Ivorian reggae singers bury rivalry for “peace” tour

ABIDJAN (Reuters) – As darkness falls over Ivory Coast‘s lagoon-side commercial capital a steady thumping cuts through the tropical night.

But where once the thud of heavy weapons set the Abidjan‘s residents scrambling indoors for cover, tonight it is a reggae bass line that draws them out.

Here, little over a year ago, supporters of then-president Laurent Gbagbo and his rival Alassane Ouattara were fighting a brief post-election civil war, the final deadly showdown of a decade-long political crisis.

After years teetering precariously between war and peace, the flames of division, xenophopia and anger – fanned in no small degree by some of the country’s most famous musicians – exploded into a conflict in which more than 3,000 people died.

One of Ivory Coast’s leading reggae artists, Serge Kassy, even rose to become a leader and organizer of Gbagbo’s Young Patriots street militia – a group accused of numerous atrocities during the war. Kassy is now in exile.

“When I looked at the musical scene in Ivory Coast, I realized that we ourselves went too far,” said Asalfo Traore of the zouglou band Magic System, one of the few groups that refused to take sides during the crisis years.

“It was when everything was ruined that we wanted to glue the pieces back together. But it was too late.”

Now, long-divided musicians are once again coming together, hoping to use their influence, so destructive for so long, to help Ivory Coast heal its deep wounds, and the country’s leading rival reggae artists are showing the way.

REGGAE RIVALRY

The long feud between Alpha Blondy and Tiken Jah Fakoly is a thing of legend in the reggae world, though neither has been willing to say what was behind the bad blood.

Both men come from Ivory Coast’s arid north and share a musical genre. But the similarities stop there.

Alpha, considered the father of Ivorian reggae, takes the stage in Abidjan clad in a shimmering pink suit, golden tie and Panama hat of an urban dandy. Tiken wears the traditional flowing robes of his northern Malinke tribe.

During the crisis, Alpha remained in Ivory Coast, while Tiken, a vocal critic of President Gbagbo‘s regime, went into exile in neighboring Mali.

They had so successfully avoided each other during their long parallel careers that before he picked up the phone to approach Alpha with the idea of uniting for a series of peace concerts, Tiken claimed they’d met only twice.

“Before going to the Ivorians to ask them to move towards reconciliation, it was important for us to show a major sign. That’s what we did,” Tiken told Reuters.

Out of a meeting in Paris was born a simple idea: six concerts in six towns across a country once split between a rebel north and government-held south, bringing together musicians from across the political spectrum to push for peace.

“No one’s died over the problems between Tiken and me,” said Alpha. “There are things that are more serious than our little spats, our pride and our vanities.”

Uniting the Ivorian music scene proved relatively easy in the end. Uniting the country could prove a tougher task.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Some 18 months since the war ended, reconciliation in Ivory Coast is going nowhere.

Though Ouattara is praised by international partners for quicky turning around the economy, critics complain he has done little to foster unity. He has so far refused to prosecute those among his supporters accused of atrocities during the war.

Meanwhile Gbagbo, who lost the run-off election but garnered 46 percent of votes, is in The Hague on war crimes charges.

The leaders of his FPI political party are either dead, in jail or living in exile, from where they are accused by United Nations investigators of organizing deadly armed raids on Ivorian police, military and infrastructure targets.

“People came here for Alpha, Tiken Jah and artists they only ever see on TV, not for reconciliation,” said high school teacher Michel Loua in Gagnoa, the second stop on the tour in Gbagbo’s home region.

“The politicians have made a business of it. They talk up reconciliation when it suits them, otherwise they could care less,” he said.

Unity was never a problem, Alpha said, until politicians began to play the ethnic identity card in the struggle for power that followed the death of independence President Felix Houphouet-Boigny in 1993. And even after the violence and massacres, it is still not the problem today.

“Ivorians are not divided. That’s what I discovered,” he said on the last night of the tour. “If there are people that need reconciliation, it’s not the artists or the people. It’s the politicians,” he said.

