ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 304

Snow Monkeys Love Hot Baths Just Like Humans Do, and Now We Know Why

By Rachael Rettner

Japanese macaques, or “snow monkeys,” have been spotted taking baths in man-made hot springs during winter for decades. Now, researchers have discovered exactly why the monkeys do this.

The results are not exactly Earth-shattering: The monkeys are cold.

But the researchers also found that indulging in a hot-spring bath may lower the monkeys’ levels of biological stress.

“This indicates that, as in humans, the hot spring has a stress-reducing effect in snow monkeys,” study lead author Rafaela Takeshita, of Kyoto University in Japan, said in a statement. “This unique habit of hot spring bathing by snow monkeys illustrates how behavioral flexibility can help counter cold-climate stress,” Takeshita said.

The study was published Tuesday (April 3) in the journal Primates.

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Brain-stimulation trials get personal to lift depression

By Nicky Phillips

Before playing a guitar, musicians tune the strings to particular frequencies to get the pitch they want. Starting this week, a team of neuroscientists in Australia will apply a similar tuning process to human brains as part of a study to recalibrate abnormal neural patterns to a healthy state.

The group, at Monash University in Melbourne, is conducting one of the first trials to use electrodes on people’s scalps, both to monitor their brain activity and to provide customized electrical stimulation. By tuning groups of neurons to specific frequencies, the team will attempt to alleviate people’s depression and other mood disorders. The Monash team is one of several around the world experimenting with such ‘closed loop’ systems — where stimulation is directed by the patient’s brain activity, which is in turn altered by the stimulation.

“They’re doing something right at the cutting edge,” says Charlotte Stagg, a neurophysiologist at the University of Oxford, UK. “It’ll be pretty cool if they can get it to work.”

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Vet Sues Air Force Over Controversy Involving Christian Flag-Folding Speech

By Hemant Mehta

As recently as a couple of years ago, the U.S. Air Force made clear that “when a flag folding ceremony is desired and conducted by Air Force personnel at any location, on or off an installation, this script is the only one that may be used.” They were referring to a secular script drenched in patriotism.

The alternative, which the Air Force said could be used at “personal ceremonies as long as the participants are volunteers,” was explicitly Christian.

Here’s the dilemma: Which version did you have to use at a personal retirement ceremony at an Air Force base when military officials were involved? (Was that a public or private event?)

That was the question at the heart of a 2016 controversy.

When retired Senior Master Sgt. Oscar Rodriguez gave the flag-folding speech at his friend’s retirement ceremony at Travis Air Force Base in April of that year, he used the Christian version of the speech. But because he was supposed to use the secular version, he was disobeying protocol and essentially removed from the ceremony by force.

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Religious Liberty for a Select Few

By Sharita Gruberg, Frank J. Bewkes, Elizabeth Platt, Katherine Franke, and Claire Markham

Introduction and summary

In its first year, the Trump administration has systematically redefined and expanded the right to religious exemptions, creating broad carve-outs to a host of vital health, labor, and anti-discrimination protections. On May 4, 2017—the National Day of Prayer—during a ceremony outside the White House, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.” At the time, the executive order was reported to be a “major triumph” for Vice President Mike Pence, who, as governor of Indiana, famously signed a religious exemption law that would have opened the door to anti-LGBTQ discrimination.1 Among its other directives, the order instructed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in Federal law.”2 The guidance on “Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty,” which Sessions subsequently issued in October 2017, purports to clarify existing religious liberty protections.3 However, in practice, it expands those provisions to improperly elevate the right to religious exemptions above other legal and constitutional rights and to shield those who would seek to use federal dollars while denying necessary services to and discriminating against LGBTQ people, women, and religious minorities.

Federal agencies are already relying on Sessions’ guidance to broaden exemptions related to essential health services, including sexual and reproductive health care. In January 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the creation of a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in the Office for Civil Rights as well as the publication of a proposed rule that would radically redefine and expand existing religious exemptions under the law. Among its other provisions, the rule would expand the right of health care providers to deny patients necessary care related to abortion and sterilization.4 In October 2017, HHS published a rule allowing virtually any employer that objects to contraception on moral or religious grounds to apply for an exemption to the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that employers provide contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans.5 Both measures referenced Sessions’ October 2017 guidance as part of the department’s rationale for promulgating these rules.

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Our tree-climbing human ancestors could walk upright like us, study of chimps and other primates shows

By Ann Gibbons

With their opposable toes and flat feet, early human ancestors have often been portrayed as weird walkers, swaying from side to side or rolling off the outside edges of their feet. Now, a new study finds that this picture of awkward upright locomotion is wrong: Early members of the human family, or hominins, were already walking upright with an efficient, straight-legged gait some 4.4 million years ago. The study helps settle a long-standing debate about how quickly our ancestors developed a humanlike gait, and shows that ancient hominins didn’t have to sacrifice climbing agility to walk upright efficiently.

