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All Critics (156) | Top Critics (38) | Fresh (153) | Rotten (3)
Hawke and Delpy remain as charming as ever, and their combined goofiness is more endearing than annoying.
Love is messy here, life cannot be controlled, satisfaction is far from guaranteed. Romance is rocky at best. But romance still is.
Though "Before Midnight" is often uncomfortable to watch, it's never less than mesmerizing - and ultimately, a joy to walk with this prickly but fascinating couple again.
"Before Midnight" is heartbreaking, but not because of Jesse and Celine. It's the filmmakers' passions that seem to have cooled.
Before Midnight is fascinating to watch, and so long as Celine and Jesse are communicating, there's still hope.
How (Jesse and Celine) try to rekindle that flame is what drives Midnight, a film that feels so authentic it's like overhearing a conversation you're not sure you should be hearing.
The release of each sequel is becoming an event, so it's particularly great to see Before Midnight not only meeting expectations but raising the bar.
It's a brave, challenging and essential installment in what is one of modern cinema's finest trilogies.
The beauty of this film - like the two before - is its natural flow of conversation and ability to engage and transport us into the moment
Before Midnight is no romance. It's a horror movie.
Takes its traditional romantic tale into more insightful territories.
Hawk and Delpy know just how to get under your skin. Their onscreen alter egos fit like a glove, and witnessing their ageing, nagging, toying love is a true privilege.
What lifts Linklater's trilogy above your average dialogue-heavy indie is not just the intelligence of the conversation but its frankness and humor.
There's not a hint of melodrama or falsity in the Before series.
The 'Before' trilogy is a vacation for me. I am taken away, and it is never for long enough. I genuinely feel lucky to have these movies.
I'm not sure this is the end of Richard Linklater's 'Before' trilogy. It's perfection just as it is, but then again, Linklater has nine more years to work on the sequel.
Loving words mix with personal attacks, the magic moments with the unintended slights, as we witness the occasional desperation of imperfect people doing the best they can when life moves beyond meet-cute and courtship. That's authentic.
Linklater and his players bring an end to the fantasy and welcome the thrilling ups and bitter downs of reality to this love story.
Like the first two films, it reflects the real world in a way that seems almost preternatural. It's just that, here, the real world is a harsher, more disappointing place.
The duo, clearly so comfortable in their characters' skin, indulge in intelligent banter, sharp humour and emotional truths.
So much better written than contemporary novels, this film is a literary as well as cinematic achievement to cherish. For grown-ups.
As before, it's often very funny, with Jesse and Celine swapping Woody Allen-esque one-liners - nicely snarky, appealingly abrasive.
The acting, the dialogue and direction are superb.
None of the films is faultless in itself, but, tinted with complementary tones, the complete cycle comes as close to perfection as any trilogy in cinema history.
Marvelous. It's impossible to shake the feeling that we are merely eavesdropping on reality. Witty, wise, and -- most important of all -- truly romantic in ways that movies usually aren't.
It's been 18 years since Hawke, Delpy and Linklater introduced us to Jesse and Celine, and their story just gets richer, funnier and more punchy each time we see them. In 1995's Before Sunrise, they were idealistic 23-year-olds.
Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/before_midnight_2013/
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See Inside Nations raced to gain an advantage with new technology and better armaments
Submarine Gun: 75-millimeter gun made by the German arms manufacturer Krupp. Image: Scientific American
There are many tangled causes for World War I, fought from 1914 to 1918. Historians cite the alliance system, imperialism, nationalism, and the social shifts caused by modernity and industrialization. Rival nations raced to build more efficient and effective weapons and ways to control sea, sky and land. Countries also raced to develop the military systems to wield these weapons and industrial capacity to supply them. There is something of a chess game in watching the buildup of Germany?s zeppelin fleet in an attempt to gain an advantage over Britain?s battleship fleet, or seeing French aircraft industry as it was built up to gain an advantage over the German land war capability. Perhaps one reason that the public and governments were keen to go to war was a severe underestimation of the damage and casualties that massive numbers of these weapons could cause.
? View the Military Science from 1913 Slide Show
Scientific American observed this race keenly in 1913, even though the United States was not drawn into the war until 1917. The images, mostly of weapons, in this photo album show some of the mistaken assumptions about how a war would be fought. Battleships were a main focus of war at sea, a traditional path to victory for many countries. But torpedo attacks by submarines against supplies and raw materials carried by merchant shipping could wreck a country?s war capabilities just as surely as large-caliber shells could. The idea of enemy airships and airplanes suddenly appearing in the skies to rain deadly bombs were a huge factor in the minds of the civilian population and military planners. But the psychological terror of these attacks far outweighed their actual results.
From the archives of Scientific American of 1913, here are some snapshots of military technology. In 1914 the rivals would become opponents in a war that was called ?the Great War for Civilization.?
? View the Military Science from 1913 Slide Show
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/basic-science/~3/oJH7cuTA0IA/article.cfm
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July 14th, 2013
Online Betting in the UK has already exceeded ?2 billion and in an attempt to break into the world of online betting, Facebook has teamed up with bookmaker Paddy Power for in-play betting. This is major online gambling expansion from Facebook. The offer is ?restricted to the UK, where Sports Betting is all legal.
Facebook was under fire earlier for offering casino games with real money winnings. The recent deal with Paddy power which that was announced yesterday will enable Facebook to integrate ?Paddy Power in Play ? the sport betting platform, and make it availible to its users from the UK.
Sports Betting Right From your Facebook Account
?Paddy Power in Play ?will enable Facebook users to bet right from their Facebook accounts on a variety of sporting events while providing them the opportunity to engage with other players.
Both the Companies are excited about the prospects of this new sport betting product. According to?Peter O?Donovan, managing director of Paddy Power ????We are pleased to partner with Facebook on this pioneering work. ? ?,while the Facebook spokesman was quoted as saying ??Online betting is a very popular and a regulated phenomenon in the UK , we have carefully selected our provider and we have taken strict measures to prevent under 18 ?.
How Safe Will be the Under Age ?
Facebook has some 3 million UK based users that are aged in the range of 13 to 17 , which is an alarming sign for the campaign groups.
Both Facebook & Paddy Power have assured that ?strict measures are taken to make ?Paddy Power in Play ??totally inaccessible to users under 18. ?But critics are still skeptical and have raised concerns that under 18 can still access the product by providing ?wrong age information or using their parents credit cards.
A similar research in 2008 by the Gambling commission has found that almost 1 million children are suffering with gambling problems. A campaign group ?Stop Children Gambling ? has stated on its website that Street Bookmakers have the same age limit but they can at least identify the gamblers age with the face looks and unfortunately it is not the case on internet.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gambling-gazette/ZbqE/~3/karoNGRUl3s/
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(Medical Xpress)?Alcohol is responsible for more than one-in-twenty deaths of New Zealanders aged under 80, new University of Otago research suggests. Although most harm to young people's health from drinking is through injury, alcohol also contributes to chronic diseases, and breast cancer is the leading cause of death from alcohol in both M?ori and non-M?ori women overall.
