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January 28, 2016
Neuronal Basis Of Consciousness Explored In New Study
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Consciousness arises from an ordered yet chaotic pattern of communication between neurons, according to a new study. agsandrew/Shutterstock
What is consciousness? As questions go, that’s quite a whopper, with all sorts of philosophical and neurological implications – but that didn’t stop an international team of researchers from attempting to answer it. Publishing their findings in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, they suggest that consciousness may be produced by an “ordered chaos” within the brain, with neurons communicating in a spontaneous manner, forming transient patterns that adhere to underlying structures.
Six New Millisecond Pulsars Discovered
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Artist impression of a millisecond pulsar. NASA
Some of the most precise clocks in the universe are not clocks at all – they are fastly-rotating pulsars, which can be more accurate than atomic clocks. They are so precise that they can be used to test the most sophisticated physics theories to a staggering precision, so astronomers are always looking for more of them.
Artificial Intelligence Defeats Top Player Of Complex Strategy Game “Go”
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Go is a traditional Chinese game, and it's considered the most complex game played by humans. Tatiana Belova/Shutterstock
They might not be able to feel or think yet, but artificial intelligence is progressing at an impressive pace, solving problems thought to be unsolvable by machines.
A computer program can now defeat a professional human player in the classic strategy game Go, as reported in this week's issue of Nature by a team from Google DeepMind. Go is often considered the most complex game humans can play.
Sri Lanka Destroys Its Stock Of Illegal Ivory – And Apologizes To Elephants
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A total of 359 elephant tusks were destroyed at a ceremony in Colombo. AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena
Sri Lanka has become the first South Asian country – and the 16th in total – to destroy its stockpile of confiscated illegal ivory. A total of 359 elephant tusks were crushed during a public ceremony in Colombo, attended by government officials, diplomats, schoolchildren and representatives of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
Antidepressants Double Risk Of Suicide And Aggression In Young People, Study Finds
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Suicide has been linked with antidepressants since the '90s. Sanchai Yimkhruathong/Shutterstock
We’ve been using them since the ‘50s, yet we are still unravelling the effects of antidepressants. The entire basis for their use – that depression results from a chemical imbalance in the brain – is disputed, and while their consumption has skyrocketed in recent decades, there is little evidence to show that they are much better than a placebo.
Yahoo Japan Allowed Sale Of 12 Tonnes Of Ivory Over Two Years
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Much of the ivory is crafted into name seals known as "hanko." Vikalpa/Flickr. CC BY 2.0
The website Yahoo Japan has come under heavy fire for allowing the sale of an estimated 12 tonnes (13.2 tons) of ivory products over a two-year period.
January 27, 2016
Musical Pitch Perception May Have Long Evolutionary History
The ability to distinguish between sounds of varying pitch makes people capable of producing and understanding speech and music. And the way we are able to process pitch has been thought to be unique to our big-brained species.
But now, there’s evidence that a tiny monkey—the common marmoset from Brazil—can distinguish pitch the same way we do. That’s according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Xindong Song et al, Complex pitch perception mechanisms are shared by humans and a New World monkey]
Ten years ago, researchers identified a region of the marmoset brain that appeared to process pitch. But they needed to confirm that the animals did indeed notice changes in pitch—which presented a challenge: they had to find a way to get the animal to indicate that it had heard something. So they trained the marmosets to respond to a change in pitch with a behavior—specifically, they would lick a waterspout.
The researchers then had the animals listen to a series of notes with the same pitch. And, at random, they’d change it up. “Just like, for example, when I say, ‘ma ma ma MA.’ Right, at some point I make the pitch a little higher.” Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Xiaoqin Wang, lead researcher of the study. The actual difference in pitch, he says, was much smaller than that. But you get the idea. “And, when the animal hears that change, it will lick the waterspout to indicate they hear the difference.” Which the miniscule monkeys indeed did.
Because both we and marmosets have this talent, the ability likely evolved in a common ancestor long-ago—this type of pitch perception may thus go back more than 40 million years ago, much earlier than previously thought. And the understanding of how the brain processes pitch may eventually explain why some people have perfect pitch, while others are tone deaf.
—Christine Herman
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
The Two Pattersons
There is nothing particularly odd, I suppose, about the fact that opposition to evolution sometimes runs in families. Henry M. Morris, the father of modern creation science, was also the father of John D. Morris and Henry M. Morris III, president emeritus and chief executive officer, respectively, of the Institute for Creation Research. The flamboyant young-earth creationist Kent Hovind of Creation Science Evangelism is the father of Eric Hovind of Creation Today. The young-earth creationist and “intelligent design” promoter Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is the grandson of Byron C. Nelson, a young-earth creationist of the Scopes era. Along with the young-earth creationist Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis also reportedly employs a whole crowd of his relatives and in-laws. Doubtless there are further examples. As I say, there is nothing particularly odd, or discreditable for that matter, about it. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the two Pattersons.
