When a new species emerges following adaptive changes to its local environment, the process of choosing a mate can help protect the new species’ genetic identity and increase the likelihood of its survival. But of the many observable traits in a potential mate, which particular traits does a female tend to prefer?

A new study from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis finds that a female’s mating decisions are largely based on traits that reflect fitness or those that help males perform well under the local ecological conditions.

Males’ bright colors, flashy ornaments, and elaborate songs are examples of fitness-related traits that females appear to have evolved to prefer, according to the study, which appears in the journal Ecology Letters.

An example of these fitness-related traits can be found in the tropical Heliconius butterfly, where diverging color patterns on the butterflies’ wings influence mate choice and hence divergence of populations. Another example are Darwin’s finches, whose beaks evolved over millions of years with changes in birdsong, an important mating signal, and thus contributed to the rise of new and distinct finch species.

The study settles a long debate in evolutionary biology about the surprising commonality of traits that play a crucial role in both survival and mate choice. It was previously thought that such traits were uncommon and were thus named “magic traits.” However, in unraveling the trick behind the so-called magic traits, the study predicts that these magic traits are far more common in nature than expected, and in fact, predicts that female mating preferences may reflect forces of natural selection that were in place during the origin of the species.

“Even if the link between survival and mate choice is not there to start with, it will probably evolve,” said lead author Xavier Thibert-Plante.

Understanding the biological basis of mating behavior is important because it can shed light on how species boundaries are formed and maintained.

“Mating preference is crucial for the evolution of new species because it reduces, and may in some cases eliminate hybridization, which can produce offspring of mixed ancestry, slowing down or reversing adaptation and differentiation among emerging species,” Thibert-Plante explained.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS).

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Today’s congressional hearing was a joke. The reason: Firms like Booz Allen bankroll and own Congress. Here’s howHave you noticed anything missing in the political discourse about the National Security Administration’s unprecedented mass surveillance? There’s certainly been a robust – and welcome – discussion about the balance between security and liberty, and there’s at least been some conversation about the intelligence community’s potential criminality and constitutional violations.

Thanks to what I’ve previously called the No Money Rule, however, there has only been indirect references to how cash undoubtedly tilts the debate against those who challenge the national security state.

Those indirect references have come in the form of stories about the business model of Booz Allen Hamilton, the security contractor which employed Edward Snowden.

CNN/Money notes that 99 percent of the firm’s multi-billion-dollar annual revenues now come from the federal government. Those revenues are part of a larger and growing economic sector within the Military-Industrial Complex – a sector that, according to author Tim Shorrock, is “a $56 billion-a-year industry.”

For the most part, this is where the political discourse about money stops. We are told that there are high-minded debates about security and liberty, with politicians of differing parties contributing to those debates from positions of principle and ideology. We are also told in passing that there’s this massively profitable private industry that makes billions a year from the policy decisions that ultimately emerge from such a debate.

Thanks to the No Money Rule among the Washington press corps, though, there is mostly silence about the connection between the private industry and the public policy. Indeed, few in D.C. are willing to say that the policy debate may be, in part, driven by the private industry and almost nobody dares mention that politicians’ attacks on surveillance critics may actually have nothing to do with principle, and everything to do with going to bat for their campaign donors.

For a taste of what that kind of institutionalized corruption looks like, take a look at the amount of money Booz Allen Hamilton and its parent company The Carlyle Group

This is just an example from two companies among scores, but it exemplifies a larger dynamic. Simply put, there are huge corporate forces with a vested financial interest in making sure the debate over security is tilted toward the surveillance state and against critics of that surveillance state. In practice, that means when those corporations spend big money on campaign contributions, they aren’t just buying votes for specific private contracts. They are also implicitly pressuring politicians’ to rhetorically push the discourse in a pro-surveillance, anti-civil liberties direction – that is, in a direction that preserves the larger political assumptions on which the profits of the entire surveillance-industrial complex are based.

The success of that pressure is exemplified by the title of today’s congressional hearing with the head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander. The hearing doesn’t ask why Alexander lied to Congress or whether the NSA has engaged in illegal acts. No, a Congress bankrolled by firms like Booz Allen predictably calls the hearing “How Disclosed NSA Programs Protect Americans & Why Disclosure Aids Our Adversaries” – the two preconceived assumption being that 1) the NSA’s surveillance programs, which generate huge profits for companies like Booz, are beneficial to Americans’ security and 2) critics of those programs hurt the country.

None of this, by the way, is exclusive to debates over domestic national security policy. As Booz Allen’s business model suggests, there are also foreign policy implications to the pay-to-play culture.

As the New York Times notes, the firm is expanding its profit potential by “marketing” its surveillance and security services to Middle East dictatorships that want to strengthen their grip on power. According to the Washington Business Journal, that includes Kuwait, Qatar, Omar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and “other countries” working to crush democratic dissent “associated with the Arab Spring.” That means American politicians who are financed by Booz and other firms with a similar multinational business model not only have a vested campaign-contribution interest in shilling for the domestic surveillance state that their donors profit from. They also have a similar interest in denigrating the democratic protest movements that challenge Mideast surveillance states that make those donors big money, too.

Obviously, this kind of moneyed influence should be a critical focus of the political reporting on politicians’ declarations about Snowden, the NSA, foreign policy and surveillance in general. When, for instance, a journalist reports on a politician slamming critics of the surveillance state, the public should be told whether that politician has taken money from firms that make their money off the continued expansion of that surveillance state. But that isn’t happening thanks to the aforementioned No Money Rule in the Washington press – and that rule isn’t just about etiquette. On national security issues, it is often about the elite agenda-setting Washington media outlets which also financially rely on an ever-expanding national security state.