Minutes later he was on stage singing “Course au Pouvoir”, a 16-year-old song that has found new relevance today with its lyrics: “There’s blood on the road that leads to the tower of power. Innocent blood.”

Having wrapped up their tour, Tiken, Alpha and the rest of the musicians are due to meet with President Ouattara and plan to call for the release of all pro-Gbagbo prisoners not accused of involvement and killings as a sign of good will.

The move has been called for by human rights groups as well as the FPI, who list it as one of their pre-conditions for dialogue. And though Ouattara has given no indication he is open to the possibility, many feel it is an unavoidable step towards lasting peace.

(Editing by Richard Valdmanis, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Vital Signs: Limits to Resveratrol as a Metabolism Aid

Resveratrol, the red wine component shown to be helpful in improving metabolic function in obese or diabetic people, has no discernible effect on healthy women who are not obese, a new experiment has found.

In a small 12-week randomized, double-blinded trial, researchers gave 29 normal weight postmenopausal women either 75 milligrams a day of resveratrol or a placebo, testing their metabolic function at the start and end of the study.

Blood concentrations of resveratrol increased in the group given the supplements, but the scientists found no difference between them and those given the placebo in body composition, resting metabolic rate or glucose tolerance (a test for insulin resistance and diabetes).

The study, to be published in this week’s issue of the journal Cell Metabolism, found that blood pressure, heart rate, C-reactive protein levels (a measure of inflammation), LDL, HDL and total cholesterol were unaffected by resveratrol. In other words, resveratrol blood concentrations were associated with no quantifiable changes, beneficial or otherwise, in any measure of metabolic function.

Does this mean that resveratrol offers no benefits? Not necessarily, said the senior author, Dr. Samuel Klein, a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. “We only show that metabolically healthy people get no benefits to begin with,” he said. “We have no way of knowing whether it will prevent future metabolic complications.”

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Facing Protests, China’s Business Investment May Be Cooling

SHIFANG, China — Local leaders were all smiles this summer at a groundbreaking ceremony for a vast copper smelting project that seemed like the answer to the chronic unemployment that has plagued this city in northern Sichuan ever since a devastating earthquake in 2008.

Reuters

A protest against plans to expand a petrochemical plant in Ningbo, China, last month. More investment projects are running into opposition from a growing Chinese middle class concerned about environmental damage.

But within days, the tree-lined plaza at the heart of the city was packed with thousands of youths, protesting that the $1.6 billion factory would pose a pollution hazard. After two nights of street battles pitting youths against the riot police, city leaders canceled the smelter.

“The environment is more important” than new investments or jobs, said a young woman sitting on a recent afternoon at the cafe across the street from the plaza, now empty except for a clutch of retirees gathered under the clock tower.

China’s economic boom over the last three decades has depended overwhelmingly on a build-at-all-costs investment strategy in which pollution concerns, the preservation of neighborhoods and other such questions have been swept aside. But that approach is starting to backfire, posing one of the biggest challenges for the new generation of Chinese policy makers who will take over at the Communist Party Congress, which starts on Thursday.

New investment projects used to be seen as the best way to keep the Chinese public happy with jobs and rising incomes, assuring social stability — a paramount goal of the Communist Party — while frequently enriching local politicians as well.

But from Shifang in the west to the port of Ningbo in the east, where a week of sometimes violent protests forced the suspension on Oct. 28 of plans to expand a chemical plant, more projects are running into public hostility.

In many cases, they are running into opposition not just from farmers who do not want their houses and fields confiscated, but also from a growing middle class fearful that new factories will lead to more environmental damage.

In response to this and other worries about the economy, a number of influential officials and business leaders in China have stepped up their calls for changes aimed at increasing the efficiency of investment and simultaneously shifting the country toward a greater reliance on consumption.

But China’s leaders, including the outgoing prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have been talking about such a transformation for years with little sign of success, as state-controlled banks continue to lend huge sums to politically powerful state-owned enterprises and local governments.

