ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 504

Preparing for the Big One

By The Economist

The giant tectonic plates which make up Earth’s outermost layer are always on the move, sliding past and colliding with each other. This creates plenty of seismic activity, especially in the area around the Pacific Ocean known as the “Ring of Fire”, which accounts for some 90% of the world’s earthquakes. On April 14th a magnitude 6.2 tremor shook Kumamoto prefecture on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. Then, in the early hours of the morning on April 16th, a magnitude 7.0 quake struck the same area. On the same day, on the opposite side of the ring, a coastal region of Manabí and Esmeraldas provinces in Ecuador was shaken violently by a magnitude 7.8 quake—15 times stronger in terms of the energy released than the second Japanese quake. In Japan more than 40 people died; in Ecuador the death toll is expected to exceed 525.

The greatest risk posed by earthquakes on land comes from buildings collapsing. Whether or not they fall down depends both on circumstance and on how they are built. This was evident in both disasters. In Ecuador, traditional homes made largely from bamboo withstood the quake better because of their flexibility. The more affluent, living in buildings made of concrete, were less lucky as walls, floors and roofs collapsed (as pictured above). In Mashiki, a town hard hit by the two Japanese earthquakes, dozens of traditional wooden homes collapsed, along with the community’s Buddhist temple and Shinto shrine. But among them stands a more recent house that remains unscathed, rather like a gleaming tooth among otherwise rotten gums. Inside, recounts its relieved elderly owner, her cups and saucers were flung around but the house stood firm.

Last one standing

That solitary house underlines one of the most successful ways to protect against seismic activity. The most important part of Japan’s approach remains its stringent building code, says Naoshi Hirata of the Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) at the University of Tokyo.

For decades Japan has tightened its construction codes—by now the world’s strictest—and supported other innovations in quake-proofing construction methods. All buildings constructed after 1981 had to be sturdy enough to withstand collapse in an earthquake with an intensity of “upper 6” or higher on the scale used by the Japan Meteorological Agency (which measures shaking at individual points whereas magnitude measures the size of an earthquake). The regulations were strengthened again after the quake that hit Kobe in 1995, which had a magnitude of 6.8.

Those building regulations have sharply reduced both the rate of collapsed structures and the risk of fires spreading. When the March 2011 earthquake struck off the Pacific coast of Tohoku it was the ensuing tsunami that wrecked the coastal region, setting off a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power plant. Most newer buildings withstood the shaking, which was somewhat attenuated by the time the seismic waves reached land.

Ecuador introduced stricter seismic regulations of its own after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. But there are problems. Hugo Yepes, a geophysicist at the National Polytechnical University in Quito, complains that builders and developers have been largely ignoring them and that local officials have effectively “legalised” informal new neighbourhoods without insisting on anti-seismic standards. When visiting the area, Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president, said building standards had to be applied with greater rigour to avoid a similar scale of destruction in the future.

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The Trippy State Between Wakefulness and Sleep

By Vaughan Bell

There is a brief time, between waking and sleep, when reality begins to warp. Rigid conscious thought starts to dissolve into the gently lapping waves of early stage dreaming and the world becomes a little more hallucinatory, your thoughts a little more untethered. Known as the hypnagogic state, it has received only erratic attention from researchers over the years, but a recent series of studies have renewed interest in this twilight period, with the hope it can reveal something fundamental about consciousness itself.

Traditionally, the hypnagogic state has been studied as part of the sleep disorder narcolepsy, where the brain’s inability to separate waking life and dreaming can result in terrifying hallucinations. But it’s also part of the normal transition into sleep, beginning when our mind is first affected by drowsiness and ending when we finally lose consciousness. It is brief and often slips by unnoticed, but consistent careful attention to your inner experience after you bed down can reveal an unfolding mindscape of curious sounds, abstract scenery, and tumbling thoughts. This meandering cognitive state results from what Cambridge University researcher Valdas Noreika calls a “natural fragmentation of consciousness” and the idea that this can be tracked over the early minutes of sleep entry is the basis of recent hypnagogia research.

A recent proof-of-principle study, led by Noreika, intensively studied a single individual as he repeatedly transitioned into sleep while the brain’s electrical activity was recorded using EEG scalp electrodes. The would-be-sleeper was asked to press a button when he experienced an intrusive thought or image, and to verbally report it to the sleep researchers. The descriptions were pleasantly bizarre: “putting a horse into a sort of violin case and zipping it up,” “the phrase learning to consume consciously from a master,” “visual image of a curled up music manuscript.”