While I was researching “Misquoting Murchison,” in which I was trying to locate a passage attributed to the Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison—“I know as much of nature in her geologic ages as any living man, and I fearlessly say that our geologic record does not afford one syllable of evidence in support of Darwin’s theory”—I was reading through Alexander Patterson’s The Other Side of Evolution: An Examination of its Evidences (1903). Patterson appears to be the first person to quote Murchison in that way, although he originally did so not in The Other Side of Evolution but in a previous book, The Greater Life and Work of Christ: As Revealed in Scripture, Man, and Nature (1896), except with a reference to nature’s “geologic era” rather than nature’s “geologic ages.” And Patterson garbled it: what Murchison in fact wrote was “I flatter myself that I have seen as much of nature in her old moods as any living man, and I fearlessly say that our geological record does not afford one scintilla of evidence to support Darwin’s theory.”
Anyhow, as any sensible person would, I consulted Ronald L. Numbers’s The Creationists (1992) to see what was said about Patterson. On p. 17, Numbers refers to him as “a Presbyterian evangelist and longtime friend of [Dwight] Moody’s who taught and lectured at the Moody Bible Institute” in Chicago. Patterson’s book impressed A. C. Dixon—later to coedit The Fundamentals with R. A. Torrey—as “about the best thing” on the topic; it would, Dixon thought, “do an immense amount of good if sent to all the preachers, theological professors, theological students, Y.M.C.A. secretaries and Sunday School superintendents of the English-speaking world.” Numbers devotes a paragraph to describing Patterson’s views on evolution, but offers no biographical details, not even the years of his birth and death. Fortunately, I was able to locate Patterson’s obituary in The Jewish Era—a publication of the Chicago Hebrew Mission, later the American Messianic Fellowship, which sought to evangelize the Jewish community—for January 1913.
According to the obituary, Patterson was born “in the north of Ireland of Scottish parentage in the year 1844” and brought to the United States “when but two years of age,” so in 1846 or 1847. “His father, the Rev. Robert Patterson, D. D., was a man of sterling Christian character, a deep thinker and a powerful preacher. For some years he was pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church and later of the Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church of Chicago.” (His mother, I’m afraid, receives only one word, “godly,” which she shares with his father.) I won’t rehearse the rest of the obituary, except to note that Patterson was credited with the authorship of The Other Side of Evolution and The Greater Life and Work of Christ (so it’s certain that it’s the same Alexander Patterson), that he was identified as a trustee of the Chicago Hebrew Mission (hence the obituary in its publication), and that he died on November 2, 1912. But the mention of the name of Patterson’s father came as something of a surprise to me.
Why? In the index to The Creationists, “Patterson, Alexander” is just above “Patterson, Robert,” and the discussion of Robert Patterson appears on pp. 14 and 15, just before the main discussion of Alexander Patterson. There Numbers refers to “four creationist pamphlets—subsequently published in book form as The Errors of Evolution (1885)—by Robert Patterson (1821–1885), the Irish-born pastor of the East Oakland Presbyterian Church in California.” There’s no suggestion in The Creationists that Robert Patterson and Alexander Patterson were related, and Oakland is not exactly in the same neighborhood as Chicago. But by now I was wondering. So I took a look at the third edition of The Errors of Evolution (the subtitle of which, by the way, is An Examination of the Nebular Theory, Geological Evolution, the Origin of Life, and Darwinism), which contained a biographical note about the author, who was eight years in his grave by the time of its publication in 1893.
The Robert Patterson of The Errors of Evolution was “born in Letterkenny, County of Donegal, Ireland, of Scotch Irish parents,” emigrated to the United States in 1847, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1852. “In 1857 he removed to Chicago, where he became pastor of the Reformed Presbyterian Church … continuing there until the foundation of the Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church was laid in 1861, the pastorate of which he accepted.” He stayed in Chicago until 1873, and then he served in turn as the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, the Central Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, and (from 1880 until his death in 1883) the East Oakland Presbyterian Church, where he worked on what would become The Errors of Evolution. The last hours of his life “were spent in sacred seclusion with his loved ones,—two daughters and a son, Alexander, a preacher of the same blessed gospel which had been his joy in life and was his comfort as death drew nigh.” Alexander!
It’s true that Patterson is not a particularly rare surname (it was the 104th most common surname in the 2000 census), especially in Chicago, where a family of Pattersons was long connected with the Chicago Tribune (“the World’s Greatest Newspaper,” as it used to style itself). But the biographical details for Robert Patterson provided in the third edition of The Errors of Evolution are so close to the biographical details for Robert Patterson provided in the obituary for Alexander Patterson that I am convinced that they are one and the same, even though the connection seems never to have been remarked in the literature. A further, if not decisive, consideration: Alexander Patterson dedicated The Greater Life and Work of Christ to the memory of his father “Rev. Robert Patterson, D.D.,” and later in the book quotes (with a very specific citation) “Dr. Patterson”’s The Errors of Evolution on the inefficacy of natural selection. If they weren’t the same person, it would be odd of him not to mention it!