For a microcosmic (but not the only) example of that little-mentioned reliance – and how it may skew the way the elite media frame the national security debate – look at these side-by-side pages from the ultimate agenda-setting D.C. newspaper, Politico:

As you can see, the ad on the left side is for a defense contractor. Like surveillance/security firms, it is part of a larger industry that relies on the ever-expanding national security state for its profits – and that therefore is hostile to national security state critics like Snowden. That industry invests heavily not only in politicians, but in advertising in Washington publications like Politico. Is it any coincidence that (as you can see on the right page) such publications loyally frame the debate over Snowden not as a question that ponders possible positive qualities (heroism, courage, etc.) but as a question exclusively of negatives: specifically, did he commit treason or is he a traitor?

Noting all of this isn’t to allege conspiratorial micromanagement of politicians and media by the military-intelligence community. It isn’t, for instance, to claim that everything that comes out of surveillance defenders’ mouths comes from talking points provided by Booz Allen’s lobbyists, nor is it to claim that Politico writers are directly ordered by their advertisers to depict national security critics on exclusively negative terms. It is actually to suggest something much more pernicious and ubiquitous than that.

As anyone who has worked in Washington politics and media well knows, the Capital is not a place of competing high-minded ideologies — in terms of the mechanics of legislation and policy, it is a place where monied interests duke it, where those with the most money typically win, and where a power-worshiping media is usually biased toward the winners. In the context of money and national security, there is a clear imbalance — there are far fewer moneyed interests whose business is transparency and protecting civil liberties than there are moneyed interests whose business is secrecy and curtailing civil liberties. That imbalance has consequently resulted in a larger environment in Washington that is so dominated by national-security-state money that the capital’s assumptions reflexively, unconsciously and automatically skew toward the national security state without overt corporate orders ever having to be given to politicians or media outlets.

If the simplest most straightforward explanation is often the most accurate, then this skewing is almost certainly part of why the pro-surveillance terms of the political debate in Washington is so at odds with public opinion polling on the matter. Big Money has helped create that disconnect – even though Big Money is somehow written out of the story.

GALLERY.

Some peaches were gathered in your name,
and that was enough beneath panels of
trick moonlight, parsing out phrases from
clouds, asleep like a Subaru in the suburbs.

This time, we come as just one, indifferent
to mealtime, caught with acrylic metallics
between sheets, waffling our waywardness,
agreeing to save a cartoon milk carton.

In each, one of us sleeps despondent though
eager to husk, brushing back delicious curls,
yet modest in the sloppy reticence of daily
correspondence, rejigging dirty postcards.

I could see poppies doffing pinkish caps.
I sensed in each bed a swart discipline,
a taste. Thoughts broken like islands, firm
partners thick as the Kawaiisu and Khoi.

This life, in fact, is about rubbernecking space
sacred as junk-bond litigants beyond all
purview, moist expectations festering our ears.
So peers triumph. Yet in the jealous ruckus

of shucking, wincing, I’d still surround you if
I could, replaying our loquacious pastimes:
breaching your neck’s cover, its mint sugars,
our awkward commotion iridescent once.

After it descended, it didn’t cause much pain.
Finally, your resale value was ascertained.
The meek leggings of fog, its crude smallnesses,
follow someone walking a dog duly along.

Adam Fitzgerald

The Late Parade
Liveright

Milton had been a Cambridge friend of Charles Diodati, and while touring Europe as a thirty-year-old he had visited Charles at the family villa. By Byron’s time, the villa had become a rental, the region a prestigious resort area. When word circulated that the infamous Byron had taken up residence, one enterprising hotelier installed a telescope in order that his guests might get a close-up of the “League of Incest” — Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont (half-sister to Mary, pregnant with Byron’s child), John Polidori (Byron’s physician) — in action. One gossipy note sent back to England from a nearby villa testified to Byron cavorting with “another family of very suspicious appearance,” though the communicant admitted, “How many he has at his disposal out of the whole set I know not. . . .”

Shelley’s first-hand report of Diodati life describes not a harem but “a menagerie, with eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were masters of it.” Peace and quiet, let alone intimacy, does not seem likely; then again, not only did Mary Shelley find the privacy necessary to start plotting Frankenstein, layering in multiple associations with Milton’s Paradise Lost, but Polidori was able to concentrate on what would become “The Vampyre,” and Byron himself would write the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This opens with a reference to Ada, his newly-born daughter:

Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smil’d, And then we parted. . . .

Their parting had been caused by the rumors of incest surrounding Byron’s relationship with his half-sister, and it would prove to be permanent. Ada grew up estranged from both parents, and to be a mathematical genius. She worked with Charles Babbage, whose “Analytical Engine” is widely considered to have been the world’s first computer, and her contributions were such that the programming language ADA is named in her honor. She died at the age of thirty-six, the same as her father; in her last years she was like her father in other ways, her difficulties including several romantic scandals, problems with alcohol and opium, and gambling debts.

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Sept. 27, 1954. Smithtown, New York. “Smithtown Shopping Center. General view.” Meet you at Play Mart in an hour. Photo by Sam Gottscho.

via.

Today’s picture shows a worker on the rig floor. His foot is on a segment of drill stem. Each segment of drill stem is 30 feet long. He has his hands on the “Tongs” which are an enormous set of pipe wrenches, suspended in the air by chains and cables. You can see another rig immediately in the background.

vi.

Justine Kurland, Smoke Bombs, 1998 (689.2000)

In Smoke Bombs, from one of Kurland’s earliest bodies series, Runaway Girls, the artist orchestrates narratives within landscapes, often the American West, and features teenaged girls as her models. The uncharted or forgotten spaces Kurland depicts capture the feral state of the runaway. The artist casts her girls into active roles, reinventing the Lost Boys narrative.

Kurland describes the process of this early work, the majority of which was made while pursuing her MFA at Yale, as an act of running away from the East Coast, when she herself drifted on extended road trips. While on the road, Kurland culls her female adolescent models from high schools and colleges; she pulls them along like seaweed for a collaborative moment where she arranges the scene and then documents the interactions between the individuals depicted. In recent years, Kurland has continued to photograph while driving across the country. Her newest work, This Train is Bound For Glory, explores the livelihood of the contemporary American drifter, as well as her relationship with her young son, who accompanies her on the road.