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Why We Sleep Badly on Our First Night in a New Place

By Ed Yong

When you check into a hotel room or stay with a friend, is your first night of sleep disturbed? Do you toss and turn, mind strangely alert, unable to shut down in the usual way? If so, you’re in good company. This phenomenon is called the first-night effect, and scientists have known about it for over 50 years. “Even when you look at young and healthy people without chronic sleep problems, 99 percent of the time they show this first-night effect—this weird half-awake, half-asleep state,” says Yuka Sasaki from Brown University.

Other animals can straddle the boundaries between sleeping and wakefulness. Whales, dolphins, and many birds can sleep with just one half of their brains at a time, while the other half stays awake and its corresponding eye stays open. In this way, a bottlenose dolphin can stay awake and alert for at least five days straight, and possibly many more.

Sasaki wondered if humans do something similar, albeit to a less dramatic degree. Maybe when we enter a new environment, one half of our brain stays more awake than the other, so we can better respond to unusual sounds or smells or signs of danger. Maybe our first night in a new place is disturbed because half our brain is pulling an extra shift as a night watchman. “It was a bit of a hunch,” she says. “Maybe we’d find something interesting.”

She invited 11 volunteers to spend a few nights at her laboratory. They slept in a hulking medical scanner that measured their brain activity, while electrodes on their heads and hands measured their brain waves, eye movements, heart rate, and more. “The scanner has a bed that could go completely flat, and we put a lot of pillows and towels to make it comfortable,” says Sasaki. “It was a little restricted but people could still sleep.” And sure enough, they took longer to fall asleep and slept less deeply on the first night.

While they snoozed, team members Masako Tamaki and Ji Won Bang measured their slow-wave activity—a slow and synchronous pulsing of neurons that’s associated with deep sleep. They found that this slow activity was significantly weaker in the left half of the volunteers’ brains, but only on their first night. And the stronger this asymmetry, the longer the volunteers took to fall asleep.

The team didn’t find this slow-wave asymmetry over the entire left hemisphere. It wasn’t noticeable in regions involved in vision, movement, or attention. Instead, it only affected the default mode network—a group of brain regions that’s associated with spontaneous unfocused mental activity, like daydreaming or mind-wandering. These results fit with the idea of the first-night brain as a night watchman, in which the left default mode network is more responsive than usual.

To test this idea, Sasaki asked more volunteers to sleep in a normal bed with a pair of headphones. Throughout the sessions, the team piped small beeps into one ear or the other, either steadily or infrequently. They found that the participants’ left hemispheres (but not the right) were more responsive to the infrequent beeps (but not the steady ones) on the first night (but not the second). The recruits were also better and quicker at waking up in response to the beeps, when the sounds were processed by their left hemispheres.

This shows how dynamic sleep can be, and how attuned it is to the environment. The same applies to many animals. In 1999, Niels Rattenborg from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology found that ducks at the edge of a flock sleep more asymmetrically than those in the safer center. “In this way, sleeping ducks avoid becoming sitting ducks,” he says. Fur seals do something similar; they sleep in the usual way on land, but at sea, they sleep on one side with the open eye looking down, perhaps to watch for sharks.

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Victims of a New African Massacre: Gorillas

By Rachel Nuwer

The Grauer’s gorilla, the world’s largest primate, has been a source of continual worry for conservationists for more than two decades. Longstanding conflict in the deep jungles of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo left experts with no choice but to guess at how that gorilla subspecies may be faring.

Now, with tensions abating somewhat, researchers finally have an updated gorilla head count — one that confirms their fears. According to findings compiled by an international team of conservationists, Grauer’s gorilla populations have plummeted 77 percent over the last 20 years, with fewer than 3,800 of the animals remaining.

“We suspected that the Grauer’s gorilla had declined because of all the insecurity in the region, but no one had an idea of how much they’d declined by,” said Andrew Plumptre, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Albertine Rift Program in Central and Eastern Africa. “It turns out that the rate of collapse pushes this subspecies to the verge of extinction.”

Grauer’s gorillas — named after Rudolf Grauer, an Austrian explorer and zoologist who first recognized the apes as a separate subspecies — resemble their close relative, the mountain gorilla, save for their longer limbs and shorter hair. Although Grauer’s and mountain gorilla populations were once connected, years of isolation have left them genetically distinct enough to warrant separate designations as eastern gorilla subspecies.

In 1994, the Wildlife Conservation Society conducted surveys in and around Kahuzi-Biega National Park, in what was then eastern Zaire. Researchers estimated that 17,000 Grauer’s gorillas remained. But the Rwandan genocide that year led to the gorillas’ precipitous decline.

