Doctors Without Borders: “The humanitarian crises that the media isn’t covering, but should be.” (via Utne Reader)

“Scientists from across the world gathered Monday to hammer out the final details of an authoritative report on climate change that is expected to project centuries of rising temperatures and sea levels unless there are curbs in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.” (New York Times) The central consensus is that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are reaching twice preindustrial levels as a result of human activities, and that this will result in a 3-8 degree (F) increase in ambient temperatures. Where the consensus founders is on the extent of sea level rise and coastal impact. Some climate scientists fear that existing models are too conservative, in light of recent findings about the instability of Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. Competing agendas have led to leaks of information from the upcoming reports designed to be either as frightening or reassuring as possible. (Which would you rather hear?)

Wake up and smell the coffee, Nancy: ‘In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president’s minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new “way forward” for U.S. forces in Iraq.

“He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” the California Democrat said. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’ ” ‘ (The Politico) When has Bush’s rationale for any Presidential decision ever gone beyond groundless confidence and infantile willfulness?

In the wake of the insurgent downing of a Blackwater helicopter and the execution-style killing of its crew hours before the State of the Union address, Democracy Now! interviews Jeremy Seahill, author of a forthcoming book profiling Blackwater . Does Bush’s call for a troop surge obscure a more substantial but undeclared private mercenary surge in Iraq?

“The attempts of brain damage victims to imagine falter thanks to an inability to marshal the places of the past.” (Scientific American) Bilateral damage to the hippocampus is known to cause amnesia. Now a study from the University of London found deficiencies in the abilities of five amnesiac men, compared with matched subjects, to imagine. It points to a greater role for the hippocampus in adding a temporal dimension to our experience; without its functions we exist in a timeless present. It makes a sort of sense that if you cannot have the experience of remembering a time gone by, you cannot imagine a time when the present moment will have passed. And one FmH reader [thanks, Joel] noted the resonance with T.S. Eliot:

And right action is freedom
From past and future also. (The Dry Salvages)

Steve Silberman:

In a major scoop, Silberman, who has become one of the best-informed and best-sourced reporters about neuroscience and medical topics, exposes an epidemic of multiply resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infecting wounded troops in the ‘evacuation chain’ from field hospitals in Iraq through medevac facilities to civilian hospitals in Europe and the US; it has already spread to civilian patients in those hospitals. Although the US government long maintained that the organism originated in Iraqi soil and infected soldiers wounded by IEDs, it is clear that the real culprits are the unsterile conditions and unrestrained use of broad-spectrum state-of-the-art antibiotics in US field hospitals in Iraq. Silberman does a good job of laying out the factors that continue to prevent an effective response to these issues. These include, of course, Rumsfeld’s doctrine of fighting the war on a shoestring and the military’s misuse of medical resources to keep casualties on the front lines as long as possible.

Silberman’s story is one of the Huffington Post’s “most huffed stories.” Huffit is HuffPo’s new Digg-like feature in which readers register which stories they feel are most newsworthy.

Multiply-resistant strains of bacteria are becoming a fact of life. As a physician working in a medical hospital, I am dealing with increasing regularity with patients with MRSA or C. difficile. The situation is only going to become worse as resistant bacteria’s sharing of drug resistance genes (a process which Silberman aptly likens to sharing open source software code) accelerates and we enter a fallow period in antibiotic development. There has always been an ‘arms race’ (another apt metaphor) between infectious disease organisms and medical tactics, and medicine is losing out. Could the Iraq war end up playing a major role in the end of the era of medical ascendancy over infectious disease?

After a patient who had had a stroke that damaged his insula readily and abruptly quit smoking, researchers at the University of Iowa looked at a number of other stroke victims and found that those with insular damage often quit smoking effortlessly and suddenly. (Forbes)

The emerging neurobiology of addictions (both behavioral and substance) emphasizes a two component system, one of which controls cravings and the other the satisfaction or reward associated with the addictive behavior. Separate and complementary interventions target these two components; for example, the concurrent use of the medications acamprosate and naltrexone to assist relapse prevention in recovering severely alcohol-dependent patients. The insula seems to be instrumental to the craving component.

