ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 314

A new era of rationally designed antipsychotics

By David R. Sibley & Lei Shi

Schizophrenia is a disorder that involves hallucinations, delusions and cognitive impairment, and that affects nearly 1% of the global population1. The mainstays of therapy have been drugs that block the activity of the D2 dopamine receptor (D2R), a member of the large G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily of membrane proteins. Unfortunately, most of these antipsychotic drugs come with a plethora of debilitating side effects, many of which are due to off-target interactions with other GPCRs. In a paper in Nature, Wang et al.2 now report the crystal structure of D2R in complex with the antipsychotic drug risperidone. The structure reveals features that might be useful for the design or discovery of drugs that have greater selectivity for D2R than existing therapeutics, and consequently have fewer side effects.

The naturally occurring ligand for D2R is a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which mediates various physiological functions, including the control of coordinated movement, cognition and the reinforcing properties of drugs of abuse. There are five receptors for dopamine, which fall into two subgroups on the basis of their associated intracellular signalling pathways and their affinities for various drugs3: D1-like receptors (D1R and D5R) and D2-like receptors (D2R, D3R and D4R). As early as the 1970s, it was hypothesized that the therapeutic effects of antipsychotic drugs were due to them blocking D2-like, rather than D1-like, receptors4,5, but the existence of multiple D2-like receptors was not discovered until they were cloned some 15 years later6.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Atheist Groups Demand Equal Treatment for Humanist Nevada Prison Inmate

By Hemant Mehta

After a federal judge said Humanism doesn’t count as a “religion” when it comes to a non-religious federal prisoner who just wanted the same perks and privileges offered to his religious colleagues, the American Humanist Association is filing an appeal. And they have support from two other major groups promoting church/state separation.

This case was originally filed in October of 2016. Benjamin Espinosa, an inmate at Northern Nevada Correctional Center, said he just wanted to start a Humanist study group, much like Christian inmates who get together to study the Bible. But he wasn’t able to do that — or a lot of other things religious inmates could do — because the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDoC) said he wasn’t part of a recognized faith group.

Here’s what Espinosa was asking for since it’s what all the other inmates got:

(1) ability to meet with community-funded or volunteer chaplains on a regular basis; (2) ability to keep religious items both in their cells and in faith group storage containers in the prison chapel; (3) eligibility for enrollment in a religious correspondence course; (4) to have community chaplain perform religious rites/rituals; (5) work proscription days and observance of holidays; and (6) to receive donated materials or to purchase items such as books, DVDs, and various articles such as medallions, crosses, crystals, herbs, incense, etc.

In addition to not being able to do the secular equivalents of all that, he also wasn’t able to schedule meeting times the same way, nor was he given a venue for those gatherings.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Pence: Abortion will end in U.S. ‘in our time’

By Jessie Hellmann

Vice President Pence predicted Tuesday that legal abortion would end in the U.S. “in our time.”

“I know in my heart of hearts this will be the generation that restores life in America,” Pence said at a luncheon in Nashville, Tenn., hosted by the Susan B. Anthony List & Life Institute, an anti-abortion organization.

“If all of us do all we can, we can once again, in our time, restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law.”

Pence has long championed anti-abortion policies, as a congressman, as the governor of Indiana and as vice president.

He told the crowd he has seen more progress in the Trump administration’s first year in office than he has in his entire life. 

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Physicists plan antimatter’s first outing — in a van

By Elizabeth Gibney

Antimatter is notoriously volatile, but physicists have learned to control it so well that they are now starting to harness it as a tool for the first time. In a project that began last month, researchers will transport antimatter by truck and then use it to study the strange behaviour of rare radioactive nuclei. The work aims to provide a better understanding of fundamental processes inside atomic nuclei and to help astrophysicists learn about the interiors of neutron stars, which contain the densest form of matter in the Universe.

“Antimatter has long been studied for itself, but now it is mastered well enough that people can start to use it as a probe for matter,” says Alexandre Obertelli, a physicist at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, who leads the project, known as PUMA (antiProton Unstable Matter Annihilation), which will take place at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

CERN’s antimatter factory makes antiprotons — the rare mirror image of protons — by slamming a proton beam into a metal target, then dramatically slowing the emerging antiparticles so they can be used in experiments. Obertelli and his colleagues plan to use magnetic and electric fields to trap a cloud of antiprotons in a vacuum (see ‘Antimatter to go’). Then they will load the trap into a van and drive it a few hundred metres to the site of a neighbouring experiment, known as ISOLDE, that produces rare, radioactive atomic nuclei that decay too quickly to be transported anywhere themselves. “It’s almost science fiction to be driving around antimatter in a truck,” says Charles Horowitz, a theoretical nuclear physicist at Indiana University Bloomington. “It’s a wonderful idea.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

South Carolina Republicans want ‘parody marriages’ to circumvent marriage equality

By Zack Ford

A group of South Carolina state lawmakers have proposed a new bill to try to circumvent marriage equality and allow discrimination against gay, lesbian, and bi people. It would dub same-sex couples’ marriages “parody marriages,” and its reasoning is incomprehensibly bizarre.

