ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 423

Cold Tolerance Among Inuit May Come From Extinct Human Relatives

By Steph Yin

Inuit who live in Greenland experience average temperatures below freezing for at least half of the year. For those who live in the north, subzero temperatures are normal during the coldest months.

Given these frigid conditions, anthropologists have wondered for decades whether the Inuit in Greenland and other parts of the Arctic have unique biological adaptations that help them tolerate the extreme cold.

A new study, published on Wednesday in Molecular Biology and Evolution, identifies gene variants in Inuit who live in Greenland, which may help them adapt to the cold by promoting heat-generating body fat. These variants possibly originated in the Denisovans, a group of archaic humans who, along with Neanderthals, diverged from modern humans about half a million years ago.

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Question of the Week – 12/28/16

Despite the challenges we see before us, scientific discovery never stops. If you were to make your best guess (or perhaps if you possess the power of prophetic foresight), what do you think might be one of the major scientific discoveries of 2017? A medical breakthrough? A leap in computer technology? New information about life’s origins? Or something else entirely?

Our favorite answer wins a copy of A Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins (no repeat winners).

And please don’t forget to send in your submissions for Question of the Week! You can suggest a question by emailing us at QotW@richarddawkins.net. Please remember this is for “Question of the Week” suggestions only, and answers to the Question of the Week should be submitted through the comments section on the Question of the Week page  Thank you!

Antimatter just got a little bit less mysterious

By Sophie Bushwick

Antimatter, the equal-but-opposite twin of regular old stuff, is a finicky material. It’s only in the past 20 years that scientists have been able to create the simplest atoms of antimatter and keep them stable. Now they have made the first measurements of antihydrogen’s internal structure.

Hydrogen is the first element in the periodic table, and consists of one electron orbiting one proton. Its mirror antihydrogen has one anti-electron, or positron, and one antiproton. If a positron and an electron collide, they will annihilate one other and release energy. Ditto for a proton-antiproton interaction. Because our universe is chock full of electrons, protons, and various combinations of the two, it’s exceptionally difficult to keep either anti-particle around for very long.

That’s exactly the challenge that physicists tackle at CERN’s Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA). They create a vacuum in a magnetic bottle, then toss positrons and antiprotons into it. Ideally, the two will combine into antihydrogen, the bottle will keep the antimatter stable, and then the scientists can study it—with lasers, of course.

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Special counsel warns against ‘any effort to chill scientific research’ amid climate concerns

By Chris Mooney

The Office of Special Counsel, an independent U.S. agency that protects whistleblowers and investigates prohibited practices that affect government employees, declined this week to further investigate a questionnaire sent from the Trump transition team to the Energy Department.

The memo asked for the names of staffers who attended international climate change meetings or interagency meetings related to the economic consequences of climate change.

In a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Carolyn Lerner, the special counsel, noted that the Trump transition team had said the questionnaire “was not authorized” and that “transition officials are not considered federal employees” legally.

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Remembering Carl Sagan

By Joel Achenbach

Carl Sagan died 20 years ago Tuesday, at the far-too-young age of 62. He had many strong beliefs, none greater than his conviction that science was a candle in the dark.

There’s a lot of darkness these days — science denialism in its various forms. It’s certainly not a novel development, but it’s a bigger problem than ever given the scale of our scientific and technological challenges. The world has 7 billion of us now, and we need to be smart and correct and wise. We need to be wary of bunk. Technologies that spread knowledge also spread nonsense and abet charlatans. When Sagan died, the World Wide Web was only a few years old, search engines were just getting going, and social media and smart phones were a decade in the future. Climate change was already a big topic, one that incited anti-scientific arguments, but the issue had not yet become completely and hopelessly politicized. The Lancet had not yet published a notorious anti-vaccine study that would later be retracted.

The list of scientifically mediated, politically divisive issues is a long one, and Sagan would have been a busy man these last 20 years.