For years, some paleoanthropologists argued that hominins like the famous 3.1-million-year-old Lucy weren’t graceful on the ground because they retained traits for climbing trees, such as long fingers and toes. In one famous experiment, researchers donned extra-long shoes—one critic called them clown shoes—to mimic walking with longer toes. The scientists stumbled over their long feet and concluded that early hominins would have been just as clumsy. But other researchers argued that natural selection would have quickly favored adaptations for efficient walking given the dangers on the ground, even while hominins were still scurrying up trees.

To test these hypotheses, evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer of the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City and his team compared how humans, living apes, and monkeys use their hips, leg bones, and muscles when they walk and climb. CUNY graduate student Elaine Kozma filmed chimps, bonobos, gorillas, gibbons, and other primates in zoos so she could measure the precise angles of their legs and hips when they walked upright. She then calculated the stresses on their bones during maximum extension and found that apes put a lot of force on their massive thighs, hamstrings, and knees—forces that also help them power up trees.

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Judge to North Carolina Prisons: Humanism Is a Faith Group

By Gary D. Robinson

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The North Carolina prison system must recognize humanism as a faith group and allow its adherents behind bars to meet and study their beliefs, a federal judge has ruled in an order released Thursday.

The American Humanist Association and a North Carolina inmate serving a life sentence for murder sued state Department of Public Safety officials in 2015. They accused prison leaders of violating the religious establishment and equal protection clauses of the Constitution by repeatedly denying recognition the requests of the inmate, Kwame Jamal Teague.

In the order, U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle wrote that prison officials failed to justify treating humanism differently from those religions that are recognized behind bars. Boyle also ordered the state to adjust its computer system so prisoners who declare themselves humanists can be registered under that group.

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Supreme Court Won’t Hear Christian Group’s Case Involving Giant Cross in MI

By Hemant Mehta

The Supreme Court announced today that it would not hear a case involving a giant hydraulic cross that had been going up in Grand Haven, Michigan several times a year until the city decided to take it down. That’s exactly what supporters of church/state separation were hoping for.

The cross on Dewey Hill had come under fire in 2014, and local atheists soon convinced the city council to put an end to the government promotion of religion. Ever since then, however, Christians have been trying to fight back.

In 2015, Christians who were furious about losing a privilege they never deserved in the first place formed a group called “Citizens of Grand Haven” and filed a lawsuit asking the court to reverse the city council’s decision.

Their case was dismissed later that year in large part because the organization wasn’t real (it was only created to file this lawsuit) and because the members were anonymous. They soon filed a new lawsuit, this time without the anonymity.

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World’s largest dinosaur found in Scotland

By  Chris Dyer

Rare dinosaur footprints belonging to the largest animal to ever roam the planet have been found in Scotland. Dozens of the 170 million-year-old fossils, belonging to early sauropods, have been unearthed in a muddy lagoon on the Isle of Skye.

Sauropods grew to be at least 49ft (15 metres) long and weighed more than 10 tonnes. Footprints from theropods – the “older cousins” of Tyrannosaurus rex who stood at two metres tall – were also found.

They are thought to be the oldest dinosaur fossils ever found in Scotland. Another set of footprints were also found on Skye in 2015,.

Geologists say the new finds are important as evidence from the Middle Jurassic period is rare, and few such fossil sites have been found around the world.

The discovery adds to growing evidence the prehistoric reptiles were widespread on Skye at a pivotal time in their evolution.

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Bats Are Migrating Earlier, and It Could Wreak Havoc on Farming

By Inga Vesper

Every year migratory bats travel from Mexico to Bracken Cave near San Antonio, Tex., where they spend the summer consuming insects that would otherwise devour common food crops. But the bats have been showing up far earlier than they did two decades ago, possibly because of a warming climate, new research suggests.

This trend creates a risky situation in which bats may not find enough food for themselves and their young, as the insects they prey on may not yet have arrived or hatched. If bat colonies shrink as a result of this schedule snafu, their pest control effect could fall out of sync with crop-growing seasons—potentially causing hefty losses, scientists say.

“If the whole system becomes unreliable, then it will be a big, big problem for agriculture,” says Jennifer Krauel, a bat biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who was not involved in the new research. “I don’t think the bats will go away entirely, but even a reduced colony size will have an effect.”

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Why Easter never became a big secular holiday like Christmas

By Tara Isabella Burton

Christians from a variety of traditions will celebrate Easter this Sunday. Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. For many Christians, including those from Eastern Orthodox traditions (who generally celebrate Easter later than Western Christians, as they use a different calendar), Easter is the most important Christian holiday of all.

But in North America and Europe, Easter has a diminished cultural force as a time for secular celebration — its wider cultural cachet hardly approaches that of Christmas. As Jesuit priest and writer James Martin wryly wrote for Slate, “Sending out hundreds of Easter cards this year? Attending way too many Easter parties? … Getting tired of those endless Easter-themed specials on television? I didn’t think so.”

So why don’t we celebrate Easter the way we do Christmas? The answer tells us as much about the religious and social history of America as it does about either holiday. It reveals the way America’s holiday “traditions” as we conceive of them now are a much more recent and politically loaded invention than one might expect.

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