A new assessment of the burden of ill health due to alcohol consumption in New Zealand, commissioned by the Alcohol Advisory Council, is published today (July 15) by the Health Promotion Agency. The report, 'Alcohol-attributable burden of disease and injury in New Zealand: 2004 and 2007' included 35 different groups of health conditions causally related to drinking, and found that approximately 800 deaths per year in people under 80 were attributable to alcohol.
Professor Jennie Connor and Robyn Kydd from the University's Department of Preventive and Social Medicine in Dunedin conducted the study in collaboration with the WHO Global Burden of Disease 2010 Risk Factors Collaborating Group, based in Toronto.
The report confirms the significant impact of heavy drinking and intoxication on health outcomes, with 43% of all alcohol deaths being due to injuries, and much of the burden of non-fatal conditions being due to alcohol use disorders.
Professor Connor says the report also highlights alcohol's important toxic and carcinogenic properties, and that for many chronic diseases there is no threshold for safe consumption. More than 30% of alcohol-attributable deaths were due to cancers, including breast and bowel cancer.
"This study demonstrates that alcohol consumption is one of the most important risk factors for avoidable mortality and disease in early and middle adulthood, and contributes substantially to loss of good health across the life course," she says.
More alcohol-related harm was seen in men than in women, and in M?ori than in non-M?ori. These differences were largely due to differences in alcohol consumption patterns.
"Alcohol has so many different impacts on health that summaries at a population level are needed for us to understand the magnitude of the issue as a whole and the importance of healthy alcohol policy.
"In addition to the wide range of physical health conditions included in this study, we need to remember that there are many effects of heavy drinking on communities that are not able to be reflected in studies such as this", says Professor Connor.
Health Promotion Agency (HPA) General Manager Policy, Research and Advice, Dr Andrew Hearn, says the report is a valuable addition to the evidence of the impact of alcohol on people's health and as a cause of injury across the population in New Zealand.
"Reports such as this can be used to inform preventive strategies and their priorities," he says.
Explore further: Unhealthy drinking widespread around the world, study shows
Source: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-07-breast-cancer-alcohol-attributable-death-zealand.html
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Thailand?s Chulalong University has come under fire for displaying a mural depicting Adolph Hitler as a superhero, along with Superman and Batman.
The mural, outside the University?s Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts building, has attracted a great deal of attention as passersby pose in front of the mural to take photographs, some of whom perform the Nazi salute.
?Hitler as a superhero? Is he an appropriate role model for Thailand's younger generation? a genocidal hate monger who mass murdered Jews and Gypsies and who considered people of color as racially inferior?? charged Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights group dedicated to exposing anti-Semitism and educating about the lessons of the Holocaust.
?The Simon Wiesenthal Center is outraged and disgusted by this public display at Thailand's leading school of higher education,? said Rabbi Cooper. ?This mural has been on display for days nearby the University's Faculty of History building. We are outraged by those who created this travesty, at the young person posing using the Nazi 'Seig Heil' salute and appalled and disgusted by the total silence of the University's elite for the apparent failure of anyone demanding its removal.?
Last winter, Rabbi Cooper brought the Wiesenthal Center's?Courage To Remember Holocaust exhibit, translated into Thai, to Bangkok's UN Hall where he joined 500 community activists, students and diplomats to stand in solidarity with 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Hitler's Nazi Third Reich.
?Perhaps it?s time that the University arranges for its faculty and students to view it as part of an anti-genocide curriculum,? Cooper concluded.
Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/169894
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Source: www.ft.com --- Sunday, July 14, 2013
Chinese navy ships sail through the waters that separate Japan and Russia for the first time, in the latest example of China?s growing military reach ...
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Posted: Sunday, July 14th 4:01?PM
... your calls at 201.939.4513 or submit your questions on twitter by following @Giants and using #GiantsChat! Thu., Jul. 25, 2013 10:00AM - 10:30AM EDT Listen to B ...
Source: http://sportspyder.com/teams/new-york-giants/articles/9562586
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Source: propertyofzack.com --- Friday, July 12, 2013
Mayday Parade recently performed an acoustic version and told the story of "When You See My Friends." Check it out below after the jump. ...
Source: http://propertyofzack.com/post/55318262069
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Source: www.nytimes.com --- Friday, July 12, 2013
Captaintreacherous, the pacer of the year in 2012, will try to keep his undefeated season rolling when he takes on nine rivals in the $635,750 Meadowlands Pace. ? ? ? ? ...
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Source: hk.ibtimes.com --- Thursday, July 11, 2013
Eight more cities in China, the world's biggest auto market, are likely to announce policies restricting new vehicle purchases, an official at the automakers association said, as Beijing tries to control air pollution. ...
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TAMPA ? The dead body decomposed for two weeks inside an 84-square-foot apartment.
He died inside his cramped motel room, police said. Officers found garbage and clothes strewn about. The air reeked. The tenant was 70, dead of natural causes.
No one had seen him for days. Then the landlord told someone to go find him. The rent was due.
The landlord was Tampa Port Authority Chairman William A. "Hoe" Brown, a GOP State Committeeman and prominent Republican fundraiser for candidates ranging from Pam Bondi to Mel Martinez.
That February 2009 incident, revealed in police records, shows that problems at Brown's properties in Seminole Heights go back much farther than the chairman has said they do.
A inquiry Monday by the Tampa Bay Times led Brown to apologize and remove five squalid mobile homes he illegally rented behind his property management office at 106 W Stanley St.
Earlier this week, Brown said he put them there late last year. When told police records show a trailer on the property before last year, he acknowledged Thursday night that one unit had been there since 2006.
Among the records proving tenants lived behind Brown's office well before last year was a 2006 domestic violence case in which a man punched his girlfriend, police said, in "the trailer ... located behind the house" at 106 W Stanley St.
Story here
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tampabaycom/blogs/buzz/~3/bWOj7ulk8H4/2131082
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The dog days of summer are upon us, which means that stories about the national epidemic of teacher-student sex stories have slowed to a trickle (though, thanks to Laura Whitehurst, they certainly haven?t petered out completely).
While The Daily Caller can offer far fewer stories about teacher-student hanky-panky, there?s no time like the present to commemorate the academic year that was.
Without further ado, here are the most attractive teachers who allegedly got busy with their students ? or at least faced criminal proceedings for their endeavors ? in 2012-13.
Follow Eric on Twitter?and send education-related story tips to?erico@dailycaller.com.
Click an image below for larger version.
