ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 632

Half-Mile Spider Web Found In Tennessee

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Christina VanMeter/Flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Residents on May Street and Chelsea Avenue in north Memphis, Tennessee may have been fooled into thinking they had been treated to an early sprinkling of snow. However, a closer inspection proved that the white film grazing their ground was actually a gargantuan spider web almost a kilometer (0.6 miles) in length.

CFI and Dawkins Foundation Urge FTC to Stop Homeopathy’s False Advertising

The Center for Inquiry and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science are urging the Federal Trade Commission to put an end to false advertising by the manufacturers of homeopathic products. They point to the overwhelming scientific consensus that these pseudoscientific alternative remedies have no effect (other than a placebo effect) on any condition, and harm consumers who rely on them in lieu of real, science-based medicine.

CFI and the Dawkins Foundation, jointly filing comments, remind the FTC that its mandate is “to protect the American public, not to safeguard the sales of relics from the cabinets of 18th century medicine.” They argue that the FTC should use its authority to stop manufacturers from falsely advertising homeopathy’s safety or efficacy until such claims can be scientifically proven. The FTC itself has recently expressed its own concern about the harm to American consumers posed by the unsubstantiated claims of the homeopathy industry.

“Homeopathy does not work, has never been proven to work, and based on universally accepted, fundamental scientific principles, it cannot work,” said Michael De Dora, director of public policy for the Center for Inquiry. “Nonetheless, the homeopathy industry enriches itself by deceiving consumers by falsely promising to cure all manner of conditions, wasting Americans’ money and putting their health at risk.

“The FTC has a mandate to protect Americans from this kind of dangerous misinformation, and we strongly urge them to act on that mandate.”

“Homeopathy isn’t real medicine. It’s snake oil, and its manufacturers have evaded regulatory scrutiny for far too long with tragic consequences,” said Robyn Blumner, president & CEO of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. “The FTC needs to end this dangerous deception of American consumers.”

Homeopathy is an 18th century, pre-scientific concept based on the fiction that “like cures like,” compounded with the fantastical idea that water can retain a “memory” of a given substance once diluted to an infinitesimal degree, to the point that literally nothing of the original ingredient remains. Homeopathy has been entirely disproven and rejected by modern science, with zero evidence of effectiveness in treating any condition, beyond a placebo effect. In the UK, government health officials are considering blacklisting homeopathic products from the National Health Service altogether.

Yet Americans continue to throw away billions of dollars on homeopathic products, and too often use them in place of actual medicine, putting their health at serious risk with useless products such as homeopathic “vaccines” and asthma treatments.

CFI and the Dawkins Foundation point to Sections 5 and 12 of the FTC Act that prohibit both the “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” in commerce and “the dissemination of false advertisements” related to drugs. “Homeopathic products clearly fall within these parameters,” De Dora said. “Homeopathic products are consistently advertised as both effective and safe in addressing a range of health conditions. Yet, empirical studies have illustrated decisively and repeatedly these claims are false.”

Earlier this year, the Center for Inquiry publicly testified before the Food and Drug Administration to argue that homeopathic remedies must be held to the same standards for safety and efficacy as any other drug.

The full comments are available here.

* * *

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a nonprofit educational, advocacy, and research organization headquartered in Amherst, New York, with executive offices in Washington, D.C. It is also home to both the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism. The mission of CFI is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. CFI‘s web address is www.centerforinquiry.net.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to remove the influence of religion in science education and public policy, and eliminate the stigma that surrounds atheism and non-belief.

Why People Stick With Outdated Technology

It’s no surprise that Sony Corp. will finally stop manufacturing Betamax videocassettes. Betamax transformed the world’s viewing habits 40 years ago but it quickly succumbed to the rival format, VHS. No new Betacam recorders have been available, even in Japan, for over 13 years.

So why did the format last so long? It’s easy to blame corporate stubbornness. But the persistence of obsolescent technologies goes beyond culture. It takes three forms:

The first is pragmatic. Many people, including owners of the latest devices, retain some old ones because they avoid some of the vulnerabilities of newer equipment. Consider the often-ridiculed fax machine: A scanned document may be more convenient and cheaper to send than a fax, for example, but unencrypted personal information is notoriously easy to hack online.

Another pragmatic reason for using older devices is simply that they still work. Professional laboratory instruments and theatrical lighting systems with years of useful life ahead of them still operate with floppy disks, for example.

