ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 750

Yawns Are Contagious In Budgies

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

JENG_NIAMWHAN/shutterstock

Just thinking about yawning has made my jaw start to droop. Practically all vertebrates yawn, but so far only a handful have been shown to yawn contagiously, and all of them are mammals. Not anymore. For the first time, researchers have shown that budgies also “catch” yawns from other birds.

CHARLIE CHARLIE CHALLENGE GONE WRONG!!!

OMG YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS! Charlie Charlie can we play? Pencil game! Twitter trend ‘Charlie Charlie Challenge’ has teens trying to summon Mexican demon: http://pix11.com/2015/05/25/latest-twitter-trend-charlie-charlie-challenge-has-teens-trying-to-summon-demon/

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Thanks for watching my charlie charlie challenge gone wrong! So did you summon a mexican demon during your charlie charlie challenge pencil game? If you did a charlie charlie challenge let me know how it went in the comments! Mexican demons are everywhere now. Great. Thanks, Charlie.

Robot pets to rise in an overpopulated world

Credit: © Silkstock / Fotolia

By Science Daily

University of Melbourne animal welfare researcher Dr Jean-Loup Rault says the prospect of robopets and virtual pets is not as far-fetched as we may think.

His paper in the latest edition of Frontiers in Veterinary Science argues pets will soon become a luxury in an overpopulated world and the future may lie in chips and circuits that mimic the real thing.

“It might sound surreal for us to have robotic or virtual pets, but it could be totally normal for the next generation,” Dr Rault said.

“It’s not a question of centuries from now. If 10 billion human beings live on the planet in 2050 as predicted, it’s likely to occur sooner than we think. If you’d described Facebook to someone 20 years ago, they’d think you were crazy. But we are already seeing people form strong emotional bonds with robot dogs in Japan.

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Misconception Monday: Is “Greenhouse” Misleading?

Climate change education

“Greenhouse gases” and “the greenhouse effect” are terms used to describe some of the most basic concepts related to global warming. If students learn anything about climate change, they usually learn about these first. This is good in some ways, because these are the fundamental concepts in scientific explanations of how climate change works and why the earth is warming. But the specific metaphor here, comparing the Earth to a greenhouse with carbon dioxide and water vapor cast in the roles of panes of glass, has been criticized on the grounds that it may engender a misunderstanding of the science.

To evaluate the criticism, we need to start with a little background of what scientists mean when they use the term “greenhouse effect,” The image below (from Wikimedia Commons) nicely depicts the conventional model of the greenhouse effect. Solar radiation passes through the Earth’s atmosphere, hits the Earth, is converted to heat energy, and is radiated back to the atmosphere as infrared radiation. Some of that radiation is trapped by greenhouse gases and reradiated back down to the Earth, making the planet warm. Voilà.

Superficially, this seems very similar to a greenhouse: the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere keep it warm under them, just as the panes of glass in a greenhouse do. So what’s the problem?

Well, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapor are not panes of glass. The panes of glass in a greenhouse work by preventing convective cooling by reducing airflow. How do the greenhouse gases work?

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research offers a good explanation of this:

There are several different types of greenhouse gases. The major ones are carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, and nitrous oxide. These gas molecules all are made of three or more atoms. The atoms are held together loosely enough that they vibrate when they absorb heat. Eventually, the vibrating molecules release the radiation, which will likely be absorbed by another greenhouse gas molecule. This process keeps heat near the Earth’s surface.

Most of the gas in the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen – both of which are molecules made of two atoms. The atoms in these molecules are bound together tightly and unable to vibrate, so they cannot absorb heat and contribute to the greenhouse effect.

So a greenhouse for plants and the greenhouse effect for the Earth work in really very different ways. Using the same term for phenomena that are actually quite different could be confusing, especially for students who have labored to understand the differences among the forms of heat transfer.

Are we accidentally perpetuating misconceptions by using the “greenhouse” terminology? I posed this question to a number of colleagues in the climate education community. The feedback was interesting.

Some people defended the “greenhouse” terminology by arguing that it is an analogy, and analogies are meant to be suggestive, not exact. Some of them also appealed to the familiarity of the terminology: students are likely to have a good idea about what a greenhouse is like and how it works; wouldn’t it be foolish not to exploit that familiarity to explain how heat is trapped by greenhouse gases? These people agreed that the usefulness of the terminology outweighs the risk of the misconceptions it engenders.

On the other hand, other people argued that the terminology ought to be changed. One reason they cited was the importance of maintaining consistency across the sciences: if it is important in a physics classroom to distinguish among convection, radiation, and conduction as forms of heat transfer—which it is—then it should be important in a classroom where climate science is taught, too.

Another reason cited in favor of precision was the increasing importance of climate science. When the greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases were first identified as such, back in the nineteenth century, they were mainly under discussion by scientists who, presumably, were equipped to resist the misconception that the terminology might suggest. Now, in the early twenty-first century, it is crucial that climate science be accurately understood, not just by scientists but by the public in general and by students in particular.

