ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 598

Watch A Live Stream Of The Quadrantid Meteor Shower

Space





Photo credit:

A Quadrantid meteor. NASA

Sunday night will showcase the first meteor shower of 2016 to help you wash away those post-holiday blues and your three-day hangover from New Year's Eve. The first meteor shower of the new year is called the Quadrantid meteor shower.

Star Wars: The Feminism Awakens? (Episode I)

Obligatory Force Awakens Spoilers Warning For The Ten People Left On The Planet Who Haven’t Seen It. In the wake of The Force Awakens there are numerous discussions about the social justice consciousness of the filmmakers and the potential for positively empowering girls and young women. Part of this has involved complaints that the film put feminist [Read More...]

IS SHE A LESBIAN?

How can you tell if a girl is gay? Here are some ways to identify a lesbian. Arielle shows us her bra and smacks my ass… am I a lesbian now?

CHECK OUT HER VIDEO! https://youtu.be/O_oJpp1RDmI

15 Ways To Spot A Lesbian According To Some Really Old Medical Journals: http://www.autostraddle.com/15-ways-to-spot-a-lesbian-according-to-some-really-old-medical-journals-139954/

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First Dengue Fever Vaccine Gets Green Light in Three Countries

Mosquito-borne disease affecting millions has had no approved vaccine until now

When female Aedes Aegypti mosquito sups on the blood of its human victims it too often deposits the virus that causes dengue, causing as many as 400 million infections per year worldwide. Severe forms of the painful, flu-like disease can be fatal, especially among children. And until recently there has been no truly effective prevention except avoiding getting bit.

But the outlook against the disease is looking better.

During the past month Dengvaxia, developed by the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi, has been approved for use in three countries: Mexico and the Philippines approved the vaccine earlier this month. This week, the company also announced the drug has received the green light in Brazil, which has seen more than 1.4 million cases of the disease in 2015. Exactly when the inoculations will be deployed—and at what price—remains unclear as terms of the vaccine are being negotiated between the company and the countries.

Sanofi’s vaccine, which is designed to coax the body’s immune system into making antibodies against all four forms of dengue, is a live virus comprised of an attenuated yellow fever virus. (Yellow fever virus and dengue virus have the same genus.) For the vaccine, however, the virus is genetically engineered to include genes encoding for dengue proteins. Other dengue vaccines are also in development but none have received approval.

Religion and politics led to social tension and conflict, then and now: study

Humans haven’t learned much in more than 2,000 years when it comes to religion and politics.

Religion has led to social tension and conflict, not just in today’s society, but dating back to 700 B.C. according to a new study published today in Current Anthropology .

University of Colorado anthropology Professor Arthur A. Joyce and University of Central Florida Associate Professor Sarah Barber found evidence in several Mexican archeological sites that contradict the long-held belief that religion acted to unite early state societies. It often had the opposite effect, the study says.

“It doesn’t matter if we today don’t share particular religious beliefs, but when people in the past acted on their beliefs, those actions could have real, material consequences,” Barber said about the team’s findings. “It really behooves us to acknowledge religion when considering political processes.”

Sounds like sage advice in today’s world that has multiple examples of politics and religion intersecting and resulting in conflict.

The team published its findings “Ensoulment, Entrapment, and Political Centralization: A Comparative Study of Religion and Politics in Later Formative Oaxaca,” after spending several years conducting field research in the lower Río Verde valley of Oaxaca, Mexico’s Pacific coastal lowlands. They compared their results with data from the highland Valley of Oaxaca.

Read more by clicking on the name of the source below. 

Revisiting The Stoics, Towards Revising stoicism

My feelings towards the ancient Stoics have oscillated quite a bit over the years. I’ve never scoured their writings nor done scholarship on them but they’ve nonetheless had a big impact on me. In the immediate aftermath of my deconversion, during my years of peak Nietzsche enthusiasm, I reflexively sided with Nietzsche when he lobbed barbs at them, [Read More...]

John Malkovich’s Creepy Narration of Plato’s Cave Allegory Set to Experimental Music

In the audio below, John Malkovich narrates Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to music by Eric Alexandrakis, as remixed by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon for the project Like a Puppet Show. Much more about the project can be learned from Pitchfork and especially at Rolling Stone. Many thanks to @durancurefan for the heads up. While my first listen I found [Read More...]

Ten Of The Most Awe-Inspiring Space Images Of 2015

Space





Photo credit:

New Horizons' "funky" image of Pluto, with altered colors highlighting differences in soil composition. NASA

2015 has been a pretty awesome year for space exploration. It has seen the likes of the New Horizons flyby of Pluto, private enterprises making some ground-breaking developments, and a whole manner of less "front-page news," which is nonetheless slowly but surely helping us increase our understanding of the vast intergalactic heavens.

What We’re Reading

General

Tanks to our loyal readers! (The illustration shows a temporary library facility established in an abandoned water supply reservoir in the wake of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.) And best wishes for the new year from all of us at NCSE.

A Yankee at Oxford: John William Draper at the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford, 30 June 1860, Notes and Records, December 23, 2015 (published online in advance of publication) — A look at the legendary encounter between Thomas Henry Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, with the aid of recently rediscovered letters from and to John William Draper, who was on the spot.
Why Exaptation is an Unnecessary Term in the Science of Form, Why Evolution is True, December 28, 2015 — Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba introduced the term “exaptation” in 1982 — unnecessarily, argues Matthew Cobb: “it actually hinders understanding, by suggesting that non-adaptive processes are at work.”
Pseudogenes, Intelligent Design, and Kitzmiller (part 1 and part 2), BioLogos, December 28–29, 2015 — Dennis Venema debunks a Discovery Institute staffer's attempt to argue that the beta globin pseudogene isn’t good evidence for the common ancestry of humans and chimpanzees.
New Video of Giant Squid Surfaces, Deep Sea News, December 29, 2015 — Great news for cephalopodophiles everywhere from Craig McClain! An extremely rare sighting in Japan’s Toyama Bay of the giant squid Architeuthis not only confirmed but even with video.
The Scariest Part of this Weird Weather is Coming Soon, Slate, December 29, 2015 — It’s warmer at the North Pole this week than it is in Southern California. Eric Holthaus explains that this is just a scary preview of what’s to come later this century.

7th period of the periodic table of elements is complete

The fourth IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party (JWP) on the priority of claims to the discovery of new elements has reviewed the relevant literature for elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 and has determined that the claims for discovery of these elements have been fulfilled, in accordance with the criteria for the discovery of elements of the IUPAP/IUPAC Transfermium Working Group (TWG) 1991 discovery criteria.

These elements complete the 7th row of the periodic table of the elements, and the discoverers from Japan, Russia and the USA will now be invited to suggest permanent names and symbols. The new elements and assigned priorities of discovery are as follows:

Element 113 (temporary working name and symbol: ununtrium, Uut)

The RIKEN collaboration team in Japan have fulfilled the criteria for element Z=113 and will be invited to propose a permanent name and symbol.

Elements 115, 117, and 118 (temporary working names and symbols: ununpentium, Uup; ununseptium, Uus; and ununoctium, Uuo)

The collaboration between the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA; and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA have fulfilled the criteria for element Z=115, 117 and will be invited to propose permanent names and symbols.

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