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Here Are All the Ways That Politicians Lie About Science

by RebekahEbert657 Posted on September 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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History is riddled with science denial. From Newton’s law of gravitation to Hanaoka Seinshu’s use of anesthesia, there’s no shortage of discoveries that have been scoffed at, ridiculed, and wholly rejected by prominent thinkers before eventually settling into the human narrative. But too often, significant damage is done—and sometimes lives are lost—while these debates play out. After centuries of dismissing scientific discoveries, only to be proven wrong time and again, you’d think we’d learn to have a little more faith in the experts.

In the era of social media, around-the-clock cable news, and Donald Trump, preventing the spread of misinformation has become one of the greatest challenges facing the scientific community. That’s especially true when it comes to politics. On this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, science journalist and author Dave Levitan calls out some of Washington’s worst offenders.

As a former writer for Factcheck.org’s SciCheck project—part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center—Levitan has spent countless hours pouring over statements made by politicians about science. Sometimes our leaders get the facts right. But frequently, says Levitan, they distort, misrepresent, or flat-out fabricate the data in order to pander to their audience or push an agenda. That’s the subject of Levitan’s forthcoming book, Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science. To hear Levitan and co-host Kishore Hari dissect the many different techniques that our country’s leaders use to distort science, click below:

While misleading rhetoric is nothing new in politics, the danger it poses to environmental and public health may be at an all-time high. In a country where scientific literacy is already in decline, misinformation about topics as significant as climate change or infectious diseases can have devastating consequences. Yet many politicians, purposely or not, continue to get the science wrong. Levitan points to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) as an example of the perfect “denier-in-chief.” Last year, Inhofe brought a snowball to the Senate floor to dispute the science of global warming. His implication: Because there was snow on the ground, the Earth couldn’t possibly be getting warmer. It was a classic display of a cherry-picking politician using a single data point to obscure an indisputable trend:

Two years ago, as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was gearing up to run for president, he slammed the National Institutes of Health for funding research on fruit flies. “Have you seen what the NIH spends money on?” Paul said, according to the Washington Post. “Nine hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars spent to discover whether or not male fruit flies would like to consort with younger female fruit flies.” When you put it like that, the NIH sounds ridiculous. But Paul missed the mark completely. As Levitan wrote at the time:

The characterization of the project as simply testing “whether male fruit flies like younger female fruit flies” is misleading. The study was in fact part of ongoing work looking into olfaction and other sensory perception, the aging process and how it relates to sexual and social activity. A paper that came out of the same line of inquiry appeared in the prestigious journal Science in 2013, showing that exposure to female pheromones without the opportunity to mate actually decreased male flies’ life spans. In short, sexual reward “specifically promoted healthy aging,” according to Scott Pletcher the scientist whose research Paul was criticizing. His lab’s work could yield insights both into how humans age and into aging-related diseases…Paul is entitled to his opinions on where government funds are best spent, but the study of flies has yielded important benefits to human health.”

Misrepresenting research is “a way to get people to not want the government to spend money,” Levitan says. “The effect, though, is that people don’t understand the importance of basic science research.”

Of course, scientists share the burden of communicating their findings clearly, but most of them don’t have the public megaphones that elected officials do. “Politicians have a lot of responsibility,” Levitan says. “They’re the ones legislating and governing where money goes and what science actually can get done. Some random scientist can’t just decide he’s going to give a speech and everyone will watch.”

In the end, Levitan offers voters a simple way to sift through the BS: Have a healthy degree of skepticism when politicians talk about science. “If they’re making fun of basic research,” he says, “they’re probably wrong.” And his advice to the politicians: Let the scientific consensus be your talking point.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Here Are All the Ways That Politicians Lie About Science

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An Accidental Nuclear Detonation "Will Happen"

by Danilo1981 Posted on September 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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It would be impossible to fully replicate the depth of dread and disbelief that Command and Control—Eric Schlosser’s 2013 book chronicling the Air Force’s history of nuclear weapons mishaps—bestows on its readers. This is not to say that the haunting new documentary of the same name, co-written by Schlosser and director Robert Kenner (Food, Inc.), doesn’t pack a punch. While the film’s producers were forced to simplify and trim from the book’s deeper content, any viewer who has not read the original or who, like most Americans, pays little heed to our modern nuclear arsenal, is due for a fine scare.

