ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 429

Study Suggests 3.2 Million-Year-Old Lucy Spent a Lot of Time in Trees

By Joanna Klein

Lucy was a small one. She weighed about as much as the average 2nd grader and stood about three-and-a-half feet tall. But that lady (or pre-lady, because Australopithecus afarensis like her weren’t quite human) was strong. Her famous skeleton, a 3.18 million-year-old fossil also known as AL 288-1, tells us so. But to build arm bones as strong as hers, she, and possibly other members of her species, probably spent a lot of time in trees, suggests a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.

Lucy, discovered almost half a century ago, was the most complete skeleton of the earliest hominid ever found at the time. She changed our understanding of human evolution. There’s little doubt Lucy walked on two feet like a modern human, or that she climbed trees to sleep, avoid predators or gather food. Some scientists — including some involved in this study — even think she died after a fall from one. But just how much time she spent in trees has been a subject of contention because interpretations of her ancient skeletal clues are hard to prove. For the latest study, researchers looked at the ways bones can grow stronger or weaker with everyday use. And by examining the internal structure of Lucy’s upper right arm and leg bones and comparing them with the bones of around 100 chimpanzees and 1,000 modern humans, they concluded that climbing trees wasn’t just some trivial task. Lucy did it enough that the ratio of strength between her arms and legs is slightly more chimpish than human.

“That doesn’t mean she was acting like a chimp, just that she was stressing her limbs more like a chimpanzee than a modern human,” said Christopher Ruff, a paleoanthropologist at Johns Hopkins University who led the study.

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More hotels are checking out of the Bible business

By Hugo Martin

When the ultra-hip Moxy Hotel opens in San Diego next year, the rooms will be stocked with the usual amenities — an alarm clock, hair dryer, writing desk and flat-screen TV.

But you won’t find a Bible in the bedside nightstand.

Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel company, supplies a Bible and the Book of Mormon in the rooms of every other hotel in the franchise. But the company has recently decided that no religious materials should be offered at two of its newest millennial-oriented hotel brands, Moxy and Edition hotels.

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Planned Parenthood and ACLU mount abortion law challenges in three states

By Molly Redden

Reproductive rights advocates announced a significant slate of challenges to anti-abortion laws on Wednesday, taking aim at major restrictions in three states which advocates say are unconstitutional.

Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal advocacy group which argued a landmark abortion case earlier this year, filed three lawsuits in Alaska, Missouri and North Carolina. In Missouri, the groups will challenge a pair of abortion restrictions that have reduced the number of abortion providers to just one. They are taking aim at a similar clinic restriction in Alaska. In North Carolina, they will mount a challenge to a 20-week ban on abortion that has some of the nation’s strictest exceptions.

The two Missouri restrictions are highly similar to laws in Texas that the US supreme court struck down in June. They require abortions to be performed in expensive, hospital-like facilities and require abortion providers to have certain professional relationships with a local hospital.

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MDMA approved for final trials to treat PTSD before possible legalization

By Olivia Solon

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the green light to phase three trials of MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, the final phase of validation required to turn the party drug into a legal medicine.

The treatment involves giving patients the drug just three times – once a month – during long talking therapy sessions, interspersed with weekly sessions without the drug. Early trials of the drug, currently listed as a schedule 1 substance by the Drug Enforcement Administration along with heroin and cocaine, have shown encouraging results for patients with treatment-resistant PTSD.

“Moving from phase two to phase three shows we have strong scientific reason to believe that MDMA is an effective treatment for PTSD in therapy. The fact the FDA is ready to move forward with phase three signals that they agree,” said Brad Burge, from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), a not-for-profit based in Santa Cruz, California, that has spearheaded efforts to turn MDMA into a medicine.

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Never go to bed angry – study finds evidence for age-old advice

By Hannah Devlin

Never go to bed angry, the old saying goes, or bad feeling will harden into resentment. Now scientists have found evidence to support the idea that negative emotional memories are harder to reverse after a night’s sleep.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that during sleep, the brain reorganises the way negative memories are stored, making these associations harder to suppress in the future.

“In our opinion, yes, there is certain merit in this age-old advice,” said Yunzhe Liu, who led the research at Beijing Normal University and is now based at University College London. “We would suggest to first resolve argument before going to bed; don’t sleep on your anger.”

