ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 796

Dog Brains Process Human Speech In The Same Way We Do

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Annette Shaff / Shutterstock

Sometimes it may seem like your dog doesn’t want to listen. But in our study, however, we’ve found that he may understand more than he lets on.

Human speech is complex, communicating not only words but also tone, as well as information about the speaker such as their gender and identity. To what extent can a dog pick up on these different cues?

Is Stephen Hawking Right? Could AI Lead To The End Of Humankind?

Technology





Photo credit:

Wikimedia Commons

The famous theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, has revived the debate on whether our search for improved artificial intelligence will one day lead to thinking machines that will take over from us.

The British scientist made the claim during a wide-ranging interview with the BBC. Hawking has the motor neurone disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and the interview touched on new technology he is using to help him communicate.

Hundreds Of Meteors Will Light Up The Night Sky Tonight

Space





Photo credit:

NASA/JPL

The Geminid meteor shower is a favorite of sky watchers every December because it can produce up to 120 sightings per hour. This year’s show runs from December 7-17, peaking overnight on the 13th-14th. Though the moonlight will wash out some of the meteors this year, the brightest ones will still be visible and it is set to be a pretty good event. The Geminids are named for the fact that they look like they are originating from the constellation Gemini. 

Alan Turing and The Imitation Game

The Imitation Game comes out tonight, but before its release, Hank got to talk with the film’s director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore about bringing one of the world’s most brilliant mathematicians to film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5CjKEFb-sM

Hosted by: Hank Green

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Quarter-Million Tons of Plastic Plague Oceans

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch may be the most infamous of the world's floating trash dumps. But it's far from the only one. There's plastic trash littering "the Bay of Bengal, the Mediterranean Sea, the coast of Indonesia, all five subtropical gyres; coastal regions, enclosed bays, seas and gulfs." Marcus Eriksen, director of research at the Five Gyres Institute. 



Eriksen surveyed those areas, along with his seafaring colleagues. Collectively, they spent some 900 hours logging every large piece of plastic they could spot from their boats. And they trawled for plastic nearly 700 times along the way, picking through their nets and cataloguing the debris. "I find the necks of bottles, fragments of toothbrushes and combs. Action figure parts. Army men. I find a lot of army men." 



The researchers plugged that trash census data into ocean models, which simulate the circulation of the world's waters. Based on the densities of trash the researchers found, the models predicted some 5.25 trillion particles of plastic may be floating out there…adding up to about 269,000 tons. And more than 90 percent of those pieces may be smaller than a grain of rice. The study appears in the journal PLOS ONE. [Marcus Eriksen et al.: Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea]



What happens to all that plastic? "The ocean's going to take it, blast it to smithereens, it's going to cycle it through marine organisms, and sink it to the sea floor. That's the ultimate life cycle, I believe, for plastics. We're like constantly sprinkling fish food on the entire ocean surface." The solution, Marcus says, isn't some fleet of seafaring garbage trucks. It's keeping our trash to ourselves—which would be a sea change in behavior.



—Christopher Intagliata





[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]

California’s Drought Likely The Worst In 1,200 Years

Environment





Photo credit:

zhuda/iStock

California has been experiencing a drought since 2012, which is the worst that has been recorded in the last century. But how does it compare to droughts that occurred before human weather records? Though droughts in California aren’t particularly rare, a recent study has found that this drought is the most intense that has occurred in the area over the last 1,200 years.

Humans On Mars Soonish Says NASA Bigwig

Last week NASA hailed the launch of its new Orion capsule as the first step toward sending people to Mars. But is a manned mission to the Red Planet really doable?

 

“I liken it to the 1920's, ‘30's, ‘40's when it was believed that Everest might be impossible to climb.” John Grunsfeld, the former astronaut who now heads NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. We spoke at Cape Canaveral just before the Orion launch.

 

“Well, eventually it was climbed by Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hilary. And they did this big siege approach where they had thousands of porters and they brought big camps and afternoon tea and all this kind of stuff. And that was kind of the Apollo approach to going to the moon and back safely in a decade. We brought all resources to bear.

 

“But modern exploration on Earth—polar exploration, Antarctic, climbing, even climbing Mount Everest—people do it in a very light fashion using technology, they’re very creative and they take more risks in some cases. And I think that’s going to be our path to Mars, a much leaner path and one where we are able to use technology to enable the way, rather than a big siege approach.

 

“And so I think it’s very realistic. I think we could do it in the 2030’s, certainly by the 2040’s, with the national will and the interest. And I think it’s our science missions that are providing that drive.”

 

—Clara Moskowitz

 

(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)

 

Lunar Dynamo May Have Generated The Moon’s Ancient Magnetic Field

Space





Photo credit:

Hernán Cañellas (provided by Benjamin Weiss)

NASA sent astronauts to the moon during the Apollo missions to resolve the composition of the moon’s interior. Unfortunately, scientists still aren’t sure if the moon’s interior is molten with a metal core, or if it’s mostly unmelted like an asteroid. There is evidence that the moon once had a very powerful magnetic field, but it isn’t known if it was caused by dynamos generated from a molten core, or through the less likely option that it came from external sources.

“Do You Know How Complex Feet Are?!?”: Adventures of a Creationist at the Field Museum

Anti-evolutionIllinois

I don’t know how to say this word, so I’m just going to pretend that I know how to say it.

That’s how creationist Megan Fox opens her self-styled “audit”of the exhibits of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This homeschooling mom’s video recently went viral, and offers insight into the minds of people outraged at the idea of science museums. An audit implies a power relationship, and Fox has come to the Field on a mission to put those scientists in their place.

