Mainly, evitar a fome!

Some biofuels might do more harm than good to the environment, study finds
Vince Stricherz
Biofuels based on ethanol, vegetable oil and other renewable sources are increasingly popular with government and environmentalists as a way to reduce fossil fuel dependence and limit greenhouse gas emissions.
But new research led by biologists at the "Universidad Autonoma de Madrid" and University of Washington, shows that some of the most popular current biofuel stocks might have exactly the opposite impacts than intended. The authors of a paper published in the June issue of the journal Conservation Biology offer a dozen policy recommendations to promote sustainability and biodiversity in biofuel production.
The study looked at factors such as the energy needed to produce a renewable fuel source compared with how much energy is produced, the impact on soil fertility and effects on food supply when fuels based on crops such as corn and soybeans are mixed with fossil fuels. Based on those factors, the authors determined that corn-based ethanol is the worst alternative overall.
"It's foolish to say we should be developing a particular biofuel when that could mean that we're just replacing one problem with another," said lead author Martha Groom of the UW Bothell.
The authors argue that precise calculations are needed to determine the ecological footprints of large-scale cultivation of various crops used for biofuels. They note, for example, that because such large amounts of energy are required to grow corn and convert it to ethanol, the net energy gain of the resulting fuel is modest. Using a crop such as switchgrass, common forage for cattle, would require much less energy to produce the fuel, and using algae would require even less. Changing direction to biofuels based on switchgrass or algae would require significant policy changes, since the technologies to produce such fuels are not fully developed.
The paper's policy suggestions are "not definitive at all," Groom said, "but rather each category calls out a question and is a starting point in trying to find the proper answers."
These concerns are becoming more acute with the rapid rise of both food and fuel prices, she said. The issue is especially touchy for farmers who might for the first time be realizing significant profits on their crops, but it also is a serious concern for motorists.
"I've heard about people getting their gas tanks siphoned, and I hadn't heard of that since the '70s," she said.
A difficulty, Groom said, is that while escalating prices add pressure to find less costly fuel sources, acting too hastily could create a host of other problems. For example, farmers who plant only corn because it is suddenly profitable, and don't rotate with crops such as soybeans, are likely to greatly deplete their soil, which could limit crop growth and promote soil erosion.
Also, some plants are better than others for absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while others perhaps need more cultivation, which requires more fossil fuel for farm equipment. In addition, fertilization, watering and harvesting all require energy.
The study took about a year to conduct and is a synthesis of peer-reviewed research published in a various journals. The scientists examined the literature looking for indicators of biofuels that are more sustainable and carry a smaller ecological footprint, then used that information to derive the policy recommendations.
The primary audiences for the work are policy makers, students and other biologists, Groom said. The primary goals are to establish a logical basis to evaluate options for biofuel development and to spur new research to find the most ecologically promising alternatives.
"We don't want to make new mistakes. If we don't ask the right questions to start with, we're going to replace old problems with new ones," she said.
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Policy Recommendations
Calculate a biofuel's ecological footprint
Promote only biofuels that can be produced sustainably
Select highly efficient species for biofuels
Work to minimize land needed for biofuels
Encourage reclamation of degraded areas
Prohibit clearing areas for more cultivation
Promote use of energy crops that require less fertilizer, pesticide and energy
Promote native and perennial species
Prohibit use of invasive species
Promote crop rotation on cultivated lands
Encourage soil conservation
Promote only biofuels that are at least net carbon neutral

Alguém contamina a água!