Neuroscientists have long relished studying patients with circumscribed lesions in specific brain areas, to see which functions those areas subsume. Far more precise knowledge can be derived than the newer brain imaging techniques to study regional activation during certain mental tasks.

Rarely Seen Sea Monster Captured, Then, Following Script, Dies: “Yet another rare-freaky sea creature has made a rare-freaky video appearance — courtesy Japanese marine researchers — before being promptly declared dead.” (New York Times )

A report from Cambridge University researchers suggests that people lease clothes instead of buying them, in light of the resource impact of the textile industry. New York Times readers respond. The point seems to be to encourage reuse rather than discarding clothes. If leasing caught on, it would essentially be a piece of jiu jitsu to achieve an expansion of the second-hand clothes market. My guess is that tying the concept of leasing to the resource reuse meme will actually do little to promote it, given the intimate relationship most people have with their clothing. A P.R. campaign about the ludicrousness of buying clothes in response to everchanging notions of style foisted on consumers by the clothing industry (whether we are talking about high-end couturiers or The Gap), rather than durability and serviceability, would be energy better spent. Along with this should come efforts to encourage donation of used clothes or even the implementation of frank recycling systems similar to those in place for other resource-intensive genres of waste.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center was overrun by the most disruptive and extensive of an increasing number of pseudo-epidemics caused by faith in rapid screening tests that ultimately turn out to be false positives — sensitive but not particularly specific.

The so-called epidemic of pertussis at Dartmouth turned out to be a spate of run-of-the-mill respiratory infections. Specific, but slower, tests failed to find any pertussis in any of the affected individuals. Proponents of the rapid tests argue that there is no way to be prepared for a potentially devastating pandemic without the risk of false positives from the rapid tests.

Researchers at Duke University have shown with functional MRI that the degree of activation of the posterior superior temporal sulcus [PSTS], a brain region activated when people observe others’ actions but not perform them themselves, correlated with personality ratings of subjects’ degree of altruism. (Hindustan Times ) This has some relationship to the ‘mirror neurons’ with which I have been fascinated and about which I have written repeatedly in FmH, which I think of as the neurophysiological basis for interpersonal empathy and — to extrapolate — socialization.

The capacity to have an interior experience upon watching someone else’s behavior similar to the experience of performing that behavior yourself may be a basis of the sense of inherent congruence between others’ feelings and thoughts and our own, the ability to have a so-called ‘theory of mind’, which is an important developmental achievement for humans. As suggested in the article, this body of work may help explicate the neural basis for certain conditions, in which I am interested in my work as a clinical psychiatrist, in which the capacity for empathy or mutuality break down, such as antisocial personality disorder or autistic spectrum disorders. (I am overwhelmed by the incident at Lincoln-Sudbury [MA] High School, down the road from my hospital, last Friday in which a student with a mild autistic-spectrum condition stabbed another student, apparently unknown to him, to death in one of the school restrooms.)

Here is what you come up with if you search on PSTS and ‘mirror neurons’ together. Two good starting point reviews of the nascent field of social cognitive neuroscience, which is built on these and similar observations and speculations, are these papers by Rebecca Saxe of MIT (Current Opinion in Neurobiology) and the Friths of London (Science). And, while I was browsing related materials, I came upon this paper by Chatterjee (Journal of Medical Ethics), which you might find intriguing if you are interested in this area at all.

Hillary runs for the White House as ‘new Thatcher’ (Sunday Times of London) and Bob Harris finds her ‘unelectable, and rightly so’.

or are right-wing demagogues killing two Democratic birds with one stone? (Media Matters)

According to a poll… by Fox News of all people… More Americans Dislike Bush Than … Cheney! (TPMCafe)

“Doomsday Clock” Moves Two Minutes Closer. Since 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has graphically gauged the world’s proximity to nuclear devastation with its famous clock, which edged as close as 3 minutes to midnight during the era of US and Soviet arms development and testing; and as far away as 15 minutes to the hour, after the nuclear test ban treaty. Now the clock edges two minutes closer to doomsday. “Reflecting global failures to solve the problems posed by nuclear weapons and the climate crisis, the decision by the BAS Board of Directors was made in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates.”