Kate Levy, ICP-Bard 2013

via Fans in a Flashbulb.

American Girl in Italy » ruth_orkin_girl_italy, forence. 1951

< vi.

READ.

Two teams of physicists have stumbled across a weird new subatomic particle that’s unlike anything else we’ve ever seen—and it could rewrite the rules of matter as we know them.

Researchers from both the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in China have been studying a particle originally discovered 2005, called Y(4260). As physicists are wont to do, they’ve been smashing together electrons and positrons to create bucket loads of Y(4260), which exists for just 10-23 seconds before falling apart into different subatomic particles.

But they’ve observed something weird: a bump in their data, at 3.9 gigaelectronvolts, that corresponds to about four times the weight of a proton. While it’s far from certain, that suggests that there exists a new kind of particle—currently known as Z(3900)—which is made of four quarks.

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Wow. Who knew the FBI had computers that could communicate with other agencies?

The last time the topic came up, back in 2007, things didn’t work that way. That’s when we learned that the FBI and CIA had incompatible computer systems that couldn’t interface to share information or even communicate. It caused a flurry of tut-tutting and then disappeared from view.

The story of the computer glitch was contained in a pair of documents released several months apart, scrubbed versions of secret reports by the two agencies’ inspector-generals’ offices, examining the intelligence failures that led up to the September 11 attacks. The FBI report was completed in November 2004 and released in June 2006; the CIA report was completed in June 2005 and released in August 2007.

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When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward into a snowbank, you don’t worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your second is that you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for dinner. Friends are expecting you at their cabin around eight for a moonlight ski, a late dinner, a sauna. Nothing can keep you from that.

Driving out of town, defroster roaring, you barely noted the bank thermometer on the town square: minus 27 degrees at 6:36. The radio weather report warned of a deep mass of arctic air settling over the region. The man who took your money at the Conoco station shook his head at the register and said he wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight if he were you. You smiled. A little chill never hurt anybody with enough fleece and a good four-wheel-drive.

But now you’re stuck. Jamming the gearshift into low, you try to muscle out of the drift. The tires whine on ice-slicked snow as headlights dance on the curtain of frosted firs across the road. Shoving the lever back into park, you shoulder open the door and step from your heated capsule. Cold slaps your naked face, squeezes tears from your eyes.

You check your watch: 7:18. You consult your map: A thin, switchbacking line snakes up the mountain to the penciled square that marks the cabin.

Breath rolls from you in short frosted puffs. The Jeep lies cocked sideways in the snowbank like an empty turtle shell. You think of firelight and saunas and warm food and wine. You look again at the map. It’s maybe five or six miles more to that penciled square. You run that far every day before breakfast. You’ll just put on your skis. No problem.

There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a child it’s lower: In 1994, a two-year-old girl in Saskatchewan wandered out of her house into a minus-40 night. She was found near her doorstep the next morning, limbs frozen solid, her core temperature 57 degrees. She lived.

Others are less fortunate, even in much milder conditions. One of Europe’s worst weather disasters occurred during a 1964 competitive walk on a windy, rainy English moor; three of the racers died from hypothermia, though temperatures never fell below freezing and ranged as high as 45.

But for all scientists and statisticians now know of freezing and its physiology, no one can yet predict exactly how quickly and in whom hypothermia will strike–and whether it will kill when it does. The cold remains a mystery, more prone to fell men than women, more lethal to the thin and well muscled than to those with avoirdupois, and least forgiving to the arrogant and the unaware.

The process begins even before you leave the car, when you remove your gloves to squeeze a loose bail back into one of your ski bindings. The freezing metal bites your flesh. Your skin temperature drops.

Within a few seconds, the palms of your hands are a chilly, painful 60 degrees. Instinctively, the web of surface capillaries on your hands constrict, sending blood coursing away from your skin and deeper into your torso. Your body is allowing your fingers to chill in order to keep its vital organs warm.

You replace your gloves, noticing only that your fingers have numbed slightly. Then you kick boots into bindings and start up the road.

Were you a Norwegian fisherman or Inuit hunter, both of whom frequently work gloveless in the cold, your chilled hands would open their surface capillaries periodically to allow surges of warm blood to pass into them and maintain their flexibility. This phenomenon, known as the hunter’s response, can elevate a 35-degree skin temperature to 50 degrees within seven or eight minutes.

Other human adaptations to the cold are more mysterious. Tibetan Buddhist monks can raise the skin temperature of their hands and feet by 15 degrees through meditation. Australian aborigines, who once slept on the ground, unclothed, on near-freezing nights, would slip into a light hypothermic state, suppressing shivering until the rising sun rewarmed them.

You have no such defenses, having spent your days at a keyboard in a climate-controlled office. Only after about ten minutes of hard climbing, as your body temperature rises, does blood start seeping back into your fingers. Sweat trickles down your sternum and spine.

By now you’ve left the road and decided to shortcut up the forested mountainside to the road’s next switchback. Treading slowly through deep, soft snow as the full moon hefts over a spiny ridgetop, throwing silvery bands of moonlight and shadow, you think your friends were right: It’s a beautiful night for skiing–though you admit, feeling the minus-30 air bite at your face, it’s also cold.

After an hour, there’s still no sign of the switchback, and you’ve begun to worry. You pause to check the map. At this moment, your core temperature reaches its high: 100.8. Climbing in deep snow, you’ve generated nearly ten times as much body heat as you do when you are resting.

As you step around to orient map to forest, you hear a metallic pop. You look down. The loose bail has disappeared from your binding. You lift your foot and your ski falls from your boot.

You twist on your flashlight, and its cold-weakened batteries throw a yellowish circle in the snow. It’s right around here somewhere, you think, as you sift the snow through gloved fingers. Focused so intently on finding the bail, you hardly notice the frigid air pressing against your tired body and sweat-soaked clothes.

