ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 498
May 2, 2016
How Do Drugs Work?
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Ever wondered how the small, white ibuprofen pill turns off your headache? from shutterstock.com
Whether a drug is prescribed by the doctor, bought over the counter or obtained illegally, we mostly take their mechanism of action for granted and trust they will do what they’re supposed to.
But how does the ibuprofen pill turn off your headache? And what does the antidepressant do to help balance your brain chemistry?
For something that seems so incredible, drug mechanics are wonderfully simple. It’s mostly about receptors and the molecules that activate them.
Receptors
To Fight Zika, Let’s Genetically Modify Mosquitoes – The Old-Fashioned Way
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Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are at the center of Zika virus' spread. Jaime Saldarriaga/Reuters
The near panic caused by the rapid spread of the Zika virus has brought new urgency to the question of how best to control mosquitoes that transmit human diseases. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes bite people across the globe, spreading three viral diseases: dengue, chikungunya and Zika.
It’s The Year 2020…How’s Your Cybersecurity?
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If we’re super-wired in the future, will we also be super-vulnerable? keoni101/flickr, CC BY-SA
our real-time emotional state? With networked devices tracking hormone levels, heart rates, facial expressions, voice tone and more, the Internet could become a vast system of “emotion readers,” touching the most intimate aspects of human psychology. What if these technologies allowed people’s underlying mental, emotional and physical states to be tracked – and manipulated?
Great Barrier Reef Bleaching Would Be Almost Impossible Without Climate Change
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Coral Bleaching at Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef. © XL Catlin Seaview Survey
The worst bleaching event on record has affected corals across the Great Barrier Reef in the last few months. As of the end of March, a whopping 93% of the reef has experienced bleaching.
Genetic Detectives: How Scientists Use DNA To Track Disease Outbreaks
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An epidemiologist examines the sample taken from a patient thought to be infected with influenza A (H1N1) virus. Maria Armas/Reuters
They’re the top questions on everyone’s mind when a new disease outbreak happens: where did the virus come from? When did this happen? How long has it been spreading in a particular country or group of people?
These questions have been the foundation of epidemiology, the study of the occurrence and spread of disease, since the days when outbreaks were tracked by hundreds and hundreds of questionnaires linking people with similar symptoms.
When Myth Meets Reality: Fabled Beasts And Real-Life Creatures
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Less unicorn, more hairy rhino. DiBgd/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
Fantastic creatures have fascinated humans for thousands of years. When a new skeleton of the extinct horned mammal Elasmotherium sibiricum was discovered recently, its common name –the “Siberian Unicorn” – quickly resurfaced. But this “unicorn” was very different to the creature of Western mythology.
Disease Evolution: How New Illnesses Emerge When We Change How We Live
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Some 60% of bugs that infect humans originated in animals. CDC Global/Fickr, CC BY
Humans have been “acquiring” infectious diseases from animals (zoonotic diseases) since we first started hunting wild game on the African savannahs. Indeed, nearly 60% of bugs that infect humans originated in animals.
A New State Of Matter: Quantum Spin Liquids Explained
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Spin, liquid – just add quantum. Panom Pensawang/shutterstock.com
Magnetism is one of the oldest recognised material properties. Known since antiquity, records from the 3rd century BC describe how lodestone, a naturally occurring magnetised ore of iron, was used in primitive magnetic compasses. Today, thanks to the theory of quantum mechanics we now understand the nature of magnetism, too, with the concept of spin explaining the behaviour of elementary particles such as electrons in the material that make it magnetic.
April 29, 2016
More Creative Types May Face Concentration Challenges
Ever try to work in a coffee shop, but your concentration gets derailed by all the talking, not to mention the steaming and the pouring? The problem might not be that you’re easily distracted. It could be that your brain is actually highly creative. So finds a study in the journal Neuropsychologia. [Darya L. Zabelina et al, Creativity and sensory gating indexed by the P50: Selective versus leaky sensory gating in divergent thinkers and creative achievers]
Previous behavioral studies have found that more creative people may have leaky sensory filters. That means the involuntary neurological process that ordinarily filters out irrelevant stimuli are not as fully engaged.