Interesting broadening of their considerations to include the dangers posed by climate change, another global catastrophe paralleling the effects of a thermonuclear exchange, but not as far afield as it might seem, given that the devastating changes of ‘nuclear winter’ would envelop the earth after a nuclear war. Here’s a timeline of the advances and retreats of the minute hand over the past 60 years of the nuclear era.

Interestingly, the propagandistic Voice of America covers the BAS announcement. I suppose it is because the BAS decision focuses heavily on the nuclear threats posed by those the U.S. so needs to demonize, Iran and North Korea as well as the extant Soviet arsenal, thus allowing obliviousness to the fact that the US has always represented the preeminent nuclear threat to the world.

(Washington Post)

Philosophers/physicists have long drawn parallels between information theory and quantum theory. The contention that the physical world is built, ultimately, of information — that the distinction between the world and information about the world is murky — has troubled me, until I read this description of Viennese physicist Anton Zeilinger’s explanation of quantum mechanics.

Researchers identify one of the important molecular constituents of the long term potentiation process thought to underlie the deposition of memories. This has potentially monumental implications, although the reporting is restrained. (New Scientist)

With the arrival of a film adaptation of Perfume, discussion of so-called ‘unfilmable’ novels is burgeoning. Here is Screenhead‘s list of the supposedly hardest novels to film, for example, and here a discussion from Time Out London. But the adaptability of a novel is only a problem if one somehow believes that the book and the film are in some sense the same thing; this is usually the same mindset whose grasp of a work of art goes no further than what it is ‘about’; in the case of narrative arts what story they tell and visual arts what they show.

I thought the twentieth century was all about art transcending the denotative and freeing us to have a more complicated reaction to a work of art, experiencing a complex and subtle interplay between what we think and feel in the encounter. We grasp this in Literature 101 and Film 101 early in our college education, it seems to me. The experience of reading a book and that of seeing a film, even if they have the same title and even the same plot, are intrinsically and irreconcilably distinct. (In fact, one might argue, so are two different film adaptations of the same story!)

A ‘faithful’ adaptation of a novel will become a ‘movie’, not a film, which an audience receives merely as a good yarn and whose reaction begins and ends with how ‘awesome’ it was or not.

Addendum: as a counterpoint, I just came across this line from a London Review of Books review of The Prestige, based on a novel I had enjoyed several years ago.

What follows is a list of vendors with links to their 2007 DST fixes. (edgeblog)

Astronomy Picture of the Day, January 9: “The brightest comet in decades is unexpectedly now visible. The most optimistic predictions have Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1) shortly becoming one of the brightest comets of the past century. For the next few days, its short tail and bright coma can be spotted with the unaided eye close to the Sun and near the horizon in both evening and morning skies. “

A little New York Times reading this morning:

With all the furor about the Bush administration’s preoccupation with Iraq’s nonexistent ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and with Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, let us not forget that the major proponent of WMD in our time has been the U.S. One of the most egregious historical legacies of the Bush administration will be its reversal of the world’s nuclear stability. Now we learn that it will be announcing this week a major step forward in the building of the first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades. continuing its single-minded destabilization of the ‘arms race’. Yes, the new weapon would not add to, but replace, existing nuclear armaments, but as an untested and, some say, risky hybrid incorporating elements from competing designs it will require costly refurbishment of the nation’s entire nuclear weapons manufacturing edifice and seems likely — probably by design — to force an end to the U.S. moratorium on nuclear weapons testing to make sure the new design works. As with most of its follies these days, the administration insults our intelligence, justifying this boondoggle by invoking the War on Terror® — that it is necessary to make our arsenal more secure from theft by terrorists. (Are we now to believe that assurances about the last generation’s nuclear security measures were lies?)

…and We Might Not. Now I’m a psychiatrist, and sometimes I even call myself a neuropsychiatrist, but don’t waste my time with this pitifully reductionist take on an act of heroism:

And especially when you are going to end up with a conclusion acknowledging how little you’ve really ‘explained’:

Dr. Ronald Pies’ sensitive reflection on a patient’s humble gift to her psychiatrist. (New York Times )

Utterly fascinating feature about a new Japanese fad and what it says about the essence of play. I got this from kottke’s assemblage of his best links of the year.