ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 580

More babies are being born with organs outside their bodies, and experts have no idea why

Photo credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

By Sarah Kaplan

When Brooke gave birth, she wasn’t able to hold her newborn daughter against her, feel the baby’s tiny chest rise and fall as it issued its first, tremendous wail.

Instead, she got only a brief glimpse of her child, Anna, before the little girl was whisked away into surgery.

What she saw was disquieting: Her infant daughter’s intestines protruded outside her body, dark and slick and alien-looking. It would take a nerve-wracking operation and weeks in the intensive care unit until her internal organs were back were they belonged and baby Anna could finally come home, Brooke wrote for the CDC (the post does not give her last name).

Anna was born with gastroschisis, a rare birth defect that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said has become worryingly more common in recent years, particularly for young African American mothers.

In a report published Friday, the public health agency said that it found 30 percent more cases of the disease between 2006 and 2012 than it did from 1995 to 2005. Among African American mothers who were younger than 20, the number of babies born with the disease jumped 263 percent.

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Venus flytraps ‘able to count’ in order to avoid false alarms, study finds

Photo credit: Adam Gault/Getty Images/OJO Images RF

By Press Association

Venus flytraps can count, according to scientists who tested the carnivorous plants and found they use their mathematical skill to conserve energy and avoid false alarms.

Researchers in Germany learned that the Venus flytrap adjusts its feeding behaviour according to the number of times the sensitive trigger hairs on its special leaves that resemble spring traps are stimulated.

“The carnivorous plant Dionaea muscipula, also known as Venus flytrap, can count how often it has been touched by an insect visiting its capture organ in order to trap and consume the animal prey,” said lead scientist Prof Rainer Hedrich, from the University of Wurzburg.

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New Biggest Prime Number = 2 to the 74 Mil … Uh, It’s Big

Photo credit: Tucker Nichols

By Kenneth Chang

The largest known prime number, newly discovered, is almost five million digits longer than the previous record-holder.

In a computer laboratory at a satellite campus of the University of Central Missouri, an otherwise nondescript desktop computer, machine No. 5 in Room 143, multiplied 74,207,281 twos together and subtracted 1. It then checked that this number was not divisible by any positive integer except 1 and itself — the definition of a prime number.

This immense number can only be practically written down in mathematical notation using exponents: 274,207,281 − 1.

The previous largest was 257,885,161 − 1, which has a mere 17 million or so digits.

This is the 15th prime number found by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or Gimps, for short, a volunteer project that has been running for 20 years. “I’ve always been interested in prime numbers,” said George Woltman, who founded Gimps after he had retired. “I had a lot of time on my hands,” he said.

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Headbanging in the house of God: Rio congregation worships with heavy metal

Photo credit: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

By Jonathan Watts

Of the many macabre ways in which the Metanóia chapel differs from its counterparts around the world, perhaps the most revealing is its noticeboard.

As well as the usual updates on services, baptisms and weddings, it includes a host of blood-curdling advertisements for upcoming events.

“Night of the Massacre”, “Into the Infernal” and “Blood Fest” scream the headlines that might, at first sight, leave a visitor to a Catholic chapel alarmed or, at least, perplexed.

Given the chapel’s location in Maré – a huge favela complex in Rio de Janeiro that is so difficult for the authorities to control that it was recently occupied by the Brazilian military – some might wrongly assume the signs refer to conflict between police and gangs.

In fact, they are gig notices that testify to a small but growing heavy metal evangelical movement that is upturning Brazilian stereotypes of Catholicism, samba and favela violence.

Metanóia, a second-floor church that attracts a small but dedicated group of followers, is testimony to the diversity and complexity of Brazil’s pick ‘n’ mix culture.

The setting is studiously gothic. In one corner a skeletal grim reaper peers out from an open coffin. In another, a skull is chained above a dusty Bible. The walls are decorated with spiders, bats and saw blades. Black crucifixes dangle from the ceiling. On the altar, between a tabernacle and a sword, sits a goat skull pierced by a jewelled dagger. Behind it, a giant banner declares, “Jesus Christ is Lord of the Underground.”