Portugal foi hoje apontado em Bruxelas como o Estado-membro com maior disparidade na repartição dos rendimentos, ultrapassando mesmo os Estados Unidos nos indicadores de desigualdade.
O Relatório Sobre a Situação Social na União Europeia (UE) em 2007 conclui que os rendimentos se repartem mais uniformemente nos Estados-membros do que nos Estados Unidos.
"Apenas Portugal apresenta um coeficiente superior ao dos Estados Unidos", sublinha ainda o documento.
O relatório é o principal instrumento que a Comissão Europeia utiliza para acompanhar as evoluções sociais nos diferentes países europeus.
Os indicadores de distribuição dos rendimentos mostram que os países mais igualitários na distribuição dos rendimentos são os nórdicos, nomeadamente a Suécia e Dinamarca.
"Portugal distingue-se como sendo o país onde a repartição é a mais desigual", salienta o documento que revela não haver qualquer correlação entre a igualdade de rendimentos e o nível de resultados económicos.
Mas se forem comparados os coeficientes de igualdade de rendimentos dos Estados-membros com o respectivo PIB (Produto Interno Bruto) por habitante constata-se que os países como um PIB mais elevado são, na sua generalidade, os mais igualitários.

http://diario.iol.pt/sociedade/pobreza-portugueses-portugal-bruto-da-costa-trabalho-dinheiro/955231-4071.html

Lisboa, 18 Mai (Lusa) - O escritor português José Saramago rejeitou hoje que Espanha não encare Portugal como um Estado independente, ideia defendida pelo vice-presidente do Governo Autónomo da Catalunha, Josep-Lluís Carod Rovira, em declarações à Lusa.
"Discordo completamente. Tenho com Espanha uma relação que é conhecida e nunca me apercebi de qualquer irregularidade política ou estratégia de qualquer tipo, comercial ou financeiro, que indicasse que Espanha não reconhece a independência de Portugal", disse o Nobel da Literatura.
A residir na ilha espanhola de Lanzarote há vários anos, José Saramago afirmou que "Espanha tem mais coisas em que pensar" do que em estar a "alimentar qualquer tipo de rancor histórico".
"A pessoa que fez essas afirmações está a tentar defender os interesses da Catalunha, não acredito nada que esteja interessada em Portugal", sublinhou o escritor que visitou hoje em Lisboa a exposição "José Saramago. A Consistência dos Sonhos".
"Não há nada mais fácil do que afirmar, mas é necessário que se demonstre" o que se diz, disse o escritor, acrescentando que nesses casos "a imprensa fica com uma manchete e não tem mais nada para dizer do que isso. Não aparece a justificação de uma afirmação tão séria e grave como essa".
Numa entrevista à Agência Lusa, o vice-presidente do Governo Autónomo da Catalunha disse que Espanha ainda não assumiu que Portugal é um Estado independente e que Madrid pretende manter uma "tutela paternalista" e uma atitude de "imperialismo doméstico" sobre o Estado português.
O número dois do executivo catalão e responsável pelas relações externas da região com 7,5 milhões de habitantes, afirmou que pretende conseguir o apoio de Portugal para o projecto de independência que defende para a Região Autónoma, cujo referendo propõe que se realize em 2014.

Os grandes só nos parecem grandes porque estamos de joelhos perante eles. Levantemo-nos!

Foto do: http://xatoo.blogspot.com/

Não, não vou abundar no modelo de comunismo de conselhos, ainda que, para os detractores do comunismo, este resulte, pelo menos, perturbador. A possibilidade de aplicar esta realidade organizativa e, seguramente, bastante mais democrática que a actual tendência de implementar uma encoberta ditadura "bipolar", resulta contrária à filosofia de Schopenhauer e à sua aposta na decadênte aceitação da vida como sufrimento permanente (não era essa a intenção do Budismo). Medos, afastamento de si e da vida ou da vontade de viver, desvalorização do individúo ou desvirtuação do impeto pela consecução de objectivos.
Sem vontade, ou reprimindo esta como regra, seria melhor não sonhar, esperar que nos fustiguem para receber comida, só comida, como salário, cumprindo a vontade de quem se julga mais livre com a contenção das liberdades de quem à sua submete, como se de um rebanho manso se tratara. Escreverei sobre a manipulação dos Portugueses pela oligarquia mundial, através dos "CEO" da filial Portugal, sobre a forma de conduzir, obrigando de forma implicita, os cidadãos do meu país à escravidão.

