ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 391

Psychedelic compound in ecstasy moves closer to approval to treat PTSD

By Amy Maxmen

Psychologists have occasionally given people psychedelic drugs such as LSD or magic mushrooms to induce altered states, in an attempt to treat mental illness. Today, many of those drugs are illegal, but if clinical trials testing their efficacy yield positive results, a handful could become prescription medicines in the next decade. The furthest along in this process is MDMA — a drug sold illegally as ecstasy or Molly — which is showing promise in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Last week, at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference in Oakland, California, researchers presented unpublished results from phase II trials involving a total of 107 people diagnosed with PTSD. The trial treatment involved a combination of psychotherapy and MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviewed these data in November, which were not released to the public at the time. The agency recommended that the researchers move forward with phase III trials, the final stage before potential approval of the drug.

At the conference, researchers affiliated with the non-profit organization that is sponsoring the trials, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in Santa Cruz, California, presented some of their latest resutls. They used a cinically validated scale that assesses PTSD symptoms such as frequency of nightmares and anxiety levels. More than one year after two or three sessions of MDMA-assisted therapy, about 67% of participants no longer had the illness, according to that scale. About 23% of the control group — who received psychotherapy and a placebo drug — experienced the same benefit.

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That Ghostly, Glowing Light Above Canada? It’s Just Steve

By Jacey Fortin

If you happen to be in Canada on a clear night, look to the stars and maybe you’ll see it: a strip of light stretching from east to west, all the way from the banks of Hudson Bay to the fjords of British Columbia.

Is it a wayward piece of the aurora borealis? Or maybe a plane’s contrail? A rarely seen strip of a proton aurora? Or is it a comet’s tail?

Actually, it’s none of the above. Scientists are still working to figure out exactly what they’re dealing with.

And until that day, they’re going to call it Steve.

What sets Steve apart is not just its charmingly banal name. It’s also the way it has been — and is still being — discovered, said Eric Donovan, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary.

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Alabama science literacy threatened by antiscience resolution

By Dr. Amanda Glaze

It was good news for Alabama’s students when the state board of education voted unanimously to adopt a new set of state science standards in 2015. Supported by science teachers throughout the state, the new standards lay the framework for Alabama students to achieve the scientific understanding and abilities they will need to prosper in the twenty-first century.

But that achievement is now under threat in the state legislature. House Joint Resolution 78, which has already passed the House and is now headed for the floor of the Senate, is that threat. If passed, the resolution would be a message from the legislature to science teachers, telling them to disregard or contradict the standards whenever they please.

How so? The resolution urges educational administrators to “refrain from prohibiting” teachers from presenting “the scientific strengths and the scientific weaknesses” of scientific theories taught “within the curriculum framework developed by the State Board of Education” — meaning the new science standards and material based on them.

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Can skeptical parents be persuaded to vaccinate?

By Kai Kupferschmidt

The beloved novelist and children’s author Roald Dahl once wrote an open letter describing how his daughter Olivia suffered from measles when she was 7 years old. Olivia seemed to be recovering, Dahl wrote, and he was sitting on her bed, teaching her how to build animals out of pipe cleaners, when he noticed that she had trouble coordinating her fingers’ movements.

“‘Are you feeling all right?’ I asked her.”

“‘I feel all sleepy,’ she said.”

“In 1 hour she was unconscious. In 12 hours she was dead.”

That happened in 1962, 1 year before the measles vaccine was developed. The virus had caused Olivia’s brain to swell—an often-fatal complication called measles encephalitis. Dahl wrote the letter for the Sandwell Health Authority in the United Kingdom in 1986, hoping it would help persuade parents to vaccinate their children. The letter began circulating again in 2015, when a large measles outbreak that began at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, sickened more than 100 children.

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This plastic bag, an artificial womb, could some day save extreme preemies

By Travis M. Andrews

Each year in the United States, about 30,000 babies are born before gestating for 26 weeks, which is considered “critically preterm.” The resulting health problems are vast. Half don’t survive, and those who do face a 90 percent risk of lasting health problems.

Such premature births are responsible one-third of infant deaths and half of the cerebral palsy cases in the country.

“The first health challenges the very preterm babies face is actually surviving,” said Kevin Dysart, a neonatologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Among those that survive, the challenges are things we all take for granted, like walking, talking, seeing, hearing.”

Emily Partridge, a researcher at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in a video: “Just looking at them, it is immediately clear that they shouldn’t be here yet. They’re not ready.”

