ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 586
January 16, 2016
What Happens When Bleach Is Added To Cola?
Photo credit:
CrazyRussianHacker/YouTube screenshot
You’ve probably seen the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment a thousand and one times on YouTube. So now, it’s time for the inevitable next step in scientific exploration: Coca Cola plus bleach.
Tsai Ing-wen elected Taiwan’s first female president
Tsai Ing-wen has been elected Taiwan’s first female president.
Ms Tsai, 59, leads the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that wants independence from China.
In her victory speech, she vowed to preserve the status quo in relations with China, adding Beijing must respect Taiwan’s democracy and both sides must ensure there are no provocations.
China sees the island as a breakaway province – which it has threatened to take back by force if necessary.
In her speech, Ms Tsai hailed a “new era” in Taiwan and pledged to co-operate with other political parties on major issues.
The will of the Taiwanese people would be the basis for relations with China, Ms Tsai said.
“I also want to emphasise that both sides of the Taiwanese Strait have a responsibility to find mutually acceptable means of interaction that are based on dignity and reciprocity.
“We must ensure that no provocations or accidents take place,” Ms Tsai said, warning that “any forms of suppression will harm the stability of cross-strait relations”.
She thanked the US and Japan for their support and vowed Taiwan would contribute to peace and stability in the region.
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What Happens If Hold Your Pee In For A Really Long Time?
Photo credit:
Fotos593/Shutterstock
Holding in your pee can be an unpleasant, foot-tapping, leg-crossing experience. But don’t get swept away by urban legends: your bladder probably won’t pop. Probably.
That said, holding in your pee likely won't do you any favors, either. Years of regular pee-holding can increase your risk of urinary tract infections and a condition called urinary retention, where you bladder cannot fully empty.
January 15, 2016
U.S. Warns Pregnant Women to Avoid Zika Virus
On Friday evening, at the start of a long holiday weekend, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel warning for pregnant women and those trying to get pregnant: stay clear of places where Zika virus is present.
The warning about the mosquito-borne illness encompasses 14 countries and areas, which include: Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Moreover, the number of areas with active transmission of Zika will increase, says Lyle Petersen, director of CDC’s Division of Vector Borne Infectious Diseases.
“This is a fairly serious problem,” says Petersen. CDC issued the statement today instead of waiting until after the weekend, he says, because “the virus is spreading fairly rapidly throughout the Americas” and there is mounting evidence connecting Zika and microcephaly. The agency was originally slated to issue its announcement Friday afternoon but delayed it until Friday evening.
The agency is issuing this recommendation after CDC scientists tested samples provided by Brazilian health authorities from two infants with diagnosed microcephaly who died shortly after birth and from two pregnancies that ended in miscarriage. All four mothers reported having symptoms consistent with Zika virus disease during their pregnancy. CDC’s analysis found that Zika virus was present in the brains of both full-term infants. Outside of this Zika link, microcephaly is typically caused by genetic factors, exposure to environmental toxins or diseases during pregnancy including rubella or herpes.
CDC is now recommending that women in any trimester of pregnancy “should consider postponing travel to the areas where Zika virus transmission in ongoing.” So far, most evidence suggests the risk to pregnant women is greatest during the first trimester. For women who are trying to get pregnant CDC recommends consulting with a healthcare provider before traveling to these areas. People traveling to any of the 14 areas covered under the warning should make sure windows in their lodgings have screens and strictly follow steps to prevent mosquito bites during the trip, including wearing long sleeves, long pants and applying insect repellents containing substances like DEET. “Insect repellents containing DEET, picaridin, and IR3535 are safe for pregnant and nursing women and children older than 2 months when used according to the product label,” the agency said, in a statement.
The mosquito-borne disease caused by the Zika virus was considered minor and rare prior to a large outbreak in Micronesia in 2007. The disease itself is relatively mild – leading to a week of symptoms including rash, fever and joint pain – but its recent links with microcephaly prompted CDC to take this step. “We cannot quantify the risk,” Petersen said.
Last year, Brazil reported about 20 times its average level of microcephaly. Between October 2015 and January 2016 there have been more than 3,500 cases of the incurable condition, CDC says, citing Brazilian health authorities. Babies with the condition are born with abnormally tiny heads, and often, debilitating brain damage. “It is critically important to confirm or dispel a causal link between Zika infection of pregnant women and the occurrence of microcephaly by doing intensive investigative research, including careful case–control and other epidemiologic studies as well as attempts to duplicate this phenomenon in animal models,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, and his colleague David Morens wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this week.
Petersen says it is too early to speculate if the Zika-microcephaly travel warning will still be in effect by the time of Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this summer.
So far, Zika has not yet been locally transmitted in the United States, although 26 U.S. travelers have been infected with the virus elsewhere, Petersen says. The species of mosquitoes biologically capable of transmitting the virus, however, are present in the United States.
