From my CNN News alert:

Moammar Gadhafi is dead, according to reports on Arab media. CNN has not confirmed the reports.

One of the networks reporting the news was Al-Ahrar, a National Transitional Council TV station. It didn’t cite a source and the news couldn’t be independently confirmed.

The New York Times says the death was also verified by the head of Libya’s Military Council.

My guess is that he was killed rather than having committed suicide.

UPDATE: The NYT now reports that Qaddafi was indeed killed in a battle in his hometown of Surt.  There are supposedly photos of the body.

Beleaguered psychologist Marc Hauser, who was disciplined by Harvard University for scientific misconduct, has just resigned his position there.  As the New York Times reports, he was originally given a year’s leave and other punishments, but was not fired.  It’s not clear why he’s resigned now.  His resignation letter, published in the Boston Globe (click to enlarge), says he’s doing interesting work on at-risk teenagers, and has been offered “exciting opportunities in the private sector.”

Hauser is still under investigation by the federal government, presumably because his research on primates was sponsored by federal grants.

At the University of Chicago, Ph.D.s get their degrees a day before undergraduates, and each division has its own graduation ceremony (ours is the Division of Biological Sciences, which includes the medical students).  Since my student Daniel graduated today, I went to the ceremony to “hood” him.  I’m not sure how cosmopolitan this ceremony is, but in the U.S. one’s advisor puts the “hood,” a cloth mantle, over the student’s cap and gown. It’s at that moment that the student magically attains the doctorate. (Daniel’s hood is in blue below.)

It was a touching event; how can one not feel good at the sight of so many young people officially completing the tortuous road to an M.D. or Ph.D.?  And how can one not ponder the wingéd chariot of time as a bunch of old scholars literally transfer their mantle to the next generation?

But enough of this musing.  Here I am with the newly-coined Dr. Matute, resplendent in our academic regalia.  My own, kindly loaned by Dr. Neil Shubin, is the Harvard “crimson” robe (everyone told me it looked PINK), while Daniel is in Chicago maroon.

Kudos to Daniel, and may I take paternal pride in adding that he won the award for the best doctoral thesis in the entire Division of Biological Sciences (he’s holding his certificate).

UPDATE:  My friend Carolyn Johnson sent me some photos she took of the hooding.  Here’s the very moment that Daniel became Dr. Daniel:

And, a happy Ph.D. with his certificate and cash award:

UPDATE: As Maddoxflower reports in the comments below, and which was verified not only on the NBC news last night but by this report, rumors of the typewriter’s death are much exaggerated. Typewriter fans: a few places are still making them.

There will be no more typewriters produced on this planet.  According to the Atlantic, the world’s last typewriter factory, Godrej and Boyce of Mumbai, India, has shut its doors.

With only about 200 machines left — and most of those in Arabic languages — Godrej and Boyce shut down its plant in Mumbai, India, today. “Although typewriters became obsolete years ago in the west, they were still common in India — until recently,” according to the Daily Mail, which ran a special story this morning about the typewriters demise.

Godrej and Boyce’s Prima—the last typewriter model on Earth

UPDATE: He passed (natürlich), with a departmental record closed session of only 35 minutes.

Five years ago I returned from a sabbatical in France to find a graduate student from Colombia sitting on a stool in my lab, peering at flies through the microscope.  His name was Daniel Matute, and he had decided to do a temporary “rotation” in my lab—one of those “let’s-spend-ten-weeks-doing-research-in-a-lab-to-see-how-it-feels” experiences.  Fortunately, Daniel never left, and this morning he will take his formal exam for the Ph.D.  In our department, this consists of presenting a one-hour public talk followed by a closed session in which the candidate is examined by the five members of his committee.

I suspect, however, that the examination will be perfunctory given that this is what he’s accomplished so far:

Matute D. R., C. J. Novak, and J. A. Coyne. 2009. Temperature-based extrinsic reproductive isolation in two species of Drosophila. Evolution 63: 595-612

Matute, D.R., Butler, I.A. & Coyne, J.A. Little or no effect of the tan locus on pigmentation levels inviable female hybrids between Drosophila santomea and D. melanogaster. Cell; 139: 1180-118

Matute D.R., Coyne JA. 2010. Intrinsic reproductive isolation between two sisters species of Drosophila. Evolution; 64: 903 – 920

Matute D.R. 2010. Reinforcement of gametic isolation in Drosophila. PLoS Biol. Mar 23;8(3):e1000341.