What do you think? Do you think that “greenhouse gases” and “the greenhouse effect” are okay terms to keep using, even if they may perpetuate misconceptions? Or if you think other terms are needed, what would they be?

GMO Scientists Could Save the World From Hunger, If We Let Them

ROBERT PRATTA/REUTERS

By Tom Parrett

A Nebraska Cornhusker frets as he surveys his drought-stunted crop. A Nigerian yam farmer digs up shrunken tubers. A Costa Rican coffee baron lays off hundreds of workers because a fungus has spoiled his harvest. I planted cherry trees in upstate New York last spring. One summer morning, they were denuded by Japanese beetles.

Such disasters are increasingly common on a planet buffeted by climate change and worldwide commerce, where heat burns crops, soil has been ruined by over-farming and drought, and bugs ride across oceans to feast on defenseless plants. Agronomists have been working on these problems for years, but the rapid population growth of humans makes overcoming these challenges increasingly urgent. If we can’t feed the world, it will eventually feed on us.

The United Nations and experts say global food production will have to double by 2050, at which point the world population is expected to have grown from 7 billion today to well beyond 9 billion. That’s just 35 years away, and there will be no new arable land then. In fact, there probably will be less. For example, 73 million acres of arable land in the U.S. were lost between 2002 and 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA); more was certainly made fallow during the last several years of severe drought. Looking ahead, growing conditions will only get harsher.

The solution, though, appears to be on the way: In 2012, a new tool was invented that revolutionizes how scientists can examine—and manipulate—plant genetic processes. It’s called CRISPR-Cas9, and unlike its predecessors in the world of genetic modification, it is highly specific, allowing scientists to zero in on a single gene and turn it on or off, remove it or exchange it for a different gene. Early signs suggest this tool will be an F-16 jet fighter compared with the Stone Age spear of grafting, the traditional, painstaking means of breeding a new plant hybrid. Biologists and geneticists are confident it can help them build a second Green Revolution—if we’ll let them.

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Why Are Christian Numbers Dropping?

By David Niose

America continues to trend secular. According to a recently released Pew study, almost one in four Americans, 23 percent, now identify as religiously unaffiliated, up from just 16 percent in 2007. This continues a shift that began in the early 1990s, when the percentage of religiously unaffiliated was in single digits. The rise of these “Nones” comes mainly at the expense of Christianity, which saw a drop from about 78 percent to 70 percent in the last eight years.

In trying to explain the swing toward secularity, the most common hypothesis is one that links the trend to politics, particularly the high-visibility political engagement of the religious right. A New York Times article about the Pew survey, for example, cited “the politicization of religion by American conservatives” as a key reason for the decline in Christian affiliation. Similarly, in an NPR interview in 2013, Harvard professor Robert Putnam explained the rise of Nones as a political reflex: “These were the kids who were coming of age in the America of the culture wars, in the America in which religion publicly became associated with a particular brand of politics, and so I think the single most important reason for the rise of the unknowns is that combination of the younger people moving to the left on social issues and the most visible religious leaders moving to the right on that same issue.”

No matter what you think of this “political” explanation of the Nones, it’s interesting that it ignores the most obvious reason for abandoning a religion. That is, isn’t it quite possible that many are leaving Christianity simply because they don’t really believe it anymore?

In analyzing shifts in religious demographics, pundits and experts sometimes overlook the obvious: people usually identify with a religion because they accept its doctrines. To be sure, cultural factors also have great weight (people tend to believe and identify with the religion of their families, for example), but those who attribute the growth of religious disaffiliation to politics, without considering the basic notion of belief, are missing the elephant in the room.

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Is organic food worth the higher price? Many experts say no

By David Lazarus

Kristin DiMarco was heading into a Trader Joe’s in West Los Angeles the other day and knew for sure what she wouldn’t be buying: anything organic.

“I just feel like I’ve already built up an immunity to anything that might be in my food,” the 26-year-old told me.

Besides, she said, why would she want to pay a markup that can run double or triple the cost of conventional food?

“I don’t think there’s a big-enough difference in quality to justify those prices,” DiMarco said.

She’s not alone. The market research firm Mintel released a study last week showing that younger consumers — the fickle Gen X and millennial crowds — are decidedly cynical about the high prices charged for organic goods.

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Prime Suspect in Infant Deaths: Lack of Oxygen

Thousands of infants each year die in their cribs from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) for reasons that have remained largely a mystery. A study published May 25 provides strong evidence that oxygen deprivation plays a big role.

One reason the cause of SIDS has been so difficult to study is the sheer number of variables researchers have had to account for: whether the infant sleeps face down, breathes secondhand smoke or has an illness as well as whether the child has an unidentified underlying susceptibility.

To isolate the effects of oxygen concentration, researchers from the University of Colorado compared the rate of SIDS in infants living at high altitudes, where the air is thin, to those living closer to sea level. Infants at high altitudes, they found, were more than twice as likely to die from SIDS. It was “very clever of the authors,” says Michael Goodstein, a pediatrician and member of the 2010–2011 Task Force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome who was not involved in the study. “The authors did a good job controlling for other variables,” he adds.

