ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 677
September 30, 2015
Stem Cells May Hold The Key To Fixing A Mutated Gene That Causes Blindness
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Researchers at the University of Cape Town trying to understand the mutation in the gene that causes night blindness, loss of peripheral vision and eventual blindness. Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
Stem cell research is being used in South Africa to develop “disease in the dish” models that fix a gene mutation that results in night blindness, tunnel vision and eventually blindness.
If the research pans out, the mutations can be fixed in a process called gene editing, which takes place in stem cells derived from the patient’s skin. These stem cells are turned into the tissue compromised in disease, which in this case is the retina of the eye.
Why It Hurts To See Others Suffer: Pain And Empathy Linked In The Brain
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Study suggests the ability to experience pain may be the key to having empathy for others in pain. www.shutterstock.com
The human brain processes the experience of empathy – the ability to understand another person’s pain – in a similar way to the experience of physical pain. This was the finding of a paper that specifically investigated the kind of empathy people feel when they see others in pain – but it could apply to other forms of empathy too.
Romanov Mystery: Can Digging Up 100-Year-Old Bodies Help Crack Unsolved Murders?
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Wikimedia Commons
Imagine the untold misery caused by telling the wrong family that their loved one is dead while another family is left in blissful ignorance. That’s why accurately identifying bodies is of paramount importance.
Many Bats Hate Long Commutes – Here’s How To Help Them
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‘I don’t do public transport.’ Gucio_55
Many bat species suffered severe population declines in the UK and elsewhere during the 20th century mainly due to their habitats being fragmented, damaged and destroyed, particularly in woodland areas. Though many species have stabilised or even increased slightly in the past couple of decades, numbers are still much lower than they were in the early 1900s.
The Martian Review: Science Fiction That Respects Science Fact
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He’s going to have to ‘science the shit out of this’. 20th Century Fox
Picture yourself as an explorer in a distant and dangerous place. Something goes wrong, and you and your team have to abandon the venture and head straight for home. But you get left behind, the rest of the team thinking you are dead, and you have no way to contact them.
September 29, 2015
MacArthur Genius Grant Winner Makes Waste a Resource
“Wastewater itself traditionally has been viewed as something negative, it has been viewed as something that we need to get rid of.”
Environmental engineer Kartik Chandran of Columbia University. On September 29th he was named one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows, often referred to as recipients of the “genius grants.” Where most people see sewage, Chandran sees a resource.
“To me these are not just waste streams, there are enriched streams. These are enriched in nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, these are enriched in carbon, organic carbon. These are also enriched in energy. And so if you now start to think about these as enriched streams, these now contain resources that we could extract and recover and use.
“Using alternate biological processes we can convert the carbon present in these waste streams to methane, and methane can be directly used for energy. We can extract the methane and we can use it for cogeneration of electricity and power. There are many utilities in the nation that actually do this. This changes the game when we are talking about developing or underdeveloped economies where people just don’t have access to sanitation. Because they don’t have access to energy to drive these energy-intensive sanitation processes or wastewater treatment processes. So what we are now doing is, considering, when we start talking about waste streams as energy sources, we are basically driving the treatment of these waste streams from the energy which is produced from within these streams.
“One example of our field work is in Ghana, where we’ve been working with Engineers Without Borders, the student chapter at Columbia University, to design and implement novel toilets that can separate out the urine stream and the fecal sludge stream from human waste. And the end application for this project has been the re-use and recovery of nutrients from the urine stream for agriculture in villages in Ghana. Another example of our field work in Ghana is the conversion of fecal sludge to biodiesel to drive the conversion of fecal sludge to more high-value endpoints.”
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)
Chandran audio via MacArthur Foundation
Secret Chambers Found In Tutankhamun’s Tomb
Photo credit:
Jaroslav Moravcik/Shutterstock
The story of ancient Egypt’s iconic Queen Nefertiti is a source of ongoing intrigue and speculation. Renowned for her beauty, she was the chief wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, formerly Amenhotep IV, during the 14th century B.C.E. Though her husband’s decision to part with traditional religion and establish the Aten, a cult of the Sun disc, was extremely controversial, she supported him.
