ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 375

Amputees control avatar by imagining moving their missing limbs

By Sam Wong

People who have had amputations can control a virtual avatar using their imagination alone, thanks to a system that uses a brain scanner.

Brain-computer interfaces, which translate neuron activity into computer signals, have been advancing rapidly, raising hopes that such technology can help people overcome disabilities such as paralysis or lost limbs. But it has been unclear how well this might work for people who have had limbs removed some time ago, as the brain areas that previously controlled these may become less active or repurposed for other uses over time.

Ori Cohen at IDC Herzliya, in Israel, and colleagues have developed a system that uses an fMRI brain scanner to read the brain signals associated with imagining a movement. To see if it can work a while after someone has had a limb removed, they recruited three volunteers who had had an arm removed between 18 months and two years earlier, and four people who have not had an amputation.

While lying in the fMRI scanner, the volunteers were shown an avatar on a screen with a path ahead of it, and instructed to move the avatar along this path by imagining moving their feet to move forward, or their hands to turn left or right. The people who had had arm amputations were able to do this just as well with their missing hand as they were with their intact hand. Their overall performance on the task was almost as good as of those people who had not had an amputation.

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The fight to save thousands of lives with sea-floor sensors

By Alexandra Witze

Jerry Paros is worried about the geological time bomb ticking away just off the coast near his home in Washington state. But unlike the millions of people who fear the earthquake and tsunami that will one day rock that region, Paros is doing something about it. His company made millions of dollars building exquisitely precise quartz sensors for oil, gas and other industry applications. Now he wants to use them to save the world from natural disasters.

At the Redmond headquarters of his company, Paroscientific, the 79-year-old inventor picks up a volleyball-sized metallic rack from a table, lifts it to shoulder height and then lowers it. Inside the contraption, sensors pick up the tiny change in atmospheric pressure as the device travels up and down. “Here, I’ll give you a very expensive doorbell,” he says, opening and shutting the office door to change the air pressure yet again. In the air, Paros’s instrument can register such delicate shifts in pressure. But the ultimate destination of this device is offshore, a few kilometres below the waves, where it will sense the weight of the water above it to detect changes in the depth of the sea floor.

Paros wants his ultra-precise gauges to be the heart of an early-warning system designed to detect when an earthquake shifts the sea floor, unleashing a tsunami. He has donated US$2 million to the University of Washington and collaborated with its researchers to test the sensors off the coastline of the Pacific Northwest.

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Court clears Mississippi LGBT objections law; appeal likely

By Emily Wagster Pettus

JACKSON, Miss. — A federal appeals court said Thursday that Mississippi can enforce a law that allows merchants and government employees cite religious beliefs to deny services to same-sex couples, but opponents of the law immediately pledged to appeal.

A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a judge’s decision that had blocked the law.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves had ruled that the law unconstitutionally establishes preferred beliefs and creates unequal treatment for LGBT people. His ruling prevented the law from taking effect last July.

The law does not take effect immediately. Plaintiffs are allowed time to appeal.

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Cold-Blooded Mummy: How India’s Hot Weather Preserved a Reptile

By Laura Geggel

A thirsty chameleon that perished during its desperate search for water may no longer be of this world, but its mummy — naturally preserved by India’s hot, tropical climate — has intrigued people the world over.

That includes those who think it’s a hoax.

The Indian chameleon (Chamaeleo zeylanicus) was likely looking for water from an old pipe that had been dry for years, said filmmaker and writer Janaki Lenin, who found the critter and posted photos of it on Twitter. The animal was still clutching the pipe, even in death.

“The tragic story of a chameleon,” Lenin tweeted June 18. “He must have remembered drinking water from this pipe a couple of years ago. But we had disconnected it.” (Lenin removed the tweet yesterday, June 21.)

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Bird eggs may be shaped by the way their mother flies

By Sam Wong

Eggs is eggs, but some are round while others are long and pointy – and now we finally know why. It’s all to do with birds’ flying ability, according to a new study.

There are many explanations for the variety of birds’ egg shapes. Take the idea that cliff-dwelling birds lay conical eggs that roll in a tight circle so they don’t fall off the cliff; or that clutch size dictates what shape of egg would make incubation more efficient.

To learn more, Mary Caswell Stoddard of Princeton University and colleagues analysed the shape almost 50,000 eggs from around 1400 species in museum collections. They quantified their shapes according to two measurements: the ellipticity, or length relative to width and the asymmetry, whether one end was pointier and the other rounder.

While elliptical eggs can be symmetrical or asymmetrical, spherical asymmetric eggs – like the shape of a hot air balloon – don’t seem to exist in nature.

