|  Citations
Why we’re not at
war with Canada
In Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace
(Princeton University Press, 2003) political-science professor Charles
Lipson explains the frequently noted but poorly understood
phenomenon of democracies not warring against one another. The transparency
of democratic governments, he argues, makes both their threats and
their promises reliable, promoting stable contracts. Democracies
also tend to experience smooth leadership transfers, Lipson notes,
and are subject to constitutional restraints, both contributing
to their international trustworthiness. Reliable Partners challenges
the realist view that a nation’s form of government does not
affect its relations with other states.
Photo by Todd Marshall |
Rajasaurus
roamed India's Narmada River valley. |
T. rex’s Indian counterpart
A new dinosaur species was identified in August by Chicago paleontologist
Paul Sereno. Large—about 30 feet
long and eight feet tall—and carnivorous, Rajasaurus narmadensis
(“regal dinosaur from the Narmada River”) lived in India
67 million years ago, around the same time as the North American
and Asian Tyrannosaurus rex. Rajasaurus’s bones—30
percent of its body and more than 60 percent of its skull—had
been sitting in an Indian government office for 25 years and were
not initially known to have have belonged to the same dinosaur.
Rajasaurus’s was the first dinosaur skull from India to be
reassembled.
A quarter for your stem
cells
Baby teeth are prized not only by the tooth fairy these days. A
study edited by Chicago cell biologist Anthony
Mahowald and published in the May 13 Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, found that the small amount of
flesh that clings to recently shed baby teeth contains valuable
stem cells, which U.S. and Australian scientists were able to turn
into brain, bone, and other tissues. Stem cells, controversial because
the most medically useful type are often harvested from human embryos,
could become more accessible thanks to this discovery. Individuals
may be able to store their own baby teeth, Mahowald says, in case
they later develop a disease that could be treated with stem cells.
Take a deep breath...or
not
Pollution particles affect infant health more than previously thought,
according to Chicago assistant professor of economics Michael
Greenstone and economist Kenneth Chay of the University of
California, Berkeley. In the August Quarterly Journal of Economics
they report that the manufacturing drop during the 1981–82
recession improved air quality and consequently reduced the infant
mortality rate. Meanwhile, Chicago meteorologists are studying another
environmental hazard: ground-level ozone, which harms asthma sufferers
in the summer. Assistant professor of geophysical sciences Gidon
Eshel and Joseph Bernstein, AB’02,
predicted ground-level ozone formation by identifying meteorological
patterns. They found that winds bringing in more heat than they
take out are a major factor in producing the hazardous gas. They
have submitted their study to the Journal of Applied Meteorology.
Monkey love
Female baboons are outspoken about sex. After mating, especially
with a dominant, high-ranking male, females grunt loudly in order
to keep the male from leaving, according to Chicago behavioral biologist
Dario Maestripieri, who found that males
responded to the grunting by guarding the females. Maestripieri
reported his research, from observations at suburban Chicago’s
Brookfield Zoo, at a July meeting of the Animal Behavior Society
in Boise, Idaho.—P.M.
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