ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 395

Think only humans can build on the knowledge of previous generations? Meet these pigeons

By Elizabeth Pennisi

By standing on the shoulders of giants, humans have built the sophisticated high-tech world we live in today. Tapping into the knowledge of previous generations—and those around us—was long thought to be a “humans-only” trait. But homing pigeons can also build collective knowledge banks, behavioral biologists have discovered, at least when it comes to finding their way back to the roost. Like humans, the birds work together and pass on information that lets them get better and better at solving problems.

“It is a really exciting development in this field,” says Christine Caldwell, a psychologist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the work.

Researchers have admired pigeon intelligence for decades. Previous work has shown the birds are capable of everything from symbolic communication to rudimentary math. They also use a wide range of cues to find their way home, including smell, sight, sound, and magnetism. On its own, a pigeon released multiple times from the same place will even modify its navigation over time for a more optimal route home. The birds also learn specific routes from one another. Because flocks of pigeons tend to take more direct flights home than individuals, scientists have long thought some sort of “collective intelligence” is at work. 

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Miniature liver on a chip could boost US food safety

By Sara Reardon

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has started testing whether livers-on-a-chip — miniature models of human organs engineered to mimic biological functions — can reliably model human reactions to food and food-borne illnesses. The experiments will help the agency to determine whether companies can substitute chip data for animal data when applying for the approval of a new compound, such as a food additive, that could prove toxic. It is the first time that a regulatory agency anywhere in the world has pursued organs-on-chips as an alternative to animal testing.

Suzanne Fitzpatrick, senior adviser for toxicology in the food-safety division of the FDA, announced the move on 11 April in a blog post. Although the chips were designed for testing drugs, Fitzpatrick’s division wants to use them to see how individual organs process products such as dietary supplements and cosmetics. They will also be able to test how food-borne pathogens affect specific organs. FDA food-safety scientists will first evaluate the human-liver chip, before moving on to kidney, lung and intestine models.

The chips are made by Emulate, a biotechnology company in Boston, Massachusetts. The miniature organs contain multiple types of human liver cells grown on a scaffold, and continuously pump a blood-like fluid through the system to deliver nutrients and remove waste. Emulate chief executive Geraldine Hamilton says that they can also add immune system components to the chip to test how it affects liver metabolism.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Self-taught artificial intelligence beats doctors at predicting heart attacks

By Matthew Hutson

Doctors have lots of tools for predicting a patient’s health. But—as even they will tell you—they’re no match for the complexity of the human body. Heart attacks in particular are hard to anticipate. Now, scientists have shown that computers capable of teaching themselves can perform even better than standard medical guidelines, significantly increasing prediction rates. If implemented, the new method could save thousands or even millions of lives a year.

“I can’t stress enough how important it is,” says Elsie Ross, a vascular surgeon at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who was not involved with the work, “and how much I really hope that doctors start to embrace the use of artificial intelligence to assist us in care of patients.”

Each year, nearly 20 million people die from the effects of cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks, strokes, blocked arteries, and other circulatory system malfunctions. In an effort to predict these cases, many doctors use guidelines similar to those of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA). Those are based on eight risk factors—including age, cholesterol level, and blood pressure—that physicians effectively add up.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Many tiny galaxies could host mammoth black holes

By Ramin Skibba

Little galaxies can pack a mighty punch. Astronomers detected and carefully weighed the black holes residing at the centres of a pair of extremely compact galaxies, finding to their surprise that they make up a large fraction of the mass of the host galaxies themselves.

These “ultra-compact dwarf galaxies” are now the second and third ones known to house such gargantuan black holes, confirming that the first one — discovered by the same group in 2014 — was not an anomaly.

“We’re three for three so far,” says Anil Seth at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He and his colleagues argue that these uniquely dense galaxies were once much larger galaxies, but have been tidally stretched and disrupted by neighbouring galaxies in their crowded environment.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Teaching load could put female scientists at career disadvantage

By Elizabeth Gibney

Female academics report spending more time on teaching and public-engagement tasks, and less time on research, than their male counterparts, according to a survey of UK university staff in science-based subjects.

The study of 2,495 male and 2,374 female academics at 43 UK institutions, published by the London-based charity Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) on 5 April, found that the gender difference was small but statistically significant. This was the case even when the effects of factors such as age, seniority and contract type were accounted for.

The finding echoes past research, which found that teaching and non-research-related administrative tasks have a greater impact on women’s careers than men’s, says Elizabeth Pollitzer, director of Portia, a non-profit organization in London that seeks to address gender issues in science.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

A Dinosaur Cousin’s Crocodile Ankles Surprise Paleontologists

By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR

Paleontologists excavating a basin in southern Tanzania have uncovered 245-million-year-old fossils belonging to one of the earliest relatives of dinosaurs. The carnivorous creature, which is not a direct ancestor to dinosaurs but more of a close cousin, is called Teleocrater rhadinus. The discovery, which was reported Wednesday in Nature, may help scientists fill in gaps in our understanding of how dinosaurs evolved as well as provide insight into what their earliest relatives looked like.