Frenzied construction of roads, bridges, tunnels and rail lines over the last decade has left China with world-class infrastructure. But it has also produced deeply indebted local governments that are struggling to finance more projects.

At the same time, vast unused capacity in practically every industrial sector has crippled profitability and left manufacturing companies straining to repay their borrowings, a problem that has been partly masked by banks in the habit of simply rolling over loans rather than recognizing losses.

“All Chinese industries are like that — can you dig out which area of Chinese industry is not in overcapacity?” said Li Junfeng, a longtime director general for energy at China’s top economic planning agency.

Investment reached 46 percent of China’s economic output last year. By comparison, Japan’s investment rate peaked at 36 percent, which it reached in the early 1970s; South Korea topped out at 39 percent in the late 1980s.

Growth in Japan and South Korea started to slow and eventually tumbled after investment peaked. The big question now is when China will run into the same limits, and how rapidly change will take place, said Diana Choyleva, an economist at Lombard Street Research in Hong Kong. “The potential for a big crisis is always there,” she said.

Even experts who strongly favor fundamental policy changes, like moving to a more market-oriented system for allocating bank loans and setting interest rates, doubt that China’s leaders are preparing to move quickly. Conversations at senior levels of the Communist Party appear to have focused so far on reducing the state’s role in the day-to-day management of many state-owned enterprises rather than selling them or breaking them up.

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Controversial Arizona nonprofit releases name of contributors -- more nonprofits

In a stunning reversal, an obscure Arizona nonprofit at the center of a legal battle over secret political contributions released on Monday morning the identity of its contributors, which it had been fighting tooth and nail to keep secret.

But the disclosure did little to shed light on who was behind the $11-million donation to a California campaign fund. The Arizona group, Americans for Responsible Leadership, identified its contributors only as other nonprofits.

The money was passed from Americans for Job Security to the Center to Protect Patient Rights to Americans for Responsible Leadership, according to state authorities. From there, the money was sent to a California campaign committee fighting Gov. Jerry Brown's tax-hike plan, Proposition 30, and pushing a separate ballot measure to curb unions' political influence, Proposition 32.

As of Sunday night, the Arizona nonprofit Americans for Responsible Leadership appeared ready to fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to avoid disclosing any records to state authorities by election day on Tuesday.

The Fair Political Practices Commission has been trying for two weeks to audit the group to determine whether it is improperly shielding the identities of its donors. California regulations says contributors must be identified if they give to nonprofits with the intention of spending money on state campaigns.

Americans for Responsible Leadership reached an agreement with the commission to reveal its contributors on Monday morning, allowing state authorities to skip the audit process. However, the disclosure of more nonprofits did little to satisfy activists who were seeking contributors' true identities.

Derek Cressman of Common Cause, which originally filed the complaint against the Arizona nonprofit, called the group "irresponsible, cowardly money launderers."

Still, Ann Ravel, chairwoman of the Fair Political Practices Commission, said in a statement that the disclosure was "a significant and lasting victory for transparency in the political process.”

Lawyers for the nonprofit have previously argued that the group was being unfairly targeted for an audit that would violate the group's 1st Amendment rights.

State authorities sued for the records, and in a matter of days the legal battle had rocketed to the California Supreme Court. On Sunday, justices issued an unusual weekend decision ordering the nonprofit to begin handing over records that day.

After the order, Americans for Responsible Leadership appeared ready to resist again, signaling its plan to ask for an emergency stay from the U.S. Supreme Court.

"This proceeding raises critical First Amendment issues regarding the ability of an organization to freely associate and speak on vital election-related matter," a lawyer wrote in a letter to the court on Sunday night.

But lawyers backed away from that plan overnight. In a statement on Monday morning, the Arizona nonprofit's legal team did not explain why they stopped fighting the court order, saying only that a settlement was reached after "late-night discussions."

