ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 381

Republican Congressman Says God Will ‘Take Care Of’ Climate Change

By Mahita Gajanan

A Republican congressman told his constituents that he believes God will “take care of” climate change if it proves to be a “real problem.”

Michigan Rep. Tim Walberg said during a town hall in Coldwater, Mich., on Friday that while he believes climate change is real, it is not something for humans to solve.

“I believe there’s climate change. I believe there’s been climate change since the beginning of time,” Walberg said. “Do I think man has some impact? Yeah, of course. Can man change the entire universe? No.”

He continued: “Why do I believe that? Well, as a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us. And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

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Climate change will make people sicker. Trump may pull out of Paris anyway.

By Julia Belluz

President Donald Trump is poised to make good on his campaign promise to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement, which would delay much needed progress on fighting global warming and damage America’s image abroad.

Less appreciated is what the move could mean for human health — and the implications of delaying action on climate change are staggering.

Researchers have long been arguing that the effects of climate change could undermine the last 50 years of gains in development and medicine, increasing the spread of deadly infections like yellow fever and the risk of chronic diseases like asthma and heart disease. So now is simply not the time to be scaling back efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The December 2015 agreement, which has been signed by nearly 200 countries, aimed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. (The US had committed to cutting its emissions by up to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.) These goals were widely viewed as a win for public health. Now, Trump’s retreat could be a major setback.

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LIGO’s third detection hints at how black hole binaries are born

By Leah Crane

Three’s a party. The LIGO collaboration has made its third observation of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of merging black holes – giving us more insight into how these pairs form and building up our catalogue of them.

“The first one was a novelty. The second one was confirmation that the novelty of the first one was not a fluke. The third one is astrophysics,” says LIGO spokesperson David Shoemaker at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “We’re making the transition to talking about a population of these objects.”

LIGO detects waveforms, which are readouts of the ripples in the fabric of the universe caused by masses moving through it. The spins of merging black holes can warp those waveforms, which are mostly produced by their orbits and eventual collision.

For the first event, we did not have enough information to determine the direction in which each black hole was spinning. For the second, we had slightly more information, indicating that each black hole was probably spinning in the same direction as they were orbiting one another.

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The Secret Evangelicals at Planned Parenthood

By Laura Kasinof

Elizabeth* is a 29-year-old stay-at-home mother of four. From a young age, her conservative evangelical parents and pastors impressed upon her the values of the religious right: that a woman’s virginity is a gift to her husband, that sex outside of marriage is a sin, that abortion is murder.

Planned Parenthood was the enemy. “My dad instilled in me that we were against that group,” Elizabeth says. “He was the kind of guy that would honk in support when people were outside protesting.”

At 18, Elizabeth married her high school sweetheart in the same conservative California church she had attended every Sunday since childhood. But the marital bliss she’d been taught would follow didn’t—within just a few years, Elizabeth discovered that her husband was having an affair, and she divorced him soon after. Suddenly she was uninsured.

Before long, Elizabeth started experiencing severe cramping and heavy periods—symptoms she would later learn were the result of an ovarian cyst. “That’s when the whole Planned Parenthood thing started,” she recalls.

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Biodiversity moves beyond counting species

By Rachel Cernansky

Emmett Duffy was about 5 metres under water off the coast of Panama, when a giant, tan-and-white porcupinefish caught his eye. The slow-moving creature would have been a prime target for predators if not for the large, treelike branches of elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) it was sheltering under. The sighting was a light-bulb moment for Duffy, a marine biologist. He’d been to places in the Caribbean where corals were more abundant and more diverse, but smaller; the fish there were always small, too. Here, in the Bocas Del Toro archipelago, he was seeing a variety of big fish among the elkhorns. “The reason these large fish were able to thrive,” he says, “was that there were places for them to hide and places for them to live.”

For Duffy, that encounter with the porcupinefish (Diodon hystrix) brought to life a concept that had long been simmering in the back of his head: that the health of an ecosystem may depend not only on the number of species present, but also on the diversity of their traits. This idea, which goes by the name of functional-trait ecology, had been part of his lab work for years but had always felt academic and abstract, says Duffy, now director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network in Washington DC.

It’s an idea that’s increasingly in vogue for ecologists. Biodiversity, it states, doesn’t have to be just about the number of a species in an ecosystem. Equally important to keeping an ecosystem healthy and resilient are the species’ different characteristics and the things they can do — measured in terms of specific traits such as body size or branch length.

