ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 240

How Does the Experimental ‘Vaccine’ for Celiac Disease Work?

By Rachael Rettner

An experimental “vaccine” for celiac disease is set to be tested in a new clinical trial to see if the treatment can protect patients with the condition from the effects of eating gluten — or, in other words, allow those patients to eat gluten safely.

The treatment, called Nexvax2 and made by the biotech company ImmusanT Inc., is a type of immunotherapy that aims to “reprogram” the immune system to be tolerant of gluten, the researchers said.

Celiac disease is a condition in which people’s immune systems react abnormally to gluten — a protein found in wheat, rye and barley — and this reaction damages the lining of the small intestine. The condition affects about 1 out of every 100 people in the United States.

Currently, the only way to manage celiac disease is for patients to avoid foods containing gluten for the rest of their lives. But even with the rise in popularity of gluten-free foods, such diets can still be difficult to follow, and patients may be inadvertently exposed to the protein. “Even the most diligent patients can suffer the adverse effects of accidental exposure,” study researcher Jason Tye-Din, head of celiac research at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, said in an Oct. 30 statement.

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Ancient genomics is recasting the story of the Americas’ first residents

By Ewen Callaway

Ancient genomics is finally beginning to tell the history of the Americas — and it’s looking messy.

An analysis of genomes from dozens of ancient inhabitants of North and South America, who lived as long ago as 11,000 years — one of the largest troves of ancient DNA from the region studied so far — suggest that the populations moved fast and frequently. The findings were published on 8 November in Cell1 and Science2.

The studies suggest that North America was widely populated over a few hundred years, and South America within one or two thousand years by related groups. Later migrations on and between the continents connected populations living as distantly as California and the Andes.

“These early populations are really blasting across the continent,” says David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who co-led the Science study.

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Jeff Sessions resigns, ending tenure marred by fights with faith groups

By Jack Jenkins

Methodists asked Jeff Sessions to repent. He resigned instead.

Sessions stepped down today (Nov. 7) as U.S. attorney general, ending a tenure marked by near-constant pushback from faith communities across the religious spectrum who opposed his policies and his attempts to defend them with Scripture.

He reportedly resigned at the request of President Trump, who has voiced frustration with Sessions since he recused himself early last year from the ongoing Department of Justice investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, citing his work on Trump’s campaign.

“I have been honored to serve as Attorney General and have worked to implement the law enforcement agenda based on the rule of law that formed a central part of your campaign for the presidency,” read the closing line of Sessions’ resignation letter to Trump.

Trump tweeted that Sessions’ chief of staff, Matthew G. Whitaker, would serve as acting attorney general for now, thanked Sessions for his service and wished him well.

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Matthew Whitaker: acting attorney general said judges should be Christian

By Jon Swaine

Donald Trump’s new attorney general once said that judges should be Christian and proposed blocking non-religious people from judicial appointments.

Matthew Whitaker, who was made acting attorney general on Wednesday after Trump fired Jeff Sessions, said judges needed a “biblical view of justice” and questioned the judgment of secular lawyers.

Whitaker made the remarks at a conservative forum in April 2014, where he appeared as a candidate for the Republican US Senate nomination in Iowa. Video clips of the event were saved by People For the American Way, a liberal campaign group.

The Republican candidates were asked what justification they would use to block the confirmation of federal judges nominated by Barack Obama, who was then US president.

Whitaker said he wanted to know about a judge’s judicial philosophy, along with their views on natural law, natural rights and the US founding documents. But he added: “I don’t think that gets us far enough.”

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The Trump Administration Just Reissued Rules Allowing Employers “Religious Or Moral” Exemptions To Covering Birth Control

By Ema O’Connor

The Trump administration released two rules Wednesday evening that would allow employers with “religious or moral” objections to providing insurance coverage for birth control to be exempt from providing that coverage.

The rules are amended versions of rules that the administration first released in October 2017. Several organizations quickly took the administration to court over the original rules, and they were blocked by two federal courts. If the new rules are not blocked by the courts again, they are scheduled to go into effect in mid-January 2019.

The Department of Health and Human Services appears to have tailored the rules (the final versions have not yet been posted to the federal register) in the hopes that this time they will stick. A memo pertaining to the rules stated that the new versions contained changes based on “public comments” made in the federal register in 2017. It was not immediately clear what those changes were.

But HHS also says the new rules will affect more women than it previously estimated. An HHS spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in 2017 that the previous versions of the rules were not expected to affect more than 120,000 women’s contraception coverage; they now estimate that “that no more than 126,400 women of childbearing age will be affected by the expanded exemptions,” the memo states. “As noted above, this is less than 0.1% of the over 165 million women in the United States.”