According to H. 4949, a “parody marriage” is “any form of marriage that does not involve one man and one woman.” It proposes that “the State of South Carolina shall no longer respect, endorse, or recognize any form of parody marriage policy because parody marriage policies are nonsecular.”

It likewise seeks to justify discrimination by proposing that “the State of South Carolina shall no longer enforce, recognize, or respect any policy that treats sexual orientation as a suspect class because all such statutes lack a secular purpose.”

Only marriages between a man and a woman would continue to be recognized “because such marriage policies are secular, accomplishing nonreligious objectives.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Billy Graham Was a Giant in American Political Life

By Charles P. Pierce

When I was growing up, Rev. Billy Graham was one of those names that floated around the news stream like lily pads in a pond. Estes Kefauver. Willy Brandt. Anastas Mikoyan. And Billy Graham. Johnny Carson used to make jokes about him that the adults thought were a riot. Occasionally, he’d drop by one of the talk shows and make small talk with Merv or Mike. He was a giant figure in the political life of this country. And now he’s dead, at 99. That’s a good long run.

I guess I’m supposed to have something to say about him. After all, as The New York Times says:

“A central achievement was his encouraging evangelical Protestants to regain the social influence they had once wielded, reversing a retreat from public life that had begun when their efforts to challenge evolution theory were defeated in the Scopes trial in 1925.

“But in his later years, Mr. Graham kept his distance from the evangelical political movement he had helped engender, refusing to endorse candidates and avoiding the volatile issues dear to religious conservatives.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

The Necessity of Secularism, pg 75

I”n any event, it’s obvious that the belief that atheists are immoral is not based on relevant factual information. It is noteworthy that this prejudice took root long before open expression of disbelief in God was a common phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, it was exceedingly rare for atheists to be open about their disbelief – with good reason, as a public declaration of atheism was sure to end in social death if not actual death. In fact, it’s only been fairly recently that large numbers of people have voluntarily identified as atheists, agnostics, humanists, or just plan “not religious.” So it’s not as though people studied and compared the behavior of believers and nonbelievers and drew the conclusion that nonbelievers are a bad group of people. To the contrary, many believers have simply assumed that the conduct of atheists must be worse than the conduct of theists because in their minds God is closely, if vaguely, associated with morality.”

Discuss!

Question of the Week- 2/28/2018

The Winter Olympics have come to a close, and one can’t help but wonder: What if there were an Olympics for science? Could there be a gold medal in experiment replication? Record times achieved in exoplanet discovery? What kind of events could there be in a Scientific Olympics?

Our favorite answer will win a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins.

Want to suggest a Question of the Week? E-mail submissions to us at qotw@richarddawkins.net. (Questions only, please. All answers to bimonthly questions are made only in the comments section of the Question of the Week.)

Humans Will Hear from Intelligent Aliens This Century, Physicist Says

By Jeanna Bryner

Humans will make contact with aliens by the end of the century, theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku told Redditers last week. However, Kaku said he wasn’t sure whether we’d be able to communicate directly with this unknown extraterrestrial society — one that could run the gamut from hostile to pacifist, according to Kaku.

In his AMA on Reddit, Kaku responded to a question about alien civilizations, saying, “Let me stick my neck out. I personally feel that within this century, we will make contact with an alien civilization, by listening in on their radio communications. But talking to them will be difficult, since they could be tens of light years away. So, in the meantime, we must decipher their language to understand their level of technology. Are they Type I, II, or III??? [These represent three categories in the Kardashev scale, measuring technological achievement in civilizations based on their level of energy use for communication.] And what are their intentions. Are they expansive and aggressive, or peaceful.”

Kaku added, “Another possibility is that they land on the White House lawn and announce their existence. But I think that is unlikely, since we would be like forest animals to them, i.e. not worth communicating with.” 

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

China’s lust for jaguar fangs imperils big cats

By Barbara Fraser

The jaguar was found floating in a drainage canal in Belize City, Belize, on the day after Christmas last year. Its body was mostly intact, but the head was missing its fangs. On 10 January, a second cat — this time, an ocelot that may have been mistaken for a young jaguar — turned up headless in the same channel.

The killings point to a growing illicit trade in jaguars (Panthera onca) that disturbs wildlife experts. The cats’ fangs, skulls and hides have long been trophies for Latin American collectors who flout international prohibitions against trading in jaguar parts. But in recent years, a trafficking route has emerged to China, where the market for jaguars could be increasing because of crackdowns on the smuggling of tiger parts used in Chinese traditional medicine.

Wildlife trafficking often follows Chinese construction projects in other countries, because Chinese workers can send or take objects home, says ecologist Vincent Nijman of Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, UK. “If there’s a demand [in China] for large-cat parts, and that demand can be fulfilled by people living in parts of Africa, other parts of Asia or South America, then someone will step in to fill that demand,” he says. “It’s often Chinese-to-Chinese trade, but it’s turning global.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.