The exertion that warmed you on the way uphill now works against you: Your exercise-dilated capillaries carry the excess heat of your core to your skin, and your wet clothing dispels it rapidly into the night. The lack of insulating fat over your muscles allows the cold to creep that much closer to your warm blood.

Your temperature begins to plummet. Within 17 minutes it reaches the normal 98.6. Then it slips below.

At 97 degrees, hunched over in your slow search, the muscles along your neck and shoulders tighten in what’s known as pre-shivering muscle tone. Sensors have signaled the temperature control center in your hypothalamus, which in turn has ordered the constriction of the entire web of surface capillaries. Your hands and feet begin to ache with cold. Ignoring the pain, you dig carefully through the snow; another ten minutes pass. Without the bail you know you’re in deep trouble.

Finally, nearly 45 minutes later, you find the bail. You even manage to pop it back into its socket and clamp your boot into the binding. But the clammy chill that started around your skin has now wrapped deep into your body’s core.

At 95, you’ve entered the zone of mild hypothermia. You’re now trembling violently as your body attains its maximum shivering response, an involuntary condition in which your muscles contract rapidly to generate additional body heat.

It was a mistake, you realize, to come out on a night this cold. You should turn back. Fishing into the front pocket of your shell parka, you fumble out the map. You consulted it to get here; it should be able to guide you back to the warm car. It doesn’t occur to you in your increasingly clouded and panicky mental state that you could simply follow your tracks down the way you came.

And after this long stop, the skiing itself has become more difficult. By the time you push off downhill, your muscles have cooled and tightened so dramatically that they no longer contract easily, and once contracted, they won’t relax. You’re locked into an ungainly, spread-armed, weak-kneed snowplow.

Still, you manage to maneuver between stands of fir, swishing down through silvery light and pools of shadow. You’re too cold to think of the beautiful night or of the friends you had meant to see. You think only of the warm Jeep that waits for you somewhere at the bottom of the hill. Its gleaming shell is centered in your mind’s eye as you come over the crest of a small knoll. You hear the sudden whistle of wind in your ears as you gain speed. Then, before your mind can quite process what the sight means, you notice a lump in the snow ahead.

Recognizing, slowly, the danger that you are in, you try to jam your skis to a stop. But in your panic, your balance and judgment are poor. Moments later, your ski tips plow into the buried log and you sail headfirst through the air and bellyflop into the snow.

You lie still. There’s a dead silence in the forest, broken by the pumping of blood in your ears. Your ankle is throbbing with pain and you’ve hit your head. You’ve also lost your hat and a glove. Scratchy snow is packed down your shirt. Meltwater trickles down your neck and spine, joined soon by a thin line of blood from a small cut on your head.

This situation, you realize with an immediate sense of panic, is serious. Scrambling to rise, you collapse in pain, your ankle crumpling beneath you.

As you sink back into the snow, shaken, your heat begins to drain away at an alarming rate, your head alone accounting for 50 percent of the loss. The pain of the cold soon pierces your ears so sharply that you root about in the snow until you find your hat and mash it back onto your head.

But even that little activity has been exhausting. You know you should find your glove as well, and yet you’re becoming too weary to feel any urgency. You decide to have a short rest before going on.

An hour passes. at one point, a stray thought says you should start being scared, but fear is a concept that floats somewhere beyond your immediate reach, like that numb hand lying naked in the snow. You’ve slid into the temperature range at which cold renders the enzymes in your brain less efficient. With every one-degree drop in body temperature below 95, your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by 3 to 5 percent. When your core temperature reaches 93, amnesia nibbles at your consciousness. You check your watch: 12:58. Maybe someone will come looking for you soon. Moments later, you check again. You can’t keep the numbers in your head. You’ll remember little of what happens next.

Your head drops back. The snow crunches softly in your ear. In the minus-35-degree air, your core temperature falls about one degree every 30 to 40 minutes, your body heat leaching out into the soft, enveloping snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.

You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.

By 87 degrees you’ve lost the ability to recognize a familiar face, should one suddenly appear from the woods.

At 86 degrees, your heart, its electrical impulses hampered by chilled nerve tissues, becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of your brain, meanwhile, begin to trigger visual and auditory hallucinations.

You hear jingle bells. Lifting your face from your snow pillow, you realize with a surge of gladness that they’re not sleigh bells; they’re welcoming bells hanging from the door of your friends’ cabin. You knew it had to be close by. The jingling is the sound of the cabin door opening, just through the fir trees.

Attempting to stand, you collapse in a tangle of skis and poles. That’s OK. You can crawl. It’s so close.

Hours later, or maybe it’s minutes, you realize the cabin still sits beyond the grove of trees. You’ve crawled only a few feet. The light on your wristwatch pulses in the darkness: 5:20. Exhausted, you decide to rest your head for a moment.

When you lift it again, you’re inside, lying on the floor before the woodstove. The fire throws off a red glow. First it’s warm; then it’s hot; then it’s searing your flesh. Your clothing has caught fire.

At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.

All you know is that you’re burning. You claw off your shell and pile sweater and fling them away.

But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there’s no stove, no cabin, no friends. You’re lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You’ve shed your clothes, your car, your oil-heated house in town. Without this ingenious technology you’re simply a delicate, tropical organism whose range is restricted to a narrow sunlit band that girds the earth at the equator.

And you’ve now ventured way beyond it.

There’s an adage about hypothermia: “You aren’t dead until you’re warm and dead.”

At about 6:00 the next morning, his friends, having discovered the stalled Jeep, find him, still huddled inches from the buried log, his gloveless hand shoved into his armpit. The flesh of his limbs is waxy and stiff as old putty, his pulse nonexistent, his pupils unresponsive to light. Dead.

