ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 520
April 5, 2016
Christians Are Still Persecuted Around the World. Here’s Where.
Photo credit: Fayaz Aziz/Reuters
By Brandon Withrow
A tragic Easter evening at a crowded park in Lahore, Pakistan, is the latest reminder that outside of the Western world, Christianity is increasingly a targeted minority.
The Taliban faction, Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, claimed responsibility for the suicide attack that killed more than 70 and wounded hundreds, mostly children. More than 5,000 militants were rounded up in Pakistan and all but approximately 200 were released during the government’s investigation.
Attacks against Christians are a pattern in Pakistan in recent years. In March of 2015, for example, 14 people were killed and more than 70 injured after suicide bombers targeted two churches in Lahore, and at least 80 were killed in a church bomb attack in 2013 in the city of Peshawar.
Human-rights organizations have an uphill battle when it comes to raising Western awareness of incidents like these. David Curry, CEO of Open Doors U.S.A., part of an international organization that tracks and brings awareness of Christian persecution, sees the Western focus on persecution in America and Europe as part of the problem.
“I don’t believe most Americans have an accurate understanding of the real state of Christian persecution around the world,” says Curry. News coverage is selected according to consumer demand, he adds. “But for news consumers to clamor for such coverage, they need to be aware of the extent of the problem.”
Open Doors reports a significant increase in attacks against Christians during 2014-2015. Last year, more than 7,000 Christians were killed for their faith, which they note is “almost 3,000 more than the previous year.” The largest areas of growing Christian persecution occur in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. Those numbers are expected to scale upward.
The Center for Inquiry (CFI), an organization whose Campaign for Free Expression promotes the rights of religious and nonreligious individuals globally, has seen the same patterns. “We were the sole secular humanist organization to press the State Department to label ISIS’s crimes against Muslims and Christians as genocide,” says Paul Fidalgo, the communications director for CFI.
Open Doors agrees with the genocide assessment, noting that persecution in the Middle East and Africa, “increasingly takes the form of ethnic cleansing.”
Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.
Can You See What’s Inside This Red Dot?
Photo credit:
Don't tilt your screen, cheater. Playbuzz
Are your eyes fine-tuned enough to spot what's in the red dot?
Facing Down the World’s Deadliest Pathogens in a BSL4 Lab
Ebola, smallpox, plague—the rogue’s gallery of highly infectious deadly pathogens is frighteningly long and their potential for havoc is great, which is why they can only be studied within the tightly controlled confines of a biosafety level 4 (BSL4) facility. The precautions make work in a BSL4 extremely demanding, slow and physically taxing, which is one reason such research lags behind studies of less-lethal organisms.
An Australian research team, however, recently reached a milestone when it became the first to screen and catalogue all of the genes activated by a BSL4 pathogen when it infects human cells. Their focus was the obscure but deadly Hendra virus, which causes respiratory disease in horses and can cross over into humans; they recently published their findings in PLoS Pathogens.
The researchers used siRNA—small bits of synthetic RNA employed to silence an individual gene—in cells placed in the well of a microarray plate, then exposed the cells to the virus and examined where the Hendra thrived and where it died. Little or no virus in a well meant that the siRNA-suppressed gene was important for viral replication, explains molecular biologist Cameron Steward, who led the effort at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency.
A scientist walks through the first air pressure resistant (APR) door at a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory
Credit: NIAID
The approach was simple but the scale was enormous, as there were multiple wells for quality control and the process was repeated for each of the approximately 20,000 human genes. It would have been difficult in a regular lab, but took years of work in the physically challenging setting of a BSL4.
“Several hundred proteins are involved to cause infection, but the one with the largest impact was a protein called fibrillarin,” Stewart says. “If you reduce the catalytic activity of fibrillarin you can block Hendra virus infection.” That was surprising, he explains, because “fibrillarin resides deep within the nucleolus of the host cell…[where it] methylates ribosomal RNA molecules, which then go on to form ribosomes,” but its full function may not be completely understood.
