ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 577

Switch to Clean Energy Can Be Fast and Cheap

Photo credit: iStock.com

By Umair Irfan

Wind and sunshine could power most of the United States by 2030 without raising electricity prices, according to a new study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Even when optimizing to cut costs and limiting themselves to existing technology, scientists showed that renewables can meet energy demands and slash carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector by 80 percent below 1990 levels.

The study, published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change, factors in energy demand, costs and, crucially, the role of weather.

Co-author Alexander MacDonald, outgoing head of the American Meteorological Society and recently retired from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, said the study sprang from discussions he had at the 2009 U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“Basically, it was really clear that nobody has really looked at the importance of weather for wind and solar energy,” he said.

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10 Easy Ways You Can Tell For Yourself That The Earth Is Round

Photo credit: NASA/Samantha Cristoforetti

By Moriel Schottlender

Humanity has known the Earth to be round for a few millenia and I’ve been meaning to show more methods that prove the world is not flat. I’ve had a few ideas on how to do that, but recently got an interesting incentive, when Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, wrote about a recently published BBC article about “The Flat Earth” society. (Most recently, rapper B.o.B. went on a Twitter rant on the topic.) Phil claims it’s ridiculous to even bother rebutting the Flat Earth Society – and I tend to agree. But the history of our species’ intellectual pursuit is important and interesting, and it’s very much well worth writing about. You don’t need to denounce all science and knowledge and believe in a kooky conspiracy theory to enjoy some historical factoids about humanity’s quest for space.

On we go to the top 10 ways to know the Earth is unequivocally, absolutely, positively, 100% not flat!

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Study shows animals with larger brains are best problem solvers

Photo credit: Sarah Benson-Amram

By Phys.org

Why did some species, such as humans and dolphins, evolve large brains relative to the size of their bodies? Why did others, such as blue whales and hippos, evolve to have brains that, compared to their bodies, are relatively puny?

It has long been thought that species with brains that are large relative to their body are more intelligent. Despite decades of research, the idea that relative brain size predicts cognitive abilities remains highly controversial, because there is still little experimental evidence to support it. However, a paper released today describes a massive experiment that supports the theory.

Sarah Benson-Amram, an assistant professor in the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming, is the lead author on a new paper, titled “Brain size predicts problem-solving ability in mammalian carnivores.” It shows that carnivore species with larger brains relative to their body size are better at solving a novel problem-solving task. The paper appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.

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New method proposed to probe the beginning of the universe

Photo credit: Yi Wang and Xingang Cheng

By Science Daily

How did the universe begin? And what came before the Big Bang? Cosmologists have asked these questions ever since discovering that our universe is expanding. The answers aren’t easy to determine. The beginning of the cosmos is cloaked and hidden from the view of our most powerful telescopes. Yet observations we make today can give clues to the universe’s origin. New research suggests a novel way of probing the beginning of space and time to determine which of the competing theories is correct.

The most widely accepted theoretical scenario for the beginning of the universe is inflation, which predicts that the universe expanded at an exponential rate in the first fleeting fraction of a second. However a number of alternative scenarios have been suggested, some predicting a Big Crunch preceding the Big Bang. The trick is to find measurements that can distinguish between these scenarios.

One promising source of information about the universe’s beginning is the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the remnant glow of the Big Bang that pervades all of space. This glow appears smooth and uniform at first, but upon closer inspection varies by small amounts. Those variations come from quantum fluctuations present at the birth of the universe that have been stretched as the universe expanded.

The conventional approach to distinguish different scenarios searches for possible traces of gravitational waves, generated during the primordial universe, in the CMB. “Here we are proposing a new approach that could allow us to directly reveal the evolutionary history of the primordial universe from astrophysical signals. This history is unique to each scenario,” says coauthor Xingang Chen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the University of Texas at Dallas.

While previous experimental and theoretical studies give clues to spatial variations in the primordial universe, they lack the key element of time. Without a ticking clock to measure the passage of time, the evolutionary history of the primordial universe can’t be determined unambiguously.

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Scientists prove key aspect of evolutionary theory

Photo credit: Steffen Dietzel/Wikipedia

By Phys.org

Evolutionary theory predicts that pairs of chromosomes within asexual organisms will evolve independently of each other and become increasingly different over time in a phenomenon called the ‘Meselson effect’.