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Solar System survey casts doubt on mysterious ‘Planet Nine’

By Gabriel Popkin

An analysis of four icy bodies discovered in the outer Solar System reveals no sign that they are being influenced by a large, unseen planet lurking beyond Neptune. The finding chips away at a line of evidence for a ‘Planet Nine’ proposed in 2014 on the basis of the clustering of objects in a region called the Kuiper belt, argues a team of astronomers in a paper1 first posted on the arXiv preprint server on 16 June.

The objects were found by researchers leading the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS), which is studying the region of space beyond Neptune. The bodies that piqued the astronomers’ interest dwell in the outer reaches of the Kuiper belt.

Using the 3.6-metre Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the team found four bodies that orbit the Sun in enormous ellipses at least 250 astronomical units (au) wide. An au is equivalent to the distance between Earth and the Sun; Neptune orbits at around 30 au. About 12 large-orbit bodies have been spotted so far, including the four found by OSSOS.

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Christians Are Harassing the Atheist Lawyer Who Won the Pensacola Cross Case

By Hemant Mehta

Earlier this week, a judge in Florida ruled that a giant government-sponsored Christian cross in Pensacola had to come down. It was clearly an establishment of religion, he said, adding, “the law is the law.”

The attorney who successfully argued this case for the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center was Monica Miller, who’s been with the AHA for five years. Her bio is incredibly impressive and she’s done a lot of work in the past several years on behalf of atheist plaintiffs, but this recent victory really struck a nerve with Christians who are now harassing her (and the AHA).

This particular post seems to have gotten the most attention on Facebook. It’s been shared more than 7,000 times as of this writing. And it’s by a man named Lou Cobb, whose Facebook profile says he’s retired from the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office in Florida.

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ESA approves gravitational-wave hunting spacecraft for 2034

By Leah Crane

LISA is a go. After decades of development and delays, the European Space Agency has given the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna mission, designed to study gravitational waves in space, the official green light. The triplet spacecraft are now slated for launch in 2034.

“I think there’s a mixture of super-excitement and ‘at last’,” says Mark McCaughrean, ESA’s senior advisor for science & exploration. “We’re finally over the starting line – it’s great.”

LISA will be made up of three identical satellites orbiting the sun in a triangle formation, each 2.5 million kilometres from the next. The sides of the triangle will be powerful lasers bounced to and fro between the spacecraft.

As large objects like black holes move through space they cause gravitational waves, ripples which stretch and squeeze space-time. The LISA satellites will detect how these waves warp space via tiny changes in the distance the laser beams travel.

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Survey Finds Broad Opposition to ‘License to Discriminate’ Laws

By Trudy Ring

If you listen to anti-LGBT politicians and activists, you’d think Americans are clamoring for “turn away the gays” laws — but a new survey indicates that’s not the case.

The 2016 American Values Atlas, released today by the Public Religion Research Institute, found that no major religious group had a majority of members supporting “license to discriminate” laws. And there was broad endorsement of marriage equality as well.

“For the first time in a PRRI poll of this size, no major religious group reports majority support for religiously based service refusals of gay and lesbian Americans,” PRRI CEO Robert P. Jones said in a press release. “And most religious groups today support same-sex marriage. The religious groups in which majorities oppose same-sex marriage make up less than 20 percent of the public.”

Sixty-one of those surveyed opposed allowing small business owners in their state to turn away gay or lesbian customers on religious grounds. Only half (50 percent) of white evangelical Protestants and fewer than half of Mormons (42 percent), Hispanic Protestants (34 percent), black Protestants (25 percent), and Jehovah’s Witnesses (25 percent) believe small business owners should have “religious refusal” rights.

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Teeth tell tale of hippo’s quick spread across Africa

By Traci Watson

Quick, huge and deadly, the common hippo is the king of Africa’s rivers. Now fossils suggest that hippos assumed power swiftly and that changes in vegetation helped to propel their rise.

An analysis of hippo teeth excavated at an Ethiopian fossil site suggests that the hippo went from bit player to boss of the waterways in less than 1.5 million years1. Earlier research had established that hippos exploded in abundance and diversity at some point in their history, but how long this ‘hippopotamine event’ took and when it happened was unknown2, 3.

The latest study concludes that the event began around 8 million years ago, as new grass types spread through Africa. This timing supports the theory that the hippo’s ascent is linked in part to the spread of these grasses. Today’s common hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius) lolls in the water during the day, emerging at night onto land to tuck into nearby greenery, especially grasses.

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