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Virtual Malady

By Will Oremus

Virtual reality has been hailed as an “empathy machine” for its ability to foment understanding by transporting people to worlds and experiences that differ from their own. The technology has also been criticized for inducing headaches and nausea.

Kudos to the creative minds at Excedrin, then, for putting two and two together in the form of “The Migraine Experience,” an augmented-reality simulator designed to, well, give people headaches—but in the name of empathy. The goal, according to Excedrin’s website: “Harnessing the power of augmented reality to bring true empathy to migraine sufferers.”

Excedrin’s simulator doesn’t actually give you a migraine, of course. It just mimics some common symptoms, such as “sensitivity to light and sound, disorientation, and aura.” Apparently, “experiencing is believing,” as Excedrin brand manager Scott Yacovino put it in a statement to Vice. Unfortunately, no app can adequately convey what it’s really like to have migraines, says Vice writer and migraine sufferer Sarah Emerson, who suggested Excedrin’s time and money might have been better spent developing treatments that actually work.

Nonetheless, the marketing campaign seems to be resonating. The YouTube video above has racked up more than 400,000 views, and a Huffington Post article about it has been shared more than 83,000 times.

That got us thinking: What other unpleasant experiences might we all better understand via virtual reality simulations?

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Have We Solved Climate Change Yet?

By Tim McDonnell

A lot of Champagne was popped on the night of Dec. 12, when diplomats from almost every country on Earth finalized the text of the historic global agreement to combat climate change. In the Paris Agreement, countries committed to hold global temperature increases to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, an ambitious target considering that the world is already more than halfway to that limit. The deal also laid out a system for wealthier nations to help poorer ones pay for adapting to unavoidable climate impacts.

But finalizing the agreement was only one step on the long road to actually achieving its aims. The next step is happening Friday, on Earth Day, as heads of state and other top officials from more than 150 countries will gather at the United Nations headquarters in New York City to put their signatures on the deal. Secretary of State John Kerry, who was a driving force in Paris, will sign the document on behalf of the United States.

Signing the document is mostly a symbolic step, indicating a country’s intent to formally “join” the agreement at some later stage. In order to “join” the agreement, national governments have to show the U.N. the piece of domestic paperwork—a law, executive order, or some other legal document—in which the government consents to be bound by the terms of the agreement. Some small countries, including some island states that are among the most vulnerable to climate impacts, are expected to offer up those documents at the same time they sign. Other countries will take longer. The agreement doesn’t take legal effect until it is formally joined by both 55 individual countries and by enough countries to cover 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (a threshold that essentially mandates the participation of the U.S. and China).

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Timbuktu’s ‘Badass Librarians’: Checking Out Books Under Al-Qaida’s Nose

By NPR Staff

For hundreds of years, Timbuktu has had a place in the world’s imagination. Located on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, the city flourished as a center of Islamic culture and scholarship in the 13th through 16th centuries. It was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988, recognized for the University of Sankore, which had as many as 25,000 students who studied the Quran, as well as the historic Djingareyber and Sidi Yahia mosques.

Timbuktu was a center of the manuscript trade, with traders bringing Islamic texts from all over the Muslim world. Despite occupations and invasions of all kinds since then, scholars managed to preserve and even restore hundreds of thousands of manuscripts dating from the 13th century.

But that changed when militant Islamists backed by al-Qaida arrived in 2012. The hardline Islamists didn’t see these texts as part of their Islamic heritage, but as idolatry, contradicting their interpretation of Islam. They set about destroying important cultural icons, including 15th-century mausoleums of Sufi Muslim saints. Librarians feared the city’s prized medieval collections of manuscripts would be next.

Librarian Abdel Kader Haidara organized and oversaw a secret plot to smuggle 350,000 medieval manuscripts out of Timbuktu. Joshua Hammer chronicled Haidara’s story in the book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu. Hammer spoke with NPR’s Michel Martin about how a librarian became an “operator.”

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Foxes That Endure Despite a Lack of Genetic Diversity

By Carl Zimmer

The Channel Islands, off the coast of Southern California, are a natural laboratory for a particularly adorable experiment in evolution.

A unique species called the island fox has lived there for several thousand years, their bodies shrinking over the generations until now each is smaller than a house cat. Adult island foxes weigh as little as 2.35 pounds.

Now a team of scientists has discovered another way in which island foxes are extraordinary: Genetically, they are nearly identical to one another. In fact, a fox community on one island has set a record for the least genetic variation in a sexually reproducing species.

