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This Week in Science (Feb. 1 – 7)

This is a collection of the 10 best and most popular stories from science and technology over the past 7 days. Scroll down and click the individual images below to read the stories and follow the This Week in Science on Wakelet (here) to get these weekly updates straight to your inbox every Sunday.

CHRISTIAN VS ATHEIST VS AGNOSTIC

Richard Dawkins and Jaclyn Glenn clearly are just new age atheist jerks who don’t know what agnostic means! To the rescue is this dude bro (Patrick Marks), who explains it all! Atheists and strong agnostics = bad. Simple agnostics and Christians = Good! Self defeating! Jesus Saves!

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Original video: “Disproving Agnosticism: Jaclyn Glenn, Richard Dawkins, this one’s for you…”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBmAwvFuuD0

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Thanks for watching this video on agnostics vs christians vs atheists vs theists vs christians vs agnostic atheists vs agnostic theists vs agnostic christians vs agnostic atheists vs agnostic agnostics and holy shit!

Asteroid mining could be space’s new frontier: the problem is doing it legally

Photo credit: EuroStyle Graphics/Alamy

By Rob Davies

When Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong hoisted the Stars and Stripes on the moon, the act was purely symbolic. Two years earlier, mindful of Cold War animosity, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) had decreed that outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty”.

In other words no country, not even the US, could own the moon or any other part of space, regardless of how many flags they erected there. Half a century on, though, the OST could prove the biggest obstacle to one of the most exciting new frontiers of space exploration: asteroid mining.

The reason lawyers could soon be poring over that 48-year-old document is that space mining could become a reality within a couple of decades.

In what is being seen as a major breakthrough for this embryonic technology, the government of Luxembourg has thrown its financial muscle behind plans to extract resources from asteroids, some of which are rich in platinum and other valuable metals. It plans to team up with private companies to help speed the progress of the industry and draw up a regulatory framework for it.

One such firm, Deep Space Industries, wants to send small satellites, called Fireflies, into space from 2017 to prospect for minerals and ice. The satellites would hitch a ride on a rocket, and larger craft would then be used to harvest, transport and store raw materials.

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Create Your Own Language, for Credit

Photo credit: Ron Barrett

By Ashley Winchester

1. What do you say to embarrass a polar bear?

2. How might an underwater society write?

3. Can a creature without teeth say “tooth”?

4. How many verbs for “to pray” does an angel need?

These are some of the questions students have pondered in “Invented Languages” at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Tex., as they create languages of their own.

The tongue spoken by the nomadic Dothraki warriors of HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones” has entered the pop-culture lexicon, and so sparked new interest in constructed languages, or conlangs. “Thanks to the popularity of ‘G.O.T.,’ ‘Avatar,’ etc., more people the world over know what language creation is,” says David J. Peterson, the linguist behind spoken Dothraki and alien-speak on the Syfy network’s “Defiance.”

At schools like S.F.A., Wellesley College in Massachusetts and Truman State in Missouri, students take apart the words, sounds, writing and patterns of such conlangs as Dothraki, Na’vi (“Avatar”), Elvish (“Lord of the Rings”) and Klingon (“Star Trek”) to get a sense of how languages evolve to meet the needs of their speakers. Coursework marries the principles of linguistics with the creativity of speculative fiction genres and pop culture.

So how do you create a language?

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The Sheltering Campus: Why College Is Not Home

Photo credit: Ivanastar/iStock

By A. Douglas Stone and Mary Schwab-Stone

Erika Christakis used to teach a course at Yale titled “The Concept of the Problem Child,” a discussion of child development and socialization in a historical and modern context. The course was a seminar of 20 participants, and it was popular; she had planned extra sessions this semester to accommodate the hundreds of interested students.