Silencing the gene that produces fibrillarin also stopped Nipah virus from replicating. Nipah is another henipavirus, a close cousin to Hendra with a high mortality rate in bats and humans in a zone stretching from Australia to Bangladesh. In fact, fibrillarin’s function appears to be similar across the entire paramyxovirus family, which includes measles and mumps, so perhaps understanding fibrillarin as a target for intervention and designing the right treatment for it could work against a broad range of viruses.
BSL4 Facilities
The continued emergence of deadly infections such as Ebola, MERS and SARS, as well as the terrorist use of anthrax in 2001—when spore-laced letters sent to elected officials in Washington and the news media killed five people and sickened 17 others—made government leaders aware of the need for more and better BSL4 capacity, and they have since provided substantial, sustained funding to support such facilities. Still, only a few dozen labs in the world are certified as BSL4 facilities; some are very small and only work on diagnostics, or cell cultures, or a single species of animals.
Most descriptions of a BSL4 facility focus on the physical aspects: elaborate negative-flow air filtration systems, airlocks to enter the “hot” space containing the pathogens, “space suits” with their own air supply systems, and rigorous decontamination procedures when exiting. In some ways it is as arduous as exploring the polar regions or outer space.
As are the demands placed upon the men and women who work every day in the bulky suits and restricted environment.
“Very quickly you learn not to have a coffee or go in feeling hungry,” says Glenn Marsh, the molecular biologist who did much of the physical work inside the Australian BSL4. “The negative airflow through the suit dehydrates you fairly quickly, so we try to be no more than about three hours at a time in a suit. It is very tiring.”
“There is nothing worse than being in the suit and having a runny nose,” says Lisa Hensley, deputy director of NIH’s Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. “You can’t blow your nose, so people got very creative with towels around their neck so they could blot their nose. And what do you do if you sneeze? You can’t clean your face shield.” That’s why they urge researchers to use judgment about when to “suit up.”
Equipment failure is another challenge.“On more than one occasion Glenn would call me up and say, ‘The robotics are broken. We can’t fix it.’ We just had to turn everything off. The equipment had to be removed from the BSL4 lab, and it had to be decontaminated before it could be fixed,” Stewart recalls. And the cells that had taken two weeks to develop had to be discarded. It added even more time to the multi-year Australian project.
Hensley says the Fort Detrick lab was designed to minimize some of these issues. It is one of the largest BSL4 labs in the world, and one of the few built to include imaging capacity for animals using CT scans and MRIs. That equipment requires a lot of maintenance, so the facility was creatively designed with much of the machinery in a “cool” portion of the lab, where normal precautions are sufficient, and a tube running in from the strictly controlled “hot” part of the lab; the research animal is placed on a moving bed in the tube for imaging.
Another way researchers have sought to reduce time in a BSL4 facility is by constructing a pseudotype virus, a chimera that artificially combines elements from two different viruses which can be studied under less-restrictive conditions. Boston University microbiologist John Connor has done this with Ebola. He says he combined glycoproteins from the outer shell of the virus, which “unlocks a pathway for the virus to get into the cell,” with core functional genes from the vesicular stomatitis virus, which poses little risk to humans. This allows him to work in a lower-level BSL2 facility. Connor says the approach can work with some stages of the viral life cycle but not with others, and experiments on a pseudotype will always have to be confirmed using the actual virus; sometimes the two organisms behave differently.
The ultimate goal of BSL4 research is not simply to generate knowledge, but to advance toward prevention and treatment of deadly diseases. Stewart says his team’s initial work has not only identified fibrillarin as essential for viable paramyxovirus replication—it also has shown that one can “deplete fibrillarin from cells or block its catalytic activity and the vast majority of cellular proteins still get made within the cell,” which suggests it is a safe target for intervention. He hopes they can develop an antiviral drug that will be effective against the entire family of paramyxovirus.