Read more stories from The Daily Caller
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This year's hottest teachers who allegedly got busy with their students [SLIDESHOW]
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hottest-teachers-allegedly-got-busy-students-slideshow-042016864.html
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Source: topics.nytimes.com --- Thursday, July 11, 2013
How a country that banned golf has become an unlikely incubator for the wunderkinds of the game. ...
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The Michigan Republican Party is coming to your neighborhood.
The state group opened the doors to 10 new regional offices across Michigan as part of the party?s new political strategy.
?At the Michigan Republican Party, we?re establishing stronger peer-to-peer, neighbor-to-neighbor relationships with voters,? Michigan Republican Party Chairman Bobby Schostak said in a prepared statement.
West Michigan locations are in Grand Rapids, Portage and Holland, which shares its space with the Ottawa County Republican Party?s offices at 513 E. Eighth St.
In addition to opening 10 new offices across the state, the party hired 10 regional field directors, four regional press secretaries and a statewide college campus coordinator.
?We?ve applied our successes from past elections and looked at where we can continuously improve and find even greater success, and developed an entirely new ground game,? Schostak said.
The field offices will be a base of operations for staff to get out into more communities and neighborhoods and meet with voters.
?
Source: http://www.hollandsentinel.com/news/x1806122183/Michigan-GOP-opens-new-regional-offices?rssfeed=true
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By Diane Duke Williams - Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis want to know whether they can reduce the rate of unintended pregnancies at community clinics by providing contraceptive counseling that emphasizes the benefits of long-acting birth control, like IUDs and implants, and by making these methods available to women at sharply reduced costs or free of charge.
About half of all pregnancies in the United States ? some 3 million a year ? are unplanned. While intrauterine devices (IUDs) and under-the-skin implants are most effective at preventing pregnancies, many U.S. women still choose birth control pills and condoms, which have higher failure rates.
Some also are deterred by the high up-front costs of IUDs and implants, which are not always covered by insurance.
Madden
?We suspect that contraceptive counseling alone is not enough to increase the use of long-acting birth control,? said Tessa Madden, MD, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and principal investigator of the study. ?Factors such as cost and lack of information from health-care providers may make it difficult for women to get IUDs and implants, and we want to see what happens when we remove those barriers in community clinics.?
The new initiative is a follow-up to a study reported in 2012 in the New England Journal of Medicine by the same team of researchers. That study, known as the CHOICE project, found a clear benefit to providing contraceptive counseling and free birth control to more than 9,000 St. Louis-area women. Those who opted for birth control pills or other short-term methods like the patch or vaginal ring were 20 times more likely to have an unintended pregnancy than women who used IUDs or implants.
The researchers want to see whether they can match results from the CHOICE project at two community clinics in St. Louis and two in Memphis, Tenn.
The researchers will enroll 800 women who will be divided into two groups. Half will receive contraceptive counseling, including information about all forms of birth control and a visit with a health-care provider. And the other half will receive the same counseling and a visit with a health-care provider who has received special training in IUDS and implants. Participants in this group also will receive help paying for IUDs or implants if they do not have health insurance or their insurance does not cover these methods.
Women in both groups will complete surveys after visits with their health-care providers and later at six weeks, six months and 12 months. Researchers then will compare how many women had unplanned pregnancies. They also will evaluate which birth-control method women chose and how satisfied they were with their birth control and counseling.
?If this research leads to changes in how we deliver contraceptive services, we could reduce the rate of unintended pregnancy in the United States,? Madden said. ?Fewer unintended pregnancies will lead to better health for women and their families.?
Madden and her colleagues? research will be funded by a federal Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) award. All awards in this most recent round of funding were approved pending completion of a business and programmatic review by PCORI staff and issuance of a formal award contract.
PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010. Its mission is to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed health care decisions. PCORI is committed to continuously seeking input from a broad range of stakeholders to guide its work. More information is available at www.pcori.org.
Washington University School of Medicine?s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children?s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children?s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.
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Planning a summer road trip? This interactive map by PeekAnalytics charts millions of tweets in over 12,000 cities to find the 20 most popular burger chains, and surfaces some surprising trends. While the big boys like McDonald's and Burger King are the most chatted about, there are many more cult favorites that punch far above their weight in the social media space. For example:
Shake Shack, the semi-haute burger and malted joint, has fans in Nebraska, 1,300 miles from the nearest location. In-N-Out Burger has just as many vocal devotees on the East Coast as on the West, despite having zero locations east of the Mississippi. And Sonic has a posse--a Texas posse.
These data points, like the cronut craze and the wildly successful Noodles & Company IPO, are part of a trend. We seem to be living through a moment of convergence between food and social media where no meal is too mundane to be hashtagged and shared online.
[Images via PeekAnalytics]
Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/3014089/fast-feed/twitter-maps-americas-favorite-burgers
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On Sunday, two bombs targeting military troops killed 21 and wounded dozens in northwestern Pakistan. The attacks came as British Prime Minister David Cameron was visiting Pakistan to pledge aid for fighting terrorism?
Pakistani security officials and rescue workers examine the site of car bombing on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan, Sunday. A car bomb exploded as a convoy of paramilitary troops passed through the outskirts of the northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing more than a dozen people and wounding scores of others, police said.
Mohammad Sajjad/AP
EnlargeTwo bombings killed 21 people in northwestern Pakistan on Sunday, just as Britain's prime minister was in the capital pledging to help to fight extremism.
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In the deadlier of the two attacks, a car bomb exploded as a convoy of paramilitary troops passed through the outskirts of the northwest city of Peshawar, killing at least 17 people and wounding dozens of others, police said.
Most of the dead and wounded were civilians, although nine paramilitary Frontier Corps troops were hurt, said police official Shafiullah Khan. The blast struck one Frontier Corps vehicle, but the other passed by safely.
The explosion damaged many other vehicles and shops in the area, according to local TV video. Frontier Corps vehicles rushed to the scene, and a police officer collected evidence from the crater caused by the bomb.
Later in the day, a roadside bomb struck an army convoy and killed four soldiers in the North Waziristan tribal area, the main sanctuary for Taliban and al-Qaida militants in the country, said intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters. The blast also wounded 20 soldiers, the officials said.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but suspicion will likely fall on the Pakistani Taliban. The group has been waging a bloody insurgency against the government for years that has killed thousands of security personnel and civilians. The militants have proven resilient despite a series of army offensives against them in the tribal region.
British Prime Minister David Cameron told his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, that Britain would do all it can to help fight extremism, a battle that he said requires both a tough security response and measures to fight poverty and promote education.
Britain pledged to provide Pakistan more equipment to battle the kind of improvised explosives that killed the soldiers in North Waziristan and to share expertise in protecting sporting events. Britain hosted the Olympic Games last summer.
