ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 394

Some of the Parts: Is Marijuana’s “Entourage Effect” Scientifically Valid?

By Angus Chen

If you believe budtender wisdom, consuming a strain called Bubba Kush should leave you ravenous and relaxed whereas dank Hippie Chicken should uplift you like a dreamy cup of coffee. But if you take pure, isolated delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana—you’ll experience “a high that has no specific character, so that seems boring,” says Mowgli Holmes, a geneticist and founder of a cannabis genetics company Phylos Bioscience.

What gives cannabis “character,” in Holmes’s view, are the hundreds of other chemicals it contains. These include THC’s cousin cannabinoids such as cannabidiol, along with other compounds called terpenes and flavonoids. Whereas terpenes are generally credited with giving pot its varied fragrances—limonene, for example, imparts a snappy, citrusy perfume—the cannabis industry and some researchers have espoused the controversial idea that such compounds can enhance or alter THC’s psychoactive and medicinal properties.

This so-called “entourage effect” refers to this scrum of compounds supposedly working in concert to create what Chris Emerson describes as “the sum of all the parts that leads to the magic or power of cannabis.” Emerson is a trained chemist and the co-founder of a designer marijuana vaporizer products company called Level Blends. Product designers like him believe they can create THC vaping mixtures tuned with different concentrations of each terpene and cannabinoid for specialized effects.

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Billion-dollar project would synthesize hundreds of thousands of molecules in search of new medicines

By Robert F. Service

Martin Burke is a tad envious. A chemist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Burke has watched funding agencies back major research initiatives in other fields. Biologists pulled in billions of dollars to decipher the human genome, and physicists persuaded governments to fund the gargantuan Large Hadron Collider, which discovered the Higgs boson. Meanwhile chemists, divided among dozens of research areas, often wind up fighting for existing funds.

Burke wants to change that. At the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting here earlier this month, he proposed that chemists rally around an initiative to synthesize most of the hundreds of thousands of known organic natural products: the diverse small molecules made by microbes, plants, and animals. “It would be a moon mission for our field,” Burke says. The effort, which would harness an automated synthesis machine he and his colleagues developed to snap together molecules from a set of premade building blocks, could cost $1 billion and take 20 years, Burke estimates. But the idea captivates at least some in the field. “Assuming it’s a robust technology, I would have to think it would be revolutionary,” says John Reed, the global head of pharma research and early development at Roche in Basel, Switzerland. “Even if it only allowed you to make half the compounds, it strikes me as worthy.”

Natural products have countless uses in modern society. They make up more than half of all medicines, as well as dyes, diagnostic probes, perfumes, sweeteners, lotions, and so on. “There’s probably not a home on the planet that has not been impacted by natural products,” Burke says.

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Doom and gloom won’t save the world

By Nancy Knowlton

Once upon a time, a career as a marine biologist conjured images of days spent diving amid beautiful sea creatures. These days, it can often feel like being an undertaker for the oceans.

Early in my career, I witnessed first-hand the depressing side of the job. The coral reefs off the north coast of Jamaica, where I had spent several magical years as a graduate student in the mid 1970s, were struck by a category-5 hurricane in 1980. Then came mysterious ailments that devastated two of the most important coral species, along with a species of sea urchin that, because of previous overfishing, had become the last defence against a tide of seaweed that was choking the struggling coral. Ten years after my first dive in Jamaica, the reefs I’d studied were all but gone.

These days, students studying reefs spend their time investigating bleaching and acidification, terms that were never mentioned when I took my first coral-reef class in 1974.

As we observe Earth Day on 22 April, it’s worth recounting how researchers like myself have managed to rebound a bit from all this depressing news.

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Climate Change Reroutes a Yukon River in a Geological Instant

By John Schwartz

In the blink of a geological eye, climate change has helped reverse the flow of water melting from a glacier in Canada’s Yukon, a hijacking that scientists call “river piracy.”

This engaging term refers to one river capturing and diverting the flow of another. It occurred last spring at the Kaskawulsh Glacier, one of Canada’s largest, with a suddenness that startled scientists.

A process that would ordinarily take thousands of years — or more — happened in just a few months in 2016.

Much of the meltwater from the glacier normally flows to the north into the Bering Sea via the Slims and Yukon Rivers. A rapidly retreating and thinning glacier — accelerated by global warming — caused the water to redirect to the south, and into the Pacific Ocean.

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Captured: First ‘Image’ of the Dark Matter That Holds Universe Together

By Nancy Atkinson

For decades, scientists have tracked hints of a thread-like structure that ties together galaxies across the universe. Theories, computer models, and indirect observations have indicated that there is a cosmic web of dark matter that connects galaxies and constitutes the large-scale structure of the cosmos. But while the filaments that make up this web are massive, dark matter is incredibly difficult to observe.

