A 60-Year Project to Build a Dome Using Living
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Notes from Zuccotti Park. 3 Now Starting: A 60-Year Project To Build A Dome Using Living Trees 7 Brain Parasite Directly Alters Brain Chemistry 8 CROWDS R US 10 Tropical Forests Fertilized by Nitrogen Air Pollution, Scientists Find 13 The Rise of the Megacity 15 Hi-Tech Scans Catch Prehistoric Mite Hitching Ride On Spider 18 The Kyoto Accords — and Hope — Are Expiring 20 Ancient DNA Provides New Insights Into Cave Paintings of Horses 22 7 Steps For Creating Disruptive New Retail Experiences 25 Sea Life 'Must Swim Faster to Survive' to Survive Climate Change 28 Are Doctors Really to Blame for the Overdose Epidemic? 30 Castles in the Desert: Satellites Reveal Lost Cities of Libya 32 From Dream Into Nightmare 34 New Role for 'Hormone of Love' Oxytocin in Brain: Development of Brain-Body Interface 36 Debunking the Myth of the 'Freshman 15' 38 Easily 'Re-Programmable Cells' Could Be Key in Creation of New Life Forms 40 What‘s More Expensive, Prison Or Princeton? 42 NASA Develops Super-Black Material, Absorbs Light Across Multiple Wavelength Bands 46 Is There a City on Pluto? Before You Answer, Consider: We've Never Looked. 47 Half-Billion-Year-Old Predator Tracked: Multi-Legged Creature Ruled the Seas 49 Wanted: Worldly Philosophers 51 Ancient Lunar Dynamo May Explain Magnetized Moon Rocks 53 How Should We Pay Teachers? 55 Do Plants Perform Best With Family or Strangers? Researchers Consider Social Interactions 57 A Long, Strange "Trip to the Moon" 59 Ocean Could Have Contained Enough Methane to Cause Drastic Climate Change 62 A Brief History of Time Travel Literature 65 Using Light, Researchers Convert 2-D Patterns Into 3-D Objects 66 Can Silicon Valley and Detroit Reinvent the Car Business? 68 'Fishy Lawnmowers' Help Save Pacific Corals 70 Human histories are noble undertakings, but too often the writer gets in the way. 72 Greenhouse Gas Index Continues to Climb 75 Is High College Tuition Defensible? 77 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Physicists Chip Away at Mystery of Antimatter Imbalance 79 China Tries to Add Cultural Clout to Economic Muscle 81 New Method for Visualizing Mechanical Forces On Cell Surface 84 The Difference Between American and British Humour 86 Sea Change Can Forecast South American Wildfires 88 Consciousness: The Black Hole of Neuroscience 90 Hubble Uncovers Tiny Galaxies Bursting With Starbirth in Early Universe 92 Why Second Life Failed 95 No Need to Shrink Guts to Have a Larger Brain 98 Peter Campbell 100 Can Fetus Sense Mother's Psychological State? Study Suggests Yes 104 Who said Gaddafi had to go? 106 Weird World of Water Gets a Little Weirder 122 Grey Panic 124 Giant Planet Ejected from the Solar System? 131 What might they want? 133 Nano Car Has Molecular 4-Wheel Drive: Smallest Electric Car in the World 137 My Egyptian Cousin 139 Obese Monkeys Lose Weight On Drug That Attacks Blood Supply of Fat Cells 142 Big Bang Theory fuels physics boom 145 America and Libya 147 Value of degrees to be revealed for first time 148 Biologists Slow the Aging Process in Fruit Flies: Study Has Implications for Humans 150 Sympathy, Not Surrender 153 Fresh warning over A-level grade inflation 155 Operation Graduation 157 China as Paper Republic 159 Composition No.1: The First Book in a Box, Redux 161 The Subconscious Shelf 163 Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life 166 Boom and bust shapes Saturn's rings 178 Ancient Stars Shed Light On the Prehistory of the Milky Way 180 Aliens don't need a moon like ours 183 Ionized Plasmas as Cheap Sterilizers for Developing World 185 Tough astronaut bugs to blast off for Martian moon 188 New Computer Chip Models How Neurons Communicate With Each Other at Synapses 190 Is it time to let some species go extinct? 193 The Strange Rubbing Boulders of the Atacama 194 Artificial intelligence joins the fossil hunt 196 Born to Roar: Lions' and Tigers' Fearsome Roars Are Due to Their Unusual Vocal Cords 198 2 Infoteca‟s E-Journal No. 180 December 2011 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila First Person Pre-Occupy Notes from Zuccotti Park. By Aaron Lake Smith Fall is a season for insomnia. The temperate weather and the knowledge that Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming triggers a kind of physiological alarm, a manic desire to live the year-end. At 3:30 in the morning, after hours spent tossing and turning, I abruptly stood up and put on pants and a shirt. A magnetic tug called me toward the window. Yellow squares of light glowed from high-rise public housing in the distance; the moon illuminated the low-lying cloud cover. For the first time since 9/11, New York felt restless, pregnant, as