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Ancient-human genomes plucked from cave dirt

By Ewen Callaway

Bones and teeth aren’t the only ways to learn about extinct human relatives. For the first time, researchers have recovered ancient-human DNA without having obvious remains — just dirt from the caves the hominins lived in. The technique opens up a new way to probe prehistory.

From sediments in European and Asian caves, a team led by geneticist Viviane Slon and molecular biologist Matthias Meyer, both at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced genomes of cell structures called mitochondria from Neanderthals and another hominin group, the Denisovans. Their work is published in Science1.

“It’s exciting to see that you can end up with a whole pile of ancient-human DNA from just dirt,” says Michael Bunce, an evolutionary biologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

Slon and Meyer are not the first to decode ancient dirt. Palaeogeneticist Eske Willerslev of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen pioneered the approach in 2003, to find out about the plants and animals that populated prehistoric environments2, 3. Using the technique, he and his team revealed that Greenland was once richly forested4. But Slon and Meyer are the first to use the technique on hominin DNA.

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Cassini radio signal from Saturn picked up after dive

By Jonathan Amos

The Cassini spacecraft is sending data back to Earth after diving in between Saturn’s rings and cloudtops.

The probe executed the daredevil manoeuvre on Wednesday – the first of 22 plunges planned over the next five months – while out of radio contact.

Nasa’s 70m-wide Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna at Goldstone, California, managed to re-establish communications at 06:56 GMT (07:56 BST) on Thursday.

The close-in dives are designed to gather ultra high-quality data.

At their best resolution, pictures of the rings should be able to pick out features as small as 150m across.

The Cassini imaging team has already started to post some raw, unprocessed shots on its website.

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Trump is trying to shrink Bears Ears National Monument. Here’s why scientists are worried

By Carolyn Gramling

President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday calling on the Department of the Interior (DOI) to review “all Presidential designations or expansions of designations under the Antiquities Act made since January 1, 1996.”  Why would a new president with so much on his plate care about 24 parcels of land and sea that his three immediate predecessors decided to protect permanently?

The answer, not surprisingly, is politics. Opponents of such designations see them as unwanted federal interventions. And that’s why Trump has asked Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review those decisions, starting with an expanse of land in southeastern Utah surrounding a twin pair of mesas known as Bears Ears. Its designation was one of former President Barack Obama’s last acts in office.

“In December of last year alone, the federal government asserted this power over 1.35 million acres of land in Utah, known as Bears Ears—I’ve heard a lot about Bears Ears, and I hear it’s beautiful—over the profound objections of the citizens of Utah,” Trump said during a signing ceremony at DOI. “The Antiquities Act does not give the federal government unlimited power to lock up millions of acres of land and water, and it’s time we ended this abusive practice,” he added. 

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Controversial study claims humans reached Americas 100,000 years earlier than thought

By Ewen Callaway

Ancient humans settled in North America around 130,000 years ago, suggests a controversial study — pushing the date back more than 100,000 years earlier than most scientists accept. The jaw-dropping claim, made in Nature1, is based on broken rocks and mastodon bones found in California that a team of researchers say point to human activity.

Their contention, if correct, would force a dramatic rethink of when and how the Americas were first settled — and who by. Most scientists subscribe to the view that Homo sapiens arrived in North America less than 20,000 years ago. The latest study raises the possibility that another hominin species, such as Neanderthals or a group known as Denisovans, somehow made it from Asia to North America before that and flourished.

“It’s such an amazing find and — if it’s genuine — it’s a game-changer. It really does shift the ground completely,” says John McNabb, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK. “I suspect there will be a lot of reaction to the paper, and most of it is not going to be acceptance.”

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Female dragonflies fake sudden death to avoid male advances

By Sandrine Ceurstemont

Female dragonflies use an extreme tactic to get rid of unwanted suitors: they drop out the sky and then pretend to be dead.

Rassim Khelifa from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, witnessed the behaviour for the first time in the moorland hawker dragonfly (Aeshna juncea). While collecting their larvae in the Swiss Alps, he watched a female crash-dive to the ground while being pursued by a male.

The female then lay motionless on her back. Her suitor soon flew away, and the female took off once the coast was clear.

“I was surprised,” says Khelifa, who had never previously seen this in 10 years of studying dragonflies.

Female moorland hawkers are vulnerable to harassment when they lay their eggs since, unlike some other dragonflies, they aren’t guarded by their male mates. A single sexual encounter with another male is enough to fertilise all eggs and copulating again could damage their reproductive tract.

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