And the world’s military leaders, for all their fascination with advanced weapons, find it hard to part with older, rugged ones like the World War II–era Kalashnikov automatic rifle, now marketed and produced worldwide as the AK-47. The AR-15, a favorite of American civilian firearm enthusiasts, was also introduced over 50 years ago. Even apparent breakthroughs may be less effective than they seem. The military historian David Edgerton, in his book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, argues that Hitler would have done better to build 24,000 fighter aircraft for the cost of his “wonder weapon” V-2 rocket program, and that the U.S. could have defeated Japan earlier if Manhattan Project funds had been used for more (conventionally armed) B-29s.

In civilian technology, too, the past is still alive. Technically, the audio cassette (originated by Philips in Europe) may be even more primitive than the Betamax tape, but the largest remaining American producer, the National Audio Company in Missouri, has reported a 20 percent growth in sales from 2013 to 2014, and the best year since the company was founded. Lots of old tape drives are rugged and effective.

A second reason for using older technology is aesthetic. Where pragmatic users like saving money, aesthetic ones will gladly pay more for what they consider a higher quality or more authentic experience. Not too long ago, vinyl records were associated with middle-aged audiophile purists; now they appeal to youthful hipsters as well. Even vacuum tube amplifiers, said to have a warmth lacking in solid-state electronics, have new admirers.

Sometimes, pragmatic choices morph into aesthetic ones. Modern automatic transmissions offer better fuel economy than the few remaining U.S. stick shift models, and are now standard equipment on American-built cars. Yet remaining devotees still crave manual transmissions for the tactile experience of driving them. One enthusiast predicted in the Wall Street Journal that they will build their own if all manufacturers drop them.

Paradoxically, the Web and social media have also helped prolong the lives of waning technologies, especially on aesthetic grounds. The page “Driving a Stick Shift” has over 10,000 Likes on Facebook. Amazon, eBay and modern search engines make it easy to find niche products in the U.S—including working Betamax recorders and vintage tapes, still sealed in their original wrappers. The many academic aficionados of the elegantly simple WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS can turn to a Columbia University Web site for instructions and troubleshooting.

For aesthetic preservation, star power also helps. The artist Chuck Close’s stunning 20 by 24 Polaroid portraits helped frame the instant photo technology as an elite tool rather than a pre-digital relic; entrepreneurs who bought the failing original company’s assets are selling film and cameras again. Meanwhile, prominent directors, including Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Judd Apatow and J. J. Abrams have persuaded Hollywood studios to guarantee Kodak a critical mass of orders for 35-millimeter film stock. Tarantino, a staunch foe of digital projection, shot and released The Hateful Eight in the endangered 70-millimeter format. (Sadly there was no such champion for Kodachrome slide film; the last rolls were processed in 2010–11.)

Aestheticism can cost millions—Tarantino had to have special new lenses manufactured to project his latest film—but it also can be dirt cheap. A notoriously leaky 1980s Soviet camera, the Lomo, was embraced by a circle of Viennese enthusiasts who cherished its potential for creative distortion and founded a flourishing Lomography movement. The once-defunct Moleskine notebook company promotes a link between handwriting and individual style with its roster of historic artists and writers. (Many Moleskine notebooks are among the few surviving examples of real signature-sewn bindings.)

The third conservative style might be called rescue technology. Many essential records and elements of audiovisual production have not been and won’t be digitized. Whereas the last American company to sell IBM card-reading machines, Cardamation Co., went out of business in 2012 after its owner’s death, the California Tab Card Co. still sells punch cards. And at least one successful family-owned technology business, Sparkler Chemical Filters of Texas, proudly punches in its business records. Public libraries have long abandoned exclusive use of card catalogues, and the last company preparing new cards discontinued them in October 2015, but there are still countless historic public and private records in file card format that must be preserved, and damaged cards replaced.

Whatever the motive, saving old formats is among other things a green reply to planned obsolescence and the electronic waste menace. So let’s toast, not mock, the Japanese Betamax fans who stayed loyal to the end.

 

The Case of the Disappearing Quasars

Astronomers peering across the universe think they’ve caught a dozen quasars—extremely bright and distant objects powered by ravenous supermassive black holes at the centers of ancient galaxies—in a disappearing act. Or at least transitioning into their quiescent and dimmer counterparts: galaxies with starving black holes at their cores. The surprising find has astronomers asking whether these objects are shutting down permanently or simply flickering out for the time being.

