Femininity, Salvaged 3 Unsolved Mysteries of Matisse the Austere 6 Suspected, Pursued. Innocent? 9 Immune therapy Alzheimer's hope 11 Potent cancer drug hopes raised 13 Why raindrops come in many sizes 15 Making Home a Safer Place, Affordably 17 Harry Potter and the Hallowed Halls 19 'Squeeze' Against the Machine 21 Ponderous Polluters Let A Little Light Shine In 24 The Potential Militant Extremist Inside Each of Us 26 Salting it Away (and Other Problems with Nuclear Waste) 29 'Mozart Effect' Real — For Some 31 What If It's Not Raining Men? 33 Can This Fishery Be Saved? Yes! 36 Do you believe in miracles? 40 A pocket guide to prehistoric Spain 43 LCROSS Spacecraft Successfully Detects Life On The Blue Planet 45 Novice Parents Overlook Many Child-injury Risks 46 Research On Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia Yields Surprises 48 Scientists Devise Efficient Way Of Learning About Complex Corn Traits 50 1930s Home Goes Green 52 'Motion Picture' Of Past Warming Paves Way For Snapshots Of Future Climate Change 54 Newfound Chemistry Should Be Added To Atmospheric Models, Experts Say 57 Primate Archaeology Sheds Light On Human Origins 59 Earth's Most Prominent Rainfall Feature Creeping Northward 61 Gene Transcribing Machine Takes Halting, Backsliding Trip Along The DNA 63 No Daily Or Weekly Pattern To Earthquakes In Western U.S. 65 New Method Predicts Which Brain Tumors Will Respond To Drug 66 How To Manage Dental Erosion Caused By Everyday Beverages 68 Membrane Breaks Through Performance Barrier 69 People With Lots Of Working Memory Are Not Easily Distracted 71 Heat Shock Proteins Provide Protection Against Cataracts 73 Taking The Hard Work Out Of Software 75 Breast-Feeding Linked to Lower Cancer Risk 76 Stealing in Childhood Does Not a Criminal Make 77 Online Treatment May Help Insomniacs 79 People 'get happier as they age' 82 Equation 'to spot small placenta' 84 Freak wave 'hot spots' identified 86 'Radical rethink' needed on food 88 Brain radiotherapy affects mind 90 Drink blamed for oral cancer rise 92 Optimistic women 'live longer' 96 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila 'Crisis satellite' returns images 98 Young Philosophers 100 Voices Silenced, Faces Preserved 103 The Auto as Architect’s Inspiration 104 Saving Fuel But Melting Ice Faster 107 Surely Some Flora Out There Can Fuel My Car 109 New Leaps in Research on Injuries 113 Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World 115 The Earth Is Warming? Adjust the Thermostat 118 Scientist Tackles Ethical Questions of Space Travel 120 Cost of Decoding a Genome Is Lowered 123 Five-Second Touch Can Convey Specific Emotion, Study Finds 126 Beetroot juice 'boosts stamina' 128 Scientists find an itchiness cell 130 Men with angina 'at greater risk' 132 Martian methane mystery deepens 134 Cannibalism theory over bone find 136 Clever rooks repeat ancient fable 138 Stunning ‘AquaIris’ Water Purifier by Talia Radford 141 San Francisco Transforming Toxic Site into UN Global Warming Center 142 TREETOP OFFICE: Eat Your Heart Out, Cubicle Warrior 143 LEAF POWER: Artificial Glass Leaves Produce Energy via Transpiration 144 Is That Behavior Ethical? The Powerful Have a Different Perspective 145 Natural Man 147 Michael Jantzen’s Sun Rays Pavilion Leans Towards Sustainability 150 Dementia link to 'mid-life ills' 151 'Proof' malaria began in chimps 153 Scientists halt epilepsy in mice 155 Domestic dog origins challenged 157 'Feather-eating bugs' dull birds 159 Call for debate on killer robots 161 Fire risk 'super' ants discovered 164 Experts puzzled by spot on Venus 166 Protein 'key to premature births' 167 Images reveal 'lost' Roman city 169 Variations in Perception of Bitter Go Way Back 170 Mutation Tied to Need for Less Sleep Is Discovered 171 The Expense of Eating With Celiac Disease 173 Drug 'attacks cancer stem cells' 176 Many women 'not on safest pill' 178 Moderate drinking 'boosts bones' 180 Facial expressions 'not global' 182 Antarctic glacier 'thinning fast' 184 US probe captures Saturn equinox 186 World Record In Packing Puzzle Set In Tetrahedra Jam 187 How Pathogens Have Shaped Genes Involved In Our Immune System 190 Manganese Damages Immune Response In Marine Animals, Research Finds 191 Mars Orbiter Shows Angled View Of Martian Crater 192 Parents Can Help Stop The Obesity Epidemic, Says Psychologist 193 London's Earliest Timber Structure Found During Belmarsh Prison Dig 194 Baltic Sea: Rapid Changes In Winter Climate 196 How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous. 197 What Puzo Godfathered 40 Years Ago 200 2 Infoteca’s E-Journal No.78 August 2009 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Femininity, Salvaged By GINIA BELLAFANTE In the early 1970s Lillian Bassman, among