But those who understand cold know that even as it deadens, it offers perverse salvation. Heat is a presence: the rapid vibrating of molecules. Cold is an absence: the damping of the vibrations. At absolute zero, minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, molecular motion ceases altogether. It is this slowing that converts gases to liquids, liquids to solids, and renders solids harder. It slows bacterial growth and chemical reactions. In the human body, cold shuts down metabolism. The lungs take in less oxygen, the heart pumps less blood. Under normal temperatures, this would produce brain damage. But the chilled brain, having slowed its own metabolism, needs far less oxygen-rich blood and can, under the right circumstances, survive intact.

Setting her ear to his chest, one of his rescuers listens intently. Seconds pass. Then, faintly, she hears a tiny sound–a single thump, so slight that it might be the sound of her own blood. She presses her ear harder to the cold flesh. Another faint thump, then another.

The slowing that accompanies freezing is, in its way, so beneficial that it is even induced at times. Cardiologists today often use deep chilling to slow a patient’s metabolism in preparation for heart or brain surgery. In this state of near suspension, the patient’s blood flows slowly, his heart rarely beats–or in the case of those on heart-lung machines, doesn’t beat at all; death seems near. But carefully monitored, a patient can remain in this cold stasis, undamaged, for hours.

The rescuers quickly wrap their friend’s naked torso with a spare parka, his hands with mittens, his entire body with a bivy sack. They brush snow from his pasty, frozen face. Then one snakes down through the forest to the nearest cabin. The others, left in the pre-dawn darkness, huddle against him as silence closes around them. For a moment, the woman imagines she can hear the scurrying, breathing, snoring of a world of creatures that have taken cover this frigid night beneath the thick quilt of snow.

With a “one, two, three,” the doctor and nurses slide the man’s stiff, curled form onto a table fitted with a mattress filled with warm water which will be regularly reheated. They’d been warned that they had a profound hypothermia case coming in. Usually such victims can be straightened from their tortured fetal positions. This one can’t.

Technicians scissor with stainless-steel shears at the man’s urine-soaked long underwear and shell pants, frozen together like corrugated cardboard. They attach heart-monitor electrodes to his chest and insert a low-temperature electronic thermometer into his rectum. Digital readings flash: 24 beats per minute and a core temperature of 79.2 degrees.

The doctor shakes his head. He can’t remember seeing numbers so low. He’s not quite sure how to revive this man without killing him.

In fact, many hypothermia victims die each year in the process of being rescued. In “rewarming shock,” the constricted capillaries reopen almost all at once, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure. The slightest movement can send a victim’s heart muscle into wild spasms of ventricular fibrillation. In 1980, 16 shipwrecked Danish fishermen were hauled to safety after an hour and a half in the frigid North Sea. They then walked across the deck of the rescue ship, stepped below for a hot drink, and dropped dead, all 16 of them.

“78.9,” a technician calls out. “That’s three-tenths down.”

The patient is now experiencing “afterdrop,” in which residual cold close to the body’s surface continues to cool the core even after the victim is removed from the outdoors.

The doctor rapidly issues orders to his staff: intravenous administration of warm saline, the bag first heated in the microwave to 110 degrees. Elevating the core temperature of an average-size male one degree requires adding about 60 kilocalories of heat. A kilocalorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one liter of water one degree Celsius. Since a quart of hot soup at 140 degrees offers about 30 kilocalories, the patient curled on the table would need to consume 40 quarts of chicken broth to push his core temperature up to normal. Even the warm saline, infused directly into his blood, will add only 30 kilocalories.

Ideally, the doctor would have access to a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, with which he could pump out the victim’s blood, rewarm and oxygenate it, and pump it back in again, safely raising the core temperature as much as one degree every three minutes. But such machines are rarely available outside major urban hospitals. Here, without such equipment, the doctor must rely on other options.

“Let’s scrub for surgery,” he calls out.

Moments later, he’s sliding a large catheter into an incision in the man’s abdominal cavity. Warm fluid begins to flow from a suspended bag, washing through his abdomen, and draining out through another catheter placed in another incision. Prosaically, this lavage operates much like a car radiator in reverse: The solution warms the internal organs, and the warm blood in the organs is then pumped by the heart throughout the body.

The patient’s stiff limbs begin to relax. His pulse edges up. But even so the jagged line of his heartbeat flashing across the EKG screen shows the curious dip known as a J wave, common to hypothermia patients.

“Be ready to defibrillate,” the doctor warns the EMTs.

For another hour, nurses and EMTs hover around the edges of the table where the patient lies centered in a warm pool of light, as if offered up to the sun god. They check his heart. They check the heat of the mattress beneath him. They whisper to one another about the foolishness of having gone out alone tonight.

And slowly the patient responds. Another liter of saline is added to the IV. The man’s blood pressure remains far too low, brought down by the blood flowing out to the fast-opening capillaries of his limbs. Fluid lost through perspiration and urination has reduced his blood volume. But every 15 or 20 minutes, his temperature rises another degree. The immediate danger of cardiac fibrillation lessens, as the heart and thinning blood warms. Frostbite could still cost him fingers or an earlobe. But he appears to have beaten back the worst of the frigidity.

For the next half hour, an EMT quietly calls the readouts of the thermometer, a mantra that marks the progress of this cold-blooded proto-organism toward a state of warmer, higher consciousness.

“90.4…
“92.2…”

From somewhere far away in the immense, cold darkness, you hear a faint, insistent hum. Quickly it mushrooms into a ball of sound, like a planet rushing toward you, and then it becomes a stream of words.

A voice is calling your name.

You don’t want to open your eyes. You sense heat and light playing against your eyelids, but beneath their warm dance a chill wells up inside you from the sunless ocean bottoms and the farthest depths of space. You are too tired even to shiver. You want only to sleep.

“Can you hear me?”

You force open your eyes. Lights glare overhead. Around the lights faces hover atop uniformed bodies. You try to think: You’ve been away a very long time, but where have you been?

“You’re at the hospital. You got caught in the cold.”

You try to nod. Your neck muscles feel rusted shut, unused for years. They respond to your command with only a slight twitch.