The message is underscored by the founding pastor Enok Galvão. “Here in the underground, in our own way, we welcome God into our hearts,” the tattooed preacher declares to his congregation, who raise their fists to the heavens and declare, “Praise be to the Lord.”

Once his sermon is over, the music – and the moshing – begins. Four bands, ranging from soft evangelical rock to hardcore Christian death metal, take the mood as far from a traditional church choir as can be imagined.

One of the vocalists Joab Farias, a bank employee with a long beard and a black ear stud, specialises in the guttural growls of death metal.

“To me it’s really natural. I see no reason not to use this kind of voice for worship,” he explains. “Music is a realm of complete freedom.”

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“Snowmageddon” Set To Hit East Coast US With Record Snowfall

Environment





Photo credit:

A view of the snow storm as it moves east across the United States. NASA

Snowmageddon. Snowpocolypse. Snowzilla. Call it what you will, it looks like North America is set for a serious bout of weather as an intensifying snow storm sweeps across the states, bringing with it predictions of a historic blizzard hitting the East Coast.

Record levels of snow are expected to be dumped on Washington, D.C., and the mid-Atlantic region, while the Gulf states have been warned of heavy rains and the potential for tornadoes.

Mini T. Rex: ‘Welsh Dragon’ May Be Earliest Jurassic Dinosaur

Photo credit: Bob Nicholls

By Laura Geggel

Two brothers hunting for ichthyosaur fossils along the coast of the United Kingdom came across something far more astounding: The bones of what may be the earliest known dinosaur from the Jurassic period in the U.K., and possibly even the world, a new study finds.

After finding the bones in 2014, Rob Hanigan contacted his brother, Nick. The two scoured the coast, located just south of Wales, for more of the fossils, taking careful geological notes along the way.

Later, they reached out to paleontologists at the University of Portsmouth, who confirmed that the bones belonged to a theropod, a group of mostly meat-eating dinosaurs. Moreover, the paleo-beast lived at a key point of dinosaur diversification at the beginning of the Jurassic, said study co-author Steven Vidovic, a doctoral researcher of paleontology at the University of Portsmouth.

“It’s a jumbled mix of bones that are a real puzzle to put back together,” Vidovic told Live Science in an email. “It was very rewarding reconstructing it.”

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Scientists Find Hints Of A Giant, Hidden Planet In Our Solar System

Photo credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

By Nell Greenfieldboyce

The astronomer whose work helped kick Pluto out of the pantheon of planets says he has good reason to believe there’s an undiscovered planet bigger than Earth lurking in the distant reaches of our solar system.

That’s quite a claim, because Mike Brown of Caltech is no stranger to this part of our cosmic neighborhood. After all, he discovered Eris, an icy world more massive than Pluto that proved our old friend wasn’t special enough to be considered a full-fledged planet. He also introduced the world to Sedna, a first-of-its-kind dwarf planet that’s so far out there, its region of space was long thought to be an empty no man’s land.

Now Brown has teamed up with Caltech colleague Konstantin Batygin to do a new analysis of oddities in the orbits of small, icy bodies out beyond Neptune. In their report published Wednesday in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers say it looks like the orbits are all being affected by the presence of an unseen planet that’s about 10 times more massive than Earth — the size astronomers refer to as a super-Earth.

“I’m willing to take bets on anyone who’s not a believer,” says Brown. He thinks existing telescopes have a shot at spotting this mystery planet in just a few years, since this new study points to a band of sky where astronomers should look.

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Hunter-gatherer massacre suggests groups of humans waged war earlier than we thought

Photo credit: Marta Mirazon Lahr, enhanced by Fabio Lahr

By Marta Mirazon Lahr

The area surrounding Lake Turkana in Kenya was lush and fertile 10,000 years ago, with thousands of animals – including elephants, giraffes and zebras – roaming around alongside groups of hunter gatherers. But it also had a dark side. We have discovered the oldest known case of violence between two groups of hunter gatherers took place there, with ten excavated skeletons showing evidence of having been killed with both sharp and blunt weapons.