Why Avocados Shouldn’t Exist
Photo credit:
Natali Zakharova/Shutterstock
Over the past tens of thousands of years, the humble avocado has gone through a lot on its journey to your Instagram feed. If you’re a fan of the fruit, you owe a lot to giant ground sloths, car-sized armadillos and some prehistoric mesoamerican humans.
Judge kills same sex-adoption ban
Photo credit: Rogelio V. Solis, AP
By Mollie Bryant
A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction to bar Mississippi from carrying out its law preventing same-sex couples from adopting, according to a court order filed Thursday.
The order was issued the day after the state Senate passed the Religious Liberty Accommodation Act, which would allow businesses to deny services to LGBT people. It also would allow clerks to deny same-sex marriage licenses to gay couples.
Written by U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan III, the order argued that the state’s law barring the adoptions “obviously targets married gay couples and limits their rights.” Furthermore, the court argued that the Department of Human Services’ policy violates the constitution’s equal protection clause as the result of last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling that laws against same-sex marriage are unconstitutional.
DHS’ current adoption policy doesn’t allow discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin, but sexual orientation and gender identity aren’t included, court records show.
The order was filed in a lawsuit against the Mississippi Department of Human Services that argues the state’s adoption policy is unconstitutional. On behalf of four same-sex couples, the Campaign for Southern Equality and Family Equality Council filed the lawsuit last year against DHS, as well as Gov. Phil Bryant and Attorney General Jim Hood, whom Jordan dismissed as defendants.
In a written response to the ruling, Roberta Kaplan, lead attorney in the case, said: “We are obviously thrilled with today’s ruling, but our clients are beyond ecstatic. And that is exactly as it should be. Two sets of our clients have waited many (almost 9 and 16) years to become legal parents to the children they have loved and cared for since birth. We hope that it should finally be clear that discrimination against gay people simply because they are gay violates the Constitution in all 50 states, including Mississippi.”
Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.
Unsurprisingly, the Children of Anti-Vaxxers Are the Biggest Victims of Measles Outbreaks
Photo credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
By Elissa Strauss
In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that measles had finally been eliminated in the United States. It was a triumph—but it didn’t last. By 2014 there were 677 reported cases of the disease, the highest rate in 20 years. In 2015, there were 189 reported cases—low compared to 2014, but still outrageous considering there were zero cases 15 years earlier.
Scientists attribute the unfortunate rise in measles and other infectious diseases to the growing number of parents who forgo or delay vaccinations for their children. People who abstain from vaccinations endanger the general population by weakening herd immunity, in which a highly immunized population protects against the spread of a disease. When less than 96 percent of a population is vaccinated, measles is more likely to spread to people who can’t be vaccinated for health reasons and to people who don’t develop full immunity even after being vaccinated. This means that we should all be frightened by the anti-vaxxer movement, even those of us who do vaccinate our children. But a new study funded by the National Institutes of Health indicates that the biggest victims of the anti-vaccine movement are the children of anti-vaxxers.
Researchers at Emory University and John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health reviewed all studies on vaccinations and two infectious diseases, measles and pertussis (also known as whooping cough), published over the last 15 years in order to figure out the connection between vaccine delay, refusal, and exemption and recent outbreaks of measles. They found that those who don’t get the measles vaccine are far more likely to get and spread the measles than those who got it—and that the vast majority of the unvaccinated people who got measles were unvaccinated by choice.
Of the 970 measles cases with detailed vaccination data, 574 cases were unvaccinated despite being vaccine eligible and 405 (70.6%) of these had nonmedical exemptions (eg, exemptions for religious or philosophical reasons, as opposed to medical contraindications; 41.8% of total).
The findings for pertussis, or whooping cough, were a little more complicated. The researchers found that “the 5 largest statewide epidemics had substantial proportions (range, 24%-45%) of unvaccinated or undervaccinated individuals.” However, there also were several pertussis outbreaks in highly vaccinated areas, which, they say, indicates waning herd immunity. The researchers conclude that the phenomenon of vaccine refusal, as opposed to medical exemption, has led to an overall increased risk of both diseases, especially for the unvaccinated.
