have rarely embraced Stephen King as a serious writer. But the prolific novelist, best known for his horror stories, is about to enter some serious company. The National Book Foundation is honoring the best-selling author with a lifetime achievement award whose previous recipients have included Arthur Miller, Eudora Welty and John Updike.” —NPR One of the interesting facets of this interview is to hear King avow that his writer’s block has become permanent; he refers to himself the novelist in the past tense.

The road to regeneration starts here:

“By academic standards, shifting from cardiology to developmental biology is a bizarre career move. Regeneration studies is a backwater even among biologists, who have been chopping the legs off salamanders for more than 200 years without ever discovering why some of them manage to grow back. And while clues to regeneration have emerged – retinoic acid will induce some frogs to grow three new legs in place of one – the field has a history of derailing respectable scientists.

As to whether humans could ever develop similar capacities of self-repair, most biologists have concluded, albeit reluctantly, that the answer is no. There seems to be something inherently different about amphibian cells: a swamp-animal mutability that mammals – including people – simply don’t possess.

But Keating remains convinced that newts hold the key to human healing. Our bodies, he points out, can already regenerate to a degree, repairing broken bones and regularly trading dead cells for new ones. Skin cells, for instance, last about two weeks, and our stomach lining molts once a month. This constant replenishment is what enables our 70-year lifespan, but cell growth is calibrated to run at a trickle: too slow to fix major damage. Lose an arm or a kidney and that’s it; we can’t generate the lost part any more than a car can sprout a new transmission.

Why? It’s an evolutionary mystery. The ability to regrow legs and eyes seems like a clear Darwinian advantage – one that surviving generations would have retained. But a paradox of regeneration is that the higher you move up the evolutionary chain, the less likely you’ll have the ability to regrow limbs or organs. Keating’s mission: figure out the cause of this paradox – and reverse it.” —Wired

“It is the stuff of legend. And the hunger for that legend today is unmistakable. It has been a long time since any thinker left so large a mark on an age as did Sartre. The first sign of a revival came three years ago, on the 20th anniversary of his death, when the mediagenic French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy published a best-selling book, recently translated into English as Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century (Polity Press). A team of scholars, including several American professors, is now finishing the Dictionnaire Sartrean, with entries on the thinker’s concepts, influences, and political alliances — as well as a directory of his sizable entourage, mistresses included. It is scheduled for publication in 2005, as part of the centenary of the thinker’s birth. That anniversary will also be celebrated with an international conference in Paris.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education

offers a new window onto his work and influence: “Ludwig Wittgenstein’s only known musical work had its world premiere last week in Cambridge. It is called, according to the title that he had pencilled above his two-line score, Leidenschaftlich (in English, ‘Passionate’). At four bars, it lasts less than 30 seconds and is little more than a powerful, fiery flourish.

Yet it brought an invited audience of 150 curious Wittgenstein enthusiasts, unaware of his musical pretensions, to Emmanuel College’s acoustically refined new Queen’s Hall auditorium…” —Andante

FBI scrutinizing anti-war protesters. “The FBI has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.” —SF Chronicle

Related: Environmentalists = Terrorists? “Bill would define New York eco- and animal-rights activists as terrorsts.” —The Village Voice

“President Bush may be only halfway to his outrageous fundraising goal, but he has already accomplished his mission of destroying the presidential public financing system.” —Craig Aaron, tompaine.com

“George W. Bush will go down in history as America’s worst environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America’s environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country’s air, water, public lands and wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation’s most important environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six years in Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the same to America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit, diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper and the senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, tompaine.com

“Fifty years after Piltdown man was exposed as an outrageous fraud, Tim Radford selects his all-time favourite science scams.” —Guardian.UK