ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 758
April 18, 2015
How Much Is The Human Body Worth?
Photo credit:
Buddy Loans Infographic
No price can be put on a life. But whether we like it or not, once a person has died, there is value to the human body as a commodity. And different parts of our body are worth different amounts—while corneas are small, they fetch a large price (£15,000, or about $22,450), whereas our skeleton garners significantly less (£5,000, about $7,483). The price also depends on whether the body part is sold for specimen use, transplants, or on the black market.
April 17, 2015
Hormones and Puppy Love
This week, science explains the chemical love-connection we share with our dogs, and how some of the most isolated populations of people in the world are different on the inside.
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Sources:
http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1261022
http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aab1200
http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/sciadvances/pdf.php?date=2015-04&file=clemente150417.pdf
http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2015-04/cp-wlm040915.php
http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/abstract/S2211-1247(15)00340-X
http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/cell/pages/pdf/cellreports/CELREP1688_proof.pdf
http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2015-04/nlmc-umd041315.php
Mummified Bodies In Hungarian Crypt Tell Tale of Tuberculosis
Photo credit:
Gemma L. Kay et. al / Nature Communications. Mummified remains of Terézia Hausmann
Scientists have traced multiple tuberculosis strains back to a single late Roman ancestor. The findings support current scientific estimates that indicate tuberculosis (TB) emerged only 6,000 years ago. Previous theories suggested that the ancestral microbe was much more ancient, perhaps 70,000 years old. The paper has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Gibbon Language Decoded
Photo credit:
tragong via shutterstock. It turns out lar gibbons have a complex, context-specific language in their whispers, which until now has been overlooked due to their loud calls.
If you think learning another human language lacks ambition, now is your chance to learn gibbon. A new paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology reveals the basics of gibbon language. Better still, this is an open access journal so all the information you need is ready and waiting.
Evidence Of Cannibalism In Ancient Humans
Photo credit:
The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. As the Ice Age was ending, humans fashioned skulls into drinking vessels and left teeth marks on bones.
Ancient humans living in southern England towards the end of the last ice age made human skulls into drinking vessels. We don't know, however, if this was a way of revering lost loved ones, or glorifying in the defeat of enemies.
Scientists Enhance Creativity Through Brain Stimulation
Photo credit:
Halfpoint/ Shutterstock
Scientists have recently managed to achieve some pretty remarkable things by stimulating different bits of our brains.
Everybody Else Is Doing It…
Were you lying all the time? Was it just a game to you?
But I’m in so deep. You know I’m such a fool for you.
You got me wrapped around your finger, ah, ha, ha.
Do you have to let it linger? Do you have to, do you have to,
Do you have to let it linger?
—The Cranberries, “Linger” from the album Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?
Listening to a radio discussion earlier this week, I heard an archetypical example of a common dodge in discussions of climate change denial, one I find particularly frustrating because everything about it is factually and logically flawed. This “everybody does it” approach is common among climate change deniers and creationists, but too often people simply accept the premise, thus missing a chance at a deeper and more thoughtful discussion of science and how people confront contentious topics.
A caller on KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny asked Bill Whalen, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution: “What do you think it says about the Republican field that so many candidates lack a basic understanding of reality and of science in terms of global warming?”
Whalen started by simply trying to change the subject, saying: “I would disagree with your caricature of the Republicans. They’re just skeptical of the extent to which climate change is talked about, plain and simple. By the way, a caller a couple minutes ago asked…” and then switched to a different topic.
Host Michael Krasny wouldn’t let the matter drop so quickly:
Krasny: “Bill Whalen, all due respect, there are a number of Republicans who have essentially dissed or dismissed climate change and particularly global warming.”
Whalen: “Well, Michael, name those who flat out dismissed it.”
Krasny: “Well, it depends, I suppose, how you define ‘dismissal.’”
Whalen: “This is the problem, not all of them dismiss it.”
Krasny: “There’s a lot of doubt about the science that’s come from them.”
Whalen: “Well there you go, they’re doubtful, that’s a difference from dismissing it.”
Krasny: “But it’s more on the GOP side is it not, than on the Democratic side?”