1º- Abandonamos o campo e a pesca, deixámos de ser auto-suficientes, no aspecto alimentar, uma questão de segurança nacional em qualquer estado não alinhado.
Sobre o pretexto da "querida europa", que não será seguramente aquela à qual cantava Fausto, imigrámos em massa para algum dos polos de servilismo instituidos e em franca expansão, neste país que não só se constitui por Lisboa ou Porto, e passámos a formar parte da vara de mão de obra barata e abnegada que procura o capital transnacional, passando a depender do mesmo até que aumente a segurança noutro país de terceiro mundo onde a vida valha ainda menos e assim os gastos com pessoal ou os impostos.

Ao abandonar a nossa terra deixamos o "terreno" adequado aos interesses dos especuladores, aqueles que criam estructuras para que os poucos que permanecem não encontrem outra forma de sobreviver senão servindo, com boa cara, boa aparência e 12º ano, os turistas de pé descalço que por uns patacos vêm ao nosso país descarregar a tensão acumulada durante o seu ano de trabalho, naturalmente mais bem pago, ainda que as funções, no seu país, sejam similares àquelas para as quais estudou o cidadão que por cá o limpa.

Ao reduzir, globalmente, as áreas de producção agricola, pesqueira, etc. Diminuimos a quantidade de alimentos nacionais no mercado, importamos de onde nos permitirem, aumentando consequentemente o preço dos productos e sendo culpados indirectos da fome que se anuncia, obrigando a aumentar ordenados, reduzir quadros, mais desemprego, menos consumo, mais desemprego, encerramento de pequenas e medias empresas, essas seguramente nacionais, mais impostos, menos direitos sociais, deslocalização das multinacionais, mais desemprego, mais fome, mais impostos, mais dependência do oligopólio.
2º- Tornar-nos-emos robôs, cada dia mais caros, sujeitos a critérios cada vez mais restrictivos, sobretudo e antes de mais nas oportunidades de trabalho, aumentando o fosso entre as camadas sociais mais favorecidas, que serão também as mais formadas (ou deformadas) académicamente, e a grande maioria do proprietário real -embora sem serventia- deste país, o cidadão comum ou seja todos nós, facilitando ainda mais o dominio do ser humano pelo capital e seus esbirros e aceitando pagar para trabalhar, algo que já se leva a cabo cada vez que entramos numa urgência ou vamos ao médico para que nos solucione problemas de saúde derivados, muitas vezes, do trabalho, problemas fisicos e psiquicos e que também se reflectem na vida familiar, para que possâmos voltar ao trabalho.
3º- Globalmente, ao votar governos como aqueles que, estilo capataz, no têm usado durante os 33 últimos anos, estamos a permitir a criação de latifúndios, latifúndios transnacionais, os quais nos obrigarão a perder a vontade, poderemos deixar de ser "O animal que fala", a tábua rasa dos nossos filhos será impressa no momento do parto e a noosfera com a qual sonhávamos, um sonho de criança antiga, daquelas que só se souberam escravas quando, ainda cândidas ("hay que madurar pero sin perder la candidez"), se deram conta que o seu valor está cotado no mercado e definido por quem, só por ser share-holder, se dá conta, no quarto de banho, que a rentabilidade da empresa que paga ordenados mais baixos é maior. Pensaremos que tudo não passou de idealismo juvenil e sem fundamentos, ainda que os nossos filhos nem sequer possam brincar dessa forma, como acontece hoje em muitos países, também no nosso.
Vamos votar fora do binómio, não podemos continuar a ser uma massa uniforme da qual se alimentam os corruptos!

"Os grandes só nos parecem grandes porque estamos de joelhos perante eles. Levantemo-nos!"

