McGrory: T leaves them in the depths

I like that Brian McGrory makes a practice of calling attention to notable incidents that aren’t getting much media play.  His column this week covers the 2 1/2 hour Red Line breakdown from Wednesday night (which, thanks to my first time homebuyers class, I blessedly didn’t get caught  up in). I give the passengers a lot of credit for not railing against the T when they could tell workers were trying to get things moving the entire time they were stuck underground. But to be 200 feet outside the station, and not let the passengers disembark for two hours? It sounds unacceptable. Add to this the fact that there is NO cell phone service on the Red Line, and you can imagine how many family members or child care providers were stuck wondering where these passengers were. Given that we have an aging fleet and no money to make meaningful upgrades — not to mention a lack of willingness on the part of the public to pay more taxes to fix transit problems — perhaps the better approach would be prioritize cell service, which other subway lines have, so that these emergencies don’t turn into crises for families who rely on the Red Line every day.

Read Brian McGrory’s column here.

Cambridge, Davis Square buck a down market. But can it last?

Says the Boston Globe:

Condo and home prices have been remarkably stable over the past few years in such perennial hot spots like Cambridge and Davis Square, even as real estate market has gone haywire elsewhere.

There have been minor blips up and down, but no big comedown from the market’s peak back in 2005, when the real estate bubble was just about to burst. Just a steady march upward over the years.

Judging from the $1 million-plus condo for sale in Davis Square I just spotted online, some sellers still believe they are back in the time of easy money and silly prices. OK, so it’s new and in the heart of Davis Square, but it’s a condo.

So is this just another mini-bubble waiting to burst, with the double dip in real estate prices that is sweeping the country finally bringing a well-deserved comeuppance to all those cocky sellers who so far have escaped unscathed?

There are certainly some small warning signs that all might not be well in paradise.

Cambridge home prices are back down to 2009 levels, having jumped last year with the home buyer tax credit. And gcbma has noted that the number of homes and condos sold at a loss in Somerville has risen steadily to about 43 percent, up from roughly nil during the bubble years.

Yet Cambridge and Davis Square also have some inherent advantages that say, Natick, Franklin or Quincy just can’t compete with.

For one thing, these are really fun, interesting and centrally located places to live. Moreover, there’s a cachet will always draw a steady stream of buyers to places like Davis Square as opposed to respectable but thoroughly lunch bucket cities like Quincy.

And while the national economy struggles to get back on its feet, Cambridge is at the center of a mini-boom, with tech and biotech firms expanding rapidly.

Still, even if I had the cash, you wouldn’t catch me shelling out a million to live in Davis Square.

Sure, it’s fun place to visit, but that just seems foolish.

As a first-time buyer, I’m definitely seeing this first hand. You?

On Small Farms, Hoof Power Returns

Rich Ciotola with Larson, far left, and Lucas, the team of young oxen he works with in Sheffield, Mass.

New York Times: On a sunny Sunday just before the vernal equinox, Rich Ciotola set out to clear a pasture strewn with fallen wood. The just-thawed field was spongy, with grass sprouting under tangled branches. Late March and early April are farm-prep time here in the Berkshires, time to gear up for the growing season. But while many farms were oiling and gassing up tractors, Mr. Ciotola was setting out to prepare a pasture using a tool so old it seems almost revolutionary: a team of oxen.

Mr. Ciotola, 32, is one of a number of small farmers who are turning — or rather returning — to animal labor to help with farming. Before the humble ox was relegated to the role of historical re-enactor, driven by men in period garb for child-friendly festivals like pioneer days, it was a central beast of burden. After the Civil War, many farms switched from oxen to horses. Although Amish and Mennonite communities continue to use horses, by World War II most draft animals had been supplanted by machines that allowed for ever-faster production on bigger fields.

Now, as diesel prices skyrocket, some farmers who have rejected many of the past century’s advances in agriculture have found a renewed logic in draft power. Partisans argue that animals can be cheaper to board and feed than any tractor.

They also run on the ultimate renewable resource: grass.

“Ox don’t need spare parts, and they don’t run on fossil fuels,” Mr. Ciotola said.

Animals are literally lighter on the land than machines.

“A tractor would have left ruts a foot deep in this road,” Mr. Ciotola noted.

In contrast, oxen or horses aerate the soil with their hooves as they go, preserving its fertile microbial layers. And as an added benefit, animals leave behind free fertilizer.

Drew Conroy, at right with Finn, has written a teamster's guide to working with oxen. A professor of applied animal science, he holds workshops for farmers eager to learn.

David Fisher, whose Natural Roots Community Supported Agriculture program in Conway, Mass., sells vegetables grown exclusively with horsepower, said he is getting record numbers of applicants for his apprentice program.

“Using animals is just really appealing to the senses,” he said, adding that he found it philosophically appealing as well. “There’s a deep environmental crisis right now, and live power is also about creating an alternative to petroleum. Grass is a solar powered resource — and you don’t need manufacturing plants or an engineering degree to make a horse go.”

Oxen are also cheap, at least compared to a tractor, and can work for 10 to 14 years. Since the dairy industry relies on keeping cows pregnant so they lactate, millions of baby bulls are born each year. A pair of calves start at $150 and range up to $1,500, depending on their breed and how much training they have.

Some dairies even give their young males away. Mr. Ciotola got Lucas and Larson, now 2 ½, as wobbly-kneed babies from a nearby raw-milk dairy, bartering for them with his own labor. “I just had to buy or make the yokes and cart,” he said.

Read the full article here.

Study: Were all languages born in Africa?

A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated, the New York Times is reporting.

The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.

The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language.  Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

A New Push to Let H.I.V. Patients Accept Organs That Are Infected

David Aldridge of Los Angeles had a kidney transplant in 2006, but he will soon need another. Like many people living with H.I.V., he suffers from kidney damage, either from the virus or from the life-saving medications that keep it at bay.