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Math Problems Can Be Physically Painful

By Ian Steadman, Wired UK

How much do you hate doing sums? Long division? Fractions? Calculus?

For many people the thought of these kinds of problems is horrible. Painful, even. A study by psychologists Ian Lyon and Sian Beilock has shown that that’s not hyperbole — some people who dislike math do so because the thought of working out things with numbers is experientially similar to physical pain. For people with “high levels of mathematics-anxiety” (HMAs), maths hurts.

Lyon and Beilock, from the University of Chicago and Western University, respectively, were intrigued by other studies that had shown that some people experience social rejection in a way comparable to actual pain, and that it seems to be experienced relative to the amount of anxiety people feel. Maths, they figure, also generates a fair bit of anxiety in people: “Mathematics … anxiety is an ideal test bed for expanding our understanding of how physically innocuous situations might elicit a neural response reflective of actual physical pain,” they wrote.

The hypothesis was that the expectation of having to do maths would be the thing to generate the anxiety, which would in turn generate pain. They asked for participants to answer survey questions about how anxious maths problems made them feel, whittling it down to two samples of 14 people each — one group of HMAs, and one group of LMAs (that is, low anxiety about mathematics). The criteria for quantifying anxiety was based on the Short Math Anxiety Rating-Scale (SMARS), a scale specifically designed in 1972 for measuring how anxious people get about the idea of getting maths (and it says something about how widespread an issue this is that there’s already a psychological scale for measuring it).

The 28 people were asked a series of word and number puzzles while their brains were scanned with an MRI machine. As they lay inside the machine, a coloured light would flash up before each set of questions appeared, signalling whether it would be language or maths questions that followed, and what difficulty (either easy or hard) they would be. This was key to testing the hypothesis that it’s the expectation that triggers the unpleasant sensations, not the actual puzzles themselves.

When it came down to easier maths and word questions, there was no difference between the two groups of HMAs and LMAs. For the harder questions, though, HMAs “significantly” underperformed LMAs, which makes sense — people who are very anxious tend to perform worse at tasks that require lots of thought.

Looking at the differences in brain activity between the HMAs and LMAs when working on the harder maths questions, Lyon writes that “four regions — bilateral dorso-posterior insula, mid-cingulate cortex, and a dorsal segment of the right central sulcus — showed a significant interaction, driven by a positive relation between SMARS and math-cue-activity and a negative relation between SMARS and word-cue-activity”. For HMAs, their ability to perform harder maths problems was impacted more the greater their score on the SMARS assessment; there was no such correlation when it came to word problems. Interestingly, the correlation also only held for HMAs — for LMAs, their scores on the SMARS had a “non-significantly negative” relation to their ability to solve any of the maths problems.

The dorso-posterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex are parts of the brain that are associated with the experience of pain — the results showed that, when HMAs saw the light that corresponded to a hard maths problem, their brains anticipated the questions as a “a visceral, aversive bodily reaction”.

In the conclusion, Lyon writes: “We provide the first neural evidence indicating the nature of the subjective experience of math anxiety. Previous research on the overlap between pain processing and psychological experience of social rejection has focused primarily on the actual experience of being rejected [but] our data go beyond these results and suggest that even anticipating an unpleasant event is associated with activation of neural regions involved in pain processing.”

There are also implications for the theory that this kind of experience of pain is something inherent in humans thanks to evolution. Lyon considers it “unlikely that a purely evolutionary mechanism would drive a neural pain response elicited by the prospect of doing math (as math is a recent cultural invention)”. That means the pain pathways in the brain can be activated by things that have no relation to painful experiences — which could shed light on other psychological phenomena like phobias.

Since it’s the anticipation of mathematics that seems to get people the most, rather than the actual sums themselves, it might be worth investigating whether there’s a different way of teaching maths in schools. It could also mean taking the time to simplify the process for returning a tax return, for example. Governments often wring their hands over how many adults are effectively mathematically illiterate after leaving school, but maybe it’s not their fault they couldn’t concentrate in class. They might well have just been scared of the number seven (because, after all, seven ate nine).