"The enemies of Pakistan are enemies of Britain, and we will stand together and conduct this fight against extremism and terrorism together," Cameron said at a joint news conference with Sharif in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
Cameron arrived in Pakistan following a visit to neighboring Afghanistan. He welcomed Pakistan's stated commitment to help promote a peace deal with the Afghan Taliban.
Pakistan is seen as key to any deal because of its historical links with the insurgents. Pakistan pushed the Taliban to carry through with its recent step to set up a political office in the Gulf country of Qatar, although acrimony between the insurgents and the Afghan government has hampered the negotiation process.
"I assure Prime Minister Cameron of our firm resolve to promote the shared objective of a peaceful and stable Afghanistan to which the 3 million Afghan refugees currently living in Pakistan can return with honor and dignity," Sharif said at the news conference.
Sharif has also pushed for peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban, although a series of attacks by the group since he took office in early June have led many to question that approach.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for shooting to death 10 foreign mountain climbers and a Pakistani guide in northern Pakistan a week ago, an attack the group said was retaliation for a U.S. drone strike that killed the Taliban's deputy leader.
The Taliban withdrew their offer of peace talks with the Pakistani government following the drone strike. The government continues to stick by its stance that negotiating with the group is the only way to bring peace.
Critics of talks point out that past peace deals eventually collapsed, offering the militants a chance to regroup. They also note that the Taliban reject Pakistan's democratic government and believe Islamic law should be applied throughout the country.
Associated Press writers Sebastian Abbot and Zarar Khan in Islamabad and Rasool Dawar contributed to this report.
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CNC mills are usually the antithesis of portable. Sometimes they're as big as trucks. But ShopBot Tools, a North Carolina-based CNC Tool manufacturer, is trying to change that with the Handibot, a CNC Mill you can carry around.
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BEIJING (AP) ? A Chinese businessman behind the plan to build a waterway across Nicaragua to rival the Panama Canal says his ambitions are well-researched and backed by an experienced team despite skepticism over whether the 40-year-old can deliver the $40 billion project.
Wang Jing, chairman and owner of Hong Kong-based HKND Group, told a news conference Tuesday in Beijing: "We don't want it to become an international joke, and we don't want it to turn into an example of Chinese investment failures."
HKDN won approval from Nicaragua to study, and possibly build and run a shipping channel across the central American country.
Wang says his consultants on the project have rich experience and include U.S.-based McKinsey & Co and China's biggest construction firm, the state-owned China Railway Construction Corp.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-businessman-assures-nicaragua-canal-success-085331031.html
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June 24, 2013 ? Researchers say they now know what allows some Western corn rootworms to survive crop rotation, a farming practice that once effectively managed the rootworm pests. The answer to the decades-long mystery of rotation-resistant rootworms lies -- in large part -- in the rootworm gut, the team reports.
The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Differences in the relative abundance of certain bacterial species in the rootworm gut help the adult rootworm beetles feed on soybean leaves and tolerate the plant's defenses a little better, the researchers report. This boost in digestive finesse allows rotation-resistant beetles to survive long enough to lay their eggs in soybean fields. Their larvae emerge the following spring and feast on the roots of newly planted corn.
"These insects, they have only one generation per year," said University of Illinois entomology department senior scientist Manfredo Seufferheld, who led the study. "And yet within a period of about 20 years in Illinois they became resistant to crop rotation. What allowed this insect to adapt so fast? These bacteria, perhaps."
Controlling rootworms is an expensive concern faced by all Midwest corn growers, said study co-author Joseph Spencer, an insect behaviorist at the Illinois Natural History Survey (part of the Prairie Research Institute at the U. of I.). Yield losses, the use of insecticides and corn hybrids engineered to express rootworm-killing toxins in their tissues cost U.S. growers at least $1 billion a year.
In a 2012 study, Seufferheld, Spencer and their colleagues reported that rotation-resistant rootworm beetles were better able than their nonresistant counterparts to tolerate the defensive chemicals produced in soybeans leaves. This allowed the beetles to feed more and survive longer on soybean plants. The researchers found that levels of key digestive enzymes differed significantly between the rotation-resistant and nonresistant rootworms, but differences in the expression of the genes encoding these enzymes did not fully explain the rotation-resistant beetles' advantage. Seufferheld and his colleagues thought that microbes in the rootworms' guts might be helping them better tolerate life in a soybean field.
To test this hypothesis, graduate student Chia-Ching Chu analyzed the population of microbes living in the guts of rootworm beetles collected from seven sites across the Midwest. Some of these sites (including Piper City, Ill.) are hot spots of rotation-resistance and others (in Nebraska and northwest Missouri, for example) lack evidence of rotation-resistant rootworms.
Chu found significant and consistent differences in the relative abundance of various types of bacteria in the guts of rotation-resistant and nonresistant rootworms (see graphic). These differences corresponded to differing activity levels of digestive enzymes in their guts and to their ability to tolerate soybean plant defenses.
The researchers found other parallels between the composition of gut microbes and the life history of the rootworms. The beetles' gut microbial structure corresponded to the insects' level of activity (rotation-resistant rootworms are usually more active), and also paralleled -- in a graduated fashion -- the plant diversity of the landscapes they inhabited. (Rotation-resistant rootworms are most abundant in regions where rotated corn and soybean fields are the dominant components of the agricultural landscape.)
To determine whether the microbes were in fact giving the rotation-resistant beetles an advantage, the researchers dosed the beetles with antibiotics. Low-level exposure to antibiotics had no effect on any of the beetles, but at higher doses the rotation-resistant beetles' survival time on soybean leaves fell to that of the nonresistant beetles. Antibiotics also lowered the activity of digestive enzymes in the rotation-resistant beetles' guts to that of their nonresistant counterparts.
The message of the research, Seufferheld said, is that the gut microbes are not just passive residents of the rootworm gut.
"They are very active players in the adaptation of the insect," he said. "The microbial community acts as a versatile multicellular organ."
"It's not just the rootworm that we have to worry about," Spencer said. "There's really this whole conspiracy between the rootworm and its co-conspirators in the gut that can respond fairly quickly, relatively speaking, to the assaults that they face."
The research team also included former postdoctoral researcher Jorge Zavala (now a professor at the University of Buenos Aires) and graduate student Matias Curzi.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/slJG9FABJYI/130624152603.htm
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June 25, 2013 ? Babies as young as two months know when they are about to be picked up and change their body posture in preparation, according to new research.
Professor Vasu Reddy, of the University of Portsmouth, has found most babies aged two to four months understand they are about to be picked up the moment their mothers come towards them with their arms outstretched and that they make their bodies go still and stiff in anticipation, making it easier to be picked up.
This is the first study to examine how babies adjust their posture in anticipation to offset the potentially destabilising effect of being picked up.