To test that idea, researchers asked volunteers to fill out a creative achievement questionnaire and take a test to assess creative cognition. Then, their brain activity was monitored while they listened to closely separated click sounds.
A typical brain responds to the first click a lot stronger than the second, identical click. It’s as if the brain acknowledges it processed something novel and doesn’t need to process the second click to the same extent. But for creative brains—
“They process the second click to the same degree so they don’t censor out information that is repetitive or irrelevant in some sense. “
Darya Zabelina of Northwestern University, lead researcher of the study.
“What’s interesting is that it happens 50 milliseconds after stimulus onset. With behavioral studies it’s impossible to sort of know exactly when this…happens. And with neurophysiology we’re able to see that only 50 milliseconds after…the clicks in our study were presented more creative people were less likely to filter out the noise. So 50 milliseconds, you’re not able to decide whether…to process something or not, it’s sort of an automatic response.”
If this kind of hyper-alert condition sounds familiar, you’re in good company. Kafka, Darwin, Chekhov and Proust were reported to avoid distractions while working because they were easily distracted. So try some ear plugs and go finish that world-changing book you’re been writing. Or possibly just trying to read.
—Erika Beras
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
What We’re Reading
From http://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2438
Some mind-numblingly painful non-science below. Indeed, from one of the items: “It’s quite an achievement, really, to be so wrong i[n] so many ways on so simple a subject in so few words.” Feels like there’s a lot of that going around lately......
On the other hand, Susan Hassol, interviewed on a NASA blog below, says there are plenty of reasons for optimism, and we need to make sure to give people reason to believe that we can tackle climate change. We’ve cleaned up our messes before—remember “Burn on, big river, burn on”? Well, the Cuyahoga is no longer flammable. So chin up, and get to work!
Global Warming Feels Quite Pleasant The New York Times, April 21, 2016 — Global warming has made the weather overall more pleasant in the US over the past few years, making Americans more lethargic over climate change. Will a drastic change in weather be needed for people to act?
A Day with Ken Ham, Slate.com, April 25, 2016 — The formidable Zach Kopplin, winner of NCSE’s Friend of Darwin award, reports on his experience attending one of Creation Museum founder Ken Ham’s “Vision Conferences.” That vision is decidedly idiosyncratic and resolutely anti-evolution. Most alarming, it appears that public school trips to the Creation Museum, a clear violation of the constitutional separation of church and state, are continuing to happen. You won’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Ham doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state.
10 Astounding Moments in a Creationist Textbook: Revis[i]ting Of Pandas and People, Poppycock, April 25, 2016 — Prompted by the acquisition of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics by the Discovery Institute, Carrie Poppy offers a listicle about FTE’s most infamous publication, Of Pandas and People, the “intelligent design” textbook at the center of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.
Why Creationists Are Out of Time With History and Science, The Guardian, April 27, 2016 — Paleontologist Dave Hone is unimpressed with creationist misunderstanding and misuse of his work on pterosaurs. “It’s quite an achievement, really, to be so wrong i[n] so many ways on so simple a subject in so few words.”
We’re Over Being Bummed About Climate Change and Ready for Solutions, NASA Global Climate Change, April 28, 2016 — Oceanography teacher and NASA science blogger, Laura Faye Tenenbaum interviews climate communication expert Susan Hassol about flipping the message about climate change from doom to zoom: No question, climate change is an enormous challenge but there’s a lot to be positive and optimistic about. And the sooner we get to work, the less it will cost.
Unfriendly Climate, Texas Monthly, May 2016 — “Texas Tech’s Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most respected experts on global warming in the country. She’s also an evangelical Christian who is trying to connect with the very people who most doubt her research. Too bad the temperature keeps rising.”
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