Source: Wired.co.uk

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“Political Animals” won’t get a second run on USA

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Political Animals” has not been elected to a second term.

The USA Network miniseries from “Brothers & Sisters” executive producer Greg Berlanti and starring Sigourney Weaver as a divorced former First Lady turned Secretary of State, won’t be returning to the network.

The news isn’t terribly surprising, as “Political Animals” was conceived as a miniseries, but the project marked an ambitious jump for USA.

“We are proud of ‘Political Animals,’ our miniseries that attracted critical acclaim and impacted the cultural conversation this summer,” a spokeswoman for USA told TheWrap in a network statement. “It was a pleasure to work with Greg Berlanti and Laurence Mark and a powerful cast led by Sigourney Weaver. We look forward to collaborating again with these immensely talented creatives.”

“Political Animals” premiered July 15 — a night that also saw the highly anticipated Season 5 premiere of AMC’s “Breaking Bad” – and grabbed 3.8 million total viewers in Live Plus 7 Day ratings, which takes into account DVR viewings. Over its six-episode run, the miniseries averaged 3.2 million total viewers in Live Plus 7 Day.

Deadline first reported the news of “Political Animals” not returning.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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A Wheelchair Tour of Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa

Brian Lehmann for The New York Times

Alex Watters does a wheelie in a parking lot at his alma mater, Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. He damaged his spine in a diving accident freshman year. More Photos »

THE specially equipped Dodge Sprinter pulled into the Morningside College parking lot, transporting my campus guide and his Quickie 646 SE motorized wheelchair. Alex Watters was returning to this small liberal arts college in Sioux City, Iowa, for a wheelchair tour of the campus he had navigated as an undergraduate. Our mission was to understand some of the challenges faced by students with a physical disability for a book I was writing on the first-year college experience.

Brian Lehmann for The New York Times

A caregiver, Jennifer Mozak-Wubbena, helps Alex Watters prepare for the day. Mr. Watters can’t use his hands. More Photos »

I stuck my hand out. Alex could raise his arm but had no mobility in his hands, so I shook his outstretched fist. Freshman year, he had damaged his spinal cord in a diving accident and lost the use of his legs and hands. “Ready to go?” he asked as I grabbed my manually operated wheelchair, on loan from the nursing department.

“Ready as ever,” I said, not altogether sure how to operate the thing. As I struggled to get over the tiny ribbon of tar between the parking lot and sidewalk, Alex zipped around the lot doing wheelies, as if to say, “You have no idea what you’re in for.”

Motoring backward while talking, like an admissions office tour guide, he was contagiously optimistic. “Sure, I have challenges now,” he said, “but I’m not going to let them take over my life.”

ALEX WATTERS comes from Okoboji, a small town in the northwest corner of Iowa, on the border with Minnesota. He had applied to the University of Iowa and Drake but chose Morningside because he was heavily recruited to play golf. He had been captain of his high school team junior and senior years. When he arrived on campus — it was fall 2004 — he was full of excitement and expectation.

The second week there, Danielle Westphal — a classmate with whom he had won a dance contest during orientation — invited him to a family get-together on Lake Okoboji. He and a friend drove up to the cabin, arriving at about 10 p.m. As the guests toasted marshmallows around a bonfire, Alex and his hostess’s younger brother decided to go for a swim. The weather was beginning to get cold. He figured this would be his last swim of the season.

The two of them changed into their trunks and walked 150 feet out onto the dock. A gust of wind blew, and Alex’s hat flew off, landing near a boat hoist. He took off his shirt and dived in after it. But there was a sandbar. The water was only 18 inches deep. He heard his neck snap.

“I remember laying face-first underwater,” Alex said, a crack in his voice. “At first I tried to start swimming, but of course I couldn’t move. I thought, this was it. I’m a pretty religious person, so I was thinking, ‘I’m O.K. with this if it happens.’ And then I blacked out.”