While this event was first predicted almost twenty years ago, evidence for it has proved elusive.

Now, researchers from the University of Glasgow have demonstrated the Meselson effect for the first time in any organism at a genome-wide level, studying a parasite called Trypanosoma brucei gambiense (T.b. gambiense). Their findings are to be published in the journal eLife. The research was conducted at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology in the University’s Institute of Biodiversity Animal Health and Comparative Medicine.

T.b. gambiense is responsible for causing African sleeping sickness in humans, leading to severe symptoms including fever, headaches, extreme fatigue, and aching muscles and joints, which do not occur until weeks or sometimes even months after infection.

These symptoms extend to neurologic problems, such as progressive confusion and personality changes, when the infection invades the central nervous system.

In order to demonstrate the Meselson effect in T.b. gambiense, the research team, led by Dr. Annette Macleod, sequenced the genomes of 85 isolates of the parasite, including multiple samples from disease focus points within Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire and Cameroon, collected over fifty years from 1952 to 2004.

The similarity of the genomes studied from these different locations, together with a lack of recombination in the evolution of the parasite, suggests that this sub-species emerged from a single individual within the last 10,000 years.

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Map: Publicly Funded Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism.

Photo credit: Slate

By Chris Kirk

A large, publicly funded charter school system in Texas is teaching creationism to its students, Zack Kopplin recently reported in Slate. Creationist teachers don’t even need to be sneaky about it—the Texas state science education standards, as well as recent laws in Louisiana and Tennessee, permit public school teachers to teach “alternatives” to evolution. Meanwhile, in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, taxpayer money is funding creationist private schools through state tuition voucher or scholarship programs. As the map below illustrates, creationism in schools isn’t restricted to schoolhouses in remote villages where the separation of church and state is considered less sacred. If you live in any of these states, there’s a good chance your tax money is helping to convince some hapless students that evolution (the basis of all modern biological science, supported by everything we know about geology, genetics, paleontology, and other fields) is some sort of highly contested scientific hypothesis as credible as “God did it.”

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Like Mother, Like Daughter–the Science Says So, Too

We often attribute key characteristics to one of our parents: He gets his athleticism from his father, or her quickness to anger, that’s all her mother. Whether the genetics are actually pulling the strings in these cases is another story. But a growing body of research has suggested that these hereditary ties do apply to mood disorders—including depression, which affects more than 2.8 million adolescents in the United States alone—and that the hereditary ties seem to be strong between mothers and daughters.

Researchers of a new study published in this week’s Journal of Neuroscience of 35 healthy families have found that the brain’s corticolimbic system, responsible for the regulation of emotion—and associated with the manifestation of depressive symptoms—is more likely to be passed down from mother to daughter than from mother to son or father to child. This finding, which supports past evidence from animal research and clinical studies on depression, could provide a better understanding of the role genetics play in mood disorders and other conditions, enabling better identification of at-risk groups and preventive measures.

“Our study’s uniqueness,” says lead author Fumiko Hoeft, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCSF, “is that we’re the first one to get the whole family and scan both parents and offspring to look at how similar their brain networks are. We can tell, even though the genetics are more complicated than we originally thought, who we got our eye color from. And we joke about inheriting stubbornness, or organization—but we’ve never actually seen that in human brain networks before. [This research] was a proof of impact, of using a new design that has significant potential.”

Hoeft cites Dr. Seuss’s children’s book Horton Hatches the Egg—in which the elephant sits on a bird’s egg in lieu of its actual mother, and a hybrid elephant-bird ends up hatching—as a cartoonish example of the inspiration for this research. The forces of both nature and nurture are at play. “What’s relevant is that it shows the profound influence of prenatal impact on offspring, which we often forget,” Hoeft adds. “Prenatal input is considered in the most severe cases, like alcohol and smoking. But it happens in everyone. A mom being stressed has an impact on her child’s outcome.”

The finding is particularly relevant in light of the recommendations issued today by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which include the screening of pregnant women and new mothers for depression. While this recommendation is primarily a response to concerns about the role of the “nurture” side of the equation, Hoeft seeks to unravel how biology plays its part as well.