Teeny Tiny Snail Could Fit In A Needle’s Eye 10 Times
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New snail species, Angustopila dominikae, the only known specimen measuring the astounding 0.86 mm in shell height. Barna Páll-Gergely
Researchers examining soil from China have discovered the empty, light gray shells of seven new species of land snails. One of them is so miniscule, 10 of them could fit into the eye of a large sewing needle at the same time. The new microsnails are described in ZooKeys this week.
VW Scandal Causes Small but Irreversible Environmental Damage
Volkswagen’s ruse to circumvent U.S. auto emissions standards has left many wondering about the precise environmental impact of its cars, which emitted more pollutants than regulations allow. Although the extra pollution is impossible to quantify so soon, experts agree that although the amount is globally insignificant, it might add to Europe’s regional health concerns.
On September 18 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered that four Volkswagen vehicles from model years 2009 to 2015 had been rigged with illegal software. They used a sophisticated algorithm that would make the cars run cleanly during emissions tests but then stop so the cars would get better fuel economy and driving ability. As such, the unrestricted vehicles released higher-than-acceptable emissions in everyday driving situations. The German automaker quickly recalled 482,000 VW and Audi brand cars in the U.S. alone, and later admitted that the software might have been fitted to 11 million vehicles worldwide.
EPA now suspects that these cars emitted 10 to 40 times more nitrogen oxide—a pollutant that can harm human health—than standards allow. Many news organizations were quick to jump on this number. The Guardian ran its own analysis, claiming that the scandal may have caused nearly one million extra metric tons of pollution yearly. But experts remain skeptical.
John Heywood, a mechanical engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who focuses on internal combustion engines and air pollution is hesitant to agree with such high numbers. He has identified a key change in how the engine operates (by delaying the start of combustion) that would improve the snappiness of the driving, but it would only increase nitrogen oxide emissions by three to five times.
Travis Bradford, director of Energy and Environment Concentration at Columbia University, agrees. He argues that a number as high as 40 likely represents a spike while the car is accelerating. It cannot be anywhere near the average. “Fuels these days are not that dirty and emissions control systems are not that clean,” Bradford says. “So the idea that it would on average be 40 times the amount of emissions is pretty incredulous.”
Still, experts agree that nitrogen oxide (pdf) is a nasty pollutant. Once released into the air it quickly converts into nitrogen dioxide—a reddish-brown gas with a pungent odor—and then absorbs sunlight to transform into the yellow-brown haze that blankets cities. It is this smog that can exacerbate dozens of health problems, including asthma, bronchitis and emphysema. Alternatively, it can be washed into the ground in the form of acid rain, which can kill plants and animals. Once the damage is done “there is no antidote,” says Yiannis Levendis, an engineering professor at Northeastern University who focuses on diesel emissions.
The news is not tragic for those living in the U.S., where the portion of diesel-powered cars is small (roughly 1 percent). But in Europe that number is much higher, clocking in at roughly 50 percent. In some European cities there is already so much nitrogen dioxide that it is “toxic in its own right,” Heywood says. But that was prior to the scandal. VW just upped the dosage.
All experts agree that on a local scale, the extra pollution can only make matters worse; on a global scale, however, it is insignificant. According to the EPA, small cars released roughly one billion metric tons (pdf) of greenhouse gases in 2011 alone. The Guardian’s estimate, which experts agree is likely too high, is that the rigged cars account for only 0.1 percent of that. “Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, this is a drop in the bucket in terms of our aggregate pollution,” Bradford says. He says “unfortunately” mostly because he thinks it’s a shame that pollution is already so high, and partially because he is flabbergasted that a company of VW’s stature could stoop so low. “They literally stole public property,” he says. “They took air that could have been cleaner and available to all the people in the U.S. because they wanted to sell cars.”
Heywood will keep crunching the numbers. But he’s waiting for Volkswagen and EPA to release more concrete information. “We've got to let the dust settle on the numbers,” he says, before we jump to any radical conclusions.
Drugs, Drama & Addiction
Addiction is a serious problem and I recently had a very scary encounter with someone dealing with drug addiction (meth). It’s amazing to me how you can go so far out of your way to help a person that continues to take advantage of you and lie. People suck. Methamphetamine is a scary drug that I’ve personally never tried, but have recently experienced some drama with a meth addict. If you’ve ever dealt with a meth addiction or known someone addicted to meth or any other drug leave a comment and let me know. How would you have dealt with this situation?
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