I’ve been astonished at how many people fail to appreciate the athletic significance of this. Remember, this is a competitive issue, not a human-rights issue. No one is saying that Semenya isn’t a woman, a human being, and an individual deserving of our full respect.
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Caster Semenya and the Logic of Olympic Competition - The New Yorker - 0 views
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Semenya is equipped with an extraordinary and anomalous genetic advantage.
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That premise hopefully agreed, we then see that the presence of the Y chromosome is the single greatest genetic “advantage” a person can have. That doesn’t mean that all men outperform all women, but it means that for élite-sport discussion, that Y chromosome, and specifically the SRY gene on it, which directs the formation of testes and the production of testosterone, is a key criterion on which to separate people into categories.
What Is a Robot, Really? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The question is more complicated than it seems.
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Self-operating machines are permeating every dimension of society, so that humans find themselves interacting more frequently with robots than ever before—often without even realizing it. The human-machine relationship is rapidly evolving as a result. Humanity, and what it means to be a human, will be defined in part by the machines people design.
Exploring the Ethics of 'Designer Babies' - Huffington Post - 2 views
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By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer Published: 03/13/2014 02:18 PM EDT on LiveScience Creating designer babies who are free from disease and super athletic or smart may finally be around the corner.
Infographics Lie. Here's How To Spot The B.S. | Co.Design | business + design - 1 views
How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views
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In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Haslam argues that concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
Same but Different - The New Yorker - 0 views
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Why are identical twins alike? In the late nineteen-seventies, a team of scientists in Minnesota set out to determine how much these similarities arose from genes, rather than environments—from “nature,” rather than “nurture.” Scouring thousands of adoption records and news clips, the researchers gleaned a rare cohort of fifty-six identical twins who had been separated at birth. Reared in different families and different cities, often in vastly dissimilar circumstances, these twins shared only their genomes. Yet on tests designed to measure personality, attitudes, temperaments, and anxieties, they converged astonishingly. Social and political attitudes were powerfully correlated: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. The same went for religiosity (or its absence), even for the ability to be transported by an aesthetic experience. Two brothers, separated by geographic and economic continents, might be brought to tears by the same Chopin nocturne, as if responding to some subtle, common chord struck by their genomes.
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It’s one thing to study epigenetic changes across the life of a single organism, or down a line of cells. The more tantalizing question is whether epigenetic messages can, like genes, cross from parents to their offspring.
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The most suggestive evidence for such transgenerational transmission may come from a macabre human experiment. In September, 1944, amid the most vengeful phase of the Second World War, German troops occupying the Netherlands banned the export of food and coal to its northern parts. Acute famine followed, called the Hongerwinter—the hunger winter. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children died of malnourishment; millions suffered it and survived. Not surprisingly, the children who endured the Hongerwinter experienced chronic health issues. In the nineteen-eighties, however, a curious pattern emerged: when the children born to women who were pregnant during the famine grew up, they had higher rates of morbidity as well—including obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. (Malnourishment in utero can cause the body to sequester higher amounts of fat in order to protect itself from caloric loss.) Methylation alterations were also seen in regions of their DNA associated with growth and development. But the oddest result didn’t emerge for another generation. A decade ago, when the grandchildren of men and women exposed to the famine were studied, they, too, were reported to have had higher rates of illness. (These findings have been challenged, and research into this cohort continues.) “Genes cannot change in an entire population in just two generations,” Allis said. “But some memory of metabolic stress could have become heritable.”
A Push for Diesel Leaves London Gasping Amid Record Pollution - The New York Times - 0 views
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The current problem is, in part, an unintended consequence of previous efforts to aid the environment.The British government provided financial incentives to encourage a shift to diesel engines because laboratory tests suggested that would cut harmful emissions and combat climate change. Yet, it turned out that diesel cars emit on average five times as much emissions in real-world driving conditions as in the tests, according to a British Department for Transport study.
Maps reveal schizophrenia 'hotspots' in England - BBC News - 0 views
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"The lowest rate of schizophrenia prescriptions was in East Dorset. However, explaining the pattern across England is complicated and the research team says the maps pose a lot of questions. They were developed using anonymous prescription records that are collected from doctors' surgeries in England. They record only prescriptions given out by GPs - not the number of patients treated - so hospital treatment is missed in the analysis."
BBC - Future - How to get people to overcome their bias - 0 views
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How do you persuade somebody of the facts? Asking them to be fair, impartial and unbiased is not enough. To explain why, psychologist Tom Stafford analyses a classic scientific study.
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How do you persuade somebody of the facts? Asking them to be fair, impartial and unbiased is not enough. To explain why, psychologist Tom Stafford analyses a classic scientific study.
The Honor Code | Katy Chevigny on Vimeo - 0 views
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If we change the way we think about honor, could we make the world a better place? Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah proves we can in The Honor Code.
Goodnight. Sleep Clean. - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.”
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Sleep, it turns out, may play a crucial role in our brain’s physiological maintenance. As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.
The placebo effect: A new study underscores its remarkable power - The Globe and Mail - 0 views
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"But according to new research, the therapeutic effects of a placebo are so powerful that an inert pill has a good chance of reducing symptoms - even if patients know they are taking a dummy pill."
Lights Out: A New Reckoning for Brain Death : The New Yorker - 0 views
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"But brain death is not quite as certain as these bioethicists might like. A doctor can't always determine whether the brain is truly dead. The diagnosis is made the old-fashioned way: by careful observation. A doctor checks to see whether the eyes are responsive to light or touch; she pricks the nailbeds to discern whether the pain registers; she tests muscle reflexes; she determines whether the buildup of carbon dioxide triggers spontaneous breathing if the ventilator is shut off; and she may use an electroencephalograph to detect electrical activity in the brain. (However, even a dead brain may produce some voltage.) If all the findings are negative, then the declaration is made. Even then, the doctor can be wrong. "
Rachel Aviv: The Scientist Who Took on a Leading Herbicide Manufacturer : The New Yorker - 0 views
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"Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta's public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was "discredit Hayes.""
La Vie En Rouge « The Dish - 0 views
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Most mammals, including most primates, are dichromatic, meaning they can only detect two color wavelengths: green and blue. Certain primates, though, have evolved to see a third: red. It turns out that these primates—humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, to name some—all have one thing in common: bare-skinned faces. Based on this trend, experts have
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