ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 398

Syria war: Is Trump slipping into Syria quagmire?

By PJ Crowley

President Donald Trump drew his sharpest distinction from his predecessor, Barack Obama, by swiftly ordering a military response to the apparent use of chemical weapons by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad earlier this week.

Unlike President Obama, who hesitated in 2013 when confronted with a clear violation of his red line, Trump did not seek allies, ask Congress for permission, or evidently worry about long-term implications.

President Trump, in brief remarks at Mar-a-Lago following a dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping, indicated that the strikes targeted the Syrian military forces that carried out the Idlib chemical weapon attack, an action he suggested “crossed a lot of lines”.

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Ancient Cannibals Didn’t Eat Just for the Calories, Study Suggests

By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR

Here’s some food for thought. How many calories would you get from consuming one whole human body? More than 125,000, according to a new study on human cannibalism that will either make you queasy or have you reaching for some fava beans and a nice chianti.

For more than a decade James Cole, an archaeologist from the University of Brighton in England, pondered that question while studying “nutritional human cannibalism” during the Paleolithic, which lasted from about 2.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago.

“I was interested in how nutritious are we actually?” Dr. Cole said. “Whenever I talk about the topic, I always get a slight sort of side view from my colleagues.”

His morbid fascination led him to create what is essentially a calorie counting guide for cannibals, which he published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. He is the sole author.

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UN report: Clean power is up, costs are down

By Roger Harrabin

The world added record levels of renewable energy capacity in 2016, according to the UN.

But the bill was almost a quarter lower than the previous year, thanks to the plunging cost of renewables.

Investment in renewables capacity was roughly double that in fossil fuels, says the report from UN Environment.

It follows news that the cost of offshore wind power has fallen by around a third since 2012 – far faster than expected.

But the report’s authors sound the alarm that just as costs are plunging, some major nations are scaling back their green energy investments.

This, they say, reduces the likelihood of meeting the Paris climate agreement.

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How the genomics revolution could finally help Africa

By Linda Nordling

It took a public-health disaster for the Zimbabwean government to recognize the power of precision medicine. In 2015, the country switched from a standard three-drug cocktail for HIV to a single-pill combination therapy that was cheaper and easier for people to take every day. The new drug followed a World Health Organization recommendation to incorporate the antiretroviral drug efavirenz as a first-line therapy for public-health programmes. But as tens of thousands of Zimbabweans were put onto the drug, reports soon followed about people quitting it in droves.

Collen Masimirembwa, a geneticist and founding director of the African Institute of Biomedical Science and Technology in Harare, was not surprised. In 2007, he had shown that a gene variant carried by many Zimbabweans slows their ability to break down efavirenz1. For those with two copies of the variant — about 20% of the population — the drug accumulates in the bloodstream, leading to hallucinations, depression and suicidal tendencies. He had tried to communicate this to his government, but at the time efavirenz was not a staple of the country’s HIV programme, and so the health ministry ignored his warnings.

Masimirembwa continued to publish his research, but the authorities took no heed until there was trouble. A lot of confusion could have been avoided if the government had listened, he says, “It’s not a bad drug. We just know it can be improved in Africa.”

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Apes can see things from your perspective and help you out

By Sam Wong

Our closest evolutionary relatives are quite the mind readers. And they can use that knowledge to help people figure things out when they are labouring under a misapprehension, according to the latest research.

The ability to attribute mental states to others, aka theory of mind, is sometimes considered unique to humans, but evidence is mounting that other animals have some capacity for it.

In a study last year, chimps, bonobos and orangutans watched videos of people behaving in different scenarios as cameras tracked their eye movements. The experiment found that the apes looked where an actor in the video would expect to see an object, rather than towards its true location, suggesting the animals were aware others could hold false beliefs.

But that experiment left open the possibility apes were simply predicting that the actor would go to the last place he’d seen the object, without understanding that he held a false belief. Now, David Buttelmann at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues tested 34 zoo chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans, in search of more conclusive evidence.

In their test, person A places an object into one of two boxes, then either remains in the room or leaves. Person B removes it, places it in the other box and locks both boxes. Then A tries to open the box where they left the object. The apes know how to unlock the boxes and can decide to open either one.

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Syria chemical attack looks like nerve gas – and was no accident

By Debora MacKenzie

Nerve gas is back. Images of the victims and reports from doctors on the scene of yesterday’s Syrian government air strike on the rebel-held northern town of Khan Sheikhoun suggest the weapon used was the nerve agent, sarin. At least 70 men, women and children died and hundreds were injured.