At first the young boy thought Alex was playing a joke on him. Then he sensed something was terribly wrong. He ran back to the cabin to get help. They came running, and Danielle jumped into the water feetfirst and knelt beside Alex. He had now been under water more than two minutes. She turned him over and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. E.M.S. arrived, and from the local hospital he was quickly airlifted to Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City.

“Next thing I remember are Mom and Dad and our pastor standing by my bed and the surgeon telling them about the operation I would soon have,” he told me. His spinal cord wasn’t severed but pinched. “Your spinal cord is like a banana,” Alex said. “If you bend it severely enough it won’t necessarily break but it will be permanently damaged.”

After surgery to stabilize the vertebrae in his neck, Alex underwent therapy for six months at a rehabilitation hospital in Denver. I asked him what he was feeling at this point. He and his parents had become interested in stem cell research, and the possibility he would someday walk again. “But I really didn’t want to live my life hoping I would walk again when the chances were I might not,” he said. “Even at that point, I was pretty happy with who I was and even then I was thinking about the possibility of returning to college.”

He took courses at Iowa Lakes Community College that summer, and the next fall returned to Morningside to resume his first year.

Roger H. Martin is president emeritus of Randolph-Macon College and author of “Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again.”

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Keeping 007 relevant in a changed world

NEW YORK — Early in "Skyfall," Judi Dench's M pulls aside our embattled hero, played once again with suave ennui by Daniel Craig, and wonders whether the world still needs either of their services. As Bond wraps his head around that idea, he looks searchingly at his boss. "So this is it?" he wonders. "We're both played out?"

Questions about relevance dangle throughout the new James Bond movie, which opens in the U.S., after a crescendo of marketing, on Nov 9. Field agents are of diminishing importance in an era of cyber-spying and drone warfare, and the uniqueness of Bond's gadgets has been diluted at a time when everyone and their great-aunt carries an iPhone.

PHOTOS: James Bond through the years

Yet as the film franchise turns 50 (yes, someone born the year "Dr. No" came out is now eligible to join AARP) themes of retirement and sell-by dates aren't simply screenplay fodder — they pertain to the franchise itself.

After strong early reviews and solid overseas business, the latest Bond adventure sweeps into theaters with blockbuster expectations. But even if the Sony release blows the doors off the box office like, well, 007 making a grand entrance, it can't hide what those who worked on it quietly acknowledge — making this movie was a more difficult and delicate undertaking than ever.

No longer is a successful Bond movie simply a matter of dialing up clever dialogue and dazzling set pieces. Facing a world that would be unrecognizable to those behind the early Ian Fleming adaptations, Bond filmmakers and actors grapple on many levels with how to keep the series fresh.

They must find ways for a tuxedo-wearing, martini-swilling protagonist to stay relatable while a global downturn rages. They need to project a contemporary degree of villainy in a world where the threat of Islamist terrorism is, for a variety of reasons, not as easily portrayed as the enemies and fears of the Cold War.

They want to retain at least a hint of gravitas after years of Austin Powers and Johnny English.

Maybe most important, they struggle with how to avoid what might be called the quaintness trap — staying relevant in a cinema culture that has seen the rise of splashy CG action movies on the one hand and modern truth-seekers a la Jason Bourne on the other.

"The theme of our story is that we have to question if the old classic things still work," said Javier Bardem, who plays the villain in "Skyfall," directed by Sam Mendes. "It's implied in every character in this movie. But it's also the question about the James Bond franchise."

New obstacles

For years, Barbara Broccoli, the longtime producer and steward of the spy series (total box office: about $5 billion), knew that she wanted a film for the franchise's 50th anniversary. "Bond 23," as "Skyfall" soon became known, was a way of honoring her late father, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, who died in 1996 and was heavily responsible for putting Fleming's work on the screen. It also offered a third act in the Craig-led Bond.