Then came the notorious email — subject: “Dressing Yourselves” — that she sent to students in the residence hall where she and her husband serve as masters. In it, she criticized a detailed memo from administrators advising sensitivity in choice of Halloween costumes and activities. The essential point in the email: The university’s memo infantilized the students. The term, in developmental psychology, refers to a parenting approach that uses a level of assistance and control more appropriate for much younger children; ultimately, such behavior can hinder capacities to develop independence and resilience.

Despite Ms. Christakis’s nuanced argument, an open letter denounced her views as degrading to marginalized people and garnered nearly a thousand signatures, and a video of students confronting and verbally assaulting her husband went viral.

We helped organize an open letter of our own, defending Ms. Christakis’s contribution to campus discourse; it was signed by 88 current or retired Yale faculty members. But as a result of the harsh reaction she experienced, she announced in December that she would no longer teach at Yale, eliminating an important educational option for undergraduates.

While this dramatic incident raised concerns about free speech and civil debate on campus, it is also worth analyzing it from a developmental perspective. After all, universities are the settings for the transition to adulthood for a large segment of American youth.

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Give Up Your Data to Cure Disease

Photo credit: Antti Uotila

By David B. Agus

HOW far would you go to protect your health records? Your privacy matters, of course, but consider this: Mass data can inform medicine like nothing else and save countless lives, including, perhaps, your own.

Over the past several years, using some $30 billion in federal stimulus money, doctors and hospitals have been installing electronic health record systems. More than 80 percent of office-based doctors, including me, use some form of E.H.R. These systems are supposed to make things better by giving people easier access to their medical information and avoiding the duplication of tests and potentially fatal errors.

Yet neither doctors nor patients are happy. Doctors complain about the time it takes to update digital records, while patients worry about confidentiality. Last month the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went so far as to warn that E.H.R.s could “crash” the medical system.

We need to get over it. These digital databases offer an incredible opportunity to examine trends that will fundamentally change how doctors treat patients. They will help develop cures, discover new uses for drugs and better track the spread of scary new illnesses like the Zika virus.

Medicine is famous for serendipity — scientists coming across important findings when they least expect them or aren’t even looking. I’ve often said that we may have all the drugs and therapies we need already to prevent, treat or cure most ailments, but we don’t know which ones can be used on which conditions and at which doses.

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Comets May Not Explain “Alien Megastructure” Star’s Strange Flickering after All

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

By Shannon Hall

It’s looking less likely that a swarm of comets or an “alien megastructure” can explain a faraway star’s strange dimming.

The star (nicknamed “Tabby’s Star,” after its discoverer, Tabetha Boyajian) made major headlines last October when Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, suggested that it could be surrounded by some type of alien megastructure. A more likely idea — one that’s far less exciting — is that the star is orbited by a swarm of comets. But scientists can’t be sure either way.

Now, Bradley Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, has probed the star’s behavior over the past century by looking at old photographic plates. Not only does the star’s random dipping date back more than a century, but it also has been gradually dimming over that period — a second constraint that makes it even harder to explain.

The first signs of the star’s oddity came from NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which continually monitored the star (as well as 100,000 others) between 2009 and 2013. Astronomers, citizen scientists and computers could then search for regular dips in a star’s light — a sign that an exoplanet has passed in front of that star. The largest planets might block 1 percent of a star’s light, but Tabby’s star dropped by as much as 20 percent in brightness. That, in and of itself, would be weird. But the periodic dimmings didn’t occur at regular time intervals, either — they were sporadic. The signature couldn’t be caused by a planet, scientists said.

In September, a team led by Boyajian, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, tried to make sense of the unusual signal. First, the researchers looked into any angles that might mean there was something wrong with the data itself. They even checked in with Kepler mission scientists. But everything came out clean. “The data that we were observing with Kepler is, in fact, astrophysical,” Boyajian told Space.com.

Still, nothing about the observations indicated what might be causing the extreme interference. After considering many possible scenarios, Boyajian determined that dust from a large cloud of comets was the best explanation. But she admits that “it’s a bit of a stretch to have comets that are large enough to block that much of the light from the star.” With her paper published, she hoped that other astronomers would jump in with alternative solutions.