Last year Stephanie LaMassa from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (then at Yale University) discovered the greatest change in luminosity ever detected in a quasar. She was digging through data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey when she found that a quasar had dimmed in brightness by a factor of six in just 10 years. Its spectrum changed, too, from that of a classic quasar to a regular galaxy.

Astronomers suspect that all quasars, which were common in the early universe, will eventually transition into humdrum galaxies. The nomenclature “active galactic nuclei” is useful in understanding why. Quasars belong to a larger class of objects called active galactic nuclei, all of which are powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes. Naturally, active galactic nuclei can turn inactive: Over tens of thousands of years black holes run out of gas and dust to eat, so quasars dim and grow quiescent.

There is nothing controversial about the idea that active galactic nuclei can become inactive. What LaMassa and her colleagues doubted was that a quasar could go from active to inactive in just 10 years. Such a dramatic change should occur on a timescale that dwarfs human lifetimes. They looked for different explanations but did not find any that satisfied them. So when LaMassa presented her results at the January 2015 American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, it set in motion a rush among the astronomical community to explain her disappearing quasar—and find new ones.

In March Andrea Merloni at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany studied LaMassa’s mystery object and suggested that it was not a typical quasar at all. Instead, Merloni proposed, a single star passed near a supermassive black hole and was rapidly torn apart, causing a bright flare that astronomers mistook for a quasar. The light from an event like this would fade over the course of just a few years. Although the explanation matched the timescale, some astronomers found problems with the argument. Julian Krolik, a theorist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with either Merloni’s or LaMassa’s studies, points out that a supermassive black hole would not necessarily tear apart a star in the way that Merloni proposed. “The larger-mass black holes can swallow a star whole,” he says, and if that happened, there would be no flare.

LaMassa’s talk in January created enough of a controversy that three additional teams conducted their own research, searching for further examples of these so-called “changing-look quasars.” In September each team posted papers to arXiv, a preprint server used by the astronomy and physics communities. Three teams—one led by Jessie Runnoe of the Pennsylvania State University, one by John Ruan of the University of Washington and another by the University of Edinburgh’s Chelsea MacLeod—discovered a dozen new examples of changing-look quasars. All were found using different methods.

But even with the examples it remains unclear if these objects are shutting down temporarily or for good. An answer might help astronomers better grasp the specifics of how gas and dust flows onto a black hole in the first place and why this process fluctuates over time. Ultimately it could shed light on the processes that helped shape galaxies, including our own.

For his part, Krolik thinks the most likely explanation for changing-look quasars is simple variation. Statistically speaking, it is very unlikely that astronomers just happened to look at these objects, which have lifetimes of billions of years, at the very moments they snuffed out forever. We already know that quasars flicker, varying in brightness by a factor of up to three, Krolik says. A factor of six—although unexplained—is not too far off. And one of the 12 newly discovered objects did not just disappear but reappear. Krolik thinks that this lonely quasar blazed back into existence for the same reason that it flickered out: a variation in the gas and dust flowing onto the black hole.

The next step will be to see if any of the newly discovered dozen brighten over the upcoming years. A few teams would also like to conduct a targeted survey (instead of the serendipitous archival search) to look for more. Although this would likely churn up more fruitful results, the archival search speaks to the fact that there could be interesting things hiding in old images. “I think that's pretty cool that there's all this untapped data out there that could host really awesome discoveries if only we knew what it is to look for,” LaMassa says.

How Renewable Energy Could Make Climate Treaties Moot

The world is counting on an international climate agreement in Paris next month to stop the rising fossil fuel and biofuel emissions that are warming the planet. Creating an international agreement is an admirable goal, but it is interesting that countries are not racing to zero emissions on their own. It is even more amazing that no country has performed a study on the benefits and costs of going to 100 percent clean, renewable energy.

Fortunately, scientists have done the analyses. They show that switching to an entirely renewable energy system would save money and lives while making international climate agreements unnecessary.