About three years ago, with the blessing of studio MGM, Broccoli and stepbrother/fellow producer Michael Wilson hired the longtime Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, along with "The Queen" scribe Peter Morgan. At nearly the same time they brought on Mendes, the British director of "American Beauty" who was in a slump after his young-marrieds drama "Away We Go" flopped in 2009.

Then MGM filed for bankruptcy, and suddenly everyone was frozen in place. (To avoid legal action from creditors, Mendes was retained off the books as a "consultant.")

PHOTOS: The Bond girls

"It was a nightmare," Broccoli recalled. "This was one of those situations that's really frustrating — when all the delays have nothing to do with the making of the movie." Craig's attitude was even more bleak. "I thought OK, we might have to say goodbye to this," he said in an interview in New York several weeks ago. "And that made me really sad." In the hiatus, Morgan left, replaced by the veteran John Logan ("Hugo").

MGM was finally reconstituted with new owners. But now came another problem: how to make Bond dramatically relevant again. The franchise wasn't just long in the tooth — it was coming off a disappointing entry in 2008's "Quantum of Solace." Craig acknowledged in the interview that the movie wasn't "satisfying." Wilson said that, after witnessing the critical reception, he thought, "Oh God, we really screwed this up."

A big reason for that was Bond's nemesis. During the decades that the series provided a catharsis for the Soviet threat, it was easy to put a face on the menace. But since the Iron Curtain fell — and especially after the attacks of Sept. 11 — that was a lot tougher.

In "Casino Royale," Craig's initiation, filmmakers used a clever work-around: They channeled the demons that would normally reside in the villain into the hero. Craig's Bond was grimmer and darker, which not only made for a compelling character but for some juicy zeitgeist stuff, Bond's beleaguered air matching our post-Sept. 11 anxiety.

In "Quantum," writers essentially opted out, creating villains and stakes that had little to do with the headlines (they involved a Bolivian coup and the arcana of water rights.) The film was rushed into production after the writers strike — "you shouldn't try to rewrite whole sections of the story while you're shooting," Craig noted dryly — and the results were wobbly.

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Asteroid Belts Could Be Key to Finding Alien Life

By Ian Steadman, Wired UK

If we want to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it might be wise to look for stars with asteroid belts similar the one in our own Solar System.

According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, evolution goes faster and further when life has to make rapid changes to survive new environments — and few things have as dramatic an effect on the environment as an asteroid impact. If humans evolved thanks to asteroid impacts, intelligent life might need an asteroid belt like our own to provide just the right number of periodic hits to spur evolution on. Only a fraction of current exoplanet systems have these characteristics, meaning places like our own Solar System — and intelligent aliens — might be less common than we previously thought.

Astronomers Rebecca Martin of the University of Colorado in Boulder and Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore have hypothesised that the location of the Solar System’s asteroid belt — between Jupiter and Mars — is not an accident, and actually necessary for life. As the Solar System formed, the gravitational forces between Jupiter and the Sun would have pulled and stretched clumps of dust and planetoids in the inner Solar System. The asteroid belt lies on the so-called “snow line” — fragile materials like ice will stay frozen further out, but closer in they will melt and fall apart.

During the formation of the Solar System, cold rock and ice coalesced into the planets as we know them. However, as Jupiter formed, it shifted in its orbit closer to the Sun just a little bit before stopping. The tidal forces at work between Jupiter and the Sun would have torn apart the material on the snow line, preventing a planet forming and leaving behind an asteroid belt — which today has a total mass only one percent of that which would have been there originally.

Those asteroids would have bombarded the inner Solar System — including Earth — and, in theory, provided the raw materials needed for life (like water) and also giving evolution a kickstart by drastically changing the early Earth’s climate and environment. To check that this wasn’t just something restricted to our Solar System, Martin and Livio looked at data from Nasa’s Spitzer telescope, which has so far found infrared signals around 90 different stars which can indicate the presence of an asteroid belt. In every case, the belts were located exactly where Martin and Livio had predicted the snow line should be relative to each star’s mass, supporting their snow line theory of asteroid belt formation.

