ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 583

A Garden Grows in Space: First Zinnias Bloom, to Astronaut’s Delight

Photo credit: NASA/Scott Kelly

By Sarah Lewin

Zinnias have opened their pretty petals for the first time on the International Space Station, and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly couldn’t be prouder.

The zinnias, grown as part of the Veggie program, have had a rough path: They battled excessive water, overdrying and even enterprising mold before beginning to recover in early January.

To better balance conditions for the zinnias, NASA named Kelly an autonomous gardener (or “commander” of Veggie) on Christmas Eve, so he could independently decide when the plants needed to be watered or tended to instead of waiting for directives from Earth. It looks like that hard work has paid off, with new photos of the zinnia’s first vivid orangey-yellow bloom.

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Scientists have found that smoking weed does not make you stupid after all

Photo credit: AP/David Zalubowski

By Christopher Ingraham

You might have heard that smoking marijuana makes you stupid.

If you grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, that was more or less the take-home message of countless anti-drug PSAs. In more recent years, it’s a message we’ve heard — albeit in more nuanced form — from Republican candidates on the campaign trail and from marijuana opponents at the state-level.

The contemporary version of argument can be traced to a 2012 Duke University study, which found that persistent, heavy marijuana use through adolescence and young adulthood was associated with declines in IQ.

Other researchers have since criticized that study’s methods. A follow-up study in the same journal found that the original research failed to account for a number of confounding factors that could also affect cognitive development, such as cigarette and alcohol use, mental illness and socioeconomic status.

Two new reports this month tackle the relationship between marijuana use and intelligence from two very different angles: One examines the life trajectories of 2,235 British teenagers between ages 8 and 16, and the other looks at the differences between American identical twin pairs in which one twin uses marijuana and the other does not.

Despite vastly different methods, the studies reach the same conclusion: They found no evidence that adolescent marijuana use leads to a decline in intelligence.

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Can you push a spacecraft with light?

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace: ‪http://www.squarespace.com/physicsgirl

What if you could power a ship using sunlight instead of wind? Well in space, you can! Solar sails or light sails are pushed with light from the sun. Photons provide a kick when they reflect off the sail pushing the sail like an air molecule in the wind pushes a sailboat. Find out how a solar sail works and about the future of this technology!

‪http://physicsgirl.org/

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Host/editor: Dianna Cowern

Wrter: Sophia Chen

Editor: Jabril Ashe – sefdstuff.com/science

Animator: Kyle Norby

Photos/Videos:

NASA

LightSail – Planetary Society

Pixabay.com

Shutterstock.com

FASTSAT NanoSail-D Launch – NASA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gS4n5vz9Tw

Optical Tweezes Footage – Dr Luis Grave De Petralta:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6ybb9rKfus

IKAROS drawing – Andrzej MIrecki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS#/media/File:IKAROS_solar_sail.jpg

Music: APM and YouTube

HELL IS REAL! SHOCKING NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE!

HELL IS REAL! SHOCKING NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE! You guys seriously won’t believe how real this is. Drug overdose has nothing to do with this experience, it was strictly a hell thing. For real. Get my awesome tshirts! http://www.jaclynglenn.com

Support me on Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/Jaclyn

Original video: These Monsters don’t compare to what he saw in Hell!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23JR_WuBfGg

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Thanks for watching this video on near death experiences. Have you ever had a near death experience? Drug-induced near death experiences are totally still valid and count and stuff. Leave a comment and tell me about your near death experience below! Did you see the light? Did the hand of Jesus or God or FSM reach down and pull you out of the fiery pits of hell? Leave a comment and I’ll totally believe you. True stories only, nothing made up please

The Big Search to Find Out Where Dogs Come From

Photo credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times

By James Gorman

Before humans milked cows, herded goats or raised hogs, before they invented agriculture, or written language, before they had permanent homes, and most certainly before they had cats, they had dogs.

Or dogs had them, depending on how you view the human-canine arrangement. But scientists are still debating exactly when and where the ancient bond originated. And a large new study being run out of the University of Oxford here, with collaborators around the world, may soon provide some answers.

Scientists have come up with a broad picture of the origins of dogs. First off, researchers agree that they evolved from ancient wolves. Scientists once thought that some visionary hunter-gatherer nabbed a wolf puppy from its den one day and started raising tamer and tamer wolves, taking the first steps on the long road to leashes and flea collars. This is oversimplified, of course, but the essence of the idea is that people actively bred wolves to become dogs just the way they now breed dogs to be tiny or large, or to herd sheep.

The prevailing scientific opinion now, however, is that this origin story does not pass muster. Wolves are hard to tame, even as puppies, and many researchers find it much more plausible that dogs, in effect, invented themselves.