Oliver A. Ryder, the director of genetics at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, said the new research posed a biological puzzle.

It’s an axiom of evolutionary biology that low levels of genetic variation put species at risk of extinction. Yet the delicate island foxes are still racing across meadows and bounding up trees.

“How can the island foxes get away with it?” Dr. Ryder said.

The new study, published on Thursday in Current Biology, was led by Robert K. Wayne, a geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Wayne has been studying the DNA of island foxes since the early 1990s, hoping to understand their remarkable makeup.

“They’re like dodos,” Dr. Wayne said in an interview. “They have no notion of human fear. You can just put them in your lap.”

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The Bathroom War Between the States

By Herb Silverman

The Civil War started in my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. At the time, the South called it the “War Between the Confederate States of America and the United States of America,” now shortened to the “War Between the States.” A few here in Charleston still call it the “War of Northern Aggression.”

While there hasn’t been another actual war, there have been competitions between North and South Carolina since I moved to South Carolina in 1976 to teach at the College of Charleston. North Carolina has usually fared better, and I’m not referring just to sports teams. South Carolina has no equivalent to the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill Research Triangle, with outstanding academic universities like North Carolina State, Duke, and the University of North Carolina. Educational opportunities and quality of life have long seemed better in North Carolina. Some in South Carolina half-jokingly told me that the difference between North and South Carolina is the difference between culture and agriculture.

However, the culture, especially in Charleston, has improved significantly, making the city a top tourist attraction. There’s more interest and talk in South Carolina about how best to improve education and race relations, though words and ideas need to be put into action along with financial priorities for these issues. In some ways, South Carolina has become better than North Carolina. I’d like to say that’s good news, but it’s actually bad news, because North Carolina has recently gotten worse in ways that South Carolina hasn’t, at least not yet.

North Carolina approved a law blocking local governments from passing anti-discrimination rules that grant protections to gay and transgender people. This is a solution searching for a problem. There are zero recorded instances of harassment by transgender people in bathrooms. However, because there are at least three recorded instances of Republican politicians being arrested for lewd behavior in public restrooms, perhaps we should bar male Republican politicians from using public restrooms.

If family-values, Bible-thumping politicians don’t want to treat people fairly on moral grounds, then perhaps they could be persuaded on economic grounds. North Carolina lost revenue when Bruce Springsteen cancelled a concert and companies like PayPal pulled out of projects. But my favorite protest comes from the porn site X-hamster, which decided to block its website from North Carolinians and replace it with a petition to repeal the law. A spokesperson for X-Hamster said, “Judging by the stats of what you North Carolinians watch, we feel this punishment is a severe one. We will not stand by and pump revenue into a system that promotes this type of garbage. We respect all sexualities and embrace them.” (Note to my wife: I hadn’t visited the site before reading about the issue here.)

Just when I thought it was safe to live in South Carolina, along comes proposed legislation from a South Carolina senator ironically named Lee Bright (R), who is known for his attempts to bring bad legislation passed in other states to South Carolina. Bright introduced the North Carolina bathroom bill in the South Carolina legislature, saying, “I want to stand with North Carolina … for showing some decency and common sense.” When asked about the economic fallout caused by companies like PayPal, Bright argued, “Apparently PayPal has shown its support for pedophiles by wanting them to go into bathrooms.” Even though this legislation hasn’t yet passed in South Carolina (and I hope it never will), there is already economic fallout. An $830 million corporation is pulling out of South Carolina over the proposed anti-LGBT bill.

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The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them

By Conor Friedersdorf

At UC Davis, where student activists still hope to oust Chancellor Linda Katehi, critics of their activism are using concepts like “safe space” and “hostile climate” to attack it.

The student activists had occupied a small room outside Katehi’s office, planning to stay until their chancellor resigned or was removed from her post. By the time they left 36 days later, a petition that now bears roughly 100 signatures of UC Davis students and staff were demanding that they prematurely end their occupation, criticizing their tactics, and alleging a number of grave transgressions: The signatories accused the student activists of sexism, racism, bullying, abuse, and harassment, complaining that many who used the administration building “no longer feel safe.” The student activists say that those charges are unfair.

The conflict illustrates a pattern that campus observers are likely see more and more in coming years: Insofar as progressives succeed in remaking campuses into places unusually sensitive to psychological harms, where transgressing against “safe spaces” is both easy to do and verboten, confrontational activism will no longer be viable.

Too many people feel upset by it.

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