2010年6月28日星期一
2010年6月25日星期五
2010年6月18日星期五
李慧玲的空虚与寂寞
2010年6月17日星期四
THE MILKMAID
Vermeer’s painting of a maidservant pouring milk, on loan to the Met from the Rijksmuseum is a work of extraordinary fullness in every respect. This feeling of uncanny amplitude is partly the result of how in the way Vermeer made his own sunlight coursing through a window (a “cool graced light,” in Frank’s O’Hara’s phrase, if ever there was one) acts on bits of earthly surface, affording a kind of extreme visibility to each thing exposed in its path. Light in Vermeer is such a fact of aesthetic experience, so intrinsic to everyone’s appreciation of his art, that it may have blinded us to a great deal else that shows up in the pictures. Neither signed nor dated, on a near-square canvas nearly a foot and a half in either dimension, the picture, for all its grandeur, seems a hinge work of Vermeer’s early maturity. Better known nowadays as The Milkmaid, it’s an anomaly within his output generally, its worked-up surface and culinary subject matter stated comparatively coarsely, a less delicate image overall than the preternatural refinements soon to come. The Met curator and scholar of Dutch art Walter Liedtke places it historically in the company of other paintings, some of them, like the Cavalier and Young Woman in the Frick, in similarly compact formats done around 1657-58, when Vermeer was in his mid-twenties.more from Bill Berkson at artcritical here
2010年6月13日星期日
认同的半径
2010年6月4日星期五
HOW ACUPUNCTURE PIERCES CHRONIC PAIN
全世界有数百万人利用针灸去缓解疼痛,但人们仍然不清楚这种古代医疗方法的原理。现在,一项对老鼠的新研究显示,针灸的针刺可能会激活周围的疼痛抑制受体,并释放出一种能促进受体响应疼痛的化合物。报告发表在最新一期的《自然神经科学》上。研究人员提出了两种针灸止痛假说。一种观点是,针灸通过刺激疼痛感应神经,引发大脑释放出名为“内啡肽”的类似鸦片的化合物。另一种观点认为,针灸的作用类似于安慰剂。纽约Rochester大学医学中心神经学家Maiken Nedergaard对两种假说都持怀疑态度。Nedergaard怀疑,当针灸师刺进并旋转针灸针,它可能会造成器官组织的轻微损伤,导致其释放出名为腺苷的缓解局部疼痛的化合物。Nedergaard与其16岁女儿Nanna Goldman、及其他研究人员对一只老鼠的腿实施轻微针刺,然后提取针灸点周围的液体,发现腺苷的含量是针灸前的24倍。然后,研究人员进一步发现,增加腺苷能延长止痛时间。而基因改造过无腺苷功能的老鼠没有从这种治疗中获得任何好处。也有专家对这项发现表达了异议,他认为上述发现恰好可作为安慰剂效应的证据,因为皮肤的任何地方受到伤害都会产生抗疼痛的腺苷。这位作者还挖掘出论文合作者之一的妻子是互补和替代医疗(针灸属于替代医疗)中心的主任。
From Science
Millions of people worldwide use acupuncture to ease a variety of painful conditions, but it’s still not clear how the ancient treatment works. Now a new study of mice shows that insertion of an acupuncture needle activates nearby pain-suppressing receptors. What’s more, a compound that boosts the response of those receptors increases pain relief—a finding that could one day lead to drugs that enhance the effectiveness of acupuncture in people.
Researchers have developed two hypotheses for how acupuncture relieves pain. One holds that the needle stimulates pain-sensing nerves, which trigger the brain to release opiumlike compounds called endorphins that circulate in the body. The other holds that acupuncture works through a placebo effect, in which the patient's thinking releases endorphins. Neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York state was skeptical about both hypotheses because acupuncture doesn’t hurt and often works only when needles are inserted near the sore site. Nedergaard instead suspected that when acupuncturists insert and rotate needles, they cause minor damage to the tissue, which releases a compound called adenosine that acts as a local pain reliever.
More here.