The contextual backdrop of Schosser’s book incudes plenty of the kind of Cold War insanity that many Americans have relegated to the attics of our memories: the rush-rush nuclear buildup stewarded by the hawkish Strategic Air Command boss Gen. Curtis LeMay, the existential nuclear standoffs between JFK and the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev, the WarGames-esque computer glitches that falsely signaled Soviet nukes flying our way, and the shock of General William E. Odom, a national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, upon receiving a briefing on the SIOP, the nation’s top-secret plan in case of a nuclear conflict: “It was just a huge mechanical war plan aimed at creating maximum damage without regard to the political context,” Odom said. “The president would be left with two or three meaningless choices that he might have to make within 10 minutes after he was awakened after a deep sleep some night.”

But Schlosser’s coup de grâce was a list he obtained (via freedom of information requests) detailing a litany of nuclear fuckups by the Air Force. Although the brass typically blamed human error, the record in its totality suggested that America’s systems for safeguarding its nuclear weapons were profoundly broken, were they ever working in the first place. Some incidents were fairly minor and others reflected organizational ineptitude—an accidental shipment of missile nose-cone fuses to Taiwan, nukes sitting around in barely guarded storage igloos on foreign tarmacs, things like that. But the scariest part by far was the tale after tale of actual near-misses: nuke-laden B-52s fragmenting in midair, crashing and scattering radiation; immensely powerful warheads exposed to fire and intense heat and hurled or dropped into American fields and swamps. Yet somehow, by the grace of God, there was never an accidental nuclear detonation on American soil.

The film—which opens on a scene in September 1980, as young maintenance guys suit up to work on a Titan 2 missile in Damascus, Arkansas—features great archival footage and reenactments shot in a decommissioned silo complex. Command and Control dutifully follows the book’s basic outline. The central narrative thread involves a technician’s mistake at a Titan 2 silo that ended with the explosion of a missile whose warhead was more powerful than all the bombs America dropped in WWII combined, the nukes included. (The warhead didn’t detonate, obviously, but at the time nobody knew that it wouldn’t.)

Air Force maintenance men in a reenactment of the Damascus Incident. American Experience Films/PBS

This part of the story is related onscreen by the same former airmen, commanders, journalists, and politicos who appear in the book—largely men who were there or otherwise involved. Among them is then-Senior Airman David Powell, who was a teenager on an Air Force maintenance team when he dropped a nine-pound socket head down the silo shaft, puncturing the missile’s fuel tank. (To get a taste, read the scene as it appears in Schlosser’s book.) What comes after serves as a potent illustration of the breakdown of the military’s command-and-control structure, designed to prevent such accidents and deal with them effectively should they happen. Spoiler alert: Bad decisions are made by know-nothings up the chain of command, and bad things result.

A film, of course, delivers something a book cannot. We get to see real footage from nuclear detonations, from the actual Damascus Incident, and from some of the past nuclear mishaps, the worst one involved the accidental release of two H-bombs over Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1961—such an insanely close call that I still shudder to contemplate it. Better yet, we get to meet and hear directly from the Damascus men, including former Senior Airman Powell, an otherwise cheerful guy who tears up as he recounts how, after more than three decades, not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about that socket slipping from his hand—and the chain of events it set off.

As in the book, the tense Damascus narrative plays out against the backdrop of a nation bumbling its way along the nuclear learning curve. As Schlosser notes in the film, we’ve built some 70,000 nuclear weapons over the years, and the fact that none has detonated by accident is a testament to the smarts of the weapons designers at the Sandia Lab—guys like Bob Peurifoy, a regular presence in the film, who worked their asses off convincing the brass to install failsafe devices on the bombs. But there’s yet another key factor at play, Schlosser says: “pure luck.” And that, my friends, is unbelievably scary. Because, to quote Schlosser, nuclear weapons are simply machines, albeit “the most dangerous machines ever invented. And like every machine, sometimes they go wrong.”

