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October 2, 2015
Bronze Age Britons Practised Mummification
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Bog bodies are found right across northern Europe, from Ireland to Denmark. Mark Healy/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0
The Egyptians are well known for their funeral practise of mummifying the dead, normally achieved by removing the organs and then wrapping the body tightly in bandages, a process that preserves the corpses for thousands of years. But it now seems that at around the same time, people far away in northwestern Europe were doing a similar thing.
Spectacular New Images Of Pluto’s Moon Charon
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Charon is revealing itself to be far more fascinating than we imagined. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.
NASA has revealed stunning new images of Pluto’s moon Charon, taken by New Horizons, showing vast and varied surface features that hint at a violent history. Originally expected to be a grey, monotonous world, Charon has been shown to be covered in mountains, canyons, craters, and more.
Lawrence Krauss explains why science trumps religion in illegal broadcast to Iranians
By Eric W. Dolan
US physicist Lawrence Krauss is spreading the gospel of science to Iranians via an outlawed satellite TV network.
Krauss, a professor at Arizona State University and outspoken atheist, recently appeared on the Bread and Roses show to discuss the beauty of science, and the differences between science and religion.
The Farsi/English program is broadcast on New Channel, an outlawed 24-hour TV station that reaches Iranians via satellite TV and the Internet. Bread and Roses explains on its crowdfunding page that while their show is officially banned in Iran, many Iranians “can still access it because 40-60 percent of the population have satellite dishes.”
During an interview on Bread and Roses, the physicist pointed out a fundamental difference between science and faith.
“Not knowing is fine,” Krauss said. “In fact, it is a central part of science, so it makes it different than religion, because you don’t make these assertions about things you can’t test, nor do you claim to have absolute knowledge. We learn about the universe, and it keeps surprising us. But the Big Bang really happened… we can measure so many aspects of our universe and it was once smaller and smaller and smaller. We can go back to [the very beginning], but we can get very close.”
Krauss also said humans are lucky they can understand the universe at all.
Read the full article by clicking the name of the source below.
Your brain is like a wad of paper
COMPARATIVE MAMMALIAN BRAIN COLLECTION
By Adrian Cho
Whether they’re from humans, whales, or elephants, the brains of many mammals are covered with elaborate folds. Now, a new study shows that the degree of this folding follows a simple mathematical relationship—called a scaling law—that also explains the crumpling of paper. That observation suggests that the myriad forms of mammalian brains arise not from subtle developmental processes that vary from species to species, but rather from the same simple physical process.
In biology, it rare to find a mathematical relationship that so tightly fits all the data, say Georg Striedter, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine. “They’ve captured something,” he says. Still, Striedter argues that the scaling law describes a pattern among fully developed brains and doesn’t explain how the folding in a developing brain happens.
The folding in the mammalian brain serves to increase the total area of the cortex, the outer layer of gray matter where the neurons reside. Not all mammals have folded cortices. For example, mice and rats have smooth-surfaced brains and are “lissencephalic.” In contrast, primates, whales, dogs, and cats have folded brains and are “gyrencephalic.”
Read the full article by clicking the name of the source below.
The Too Sweet Smell of Charity
My NCSE colleagues insist that I disclose that I drink Diet Coke on a daily basis.
When is a charitable donation not a charitable donation? Well, I suppose all money comes with strings. But at what point do such strings—or maybe even the appearance of strings— nudge a donation out of the category of charity and into that of undue influence?
In an interesting article in The New York Times science section this week, “Coke Spends Lavishly to Sugar-Coat Science,” Anahad O’Connor explored the sticky implications of the $120 million that the Coca-Cola company recently reported donating to a series of extremely reputable non-profit organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Cardiology, the American Cancer Society, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Both the soda maker and the recipients firmly declare that the donations do not influence the policies or recommendations of the organizations that get the money. But no one can miss the disconnect between the rapidly accumulating scientific evidence that sugary sodas contribute significantly to the nation’s rising obesity rates and donations from the pre-eminent marketer of those sodas to organizations that people trust to give them objective information about health and diet.
