ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 371

Despite Pushback, Atheist Gives Lovely Invocation to Oskaloosa (IA) City Council

By Hemant Mehta

Iowa atheist activist Justin Scott delivered his controversial-to-some invocation at last night’s meeting of the Oskaloosa City Council and it was, as expected, perfectly reasonable and inspiring.

You can hear it at the 1:10 mark in the video below.

Good evening. On behalf of the Eastern Iowa Atheists and the rising number of atheists and other non-religious citizens across Oskaloosa and Iowa, thank you for this opportunity.

It is an honor to be delivering the first ever inclusive invocation at an Oskaloosa City Council meeting, honoring both the constitution of Iowa and the United States.

Tonight’s invocation is dedicated to Iona Loonie and to anybody else across Eastern Iowa or Iowa that have ever stood up for equality in their communities but have been told to look the other way or move out.

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Invisibility cloak makes solar panels work more efficiently

By Shannon Hall

An invisibility cloak has been used in the lab to hide the metallic strips used in solar panels, making the devices more efficient at using the sun’s energy.

Invisibility cloaks are made of materials that can bend the path of light around them and so hide anything under them from view. Martin Schumann at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and his colleagues have used one to create a prototype solar panel with a cloak over the metallic contact fingers throughout the panel that extract the generated current.

Although crucial, these metal strips also reduce how much light a panel can absorb, reducing efficiency by about 10 per cent. “In the end, solar cell energy has to compete with all the fossil-fuel energy and it’s essential to increase the efficiency as much as possible in order to decrease the costs,” Schumann says.

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Turkey will stop teaching evolution in schools, education ministry says

By  Raf Sanchez

Turkish schoolchildren will no longer be taught about evolution, a government official has said, in another sign of the conservative direction the country is heading in under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Alpaslan Durmus, the head of curriculum for the ministry of education, said that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “controversial” and would be removed from school programmes by 2019.

“We have excluded controversial subjects for students at an age unable yet to understand the issues’ scientific background,” Mr Durmus said.

“As the students at ninth grade are not endowed with antecedents to discuss the ‘Origin of Life and Evolution’ section in biology classes, this section will be delayed until undergraduate study.”

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The trickiest family tree in biology

By Ewen Callaway

For 18 months in the early 1980s, John Sulston spent his days watching worms grow. Working in twin 4-hour shifts each day, Sulston would train a light microscope on a single Caenorhabditis elegans embryo and sketch what he saw at 5-minute intervals, as a fertilized egg morphed into two cells, then four, eight and so on. He worked alone and in silence in a tiny room at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, solving a Rubik’s cube between turns at the microscope. “I did find myself little distractions,” the retired Nobel prize-winning biologist once recalled.

His hundreds of drawings revealed the rigid choreography of early worm development, encompassing the births of precisely 671 cells, and the deaths of 111 (or 113, depending on the worm’s sex). Every cell could be traced to its immediate forebear and then to the one before that in a series of invariant steps. From these maps and others, Sulston and his collaborators were able to draw up the first, and so far the only, complete ‘cell-lineage tree’ of a multicellular organism1.

Although the desire to record an organism’s development in such exquisite detail preceded Sulston by at least a century, the ability to do so in more-complex animals has been limited. No one could ever track the fates of billions of cells in a mouse or a human with just a microscope and a Rubik’s cube to pass the time. But there are other ways. Revolutions in biologists’ ability to edit genomes and sequence them at the level of a single cell have sparked a renaissance in cell-lineage tracing.

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Christian crisis pregnancy centers sue Illinois over new abortion notice law

By Steve Schmadeke

Christian crisis pregnancy centers in the south and far western suburbs are challenging a change in the state’s right-of-conscience law that since January requires physicians and nurses to notify pregnant patients of all their available options, including abortion.

The lawsuit, filed against state officials including Gov. Bruce Rauner, claims their constitutional free-speech rights are violated by the changes to the law because they have to offer advice they find morally wrong. The clinics also allege the new law violates federal laws banning discrimination against doctors and other health care workers who do not provide or refer patients for abortions.

Supporters of the law say the changes only require health care providers to inform patients of all their options — a standard practice of care in the medical field.

The law was originally passed — after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion — to shield physicians opposed to performing the procedure. Modifications to that law, designed to protect patients who didn’t know all their options, were signed into law by Rauner last year after an emotional Illinois Senate subcommittee hearing that drew testimony from patients.

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What to Believe in Antarctica’s Great Ice Debate

By Shannon Hall

Our fate is tied to a frozen desert at the bottom of the world. Should Antarctica’s ice sheets dissolve, sea levels would rise dramatically—enough to flood the world’s great coastal megalopolises from New York to Shanghai and push millions of people inland. But determining just how the vast and frigid continent is currently responding to a warming world has been a challenge.

