ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 494
May 6, 2016
How Corruption Is Hurting Mexico City’s Efforts To Tackle Air Pollution
Photo credit:
Smog over Mexico City: bad air quality has led to limits on when people can drive their cars in the city. ilai/flickr, CC BY-SA
On March 15 this year, Mexico City encountered its worst environmental crisis of the last decade. A gray fog, comprising noxious air pollutants, cast a shadow over the sprawling metropolitan area for two days. Vehicles were ordered off the roads, and people were asked to remain indoors.
Reading To Your Child: The Difference It Makes
Photo credit:
California elementary school teacher doing shared reading. Kathleen Tomscha, CC BY
If you are a parent or a teacher, you most probably read stories to young children. Together, you laugh and point at the pictures. You engage them with a few simple questions. And they respond.
So what happens to children when they participate in shared reading? Does it make a difference to their learning? If so, what aspects of their learning are affected?
Shared Reading For Language Development
Antibody Injections Could Be Stepping Stone To HIV Vaccine
Photo credit:
Glass sculpture representation of Human Immunodeficiency Virus structure. LabLit/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
Imagine a seasonal jab of antibodies that could neutralise the HIV virus. Such an injection could prove to be next best alternative to an HIV vaccine, which has proven elusive to date.
American and German researchers have demonstrated that by injecting macaques with neutralising antibodies, they successfully shielded the monkeys from HIV infection for as long as six months.
Immune Response
After infection, HIV methodically weakens the immune system to the extent that a simple cold can escalate to fatal pneumonia.
Do You Even Lift? Why Lifting Weights Is More Important For Your Health Than You Think
Photo credit:
Lifting weights can seem inaccessible if you don’t know how to do it. Pascal, CC BY-SA
Regular participation in muscle strengthening activity such as weight or resistance training has many health benefits. However, this mode of exercise has been largely overlooked in Australian health promotion. Our recent research shows a large majority of Australians do not engage in muscle strengthening activity.
What’s Mother’s Day If You’ve Been Born In A Machine And Raised By Robots?
Photo credit:
Could a robot raise a child without the need for a mother? Shutterstock/Linda Bucklin
As far-fetched as it may seem today, there are a couple of compelling reasons why some humans may one day be born without either a mother or father as we now know them, and with no other humans around to bring them up.
The first is the uninhabitable Earth scenario: doomsday. This is the idea that one day our planet will not be able to support human life.
Garage Biotech: New Drugs Using Only A Computer, The Internet And Free Online Data
Photo credit:
Garage Startup. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/201407...
Pharmaceutical companies typically develop new drugs with thousands of staff and budgets that run into the billions of dollars. One estimate puts the cost of bringing a new drug to market at $2.6 billion with others suggesting that it could be double that cost at $5 billion.
Hypospadias: The Cause Of Penis Malformation Is Still A Matter Of Debate
Photo credit:
This birth defect has such a stigma because it can be related to having a smaller-than-usual penis. Mike Ault/Flickr, CC BY-SA
This is part of our series on hidden or stigmatised health conditions in men. Read the other articles in the series here.
Hypospadias is a malformation of the penis that is present from birth. In hypospadias, the opening of the urethra (the tube that drains urine from the bladder) is misplaced somewhere along the underside of the penis instead of being at the tip.
May 5, 2016
Rampant religious persecution against atheists
By Robert P. George and Hannah Rosenthal
Should it be a crime to deny the existence of God?
In the Russian city of Stavropol, Viktor Krasnov, a 38-year-old man, faces trial, charged with publicly insulting Orthodox Church believers by supporting atheism in social media. For proclaiming in a heated Internet exchange “there is no God,” Krasnov was confined for a month to a local hospital for psychiatric evaluation. If convicted under Russia’s blasphemy law, enacted in 2013 and making it illegal to “insult the religious convictions or feelings of citizens,” he may spend up to a year in prison.
During the Soviet era, Russia infamously held people in psychiatric wards and put them on trial, not for denying a deity, but affirming one. Either way, such punishment violates the universal human right of freedom of religion or belief. This fundamental liberty includes the right to believe or not to believe and live one’s life accordingly.