Comment in: Mair W. Reinforcing reinforcement. PLoS Biol. 2010 23;8(3):e1000340.

Matute D.R., Butler I.A., Turissini D.A. and Coyne J.A. 2010. The rate of evolution of hybrid incompatibilities in Drosophila. Science, 329: 1518-1521

Comment in: Milton J. Nature News. 2010. Animal and plant genes hardwired for speciation. doi:10.1038/news.2010.476
Research Highlight: Nature Reviews Genetics 11, 748 (November 2010) | doi:10.1038/nrg2895
Dispatch: Presgraves, D. C. Speciation Genetics: Search for the Missing Snowball. Current Biology, 20, R1073-R1074.

Matute D.R. 2010. Reinforcement can overcome gene flow during speciation in Drosophila. Current Biology, 20: 2229-2233.

And there are at least three more papers in the offing.  Daniel, you’ve been a great student and a credit to the lab.

It’s heartening but also sad to see the students come and go over the years: they move on to their careers while I, like a microscope, remain a aging and permanent fixture in the lab.  But let me publicly congratulate the lad, here, in advance.  Best wishes for a stellar career!

Daniel Matute, Ph.D. in statu nascendi

I woke up to the dismaying news that a huge earthquake struck Japan at 2:46 Toyko time, with the epicenter 80 miles off the northeast coast.  With a magnitude of either 8.8 or 8.9. that makes it the fifth biggest earthquake recorded this century.   The good news—if you consider anything good about such an event—is that deaths will be considerably fewer than in previous quakes in Japan, perhaps numbering in the hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands (as in the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923).  Japan now has strict earthquake building codes and everyone knows what to do when the tremors hit.

Our thoughts are with the people of Japan, and with our readers who live there.  Our official Japanese correspondent, Yokohamamama, is visiting California without her husband and three kids, and has posted updates on her website.  She was up all night, frantic, waiting to find out if her family back home was all right: there was no internet or power in Yokohama, and cellphone service was out.  I was speaking with her, however, at the moment when her husband managed to get through on Skype and assure her they were all okay. What a great relief!  She still can’t return home, though, as all airline flights have been canceled. If you live in Japan and are reading this, let us know how things are there.

The New York Times already has posted a page of videos of the quake, which show the great power of such a thing and of its attendant tsunami, which at this moment is working its way across the Pacific at five hundred miles an hour.

As I said, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), this is the fifth largest earthquake recorded in the past century. Here are the top six with their magnitudes on the Richter scale and links to their descriptions.

• 1960 05 22 – Chile – M 9.5
• 1964 03 28 – Prince William Sound, Alaska – M 9.2
• 2004 12 26 – Sumatra-Andaman Islands – M 9.1
• 1952 11 04 – Kamchatka – M 9.0
• 2011 — 8.9 — Friday in Japan
• 2010 — 8.8 — Offshore Maule, Chile

Here’s a USGS map of the fifteen strongest earthquakes of the last century, all but one on striking on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur.

A side note:  as Yokohamamama was sitting in her hotel lobby, where she had spent the night (internet reception was better there), desperate with worry, she was approached by a group of young Christians.  They sat with her a while, trying to be helpful, and—when she still hadn’t learned the fate of her family—told her that “everything happens for a reason.”  The reason, though, was not what they thought: it was simply the slipping of tectonic plates.

One of the three segments on last night’s 60 Minutes on CBS was an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Steve Kroft.  I didn’t learn a lot new, but watching the man talk is always mesmerizing.  There’s a salacious joke about Princess Diana, some self-assessment, a group interview of three of his pals (including Salman Rushdie and the editor of Vanity Fair), and a snippet of his appearance on The Daily Show on the evening after a serious health episode led doctors to tell Hitchens that he probably had metastasized cancer.

One thing that struck me about the interview was the physical resemblance between the young Oxfordian Hitchens:

and one of my rock heroes, Stephen Stills:

h/t: John Danley