ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 389

First results from Jupiter probe show huge magnetism and storms

By Andy Coghlan

Big planets come with big surprises. Last week, delegates at the annual European Geosciences Union meeting got the first glimpse of data from the Juno spacecraft now in orbit around Jupiter, and the findings are already challenging assumptions about everything from the planet’s atmosphere to its interior.

“The whole inside of Jupiter is just working differently than our models expected,” said mission principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas.

Launched on 5 August 2011, Juno reached Jupiter and began its first orbit on 4 July last year. Since then, it has performed four more circuits. There are 33 planned pole-to-pole circuits in all, encircling the entire planet bit by bit.

The findings presented in Vienna come from these first few circuits, which each last 53 Earth days and include a 6-hour scan of the planet from north to south. Although the information is preliminary, the researchers involved are thrilled.

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Noise pollution is invading even the most protected natural areas

By Ula Chrobak

The great outdoors is becoming a lot less peaceful. Noise pollution from humans has doubled sound levels in more than half of all protected areas in the United States—from local nature reserves to national parks—and it has made some places 10 times louder, according to a new study. And the cacophony isn’t just bad for animals using natural sounds to hunt and forage—it could also be detrimental to human health.

The study, which maps noise levels across the United States, is “a call to arms,” says Nathan Kleist, an ecologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who was not involved in the work. The noise maps could help scientists identify key areas to keep quiet, such as critical habitats for endangered species, he adds. “If you’re missing noise, you’re missing a huge driver of habitat suitability.”

Noise pollution—from honking cars to clanging construction equipment—can disturb sleep, cause stress, and impair concentration. In 1972, U.S. officials enacted the Noise Control Act, which gave the Enironmental Protection Agency the authority to impose limits on noise from motor vehicles and machinery. But regulators have largely ignored noise in parks, wilderness, and other protected areas, which cover 14% of the country. And 80% of the United States—including many parks and protected areas—is now within 1 kilometer of a road, thanks to rapidly growing residential and industrial areas.

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5 Things to Watch as the Future of Obamacare Moves to the Senate

By Julie Rovner

After weeks of will-they-or-won’t-they tensions, the House managed to pass its GOP replacement for the Affordable Care Act on Thursday by a razor-thin margin. The vote was 217-213.

Democrats who lost the battle are still convinced they may win the political war. As the Republicans reached a majority for the bill, Democrats on the House floor began chanting, “Na, na, na, na … Hey, hey, hey … Goodbye.” They claim Republicans could lose their seats for supporting a bill that could cause so much disruption in voters’ health care.

Now the bill—and the multitude of questions surrounding it—moves across the Capitol to the Senate. And the job doesn’t get any easier. With only a two-vote Republican majority and no likely Democratic support, it would take only three GOP “no” votes to sink the bill.

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Cell maps reveal fresh details on how the immune system fights cancer

By Heidi Ledford

Detailed maps of the immune cells that surround tumours could suggest fresh therapeutic targets, point out biological markers that can be used to select the patients most likely to respond to a given therapy, and offer insights into the best time to start administering that treatment, according to two studies released on 4 May.

The papers, published in Cell1, 2, reflect a growing appreciation by cancer researchers that a tumour’s response to treatment is often guided by the cells in its neighbourhood — particularly the immune cells that amass at its borders and invade its core.

The make-up of that population could determine the success of immunotherapy treatments, which unleash the immune system to fight cancer. And advances in the ability to characterize those individual cells in unprecedented detail are fuelling a push to catalogue them and learn more about how they dictate the progression of the disease.

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Natural Selection: Changes vs Variation

I have been trying to argue on another site that Natural Selection is selection of favourable pre-existing variations and does not involve anything “changing” into something else.

I think the idea of “changes” carries implicit baggage of teleology and intent, and that plays into the hands of the Ken Hams of this world.

People have argued that it is “the genome” that changes. I have agreed that point mutations are indeed changes, but that they are not major players in evolution (at least in sexually reproductive species) as they are one-shot affairs and possibly more likely to be neutral or deleterious as beneficial. However, I have said there is no single, fixed reference genome to change: since everyone is different from everyone else, so everyone has a unique genome (excepting monozygotic twins). And that genome is not changed during the host animal’s life: crossing-over makes a new one for each child.

I have people castigating me as an illiterate creationist, or trying to explain natural selection to me.

I am trying to say that evolution is not selection of accumulated “changes” in anything, but accumulated favourable variations. Am I just gibbering here, or am I making a rational argument?

The Roots of Middle East Religions

It all started with an illness. An illness that was hereditary and effected mostly males. Due to its hereditary nature all Middle East prophets are relatives. Since this disease mostly effects males, all Middle East prophets are males.  All those prophets had a mental disorder that made them think they received message frım God. But the message actually came from their brains. It was their brains and the mental disorder that made them believe so. They believed a message came from God, but it was their brain who created that message. Obviously when you read those holly books, you see human-like feelings, anger, disappointment, fear, hope, hate etc. This also supports the idea that prophets’ minds made up those messages, they were not God’s words.