Until recently, such patients did not receive transplants at all because doctors worried that their health was too compromised. Now they can get transplants, but organ-donor waiting lists are long. And for Mr. Aldridge, 45, and other H.I.V. patients, a potential source of kidneys and livers is off limits, because it is illegal to transplant organs from donors who test positive for the virus — even to others who test positive.

But federal health officials and other experts are calling for repeal of the provision that bans such transplants, a 23-year-old amendment to the National Organ Transplant Act.

“The clock is ticking more quickly for those who are H.I.V.-positive,” said Dr. Dorry Segev, transplant surgery director of clinical research at Johns Hopkins and a co-author of a new study indicating that 500 to 600 H.I.V.-infected livers and kidneys would become available each year if the law were changed. “We have a huge organ shortage. Every H.I.V.-infected one we use is a new organ that takes one more person off the list.”

The ban on transplanting organs from people with the virus that causes AIDS was passed at the height of the AIDS scare in 1988, when infection with the virus was considered a death sentence. But now many people with H.I.V. are living long enough to suffer kidney and liver problems, adding to the demand for organs.

This has led some health authorities to say that H.I.V.-infected organs should be available for transplant, primarily for patients infected with the virus but also potentially for some who are not.

Read more in the New York Times.

Boston Globe Editorial: The end of books is good for writers and readers

This makes me so sad. I’m one of those old-fashioned types who, despite owning an e-reader, would still rather crack open a new book :/

But the Globe says: When Borders  on Boylston Street shutters, Boston will have, permanently, one fewer bookstore. Barnes & Noble won’t be eyeing its empty site as a possible location for expansion. Nor will we see any new bookstore start-ups. There are a great many business ideas where some entrepreneur can strike it rich; bookselling is no longer one of them.

The book is dead. Books (and by “books’’ I mean words printed on paper with a hard- or softcover binding) trace their inception in the 1440s to one extraordinary new technology: the printing press. New technology as well — readers, tablets, and smartphones — mark their end. It’s been a marvelous, nearly six-century ride, but now it’s over. Two weeks ago, the American Association of Publishers reported that January sales for adult hardcovers were down 11.3 percent, adult paperbacks were down 19.7 percent, and adult mass market books down 30.0 percent. Expect to see those kinds of numbers repeated.

Not all kinds of books will suffer as badly, of course. Children’s books and art books — where layout and graphics are paramount — will persist.

But when it comes to long-form, picture-free books such as novels, paper no longer makes sense. Electronic readers are this year’s hot-selling items because they really are a better way to read. They’re lighter, more portable, and easier to use. Turning pages is effortless. And as e-books can be readily linked to multiple devices, one is never without a book.

The death of the book will change things. For many, bookstores are special places of contemplation and discovery, and their loss will be deeply felt. Libraries too will have to rethink.

Libraries will perhaps evolve into public providers of information, but all of those beautiful buildings? Probably unnecessary.

Even our homes will change. The shelves on which we proudly display the books we have read (or haven’t, but hope to impress others) will stand empty. Indeed, the whole notion of “owning’’ books will eventually seem an oddity, in the same way that displays of CDs or DVDs seem irrelevant to a streaming world.

But is this really that bad? The end of books may be to the betterment of both writers and readers. The expense of publishing and distribution necessarily meant the imposition of middlemen — agents, editors, printers — who picked and chose what would get published. Now anyone can write a novel, for example, and make it available for sale.

What do you think? Is this really a good thing? Does it improve the world of writing to remove agents and publishers, because it improves access to publicity for aspiring writers — or is it another example of eliminating valuable expertise, as with professional journalists versus bloggers? Discuss.

Unsexy Beast: Australia drums up support for Tasmanian Devil, facing extinction from rare cancer

Greg Irons, director of the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary, is a passionate advocate for Tasmanian devils. He's raising 16 devils in quarantine that are free of the fatal Devil facial tumor disease. (Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times)

It would appear to be one heck of a public relations challenge: Persuade the Australian public to care about a seldom-seen animal the size of a cocker spaniel, beady-eyed, standoffish and fond of displaying a mouthful of pointy teeth. Picture a skunk, with the jaws of an alligator and the charm of a weasel.

From a marketing standpoint, the Tasmanian devil is no koala.

But the pugnacious carnivore needs help. Scientists across Australia are working to untangle the genetic puzzle behind a fatal disease decimating the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial. The affliction is straight out of a sci-fi movie: Tumors sprout around the devil’s mouth, quickly morphing into bulbous red pustules that eventually take over the animal’s entire face, leaving it unable to eat or drink.

Alarmed by the threat to a species already on the brink of extinction, wildlife biologists here began tracking the disease 15 years ago. Early on, they identified how it spread: through facial bites when devils fight or mate. The disease had all the characteristics of a virus. But last year geneticists made a sobering discovery. Devil facial tumor disease, or DFTD, was no virus, but a highly infectious cancer — one of only three communicable cancers known to medicine.

That breakthrough piqued the interest of scientists. Though researchers say it is unlikely that humans could become infected with DFTD, the knowledge gleaned in research across Australia could prove invaluable should an infectious cancer appear among people.

Now,  in ways that surprise even themselves, Australians are rallying around this nasty, screeching beast that once was the most reviled animal in the country.

Even if relatively few Australians have taken the time to see a devil at a zoo, and even fewer have spied one in the bush, they are getting the message: It may be a devil, but it’s our devil. They’re “a little Aussie fighter,” suggested Kathy Belov, a molecular geneticist at the University of Sydney working to save the marsupial.

“There’s something really adorable about little devils,” she said.

Read the full LA Times article here.