Watching the quaint archival footage, a viewer would be tempted to view this problem as history, but to do so would be to bury one’s head in the sand. We still have plenty of nukes sitting around, and portions of our aging arsenal are essentially babysat, as our reporter Josh Harkinson discovered, by a bunch of disgruntled kids. The military screws things up routinely, of course, even if the public seldom hears about it. “Nuclear accidents continue to the present day,” Harold Brown, who was defense secretary under Jimmy Carter at the time of the Damascus Incident, says in the film. “The degree of oversight and attention has if anything gotten worse, because people don’t worry about nuclear war as much.”

It’s not just the US arsenal we need to worry about, however. North Korea just tested its most powerful nuke to date. And bitter enemies India and Pakistan are still young nuclear powers. Suppose a Pakistani nuke were to detonate accidentally. The first face-saving instinct might be to blame India. Not good. Peurifoy spent his entire career designing nuclear safety devices, and he believes an accidental detonation is inevitable, sometime, somewhere. “It will happen,” he says in the film. “It may be tomorrow or it may be a million years from now, but it will happen.”

Command and Control rolls out in selected theaters starting on September 14 in New York City. Click here for dates, cities, and venues.

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An Accidental Nuclear Detonation "Will Happen"

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FX Series "Atlanta" Is Like the Black "Master of None"

by PorterBignold Posted on September 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Triple threat Donald Glover—writer, actor, and rapper—can now tuck another feather into his cap, as showrunner of Atlanta, a worthy new series premiering September 6 on FX. The 32-year-old Glover, known for his portrayal of the lovable Troy on Community, opted to leave that series after five seasons to pursue a show of his own. With Atlanta, he looked to his own roots on the periphery of the Atlanta drug scene who attended an elite northeastern college to bring a bit of realism to a fictional story.

Glover, a native of Stone Mountain, Georgia, and a graduate of NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, plays Earn (Ernest), a Princeton dropout and a young dad who is “technically homeless” but at the moment is living with Vanessa (Zazie Beets), his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his daughter. Earn’s job selling travel deals at the airport only pays him on commission, which means his finances are constantly in disarray—at times he gets so desperate he has to borrow $20 just to take Van, whom he’s struggling to win back, to dinner. Discouraged and at his wit’s end, Earn approaches his rapper cousin Alfred (a.k.a. Paper Boi, played by Brian Tyree Henry) whose career is beginning to take off locally, and asks if he can be Alfred’s manager.

As is the case with most dramedies, many of the jokes here aren’t laugh-out-loud funny, even though Glover, during a previous three-year stint as a writer for 30 Rock, gave us many of Tracy Morgan’s absurd lines. Rather, Atlanta has a similar feel to Aziz Ansari’s Netflix hit Master of None. It provides an introspective look into the lives of millennial men navigating work, romance, and their own shortcomings as they become painfully aware of the people they’ve grown up to be.

Glover largely trades in his sillier comedic sensibilities for a more nuanced approach, while bringing much of the same charming awkwardness to Earn that he brought to Troy on Community. As a writer, Glover saves his most humorous lines for Darius (Keith Stanfield), Paper Boi’s hilariously enigmatic right-hand man.

What makes Atlanta particularly unique in the world of half-hour comedies is that fact that all its writers are black, and many are rookies in the writers’ room. “I wanted to show white people, you don’t know everything about black culture,” Glover told Vulture last month. The premise of exploring race in a comedic format is compelling enough, but Atlanta also manages to tackle gun violence, mass incarceration, sexual identity, and authoritarian abuse in the Black community (all within the first four episodes). Glover relies on humor, not preaching, to get his serious points across.

In the debut episode, Earn runs into a (presumably) old friend, a white man around his age. The friend uses the N-word while telling Earn a story about a party he’d attended, but he doesn’t use it when he tells the story to Paper Boi—a discrepancy highlighting flawed notions of whether, when, and with whom it’s appropriate for a white person to use the word.