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Superantibiotic is 25,000 times more potent than its predecessor

By Robert Service

The world’s last line of defense against disease-causing bacteria just got a new warrior: vancomycin 3.0. Its predecessor—vancomycin 1.0—has been used since 1958 to combat dangerous infections like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. But as the rise of resistant bacteria has blunted its effectiveness, scientists have engineered more potent versions of the drug—vancomycin 2.0. Now, version 3.0 has a unique three-pronged approach to killing bacteria that could give doctors a powerful new weapon against drug-resistant bacteria and help researchers engineer more durable antibiotics.

“This is pretty special,” says Scott Miller, a chemist at Yale University who was not involved in the new work. “It’s really the culmination of a decades-long effort.”

Vancomycin, long considered a “drug of last resort,” kills by preventing bacteria from building cell walls. It binds to wall-building protein fragments called peptides, in particular those that end with two copies of the amino acid D-alanine (D-ala). But bacteria have evolved. Many now replace one D-ala with D-lactic acid (D-lac), sharply reducing vancomycin’s ability to bind to its target. Today, that resistance has spread so that dangerous infections like vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) and vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA) are becoming more common. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 23,000 Americans die from 17 antibiotic-resistant infections each year (although it’s difficult to parse out how much is due to vancomycin resistance).

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Neutron stars set to open their heavy hearts

By Elizabeth Gibney

For half a century, astronomers and physicists have looked at pulsars and asked ‘how’? How can something the size of a city pack in more mass than the Sun? How does matter arrange itself to achieve such mind-boggling densities? Answering these questions in the laboratory is impossible. But a space mission due to launch on 1 June could answer some of them. For the first time, astronomers will take a detailed peek into the heavy hearts of these mysterious spinning stars.

“It is a big, big step forward to understand the property of the densest matter in the Universe,” says Tetsuo Hatsuda, a theoretical physicist at the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program in Saitama, Japan. “The state of matter at super high density at the core of the neutron star has been one of the long-standing problems in nuclear physics and astrophysics since the first discovery of the pulsar.”

Pulsars are neutron stars that shoot out beams of radiation as they spin — a feature that enabled their discovery in 1967. Neutron stars are formed from the collapsed remnants of exploded stars. And how matter arranges itself inside them has implications for the way in which particles interact through the fundamental forces, as well as for our understanding of black holes and other cosmic objects.

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How did whales get so big? Paleontologists say they’ve figured it out.

By Ben Guarino

Blue whales are the most massive animals to exist in the history of animals. Dreadnoughtus and those other thundering, 60-ton dinosaurs? Bantamweights next to one of today’s 100-ton Balaenoptera musculus.

“We truly live in an age of giants,” said Nicholas D. Pyenson, an expert in the paleobiology of marine mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Blue whales, he said, can grow as long as three city buses parked end to end. Living blue whales would be even bigger, too, if it weren’t for the sailors who killed most of the 110-foot, quarter-of-a-million-pounders 100 years ago.

Yet evolutionarily speaking, whales are recent leviathans. After the largest dinosaurs died off, land mammals bulked up, leading to elephant-size rhinoceroses, sloths and armadillos about 35 million years ago. The ancestors of today’s giant whales, meanwhile, stayed curiously small.

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New York Blood Center Reaches a Deal to Help Care for Research Chimps

By James Gorman

Two years after the New York Blood Center set off a storm of protest from animal welfare advocates by withdrawing support for a colony of chimpanzees used for biomedical research, the organization has joined with the Humane Society of the United States to guarantee their future care, pledging $6 million.

In a joint announcement on Tuesday, the two groups said the blood center would donate the money to the Humane Society, which will assume responsibility for the lifetime care of the chimps. In captivity, chimps can live 50 to 60 years.

In the statement, Dr. Christopher D. Hillyer, head of the blood center, said he was “pleased that we have found a capable organization to take care of the chimpanzees for their lifetime.” He said the agreement would allow the blood center to concentrate on ensuring the blood supply.

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CRISPR causes many unwanted mutations, small study suggests

By Michael Le Page

Does the CRISPR gene-editing method cause hundreds of extra, unwanted mutations? That’s the question raised by a small study in mice.

The idea of gene editing is to alter a single DNA sequence in the genome of cells while leaving the rest untouched. However, in practice, every gene-editing method sometimes results in unwanted changes.

This is not necessarily a problem if the rate of unwanted changes is low, as most mutations have no effect. But mutations in certain genes can lead to cancer, so the safety of CRISPR depends on how often it makes these off-target mutations.

Most studies have found few if any unwanted mutations with CRISPR. However, almost all of these studies looked for off-target changes by predicting what these were likely to be, and then seeing if they could find them.

Stephen Tsang of Columbia University Medical Center and his team have now used a more extensive method, sequencing the whole genomes of two CRISPR-edited mice, and comparing these with a non-edited control. In this way, they identified more than a thousand common mutations in the two edited mice that they think were caused by CRISPR.

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