In West Antarctica the story is relatively clear. The floating platforms of ice that ring the coast are thinning, glaciers are surging toward the sea, meltwater is flowing across the surface, fast-growing moss is turning the once-shimmering landscape green and a massive crack threatens to cleave an iceberg the size of Delaware into the ocean. But in East Antarctica, where rising temperatures have caused increased humidity and thus more snowfall, the story takes an unexpected turn.

Most scientists agree that East Antarctica—unlike its western counterpart—is gaining mass in the form of snowfall, ice or both. But how much? And is it enough to counterbalance West Antarctica’s accelerating losses? A recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters by Alba Martin-Español from the University of Bristol and his colleagues suggests the gains in East Antarctica are so small that the continent is losing mass overall. This is just one in a long line of studies that disagree with rather controversial findings published in the Journal of Glaciology in 2015, which suggested that Antarctica is gaining mass. That study sparked a dizzying debate—but one that will ultimately help glaciologists grasp just what is happening in East Antarctica, and push scientists to consider how to handle contentious results in a warming world.

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First big efforts to sequence ancient African DNA reveal how early humans swept across the continent

By Elizabeth Pennisi

The study of ancient human DNA has not been an equal opportunity endeavor. Early Europeans and Asians have had portions of their genomes sequenced by the hundreds over the past decade, rewriting Eurasian history in the process. But because genetic material decays rapidly in warm, moist climates, scientists had sequenced the DNA of just one ancient African. Until now.

This week, at the annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution here, scientists announced that they had partially sequenced 15 ancient African genomes, with representatives from all over sub-Saharan Africa. And another group—whose work is still unpublished—has sequenced seven more ancient humans from South Africa. “[Finding] ancient genomes from Africa is pretty amazing,” says Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, a population geneticist at the University of Bern, who was not involved in either project.

Africa has long been called the “cradle of humanity,” from which our earliest human ancestors spread across the rest of the world some 50,000 years ago. Africa is also where people—ancient and modern—are most genetically diverse. But how such groups, from the Hadza of East Africa to the Khoe-San of Southern Africa, came to be is a mystery. That’s in part because some 2000 years ago, early adopters of agriculture known as the Bantu spread across the continent, erasing the genetic footprint of other Africans. The one ancient African genome that has been sequenced—an Ethiopian who lived some 4500 years ago—has shed little light on this mystery.   

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CRISPR gene editing technique is probably safe, study confirms

By Michael Le Page

As you were. In May, a study claimed that the revolutionary CRISPR gene editing technique can cause thousands of unwanted and potentially dangerous mutations. The authors called for regulators to reassess the safety of the technique.

But doubts were raised about these claims from the very beginning, not least because it was a tiny study involving just three mice. Some critics have called for the paper to be withdrawn. Now a paper posted online on 5 July has proposed a simple and more plausible explanation for the controversial results. If it’s right, the authors of the original study were wrong.

“We strongly encourage the authors to restate the title and conclusions of their original paper or provide properly controlled experiments that can adequately support their claims,” write the team behind the new study. “Not doing so does a disservice to the field and leaves the misleading impression that the strong statements and recommendations found in their paper are adequately supported by the data presented.”

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Rhode Island Approves Ban On Conversion Therapy

By John Riley

On the final day of their legislative session, Rhode Island lawmakers approved a bill banning the practice of conversion therapy by licensed counselors on residents under the age of 18.

The Senate voted to approve the House version of the bill, which allows the Department of Health to discipline those licensed counselors who engage in the therapy with minors. The bill also prohibits public funds from being used to facilitate the practice of conversion therapy.

The prohibition on the therapy does not apply to therapy or counseling sought by an individual who is struggling with accepting or navigating issues related to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The bill now heads to the desk of Gov. Gina Raimondo (D), who is expected to sign it into law.

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Plague Is Found in New Mexico. Again.

By Liam Stack

The New Mexico Department of Health said this week that two women were found to have plague, bringing the total number of people this year in the state known to have the disease to three.

All three patients — a 63-year-old man and two women, ages 52 and 62 — were treated at hospitals in the Santa Fe area and released after a few days, said Paul Rhien, a health department spokesman.

Health officials in New Mexico have more experience with plague than many might expect: Every year for the last few years, a handful of people in New Mexico have come down with plague. One person has died.

While the word “plague” may conjure images of medieval cities laid to waste by the Black Death, the disease is still a part of the modern world. It is much less common than it once was, but it is no less serious.

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