“You’ll probably have amnesia,” the voice says.

You remember the moon rising over the spiky ridgetop and skiing up toward it, toward someplace warm beneath the frozen moon. After that, nothing–only that immense coldness lodged inside you.

“We’re trying to get a little warmth back into you,” the voice says.

You’d nod if you could. But you can’t move. All you can feel is throbbing discomfort everywhere. Glancing down to where the pain is most biting, you notice blisters filled with clear fluid dotting your fingers, once gloveless in the snow. During the long, cold hours the tissue froze and ice crystals formed in the tiny spaces between your cells, sucking water from them, blocking the blood supply. You stare at them absently.

“I think they’ll be fine,” a voice from overhead says. “The damage looks superficial. We expect that the blisters will break in a week or so, and the tissue should revive after that.”

If not, you know that your fingers will eventually turn black, the color of bloodless, dead tissue. And then they will be amputated.

But worry slips from you as another wave of exhaustion sweeps in. Slowly you drift off, dreaming of warmth, of tropical ocean wavelets breaking across your chest, of warm sand beneath you.

Hours later, still logy and numb, you surface, as if from deep under water. A warm tide seems to be flooding your midsection. Focusing your eyes down there with difficulty, you see tubes running into you, their heat mingling with your abdomen’s depthless cold like a churned-up river. You follow the tubes to the bag that hangs suspended beneath the electric light.

And with a lurch that would be a sob if you could make a sound, you begin to understand: The bag contains all that you had so nearly lost. These people huddled around you have brought you sunlight and warmth, things you once so cavalierly dismissed as constant, available, yours, summoned by the simple twisting of a knob or tossing on of a layer.

But in the hours since you last believed that, you’ve traveled to a place where there is no sun. You’ve seen that in the infinite reaches of the universe, heat is as glorious and ephemeral as the light of the stars. Heat exists only where matter exists, where particles can vibrate and jump. In the infinite winter of space, heat is tiny; it is the cold that is huge.

Someone speaks. Your eyes move from bright lights to shadowy forms in the dim outer reaches of the room. You recognize the voice of one of the friends you set out to visit, so long ago now. She’s smiling down at you crookedly.

“It’s cold out there,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

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Paul & Linda McCartney: Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey – from Ram, 1971

LISTEN.

Exposed, Bryan Adams

via this isn’t happiness™ Peteski.

The Mancorbo Canal in the Picos de Europe by Carlos de Haes (1876)

My Daily Art Display blog today incorporates the two things I enjoy most in art; landscape paintings and discovering a painter I had, up till now, never heard of. Today I am featuring the nineteenth century Belgian born Spanish landscape painter Carlos de Haes.

Carlos de Haes was born in Brussels in January 1826. He was born into a dynasty of merchants and financiers and was the eldest of seven children. When he was nine years old his family moved to Malaga where he grew up and went to school.

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—Iris Murdoch

A few years ago, in an introductory fiction workshop, my students and I witnessed a young man make relentless awkward attempts to get to know a young woman in the class. He was passionate and clumsy and his efforts were wholly transparent. When the time came for him to turn in his story, he submitted a piece about a young man much like himself who is hopelessly in love with a young woman much like the young woman in the class, and the two characters are in a creative writing workshop together. One night the male character shows up tipsy at the young woman’s house to ask if she will stroll with him in the warm night air and hold his hand, but the door is opened by her boyfriend, who answers for her with a punch to the jaw, sending the character flying and leaving a scrape on his chin—much like the scrape on the chin of the young man in my workshop.

Undaunted, the character retreats to his dorm to write a story about yet another character who is much like the first character who is much like the author, with the idea that a female character who is much like the first female character who is much like the girl in the workshop will read the story and understand that this literary version of himself represents his real self and that he is in love with her.

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The desert is 1,000 kilometres long, and about 500 kilometres, and its topography is varied. In the west the elevation is as high as 2,000 feet (610 metres) and the sand is fine and soft, while in the east the elevation drops to 600 feet (183 metres) with sand dunes, salt flats, and sand sheets. The terrain is covered with sand dunes with heights up to 250 metres (820 ft), interspersed with gravel and gypsum plains.

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A Jane Smiley Reader

6 stories, From horses to children to sex, memorable fiction and nonfiction from the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author.

via HERE.

Our latest Notable Narrative: “The Prophets of Oak Ridge,” Dan Zak’s 9,448-word Washington Post project—and, as of this morning, e-book—about a house painter, a drifter and an 82-year-old nun who breached the perimeter at the Y-12 National Security Complex, which produces nuclear weapons in East Tennessee. We’ll be hosting a live chat with Zak about the multimedia project this Thursday at 11 a.m., so please join us. David Beard, the Post‘s director of digital content, will also be with us, to talk about what the staff learned from producing two big digital projects back to back.

Screen Shot 2013-05-14 at 12.07.58 PM

Photo by Linda Davidson, courtesy Washington Post

The story: The activists wanted to make their point with fence cutters, graffiti, protest songs, and the thawed blood of a colleague who died in 2008 but hoped to “join” one last mission. Zak tells their story but also that of Oak Ridge, Tenn., built by the federal government as a bomb-making town. “Though you haven’t needed a badge to get into the town since 1949, Oak Ridge’s soul hasn’t changed,” he writes.

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The Guitar and the New World (Excelsior Editions, 2013) offers an entertaining yet informative social history of the world’s most popular instrument—the guitar. Author Joe Gioia investigates a hidden chapter in American music’s history that spans the ancient world to Sioux Ghost Dancers. In this excerpt taken from the chapter titled “Hey-Hey,” Gioia proposes a Native American influence on the history of the blues.