The timing of the attack seems startling, just a day ahead of today’s meeting in Brussels at which 70 countries are meant to discuss funding the reconstruction of Syria, and a week after senior US officials disavowed previous US calls to remove Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. It may have been aimed at sowing discord among Western allies, or demonstrating the regime’s defiance.

But it could also just be a continuation of war as usual for the Assad regime, which has been increasingly using chemical attacks to terrorise civilians for the past several months, even though in 2013 it signed the international treaty banning chemical weapons and agreed to let its chemical stockpile be destroyed.

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As scientists prepare to march, Science for the People reboots

By Jeffrey Mervis

The upcoming March for Science is frequently described as the first time U.S. scientists will take to the streets.

Epidemiologist Frank Bove and biochemist Ben Allen know better. They are part of a small cadre of “science workers” trying to revive a short-lived organization—named Science for the People (SftP)—that evolved from the 1960s antiwar and civil rights movements and engaged in demonstrations, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and other forms of direct action. But whereas the current marchers want to defend open inquiry and evidence-based policy in response to outside assaults on the profession, SftP was trying to rescue science from itself.

The original group maintained that too many U.S. scientists had become willing tools of an oppressive government that was fighting an unjust war and serving corporate interests. In its early years, SftP disrupted the annual meetings of AAAS (which publishes ScienceInsider), with activists shouting down speakers, accusing prominent scientists of serving the ruling class, and staging counter sessions on hot-button political issues. 

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First Clear View of a One-Celled Harpooner in Action

By James Gorman

Humans did not invent the harpoon gun. Some sea snails and jellyfish shoot darts at prey. And one single-celled predator even fires a projectile with a line attached so it can tow its prize away.

Scientists working at the University of British Columbia reported Friday that they had captured the first high-resolution video of this microscopic harpooner in action. Although it is tempting to call it Ishmael, its real name is Polykrikos kofoidii.

The video may lack the literary depth of “Moby Dick,” but it is strong on action, and Polykrikos is arguably better armed than any whaleboat launched from Captain Ahab’s Pequod.

For example, it fires a projectile that has several working parts. First is an initial dart, called a taeniocyst.

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Transgender student’s quest to use girls’ locker room defines school board race in Chicago suburb

By Moriah Balingit and Sandhya Somashekhar

Bob LeFevre Jr.’s reelection campaign for school board this year wasn’t much different from his first run 18 years ago. He relied on word of mouth to carry his message of fiscal stewardship and high-quality education. He repurposed the same yard signs, even though they are getting a little rusty.

But Tuesday — Election Day in the Palatine-Schaumburg area of suburban Chicago — will be anything but routine. The typically low-key school board race has become the epicenter of a national debate over transgender students. The Township High School District 211 election has received national attention and thousands of dollars from outside groups as a slate of conservative candidates seeks to wrest control of the board from LeFevre and other members who voted to allow a transgender girl to use the girls’ locker room at a local high school in 2015.

The election comes as an ever larger number of school districts nationally are grappling with how to accommodate an increasingly visible and vocal cohort of transgender students seeking to use the facilities of their choice. Policies supporting these students have often drawn protests from some of their peers and parents who think transgender students should use facilities based on the gender on their birth certificate. The school board election could have broad repercussions in that fight, as both sides hope it will set a new national standard for how schools balance the needs of transgender students with the privacy of their peers.

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Is dark energy an illusion?

By Adrian Cho

For the past 20 years, physicists have known that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, as if some bizarre “dark energy” is blowing up space like a balloon. In fact, cosmologists’ well-tested standard model assumes that 69% of the content of the universe is dark energy. However, there may be no need for the mysterious stuff, a team of theorists claims. Instead, the researchers argue, the universe’s acceleration could be driven by variations, or inhomogeneities, in its density. If so, then one of the biggest mysteries in physics could be explained away with nothing other than Albert Einstein’s familiar general theory of relativity. Other researchers are skeptical, however.

“If it’s right, somebody is going to have to take back Nobel prizes” awarded in 2011 for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, says Nick Kaiser, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Tom Giblin, a computational cosmologist at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, who has worked on a similar analysis, says, “I would love if inhomogeneities explained dark energy.” However, he says, “I don’t see any evidence from our simulations to expect it to be as big an effect as they see here.”

At issue is the way cosmologists calculate how the universe evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. Roughly speaking, they rely on two equations. One describes how matter coalesces into galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The other, known as the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) metric, comes out of Einstein’s theory of gravity, or general relativity, and scientists use it to calculate how much the universe has expanded at any time. At each step in time in a simulation, the cosmologists’ program uses the FLRW metric to calculate the “scale factor,” which specifies how much the universe has grown. The program then uses the scale factor as an input to calculate how the formation of galaxies and clusters advances in that step.

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