January 26, 2016
Quick Test Could Tell If Patient Needs Antibiotics
When patients show up in a hospital with a respiratory illness, they’re usually given an antibiotic, which do not work against viral infections. Even though most of these respiratory infections are viral.
It’s estimated that in these cases antibiotics are incorrectly prescribed nearly three quarters of the time. And the overuse of antibiotics is a huge problem, helping to drive the development of strains of bacteria that are resistant to our antibiotics.
So scientists have been searching for a tool that would quickly allow doctors to diagnose whether a patient has a viral or bacterial infection—and thus know for sure whether to prescribe an antibiotic.
“The new approach that we take rests on the premise that any time we are exposed to something in our environment—whether it’s cigarette smoke, changes in our diet, an infection—our bodies react to that.”
Ephraim Tsalik of Duke University. He and colleagues investigated gene expression—which genes are activated and which remain dormant—in 273 emergency room patients. Some had a bacterial infection, some had a viral one, some had both and some had no communicable disease at all. The researchers also studied 44 healthy adults as a control.
“And what we found are some elements, certain genes, that are turned on and off in a certain way that is very characteristic of a response to a viral infection. Other genes that are turned on and off in such a way that is very characteristic of a bacterial infection. And then other genes that are turned on and off in a way that is indicative of no infection at all.”
They then tested these genetic activation signatures against publicly available data sets of patient infections. And the method was 87 percent accurate. The study is in the journal Science Translational Medicine. [Ephraim L. Tsalik et al, Host gene expression classifiers diagnose acute respiratory illness etiology]
Right now, such gene tests would take perhaps 10 hours to return a diagnosis. And so the researchers are working to develop a diagnostic tool that would cut that turnaround time to just one hour, so that doctors could quickly prescribe antibiotics. But only to patients who would get a benefit, because they have a bacterial and not a viral infection. Which ultimately benefits everyone.
“Decreasing the amount of antibiotics that are used in general is one of the strategies to try and improve the antibacterial-resistance problem.”
—Cynthia Graber
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
Flat Out Wrong
For reasons passing understanding, rapper B.o.B. launched into a furious tweetstorm on Monday, Jan. 25, arguing forcefully that the Earth is flat (because look at how the horizon looks flat!) and NASA faked the moon landing. Gawker’s summary is as good as any. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astronomer extraordinaire, tried to gently set him straight. But B.o.B. fired back with a diss track that, inter alia, namechecks Holocaust denier David Irving. Holocaust denial comes in as something of a tangent, justifying the claim that Stalin was worse than Hitler and therefore the President wears a yarmulke (or maybe a pickled herring).
B.o.B.’s flat Earthism (like former celebrity Tila Tequila’s) has attracted its share of attention, so here’s some quick background. Flat Earthism is a fairly new concept: by the time anything we’d recognize as science existed, people knew the Earth was round, so there was never a flat Earth consensus. Flat Earthism was basically invented around 1830, by a huckster going by the name of Parallax (not the demonic parasite from DC Comics). According to Christine Garwood’s history of flat Earthism, Parallax (given name: Samuel Rowbotham) was probably just in it for the attention and the money (probably true of B.o.B. and Tila Tequila, too), and may not even have believed the quasi-Biblical claims he advanced. Garwood explains (quoted here):
Evidently an ingenious character, who delighted in controversy and dispute, he could not resist the ultimate challenge of toppling orthodox ideas and a fact so established as the earth’s rotundity…he had seen the passions that scientific and religious topics could evoke and, moreover, the money that people would pay to listen to a feisty debate on these themes.
Similarly, Charles Johnson, who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society of America (what people usually mean when they refer to The Flat Earth Society), shared many of those characteristics. He called himself “a natural sceptic,” and seemed to delight in battling the scientific elites, exposing the secrets that They Don’t Want You To Know. From his shack in the California desert, he could square off against the leading lights of science and government. As B.o.B.’s tweets and rap also imply, Taylor suggested that NASA and other space agencies were joined in a vast conspiracy to hide the evidence of a flat Earth, and had faked the moon landings to perpetuate the hoax. (I’m kinda hoping Mulder’s new conspiracy will rope all of that in along with the rest of the kitchen fixtures.)
To my mind, this still doesn’t quite explain why B.o.B. (or Ms. Tequila) would jump on the flat Earth bandwagon. As I told ThinkProgress, B.o.B. may just be playing the same game Samuel Rowbotham did 185 years ago, stirring up the public to boost sales. Flat Earthism works well for that purpose because it’s not really tied to any ideology, group identity, or economic interest, so it allows someone to stir up controversy without having to serve as a dog whistle. Espousing climate change denial would put B.o.B. in a partisan box, creationism would mark him as a fundamentalist, etc., but flat Earthism just signals some sort of vague, ill-informed anti-intellectualism/anti-elitism, and no one ever went broke selling that to the American public.
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