Professor Reddy said: "We didn't expect such clear results. From these findings we predict this awareness is likely to be found even earlier, possibly not long after birth.
"The results suggest we need to re-think the way we study infant development because infants seem to be able to understand other people's actions directed towards them earlier than previously thought. Experiments where infants are observers of others' actions may not give us a full picture of their anticipatory abilities."
The findings could also be used as an early indicator of some developmental problems, including autism. It was reported by researchers in 1943 that children with autism don't appear to make preparatory adjustments to being picked up.
The researchers, who included Dr Gabriela Markova of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and Dr Sebastian Wallot of the University of Aarhus, did two studies, one on 18 babies aged three months, and a second on ten babies aged two to four months old.
In both, babies were placed on a pressure mat which measured their postural adjustments during three phases: As their mothers chatted with their babies; as the mothers opened their arms to pick them up; and as the babies were picked up.
The results revealed infants as young as two months made specific adjustments when their mother stretched her arms out to pick them up. These included extending and stiffening the legs which increases body rigidity and stability, and widening or raising their arms, which helps to create a space for the mother to hold the infant's chest.
Between two and three months of age the babies' gaze moved from mostly looking at their mother's face to often looking at her hands as she stretched her arms out towards them.
The results reveal two important findings -- first, that from as early as two months babies make specific postural adjustments to make it easier to pick them up even before their mother touches them. And second, it appears that babies learn to increase the smoothness and coordination of their movements between two and four months, rather than develop new types of adjustment.
"In other words, they rapidly become more adept at making it easier for parents to pick them up," Professor Reddy said.
The mothers in the study were asked about their babies' physical responses before the tests and some reported their babies stiffened their legs or raised their arms in preparation for being picked up, but video footage watched frame by frame revealed physical adjustments happened to a greater degree and more subtly than mothers had noticed.
The researchers suggest more research now needs to be done to examine the extent to which infants discriminate between different kinds of actions directed at them, between familiar and unfamiliar actions, and how infant anticipation of these actions is influenced by the different maternal styles they each experience.
The research is published in the latest issue of the journal Plos One.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/0BD52rY3IaY/130625073554.htm
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Apple CEO Steve Jobs announces the debut of a new iPad on Jan. 27, 2010, in San Francisco. Photo by Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images
The man could not stand dirt. When he built his company?s first factory in Fremont, Calif., in 1984, he frequently got down on his hands and knees and looked for specks of dust on the floor as well as on all the equipment. For Steve Jobs, who was rolling out the Macintosh computer, these extreme measures were a necessity. ?If we didn?t have the discipline to keep that place spotless,? the Apple co-founder later recalled, ?then we weren?t going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.? This perfectionist also hated typos. As Pam Kerwin, the marketing director at Pixar during Jobs? hiatus from Apple, told me, ?He would carefully go over every document a million times and would pick up on punctuation errors such as misplaced commas.? And if anything wasn?t just right, Jobs could throw a fit. He was a difficult and argumentative boss who had trouble relating to others. But Jobs could focus intensely on exactly what he wanted?which was to design ?insanely great products??and he doggedly pursued this obsession until the day died. Hard work and intelligence can take you only so far. To be super successful like Jobs, you also need that X-factor, that maniacal overdrive?which often comes from being a tad mad.
For decades, scholars have made the case that mental illness can be an asset for writers and artists. In her landmark work Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Johns Hopkins psychologist Kay Jamison documented the ?fine madness? that gripped dozens of prominent novelists, poets, painters, and composers. As Lord Byron wrote of his fellow bards, ?We of the craft are all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.? For the author of Don Juan, as for many of the other artsy types profiled by Jamison, the disease in question is manic depression (or bipolar disorder), but depression is also common. Sylvia Plath?s signature works?The Bell Jar and Daddy?hinge on her suicidal despair. But while most Americans now acknowledge that many famous writers were unbalanced, few realize that the movers and shakers who have built this country?CEOs like Steve Jobs?also struggled with psychiatric maladies. This misunderstanding motived me to write my latest book, America?s Obsessives. After discussing Jobs and other contemporary figures in the prologue, I cover seven icons, including Thomas Jefferson, marketing genius Henry J Heinz, librarian Melvil Dewey, aviator Charles Lindbergh, beauty tycoon Est?e Lauder, and baseball slugger Ted Williams. (Like Jobs, the Red Sox Hall of Famer was a neatness nut who used to quiz the clubhouse attendant about why he used Tide on the team?s laundry.) By picking trailblazers who toiled in different arenas?from business and politics to information technology and sports?I wanted to show how a touch of madness is perhaps the secret to rising to the top in just about any line of work.
These men and women of action did have occasional bouts with depression, but they primarily suffered (or benefited) from another form of mental illness: obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The key features of this superachiever?s disease include a love of order, lists, rules, schedules, details, and cleanliness; people with OCPD are addicted to work, and they are control freaks who must do everything ?their way.? OCPD is not to be confused with its cousin, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Those with OCD are paralyzed by thoughts that just won?t go away, while people with OCPD are inspired by them. Steve Jobs couldn?t stop designing products?when hospitalized in the ICU, he once ripped off his oxygen mask, insisting that his doctors improve its design on the double. Est?e Lauder couldn?t stop touching other women?s faces. Perfect strangers would do, including those she might bump into on an elevator or a street corner. Without her beauty biz as an alibi, she might have been arrested for assault with deadly lipstick or face powder. These dynamos are hard-pressed to carve out time for anything else but their compulsions. Spouses and children typically endure long stretches of neglect. In the early 1950s, with two boys at home (today both are billionaire philanthropists), Lauder was riding the rails all over the country half the year, hawking her wares.
Obsessives hate nothing so much as taking a break to relax or reflect, and they typically do so only when felled by illness. ?Home. Not well. Busy about house. Always plenty to do. Cannot well be idle and believe will rather wear out than rust out,? wrote the 35-year-old Henry Heinz in his diary in 1880, four years after starting his eponymous processed food company. Heinz?s compulsions included measuring everything in sight?he never left home without his steel tape measure, which he used on many an unsuspecting doorway?and keeping track of meaningless numbers. When traveling across the Atlantic on a steamer in 1886, he jotted down in his diary its precise dimensions as well as the number of passengers who rode in steerage class. But this love of pseudo-quantification would produce in the early 1890s one of the sturdiest slogans in American advertising history??57 Varieties.? At the time, his company actually produced more than 60 products, but this number fetishist felt that there was something magical about sevens. By his early 50s, Heinz had already driven himself close to a complete nervous collapse on numerous occasions, and he reluctantly passed the reins of the company to his heirs. For the last two decades of his life, his children insisted that the overbearing paterfamilias chill out in a German sanatorium every summer, either at Dr. Carl von Dapper?s outfit in Bad Kissingen or Dr. Franz Dengler?s in Baden-Baden.