Hoeft and her team took MRI brain scans of each family member in the study—all participants were healthy, and none had been diagnosed with depression—and examined voxels, or tiny pieces of volume, in the corticolimbic system. They found that the association between grey matter volume in the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus (all part of the corticolimbic system) was much greater in mother-daughter pairings than in any other parent-offspring pairing, which, in turn, may suggest a significant female-specific maternal transmission pattern in mood disorders like depression.

“These results are truly interesting and exciting,” says Geneviève Piché, a professor in the psychology department at the Université du Québec en Outaouais who has studied a different aspect of the intergenerational transmission of depression, particularly the impact of environmental factors, such as parental caring and punitive behavior. “But we must remain cautious when we interpret these results,” she says. “For one, only 35 families were studied, and these were 35 healthy families. We cannot be certain that these results can be generalized to depressed families, per se. We’ll have to wait for future studies on depressed mothers and see if we get similar results.”

And, as Hoeft notes, while the study does show intergenerational transmission patterns, it does not differentiate between the type of influence at hand: genetic, prenatal, or postnatal impacts, or some combination of the three, could be responsible. “It’s not just one factor, it’s an accumulation of many risk factors that play a role or cause a child to develop depressive symptoms,” Piché added. Hoeft’s team intends to address this limitation in a new study by examining MRI scans of parents and children in families that used different forms of in vitro fertilization.

The current study opens doors for future research as well. Hoeft is particularly excited about potentially applying this study’s design not only to other mental health conditions, such as autism, but also to forming a better understanding of our addiction and reward systems, and even our language abilities (differentiating, for instance, between language, an innate ability that has existed throughout all of human history and is presumably embedded in our genetics, and reading, a relatively far newer skill).

“And these results are also interesting from a preventive point of view,” Piché says, “because in the future it may help us identify and target girls that will be at higher risk of disorders like depression, and then be able to possibly prevent the development of depressive symptoms.”

New handheld, pen-sized microscope could ID cancer cells in doctor’s offices and operating rooms

Surgeons removing a malignant brain tumor don’t want to leave cancerous material behind. But they’re also trying to protect healthy brain matter and minimize neurological harm.

Once they open up a patient’s skull, there’s no time to send tissue samples to a pathology lab — where they are typically frozen, sliced, stained, mounted on slides and investigated under a bulky microscope — to definitively distinguish between cancerous and normal brain cells.

But a handheld, miniature microscope being developed by University of Washington mechanical engineers could allow surgeons to “see” at a cellular level in the operating room and determine where to stop cutting.

The new technology, developed in collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Stanford University and the Barrow Neurological Institute, is outlined in a paper published in January in the journal Biomedical Optics Express.

“Surgeons don’t have a very good way of knowing when they’re done cutting out a tumor,” said senior author Jonathan Liu, UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “They’re using their sense of sight, their sense of touch, pre-operative images of the brain — and oftentimes it’s pretty subjective.

“Being able to zoom and see at the cellular level during the surgery would really help them to accurately differentiate between tumor and normal tissues and improve patient outcomes,” said Liu.

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Florida Drowning

Climate changeFlorida

A recent article in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Siege of Miami,” details disturbing consequences of sea level rise in Florida. The future will bring higher seas, but we normally think of climate change consequences happening nearer to the year 2100, an arbitrary target used by many climate models. Such projections are not what Kolbert’s article investigates. Her article details climate effects we can see right now.

The Miami region of southern Florida averages just six feet above sea level, meaning that many parts of the region are vulnerable to the combination of modest sea level rise and periodic high tides. Here’s how this aspect of climate change will manifest: high tides spilling into streets, parking lots with ducks floating by, ephemeral ponds on freeways causing hydroplaning cars, saltwater incursions poisoning landscaping.

This is already happening. The Florida of today, Kolbert reports, has water “bubbling out of the turf” and neighborhoods of multi-million-dollar homes with water “creeping under the security gates and up the driveways.”

Not everyone living in Florida recognizes these inconvenient tidal floods for what they are. Kolbert reports that “one of the residents of the street had mistaken the high-tide for a water-main break.” As she conducted her reporting, residents repeatedly asked her if she was from the city—as if city workers could hold back the ocean.

Even as residents slosh ankle-deep in the new sea level, they don’t seem to get it. Kolbert notes that few living in Florida understand that “much of the region may have less than half a century to go” before it becomes uninhabitable. So it goes.