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How biologists are creating life-like cells from scratch

By Kendall Powell

There were just eight ingredients: two proteins, three buffering agents, two types of fat molecule and some chemical energy. But that was enough to create a flotilla of bouncing, pulsating blobs — rudimentary cell-like structures with some of the machinery necessary to divide on their own.

To biophysicist Petra Schwille, the dancing creations in her lab represent an important step towards building a synthetic cell from the bottom up, something she has been working towards for the past ten years, most recently at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.

“I have always been fascinated by this question, ‘What distinguishes life from non-living matter?’” she says. The challenge, according to Schwille, is to determine which components are needed to make a living system. In her perfect synthetic cell, she’d know every single factor that makes it tick.

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Ten Commandments amendment cruising to overwhelming passage

By John Sharp

Alabama voters overwhelmingly supported an amendment to the state’s 1901 Constitution authorizing public displays of the Ten Commandments.

“The people we were hearing from are super excited to have this opportunity to go down in history as the first state to acknowledged that we want God, that is the Christian God, in their Constitution,” said Dean Young, the chief advocate for the amendment and the campaign strategist last year for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore. “This is the first time in the history of the country that a state has taken such a stand in acknowledging the God of the Old and New Testament.”

As the votes continue to come in tonight in Alabama, no measure nor state candidate is winning by a wider margin than the Ten Commandments, as more than 7 out of 10 voters backed the measure.

“This is a big deal. It’s a huge deal,” said Young, before the polls closed earlier Tuesday. “The highest levels across the nation in government are watching what Alabama is doing.”

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Megan Hunt, a Progressive Atheist, Just Won a Seat in Nebraska’s Legislature

By Hemant Mehta

There were a lot of openly non-religious candidates on ballots across the nation yesterday, but one of the biggest victories got virtually no attention at all.

Megan Hunt, a progressive activist from Nebraska, easily won her race in the state’s 8th District.

While her victory — in a non-partisan race to the state’s unicameral legislature — is something to celebrate if you’re a liberal, the Freethought Equality Fund PAC also notes that she’s an atheist:

Megan Hunt is running for the Nebraska State Senate in District 8. She won the nonpartisan primary on May 15 with 56% of the vote. A small business owner, community activist, mother, and sixth-generation Nebraskan, Hunt has worked in her community to empower girls, end sexual assault and harassment, and advocate for comprehensive sex education. Running because “I don’t see enough leaders who are willing to advocate for forward-looking developments in Nebraska policy,” her policy priorities focus on reducing the brain drain in the state, funding quality public education, reforming the criminal justice system, expanding Medicaid, funding for family planning services, and investing in alternative energy sources for Nebraska. Hunt is an atheist.

 

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Kim Davis, clerk who refused to sign marriage licenses for gay couples, loses to Democrat

By Will Wright

Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk made famous by her refusal to sign marriage licenses for gay couples, lost Tuesday in her reelection bid for the Rowan County clerkship.

Davis, a Republican, lost to Democratic challenger Elwood Caudill Jr. by about 700 votes.

Her loss marks at least a temporary end to the saga that has surrounded the clerk’s office since 2015, when Davis was jailed for five days after refusing to sign marriage licenses for gay couples.

“I believe that as a community we must continue to work together toward a more prosperous and cohesive Rowan County,” Caudill said after his win. “Tonight was awesome.”

The controversy launched this mostly-rural Kentucky county into the national spotlight. It gave Davis a hero’s reputation to some on the right, including Gov. Matt Bevin and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who lauded her decision as a self-sacrificing expression of religious liberty.

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Video Shows Real-Life ‘Transformers’ Robots That See, Think, and Transform

By Nick Lucchesi

A team of roboticists have taken another step toward the inevitable future where real-life Transformers move among us.

New research on modular, autonomous robots was published Wednesday that shows how robots can see, think, and decide to transform their shape based on the challenge facing them.

A six-person team published this research paper — “An Integrated System for Perception-Driven Autonomy with Modular Robots” — in the journal Science Robotics. The researchers hail from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Here are the key areas of how the robot does what it does, in the words of the researchers.

“A lot of people have seen this in movies, if you’ve seen like Transformers or Big Hero 6, robots that can change their shape,” says Mark Yim, Professor, University of Pennsylvania, of the modular robots revealed this week. “We’ve had lots of examples of robots that can do things like walking or climbing stairs … but all of those things were done separately. This is the first time that we’ve actually had a system that could do all of this stuff autonomously.”

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