CRN

Xavier Malcata - Samuel Cate Prescott Award

O galardão foi atribuído pelo Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), uma instituição norte-americana que conta com a colaboração de 22 mil profissionais da indústria, da universidade e do governo nas várias áreas da ciência e tecnologia alimentar.
A escolha do cientista português, que além de director da Escola Superior de Biotecnologia é professor catedrático da Universidade Católica Portuguesa, ficou a dever-se às suas abordagens pioneiras nesta área, nomeadamente no desenvolvimento de ingredientes nutracêuticos e alimentos funcionais, no projecto e optimização de reactores enzimáticos para o processamento de óleos alimentares, na caracterização de proteases vegetais no fabrico de queijo, na produção de culturas microbianas de arranque e afinagem para queijos tradicionais portugueses, na aplicação optimizada de operações unitárias a processos alimentares específicos, e no melhoramento das condições de fermentação do bagaço de uva para a obtenção de aguardentes bagaceiras.
O prémio será entregue em cerimónia pública no dia 28 de Junho, durante o congresso anual do IFT em Nova Orleães. Samuel Cate Prescott, um dos mais importantes cientistas alimentares norte-americanos, foi o primeiro director da School of Science do Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) e o primeiro presidente do IFT.

Por outro lado:

CIÊNCIA VIVA

programa criado em 1996 por Mariano Gago, com o objectivo de promover a cultura científica e tecnológica junto da população em geral e das escolas em particular. Oito anos depois, os sucessivos cortes de verbas e a sua distribuição por várias entidades colocam em risco este original e dinâmico projecto. Vários países europeus implementaram programas semelhantes com base neste exemplo português, facto digno de nota num país mais habituado a copiar.
O investigador Xavier Malcata defende que, para proteger e motivar os seus cérebros, o Estado deveria ter "uma visão de médio e longo prazo e, sobretudo, uma vontade política de investir recursos financeiros..." e que "...estratégias como esta não são compatíveis com mandatos, relativamente curtos, dos governos."

Is technology ruining children?

Technology is moulding a generation of children unable to think for themselves or empathise with others, says the leading brain scientist Susan Greenfield. Is it time to switch off?