Here’s the thing: Coca-Cola is throwing money off a parade float that has been rolled out before—most notably by the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. It’s a classic, and extremely effective tactic. At its most benign, the strategy of giving lots of money to organizations that are ostensibly on the opposite side of your cause (polluters to environmental groups, tobacco companies to cancer researchers) is simple PR. “What do you mean we hate the environment? Look at all the money we give to [pick a cause]: Getting kids outside! Rescuing stranded whales! Planting trees! We love the environment!” In Coca-Cola’s case, O’Connor reports that community organizations—specifically the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, the NAACP, and the Hispanic Federation—also received generous donations. Would a company that didn’t care about children’s health do that? You could look at these donations almost as a sort of tax on making or selling something that has an unsavory reputation of one kind or another, in Coke’s case, a tax on the fact that they make soda, and soda is bad for kids.
Sometimes, though, the donations serve a more subtle purpose: by giving enough money to have the company’s name associated with a reputable, evidence-based organization, the corporations lend weight to their own most-benign-possible-but-seriously-misleading, interpretation of scientific evidence.
In the case of Coca-Cola, there is a mountain of evidence that Americans’ colossal consumption of sugar contributes to obesity, diabetes, and a host of other health problems. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, sugar and sweeteners account for 36–40% of the average American’s carbohydrate consumption. But the official stance of Coca-Cola and other marketers is that sugary drinks are not solely responsible for the rise in sugar consumption, that the sugar in these drinks is no different than the sugar in other sweetened products, and that if people consume sugary beverages in moderation, they can be part of a healthy diet.
These statements, while not technically false, are classic examples of the “Hey, look over there!” tactic. If you can put your unhealthful product into a long list of other things that have the same effect, (for example, viruses.inherited mutations, pollution, and…okay, yes, tobacco cause cancer) your product/action just doesn't seem so bad. Banning smoking, this list proves, isn’t going to eliminate cancer, so people who want to take away your cigarettes are just extremists. Along the same lines, Coca-Cola’s moderation argument breaks down into: "Birthday cake! Ice Cream! They have sugar! Are you health nuts going to ban them too?"
Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that soda, energy drinks, and other sugary beverages account for a big chunk of our sugar consumption—considerably more than cake and ice cream.
Here are some sobering numbers from the Harvard School of Public Health’s Nutrition Source:
From 1989 to 2008, the percentage of children consuming sugary drinks increased from 79% to 91%. These beverages account for about 10%, on average, of kids’ caloric intake.
Sugary drinks are the single largest source of calories in teens’ diets (apparently narrowly beating out pizza).
25% of American adults get at least 200 calories from sugary drinks each day.
Sugar-rich sodas have been fingered as particularly dangerous by the health research community, not because their sugar is any different or worse than the sugar in other foods, but because they are so widely and frequently consumed. People don’t eat birthday cake or ice cream every single day, or at every meal. But lots of people, and especially far too many children, drink soda at every meal. It’s not a lost cause, though, as there are many policy options available, and states and municipalities have put several of them before their voters. Raising taxes on sugary drinks, banning the sale of extravagantly large servings, or keeping soda machines out of schools are just a few of the public policy tools that have been proposed to discourage (not forbid, not ban, just reduce) consumption.
So if Coca-Cola maintains that their products are not a problem if consumed in moderation, and the company cares about the health of its customers, such policies should not be a problem right? Well, no. These and many similar policies, as O’Connor notes, have been opposed by the trade associations that represent the interests of the beverage industry in state capitals and Washington D.C.
It is this kind of talking out of both sides of the corporate mouth that could lead someone to think that the charitable giving of companies like Coca-Cola is actually designed to sow doubt about scientific evidence, distract from the clear implications of that evidence, and provide ammunition against policies designed to reduce the health impacts of their products. And that’s why, when the details of Coca-Cola’s donations were made public recently, many of the beneficiaries announced that they intend to sever their ties to Coca-Cola and will not be accepting funding in the future.