Although the rise of measles and whooping cough are alarming to all reasonable parents, anti-vaxxers might not be as concerned, thanks to their belief that so-called “natural immunity” is superior to vaccinations. According to this theory, children who come into contact with a disease when they are young will develop an immunity to it on their own, and will end up healthier overall for not having been subjected to the vaccine. (Anti-vaxxers conveniently ignore the fact that vaccines pose virtually no health risk to most individuals, which means that avoiding them doesn’t confer any benefit.) Historical data roundly refute the idea that natural immunity works as a public health strategy. For a 1986 study, scientists looked at the prevalence of natural immunity to measles, rubella and mumps in the pre-vaccination era. They analyzed the health records of 1700 unvaccinated Spanish children and found that, among 6- and 7-year-olds, “only 12% of the children showed antibodies against the three diseases and 18.7% exhibited triple susceptibility.” By comparison, the measles vaccine, is 93 percent effective at preventing measles with one dose, and, with two doses, 97 percent effective.
Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.
April 4, 2016
Bird Combines Calls In Specific Order
Humans have always considered themselves special compared with other animals. One reason is the complexity of our language—bounded by unique rules, such as syntax, where we string words together in a specific order to create meaningful sentences.
But it turns out a bird may also vocalize with syntax rules—the Japanese great tit, a bird that’s a close relative of North America’s very own chickadee. Toshitaka Suzuki, of Japan’s Graduate University for Advanced Studies, has been listening to the calls of the Japanese great tit for the past decade. Suzuki has recorded at least ten alarm calls used by the bird. These include [sound clip], known as the ABC call, which alerts other great tits to the presence of a predator, and [sound clip] the D call, which signals the birds to approach the caller.
Now Suzuki and his colleagues have found that the great tit uses those calls together to deliver both messages to other birds. And they found that the order of that call was essential—only [sound clip] ABC-D made sense to the birds. When the scientists intentionally reversed the order to create a D-ABC call [sound clip], the birds did not respond. The study is in the journal Nature Communications. [Toshitaka N. Suzuki, David Wheatcroft and Michael Griesser, Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls]
“I think the really interesting thing is why the order matters, and figuring that out I think will be difficult but also potentially really, really interesting, because it’ll give a lot of insight...” David Wheatcroft of Sweden’s Uppsala University, one of the study scientists. “You wouldn’t expect sort of naively that it would matter. Obviously it matters in human language, the order in which we say things, but it’s still somehow shocking when you find it in tits. So I think understanding why it’s the case will be really interesting in the future.”
The work could help explain the evolution of the building blocks and structure of our own languages. [sound clip]
—Jordana Cepelewicz
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
Genomes Of 92 Early American Skeletons And Mummies Sequenced
Photo credit:
The Incan mummy La Doncela, or “The Maiden,” was found at Mount Llullaillaco in Argentina back in 1999. This girl died 500 years ago during a ritual sacrifice, and her ancient DNA was used in the present genetic study. Johan Reinhard
Researchers analyzing ancient DNA extracted from the skeletons and mummies of nearly 100 people who lived in South America 500 to 8,600 years ago reveal that European colonization led to the extinction of many indigenous genetic lineages. The findings were published in Science Advances last week.
This Interactive Graph Claims To Be Able To Predict If Your Relationship Will Last
Photo credit:
nathings/Shutterstock
Divorce is one of the gritty realities of modern life. While it’s perhaps not the jolliest of subjects, you can find out some pretty interesting things when you look at the data behind it.
Salty Oceans Could Make More Worlds Habitable
Photo credit:
Artist's impression of a water-filled moon orbiting an exoplanet. Lusianomendez/CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia
In the quest to identify the conditions that make planets habitable, the influence of the oceans has been neglected. An effort to change this has found that curious things happen on a planet with very salty, or very fresh, seas. Either circumstance might keep a planet suitable for life, even it is exposed to such little light that previous models might have written it off as an ice world.
ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog
- ريتشارد دوكنز's profile
- 106 followers