John Cornwell

Susan Greenfield’s lower lip pouts as if to blow a raspberry. Then, in soothsaying mode, the solemn utterance: “The global cyber world promises a more reassuring, safer option than the messy world of in-your-face three-dimensional life. But the IT technologies are already blurring the cyber world and reality.” The hooded eyes readjust from Delphic oracle to larky chick as she flashes a face-splitting grin. “There are people,” she chortles, “who can’t believe, eh! that the planes crashing into the twin towers were actually real, eh!” The punctuating “eh!” prompts you to agree.
Professor Greenfield, promoter extraordinaire of science, has written a book that makes routine auguries – global warming, economic downturns – look like mere gloomy hand-wringing. A specialist in brain degeneration, Greenfield is predicting that our teen generation is headed for a sort of mass loss of personal identity. She calls it the Nobody Scenario. By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen, she believes
that the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alteration. It’s as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Orange, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences.
“They are destined to lose an awareness of who and what they are: not someones, or anyones, but nobodies, eh!” That expressive mouth widens again, the lower lip ripens. “The time is well nigh,” she says, “to explore the impact of these technologies.”
Greenfield, the motormouth publicist of science, who divides her life between an Oxford lab, the Royal Institution in London, lecture circuits, brain-science conferences and the House of Lords, could of course be talking twaddle. As it happens, her new book, ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century, digresses all over the place in little flash floods of maddening provisos and second thoughts. It’s as if she dictated it while bouncing on a trampoline, fixing an errant eyelash and sorting her fraught schedule on a BlackBerry. And yet, the mainstream of her argument – the coming plight of the minds and brains of our youth – has more than a drift of horrible truth. All involved in parenting and education should pay heed.
Never one for the bluestocking frock and the shopping-parade perm, Greenfield, known as “Springy” by colleagues, leapt to media prominence 20 years back as an academic glamourpuss on chat shows and double-page spreads. Latterly she achieved fame as the director of the Mayfair-based Royal Institution, home of Christmas lectures for children and Friday-evening “colloquiums” popular among amateur-science buffs. Then she very publicly bust up with her Oxford-don husband, Peter Atkins (whose socks and undies she allegedly dumped in bin bags on the street).
The Hammersmith-born scholarship girl, with an East End electrician dad and a professional dancer mum (both still alive), has come a long way since 1968, when at Oxford she switched from classics to neuroscience. She did her doctorate on neural degeneration, but it was for her contribution to the public understanding of science that she was raised to the Lords in 2001. The titles and honours, some less than enviable, have multiplied along with the sour grapes of colleagues (it was leaked in 2005 that she was spurned as a fellow of the Royal Society – an honour she had never sought). In Saudi Arabia, where Baronesses are in short supply, she’s been dubbed “Princess” Greenfield; twice she was nominated Adelaide’s “Thinker in Residence”; once she was voted Woman of the Year by a Sunday newspaper. So, at 57, as she settles into the Indian summer of her prime, who is Baroness Greenfield to issue prophecies of doom about the younger generation?
I come upon her early in her week in the windowless strip-lit environs of Oxford University’s pharmacology department. Here’s Greenfield the research scientist, chairing a meeting of biochemists in regulation plaid shirts. She, in laboratory mode, is dressed down in a beautifully cut Russian-red jacket; a sleeveless, artificial-fur-lined silvery waistcoat; charcoal Armani trousers; a fetching beret (hint of Rasta-chic); and patent platform lace-up ankle boots. Greenfield’s strategy in the fight against Alzheimer’s has been to identify fragments of protein linked to the plaques that form the “tangles” present in the brains of sufferers. She has had a breakthrough with several such candidates, which she hopes could lead to earlier diagnosis and, eventually, a preventive medication. This morning the chemical boys have apparently identified another associated plaque maker. “So,” she says, “why not bung some peptide at receptor T30 and see if it responds?”
Greenfield is not one to endow science with mystique. But as we proceed through her lab with its test tubes, dubious sinks and humming Perspex boxes, she pauses to say: “With the entire human brain itself, I’ve never lost my sense of mystery and total awe. When I pick up a slice of preserved human cortex and a bit comes off on my fingernail, I can’t help thinking, ‘What was that once, eh? Was it cherished memories of a lover, eh? An ability to play the piano? A sense of wonder at the universe, eh?’ ” While she hopes to find a palliative for Alzheimer’s, Greenfield’s special contribution to neuroscience is her talent to stand back from the molecules and make connections across a wide landscape of specialisations, research findings and theories. What her jaundiced peers see as academic attention-deficit disorder, Greenfield regards as a bid to articulate what neuroscience is telling us about human nature in the round.

She offers her apologies for leaving the meeting early. “I’d love to be talking science all day long,” she tells me, a trifle unconvincingly. “But you see how it is… this is my life.” She takes another meeting, this one on grant proposals. She says, with obvious hyperbole yet a grain of truth: “I spend 99.9% of my time chasing funds.”
She also spends it chasing publicity, and not necessarily for herself. Now we’re out in the bracing wind standing in the piazza beneath the old Oxford city prison, converted to a boutique hotel and circuit of coffee shops and restaurants. Worthies, carers and relatives of patients have gathered to release 200 balloons to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Clive Project, an Alzheimer’s charity, one of many mental-health charities of which Greenfield is a patron.
She has the microphone: “I first realised the awful reality of Alzheimer’s,” she tells her audience, “when I heard the story of a patient, once a brilliant father, who was found angrily arguing over a chocolate biscuit with his four-year-old son.” Her voice, and the anecdote, hits an authentic note of empathy. “I’m just a scientist, looking into my Petri dishes. We’re doing our best. There’s no magic pill! It’s like cancer: there will be gradual progress!” The men are mesmerised; the women beadily eye her outfit. It’s cold, and threatening rain, but she has lent a touch of warmth and glamour to the melancholy context of the proceedings.
Now we’re walking along the Cornmarket and she’s talking about loss of identity in Alzheimer’s, and making connections with the potential loss of identity brought about by new information technologies. “Looking at the increasingly common attack by Alzheimer’s on individuality,” she says, “perhaps we can grasp the implications of these newer threats!”
Greenfield has elaborated a theory about the influence of IT on young brains. Given the time young people spend gazing into screens, small and large – reckoned to be from six to nine hours daily – she believes the minds of the younger generation are developing differently from those of previous generations. “The brain,” she says, “has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences.”
She sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern is how computer games could be emphasising what she calls “process” over “content” – method over meaning – in mental activity.

