Science

Toby Matthiesen makes the case in the NYRB blog: Since late May, pictures of Hezbollah militants standing amid the ruins of al-Qusayr, the former Syrian rebel stronghold, have offered dramatic evidence of the extent to which foreign Shia fighters are shifting the course of the Syrian war. To many observers, the Lebanese militia’s entry into the conflict has shown definitively that it has been a sectarian war from the outset. According to this view, Syria’s Alawite sect, to which the Assad clan and its security forces belong, is “quasi Shiite,” a fact which accounts for the government’s alliances to Iran and Hezbollah; while Syrian rebel forces are overwhelmingly dominated by the country’s aggrieved Sunni majority, now backed by the Sunni governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, along with various foreign Sunni jihadis. But Bashar al-Assad is head of an ostensibly secular Baathist regime and many Shia think that Alawites are heretics. Why exactly is Hezbollah getting involved, and is this conflict really rooted in religion? The answer to both these questions may lie in a suburb of Damascus called Sayyida Zainab, the site of an important Shia shrine and since the 1970s a haven for foreign Shia activists and migrants in Syria. Today, Hezbollah forces, along with Iraqi Shia fighters, defend the suburb. Though the story of Sayyida Zainab is little known in the West, it may help explain why what began as a peaceful uprising against secular authoritarian rule in 2011 has increasingly become a war between Shia and Sunni that has engulfed much of the surrounding region.

H. Hannah Nam, John T. Jost, and Jay J. Van Bavel over at PLOS One (via Chris Mooney): Abstract People often avoid information and situations that have the potential to contradict previously held beliefs and attitudes (i.e., situations that arouse cognitive dissonance). According to the motivated social cognition model of political ideology, conservatives tend to have stronger epistemic needs to attain certainty and closure than liberals. This implies that there may be differences in how liberals and conservatives respond to dissonance-arousing situations. In two experiments, we investigated the possibility that conservatives would be more strongly motivated to avoid dissonance-arousing tasks than liberals. Indeed, U.S. residents who preferred more conservative presidents (George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan) complied less than Americans who preferred more liberal presidents (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton) with the request to write a counter-attitudinal essay about who made a “better president.” This difference was not observed under circumstances of low perceived choice or when the topic of the counter-attitudinal essay was non-political (i.e., when it pertained to computer or beverage preferences). The results of these experiments provide initial evidence of ideological differences in dissonance avoidance. Future work would do well to determine whether such differences are specific to political issues or topics that are personally important. Implications for political behavior are discussed.

Europe's plans to explore Mars with a satellite in 2016 and a rover in 2018 take a big step forward with the signing of new industrial contracts.

Forget fumbling for your keys. Kevo, a new tap-to-open system from Kwikset, lets you unlock a motorized deadbolt by just touching it (as long as your iPhone is nearby).

Winners are a Japanese researcher who developed a climate supercomputer and an American engineer who studies the environmental effects of transportation systems

Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Ed: Jason Richwine swiftly resigned from the Heritage Foundation this month following revelations of his 2009 Harvard University dissertation on IQ and race, but the blogosphere continues to buzz with the story. In the aftermath, as Richwine continues to defend his research, some human biodiversity, or “HBD,” experts charge that a new generation of eugenicists may be coming of age. A recurring name is that of Stephen Hsu, the Michigan State University physicist and vice president for research and graduate studies who is researching intelligence and genetics at the world’s biggest genomics sequencing lab in Shenzhen, China. “Richwine would probably also find a friend in Stephen Hsu, a theoretical physicist by training who is currently searching for an intelligence gene,” wrote Yong Chan, research director for the racial justice website ChangeLab. “Even though mainstream science has pretty much scrapped the notion that race has any kind of biological basis long ago, that hasn’t stopped [Hsu] from trying to link intelligence with race and getting a billion and a half dollars for research based in China.” Michael Scroggins, a Ph.D. student at Teachers College of Columbia University, echoed Chan on Ethnography.com: “Suffice to say, [Richwine and Hsu] offer nothing new to debates over IQ, or poverty or immigration. Their innovation lies in the naked, unreflective application of a naïve sociobiology to policy debates over access to democratic institutions – citizenship and public education.” Much of the controversy surrounding Hsu stems from a recent Vice article alleging Hsu's cognitive genomics project is ultimately helping China engineer “genius babies.” “At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence,” the piece reads. “Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.”

In such deals, a drug maker agrees to pay a potential rival to delay selling a generic version. The decision may result in lower drug costs, advocates say.WASHINGTON — A brand-name drug maker can be sued for violating antitrust laws if it agrees to pay a potential competitor to delay selling a generic version, the Supreme Court ruled.

A new language has been discovered in a remote Indigenous community in northern Australia that is generated from a unique combination of elements from other languages. Light Warlpiri has been documented by University of Michigan linguist Carmel O'Shannessy, in a study on "The role of multiple sources in the formation of an innovative auxiliary category in Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language," to be published in the June, 2013 issue of the scholarly journal Language.

The state ordered the Exide plant to shut in April, citing arsenic emissions and calling it a public health risk. A judge rules it can restart operations, pending a hearing.A Vernon battery recycler shut by the state in April as a health risk to thousands of nearby residents will be allowed to reopen pending a court hearing next month, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled Monday.

A single advanced building control now in development could slash 18 percent -- tens of thousands of dollars -- off the overall annual energy bill of the average large office building, with no loss of comfort. Instead of running ventilation full blast whenever just a single person is in the room, customize the amount of ventilation based on the number of people actually present.