But right at the start she needs help to pronounce the word “eukaryotes,” a term which most every high school biology student knows. Though she fumbles with the pronunciation, Fox proceeds to tell her audience how those scientists have eukaryotes all wrong.

She reads from a display:

‘Eukaryotes are different from other cells because they have a nucleus which contains the cell’s DNA’ blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah? This is the important part of the definition of eukaryotes, not some useless dross. It’s hard to understand how this vital information deserves the yada yada treatment.

Fox continues to read the display:

‘At first, all eukaryotes were single-celled and many still are today.’ What?!? If many still are today, then that would support the theory that they had never changed, that they have always been as they are today. Not that they started some place else and then are here, but they were always this and still are today. This makes no sense.

I agree. What she’s saying makes no sense. It’s almost as bad as arguing that since all people start off as children, adults cannot have developed from children, because then there wouldn’t be children any longer. Fox’s misunderstanding of evolution is so profound it hurts—and all this comes from the first minute of her “audit.” There’s a painful half-hour more for your viewing pleasure, depending on how masochistic you feel. (There’s not space here to do more than scratch the surface of the rest of this video, but one word I guarantee you will hear: dragons.)

Fox’s toxic tirade is the perfect intersection of the unwatchable and the unlistenable, like an Iggy Azalea music video. Her scientific mistakes are so egregious it’s almost physically painful to watch.

Museums and zoos and parks are a rage flashpoint for many creationists. Fox’s thirty-minute diatribe at the Field Museum, and another one at Brookfield Zoo, are echoes of other videos, such as this one where a creationist at Grand Canyon bemoans that taxpayers—presumably tricked by evil atheists—have paid for a “Trail of Time” path based on the assumption that rocks are millions of year old. The nerve of the National Park Service to make exhibits using science!

There’s nothing quite like seeing your ignorance contradicted in public to raise your ire and indignation. How dare those liberal scientists suggest your opinions about science are wrong. How dare they promote “Darwinism” to defenseless children. How dare scientists use fancy words, such as “eukaryotes,” in their exhibits. And if you struggle to pronounce such words as you pontificate about how scientists misuse those terms, then shame on the scientists for making you display your ignorance of phonics.

Asimov once wrote that some think the egalitarianism of democracy implies “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” In our anti-intellectual culture—where we worship professional athletes while denigrating teachers, where cities subsidize lavish new football stadiums even as they slash school funding—it should come as no surprise that individuals such as Fox imagine their unscripted, off-the-cuff remarks at a science museum carry more scientific heft than countless peer-reviewed papers.  The intuition of a real American, according to a line of reasoning dating back to the Scopes trial, is superior to the knowledge of those egg-headed scientists with all their book learning.

The problem is that intuition stinks. It’s no better than blind guessing, and often worse than blind guessing.

In many ways, science is the systematic demonstration that most of what you intuitively think about the natural world is completely wrong. The intuitions of most beginning physics students inform them that when two objects fall, one massive and one less massive, the more massive object should hit the ground first. Wrong; intuition fails. Beginning chemistry students assume that as you alter energy in atoms, the energy levels should change in a continuous, smooth curve rather than in clunky, stair-like jumps. Wrong; intuition fails again. Beginning biology students might look at a bird’s wing and imagine they see design—perhaps even an intelligent design, an avian engineering plan, a created limb expressly designed for the purpose of allowing birds to fly. Wrong again; gut feelings are not information. One thing I’ve learned studying science is that if I feel something is true, it’s probably wrong.

Feelings and intuitions just do not get you very far. In one of the greatest reveals in movie history, Darth Vader says to Luke, “I am your father.” This is followed by one of the worst moments in movie history, when Vader suggests as proof of his claim: “Search your feelings, you know it to be true.”  Huh? How would an inventory of Luke’s feelings help? Everyone else has to go on the Maury Povich show to determine paternity using DNA, but since the Force is strong in Luke, he gets to use his magic intuition.

Magical thinking similarly permeates Fox’s commentary on a display of the famous fossil Tiktaalik, shown below in a more fleshed out form. 

She “audits” the Field display by saying:

‘Today tetrapods include reptiles, birds, and mammals like you.’ [Fox here makes a stink eye for the camera that would make any teenager blush.] Maybe they always had feet like that. Maybe that’s the way they were made--with feet … It’s not like their fins fell off and then they grew feet. That’s what they want you to believe… Do you know how complex feet are?!?

Of course, no scientist argues that the fins of an adult fish fell off and articulated limbs sprung into place, as in some bad sci-fi movie. This straw man caricature is camouflage for what Fox is really saying--that tetrapods were created. Created by God as they presently are, with all their limbs already in place. People have a right to think this, of course, but there’s no need to first attack science museums.

The Field Museum is one of the world’s best places to rid oneself of the mistaken notion that animals were supernaturally created in their present forms. So the real lesson of Fox’s “audit” is not any science-shattering observation she makes, but the spectacle of her own inability to see what is right before her. There is no insurmountable barrier to knowledge except stubbornness. The real tragedy here is a person going to a museum that shows so much of the beauty and majesty of nature, and being able to react only in self-righteous rage. 

3D Cancer Vaccine Recruits Infection-Fighting Cells

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

Microscope image of the immune system’s dendritic cells collected from a 3D scaffold three days after in vivo injection. The scaffold recruits and activates dendritic cells to trigger an immune response against cancerous cells / Harvard

Researchers have designed a programmable biomaterial that assembles itself into an infection-fighting structure once injected into the body. The findings, published in Nature Biotechnology this week, could lead to a non-surgical way to evoke natural defenses against cancers and viruses that have previously skirted immune detection.