The Boswell crest: a hooded hawk, with the motto Vraye Foy

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The Tango Singer

·Books

The Tango Singer, by Tomas Eloy Martinez.

I enjoyed this slim volume – mostly, I think, because Kirsten and I vacationed in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Feb. of this year. The book follows NYU grad student Bruno Cadigan as he goes to Buenos Aires to work on his thesis. He is trying to find the elusive Tango Singer, Julio Martel, rumored to have one of the greatest voices in Argentina.

He’s helped in his quest by “el Tucomano” – someone he meets at the airport. This thread is what holds the novel together; it is basically a number of vignettes about Buenos Aires’ past and present. Bruno arrives at the end of 2001, as Argentina’s economy takes a nosedive. A lot of the historical vignettes are “as told to” Bruno by Martel’s female companion, Alcira.

What really held my interest, however, were the stories and descriptions of various places in Buenos Aires that we actually visited. It was like being there again. Even though the images the author invokes are very detailed, they became even more vivid since I didn’t have to imagine them.

Darwin Fish found

·Science

tiktaaliktiktaalik
A team of paleontologists and zoologists have found the “missing link” fossil, showing the progression from water to land. The researchers report in the April 6, 2006 issue of Nature that they found the 375-million-year-old fossils in the Canadian arctic (in an area once a balmy river delta ). They’ve dubbed the new beast Tiktaalik roseae, which is Inuit for “big freshwater fish”.

So, the standard anti-evolution argument that such “missing links” are not found can be laid to rest. This animal is partway betwwen a fish and early tetrapods. It has lost some of the bones that fuse the head to the shoulders in fish (i.e., it has a neck). And its front “fins” have bone structures similiar to “wrists”.

Cost of (anti-malarial) drugs – makes you think

·General, Science

Some 300-500 million people suffer from malaria every year, and over a million die from it. The most effective drug for treatment, artemisinin, is derived from a species of Chinese wormwood. The process of extracting and purifying artemisinin from this plant is costly, so those that need it most can’t afford a treatment course. Also, the supply is very limited so even if they could afford it, there isn’t enough of the drug to go around.

The April 13, 2006 issue of Nature has a paper by researchers at UC Berkeley reporting they have tweaked yeast into creating artemisinic acid, a precursor of artemisinin. Creating artemisinin from the precursor acid is relatively straight-forward. So, scaling up this process may well result in reducing the cost of the drug by 10-fold, bringing a course of treatment within the reach of those who need it.

The current cost of a course of treatment is US $2.40.

That’s less than the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.