Whalen: “Yeah, that’s their take, just as we can look on the Democratic side and, for example vaccines, look at the vaccine debate we’ve had in California. Is that a conservative problem or a liberal problem? That’s a liberal problem in California.”
Sadly, no!
Here’s the thing. Liberals are not more anti-vaccine than conservatives.
I can hear you all insisting, “nononono, hippie liberals in Marin County and the wine country and San Francisco are opting their kids out of life-saving vaccinations, and that’s why measles and pertussis are killing kids! Don’t let liberals off the hook!”
But let’s put that to the test. Here’s a map of California counties colored based on a standard metric of political partisanship (Cook’s PVI looks at how much greater the Democratic voteshare was than the national average in the last two presidential elections). I mapped personal belief exemptions among kindergartners, too. PBEs are the mechanism by which Californians use religious or pseudoscientific reasons to opt their kids out of having these life-saving immunizations.
I don’t see much correlation there, and indeed, running a correlation analysis finds that counties with greater Republican voteshare had a higher rate of vaccine refusal. That’s true even if we weight the analysis by the number of students enrolled. Famously conservative Orange County has a higher rate of personal belief exemptions than the famously liberal City and County of San Francisco. It’s just not the case that vaccination is “a liberal problem in California.”
We can dig deeper, doing a regression analysis to factor out other demographic factors and focus only on the role of partisanship. I pulled in some other demographic variables from the US Census, including fraction of the population with a college degree (which is a proxy for socioeconomic class as well as a measure of education), fraction of the population that was born abroad and is not a naturalized citizen (on the assumption that undocumented immigrants may be seeking to avoid generating a paper trail, even by visiting free vaccine clinics), fraction of the population that does not speak English at home, and the fraction of the population without insurance (there are programs to give free vaccines to everyone, but not all people know about them). (Nerds: I did this as a quasibinomial regression to allow for overdispersion, weighting by student population size to account for the large difference in student populations.)
In that regression, the percentage of uninsured, the percentage who don’t speak English at home, and the percentage with a college degree were all statistically significant, while the percentage born abroad and not naturalized was not. Neither was partisanship (and what effect there was continued to show more exemptions in more conservative counties). Again, vaccine denial is not “a liberal problem in California.”
That result doesn’t surprise me, because for years I’ve been pointing out that polling data make it clear that anti-vaccination attitudes are not a partisan phenomenon. Indeed, as that link shows, polls show that people who are anti-vaccine are more likely to deny climate science and evolution, too.
So it just isn’t so that everybody else does it. But in any case, nobody’s partisan affiliation ought to exempt them from criticism when they engage in science denial.
Awesome Science Parody Of Taylor Swift Song
Photo credit:
AsapSCIENCE
Even the guys over at AsapSCIENCE have slow news days sometimes, so they decided to put their spare time to good use by creating an acapella style education parody of (believe it or not) Taylor Swift.
AsapSCIENCE wants to "use this to remind the world how science NEVER goes out of STYLE!"
Take a look at the unsurprisingly catchy tune here
First Ever Color Photo Of Pluto And Charon Sent Back By New Horizons Spacecraft
Photo credit:
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. Pluto and Charon as seen from New Horizons with a color imager on April 9, 2015.
It doesn't look like much, but the image above is the first color photograph taken of Pluto and Charon by the New Horizons spacecraft as it heads for its flyby of the icy worlds in July.
The Enduring Mystery of the Missing Oil Spilt in the Gulf of Mexico
Workers uncovered a tar mat weighing some 18,000 kilograms just offshore of a natural barrier island in Louisiana in the summer of 2013. Although the tar mat turned out to bear more sand than oil, it represented another small fraction of the hydrocarbons that went missing after BP's blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. But the sum of all the dispersed oil located thus far, from tar mats to oily marine snow, hardly accounts for at least four million barrels of oil spewed into the cold, dark bottom of the Gulf of Mexico from the deep-sea well named Macondo five years ago.
Like any good mystery, this one may never be solved. Of that four million barrels spewed on April 20, 2010, more than a million remain missing, according to the best estimates of the U.S. government.
