ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 763

Man Has Night Vision Injected Into His Eyeballs

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

YuryZap/shutterstock.com

A group of biohackers say they’ve figured out a way to inject our eyeballs with night vision, or low-light vision anyway. The procedure has allowed one superhuman to temporarily see over 50 meters (164 feet) in the dark, Mic reports. 

Could a Shield of Hot Air Block Shockwaves?

Technology





Photo credit:

Method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc / U.S. Patent Office

Last week, an engineer with Boeing was issued a patent (US 8,981,261) for a “shockwave attenuation” system that seems to work like an invisible shield of super hot air to protect soldiers by dampening shockwaves from explosions.

The Truth About Biodegradable Plastic

This week, the truth about “biodegradable plastic,” and new insights into how global warming might eventually make winters colder.

Hosted by: Hank Green

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Sources:

http://www.livescience.com/32233-how-environmentally-friendly-are-plastics.html

http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/es504258u

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/acs-mpl031815.php

http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/web/2015/03/Biodegradable-Plastics-Dont-Live-Claims.html

http://ei.cornell.edu/biodeg/

https://books.google.com/books?id=EMY9yvdduxcC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=Transition-metal+salts+biodegradable&source=bl&ots=RrCqXyu4cr&sig=jslug4ECrrDig1-E3VdkHO_hh-o&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0EYQVbviFYS5ogTVwYGQBw&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=Transition-metal%20salts%20biodegradable&f=false

http://phys.org/news/2015-03-plastics-biodegradable-dont.html

http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/150290/

http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2015-03/pifc-aoo032015.php

New lobster-like predator found in 508 million-year-old fossil-rich site

Credit: Jean-Bernard Caron/Royal Ontario Museum

By Phys.org

What do butterflies, spiders and lobsters have in common? They are all surviving relatives of a newly identified species called Yawunik kootenayi, a marine creature with two pairs of eyes and prominent grasping appendages that lived as much as 508 million years ago – more than 250 million years before the first dinosaur.

The fossil was identified by an international team led by palaeontologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, as well as Pomona College in California. It is the first new species to be described from the Marble Canyon site, part of the renowned Canadian Burgess Shale fossil deposit.

Yawunik had evolved long frontal appendages that resemble the antennae of modern beetles or shrimps, though these appendages were composed of three long claws, two of which bore opposing rows of teeth that helped the animal catch its prey.

“This creature is expanding our perspective on the anatomy and predatory habits of the first arthropods, the group to which spiders and lobsters belong,” said Cedric Aria, a PhD candidate in U of T’s Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and lead author of the resulting study published this week in Palaeontology. “It has the signature features of an arthropod with its external skeleton, segmented body and jointed appendages, but lacks certain advanced traits present in groups that survived until the present day. We say that it belongs to the ‘stem’ of arthropods.”

Read the full article by clicking the name of the source located below.

Woolly Mammoth DNA Inserted into Elephant Cells

Photo by Jonathan S. Blair/National Geographic

By Tanya Lewis

The idea of bringing extinct animals back to life continues to reside in the realm of science fiction. But scientists have taken a small step closer to that goal, by inserting the DNA of a woolly mammoth into lab-grown elephant cells.

Harvard geneticist George Church and his colleagues used a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR to insert mammoth genes for small ears, subcutaneous fat, and hair length and color into the DNA of elephant skin cells. The work has not yet been published in a scientific journal, and has yet to be reviewed by peers in the field.

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) have been extinct for millennia, with the last of the species dying out about 3,600 years ago. But scientists say it may be possible to bring these and other species back from the grave, through a process known as de-extinction.

But we won’t be seeing woolly mammoths prancing around anytime soon, “because there is more work to do,” Church told U.K.’s The Times, according to Popular Science. “But we plan to do so,” Church added.

Splicing mammoth DNA into elephant cells is only the first step in a lengthy process, Church said. Next, they need to find a way to turn the hybrid cells into specialized tissues, to see if they produce the right traits. For instance, the researchers need to make sure the mammoth genes produce hair of the right color and texture.

Read the full article by clicking the name of the source located below.

I’ll Be Speaking in Vancouver This Weekend

If you’re in the area, I’ll be giving a talk at Vancouver’s Langara College on Saturday afternoon. All the details are on the British Columbia Humanist Association’s website and you can purchase tickets here.

I’ll be joined by Armin Navabi, an ex-Muslim blogger who runs the Atheist Republic website.

C’mon, people in Seattle! It’s not *that* far away!

Ted Cruz and the Edge of the Earth

Climate change denialHistoryHumorScience and religion

In an interview with the Texas Tribune, Texas’s junior US Senator made a notably odd remark.

On the global warming alarmists, anyone who actually points to the evidence that disproves their apocalyptical claims, they don’t engage in reasoned debate. What do they do? They scream, “You’’re a denier.” They brand you a heretic. Today, the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers. It used to be [that] it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.

I’ve surveyed some ways that this “flat earth” theme has been abused in discussions of climate change before, and since Cruz is breaking some new denialist ground here, it seems worth reviewing the pertinent history.