In another episode, Paper Boi, now a rising star, spots a child playing outside with a toy gun pretending to shoot another child and proclaiming he’s “just like Paper Boi.” The rapper’s efforts to set the kid straight are lost on the child, thwarted by Paper Bio’s public persona. Elsewhere, as Earn awaits bond after being on a weapons charge after pulling a gun from his cousin’s glove compartment, another man in the jail’s holding area (where most are black) runs into his ex, a trans woman, who’s also awaiting bond. In this uncomfortable scene, the other men ridicule the man as a “faggot.” Glover then breaks the tension with humor: “Sexuality is a spectrum,” he stage-whispers to the distraught guy. “You can really do whatever you want.”

But then our attention is then drawn to a mentally unstable man clad in a hospital gown. Earn asks a guard why the man is even there—”He looks like he needs help”—and is told to shut up. Then, after the unhinged man spits some toilet water he’s been drinking on a guard, he is repaid with a beatdown.

Social issues aside, the show gives a dreamlike window into Earn’s personal growth (or lack thereof) and his life, which seems to consist of one obstacle after another. “I just keep losing,” Earn tells a wise stranger on a city bus. Yet if Atlanta maintains its careful balance of laughs and gritty reality, the show could well prove to be a winner.

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FX Series "Atlanta" Is Like the Black "Master of None"

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The Black Man Whose Killing Sparked Milwaukee Riots Had Bipolar Disorder

by MarcellaEstell Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sylville Smith, the 23-year-old black man whose shooting by police sparked riots in Milwaukee earlier this month, suffered from bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder, according to his mother, Mildred Haynes. Smith had chosen not to take medication, Haynes told me, because he thought that admitting to mental illness would impede his ability to get a concealed-carry license. “He didn’t want to be disabled because he wanted a gun,” she told me. Her son had been shot twice in the past, and robbed four times, Haynes said. He wanted the weapon to protect himself.

Wisconsin is a concealed-carry state. Applicants who have been committed for treatment for mental illness or drug dependency are barred from receiving a permit, but people are not required to undergo a mental health evaluation when they apply. Haynes earlier told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that her son had, in fact, obtained a permit. Police officials have said the gun in Smith’s possession at the time of his death was stolen from a home in a nearby town.

In our interview, Haynes also told me that Smith had an Individualized Education Program (IEP) in elementary and high school, a specialized plan for students with learning disabilities, mental health issues, or other impairments. He had problems with comprehension and understanding, she said, and he spent time in special-education classes from elementary school onward. He also was suspended from school for behavior related to his condition.

Smith was shot by a Milwaukee police officer earlier this month while fleeing from a traffic stop. According to the official account, the officer chased Smith, who turned toward the cop holding a gun. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said body camera footage of the incident, which has not been released, confirms the police account. The department has not publicly identified the officer, but Milwaukee residents have been spreading his name and, in some cases, home address on social media—the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says it has confirmed that this officer was the shooter.

Other recent shootings by police have involved subjects with a mental illness. Korryn Gaines, killed by Baltimore County police officers during a standoff earlier this month, had “developmental and behavioral injuries,” depression, and mood swings due to childhood lead poisoning, according to a lawsuit filed against her former landlord. In July, a health worker was inexplicably shot in North Miami after an officer took aim at an autistic patient the victim cared for. The officer, according to the police, mistook the toy car the patient was holding for a gun.

A report by the Treatment Advocacy Center last December found that 1 in 4 police encounters involve a person with mental illness, and that people with mental health problems are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than are people who lack such problems.

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The Black Man Whose Killing Sparked Milwaukee Riots Had Bipolar Disorder

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Donald Trump Made a Chart, and It’s Totally Wrong

by KatriceDickey Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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The world is getting really hot. The first six months of 2016 was the warmest January-to-June on record, according to NASA. Last year was the hottest year on record. This year will almost certainly be hotter. Eighteen of the 20 warmest years on record have occurred in the past two decades. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia,” writes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—a UN-affiliated body that includes the world’s leading climate scientists. These scientists are 95 percent certain that humans are the “dominant” cause of the warming.