Mystery plagued BP's blowout from the beginning. Initial oil company estimates claimed just 1,000 barrels per day flowed into the deep—an underestimate off by at least 50 times, as measured by a device that assessed the actual pressure of the escaping oil attached later in the spill. "I felt like a general on the battlefield. There was a fog of research out there," says biologist Christopher D'Elia of Louisiana State University and dean of the School of the Coast and Environment. "We didn't know where the oil was, what it was like, where it was going, how it was being dispersed."
This is more than an academic exercise because the total amount of oil spilled will determine the total value of fines faced by the multinational oil company. The federal government's initial estimate concluded that 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled from the Macondo well over 87 days, of which 17 percent was captured at the wellhead, 25 percent evaporated or dissolved and 32 percent was burned, skimmed or dispersed chemically or naturally. That left more than one million barrels out there as tar mats, tar balls, plumes or buried in sand and sediments. Although a federal judge ruled earlier this year that the well spewed just four million barrels in total, he also concluded that more than three million entered Gulf waters, much of which remains out there. "They're still battling in court what this enormous settlement is going to be," D'Elia adds. "But it's always likely the truth is somewhere in the middle."
Given the uncertain, debatable measurement of the spill itself, perhaps the total amount could be calculated by all the Macondo well oil found in the Gulf or surrounding coastlines since the spill began. Scientists documented several plumes of oil drifting in the deep, including one that stretched 35 kilometers long, two kilometers wide and 200-meters thick in the months during which oil spewed into the Gulf. Much of that oil appears to have sunk to the seafloor, settling in a layer of "oil fluff," says biogeochemist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia. That oily marine snow covers at least 3,200 square kilometers of the Gulf floor, according to research by biogeochemist David Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara. This mix of oil, mucus, shells, microscopic corpses and other detritus forms the top layer of the deep-sea sediment, as revealed by hundreds of cores pulled up from the bottom. But the oil appears in some patches and not in others just a few meters away, which Valentine, for one, attributes to the oil-forming droplets that hit some areas but not others: "We think it's some kind of misting of oily particles that are raining down on the seafloor."
Then there's the oil that made it to the swampy shoreline of the Gulf coast despite the best efforts of booms, dispersants and even ill-advised, hastily constructed barrier islands that quickly washed away. That oil can still be found along more than 1,600 kilometers of coast, especially Barataria Bay in Louisiana, among other regions, such as the tar mat off the island of Grand Terre or the tar balls that continually wash ashore. "Whether the tar balls are Macondo or not is always the question," D'Elia points out, given the many natural sources and other, smaller spills in the Gulf region.
The oil that disappeared into the sediment, whether in the marsh or the bottom of the sea, will remain there forever, however. Microbes in these sediments seem incapable of eating all of this oil—thus it will become a permanent part of the geologic record, especially the biggest hydrocarbon molecules. "If you look the cores, there's still that layer of sedimented oil on the surface but it doesn't reek of hydrocarbons anymore," Joye says. "The volatiles are gone."
And although microbes, sunlight and other natural processes eliminated much of the oil, whether it be in the deep, at the surface or on the shore, much of it remains—somewhere. "People are underestimating how much evaporates," argues marine chemist Chris Reddy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. As for the rest, he thinks it's still at the bottom, noting that the oil traveled only tens of kilometers at depth, compared with hundreds of kilometers when oil made it to the surface. In fact, the biggest concentrations of unexpected oil have been found within 40 kilometers of the Macondo wellhead, which also suggests that much of the missing oil may have sunk to the bottom of the sea. "It's not exactly missing," Valentine adds." At the same time we don't know exactly where it is either."
The Gulf of Mexico is a fairly big sea, after all—and even 210 million gallons of oil is a drop in the bucket of 643 quadrillion gallons of water. "You can easily account for the missing oil on the [continental] shelf, deep water, marshes and beaches," Joye says. That may be so, but definitive proof of that is lacking—and no smoking gun may ever be found. As Joye adds, in a sentiment echoed by her peers and even the Congressional Research Service: "I don't think we're ever going to be able to close this oil budget." The mystery of where much of the oil that spewed from BP's Macondo well ended up may never be solved.
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