ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 435

Surprise! British Red Squirrels Carry Leprosy

By Ed Yong

In 2006, Anna Meredith came across a dead red squirrel with a weird skin disorder. Its ears lacked the characteristic red tufts, and were instead swollen, smooth, and shiny, like the cauliflower ears of boxers and rugby players. Its nose, muzzle, and eyelids were similarly swollen and hairless. Meredith, a professor of conservation medicine at the University of Edinburgh, had never seen anything like this before.

But she soon saw the same problems again—in six more squirrels over the next six years. She and her colleagues analyzed tissue samples from the dead animals. And to their surprise, they discovered that the squirrels had leprosy.

That’s astonishing for two reasons. First, even though leprosy still affects at least 385,000 people around the world (including a few hundred in the U.S.), the disease was eradicated from Britain several centuries ago. Second, squirrels aren’t meant to get leprosy.

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Health Under Trump

By James Hamblin

Protesters flooded Manhattan’s public spaces the last two nights, shouting and brandishing signs that read like a disenfranchisement mixtape, from “black lives matter” to “not my president” to “I’m just sad.”

The crowd ranged from abject to furious. But the very act of protesting meant they weren’t hopeless. The worst thing that can happen to a human body, individually or collectively, is a failure of hope.

President Obama reminded us as much on Wednesday, speaking from the White House lawn. “I think of this as a relay race,” he said in his staid way, even as he prepares to pass the baton to a man who spent years claiming that our first black president was lying about being born in the United States. A man who spent much of his own campaign inciting people to despise the most significant legislation achieved by this president—the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)—as “totally awful” and “the absolute worst.”

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A New Test of Pot’s Potential to Replace Painkillers

By Greg Miller

Emily Lindley’s stash of marijuana is going to be very, very secure.

Lindley, a neurobiologist, is about to begin the first study ever to directly compare cannabis with an opioid painkiller (in this case, oxycodone) for treating people with chronic pain. She got a grant for this research two years ago, but it has taken that much time to meet all the requirements for working with a drug the federal government still considers highly dangerous.

Before it’s given to patients, the marijuana will be kept inside steel narcotics lockers bolted to the wall in a room with surveillance cameras and a combination keypad on the door. Each locker has tamper-proof hinges and requires two keys—each held by a different person. If someone puts the wrong key in one of the locks, it will become inoperable and have to be drilled out.

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How to Cope With Post-Election Stress

By Julie Beck

Collective trauma is “a shared experience of threat and anxiety in response to sudden or ongoing events that lead to some threat to a basic sense of belonging in society,” says Jack Saul, the director of the International Trauma Studies Program. “It usually is a disruption to the social and moral order.”

One could argue that those who opposed Donald Trump’s election have been through a collective trauma that has left them feeling rattled and afraid. Women and people of color have good reason to be anxious, given the sexist and racist things Trump said during the campaign, given his threats against the women who accused him of sexual assault, given how he has painted Mexicans as criminals, given that he was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, given so, so many things. People have very real fears rooted in policies Trump has promised to enact in office—including a ban on Muslim immigrants and the deportation of millions of immigrants.

It’s more than plausible to interpret the election of someone who openly espouses such views to the nation’s highest office as a disruption of the social and moral order.

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The Evangelical Reckoning Over Donald Trump

By Emma Green

For months, the stories came in waves. The death of the religious right. The new moral minority. The Christian case for voting Trump, followed by the Christian case for not voting Trump. Everyone wanted to know what conservative evangelicals, who have long been considered a unified voting bloc, would do during this election.

Now, it is clear. They overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump.

The Republican candidate’s victory may seem like an affirmation of the old, long-standing coalition between evangelicals and the Republican party, and in many ways, it is. But vote counts conceal deep, painful fractures among the huge, diverse group of Americans who identify as evangelical Christians. Nothing makes this clearer than the unprecedented in-fighting among Christian leaders in the lead-up to the election. Many people in big, important positions staked their credibility on supporting or opposing Donald Trump; old allies turned against one another, and new upstarts gained fame.

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Trump’s Cabinet: Yeah, It’s Probably Even Worse Than You Imagined

By Phil Plait

So, it hasn’t taken more than a day for President-elect Donald Trump to turn his sights toward destroying science.

The day after the election, Politico reported on who Trump is looking at to fill his Cabinet spots. The presidential Cabinet consists of people appointed by the president as the heads of the federal executive departments like the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and so on.

The list is as unsurprising as it is appalling. It’s as if Trump’s transition team made a list of all 300 million Americans, ordered them by competency and ability to not destroy everything they touch, and then skipped right down to the bottom.

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Donald Trump and the Future of Education

By Emily Deruy

I’ll be honest; I’d pre-written a piece on what a Clinton presidency might mean for education. The polls pointed in her direction and she’s been talking about children and schools for years, meaning there was plenty to mull. I’d interviewed a number of both conservative and liberal education wonks who had a general idea of what to expect and a relatively uniform belief that she would work across the aisle.

Now, what happens education-wise under Donald Trump’s administration is unclear.

What he’s said on the campaign trail about schools and students obviously won’t transfer directly into policy, but his words offer clues. Will Trump shutter the U.S. Education Department entirely, as he’s suggested? That seems highly unlikely, but there’s a very real chance he’ll scale back its scope drastically. Looking at the big picture, with Republicans controlling the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, more decision-making power is likely to be transferred back to states and local governments. And Trump is likely to push what he’s called a “market-driven” approach to education. That makes civil-rights groups and many Democrats who see the federal government as something of a safety net for vulnerable low-income students and children of color nervous.

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Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being

By Tori Rodriguez

A client sits before me, seeking help untangling his relationship problems. As a psychotherapist, I strive to be warm, nonjudgmental and encouraging. I am a bit unsettled, then, when in the midst of describing his painful experiences, he says, “I’m sorry for being so negative.”

A crucial goal of therapy is to learn to acknowledge and express a full range of emotions, and here was a client apologizing for doing just that. In my psychotherapy practice, many of my clients struggle with highly distressing emotions, such as extreme anger, or with suicidal thoughts. In recent years I have noticed an increase in the number of people who also feel guilty or ashamed about what they perceive to be negativity. Such reactions undoubtedly stem from our culture’s overriding bias toward positive thinking. Although positive emotions are worth cultivating, problems arise when people start believing they must be upbeat all the time.

In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment. “Acknowledging the complexity of life may be an especially fruitful path to psychological well-being,” says psychologist Jonathan M. Adler of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.

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Wireless Brain-Spine Connection Overcomes Paralysis in Monkey

By James Gorman

Monkeys with spinal cord damage that paralyzed one leg quickly regained the ability to walk with a wireless connection from the brain to the spinal cord below the injury, scientists reported Wednesday.

The achievement is yet another advance in the rapidly moving field of technological treatments for spinal cord damage.

In recent years, scientists have achieved brain control of robotic hands in monkeys and humans, helped a paralyzed man regain some use of a hand through a chip implanted in his brain, and used electrical stimulation of nerves to enable paralyzed rats to walk again.

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Why Christians Overwhelmingly Backed Trump

By Olga Khazan

After the release of a video in which President-elect Donald Trump said he felt he could grab women’s genitals with impunity, many thought for sure two of his supporter contingents would abandon him: conservative women and Christians.

Instead, last night, both stuck by him.

Trump won over 53 percent of white women, to Clinton’s 43 percent, according to CBS, and he did about as well among white, Republican women as among white, Republican men.

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