Here’s a NASA chart showing what all of this looks like:

But Donald Trump has a chart of his own (sort of). The real estate mogul was in South Florida last week, and a Miami Herald reporter asked him about one of the greatest threats facing the region: sea level rise. “I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change,” Trump responded. “There could be some impact, but I don’t believe it’s devastating impact.”

The world’s temperature, Trump insisted, isn’t doing anything unusual. “No, I would say that it goes up, it goes down,” he said, moving his hand up and down like a wave. “I think it’s very much like this over the years.”

It’s worth taking a moment to watch him do this in the video above. Think of Trump’s hand-waving as an attempt to chart historical temperature data. Now compare that to NASA’s chart, which shows what the climate is actually doing.

Trump, of course, is fully aware of the scientific consensus on global warming. He just thinks it’s all part of a grand conspiracy of lying scientists:

Trump returned to his completely wrong argument moments later. “You’ve had a change in weather patterns, and you’ve had it for many years,” he said. “You know, many years ago—I believe it was in the 1920s—they talked about the phenomenon of global cooling. They thought the planet was getting cooler. Now they think the planet is getting warmer.”

“I have a feeling, it’s sort of this,” added Trump, making the wave motion with his hand once more. “But nobody knows for sure.”

You can watch the full Miami Herald interview with Trump below:

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Donald Trump Made a Chart, and It’s Totally Wrong

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Why Did Black Lives Matter and the NAACP Call for an End to More Charter Schools?

by OnitaKXCUdkj Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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A few weeks ago, the Movement for Black Lives, the network that also includes Black Lives Matter organizers, released its first-ever policy agenda. Among the organization’s six demands and dozens of policy recommendations was a bold education-related stance: a moratorium on both charter schools and public school closures. Charters, the agenda argues, represent a shift of public funds and control over to private entities. Along with “an end to the privatization of education,” the Movement for Black Lives organizers are demanding increased investments in traditional community schools and the health and social services they provide.

The statement came several weeks after another civil rights titan, the NAACP, also passed a resolution, calling for a freeze on the growth of charter schools. The NAACP had equated charters with privatization in previous resolutions, but this year’s statement—which will not become policy until the National Board meeting in the fall—represents the strongest anti-charter language to date, according to Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor of education leadership and education chair of the NAACP’s California State Conference. “The NAACP is really concerned about unregulated growth of charter schools, and says it’s time to pause and take stock,” says Vasquez Heilig, who posted a copy of the resolution on his blog.

Such policy positions come at a time when parents, legislators, and philanthropists across the country—from Boston to Philadelphia to Los Angeles—are embroiled in fierce debates over the role of charters, particularly in poor, urban areas where most of these schools have been growing. Since 2000, the number of charters more than tripled, from about 1.7 percent to 6.2 percent of public schools.

Charter proponents—including prominent black educators like Secretary of Education John King Jr., Geoffrey Canada, and Steve Perry—argue that legislators need to continue this momentum for “choice” and competition among schools, citing the high test scores and college acceptance letters that many charter schools deliver. “We should not have artificial barriers to the growth of charters that are good,” King told reporters at the recent annual National Association of Black Journalists–National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention, adding that “charters should be a part of the public school landscape and can be a driver of opportunity for kids.”

Skeptics counter that charter schools contribute to racial and socioeconomic segregation, and that high percentages of charter school students in poor, urban districts can also contribute to the fiscal stress and the downward spiral of the traditional schools. Throughout the country, Vasquez Heilig noted, state charter laws vary dramatically: Some charter schools find ways to exclude disadvantaged children; others are created with explicit commitment to serve the most disadvantaged students. Vasquez Heilig argued that a moratorium would allow the public to investigate current practices and promote those that work the best.

“It’s time to pause and investigate: Should there be so many entities that are allowed to open them?” he said. “If you are not an educator, should you be allowed to open a charter school? Is there a due process for parents who feel that their kids were pushed out? How do charters schools make decisions about firing and hiring? How do they spend public money?”