Hey, I get it. I direct a non-profit, after all. Raising money is hard, and places like the American Academy of Pediatrics can do a lot of good with the money they get from Coca-Cola. But if the hidden cost is helping Coca-Cola play fast and loose with scientific evidence, it’s a devil’s bargain.
October 1, 2015
MacArthur Genius Grant Winner Probes the Pruning Brain
“They’re like the Pac-Man of our brain.”
Harvard neuroscientist Beth Stevens, talking about glia cells, which make up more than half the human brain. This week Stevens got a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, for her studies of glia.
“These cells are incredibly responsive to damage or injury. They can protect our brain by, for example, clearing bacteria or debris in the brain in the case of injury and disease…
“Until about 10 years ago, almost all of the research devoted to these cells was in these contexts. We discovered that there was another role for these cells in the normal healthy brain, in particular during development…
“So a synapse is the junction of communication between two neurons, it’s how neurons talk to each other…we’re actually born with an excess of synaptic connections…and through this normal developmental process called pruning, a large number of these extra synapses get permanently removed or eliminated while others get strengthened and maintained. These microglial cells were in fact engulfing or eating these extra synapses. So these cells are necessary to do this and now of course we’re trying to better understand how it is that they know which synapse to prune and which synapse to leave alone.
“A hallmark of many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, is the early loss of synaptic connections or synapses…And what’s most striking about this is, it’s thought that the synapse loss happens years before you see signs of cognitive impairment or pathology.
“That means it’s critical that we understand how these synapses are lost—what makes synapses vulnerable. And that’s a major question my lab is addressing. So recent work in the lab suggests that these normal pruning mechanisms that I’ve just described that are relevant to development get reactivated to drive or mediate this early synapse loss in the adult brain in these diseases. This is very exciting because it allows us to think about the potential that intervening with this pruning pathway could lead to new insight into therapeutics.”
For the complete list of this year’s 24 MacArthur Fellows, including about 10 science and medicine people depending on how you define their activities, go to macfound.org, for MacArthur Foundation.
—Steve Mirsky
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
Stevens audio via MacArthur Foundation
“Scratching” Sounds A Woman Heard Were Caused By Spider Living In Her Ear
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FOX 32 News via Daily Mail Online / Twitter
For one woman, it all started with “scratching” noises that only she could hear. Then a sharp pain stabbed at her ear. Painkillers and anti-inflammatories worked to no avail – strange sensations continued to plague her. After a week of distress and confusion, she went to the doctors. The final diagnosis: Her ear was playing host to a spider. This was the frightening discovery of 25-year-old Li Meng.
Scientists Have Genetically Engineered Micropigs To Sell As Pets
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A summit in Shenzhen, China, showcases the genetically engineered Bama breed of micropigs. BGI
A Chinese institute known for its breakthrough in genomic sequencing is now using its pioneering gene-editing technique to create and sell micropigs as pets. A portly pig will now weigh the same as a medium-sized dog – a mere 15 kilograms (33 pounds) in weight. BGI, the genomics institute planning to sell these puny pigs, claims the money will be reinvested into research.
Ancient Virus Could Play A Role In Motor Neuron Disease
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Looking for viral genes in the brain. Courtesy of Nath lab, NINDS.
Way back in time, ancient viruses are believed to have infected the reproductive cells of our ancestors, leaving behind fossils of their genomes that we still see in our DNA today. In fact, as much as 8% of our DNA is made up of the remnants of these infections, known as endogenous retroviruses. Usually they lie dormant, but they can be awoken, reigniting the production of viral elements.
Unusually Large Numbers Of Fur Seals Stranding On Californian Coast
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The seals are mainly found on the island of Guadalupe, off the coast of Mexico. Alan Harper/Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0
In a curious echo of the mass stranding of Californian sea lions along the west coast of the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) has declared another “unusual mortality event,” except this time for the
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