The findings, published in Nature, are important because they challenge our understanding of the roots of conflict and suggest warfare may have a much older history than many researchers believe.

Shocking finding

Our journey started in 2012, when Pedro Ebeya, one of our Turkana field assistants, reported seeing fragments of human bones on the surface at Nataruk. Located just south of Lake Turkana, Nataruk is today a barren desert, but 10,000 years ago was a temporary camp set up by a band of hunter-gatherers next to a lagoon. I led a team of researchers, as part of the In-Africa project, which has been working in the area since 2009. We excavated the remains of 27 people – six young children, one teenager and 20 adults. Twelve of these – both men and women – were found as they had died, unburied, and later covered by the shallow water of the lagoon.

Ten of the 12 skeletons show lesions caused by violence to the parts of the body most commonly involved in cases of violence. These include one where the projectile was still embedded in the side of the skull; two cases of sharp-force trauma to the neck; seven cases of blunt and/or sharp-force trauma to the head; two cases of blunt-force trauma to the knees and one to the ribs. There were also two cases of fractures to the hands, possibly caused while parrying a blow.

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Sharks Head Straight Home By Smell

Some sea creatures can find their way through thousands of miles of seemingly featureless oceans. Even more impressive is the route that they take.  

 

“Well, we’ve known for a long time that sharks are capable of long distance migrations, and in some cases those migrations occur along very straight paths.” Scripps Institution of Oceanography biologist Andy Nosal. “And this has always begged the question: how exactly do they know where they’re going?...So, there have been a lot of hypotheses floated over the last several decades, including the idea that these sharks are using, for example, geomagnetic cues, chemical cues and others. But none of these have really been systematically tested in the field.”

 

Nosal and his team suspected that the navigational secret of some sharks might be their sense of smell. They use their keen noses to find food, of course. And other fish, like salmon, are known to use olfaction to navigate.

 

To see if his hunch was right, Nosal scooped up some adult female leopard sharks in their preferred environment, waist-deep water off the San Diego coast. He attached a small radio transmitter behind their dorsal fins. And he blocked the sense of smell in half of the sharks by shoving cotton balls soaked with petroleum jelly in their nostrils.

 

Nosal and his crew dropped the sharks about six miles away at a spot in the open ocean. The researchers then tracked the sharks as they tried to swim back home. Four hours later, the sharks that could smell were two-thirds of the way back home—and had swum in very straight paths. But the ones with stuffed noses took erratic routes and only made it about half as far.

 

Nosal thinks they all eventually got back home. “And we know that because even though their movements, even though they didn’t get as close to shore and even though their paths were more wind-y, their movements were still biased towards shore. On average they still finished closer to shore than when they started.” And those jelly-soaked cotton balls eventually disintegrate, returning the sharks to normal. The experiment is the first to show that sharks can indeed sniff their way back home. [Andrew P. Nosal et al, Olfaction Contributes to Pelagic Navigation in a Coastal Shark, in PLOS ONE]

 

But it also shows that they must have some kind of back-up system that lets them that lets them navigate non-nasally. For Nosal, the next questions are: What’s the back-up system? And if sharks navigate by smell, what exactly is it they’re smelling that leads them—by the nose.

 

—Jason Goldman

 

(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)

Two-Thirds Of Dangerous Climate Phenomena Linked To Human Activity

Environment





Photo credit:

Wildfires are directly attributable to human-produced greenhouse gas emissions. VanderWolf Images/Shutterstock

Last December, 195 nations agreed on a plan to limit man-made (anthropogenic) warming to below 2°C (3.6°F) by the end of the century. Every signatory recognized that humanity is altering the climate, but how many dangerous climatic events can be directly attributed to human activity?