“Rice University’s Jim Tour and his colleagues at two Houston health institutions have found a drug that, when given to mice before radiation exposure, is 5,000 times more effective than the best-available therapy for radiation injuries.

Officials at the Department of Defense, seeking remedies for the radiation sickness that would follow a nuclear strike, were so taken by the research that they recently gave Tour a $540,000 grant and asked him to compress the next phase of testing into an almost unheard-of nine months.

In that time, Tour’s research group hopes to improve the drug so it works as well when given after radiation exposure as it does before.” (Houston Chronicle)

It’s Not Going to Happen. “The fact is, the ’60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, ‘It is too early to tell.’ When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can’t yet ‘overcome’ the ’60s because we still don’t even know what the ’60s were — not even close.” — Rick Perlstein (Washington Postop-ed)

James Q. Wilson asks in City Journal: “In the United States, the two groups that most ardently support Israel are Jews and evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. Jewish support is easy to explain, but why should certain Christians, most of them politically quite conservative, be so devoted to Israel? There is a second puzzle: despite their support for a Jewish state, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are disliked by many Jews. And a third: a large fraction of African-Americans are hostile to Israel and critical of Jews, yet Jewish voters regard blacks as their natural allies.”