The three Middle East religions share some common prophets like Abraham. He thought that a message came from God and God ordered him to kill his own son. He tried to kill his son. A mentally normal person cannot do this. It was Abraham’s mind who ordered him to cut his son. Abraham suffered from this mental disorder and it was passed to his descendants by genes, down to Moses, Mohammed and others.

This mental disorder looked like schizophrenia  and epilepsy. All those prophets had auditory and visual hallucinations. Abraham believed God ordered him to kill his son, Moses believed he saw God at the mountain and he lost his conscious, Mohammed believed he went from Mecca to Jerusalem in the night and then reached to heavens and talked to God and saw Moses. Moreover, Mohammed’s uncle’s son, Ali had the same mental disorder but since Mohammed declared he was the last prophet Ali could not declare himself a prophet.

According to Ali’s followers, the imams should be descendants of Mohammed and Ali. They count 12 of these descendants as the real imams. The sayings of these 12 imams also support the idea that they had the same mental disorder and had some extraordinary experiences.

The first Middle East prophet, Adam was not the first human but he was the first person who had this mental disorder. He and his wife probably lived in Aden, Yemen. He left there because he believed God told him to go away. This was just a hallucination. Adam suffered the same mental disorder. And all of Adam’s descendants heredically carried these genes. Some of his descendants declared themselves prophets, but some did not. Because those who did not enhance special areas in frontal lobe could not become (!) prophets.

Research with magnetic resonance shows that religious people can stimulate frontal lobe and if they do it enough, they start to think they were God. This research shows that all the prophecy claims can be the result of brain activity.

Women make up just 15% of NASA’s planetary mission science teams. Here’s how the agency is trying to change that

By Paul Voosen

Sometimes, change starts with a single sentence.

In December 2016, NASA began accepting bids for its next New Frontiers competition, a chance to mount a $1 billion mission to solar system destinations such as the moon, Venus, or Saturn’s moon Titan. It is a careermaking opportunity, and scientists devoured the rules in the announcement. In the second paragraph, they read something new: a sentence stating that “NASA recognizes and supports the benefits of having diverse and inclusive” communities and “fully expects that such values will be reflected in the composition of all proposal teams.”

Many scientists hope the language will help NASA get out of a rut. Over the past 15 years, women have made up just 15% of planetary mission science teams, even though at least a quarter of planetary scientists are women. The disparity is even worse for ethnic minorities: Blacks and Hispanics make up 13% and 16% of the country, respectively, but each group makes up just 1% of the nation’s planetary scientists. (Firm numbers for specific missions are not available.)

The New Frontiers deadline arrived last week, and although the proposals are not public, observers say that women lead at least four of the dozen or so NASA received. “I suspect teams that come in will be significantly more diverse than previous rounds,” says Louise Prockter, director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

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Is the Baby in Pain? Brain Scans Can Tell

By Moheb Costandi

Pain in infants is heartbreaking for new parents, and extremely difficult to treat effectively—if at all. Every year an estimated 15 million babies are born prematurely, most of whom will then undergo numerous lifesaving but painful procedures, such as heel pricking or insertion of a thin tube known as a cannula to deliver fluids or medicine. Preterm babies in the intensive care unit are subjected to an average of 11 such “skin-breaking” procedures per day, but analgesia is only used just over one third of the time.

We know that repetitive, painful procedures in early infancy can impact brain development negatively—so why is pain in infants so undertreated? One reason is the lack of standard guidelines for administering the drugs. Some analgesics given to adults are unsuitable for infants, and those that can be used often have different effects in children, making dosing a problem.

What is more, newborn babies are incapable of telling us how they feel, making it impossible to determine how effective any painkiller might be. Researchers at the University of Oxford may now have overcome this latter challenge, however. They report May 3 in Science Translational Medicine having identified a pain-related brain wave signal that responds to analgesics, and could be used to measure the drugs’ efficacy.

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Gay-Conversion Therapy Ban Survives as Supreme Court Rejects Appeal

By Greg Stohr

The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a California law that bans licensed therapists from working with children to change their sexual orientation from gay to straight, rejecting an appeal that said the measure violates religious rights.

The rebuff leaves intact a federal appeals court decision upholding California’s 2012 first-of-its-kind law. The measure prohibits the form of counseling known as “conversion therapy.”

The ban was challenged by three people, led by licensed therapist and minister Donald Welch, who said it interferes with their right to practice their religious beliefs.

California officials urged the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal, saying the law doesn’t restrict what religious leaders can say, except in the context of a state-licensed therapy session.

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Hundreds of faith leaders already oppose Trump’s planned ‘religious liberty’ order

By Jack Jenkins

News broke Tuesday afternoon that president Donald Trump is preparing an executive order on “religious liberty” that is expected to offer exemptions for people who claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, abortion, transgender identity, and premarital sex.

There’s just one catch: many faith leaders already oppose it.

According to POLITICO, Trump administration officials are planning to unveil the new order on Thursday to coincide with the National Day of Prayer. Details of the order are still under wraps, but the text is reportedly similar to an alleged draft leaked to The Nation on February 1. That draft purported to require government agencies to grant sweeping religious exemptions to people and organizations that reject same-sex marriage and other things on religious grounds — regardless of whether faith-fueled disagreement is “compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.”

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