If these are the circumstances which allow intelligent life to evolve somewhere, then it will make the task of finding aliens we can chat with a lot harder — few stars with exoplanets that we’ve found so far have the right setup of a dusty asteroid belt on the snow line with a gas giant parked just outside it.

If the gas giant has formed but not shifted in slightly, as Jupiter did, then the belt will become so full of large objects that the inner planets will be bombarded too frequently for life to fully take hold; if the gas giant continues to move inwards as it orbits, it won’t just stop the belt turning into a planet — it’ll suck everything of any serious size up and leave behind only minor fragments of space rock and dust, including any planets life could evolve on.

Martin and Livio then looked at 520 gas giants found orbiting other stars — in only 19 cases were they outside of where that star’s snow line would be expected to be. That means fewer than four percent of exoplanet systems will have the right setup to support the evolution of advanced, intelligent life in accordance with the punctuated equilibrium theory.

Martin, the lead author of the research, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, writes: “Our study shows that only a tiny fraction of planetary systems observed to date seem to have giant planets in the right location to produce an asteroid belt of the appropriate size, offering the potential for life on a nearby rocky planet. Our study suggests that our Solar System may be rather special.”

Source: Wired UK

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Foxx, Wonder among stars honoring Eddie Murphy

LOS ANGELES (AP) — However riotous the Eddie Murphy stories from Arsenio Hall, Tracy Morgan, Adam Sandler and Russell Brand, the highlight of Spike TV‘s tribute to Eddie Murphy was the comedian’s duet with Stevie Wonder.

Murphy joined the subject of one of his most classic impressions for a rousing rendition of Wonder’s 1973 hit “Higher Ground” during the taping of the Spike TV special “Eddie Murphy: One Night Only,” which is set to air Nov. 14. The Roots served as the house band.

Jamie Foxx, Tyler Perry, Martin Lawrence, Chris Rock and Keenan Ivory Wayans were also among those paying tribute to Murphy Saturday at the Saban Theater.

Accompanied by a pretty blonde, Murphy beamed throughout the two-hour program Saturday, saying he was touched by the tribute.

“I am a very, very bitter man,” he said with a beguiling smile. “I don’t get touched easily, and I am really touched.”

Morgan called Murphy “my comic hero” and came onstage wearing a replica of Murphy’s red leather suit from his standup show “Delirious.”

“He set the tone for the whole industry a long time ago,” Morgan said before Saturday’s tribute. “He inspired me in a fearless way.”

Sandler said he was still in high school when he first saw “Delirious,” which he described as “one of the most legendary standup specials of all time.”

“Everybody on the planet wanted to be Eddie,” he said. “He funnier than us. He’s cooler than any of us.”

Samuel L. Jackson said Murphy “changed the course of American film history” by giving Jackson his first speaking role on the big screen, in 1988′s “Coming to America.”

“If it weren’t for Eddie, we might not have all the wonderful films that I’ve made,” Jackson said.

“He is a true movie star,” Jackson continued, lauding Murphy’s performance in “48 Hours” and “Beverly Hills Cop.” ”You became an inspiration for all young African-American actors.”

The program featured clips of Murphy’s standup shows, his film appearances in “Shrek” and “Nutty Professor” and his work on “Saturday Night Live.”

Murphy insisted before the tribute that he is retired.

“I’m just a retired old song and dance man,” he said, adding that he only makes rare appearances these days. “That’s what you do when you’re retired: You come out every now and then and talk about the old days.”

The 51-year-old entertainer took the stage at the conclusion of the tribute to say that he was moved by the honor.

“This is really a touching moving thing, and I really appreciate it,” he said. “You know what it’s like when you have something like this? You know when they sing happy birthday to you? It’s like that for, like, two hours… and I am Eddied out.”

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen on Twitter at www.twitter.com/APSandy.

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