the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century, made the decision to dispose of her career, quite literally. Artists do this all the time without the intent — giving themselves over to excess, retreating to ashrams — but Ms. Bassman’s approach was aggressive and determined. Disillusioned by the costuming of the late 1960s, she had had enough of fashion and expressed her disdain by destroying decades’ worth of negatives and placing others in a trash bag in the coal room of her Upper East Side carriage house. Her era of furtive eroticism was over, and there was no point in scrapbooking it. Years later Ms. Bassman, who is 92, relented and retrieved her discarded images, seeking creative ways to reprint them. Some of these pictures will be on view at a new show at KMR Arts in Washington Depot, Conn. (which begins Saturday and runs through Sept. 5), juxtaposed with an anatomically resonant series on sidewalk cracks that she produced in the ’70s. The exhibition serves as a preamble to a moment of renewed interest in Ms. Bassman’s career; this fall Abrams will publish a book of her work, “Lillian Bassman: Women,” which will accompany a show at the Staley-Wise Gallery. And in November the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg, Germany, will mount a retrospective of her photography, along with that of her husband, Paul Himmel, who died in February. Ms. Bassman took her most significant pictures from the late ’40s to the early ’60s; most were published in Harper’s Bazaar under the stewardship of the magazine’s influential art director Alexey Brodovitch and belong distinctly to the era of “Mad Men” New York. The clothes have a structured beauty; the gloves are mandatory; the necks are long. Elegant men with cigarettes between their fingers occasionally enter the frame, encountering women who appear utterly indifferent to their attention. The perversions of inequality are absent; what appears instead is the glamour of a protracted cultural moment in which 3 Infoteca’s E-Journal No.78 August 2009 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila women were free from any expectation of sexual pursuit. The power of Ms. Bassman’s photographs is the power of a woman who is never moved to make a call. At the same time that she was turning out editorial work Ms. Bassman was having a considerable impact on advertising, photographing lingerie for Warner’s and other purveyors in a manner that abandoned the pharmaceutical aesthetic that then prevailed in the industry’s marketing. (These pictures form a large part of the show at KMR.) In place of heavy-set women constraining themselves in what was essentially equipment, Ms. Bassman deployed immeasurably lithe models, conveying a world in which women seemed to linger in the pleasures of their own sensuality. In her eye the undergarment emerges as a wardrobe unto itself, as if anything else in a woman’s closet were simply an imposition. It is easy to see why Ms. Bassman would have found little appeal in the uniform of the sexual revolution, first the childlike clothes of Mod style and then the hippie’s caftans, which seemed intended to counter the mass libidinal energy that had been the whole point. Hers was a world of adult sexuality that wasn’t ranted about. And the new breed of models coming of age in the late ’60s and ’70s unnerved her as well. “I got sick of them,” she said recently in the living room in her house in the East 80s. “They were becoming superstars. They were not my kind of models. They were dictating rather than taking direction.” Ms. Bassman did not need a prepackaged sexual freedom movement; she’d lived her own version years earlier. Born in 1917, the child of Russian émigrés who moved from New Haven to Brooklyn to Greenwich Village, she was given ample rein over her romantic life at an early age. Ms. Bassman first met Mr. Himmel splashing about at Coney Island; she was 6, and he was 9. When she saw him again a several years later, she fell incurably in love, and after a brief resistance her father permitted her to live with her suitor when she was 15. The couple divided their week between her family’s apartment on 13th Street and his parents’ place two blocks away. They married when Ms. Bassman was 25, and were together until Mr. Himmel’s death in February at 94, their relationship having spanned 77 years. “He never bored me,” Ms. Bassman explained. As teenagers they spent every weekend at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Ms. Bassman was drawn to the attenuated limbs of El Greco. She skipped a good deal of school, reading whatever Mr. Himmel and his friends were picking up when he was at City College. “When I’d get up in class and talk about Aldous Huxley, the teachers were astounded,” she said.