Her theory goes like this. The more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other. This can result, she maintains, in a failure to build highly personalised individual conceptual frameworks – the whole point of education and the basis of individual identity. If the purpose of a game, for instance, is to free the princess from the tower, it is the thrill of attaining the goal, the process, that counts. What does not count is the content – the personality of the princess and the narrative as to why and how she is there, as in a storybook. Greenfield avers that emphasis on process in isolation becomes addictive and profoundly mind-changing.
Here is her hypothesis. A natural brain chemical called dopamine is involved in all forms of addiction. Dopamine contributes to feelings of wellbeing on attaining a goal, especially when gratification repeatedly deferred is finally delivered. Falling levels of dopamine accompany the opposite situations, when gratification has been frustrated (for example, waiting for a phone call that never comes).
The area of the brain crucial to the dopamine hits is called the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with the prefrontal cortex, an area at the front of the brain. An under-functioning prefrontal cortex is linked with types of behaviour marked by total absorption in the here and now, and an inability to consider past and future implications. According to Greenfield, excessive dopamine can reduce the activity of brain cells in the prefrontal cortex, leading to its partial shutdown. She is speculating that the intense subjective “here and now” feeling, prompted and accompanied by dopamine “rewards” in computer play, creates a euphoric, self-centred ego boost, the pleasure of which can lead to craving and addiction.
What lasting effect does this repeated neglect in the prefrontal cortex have on the brain, and hence the mind? “Excessive dopamine hits might reduce activation in the prefrontal cortex, and in so doing tip the balance away from awareness of the significance, the meaning, of our actions,” she says.
So playing games in which I slaughter scores of all-comers with my trusty sword, as in the Tarantino movie Kill Bill, deals not with the significance of beheading and disembowelling of hordes of Japanese villains, but with the process – the action separated from meaning and consequences.
“When those teenagers kicked that goth girl to death in the park recently,” she says, “was it like a computer game for them? The buzz of the moment? Were they thinking of her as a person with feelings, with parents and siblings? Were they thinking of the implications for themselves the next day?”
For the mind to operate fully, Greenfield asserts, the prefrontal cortex must be active, and content must be a high priority. The world and oneself are then redolent with meaning.
How do the young attain unique and enriched identities? “Through the world of focused conversation, nursery rhyme repetition, recitation and rote learning, of reading and writing interspersed with bouts of physical activity in the real world, where there are first-hand and unique adventures to provide a personal narrative, personalised neuronal connections. This is education as we have known it.”
And what if “education as we have known it” fails? It will lead, she predicts, to the ultimate triumph of process over content: the Nobody Scenario. “For the first time in human history, individuality could be obliterated in favour of a passive state, reacting to a flood of incoming sensations – a ‘yuck’ and ‘wow’ mentality characterised by a premium on momentary experience as the landscape of the brain shifts into one where personalised brain connectivity is either not functional or absent altogether.”
Greenfield is unlikely to earn praise or encouragement from her peers for making connections between basic neuroscience, the culture of youth and views about child development and education. Yet she gives the impression of being drawn to such connections by a genuine spirit of inquiry rather than mere restlessness. In her lab a researcher is studying human higher-order consciousness, and another exploring links between neuroscience and classroom teaching. She is currently seeking funding to study the neuroscience of spirituality. Given the development of her pessimistic views about the impact of IT on the young, it is surprising that she has left the sociopolitical consequences unexplored. As it happens, she is more interested in the neuroscience of ethics, morality and religion – as if such dimensions more readily offer answers to her perception of a coming new dark age. Is she becoming religious?
In Turl Street we are passing Lincoln College, where she has a fellowship. She volunteers: “I’m intrigued by faith. But when people talk about religious experience it’s like I’m autistic – I don’t get it. Yet I want to understand. The other day I borrowed the key to our college chapel and sat there in silence – not praying, just sitting there. Then an organist came in and started talking on his mobile and the spell broke.”
Greenfield tells me that she has friends who have faith and she quizzes them endlessly – Ed Stourton, the broadcaster, Jack Valero, Opus Dei’s spokesperson in Britain, and a neighbour whose faith is helping him and his family overcome a serious illness. She pauses outside New College. This is the college of Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and professional antagonist of religion.
That Delphic lower lip is active again. “I’m not at all saying that all religious believers are fundamentalists; but what distinguishes the believing brain of the extreme kind – I mean the fundamentalist and the totalitarian – from the non-fundamentalist brains,” she ventures, “is the emotion of disgust, eh.