Now, researchers have produced what they say is the first composite image of a dark matter filament that connects galaxies together.

“This image moves us beyond predictions to something we can see and measure,” said Mike Hudson, a professor of astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Canada, co-author of a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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First living example of giant ancient mollusc found in the wild

By Lef Apostolakis

The first known living sample of a giant, ancient mollusc that previously was known almost exclusively by its shells has been recovered from the Philippines.

A team of researchers have finally come across a live colony of giant shipworms, or Kuphus polythalamia. Washed-up, empty, elephant tusk-like shells first hinted at the existence of this metre-long animal in the 18th century, and there are a few specimens preserved in ethanol in collections around the world. But no one knew exactly what lay within – until now.

Daniel Distel at the Ocean Genome Legacy Center at Northeastern University in Boston and his colleagues were made aware of the animal’s potential location in 2010, when a collaborator pointed out a news story from Philippine TV featuring a local trying to eat one for its supposed medicinal properties. “[It was] amazing! I’ve been looking for them for 20 years,” Distel says. “My friend and mentor Ruth Turner looked for her whole career.”

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Physicists detect whiff of new particle at the Large Hadron Collider

By Adrian Cho

For decades, particle physicists have yearned for physics beyond their tried-and-true standard model. Now, they are finding signs of something unexpected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest atom smasher at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The hints come not from the LHC’s two large detectors, which have yielded no new particles since they bagged the last missing piece of the standard model, the Higgs boson, in 2012, but from a smaller detector, called LHCb, that precisely measures the decays of familiar particles.

The latest signal involves deviations in the decays of particles called B mesons—weak evidence on its own. But together with other hints, it could point to new particles lying on the high-energy horizon. “This has never happened before, to observe a set of coherent deviations that could be explained in a very economical way with one single new physics contribution,” says Joaquim Matias, a theorist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. Matias says the evidence is strong enough for a discovery claim, but others urge caution.

The LHC smashes protons together at unprecedented energy to try to blast into existence massive new particles, which its two big detectors, ATLAS and CMS, would spot. LHCb focuses on familiar particles, in particular B mesons, using an exquisitely sensitive tracking detector to sniff out the tiny explosive decays.

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To Change Politics, Do More Than March for Science

By the Editors of Scientific American

Earlier this year scientists announced that on April 22—Earth Day—they intended to, in their own words, “walk out of the lab and into the streets.” Organizers of this March for Science were dismayed by a new administration and a Congress pushing policies likely to increase pollution, harm health, reduce our ability to forecast natural hazards such as hurricanes—and toss accepted science out the window. The protests, planned for Washington, D.C., and other cities around the U.S. and the globe, quickly gathered support from major scientific societies, tens of thousands of volunteers, hordes of Twitter supporters and 800,000 members in a Facebook group.

It’s a start—but not enough to make a lasting impression on the president, Congress or state legislators.

“Don’t tweet at them. Don’t sign goofy-ass useless internet petitions. Call,” tweeted David Shiffman, a marine biologist at the University of Miami. He is right. People need to reach out individually to members of the government and make it clear that they will back their opinions with votes.

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Trump Advisers to Debate Paris Climate Agreement

By Steve Holland and Valerie Volcovici

Advisers to President Donald Trump will meet on Tuesday to discuss whether to recommend that he withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, a White House official said on Monday.

The accord, agreed on by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015, aims to limit planetary warming in part by slashing carbon dioxide and other emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Under the pact, the United States committed to reducing its emissions by 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.

Trump has said the United States should “cancel” the deal, but he has been mostly quiet on the issue since he was elected last November.

Environmental groups want Washington to remain in the Paris agreement, even if the new administration weakens U.S. pledges.

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Odds that Tasmanian tigers are still alive are 1 in 1.6 trillion

By Alice Klein

What are the odds that Tasmanian tigers still exist? About 1 in 1.6 trillion.

Mathematical models provide yet another good reason to think the fabled Australian species is long gone, despite occasional claims of sightings.

The Tasmanian tiger or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) once occupied most of Australia, but competition with dingoes drove it to extinction on the mainland about 2000 years ago. An isolated population persisted on the island state of Tasmania until it was colonised by the British in the 19th century. Hunters were paid bounties for killing thylacines to protect sheep. The last known individual died in captivity in 1936.

But the idea that a few thylacines might be clinging on in remote wilderness continues to make headlines around the world. The most recent batch of stories came after Bill Laurance at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, and his colleagues announced plans to investigate the remote Cape York peninsula at the northern tip of mainland Australia, where there were two claimed sightings in the 1980s.

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