Laurie Santos: A monkey economy as irrational as ours

Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.

About Laurie Santos
Laurie Santos studies primate psychology and monkeynomics -- testing problems in human psychology on primates, who (not so surprisingly) have many of the same predictable irrationalities we do.

41 countries that did not support making water a human right

Every year, 3.5 million people die of water-borne illness. Diarrhea is the second largest cause of death among children under five. Lack of access to potable water kills more children than AIDS, malaria and smallpox combined. Worldwide, approximately 1 in 8 people lack potable water.

In just one day, more than 200 million hours of women’s time is consumed by collecting and transporting water for domestic use.

The situation of lack of sanitation is far worse, for it affects 2.6 billion people, or 40% of the global population.

These are the 41 countries that abstained in the July 28 UN General Assembly vote on Bolivia’s resolution to recognise access to water and sanitation as basic human rights. Rather than honestly vote “no”, they abstained to avoid being labelled as opponents of access to water, but many made statements that reveal their hostility to the very idea of recognising water as a human right.

Among others:

• Canada complained that the resolution “appeared to determine that there was indeed a right without setting out its scope”.
• The UK said “there was no sufficient legal basis for declaring or recognising water or sanitation as freestanding human rights, nor was there evidence that they existed in customary law”.
• The United States said “there was no ‘right to water and sanitation’ in an international legal sense, as described by the resolution”.
• Australia “had reservations about declaring new human rights in a General Assembly resolution”.

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TED: How we found hundreds of Earth-like planets

Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov and his colleagues search for Earth-like planets that may, someday, help us answer centuries-old questions about the origin and existence of biological life elsewhere (and on Earth). How many such planets have they found already? Several hundreds.

About Dimitar Sasselov
Dimitar Sasselov works on uniting the physical and life sciences in the hunt for answers to the question of how life began

Multicellular fossils may be world's oldest

Fossils found in Gabon suggest complex organisms lived as far back as 2.1 billion years ago, paleontologists say.

An international team of paleontologists has uncovered the earliest known multicellular fossils, pushing back the fossil record for such life forms to 2.1 billion years ago and suggesting that they lived 200 million years earlier than scientists had thought.

Since most fossils in that period were microscopic and single-celled, finding fossils that stretched as long as 4.75 inches was "like ordering an hors d'oeuvre and some gigantic thick-crust pizza turning up," said Philip Donoghue, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, who co-wrote a commentary on the finding. The report detailing the fossils, along with the commentary, was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The organisms, which don't resemble modern-day living things, existed when Earth's atmosphere would have been uninhabitable for today's plants and animals.

Their fossils provide "the first record of that fundamental threshold in organismal complexity being surpassed," Donoghue said. "To put it into context, the godfather of evolutionary biology, John Maynard Smith, identified eight major events in evolutionary history; achieving multicellularity was one of these."

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Sperm whale faeces offset CO2 emissions

In a somewhat unusual research project, scientists have found that sperm whale faeces may help oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

Australian researchers calculate that Southern Ocean sperm whales release about 50 tonnes of iron each year.

This stimulates the growth of tiny marine plants - phytoplankton - which absorb CO2 during photosynthesis.

They note in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B that in the end, this also provides more food for the whales.

Phytoplankton are the basis of the marine food web in this part of the world, and the growth of these tiny plants is limited by the amount of nutrients available, including iron.

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BBC Life

Being in Australia I couldn't watch BBC's Life series when it was aired in 2009, but I've made up for that over Australia's long weekend.

It is incredible, almost as good as Planet Earth, and goes to show that if you want a to understand more about our planet and the great number of organisms fighting for their place on it, you need look no further the BBC.

Supposedly, in the US they had to cut each episode down by 15 minutes and get Oprah Winfrey to narrate instead of David Attenborough. Is it any wonder they allow Creationism Science to be taught in the classroom.

View their webpage

View their interactive Tree of Life

Doctors to 'print' new organs for transplant patients

Although God may not like amputees enough to give them the limbs they desire (See WhyWontGodHealAmputees.com), we are fortunate enough to have real doctors and scientists to look after us.

I cannot understate that fact enough.

Yesterday I found out a friend of mine had been diagnosed with having a brain tumour. It sounds horrific, and frankly it is, but the doctors and nurses simply said, "You're going to be fine, its an easy operation and we'll do the surgery within 2 weeks; we'll cut away part of the skull, take out the tumour and put your skull back in place."

Think about that for a second. How easy do they make it sound.

That is how far we have progressed in our knowledge of the human body. No longer are we are the mercy of an invisible force who would take away peoples life without any warning.

We as a species have learnt so much about the human body and its inner workings that we are now able to diagnose and treat even the most terrifying ailment such as a brain tumour and pass it off as if you were having a fracture re-set.

Now we are, nearly, at the stage where if an organ of ours fails, for whatever reason, we can simply create the necessary cells using our DNA, manipulate them into shape and create a completely new organ.