Imagine that some ancient wolves were slightly less timid around nomadic hunters and scavenged regularly from their kills and camps, and gradually evolved to become tamer and tamer, producing lots of offspring because of the relatively easy pickings. At some point, they became the tail-wagging beggar now celebrated as man’s best friend.

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Brain monitoring chips dissolve when you’re done with them

Photo credit: Washington University School of Medicine

By Jon Fingas

By far the biggest danger of brain implants is rejection — it can be just a matter of time before your immune system freaks out and makes a bad situation that much worse. That’s where Washington University might come to the rescue. Its researchers have crafted tiny (smaller than a pencil tip) wireless brain sensors that dissolve. Their mix of silicone and polylactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) is sophisticated enough to transmit vital data like cranial pressure and temperature, but melts after a few days of exposure to typical organic matter.

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Photos: One Worm, Five Shape-Shifting Mouths

Photo credit: Vladislav Susoy & Jürgen Berger

By Mindy Weisberger

A microscopic worm’s changing face almost fooled scientists into thinking its different mouths belonged to different species. But DNA analysis proved that the worm with five faces was really just one species after all. And it’s not the only one — the scientists then discovered two additional worm species that can shape-shift their mouths into one of five adult forms, to best match whatever food is readily available.

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For Now, Self-Driving Cars Still Need Humans

Photo credit: Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

By John Markoff

Car enthusiasts, after hearing industry executives discussing the self-driving technology being built into their vehicles, might be forgiven for thinking robotic cars will soon drive themselves out of auto showrooms.

Carlos Ghosn, the chairman and chief executive of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, announced during a news media event on Jan. 7 at the company’s research laboratory in Silicon Valley that Nissan would introduce 10 new autonomous vehicles in the next four years.

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, upped the ante. In a conference call with reporters last week, he asserted that the so-called Autopilot feature introduced in the Tesla Model S last fall was “probably better than a person right now.”

Mr. Musk also said that within a year or two, it would be technically feasible to summon a Tesla from the opposite side of the country.

But there is a growing gap between what these executives are saying and what most people think of when they hear executives or scientists describing autonomous or driverless cars.

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Better Gut Microbiome Census Through Computing

In recent years, scientists have shown that the microbes that live in our guts play crucial roles in our lives. They’re involved in digestion, obesity, even mood. And a few can cause serious illness. So it would be a good idea to know the identities of the bacteria inside us. And yet, that info has been incomplete.

 

But now researchers have developed a technique to get a better census of the gut microbiome. And using the new system, the researchers have found that our microorganisms are even more diverse than we knew. The report is in the journal Nature Biotechnology. [Volodymyr Kuleshov et al, Synthetic long-read sequencing reveals intraspecies diversity in the human microbiome]

 

Currently, researchers analyze microbial diversity by taking a sample they hope includes the different kinds of bacteria in the gut. They then try to identify the different species by looking at their genomes. But they can only do that second-hand, by trying to piece together many short snippets of DNA—which can be confusing and inadequate when dealing with numerous different kinds of bacteria.

 

So geneticists at Stanford University got together with computer scientists to come up with a new approach. They used sophisticated computational techniques that enabled them to analyze much longer stretches of DNA—which included many genes that would be missed with the older system. For example, when they tested the gut microbiome from a healthy human male the old way, they found 127 different species. The new method applied to the same sample revealed the presence of an additional 51 species.   

 

The new approach could be particularly important for identifying and understanding disease-causing microbes. "When you assemble the whole genome, you have a really good idea of what pathogenic genes are present.” Michael Snyder, one of the study researchers. “So we think this technology is going to be extremely powerful for understanding the genetic basis of pathogenesis.”

 

For example, we all harbor benign strains of E. coli bacteria. But other strains can be toxic or even deadly—and they might be hard to investigate because they don’t grow easily in the lab. The new approach could look directly at the toxic strain’s genes to see how they functions. “And of course this will be really powerful then for treating humans in terms of what pathogenic genes might be present in the microorganisms they harbor.”

 

—Cynthia Graber

 

(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)

 

Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group

Why You Shouldn’t Eat ANY Snow, Not Just Yellow Snow

Environment





Photo credit:

Snow around traffic becomes a pollution Popsicle, essentially. itakefotos4u/Shutterstock

You know the saying: Don’t eat yellow snow. Unfortunately, a new study published in the journal Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts, suggests that you shouldn’t actually eat any snow at all, if you can avoid it. Snow has been found to act as a rather effective sink for tiny particles that are found primarily in car exhaust fumes, so any consumption of it is effectively like eating a pollution-flavored Popsicle.