Melvil Dewey, whose childhood fixation with the number 10 led him to devise the Dewey Decimal Classification system, also was forced into an early retirement by his feverish pace. Dewey published the first edition of his search engine?the Google of its day, which is still in use in libraries in nearly 150 countries?in 1876, when he was only 24. For the next quarter of a century, Dewey took on a series of demanding jobs, typically juggling two or three at a time, as a librarian, businessman, and editor. He became the head of the world?s first library school, at Columbia University in 1884. According to a running joke, Dewey had a habit of dictating notes to two stenographers at the same time. In the end, it was his sexual compulsions that did him in. He was a serial sexual harasser and in 1905 was ostracized from the American Library Association, the organization that he had helped found a generation earlier, when four prominent female members of the guild filed complaints against him.
The aviator Charles Lindbergh also was an order aficionado whose oversized libido created a mess. This demanding dad saw his five children only a couple of months a year. He ruled over them and his wife, the best-selling author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, not with an iron fist but with ironclad lists. He kept track of each child?s infractions, which included such innocuous activities as gum-chewing. And he insisted that Anne track all her household expenditures, including every 15 cents spent for rubber bands, in copious account books. After Lindbergh turned 50, feeding his sex addiction became his full-time job; for the rest of his life, he was constantly flying around the world to visit his three German ?wives,? longtime mistresses with whom he fathered seven children, and to hook up with various other flings.
Remarkably, though these obsessive icons were all awash in neurotic tics, there has been no shortage of hagiographers who idealize their every move. Of Heinz?s penchant for collecting seemingly random numbers, one biographer has observed that he ?enthusiastically wrote down in his diary the statistics that one must know and record on such an occasion.? Another saw in Heinz?s factoid-finding a reason to compare him to ?a scientist such as Thomas Edison.? The author of the first biography of Dewey made the laughable claim that ?there was no psycho-neurosis in [him].? Even today, some still agree with what New York Gov. Al Smith said about Lindbergh soon after his legendary flight to Paris: ?He represents to us ? all that we wish?a young American at his best.? We Americans like our heroes and do not easily let them go. By pointing out the character flaws in our superachievers, I do not intend to diminish the greatness of their achievements. Instead I aim to show exactly how they managed to pull them off. And more often than not, it was with a touch of madness.
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Public release date: 24-Jun-2013
Share ] Contact: Liisa Hakola
liisa.hakola@vtt.fi
358-207-227-206
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed a fast and affordable testing device for detecting the presence of toxic blue-green algae in water. There is currently no fast, affordable and user-friendly way for consumers to check water quality themselves.
The blue-green algae testing kit developed by VTT and the University of Helsinki is like a miniature laboratory. The device is the size of a thermometer, and it contains antibodies that react to any toxic bacteria found in a water sample. The test reveals in minutes whether the water sample contains toxic blue-green algae.
Thanks to the new testing device, consumers will soon be able to check themselves whether water is safe for swimming. At the moment, information on blue-green algal blooms in water is mostly based on visual inspections. However, visual inspections alone are not capable of determining whether an algal bloom is toxic. Until now, the toxicity of algae has generally had to be tested in a laboratory. For example, only approximately half of blue-green algal blooms in lakes are toxic and harmful to humans and animals. The new testing kit provides a fast and reliable means of determining whether a blue-green algal bloom is toxic.
Blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, favour eutrophic and warm water. Cyanobacteria can be found in almost every terrestrial and aquatic habitat - oceans, fresh water, damp soil, temporarily moistened rocks in deserts, and even Antarctic rocks. Every year, they form extensive blooms e.g. in the Baltic Sea and other waters. The prevalence of algae each summer depends on factors such as weather and water nutrient levels. The first blue-green algal blooms begin to form when the surface of sea water reaches 15 degrees.
The testing kit for detecting toxic blue-green algae is in the process of being commercialised. The kits could be on sale within 23 years.
###
For more information, contact:
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
Liisa Hakola, Senior Scientist
Tel. +358 20 722 7206
liisa.hakola@vtt.fi
Further information on VTT:
Olli Ernvall
Senior Vice President, Communications
358 20 722 6747
olli.ernvall@vtt.fi
http://www.vtt.fi
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is a leading multitechnological applied research organization in Northern Europe. VTT creates new technology and science-based innovations in co-operation with domestic and foreign partners. VTT's turnover is EUR 290 million and its personnel totals 3,100.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 24-Jun-2013 Share ] Contact: Liisa Hakola
liisa.hakola@vtt.fi
358-207-227-206
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed a fast and affordable testing device for detecting the presence of toxic blue-green algae in water. There is currently no fast, affordable and user-friendly way for consumers to check water quality themselves.
The blue-green algae testing kit developed by VTT and the University of Helsinki is like a miniature laboratory. The device is the size of a thermometer, and it contains antibodies that react to any toxic bacteria found in a water sample. The test reveals in minutes whether the water sample contains toxic blue-green algae.
Thanks to the new testing device, consumers will soon be able to check themselves whether water is safe for swimming. At the moment, information on blue-green algal blooms in water is mostly based on visual inspections. However, visual inspections alone are not capable of determining whether an algal bloom is toxic. Until now, the toxicity of algae has generally had to be tested in a laboratory. For example, only approximately half of blue-green algal blooms in lakes are toxic and harmful to humans and animals. The new testing kit provides a fast and reliable means of determining whether a blue-green algal bloom is toxic.
Blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, favour eutrophic and warm water. Cyanobacteria can be found in almost every terrestrial and aquatic habitat - oceans, fresh water, damp soil, temporarily moistened rocks in deserts, and even Antarctic rocks. Every year, they form extensive blooms e.g. in the Baltic Sea and other waters. The prevalence of algae each summer depends on factors such as weather and water nutrient levels. The first blue-green algal blooms begin to form when the surface of sea water reaches 15 degrees.
The testing kit for detecting toxic blue-green algae is in the process of being commercialised. The kits could be on sale within 23 years.
###
For more information, contact:
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
Liisa Hakola, Senior Scientist
Tel. +358 20 722 7206
liisa.hakola@vtt.fi
Further information on VTT:
Olli Ernvall
Senior Vice President, Communications
358 20 722 6747
olli.ernvall@vtt.fi
http://www.vtt.fi
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is a leading multitechnological applied research organization in Northern Europe. VTT creates new technology and science-based innovations in co-operation with domestic and foreign partners. VTT's turnover is EUR 290 million and its personnel totals 3,100.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/vtrc-ntd062413.php
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June 25, 2013 ? Moderate-intensity exercise reduces fat stored around the heart, in the liver and in the abdomen of people with type 2 diabetes mellitus, even in the absence of any changes in diet, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology.
