New campaign to end blasphemy laws worldwide launches

By Samira Shackle

Blasphemy laws hit international headlines when they result in a particular abuse of rights. Aasia Bibi, the Christian woman sentenced to death in Pakistan; Raif Badawi, the Saudi blogger currently enduring 50 lashes every week.

Yet the problem is far wider than just these individual aberrations. Blasphemy laws, broadly, are those which restrict or punish speech which is deemed to insult religion. The New Humanist has reported extensively on this issue; read our World of Blasphemy series for more information about the status of these repressive laws all over the globe.

According to the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU)’s 2014 Freedom of Thought Report, 55 countries worldwide – including EU member states – have criminal laws restricting blasphemy. In 39 countries, it is an imprisonable offence, and in six, it carries the death penalty.

---

White House Requests Boosted $18.5B NASA Budget

NASA TV/IAN O’NEILL, DISCOVERY NEWS

By Discovery News

NASA on Monday hailed a proposal by President Barack Obama to boost spending for the US space agency and announced plans for a mission to explore Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

The agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, said at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that NASA has made strides in the journey toward Mars—where a human mission is planned for 2024—with a “near-flawless” flight test of its new Orion deep space vehicle.

He also heralded success in handing over International Space Station resupply missions to commercial partners, with the first crew flights on the horizon in 2017.

Although Obama’s overall $4 trillion US budget plan faces an uphill climb through Republican-controlled Congress, support for the space agency tends to reach across bipartisan lines.

“President Obama is proposing a fiscal year 2016 budget of $18.5 billion dollars for NASA, building on the significant investments the administration has made in America’s space program over the past six years,” Bolden said in an address broadcast online and shown at NASA locations across the United States.

---

Tiny volcanic cracks ‘incubated’ ancient DNA

© NPG

By Emma Stoye

Tiny pores within volcanic rocks on ancient Earth may have provided the ideal conditions for replicating molecules, and could also have driven the evolution of longer and longer genetic sequences, researchers in Germany have shown.

One puzzling dilemma of origin of life simulations is that shorter fragments of genetic material replicate faster than longer ones and tend to out-compete them. This trend favours the loss of information over time rather than the development of longer strands.

But Dieter Braun and colleagues at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich think conditions that favour the opposite – as well as concentrating molecules in the primordial soup – could have existed inside tiny cracks within heated volcanic rocks on the sea bed millions of years ago.

‘We thought that a thermal gradient across a porous rock is a most simple and very common setting on the early Earth,’ says Braun. ‘That it can solve so many problems for the origin of life was actually not expected!’

---

Delaware Governor Announces ‘Charles Darwin Day’

Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

By Jesse Rifkin

Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) has declared Feb. 12 as “Charles Darwin Day” in the state.

Praising Darwin’s theory of evolution as “the foundation of modern biology, an essential tool in understanding the development of life on earth,” Markell’sproclamation says Feb. 12 — Darwin’s birthday — “is a time to reflect and celebrate the importance of his scientific achievements.”

As Patheos notes, the proclamation was issued at the request of Chuck Dyke, a member of the Delaware Atheist Meetup group. (According to the governor’s website, any organization based in or connected to Delaware may request special recognition for a day, week or month.)

Darwin Day has been celebrated by groups in the U.S., Europe and Canada on the British naturalist’s birthday since 1980. In 2013 and 2014, then-Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) introduced legislation to designate a national Darwin Day. Despite support from some House Democrats, the proposal never got off the ground. Former Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) made a similar attempt in 2011.

---

Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds

Credit: © gitanna / Fotolia

By Science Daily

A new procedure can quickly and efficiently increase the length of human telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that are linked to aging and disease, according to scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Treated cells behave as if they are much younger than untreated cells, multiplying with abandon in the laboratory dish rather than stagnating or dying.

The procedure, which involves the use of a modified type of RNA, will improve the ability of researchers to generate large numbers of cells for study or drug development, the scientists say. Skin cells with telomeres lengthened by the procedure were able to divide up to 40 more times than untreated cells. The research may point to new ways to treat diseases caused by shortened telomeres.

Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of the strands of DNA called chromosomes, which house our genomes. In young humans, telomeres are about 8,000-10,000 nucleotides long. They shorten with each cell division, however, and when they reach a critical length the cell stops dividing or dies. This internal “clock” makes it difficult to keep most cells growing in a laboratory for more than a few cell doublings.

---

Climate change could impact the poor much more than previously thought

Photograph: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images

By Dana Nuccitelli

It’s widely accepted that climate change will have bigger negative impacts on poorer countries than wealthy ones. However, a new economic modeling studyfinds that the economic impacts on these poorer countries could be much larger than previous estimates.

As a result, they suggest that we should be aiming to limit global warming to near, or perhaps even less than the international target of 2°C. This conclusion is in sharp contrast to current economic models, which generally conclude that the economically optimal pathway results in a global surface warming around 3–3.5°C.

Current economic models mainly treat economic growth as an external factor. In these models, global warming and its impacts via climate change don’t significantly affect the rate at which the economy grows. However, several economic studies have concluded that this is an inaccurate assumption, with a 2012 paper by Melissa Dell and colleagues taking the first stab at quantifying the effects of climate damages on economic growth.

The new study by Frances Moore and Delavane Diaz of Stanford University calibrates the climate ‘damage functions’ in one of these economic models (DICE, developed by William Nordhaus at Yale) using the results from the Dell paper. They grouped the world into rich and poor countries, finding that while the economies of rich countries continue to grow well in a warmer world, the economic growth of poor countries is significantly impaired.

---

Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds

Credit: © gitanna / Fotolia

By Science Daily

A new procedure can quickly and efficiently increase the length of human telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that are linked to aging and disease, according to scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Treated cells behave as if they are much younger than untreated cells, multiplying with abandon in the laboratory dish rather than stagnating or dying.

The procedure, which involves the use of a modified type of RNA, will improve the ability of researchers to generate large numbers of cells for study or drug development, the scientists say. Skin cells with telomeres lengthened by the procedure were able to divide up to 40 more times than untreated cells. The research may point to new ways to treat diseases caused by shortened telomeres.

Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of the strands of DNA called chromosomes, which house our genomes. In young humans, telomeres are about 8,000-10,000 nucleotides long. They shorten with each cell division, however, and when they reach a critical length the cell stops dividing or dies. This internal “clock” makes it difficult to keep most cells growing in a laboratory for more than a few cell doublings.

---