No question, something new was at large in America in 1901—a sense of greater mysteries floating above prevailing ideas of science and progress. The same summer Buffalo held dueling visions of technology and magic, William James presented his Edinburgh lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, which argued in favor of what James called a “pluralistic universe,” one in which the Christian God might compete on equal terms with other supernatural beings. Also that summer, James’s Harvard colleague, the anthropologist Charles Peabody, while excavating a pre-Columbian Indian mound in the Mississippi Delta at Coahoma, became, he said, distracted by strange music. Professor Peabody is not remembered now for any artifacts he uncovered, but for what he discovered in the air, what he called the “extraordinary” songs of the black men working for him.

The History of the Blues

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From glue-covered sticks in Egypt hang two lives, and a question: How can we stop the slaughter of songbirds migrating across the Mediterranean?

By Jonathan Franzen

Photograph by David Guttenfelder

In a bird market in the Mediterranean tourist town of Marsa Matruh, Egypt, I was inspecting cages crowded with wild turtledoves and quail when one of the birdsellers saw the disapproval in my face and called out sarcastically, in Arabic: “You Americans feel bad about the birds, but you don’t feel bad about dropping bombs on someone’s homeland.”

I could have answered that it’s possible to feel bad about both birds and bombs, that two wrongs don’t make a right. But it seemed to me that the birdseller was saying something true about the problem of nature conservation in a world of human conflict, something not so easily refuted. He kissed his fingers to suggest how good the birds tasted, and I kept frowning at the cages.

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Just a few days ago, the man whom many Germans now see as one of the greatest villains in the world visited Berlin. Keith Alexander, the head of the world’s most powerful intelligence operation, the National Security Agency (NSA), had arranged meetings with important representatives of the German government, including top-ranking officials in Germany’s intelligence agencies and leading representatives of the Chancellery and the Interior Ministry.

Alexander gave his usual presentation about how the world could be more effectively spied on and allegedly made safer. At such presentations, the NSA chief likes to extol the virtues of his agency’s “incredible technical expertise,” and he urges allies to invest more in controlling and monitoring today’s new technologies. Alexander maintains there has to be more intensive surveillance of the Internet.

But while they were still chatting about the Internet in Berlin government offices, news stories were breaking around the world that Alexander’s NSA may already have the Web firmly under its control. A former US intelligence official named Edward Snowden had leaked information to the press on the virtually all-encompassing Prism online surveillance program.

The world soon learned that Alexander’s NSA, with the help of direct access to the servers of US Internet giants, is able to secretly read, record and store nearly every type of digital communication worldwide. The public also discovered that the Americans have a preference for spying on Germany — more so than on any other country in Europe. During the days of the Cold War, when Germans referred to the US as “big brother” it had a positive connotation. Now, that term has an entirely different meaning.

Snowden’s leak raises important questions: How much surveillance of the Internet is a free society willing or able to tolerate? Does the fear of attacks justify a comprehensive monitoring of e-mails, search queries on Google and conversations on Skype? And can a country like Germany allow its citizens to be spied on by another country?

‘The State Cannot Look Away’

Surveillance cannot be based on blind faith in a democracy, but rather on a wide degree of acceptance by informed citizens, politicians and allied countries. This is by no means the case with Prism.

There are plenty of reasons to venture a confrontation with the Americans over this issue, particularly in Germany, where there has been a greater awareness of the importance of data protection than elsewhere in the world, and where citizens have engaged in heated debates over routine data collection efforts such as the national census.

“When foreign agencies infringe upon fundamental rights on German territory, the state cannot look away,” says Dieter Deiseroth, a judge at Germany’s Federal Administrative Court. “Accepting the massive collection of private information would be a serious violation of the principle that every state has to defend such rights,” he contends.

Will Revelations Disrupt Obama Visit?

Yet the German government and German intelligence agencies are reacting in such a blasé manner to the intrigues of their visitor from the NSA that it’s as if they have been told something as banal as the notion that English is “de facto” the official language of the US.

The revelations appeared to be unpleasant for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was presumably concerned that the news could disrupt this week’s carefully choreographed visit to Berlin by US President Barack Obama. During an internal discussion, Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert reacted almost indignantly when the Justice Ministry urged an inquiry into the matter — the only German ministry to make such a demand. Publicly, though, Seibert merely said that this “annoying” matter had to be thoroughly examined and that this review process remained ongoing. Furthermore, the Interior Ministry announced that it was discussing the issue with US agencies. Genuine concern would have sounded different.

Why is the German government reacting so calmly to something that it should find alarming? Perhaps because these revelations are nothing new for it? Because the Germans would like to enjoy the same capabilities that Prism affords the Americans? Or because our friends from the other side of the Atlantic so readily share their knowledge about the world and its villains with us?

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

WHEN Elisha Otis stood on a platform at the 1854 World Fair in New York and ordered an axeman to cut the rope used to hoist him aloft, he changed cityscapes for ever. To the amazement of the crowd his new safety lift dropped only a few inches before being held by an automatic braking system. This gave people the confidence to use what Americans insist on calling elevators. That confidence allowed buildings to rise higher and higher.

They could soon go higher still, as a result of another breakthrough in lift technology. This week Kone, a Finnish liftmaker, announced that after a decade of development at its laboratory in Lohja, which sits above a 333-metre-deep mineshaft which the firm uses as a test bed, it has devised a system that should be able to raise an elevator a kilometre (3,300 feet) or more. This is twice as far as the things can go at present. Since the effectiveness of lifts is one of the main constraints on the height of buildings, Kone’s technology—which replaces the steel cables from which lift cars are currently suspended with ones made of carbon fibres—could result in buildings truly worthy of the name “skyscraper”.

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Martorano discusses these killings as though he’s reading from a phone book. He’s rehashed his criminal résumé for prosecutors countless times before and now seems genuinely bored of his own story. At one point, he checks his watch, his heavy breathing reverberating through the courtroom microphone.

“And what happened then?” the prosecutor repeatedly asks at he leads Martorano through a litany of carnage—to which Martorano will respond, with a phlegmy grunt, “I shot him” or “I took his knife from him and I stabbed him” or “I left the body in the trunk.” When asked to explain where he shot one victim (I’d thought the answer might be something like “the HoJo’s in Dorchester”), Martorano says, “in the heart.” There is no change in his expression or vocal inflection.