Many blithely assume that “they” will build levees to keep back the rising oceans. After all, it works in the Netherlands, doesn’t it? But there are two big problems with such a plan. The Netherlands indeed has an extensive system of dikes and levees, protecting areas sitting below sea level; however, this kind of armored coastline won’t work in Florida, because the underlying rocks are so porous that rising water will simply seep underneath dikes and levees. The second problem can be understood by the crumbling infrastructure throughout the country—collapsing bridges, pothole-filled roads, cities with lead-contaminated drinking water, deferred maintenance at every level. Not only is America no longer choosing to build major new public works, but we are not even maintaining the infrastructure we have. So the idea of America paying for vast coastal levees rising in time to meet the surging oceans is a fantasy. Indeed, the fact that climate change will inevitably require public investment for mitigation and adaptation is a major reason so many “small government” conservatives refuse to accept that it is happening.

Insurance companies may hold the key to the future of coastal cities. As Kolbert writes, “insurers will stop selling policies on the luxury condos that line Biscayne Bay. Banks will stop writing mortgages.” At some point in our warmer future, insurance companies will refuse to do business in areas so likely to generate claims; homeowners relying on insurance as part of their mortgage may find their insurance canceled, without any other company willing to pick up the policy. Or they may find their rates increasing dramatically, according to the Lloyd’s of London dictum that there is no such thing as a bad risk—only a bad rate.

Imagine the situation for Florida homeowners. To reach Sunday open houses, potential home buyers drive gingerly through shallow lakes flooding unfamiliar streets. “For Sale” signs in front lawns tilt as they stand in saltwater at high tide. Even if buyers could be found for such inundated properties, most of those buyers would need to secure bank loans, and in order for banks to write mortgages, houses would need to be insurable. If insurance companies flee a flooding region and refuse to do business there, the whole system collapses. Buyers could pay cash, potentially. But more likely what we’d see is homeowners slashing prices in a desperate effort to get out from under their literally sinking homes.

In response to these looming problems, the mayor of Miami Beach declared, “We can’t let investor confidence, resident confidence, confidence in our economy start to fall away.” Why not? Miami Beach was incorporated slightly more than century ago, and given the rising seas, it’s hard to envision it physically existing a century from now.

No city enjoys a guarantee that investor and resident confidence will continue indefinitely, that the local economy will sustain at current levels, or that nature will be kind.

In Death Valley, not too far from where I live, there is a long 4x4 road that leads through Titus Canyon, and along this dirt path one encounters Leadfield, a rusty ghost town described by a weathered National Park Service sign that informs travelers, “...a post office was established in August, 1926. In February 1927, the post office closed and the town died.” So it goes.

Perhaps someday there will be bronze plaques, visited only by snorkelers and fish, commemorating where great American coastal cities once stood. 

Another Year, Another Anti-Evolution Bill in Oklahoma

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By Laura Moser

Oklahoma! Where there’s “plenty of air and plenty of room”—and plenty of determination, even in 2016, to get evolution out of the classroom. Just witness the tireless efforts of state Sen. Josh Brecheen, who every year since being elected in 2010 has authored legislation aimed at skirting nearly three decades of court decisions that prohibit teaching creationism in public schools.*

His first year in office, according to the National Center for Science Education, Brecheen—a Republican member whose official Oklahoma Senate bio page lists his occupation as “motivational speaker”—wrote in the Durant Daily Democrat that “I have introduced legislation requiring every publicly funded Oklahoma school to teach the debate of creation vs. evolution using the known science, even that which conflicts with Darwin’s religion.” (One of Brecheen’s more recent missions, incidentally, is “nullifying” the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.)

But as Brecheen’s anti-evolution bills have repeatedly fizzled before becoming law, he has taken to adopting (slightly) more subtle tactics. In the 2016 version, instead of advancing an outright endorsement of creationism, the more euphemistic purpose of Brecheen’s Senate Bill 1322 is:

to create an environment within public school districts that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues. … Teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.

As with the intelligent-design debate, there is no supremacy of fact; there are only “opinions about controversial issues.” And even if poor, God-fearing teachers are forced to discuss those pesky “existing scientific theories” of how the world was created, they are also allowed to discuss the potential “weaknesses” of said theories (like, say, their making no appearance in Genesis) without repercussions.

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