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6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education

By Anya Kamenetz

Part of our ongoing series exploring how the U.S. can educate the nearly 5 million students who are learning English.

Brains, brains, brains. One thing we’ve learned at NPR Ed is that people are fascinated by brain research. And yet it can be hard to point to places where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience findings.

But there is one happy nexus where research is meeting practice: bilingual education. “In the last 20 years or so, there’s been a virtual explosion of research on bilingualism,” says Judith Kroll, a professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Again and again, researchers have found, “bilingualism is an experience that shapes our brain for a lifetime,” in the words of Gigi Luk, an associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

At the same time, one of the hottest trends in public schooling is what’s often called dual-language or two-way immersion programs.

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Too much space travel is hazardous for your eyeballs

By Sarah Kaplan

Something strange has been happening to people who stay too long in space: The backs of their eyeballs start to flatten. Spider-web-like marks called choroidal folds crisscross the thin layer of blood vessels and connective tissue that surround their retinas. Their vision goes blurry, their optic nerves become inflamed. The damage can last long after the astronauts return to Earth. And scientists haven’t been able to explain why.

“People initially didn’t know what to make of it, and by 2010 there was growing concern as it became apparent that some of the astronauts had severe structural changes that were not fully reversible upon return to earth,” notes Noam Alperin, a professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Now Alperin may have found the source of this mysterious syndrome. In a study presented this week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, he suggests that the problem might be caused by pressure from the fluid that cushions the brain.

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Theory challenging Einstein’s view on speed of light could soon be tested

By Ian Sample

The newborn universe may have glowed with light beams moving much faster than they do today, according to a theory that overturns Einstein’s century-old claim that the speed of light is a constant.

João Magueijo, of Imperial College London, and Niayesh Afshordi, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, propose that light tore along at infinite speed at the birth of the universe when the temperature of the cosmos was a staggering ten thousand trillion trillion celsius.

It is a theory Magueijo has being developing since the late 1990s, but in a paper published on Monday he and Afshordi describe for the first time how scientists can finally test the controversial idea. If right, the theory would leave a signature on the ancient radiation left over from the big bang, the so-called cosmic microwave background that cosmologists have observed with satellites.

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Scientists are really, really worried about Donald Trump

By Sarah Kaplan

As soon as the election result became clear — Donald Trump would be America’s next president — ecologist Kelly Ramirez began reaching out to friends and female colleagues. Over email, the scientists anxiously discussed what the election would mean for scientific research and for the diverse group of people who conduct it.

“The hateful [campaign] rhetoric towards minorities, women, LBGTQIA, immigrants, and people with disabilities, coupled with the barrage of anti-science and anti-knowledge sentiment was difficult to take,” Ramirez wrote in a blog post for Scientific American. “Especially alone.”

By the weekend, the email group had grown to 100 women. Then 200. They drafted an open letter in defense of inclusivity and the scientific process — including the need to fight climate change — and posted it online nine days after the election. As of Tuesday night, more than 10,500 people have signed it.

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Caught in the Pulpit, pgs 192-193

“Are these reflections on religion offensive? They concern topics that many people would rather leave examined, but unlike most earlier criticisms of religion they do not point a finger of blame. It doesn’t take conniving priests to invent these cultural contraptions, an more than it took a devious social engineer to create the Japanese tea ceremony or debutante cotillions, no matter how resentful and trapped some of the participants in those superannuated traditions may feel. Just as there is no Intelligent Designer to be the proper recipient of our gratitude for the magnificent biosphere we live in, there need be no intelligent designers to be the proper targets of our anger when we find ourselves victimized by “social cells,” like the church. There are, to be sure, plenty of greedy and deceitful people who tend to rise to power in any of these organizations, but if we concentrate on hunting the villains down, we misdirect our energies. The structures themselves can arise innocently, out of good intentions, and gradually evolve into social mechanisms that perpetuate themselves quite independently of the intentions and values of their constituent parts, the agents who bustle about inside them executing the tasks that keep the institution going. Some of those agents, the clergy who must confront the deluge of information and attendant curiosity on a daily basis, are showing signs of strain, suggesting that the task facing religions everywhere is only going to become more difficult.”

–Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola, Caught in the Pulpit, pgs 192-193

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