Russia, however, is not the only country where atheists face punishment. As noted in country chapters of its Annual Report, released on Monday, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), on which we serve, has found no shortage of nations that perpetrate or permit their persecution. It is time for our country to shine a powerful spotlight on these abuses.
In February of this year, a court in Saudi Arabia sentenced a 28-year-old man to 10 years in prison, 2,000 lashes and a $5,330 fine for posting tweets favoring atheism. A Saudi court also overturned a death sentence delivered to poet and artist Ashraf Fayadh for “spreading atheism” but re-sentenced him to eight years in prison and 800 lashes. Under Saudi Interior Ministry regulations introduced in 2014, it is considered a terrorist act “to call … for atheist thought in any form.”
That same month, an Egyptian court convicted Mustafa Abdel-Nabi in absentia and handed him a three-year prison term for blasphemy for atheistic postings on his Facebook page. In 2015, a blogger from Ismailia, Sherif Gaber, was sentenced to one year of hard labor in prison for discussing his atheist views on Facebook; he is in hiding. That same year, atheist student Karim al-Banna received a three-year prison term for blasphemy because a court found his Facebook posts to “belittle the divine.” These cases are part of a recent upsurge in blasphemy charges against atheists. In addition, over the past two years, Egypt’s Ministries of Religious Endowments and Sports and Youth co-sponsored a national campaign to combat atheism among Egyptian youth.
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When Can Fetuses Feel Pain? Utah Abortion Law and Doctors Are at Odds
By Jack Healy
Starting later this month, women in Utah seeking an abortion 20 weeks or more into a pregnancy will first have to be given anesthesia or painkillers — drugs that are intended not for them, but for the fetus.
Those are the terms of a new law that has made Utah the first state in the country to require what doctors here are calling “fetal anesthesia” for the small percentage of abortions that occur at this point in a pregnancy. The law, passed by the Republican-controlled State Legislature and signed in late March by Gov. Gary R. Herbert, a Republican, has opened a new front in the heated debate over fetal pain.
The science examining when a fetus begins to feel pain is complex. Most scientists who have expressed views on the issue have said they do not think the neurological wiring to feel pain is in place until a fetus is further along in a pregnancy, past the point when nearly all abortions occur.
But in recent years the issue has become political fodder in legislative battles over restricting abortions later in a pregnancy.
Anti-abortion groups and lawmakers in Utah said they were acting out of concern for the fetus. But abortion rights activists and some obstetricians and maternal care doctors in Utah said the law was bafflingly vague and scientifically unsound. They said that it intruded into confidential decisions between doctors and patients, and that it could put women’s health at risk by creating a broad requirement for them to take unspecified painkillers.
“You’re asking me to invent a procedure that doesn’t have any research to back it up,” said Dr. Leah Torres, an obstetrician-gynecologist who spends half of a Saturday each month working in Salt Lake City at one of Utah’s two licensed abortion clinics. “You want me to experiment on my patients.”
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Feed Additive Squelches Ruminants’ Methane Belches
The global population is now nearly seven and a half billion. And that’s just humans. Because our planet is also home to one-and-a-half-billion cows, another billion sheep, and a billion goats. Their combined belches account for a full fifth of the world's methane emissions—and methane is about 30 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2.
But those methane emissions might get cut—by feeding the grazers something called 3-nitrooxypropanol. "I can tell you, they like it. No rejection at all." Maik Kindermann, an organic chemist at DSM Nutritional Products in Switzerland. Liking it, in the cow world, he says basically means they'll still gobble up their food, even with this stuff mixed in.
Kindermann's company developed the additive a few years back. It jams up an enzyme crucial to the production of methan by bacteria that live inside the animals. And it slashes the number of those methane-belching bacteria, while leaving the rest of the microbiome intact. The result? A 30 percent decrease in methane emissions. The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Evert C. Duin et al: Mode of action uncovered for the specific reduction of methane emissions from ruminants by the small molecule 3-nitrooxypropanol]
Kindermann says he thinks the chemical could be a win-win for the planet—and the animals. "You know the methane is kind of a waste product. And this energy, instead of losing it for the animal, it can be reused for the animal in terms of performance, and at the same time we are doing something for greenhouse gas emission and climate change." The product’s not on the market yet—toxicology tests are ongoing. But the hope is that it might take some of the heat off of beef.
—Christopher Intagliata
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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