“The anti-Semitic imagery of the Nazis was associated with a virus, a stealthy and elusive infection. So combating such a difficult enemy in the struggle for community hygiene isn’t just a punch-for-punch slugging it out. The enemy is a sickness. You’ve got to be on constant guard. You don’t just get angry with disease – you destroy it, exterminate it.” She nods towards New College. “The invisible viral foe could invade your body and, most importantly, your brain. That’s the language used by Dawkins, who’s developed non-belief into a belief system all of its own, and who constantly refers to religion as a virus.”
I gather there is no love lost between Britain’s two great exponents of the public understanding of science. With her sense that Dawkins is destroying something valuable in the culture (albeit a value she has not yet grasped herself), there is an impression of a standoff that could one day erupt into a spectacular public contest.
We meet the next day in Mayfair. Greenfield has spent the morning in meetings at the Royal Institution, which has had a recent multimillion-pound makeover under her direction. We’re off to Birmingham, where she is to give a lecture to an annual meeting of vets. She’s dressed in a tight-fitting grey-blue trouser suit, snug suede casuals, sharp-looking cotton shirt – white and russet stripes. Curled up in the back of the S320 Mercedes, she takes one call after another on a mobile until we’re out on the M40.
She wants to tell me about the two other threats to human identity in the 21st century already afflicting the older generation. “We’re in identity crisis!” That lower lip is swelling, and the lower whites of her eyes glint with predictive promise. “How do you see yourself? What defines you? What makes you happy, eh? These questions are right up there with the crisis of climate change in the coming century.”
For people in midlife, she asserts, the identity problem is affluence. “The reason we crave more clothes, cars, goods, brands, is that they’ll say something about us, symbolise our distinct, preferably superior identity.”
If the impact of IT on the young is creating a hedonistic, mindless generation that are becoming “nobodies”, she says, then the pursuit of possessions is creating an older generation of consumers striving to be “someone” with their status symbols. But there’s another scenario to add to the future darkness: the growing numbers of people who strive to be “anyone” – those who wish to lose their individualism in a collective identity of political or religious extremism.
“Fundamentalism,” she says, “is the suppression of uniqueness and preference for the collective. If this collective identity prevails, then the dominant defining emotion will be continual anger. Remember in Orwell’s 1984, those collective sessions of popular anger?”
I am less impressed by her “anyone” and “someone” scenarios than by her “nobody” hypothesis, and we bicker in pleasant vein until we’re minutes away from Birmingham’s International Convention Centre.
She leans forward and takes a sheaf of papers and a memory stick for the PowerPoint presentation from her bag. “What am I speaking about?” she says to herself. “Ah, consciousness – a bit academic, eh?”
We arrive on the dot of 4.30pm and she’s ushered straight onto the stage. There are some 500 people in the audience and she gets an enthusiastic welcome. Her theme is the mystery of consciousness, and how the brain gives rise to it. It’s a topic that most neuroscientists steer clear of, but for Greenfield it’s inseparable from her passion for understanding human identity, what makes us unique. She keeps it simple, outlining what she calls the “hard problem” of self-awareness and how it works like a dimmer-switch rather than an on-off light.
She speaks flawlessly without notes and with occasional jokes – “Still conscious out there?” – and elegant off-the-cuff asides about consciousness in animals. She finishes after 50 minutes to the second and leaves to a standing ovation and bouquet.
Back on the M40, she talks about ways for 21st-century people to avoid a dark age of identity crisis. She has this idea about “creativity” as the answer, and she waffles about government and educationalists. It’s enough perhaps that she’s identified an ominous link between brain development and the young, without providing all the answers.
As we reach London, I can’t help asking an unwelcome question that has hovered over our conversations: how does she define her own individuality? And is there a significant other in her life?
She looks skittishly nervous for a moment. “The answer is yes and no,” she says with finality. Then she adds with one of those sudden fantastic grins: “Perhaps I’ve got a number of significant others in my life, but it doesn’t mean that I go to bed with them.”
And how does she relax? She doesn’t like holidays, she tells me, and she plays squash three times a week in Oxford with her personal trainer. “He’s very fit – he’s only 30.”
Then we’re at the BT Tower, where she leaps out, just on time for a formal dinner. “They’ll have to take me dressed as I am,” she says. As she bids me goodnight, she hands me the bouquet. “Here,” she says, “I’m sure you’ll find a good home for these.”
Next day and it’s the Friday evening colloquium at the Royal Institution. The two doors that open onto the podium swing back. The speaker, in evening dress, enters by one; Baroness Greenfield enters by the other. A gasp goes up from the audience.
She’s in a magenta minidress a full seven inches above the knee, I reckon, and it’s covered in pink sequins. As she walks forward on dizzyingly high platform shoes, she wobbles slightly. Her Sugar Plum Fairy dress is flashing and shimmering in the arc lights. She sits to one side, settling down deep into the seat, legs stretched out.
The lecture is by a quantum physicist who’s going on and on about quarks and neutrinos, and strings, and 11 dimensions of space. She appears engrossed; or could that be a look of anxious preoccupation? She has every reason to be apprehensive about the stir she is set to make with her dire predictions about the younger generation.
One thing she knows by now, or ought to: prophets are seldom honoured in their own country.

