The Evolution of Appetite

Elizabeth Kolbert writes:

Brains are calorically demanding organs. Our distant ancestors had small ones. Australopithecus afarensis, for example, who lived some three million years ago, had a cranial capacity of about four hundred cubic centimetres, which is roughly the same as a chimpanzee’s. Modern humans have a cranial capacity of about thirteen hundred cubic centimetres. How, as their brains got bigger, did our forebears keep them running? According to what’s known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes.

link: XXXL : The New Yorker

Simple Ratio: Higher Speed Limits, More Deaths

Eric Nagourney writes:

The repeal of the national 55-mile-per-hour speed limit has made American highways a much deadlier place, a new study says.

The “failed policy of increased speed limits,” researchers write, was to blame for an estimated 12,500 deaths over a 10-year period. Their report appears in The American Journal of Public Health.

In 1974, hoping to reduce fuel consumption, Congress set a national speed limit of 55. After easing it in 1987, lawmakers got rid of it entirely in 1995, and since then the speed limit has risen in every state, the researchers said.

The study was based on highway fatality rates throughout most of the country. It found that while road deaths went down after the speed limit was lowered in 1974, they went back up an average of about 3 percent after 1995.

The lead author, Lee S. Friedman of the University of Illinois in Chicago, said that after the speed limit was removed, safety changes like the arrival of airbags should have brought the death rate down. That did not happen.

“The only explanation we can think of is the highway speeds,” Dr. Friedman said.

One way to reduce fatalities, the study said, is to improve enforcement of speeding laws. But the country could also go back to the 55-mile-per-hour system, Dr. Friedman said.

“We survived for 20 years on it,” he said. “We were doing perfectly fine.”

link: Vital Signs - Deaths Rise With Speed Limit - NYTimes.com

Khatami: "Minimum Requirement for Getting Out of the Current Situation" in Iran

Iranian reformists, among them Mohammad Khatami, the former president, have called for a referendum to resolve the crisis that has gripped the country since last month's disputed presidential election.

Khatami, whose 1997-2005 presidency saw a thaw in the Islamic republic's relations with the West, hit out on Monday at the conduct of the June 12 vote that saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his hardline successor, returned to power.

Khatami expressed concern that "public confidence in the system has been damaged", the ILNA news agency reported.

He said calls by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, another former president, for a consensus between reformists and conservatives on resolving the crisis were the "minimum requirement for getting out of the current situation".

link: Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Khatami calls for Iran referendum

Democrats: Revolutionary Moves

Michael Wolff writes:

The Republicans, who for so long have been accusing the Democrats of knowing how to solve problems only with vast, complex, culture-changing programs and bureaucracies, are, once again, accusing them of this--health care will create an intrusive government bureaucracy of unimaginable proportions.

And the Republicans are right.

The Democrats, for so long defensive about their natural inclination to create vast, complex, culture-changing programs and bureaucracies, seem barely able to hide their satisfaction (even as they busily demure about the vastness of their plan and try to shrug off its complexities and sell it as a kinder and gentler bureaucracy). The Republicans are desperate (so, too, apparently are most governors, Democrat or Republican, who will have to find the money to pay for the new regulations). The Republicans understand what's at stake: A system, like this, changes everything. As much as the Reagan era of deregulation changed how the nation thought and acted, a new health care system, touching everyone, adjusting routines, behavior, relationships, will change the way we think and act.

link: Michael Wolff: GOP Gets It: Health Care Reform Is a Revolution

Neandertal Extinction: 15,000 Years, and There Goes the Neighborhood

Katie Wong writes:

Some 28,000 years ago in what is now the British territory of Gibraltar, a group of Neandertals eked out a living along the rocky Mediterranean coast. They were quite possibly the last of their kind. Elsewhere in Europe and western Asia, Neandertals had disappeared thousands of years earlier, after having ruled for more than 200,000 years. The Iberian Peninsula, with its comparatively mild climate and rich array of animals and plants, seems to have been the final stronghold. Soon, however, the Gibraltar population, too, would die out, leaving behind only a smattering of their stone tools and the charred remnants of their campfires.

Ever since the discovery of the first Neandertal fossil in 1856, scientists have debated the place of these bygone humans on the family tree and what became of them. For decades two competing theories have dominated the discourse. One holds that Neandertals were an archaic variant of our own species, Homo sapiens, that evolved into or was assimilated by the anatomically modern European population. The other posits that the Neandertals were a separate species, H. neanderthalensis, that modern humans swiftly extirpated on entering the archaic hominid's territory.

Over the past decade, however, two key findings have shifted the fulcrum of the debate away from the question of whether Neandertals and moderns made love or war. One is that analyses of Neandertal DNA have yet to yield the signs of interbreeding with modern humans that many researchers expected to see if the two groups mingled significantly. The other is that improvements in dating methods show that rather than disappearing immediately after the moderns invaded Europe, starting a little more than 40,000 years ago, the Neandertals survived for nearly 15,000 years after moderns moved in—hardly the rapid replacement adherents to the blitzkrieg theory envisioned.

These revelations have prompted a number of researchers to look more carefully at other ­factors that might have led to Neandertal extinction. What they are finding suggests that the answer involves a complicated interplay of stresses.

link: The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals: Scientific American

Deathstar Library

Libraries aren't what they used to be; they have to compete for attention now. Rem Koolhaas built his library in Seattle as a giant ramp and built his deathstar in Dubai; Greeen! Architects has won a competition to drop a Deathstar library (they call it a bibliosphere) on top of a student center and flexible administrative building for the University Duisburg- Essen.

link: Bibliosphere Library Lands in Germany : TreeHugger

Gonna Be In That Number: Global Aging

The world's population of older people is growing at the fastest rate ever seen and the old will soon outnumber the young for the first time, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

An aging population will push up pension and healthcare costs, forcing major increases in public spending that could slow economic growth in rich and poor countries.

The number of people 65 and older hit about 506 million as of midyear 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This will double to 1.3 billion by 2040, accounting for 14 percent of the total global population.

"People aged 65 and over will soon outnumber children under age 5 for the first time in history," said the report put together by Kevin Kinsella and Wan He of the U.S. Census Bureau.

"Aging is affecting every country in every part of the world," said Richard Suzman of the National Institute of Aging, which commissioned the report. "While there are important differences between developed and developing countries, global aging is changing the social and economic nature of the planet and presenting difficult challenges."

link: In the year 2040 - 1.3 billion senior citizens | Lifestyle | Reuters

Iran: Supreme Leader Says Don't Challenge Authority

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned senior officials on Monday not to help Tehran's enemies after two former presidents expressed defiant opposition to the result of June's disputed presidential poll.

Clashes erupted between police and reformist protesters for the first time in weeks in Tehran on Friday after former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared the Islamic Republic in crisis and said there were doubts about the election result.

That statement was a clear challenge to the authority of Khamenei, Iran's most powerful figure whose endorsement of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory was meant to be the final word on the fairness of the June 12 poll.

link: Ayatollah warns against helping Iran's enemies | International | Reuters