We recently developed road maps showing how each of the 50 states in the U.S. could abandon nuclear and fossil fuels and change their all-purpose energy infrastructures (that includes electricity, transportation, heating/cooling and industry) to ones powered 100 percent by wind, water and sunlight by 2050. The details of the plan vary from state to state. Overall, however, by 2050 it would be possible to meet 100 percent of power and fuel demands in the U.S. with a mix of approximately 30.9 percent onshore wind, 19.1 percent offshore wind, 30.7 percent utility-scale photovoltaics, 7.2 percent rooftop photovoltaics, 7.3 percent concentrated solar power with storage, 1.25 percent geothermal power, 3 percent hydroelectric power and less than 1 percent wave and tidal power. Installing this capacity would require less land than one might expect: By our calculations, approximately 0.42 percent of U.S. land would be devoted to the footprints of these generators, and 1.6 percent would serve as open space between wind turbines.

A 100-percent renewable energy system would still need to continuously meet the power demands of consumers—even when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. This is a solvable problem. Our analysis found that it is possible to stabilize a renewable power system with low-cost solutions including storing excess energy generated when the sun and wind are strong in ice, water, concentrated solar power with storage, pumped hydropower and hydrogen; and by using a smarter power grid to lessen periods of excess demand. In our simulations biomass, nuclear power, natural gas and batteries (with the exception of those in electric vehicles) were unnecessary.

The benefits of switching to this entirely renewable mix would be significant. The mean cost of energy in 2050, accounting for storage transmission, distribution, maintenance and array losses, would be 10.6 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity and 11.4 cents per kWh for all energy (2013 dollars)—comparable with energy costs today. Yet each state’s end-use power demand would drop by a mean of 39.3 percent by 2050. Nationwide, the conversion would produce a net increase of two million 40-year jobs, eliminate 48,000 premature deaths due to air pollution per year in 2050 and save $3.3 trillion per year in 2050 global climate costs. Each American would save $260 per year in energy costs and $1,500 per year in health costs.

Most recently, we developed similarly detailed road maps showing how 139 countries could switch to 100 percent renewables. These studies suggest that, in aggregate, converting entirely to renewables would create a net of over 22 million jobs while preventing as many as seven million premature air-pollution deaths each year. The conversion would use little land. It would stabilize energy prices and reduce international conflict over energy—after all, each country will be largely energy independent. And it would reduce the risk of terrorism by replacing big, centralized power plants that are tempting targets with many small ones dispersed nationwide. Finally, it would do exactly what world leaders aim to do when they meet next week in Paris: nearly eliminate any additional global warming.

Mark Z. Jacobson is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program, at Stanford University.  

Almost 1/6 Of Tardigrade DNA Is Foreign

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Sinclair Stammers

Tardigrades are arguably some of the most awesome animals in the world. These microscopic organisms, sometimes called water bears or moss piglets, take living life on the edge to the extreme, capable of withstanding the harshest environments on the planet, and even outer space. Full of surprises, it turns out that a lot of their DNA – almost one-sixth – is not actually tardigrade in origin.

Genome Analysis Reveals How Subarctic Horses Adapt To Frigid Environments

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Yakutian horse, archaeological excavation. Patrice Gérard-CNRS-Mission Archeologique Francaise en Siberie Orientale

Yakutia in the Siberian Far East is one of the coldest places on Earth. Temperatures can drop below −70°C (-94°F) in the wintertime. But with their hairy winter coats, squat bodies, stubby limbs, and various other adaptations, native Yakutian horses thrive there in the open air year-round. Now, researchers analyzing their genomes reveal that these horses represent one of the fastest cases of adaptation to extreme temperatures. The findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. 

New Images Reveal An Entire Day On Pluto

Space





Photo credit:

Both sides of Pluto are seen here. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Those fantastic high-resolution images of Pluto you’ve been seeing lately have mostly just shown one side of the dwarf planet, owing to the brief flyby made by the New Horizons probe. However, in the run up to the flyby, New Horizons snapped images of the entirety of Pluto – and its largest moon Charon.

Particle Accelerators Could Soon Fit In A Shoebox

Physics





Photo credit:

Three “accelerators-on-a-chip” made of silicon are mounted on a clear base, in comparison to a U.S. penny. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

As the challenges of particle physics have become more and more complex, we've had to plan and build larger and larger machines to explore the tiny subatomic world. But now, an international group of physicists has developed a technology to miniaturize particle accelerators, which could revolutionize physics and the life sciences.

On the Maintenance of Civilization

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with author Douglas Murray about Islamism, liberalism, civil society, and the migrant crisis in Europe.