December, 1980 edition of Flat Earth News (PDF link), proclaiming Galileo a hoax and decrying Pope John Paul II's willingness to apologize for Galileo's persecution. Flat earthers have no love for heliocentrism, but know better he wasn't the first to promulgate the idea of earth being a "grease ball" (in their derisive framing).

First, he’s either getting the trope wrong, or cleverly merging two denialist tropes into some sort of frightful chimera. The myth is that Columbus refuted the flat earth consensus, even though the (rough) sphericity of the earth was known at least by the time of Aristotle, and widely accepted (at least among the literate) by the time Columbus and Galileo lived. Not that modern flat earthers have any love for Galileo, but if one must recite a piece of mythology about the history of science, at least get the myth right.

Second, there was never a scientific consensus behind the flat earth. As I wrote when two climate change-denying researchers tried this gambit last year:

Christine Garwood reviewed that history in her comprehensive history Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea. She notes that the idea of a flat earth is common in Middle Eastern religious cosmologies, including the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians/Babylonians, and early Hebrews. The ancient Greeks held a range of views on the shape of the earth, with some considering it flat, while others insisted it was cylindrical.

The Pythagoreans introduced the idea of a spherical Earth, but not based on scientific measurement. As worshippers of numbers and geometry, the Pythagoreans insisted that the Earth must take on the most perfect shape: the sphere. The idea of a flat or cylindrical earth persisted through the 5th century BCE, but the argument remained focused on questions of philosophy and theology, not on scientific observation. Plato surveys this range of views, and Garwood notes: “by the time [Plato’s] pupil Aristotle was writing, later in the fourth century BC, the globe concept seems to have become widely accepted among educated people.” … Columbus’ novelty didn’t rest in advancing a spherical earth, but in proposing a size for it that was far too small; this strategic misestimation was necessary to justify his belief that well-provisioned ships could reach the Indies by sailing west.

I think we can safely regard the flat-Earth cosmologies of the ancient Middle East as pre-scientific, and not reflecting a scientific consensus… Aristotle, Thales, and other Ancient Greeks set the stage for science and established some critical early results, but the notion of scientific consensus—a shared vision among a community of scholars united through a process of peer review and valuing evidence-driven, repeatable, testable hypotheses—would have to wait for a few millennia. In summary, then, there was probably never a scientific consensus that the Earth was flat, and that idea was first overturned not by science, but by a different philosophical system.

Indeed, the pertinent flat earth movement, one which challenged scientific consensus, wasn’t founded until the 19th century. And, like modern climate change denial, that movement never had scientific support, despite its adherents’ protestations of being “natural skeptics,” “plagued or blessed or whatever you want to call it by having a critical mind.”

The other item that Cruz combined into his denialist tropemanteau was the so-called Galileo gambit, an attempted analogy between the resistance faced by Galileo and that supposedly faced by the denier today. Generally it involves a reference to Galileo’s defense of heliocentrism, and the myth is advanced that his science was suppressed by theological and political opposition, a connection that makes more sense than Cruz’s suggestion that he was suppressed by the scientific establishment of the day. Carl Sagan famously dismissed the argument’s central analogy by noting: “The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

Not only does the analogy fail to help deniers, and not only does Cruz’s account of Galileo not match up with the reality of Galileo’s work and life, but even if he’d gotten the myth right, it would still be a bit of misleading mythology. Galileo was not punished so much for advocating heliocentrism as for intentionally insulting his strongest defenders and arguing beyond what the available evidence would support. The Church was dubious of heliocentrism on theological grounds, but probably would have come around as evidence accumulated and some sort of learned consensus grew, had Galileo not handled the politics so poorly. It probably wasn’t wise to mock the Pope (putting his words in the mouth of a fool—unflatteringly named “Simplicio”— in a quasi-Socratic dialogue), alienate his political allies (whether the Church or the Medicis), or advance clearly flawed arguments (his heliocentric model of the tides would have predicted only one tide per day, yet his grand defense of heliocentrism rested heavily on that model).

In the past, I’ve mocked politicians for falling back on the “I’m not a scientist” slogan in responding to questions about climate change. But if the alternative to that dodge is to gather every denialist talking point and merge them into a Frankenstein monster, maybe they should have stuck to not being scientists.

FAITH: Jesus is not the answer to this question.

Ok, let me leave you with something happy before I conclude this incredibly frustrating day and hit the road for home.  A friend of mine posted this and it made me smile:

Immunotherapy Drugs Could Herald New Era In Cancer Treatment

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

Encouraging human T-cells. NIAID, CC BY

Pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy treatment initially approved for advanced melanoma, recently became the first drug to be approved through the UK’s early access to medicine scheme, which gives patients with life threatening or serious conditions access to medicines that are unlicensed or off-

Young Star Theory Forged From A Near Miss With A Giant Black Hole

Space





Photo credit:

Observations of the dusty cloud G2 as it approaches and then swings around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. ESO/A. Eckart, CC BY

It was billed as the biggest event in the galactic centre since we discovered that the Milky Way harboured a supermassive black hole. The G2 gas cloud, discovered in 2011, was found to be heading directly towards the black hole.

Given the estimated mass – a few Earth masses of gas – there was no way it could possibly survive the passage intact.