And they did. A month later, the star exploded into the public’s eye when Wright announced that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization could be responsible for the signal, assuming this civilization built a megastructure, like solar panels, around the star. And Boyajian thinks the theory is definitely worth a follow-up.

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India’s Government Is Becoming Increasingly Antiscience

Photo credit: Al Jazeera English

By Apoorva Mandavilli

Three murders, a suicide and a rash of political appointments at universities have thrown Indian academia into an uproar against the conservative (right-wing) government. Prominent artists, writers, historians and scientists are speaking out against an intensifying climate of religious intolerance and political interference in academic affairs.

“What’s going on in this country is really dangerous,” says Rajat Tandon, a number theorist at Hyderabad Central University. Tandon is one of more than 100 prominent scientists, including many heads of institutions, who signed a statement protesting “the ways in which science and reason are being eroded in the country.” The statement cites the murder of three noted rationalists — men who had dedicated their lives to countering superstition and championed scientific thought — and what they see as the government’s silent complicity.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won the 2014 general elections in India in a landslide victory. The BJP and Modi, in particular, are aligned with the extremist right-wing group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. (This unholy alliance is comparable to the relationship between the Republican Party and the Tea Party, but the RSS is a paramilitary group with more violent overtones than the Tea Party has shown so far.) Together, the BJP and RSS promote the agenda of Hindutva, the notion that India is the homeland of Hindus and all others — the hundreds of millions of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others in this sprawling, secular democracy — are interlopers.

“The present government is deviating from the path of democracy, taking the country on the path to what I’d call a Hindu religious autocracy,” says Pushpa Mittra Bhargava , who founded the prestigious Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology in Hyderabad.

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Why Are These Male Fish Growing Eggs?

Photo credit: Joel Sartore

By Lindsey Konkel

Silver maples, lanky and bare, stand on the frozen flood plain at the Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge. Two sets of tracks—fox and mouse—weave across the snowy surface of the river, which is home to bass, muskrats, and beavers. In the fall, more than 20,000 migrating ducks will converge here, and in the summer, one of the refuge’s rarest species, spiny softshell turtles, will bask and forage on its gravelly beaches and sandbars.

Sixty miles south of Montreal, near the U.S.-Canada border, Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge is one of the most productive and pristine wetland ecosystems in the Northeast. Yet even here, scientists have found an abundance of fish with bizarre abnormalities that suggest exposure to hormone-disrupting water pollution.

Scientists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey studied fish in 19 national wildlife refuges in the U.S. Northeast, including Missisquoi. Their conclusion: An astonishing 60 to 100 percent of all the male smallmouth bass they examined had female egg cells growing in their testes.

Scientists call this condition intersex, and while its exact causes are unknown, it’s been linked to manmade, environmental chemicals that mimic or block sex hormones.

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Once Thought Extinct, ‘Lost’ Group of Lions Discovered in Africa

Photo credit: Born Free

By Brian Clark Howard

Lions have disappeared from much of Africa, but for the past few years scientists have wondered if the big cats were hanging on in remote parts of Sudan and Ethiopia. The region’s inaccessibility and political instability have made surveys difficult.

But scientists released a report Monday documenting, with hard evidence, the discovery of “lost lions.”

A team with Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), supported by the charity Born Free, spent two nights in November camping in Alatash National Park in northwest Ethiopia, on the Ethiopia-Sudan border. The researchers set out six camera traps that capturing images of lions, and they identified lion tracks.

The scientists concluded that lions likely also live in the larger, adjacent Dinder National Park across the border in Sudan. The International Union for Conservation of Nature had previously considered the area a “possible range” for the species, and local people had reported seeing lions in the area, but no one had presented definitive evidence.

“It’s great to have confirmation of this suspected population, especially since we don’t have a lot of information on this area,” says Luke Dollar, a big cat biologist and National Geographic explorer with the Big Cats Initiative, who was not involved in the study.

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