Beyond the risk of living at high altitudes, the study suggests a common link among different risk factors about the causes of SIDS. For example, the authors note that sleeping on the stomach and exposure to tobacco smoke can also contribute to hypoxia—insufficient oxygen reaching the tissues. Similarly, past research has suggested that sleeping on soft surfaces may shift the chin down, partly obstructing the airway, which might cause an infant to breathe in less oxygen. It’s unclear how hypoxia might contribute to SIDS but it could have to do with a buildup of carbon dioxide in the tissues when a child does not wake up.

About 3,500 infants die each year from SIDS, accidental suffocation or strangulation and unknown causes. Although researchers do not fully understand what causes SIDS, the leading hypothesis describes it as a combination of environmental stressors occurring at a critical development period of an infant who has some underlying vulnerability, such as genetic condition or brain dysfunction. The risk of SIDS peaks between two and four months old, when babies undergo rapid development. Researchers have already established that stomach sleeping, soft sleeping surfaces, blankets and other soft items in the crib, bed sharing and cigarette smoke are environmental risk factors. Previous research has shown that infants at high altitudes may experience hypoxia. Thin air at high altitudes, the study suggests, is another risk factor.

This study in Pediatrics is the largest to look for a link between altitude and SIDS and the first since doctors began recommending that babies sleep on their backs in the mid-1990s. Death rates from accidental suffocation and unknown causes were similar across all altitudes in this study.

The researchers, led by cardiologist David Katz at the University of Colorado School Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, combed the infant birth and death registries of more than 390,000 babies from 2007 to 2012 and used mothers' addresses to determine altitude. Eight in 10 infants lived below 1,800 meters and 2 percent lived above 2,400 meters. After accounting for other factors, such as socioeconomic status, breast-feeding, birth weight and maternal smoking, infants living above 2,400 meters were 2.3 times more likely to die from SIDS than those below 1,800 meters. The absolute risk of SIDS, however, remains low at all altitudes: 79 deaths per 100,000 infants above 2,400 meters; 40 per 100,000 infants below 1,800 meters.

Parents at high altitudes should not panic, however, both Goodstein and Katz advise. "We hope this study will make families residing at altitude, and the physicians counseling them, increasingly vigilant about the known risk factors for SIDS in order to minimize risk," Katz says.

 

Atheist Experience #918: View calls with Matt Dillahunty and John Iacoletti

The Atheist Experience #918 for May 17, 2015, with Matt Dillahunty and John Iacoletti.

We welcome your comments on the open blog thread for this show.

► http://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/2015/05/17/open-thread-for-episode-918-matt-and-john/

WHAT IS THE ATHEIST EXPERIENCE?

The Atheist Experience is a weekly cable access television show in Austin, Texas geared at a non-atheist audience. The Atheist Experience is produced by the Atheist Community of Austin.

The Atheist Community of Austin is organized as a nonprofit educational corporation to develop and support the atheist community, to provide opportunities for socializing and friendship, to promote secular viewpoints, to encourage positive atheist culture, to defend the first amendment principle of state-church separation, to oppose discrimination against atheists and to work with other organizations in pursuit of common goals.

We define atheism as the lack of belief in gods. This definition also encompasses what most people call agnosticism.

VISIT THE ACA’S OFFICIAL WEB SITES

► http://www.atheist-community.org (The Atheist Community of Austin)

► http://www.atheist-experience.com (The Atheist Experience TV Show)

More shows and video clips can be found in the archive:

► http://www.atheist-experience.com/archive

DVDs of the Atheist Experience can be purchased via:

► http://www.atheist-community.org/products

NOTES

TheAtheistExperience is the official channel of The Atheist Experience. “The Atheist Experience” is a trademark of the ACA.

Copyright © 2015 Atheist Community of Austin. All rights reserved.

Islamic State burned a woman alive for not engaging in an ‘extreme’ sex act, U.N. official says

Image: Reuters

By Ishaan Tharoor

Amid all the Islamic State’s  atrocities — its massacres of civilians, its beheading of hostages, its pillaging of antiquities — the systematic violence the jihadists have carried out against countless enslaved women and girls never fails to shock. For months now, we’ve heard appalling testimony from women who escaped the Islamic State’s clutches, many of whom endured rape and other hideous acts of violence.

Zainab Bangura, the U.N.’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, recently conducted a tour of refugee camps in the shadow of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, war-ravaged countries where the Islamic State commands swaths of territory. She heard a host of horror stories from victims and their families and recounted them in an interview earlier this week withthe Middle East Eye, an independent regional news site.

“They are institutionalizing sexual violence,” Bangura said of the Islamic State. “The brutalization of women and girls is central to their ideology.”

Bangura detailed the processes by which “pretty virgins” captured by the jihadists were bought and sold at auctions. Here’s a chilling excerpt:

After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold.

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