"Palavras para quê?.. É um artista Português!"

O falso professor que deu aulas durante 30 anos foi esta quarta-feira condenado pelo Tribunal de Portalegre a 18 meses de prisão, com pena suspensa por igual período, escreve a agência Lusa.
António Raposo, que exerceu funções de presidente do conselho executivo da Escola Cristóvão Falcão, em Portalegre, foi condenado pelo crime de usurpação de funções sendo ainda condenado a pagar as custas judiciais do processo.
O tribunal não se pronunciou sobre processo cível interposto pelo Ministério Público que reclama do arguido o pagamento ao Estado de um montante superior a 93 mil euros, sustentando que «com as suas condutas, usufruiu dos benefícios económicos decorrentes das habilitações que declarou ter, mas que na realidade não possuía».
A verba reclamada é referente ao período em que António Raposo exerceu funções de presidente do conselho executivo da Escola Cristóvão Falcão, entre 1 de Agosto de 2001 e 31 de Agosto de 2006. Para o Tribunal de Portalegre, trata-se de «uma questão administrativa» que poderá ser contestada pelo arguido quando for executada pelo Ministério da Educação.
Falsificou os certificados de habilitações
António Raposo foi ainda absolvido de um crime de «falsificação de documentos de forma continuada», de acordo com o tribunal, o arguido exibiu os falsos diplomas pela última vez entre os anos de 1986 e 1987 e, como já passaram mais de 10 anos sobre essa data, o crime prescreveu.
O alegado docente possuía um certificado falso do Instituto Superior Económico e Social de Évora, que lhe permitiu começar a leccionar Educação Física em Oliveira de Frades em 1976, e também um certificado falso relativo à conclusão da licenciatura em Economia no Instituto Superior de Economia da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.
À saída do tribunal, o advogado de defesa mostrou-se satisfeito com a sentença e revelou que não vai recorrer, por considerar que «o acórdão foi bem fundamentado». Sem prestar quaisquer declarações, António Raposo abandonou tranquilamente o tribunal acompanhado pela esposa.