if something unexpected could still happen, as if at this late date we could still find new ways to live in the metropolis. I threw on my shoes and stood wavering, about to leave my bedroom, but not sure of where to go. A bar? Grand Central? Maybe a friend's place? But before a decision could be rationally made, my feet took over, knowing where they wanted to go. I locked my Brooklyn tenement deadbolt, went outside, and descended into the subway toward Zuccotti Park. The G train platform is always empty at that time of night, desolate like a Bergman film. I sat on a worn-out bench. Waiting for the train, a song I haven‘t thought about for a very long time came out of nowhere. A song called ―Sleepwalkers,‖ on the final full-length by the seminal North Carolina hardcore band Zegota. Named for the clandestine resistance movement to the German occupation of Poland, Zegota was a kind of magnet that young activists and radicals of the early-to-mid 2000s gathered around — the spiritual force to periodically rejuvenate the political will. The band toured the world and put out beautiful handcrafted records on the Crimethinc label, the largest publisher of anarchist propaganda at the time. They played conferences, collectives, houses, and anti-globalization gatherings for about a decade before announcing a hiatus in the mid-2000s. What was billed as their last show was held in the linoleum-floored room of a church somewhere deep in Washington, D.C. after the National Conference of Organized Resistance (NCOR). The show turned out to be cathartic for those in attendance, the kids who were too young for Seattle who would later be too old for Occupy. The last song they played, a loud, exultant cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young‘s ―Ohio,‖ left 3 Infoteca‟s E-Journal No. 180 December 2011 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila most of the audience in tears, Neil Young‘s lyrics retrofitted to suit the schizoid Bush years: Tin soldiers and Bush is coming / we‟re finally on our own. I heard that, after going on hiatus, the members each went on to do interesting things. The Nordic-looking lead singer became a farmer. The bassist moved to Amsterdam. The petite, ever-boyish guitarist (who always seemed like the quiet ringleader of the band) relocated to Stockholm to raise his son. In short, they each continued the struggle on their own terms. Quiet little ―Sleepwalkers‖ continued to haunt me. The keyboard-driven lullaby seemed like a premonition, a glimpse of what-will-come of the kind you get when reading Dostoevsky and can smell the inchoate class rage that would, 40 years later, boil over into revolution. The lyrics of the song came back to me all at once: I had a dream I walked the city in my sleep and that I found my way home at last and nothing could lead me there but the things that I believed and in the end it was all I needed to find my way back home • The night before, I had attended the occupation of Times Square with a friend, a fellow veteran of the post- Seattle anti-globalization movement. Those were the acronym years of the FTAA, the GATT, the WTO, and the G20; also, the black mask, the affinity group, the pepper spray compound, and the class-action lawsuit. Since then, time had done its work. By tiny imperceptible degrees, we had transitioned from crusty, black- clad youth into reasonable Harper‟s-reading adults. But the experience with the movement informed our view of Occupy. It was disorienting to look out on all the angry teenagers and college students, drunk on their youth power and protesting the first time, none of them realizing that they were part of a lineage that stretched back to the beginning of time, each generation isolated and alone, getting older at their own speed; that they were just the latest model of youth that would soon be obsolete. Afterward, hearing that a second occupation would be opening up, we ventured down to Washington Square Park. We entered the park and made our way into a General Assembly that was taking place in the drained- out basin of the central fountain. The facilitators of the General Assembly were all crowded up on an elevated stone circle at the fountain‘s center, like a hype crew at a hip-hop club. Hundreds of people fanned out in circles around them, listening and repeating their statements. The lit-up Washington Square arch framed the General Assembly meeting like a halo. There, late one night in 1917, Marcel Duchamp and a gang of friends had broken into the Arch and climbed to the top. They released red balloons, popped bottles of champagne, and declared Greenwich Village a ―free and independent Republic." Aesthetically, there was something a little too perfect about this next wave of 21st-century activists.