“For the first time we have a good idea of what the very first forms on the lineage leading to pterosaurs, dinosaurs and birds looked like,” Randall B. Irmis, a curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah who was not involved in the study, said in an email about the study. “I think this will spark a lot of research into how and why pterosaurs and dinosaurs evolved into such different forms from their early relatives.”

The Teleocrater is an archosaur, a group that includes all birds, dinosaurs and the flying reptiles pterosaurs, as well as crocodiles and alligators. About 250 million years ago, at the beginning of the Triassic Period, the archosaurs broke into two main branches: the bird bunch, which includes dinosaurs, and the crocodile crew. Teleocrater is considered an early member of the bird-line archosaurs, appearing some 10 million to 15 million years before dinosaurs entered the lineage.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

“Humanist” Student Mashal Khan Beaten to Death in Pakistan After Accusations of Blasphemy

By Hemant Mehta

According to very disturbing reports out of Pakistan, Mashal Khan, an activist who called himself “The Humanist” on Facebook and a student at Abdul Wali Khan University in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, was shot and beaten to death by fellow students today after being accused of blasphemy.

According to the police, the mob first surrounded [Khan’s friend] Abdullah and forced him to recite verses from the Quran. They started beating him when he was reciting the verses. Police intervention rescued Abdullah, but the attackers then went to the hostel where Mashal Khan was staying. “Mashal was beaten and shot by the mob who died on the spot,” a police officer stated.

A video footage apparently shot on a mobile phone showed Khan lying on the floor in a pool of blood surrounded by people beating him with sticks.

That not-safe-for-life footage is here and here.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

How many American atheists are there really?

By Brian Resnick

Here’s a simple question: How many Americans don’t believe in God?

Pew and Gallup — two of the most reputable polling firms in America — both come to a similar figure. About 10 percent of Americans say they do not believe in God, and this figure has been slowly creeping up over the decades.

But maybe this isn’t the whole story. University of Kentucky psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle have long suspected that a lot of atheists aren’t showing up in these polls. The reason: Even in our increasingly secular society, there’s still a lot of stigma around not believing in God. So when a stranger conducting a poll calls and asks the question, it may be uncomfortable for many to answer truthfully.

Gervais and Najle recently conducted a new analysis on the prevalence of atheists in America. And they conclude the number of people who do not believe in God may be even double that counted by these polling firms.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Saturn moon ‘able to support life’

By Jonathan Amos

Saturn’s ice-crusted moon Enceladus may now be the single best place to go to look for life beyond Earth.

The assessment comes on the heels of new observations at the 500km-wide world made by the Cassini probe.

It has flown through and sampled the waters from a subsurface ocean that is being jetted into space.

Cassini’s chemistry analysis strongly suggests the Enceladean seafloor has hot fluid vents – places that on Earth are known to teem with life.

To be clear: the existence of such hydrothermal systems is not a guarantee that organisms are present on the little moon; its environment may still be sterile. But the new results make a compelling case to return to this world with more sophisticated instrumentation – technologies that can re-sample the ejected water for clear evidence that biology is also at play.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

What Is the “Mother of All Bombs” that the U.S. Just Dropped on Afghanistan?

By Larry Greenemeier

The idea of dropping an air-blast bomb—even if it’s the largest nonnuclear ordnance ever used by the U.S. in combat—to target fighters holed up in tunnels deep underground might at first seem counterintuitive. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB), which the Air Force unleashed on ISIS fighters and tunnels Thursday in the Achin District of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province, never actually struck the ground. But the massive crunch of air pressure created by the nearly 22,000-pound MOAB would have wiped out anyone in the vicinity, and certainly sent a clear signal that the Trump administration is willing to use unprecedented force.

Unlike a bomb designed to actually penetrate a building or the ground, the MOAB (also called a fuel-air bomb) has a “proximity fuse” on its nose that ignites the warhead when it reaches a certain altitude—which might be anywhere between 50 and 1,000 feet—says Edward Priest, a former Air Force Special Operations combat controller who retired from the military in 2015. “When they blow up, they blast fuel into the air,” Priest explains. “That fuel atomizes. Then there’s a secondary explosion that lights the fuel that’s been atomized.”

An air blast bomb “doesn’t throw out a lot of fragmentation like you’d expect from a normal bomb—it’s all blast overpressure, which can blow down trees and use the trees themselves as the fragmentation,” Priest says. “That type of bomb wouldn’t work well, for example, to destroy tanks, although the overpressure would kill the people in them. You’d overpressure the people hiding in the caves there. You’d never find them—it just blows your lungs out of your mouth. It kind of turns you inside out.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.