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It may have seemed like the world fell apart in 2016. Steven Pinker is here to tell you it didn’t.

By Julia Belluz

At many moments of 2016, it seemed the world was falling apart.

In June, there was the Orlando nightclub shooting, where dozens were killed and injured in the deadliest terror attack in the US since 9/11. That was followed by July’s blood-soaked Bastille Day in Nice, when a terrorist drove a truck over holiday revelers, killing 84 people, including 10 children. Before the month was over, ISIS militants had assassinated a French priest in his church and executed the patrons and staff at a cafe in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

And these were just a few of the terrorist attacks.

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The Necessity of Secularism, pg 13

“We’re living in the midst of a revolution in human attitudes and belief. In much of Europe and North America and other areas of the developed world, such as Australia and Japan, large portions of the population are now nonreligious, that is, they reject belief in God and transcendent spiritual entities of any sort. This is an unprecedented moment in the history of humanity. As far as we can tell, belief in gods and spirits was nearly universal until the late eighteenth century; widespread religious skepticism, such as we are now experiencing, is a phenomenon of just the last few decades.

The consequences of this dramatic shift in beliefs are still unknown, because we are living through this change. All we can say with certainty at the present is that we’re in unfamiliar territory. Humanity has never been in this situation before.”

–Ronald Linday, The Necessity of Secularism, pg 13

Discuss!!

No Doctor Should Work 30 Straight Hours Without Sleep

By James Hamblin

When Larry Schlachter was a 31-year-old neurosurgeon, he was driving to the hospital early one morning and “just blacked out.” He crashed his car and crushed his chest; broken ribs punctured his thorax, which filled with air and blood. “I almost died.”

Instead he was left with 14 fractured bones and a lingering loss of balance. He attributes the blackout to working 120-hour weeks that left him often on the brink of awareness. He put it to me clinically: “I was a victim of physician fatigue and exhaustion.”

Getting five or six hours of sleep—substantial by many physicians’ self-standards—can leave drivers impaired to a degree that’s similar to drunkenness. That’s according to findings of a study released this month from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety: Drivers who sleep only five or six hours in a 24-hour period are twice as likely to crash as those who got seven or more.

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5 Reasons a Trump Administration Should Scare the Sh*t Out of Anyone Who Cares About the Environment

By Yvette d’Entremont

When you deeply want something to be true, that’s when you have to question it the most.

I want chocolate-covered bacon to be a health food. Who doesn’t want to get in shape by eating food so tasty it might give you an orgasm? To pretend it’s true, I could hunt and peck carefully through the internet to find sources that will tell me everything I want to hear. I’d find sources that bacon is heart-healthy. And there are articles all over the place that say chocolate may actually be a health food, so chocolate-covered bacon? You’re practically doing yoga while getting a kale enema. Namaste, motherfuckers.

Then I could really do the responsible thing, ask the hard questions about caloric density, breakdown of macronutrients and micronutrients, look for peer-reviewed articles, and come to the conclusion that this is a once-in-a-while food. Back to the salads with me.

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Campus Identity Politics Is Dooming Liberal Causes, a Professor Charges

By Evan R. Goldstein

The day after the presidential election, Mark Lilla had to get something off his chest. “I wrote in a fever,” he says. The article that resulted, which appeared in The New York Times, argues that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force.”

Mr. Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, pinned the blame, in part, on academe and its fixation on identity politics. “How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose … gender pronouns?” he asked. “How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in ‘His Majesty’?”

The article has provoked an avalanche of response and rebuttal. “Stop blaming our society’s political and social crises on campus-based demands for color- and gender- coded justice that reflect the crises far more than they cause them,” wrote Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University, in the Times. “It is unconscionable, this know-better recrimination, directed at the very people who just put the most work and energy into defeating Trumpism, coming from those who will be made least vulnerable by Trump’s ascension,” wrote Rebecca Traister in New York magazine.

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