ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 660
October 20, 2015
Do Babies Feel Tickles In A Different Way To Adults?
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Ticklish? Babyfoot via Michael Kempf/www.shutterstock.com
For a newborn baby emerging from the cosy womb, the outside world is much bigger, much colder and quite a different kind of place. At birth, the way newborn babies sense their environment changes dramatically. How do they make sense of all the new sounds, sights, smells and sensations?
First-Borns May Have Higher IQ But Sibling Bonds Are What Really Shape Our Future
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Kardashian kin: study would suggest Kourtney is the smartest. Reuters
First-borns are responsible, middle children are people pleasers and the youngest are attention seekers, we often hear. But scientists have failed to find any real evidence for a link between birth order and personality.
Were Wolves Dependent On Humans Long Before They Became Man’s Best Friend?
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Keep playing dumb and they might even let us sleep by the fire. Ronnie Macdonald, CC BY
Domestic dogs and cats might be a phenomenal evolutionary success story but we still know remarkably little about how, why and when these animals first became part of our human world.
Archaeologists have been on the trail of these human-animal relationships for decades, searching for clues in the bones excavated from sites around the world. Geneticists are now helping to address these questions, and adding to a picture that is both changing rapidly and becoming more confusing.
October 19, 2015
UN Scientist Chides U.K. Government For Renewable Energy Failure
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Ference Cegledi/Shutterstock
As has been widely reported, Sweden aims to become the world’s first fossil fuel-free nation before the end of the century, and several other nations are not far behind. However, the world isn’t necessarily following suit, and the United Nations’ chief environmental scientist has singled out one of them for particular criticism: the United Kingdom.
Massive Methane Reservoirs Being Unleashed By Global Warming
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Rich Carey/Shutterstock
Climate change is a decidedly complex process, with many processes involved directly affecting others, often enhancing each other. For example, the warming of the oceans drives the release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from its frozen, submerged prisons. And now, by following bubbles of released gas, new research from the University of Washington has managed to directly track this phenomenon.
The EPA Might Have Been Underestimating The Amount Of Methane Emitted By The U.S.
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Methane naturally seeps out of natural gas wells, especially those for shale gas. rCarner/Shutterstock
Natural gas is often touted as what is called a “bridge fuel,” an energy source with a substantially lower carbon footprint than coal or oil that could help wean us off these higher-polluting energy sources, while still bringing the benefits and trappings of fossil fuels. It might be true that natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels, but this ignores the fact that in the U.S. over 40% of natural gas is now derived from fracking, and that its extraction releases the more potent greenhouse gas methane.
We Created A New Material From Orange Peel That Can Clean Up Mercury Pollution
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When researchers combined two industrial waste products they created a material that could clean up mercury. Angellodeco/Shutterstock
Mercury pollution is one of the most insidious problems in our environment. Today my colleagues and I at Flinders University have unveiled a new material than can scrub mercury from the environment, as a result of research to be published this week. The material – sulphur-limonene polysulphide – binds to mercury and changes colour, helping us see how effective it is.
Little Farmer, Big Pharma: The Quest To Modify Plants To ‘Grow’ Medicines
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The goal is to grow and activate drugs by a process as simple as making tea. wiredforlego/Flickr, CC BY-NC
The cost of pharmaceuticals is rising. For an economically developed country such as Australia, these increasing costs place a growing demand on an already spiralling health expenditure. For a developing country, these costs make many drugs simply unattainable.
How Neurosurgeons Can Now Look At Your Brain Through Your Eyes
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Hydrocephalus is the build-up of fluid pressure which compresses the brain and causes the skull to enlarge. Reuters/Andrew Biraj
For many years scientists have been trying to find a way to measure the pressure in a patient’s brain without having to drill a hole in the person’s skull. Although this remains the most reliable way to measure pressure in the brain, it is invasive, expensive and comes with the risk of infection and bleeding.
Assessing pressure inside the brain is an important part of diagnosing certain neurosurgical conditions. These include brain tumours, cranial deformities, traumatic brain injury and infection.
Apple Thins iPhone Cloud Connections
Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 kicked off a revolution in personal information sharing. With each new iPhone improvement it’s easier to tell the world where we are, what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with.
A bit ironic then that Apple is leading the charge to reclaim privacy. Newer versions of iOS emphasize encryption, to the point where Apple says it won’t be able to unlock its customers’ phones even if law enforcement orders them to do so.
Some of the latest Android devices likewise offer encryption. But Apple recently raised the stakes—the company just bought two startups whose artificial intelligence technology should give iPhones greater independence from Apple’s back-end server farms, aka “the cloud.” And like on Battlestar Gallactica, if you avoid the network, it’s a lot harder for you to get hacked.
The first startup is called Perceptio. Its deep-learning software essentially models the human brain’s ability to match patterns. iPhones could then crunch ever-larger amounts of data themselves without calling the cloud for help.
The second startup, called VocalIQ, makes software that should help Siri better remember its conversations with iPhone users. Instead of having to go back to the Web with every request, the voice-controlled digital assistant would sometimes be able to dip into its own memory for answers.
That ability might also help Siri sound more natural and put an end to its awkward, prepackaged responses. [Audio of Siri telling a joke.]
—Larry Greenemeier
The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
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