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(Photo: Peter Van Metre)
Story Highlights

Driveways and parking lots are often sealed with coal-based products
Studies suggest these products contain hazardous chemicals
More local governments are banning them, but industry says they’re safe

Could your driveway be making you sick?

Mounting research suggests it could. It’s prompting more cities, states and businesses to ban a common pavement sealant linked to higher cancer risks and contaminated soil.

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The faded images were found in Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau and are believed part of the most widespread collection of such art ever found in the U.S.

Some of the pictures were drawn using shallow lines made with a pointed tool and these show events such as hunting, or depict animals that the Native Americans would have lived with and eaten.

Other images are more elaborate, depicting mythical creatures and representing the Native’s spiritual beliefs.

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Christopher Jobson describes Anthony Howe’s sculptures as “hypnotic.” That’s just the right word to describe his metal forms that change shape in the wind. This one, entitled “About Face,” is my favorite. With 100 spinning copper panels, this face is constantly changing its expression.

You can view many more sculptures with videos at the link–and I suggest that you do so.

HERE/a>.

“I’m very concerned that we have government contractors doing what are essentially governmental jobs,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last week. “Maybe we should bring some of that more in-house,” the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, mused.

It’s a little late for that. Seventy percent of America’s intelligence budget now flows to private contractors. Going by this year’s estimated budget of about $80 billion, that makes private intelligence a $56 billion-a-year industry.

For decades, the N.S.A. relied on its own computer scientists, cryptographers and mathematicians to tap, decode and analyze communications as they traversed phone lines and satellite networks. By the 1990s, however, advances in personal computing, the growth of the Internet, the advent of cellphones and the shift in telecommunications to high-speed fiber-optic lines has made it difficult for the N.S.A. to keep up.

As the commercial world began to surpass the N.S.A., some in the agency began looking to the private sector for solutions. In 2000, thanks in part to an advisory committee led by James R. Clapper Jr., now the director of national intelligence, the N.S.A. decided to shift away from its in-house development strategy and outsource on a huge scale. The N.S.A.’s headquarters began filling with contractors working for Booz Allen and hundreds of other companies.

In 2001 the N.S.A. even outsourced its I.T. infrastructure “to push more of our work to contractors,” as its director testified last week. Mr. Snowden was a systems administrator on the program. That’s how he knew about the highly classified programs he leaked.

But apart from the risk of leaking classified information, what’s wrong with the N.S.A. or any other agency’s outsourcing critical programs to the private sector? Are contractors really “not the issue,” as a former N.S.A. director, Michael V. Hayden, insisted on Sunday on NBC?

And if the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs are unlawful or unconstitutional, as many Americans (including myself) believe, does it make any difference whether the work is done by a government analyst or a private contractor?

It does. Here’s why. First, it is dangerous to have half a million people — the number of private contractors holding top-secret security clearances — peering into the lives of their fellow citizens. Contractors aren’t part of the chain of command at the N.S.A. or other agencies and aren’t subject to Congressional oversight. Officially, their only loyalty is to their company and its shareholders.

Second, with billions of dollars of government money sloshing around, and with contractors providing advice on how to spend it, conflicts of interest and corruption are inevitable. Contractors simply shouldn’t be in the business of managing large projects and providing procurement advice to intelligence agencies. Thomas A. Drake, one of the N.S.A. whistle-blowers who exposed the waste and fraud in the N.S.A.’s Trailblazer program — Mr. Hayden’s disastrous attempt to privatize the N.S.A.’s analysis of intercepted signals intelligence — estimates that the project cost taxpayers as much as $7 billion (it was canceled in 2006). Yet the contracts kept rolling in, and Mr. Hayden went on to head the C.I.A.

Third, we’ve allowed contractors to conduct our most secret and sensitive operations with virtually no oversight. This is true not only at the N.S.A. Contractors now work alongside the C.I.A. in covert operations (two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were C.I.A. contractors; we still don’t know who their employer was).

They also analyze imagery and intercepted intelligence to track and kill suspected terrorists for the United States Special Operations Command. In April, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General found that nine of 28 tasks outlined in a $231 million contract the command awarded “may have included inherently governmental duties.” In other words, contractors were involved in secret and highly sensitive operations that by law are reserved for government operatives. After Blackwater’s sordid history in Iraq, we don’t need more unaccountable actors fighting terrorism for profit.

Finally, there’s the revolving door — or what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “undue influence.” With few regulations and no questions being asked on Capitol Hill, hundreds of former top N.S.A. and C.I.A. officials have migrated from government to the private sector and back again. The poster boy is Michael McConnell, who served as N.S.A. director during Bill Clinton’s first term, then went to Booz Allen for a 10-year stint, became director of national intelligence for George W. Bush from 2007 to 2009, and is back at Booz Allen today.

We have no way of knowing how people like Mr. McConnell formed their business relationships, and what agreements or compromises they might have made to get their private-sector jobs (and vice versa). They may be honorable men, but as recent history has shown us, there’s no reason to take them at their word. And the current one-year ban on lobbying for former officials does little to prevent conflicts of interest.

Congress must act now to re-establish a government-run intelligence service operating with proper oversight. The first step is to appoint an independent review board — with no contractors on it — to decide where the line for government work should be drawn. The best response to the Snowden affair is to reduce the size of our private intelligence army and make contract spying a thing of the past. Our democracy depends on it.

Tim Shorrock is the author of “Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.”

Street art, Paris

In some ways, taxidermy can be viewed as a precursor to photography — a static, visual representation of life. And while the process itself is fascinating as a morbid half-resurrection, a bridge between the living and the dead, it’s the necromancers themselves who are the subject of photographer Mike McGregor’s series Preserve.

“There is a intimate relationship between taxidermists and their mounts that I wanted to express,” says McGregor, who made the portraits at businesses in the Northeastern states close to his home.

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