Type 2 diabetes occurs when the body does not produce enough insulin, a hormone that regulates the movement of sugar into the cells, or when the cells resist the effects of insulin. The disease can lead to a wide range of complications, including damage to the eyes and kidneys and hardening of the arteries.
Exercise is recommended for people with diabetes, but its effects on different fat deposits in the body are unclear, according to the study's senior author, Hildo J. Lamb, M.D., Ph.D., from the Department of Radiology at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
"Based on previous studies, we noticed that different fat deposits in the body show a differential response to dietary or medical intervention," he said. "Metabolic and other effects of exercise are hard to investigate, because usually an exercise program is accompanied by changes in lifestyle and diet."
For the new study, Dr. Lamb and colleagues assessed the effects of exercise on organ-specific fat accumulation and cardiac function in type 2 diabetes patients, independent of any other lifestyle or dietary changes. The 12 patients, average age 46 years, underwent MRI examinations before and after six months of moderate-intensity exercise totaling between 3.5 and six hours per week and featuring two endurance and two resistance training sessions. The exercise cycle culminated with a 12-day trekking expedition.
MRI results showed that, although cardiac function was not affected, the exercise program led to a significant decrease in fat volume in the abdomen, liver and around the heart, all of which have been previously shown to be associated with increased cardiovascular risk.
"In the present study we observed that the second layer of fat around the heart, the peracardial fat, behaved similarly in response to exercise training as intra-abdominal, or visceral fat," Dr. Lamb said. "The fat content in the liver also decreased substantially after exercise."
Dr. Lamb noted that the exercise-induced fat reductions in the liver are of particular importance to people with type 2 diabetes, many of whom are overweight or obese.
"The liver plays a central role in regulating total body fat distribution," he said. "Therefore, reduction of liver fat content and visceral fat volume by physical exercise are very important to reverse the adverse effects of lipid accumulation elsewhere, such as the heart and arterial vessel wall."
The findings point to an important role for imaging in identifying appropriate treatment for patients with type 2 diabetes, which the World Health Organization projects to be the seventh leading cause of death worldwide by 2030.
"In the future, we hope to be able to use advanced imaging techniques to predict in individual patients which therapeutic strategy is most effective: diet, medication, exercise, surgery or certain combinations," Dr. Lamb said.
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BY:
On Tuesday, Dr. Michael Ciampi of Newton, Massachusetts appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss the effects of Affordable Care Act on his practice. He notes many doctors have stopped accepting health insurance, and have adopted a ?pay as you go? method.
The Weekly Standard?s Tony Mecia recently wrote on this growing trend in the age of Obamacare:
There?s little doubt that the new health care law is causing concern among doctors. And the frustration runs deeper than just occasional anecdotes, such as the Orlando urologist who posted a flier on his door in late March that read: ?If you voted for Obama .??.??. seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your health care begin right now, not in four years.? The doctor?s story was linked on the Drudge Report, he appeared on Fox News, and a Facebook page devoted to him has more than 3,000 fans.
While those stories are interesting, more troubling is a survey reported in March in the New England Journal of Medicine that found that 29 percent of the nearly 1,200 doctors interviewed said they would quit the profession or retire early if the health care reform bill passed. Add to that a reported shortage of doctors, retiring Baby Boomers, and 30 million new patients who formerly lacked insurance, and the result could be disastrous.
Source: http://freebeacon.com/obamacare-effect-doctors-switching-to-no-insurance-model/
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Andricia Hinckemann, Abel Jordaan, Emme-Lancia Faro and Phiwe Mathe at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa Photo by Sonia Small/Kaleidoscope Studios
BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa?Billyboy Ramahlele heard the riot before he saw it. It was a February evening in 1996, autumn in South Africa, when cooling breezes from the Cape of Good Hope push north and turn the hot days of the country?s agricultural heartland into sweet nights, when the city of Bloemfontein?s moonlit trees and cornfields rustle sultrily beneath a vast sky glittering with stars. The 32-year-old dormitory manager at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein was relaxing in front of a wildlife program on the TV with his door open.
Suddenly, he became aware of a new noise. Could it be the trees, rustling in a gust? No, it was heavier, more like trampling. Could it be his TV? He switched it off. The noise grew louder.
Ramahlele got up and poked his head out the door. There he saw the students of the dorm he managed, which housed about 100 black males, some of the first blacks to attend the historically white university since it had integrated four years earlier. And he immediately saw the source of the noise: His boys were stampeding out of the dorm entryway and running toward central campus. Some of them were singing militant songs from an earlier era, when blacks fought against apartheid rule, including one that went?Kill the Boer, a nickname for white Afrikaners. Many were holding sticks or cricket bats.
They said they wanted to confront the white boys on campus. The whites, they claimed, refused to treat them as they should be treated in South Africa?s new democracy, and they wanted to put an end to their insolence once and for all. More than one boy opened up his jacket to show Ramahlele a gun tucked inside.
Racing alongside the group, Ramahlele wasn?t truly worried until he rounded the corner and saw, under the starlight, a line of white boys at least as long as his line of black students, standing shoulder-to-shoulder. ?It looked like an army flank,? he remembered. The whites were also holding cricket bats, cocked on their shoulders like rifles. Unlike his students, they were eerily silent?until, all as one, they opened their mouths and began to sing. The song was Die Stem, the old apartheid-era national anthem.
Ramahlele?s heart sank. He felt as though he might cry. ?The history,? he explained, ?is if they?re singing that, somebody is going to die.?
I first set foot on the University of the Free State (UFS) campus in February of 2010 to study Afrikaans. On paper, the school was integrated: 70 percent of the student body was black. But 15 years after the end of apartheid?the infamous system of racial separation and black oppression that lasted from 1948 until the coming of democracy in 1994?it felt as though apartheid had never ended. The white and black students still seemed to operate in totally different worlds. There were classes in Afrikaans for the whites and classes in English for the blacks, and separate choirs and church services for both. I almost never saw a mixed-race group of students. And they didn?t live together?there were all-white dorms and all-black dorms.
UFS is in the heart of the Free State, the traditional center of Afrikaner power, settled in the mid-19th century by Dutch settlers who trekked inland in covered wagons from the Dutch East India Company?s colony at the Cape of Good Hope 600 miles southwest. They believed they had been sent to Africa by God to become a new people, the Afrikaners (?Africans? in Dutch), to tame the desert?like the Israelites in Canaan?and turn it into a garden. They plowed the region into a fertile grain belt, setting up a republic and naming a capital, pronounced ?BLOOM-fun-tayn,? meaning ?fountain of blossoms.? The city became a laboratory for the formation of Afrikaner identity. The Afrikaner National Party, the political party that designed apartheid, was established there in 1912. UFS, founded at the same time, was the first South African university to conduct classes in Afrikaans, the Dutch dialect the Afrikaners proudly formalized as part of their new Africa-based ethnicity.