Doctors might one day be able to 'print' living body parts they need for surgery, including blood vessels and entire organs.

The astonishing technique is known as bio-printing and it could make the transplant list a thing of the past.

Currently patients on the transplant list have to wait months or even years before a suitable organ becomes available.

Some religious people may say that we are only acting according to God's plan, and without the tools he put in front of us we'd never have succeeded.

If anyone honestly things this then they should be very very concerned, because I cannot imagine people worshiping a God who is fucking toying with us. A God who torments us, by killing our friends and loved ones, into spurring us on to find bigger and better ways of saving people.

Surely a world where in the vastness, possible infinite, of space lived an organism that evolved from single cell organisms to the point were we can manipulate the world around us so much that we can create new ways of ensuring we can keep on procreating, is much more likely than one where a God created us in all his love but for millions of years tortured and tormented us until only the strongest survived.

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Scientists find a ‘hint of life’ on Saturn’s moon Titan

Scientists have found evidence that there is life on Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan.
They have discovered clues that primitive aliens are breathing in Titan’s atmosphere and feeding on fuel at the surface.

The startling discoveries, made using an orbiting spacecraft, are revealed in two separate reports.

Data from Nasa’s Cassini probe has analysed the complex chemistry on the surface of Titan – the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere.

Its surface is covered with mountains, lakes and rivers which has led astronomers to call it the most Earthlike world in the solar system.

Organic chemicals had already been detected on the 3,200-mile wide planet. But the liquid on Titan is not water but methane and the scientists expect life there to be methane-based.

No Majesty of God. Just good Chemistry

Scientists create artificial life in laboratory.

Scientists have created synthetic life in the laboratory, in a feat of ingenuity that pushes the boundaries of humankind's ability to manipulate the natural world.

Craig Venter, the biologist who led the effort to map the human genome, said today that the first cell controlled entirely by man-made genetic instructions had been produced.

The synthetic bacterium, nicknamed Synthia, has been hailed as a step-change in biological engineering, allowing the creation of designer organisms with specialised functions that could never have evolved in nature.

The team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is investigating how the technology could yield microbes that make vaccines, and algae that turn carbon dioxide into green hydrocarbon biofuels.

Scientists have created synthetic life in the laboratory, in a feat of ingenuity that pushes the boundaries of humankind's ability to manipulate the natural world.

Craig Venter, the biologist who led the effort to map the human genome, said today that the first cell controlled entirely by man-made genetic instructions had been produced.

The synthetic bacterium, nicknamed Synthia, has been hailed as a step-change in biological engineering, allowing the creation of designer organisms with specialised functions that could never have evolved in nature.

The team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is investigating how the technology could yield microbes that make vaccines, and algae that turn carbon dioxide into green hydrocarbon biofuels.

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Life on Earth Arose Just Once

A great article by Tina Hesman Saey of Science News on the proof for one of the central components for the Theory of Evolution.

One isn’t such a lonely number. All life on Earth shares a single common ancestor, a new statistical analysis confirms.

The idea that life forms share a common ancestor is “a central pillar of evolutionary theory,” says Douglas Theobald, a biochemist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. “But recently there has been some mumbling, especially from microbiologists, that it may not be so cut-and-dried.”

Because microorganisms of different species often swap genes, some scientists have proposed that multiple primordial life forms could have tossed their genetic material into life’s mix, creating a web, rather than a tree of life.

To determine which hypothesis is more likely correct, Theobald put various evolutionary ancestry models through rigorous statistical tests. The results, published in the May 13 Nature, come down overwhelmingly on the side of a single ancestor.

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New evidence may solve mystery of the origin of water on Earth

For chemical compounds to bind together with other chemical compounds, they need to be in something fluid so that they can freely move around. This is why there is no life on Mars or Venus, the water would be either ice or steam.

When water is in its liquid format, then any chemicals inside the water are free to float along until they touch another chemical, which bind together and eventually create large chemical strings and eventually life.

That is a simplified version but if you'd like to learn more about this process take a look at this Made Easy video

This is only part 3 in a series of 11 short videos, that I've linked on the left hand side of this blog.

However, the BBC article below is on the origin of water, the petri dish of life, on our planet:

Scientists have found new evidence that the water on Earth was delivered by asteroids during the earliest years of the solar system.

The development comes after two teams of scientists independently discovered the first “wet” asteroid, paving the way for the first experimental proof of a longstanding mystery surrounding the origin of water on Earth.

Scientists believe that the Earth was formed barren. During a period of intense bombardment, between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago, ice-covered comets and asteroids could have delivered water. It had been assumed that these asteroids would have now dried out.

But the new observations, by teams using infrared telescopes at Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland, and the University of Central Florida, show that 24 Thermis, one of the largest asteroids in the solar system’s main asteroid belt, is covered in a thick layer of frost

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