Earlier this week Harris County, Texas, confirmed that a middle-aged female who traveled to El Salvador in November had subsequently developed symptoms of Zika and that the disease had been confirmed by laboratory testing. “She is now fully recovered,” says Umair Shah, the executive director of the Harris County Public Health and Environmental Studies. When it comes to the possibility of Zika showing up in their local mosquitoes, however, “for us it’s not a matter of if - it’s a matter of when,” he says.
In the greater Houston area, doctors have been informed to be on the lookout for Zika symptoms and take careful travel histories of people who have traveled to Zika-affected areas, according to Shah. The county’s mosquito control office is also testing local mosquitoes for any signs of dengue – a test that it is using as a proxy for Zika screening because there is no readily available field test for Zika, says Mustapha Debboun, Director of the Mosquito Control Division for the county.
What We’re Reading
David Bowie for America’s Libraries. Copyright, the American Library Association.
David Bowie told Vanity Fair in 1998 that his idea of perfect happiness was reading, and he certainly looks happy in the iconic poster from the American Library Association. Go, and do thou likewise.
Genetic Flip Helped Organisms Go From One Cell to Many, The New York Times, January 7, 2016 — Carl Zimmer reports on the interesting use of ancient protein reconstruction (the evaluation of changes in protein sequences in lineages over time to infer the sequence of the ancestral protein) to posit that a single mutation in a single protein might have been enough to jump-start multicellularity.
You’re Probably Not Mostly Microbes, The Atlantic, January 8, 2016 — Ed Yong traces the origin of the common claim that human bodies contain ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells and explains new research that disproves it. Note that Yong recommends, “avoid mentioning any ratio at all—scientifically, it’s not all that interesting.”
Charles Darwin’s Evolutionary Revelation in Australia, The Conversation, January 11, 2016 — The University of Sydney’s Frank Nicholas discusses the naturalist’s stay Down Under. “Surely two distinct Creators must have been [at] work,” wrote Darwin in his journal when he encountered Australia’s distinctive fauna during the voyage of the Beagle.
Scientists Say Human Greenhouse Gas Emissions Have Canceled the Next Ice Age, Washington Post, January 13, 2016 — Chris Mooney reports on a new study suggesting “that pre-industrial human modifications of the climate through agriculture, fires and deforestation might have just barely staved [the next Ice Age] off.”
New Dinosaur Poses Question: Does This Museum Make Me Look Fat? The New York Times, January 13, 2016 — A report on the unveiling, at the American Museum of Natural History, of the cast of a titanosaur, one of the largest dinosaurs ever found. Be sure to watch the accompanying video, A New Dinosaur Takes Shape, too.
If Done Correctly, Refuting Climate Myths Can be an Effective Educational Strategy, Skeptical Science, January 15, 2016 — Scott Mandia discusses how he helps his undergraduate students understand climate science by asking them to write “a term paper that summarizes the myth in a way that will convince a doubter to change his or her position.”
Inside the Eye: Nature’s Most Exquisite Creation, National Geographic, February 2016 —How’s this for a lede? “In his lab at Lund University in Sweden, Dan-Eric Nilsson is contemplating the eyes of a box jellyfish. Nilsson’s eyes, of which he has two, are ice blue and forward facing. In contrast, the box jelly boasts 24 eyes, which are dark brown and grouped into four clusters called rhopalia.”
Which Motive Worsens A Bad Action More: Desire or Anger?
Enormous Volcano On Pluto Might Be The Biggest In The Outer Solar System
Photo credit:
Is Wright Mons, circled here, a huge ice volcano? NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
In the inner Solar System, the biggest volcano we know of is Olympus Mons on Mars, 624 kilometers (374 miles) across and 25 kilometers (16 miles) high. But what about in the outer Solar System?
Well, that record might now belong to Pluto. If a feature known as Wright Mons on this dwarf planet is confirmed as a volcano, it will take the title of the biggest such feature beyond Mars.
Australian Raptors May Be Playing With Fire
Photo credit:
Black kites such as this one could be spreading lightning-initiated fires to additional territory. Alexius Sutandio/Shutterstock
Two scientific conferences have heard evidence that at least two Australian birds have learned to use fire, picking up smoldering sticks and dropping them in unburnt territory. The behavior has not been photographed, but numerous sitings have been reported, and is woven into the culture of local Indigenous communities.
Researchers Claim To Have Found A ‘Happiness’ Gene
Photo credit:
They report that Nigerians are very happy, while the Chinese are less so. Svetlana lakusheva/Shutterstock
According to a new study, published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, people who rate themselves as the happiest are more likely to share a certain gene. Researchers claim that this holds true for countries as far apart as Ghana and Colombia, yet to boil a nation's emotional state down to a single section of our DNA seems highly simplistic, to say the least.
Unlucky Trout Gets Frozen Against Fish Farm Wall
Photo credit:
Iowa Department of Natural Resources via yyott/Reddit
It’s mighty cold out. But if Old Man Winter’s reign is getting you down, spare a thought for this trout caught in an extremely unlucky predicament.
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