I assumed that old-line attitudes demanding racial separation had never budged in this Afrikaner redoubt. But one day my Afrikaans teacher, Matilda, a warm, arty woman with flowing brown hair, told me there was a much more complicated and disturbing story behind the campus?s racial divide. ?Once, this place was the model of integration,? she lamented over coffee at the campus cafe. Leaning forward conspiratorially over her cup, she gave me a clue. ?Go to a dorm called Karee,? she said, ?and look at a set of photos hanging in the front hall. There, you?ll begin to understand what really happened.?
I went. Karee?named for a drought-resistant tree found in the South African desert?had been built in 1978, as apartheid rule was consolidating and Afrikaans-language universities were expanding. The photos my teacher had mentioned were class photographs. The first dozen or so showed only white boys arranged on the dorm stoop, mugging for the camera. Then, in 1992, a few blacks appeared. There was one looking proud in a mauve suit, and another in a yellow shirt, his hip popped out in a jaunty contrapposto, his lips stretched wide in an enigmatic smile. 1993, 1994, 1995: Every year there were more black students, intermingled with the whites.
And then, in 1997, one year after the riot Billyboy Ramahlele witnessed, something new appeared in the photo: two flags from the age of white supremacy in South Africa?one from the old Afrikaner republic and one from the apartheid state that followed it. They were jarring to see, held high by two white boys in the last row right over the head of a black boy in a wide-brimmed hat. Over the following years, the flags remained, but the black students in the photos disappeared. By 1999, the class photo was all white again, and it stayed that way until 2008, the last year for which there was a picture.
Those images became a consuming mystery for me. UFS hadn?t remained segregated after apartheid?s end?it had integrated and then resegregated later. I wanted to know why the white students raised those ancient flags, and why the black students had left Karee. I uncovered a tale of mutual exhilaration at racial integration giving way to suspicion, anger and even physical violence. It seemed to hold powerful implications well beyond South Africa, about the very nature of social change itself. In our post?civil rights struggle era, we tend to assume progress toward less prejudice and more social tolerance is inevitable?the only variable is speed.
But in Bloemfontein, social progress surged forward. Then it turned back.
Karee is one of about 20 dorms at UFS that house a few hundred students each. The large brick buildings are situated around the edges of the stately, tree-lined campus, like guardians of tradition, which is what they once were. They had legacy admission. If your mother or father had been in a certain dorm, you?d be in that one, too. In one dorm, freshmen wore striped coats. In another, everybody but the seniors walked in through the back door.
In the early 1990s, South Africa?s universities, all public institutions, were required to integrate as part of the country?s transition to multiracial democracy. Then-UFS President Francois Retief, who was tasked with incorporating black students into an all-white campus, worried about the dorms, he explained in the drawing room of his house in an old-age village on the edge of Bloemfontein. Retief seriously considered housing blacks separately from the whites. ?Our dorms were historically more like your fraternities,? he said. ?They had a lot of in-house culture. We called them?die huise [the houses] and their culture was?die tradisies?[the traditions].?
These traditions were arbitrary, but they distinguished one dorm from another and fostered a sense of group pride and belonging. Retief feared that his white students might be reluctant to let blacks partake in their long-standing dorm culture. In 1990, he polled the student body to ask their views. To his great surprise, 86 percent welcomed the idea of housing the new black students in the white dorms. So, starting in 1992, he did just that. And it was a ?roaring success,? he recounted. The first black students ?fit in exactly!?
Lebohang Mathibela was the boy in the mauve suit in the 1992 class photo on the wall in Karee and one of the first eight black students to live in a UFS dorm. Integration ?was beautiful,? he raved when we met at the main campus caf?. Dressed in a cheerful red T-shirt, Mathibela, now 42, hardly looked older than the 21-year-old in the photo, with cheeks as round as a cherub?s and a pealing laugh. Mathibela has had an accomplished career as a linguist, speaking all 11 official South African languages.
UFS wasn?t a natural choice for a black boy from Johannesburg, his hometown. There were two kinds of historically white colleges in South Africa: those that taught in English and those that taught in Afrikaans. (There were also historically black colleges, but they have generally been of lower academic quality.) The English universities cultivated a liberal, multicultural, anti-apartheid identity; they started admitting black students in the 1980s, when it was still technically illegal to do so. The Afrikaans colleges were reputed to be everything the ?English? ones weren?t: conservative, mono-cultural, isolationist. UFS was the most daunting because it was marooned in the grain belt. For most aspirational black college applicants in the 1990s, venturing to UFS would be like choosing Mordor to study.
But UFS was also known for nurturing Afrikaans as a poetic language. That?s what drew Mathibela. In elementary school, he had developed a deep affection for Afrikaans, which was a mandatory school subject under apartheid. It was a mystery to his friends and relatives. ?I decided to come to UFS because of my love of Afrikaans,? he said. ?My mom was so angry. She said to me, ?Other children are going to Wits [the University of the Witwatersrand],? ? Johannesburg?s premier English university. ?She says to me, ?You are not my son anymore!? ?
After he was placed into Karee, he proceeded to fall in love with UFS?s dorm culture. His favorite ritual was freshman initiation. He laughed as he described it to me, because he recognized that it seemed an unlikely memory to cherish. ?We queued blindfolded and half-naked,? he recounted. Seniors painted the freshmen?s bodies in red and yellow stripes to resemble the dorm mascot, a bee. Then they made each initiate drink tomato juice from a toilet bowl. ?It looked like vomit! It was horrible! Guys were really getting sick!? Finally, the freshmen were led to a ?huge drum filled with water, cow dung and grass.? A senior shouted at them to?dyk?dive! ?Then you get out. You?re dripping, smelling like cow dung.?
After the cow-dung dip, the black and white freshmen were instructed to go back to their rooms, shower, change into a jacket and tie, and head to the dorm courtyard, where smiling seniors were waiting to hand them a plate of barbecued meat and a beer. ?You are a member now,? they informed Mathibela. ?Color doesn?t count.?
?I felt proud,? he remembered.
Like Mathibela, most of the first black students to brave UFS were gung-ho about the dorm culture. UFS had been closed to them, and it was thrilling to be let in and to belong. Another former black student who lived in a mostly white dorm in the early 1990s told me he felt like he was ?ascending.?
Their enthusiasm made the white students feel as if they had something worth sharing, bolstering their sense of pride. Mathibela recalls that a white student named Coenraad Jonker pulled him aside. ?Where did you learn to speak such beautiful Afrikaans?? he marveled. ?You are definitely going to make it here.? White students even bent some of the dorm rules to make it easier on the black students.
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