Here are some of the most significant concerns charter school critics have cited over the years:

Some charter schools practice “skimming.” There is growing evidence that some charters accept only the least difficult (and that means the least expensive to educate) students. Earlier this month, a report by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the public interest law firm Public Advocates found that 1 in 5 California charter schools practice restrictive admissions requirements or other exclusionary practices—even though charter schools are required by law to admit all students who wish to attend. Some of these practices included denying enrollment to students with lower grades or test scores; expelling students who struggle academically; or requiring students and parents to write essays and go through admission interviews.

Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles’ Center for Civil Rights Remedies also expressed similar concerns when they noticed a national pattern in their 2016 study: Some charters had both high test scores and very high suspension rates, they noted, prompting the authors of the report to conclude, “Although beyond the scope of this report, the possibility certainly exists that some charter schools are artificially boosting their test scores or graduation rates by using harsh discipline to discourage lower-achieving youth from continuing to attend.”

Meanwhile, traditional schools tend to educate students with greater challenges that cost more. One study in Philadelphia, for example, found that students with severe needs—those who have been in foster care, involved with the juvenile justice system, or whose families are on welfare—are concentrated in traditional public schools in Philadelphia. Traditional schools in Philadelphia also educate 10 percent more students living in poverty, 4 percent more English learners, and 2 percent more students with special needs.

Unregulated growth and lack of strong oversight. In June, the New York Times published a scathing investigation of Detroit’s school district, which has a bigger share of students in charters than any other city except New Orleans. Reporter Kate Zernike concluded, among many other findings, that insufficiently regulated growth—including too many agencies that are allowed to open new charter schools—contributed to a system with “lots of choice, with no good choice”:

The unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives. Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.

Other districts and states with high percentages of students in charter schools have come under similar criticism. In April, the general auditor of Pennsylvania published a report concluding that the state’s charter laws are the “worst in the US,” contributing to questionable financial practices in some charters in the district of Philadelphia, as well as fiscal woes in the state’s largest school district.

Unregulated explosion of charters drains money from traditional public schools. In most districts, per-pupil money follows students, but many expenses, such as building costs, salaries for teachers, and principals don’t go away when a student leaves for a charter school. Students in charter schools can also create extra costs. In Philadelphia, for example, the district has to pay for transportation for students attending charter schools that are often not in their neighborhood. The city also found that 30 percent of all charter students come from outside the district, but the city still has to pay for their education. As a result, a study by the Boston Consulting Group estimated that each new student in a charter school in Philadelphia creates as much as $7,000 in additional costs for the district.

Charter schools suspend more black students and children with disabilities. This year, UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies published a study that for the first time looked at the numbers of “out-of-school” suspensions for 5,250 charter schools and 95,000 public schools. The researchers found that while overall suspension rates have been going down since 2012, in charter schools, black students and students with disabilities were suspended at higher percentages in all grades than their peers in traditional schools. In middle and high schools, 12 percent more students with disabilities and 2.5 percent more black students were suspended in charters compared with noncharters.

Paying attention to this data is important, because researchers have found that being suspended is a strong indicator that a student will eventually drop out. And students who drop out are much more likely to end up in prison, becoming part of the “school-to-prison pipeline.” This issue disproportionately affects black students (in charter and noncharter schools), who are suspended at a rate four times greater than white students.

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Why Did Black Lives Matter and the NAACP Call for an End to More Charter Schools?

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Scientists May Have Found a Way to Stop Zika Cold

by Kirk7232xaxpr Posted on August 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mosquitoes may be small, but they pack a mean punch. Weighing in at a measly 2.5 milligrams, these buzzing arthropods are responsible for more deaths than snake bites, shark attacks, and murders combined. A whopping 725,000 people die each year from diseases transmitted by this common pest. Researchers have spent decades and millions of dollars fighting dengue, yellow fever, and chikungunya—dangerous viruses that female mosquitoes can spread in a single bite. Now—as scientists rev up efforts to tackle the worsening mosquito-borne Zika epidemic that’s rocked the Americas—some scientists are tapping into Earth’s oldest organic armies as they seek to wipe out these diseases.

In this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, journalist and author Ed Yong explores the emerging science of the microbiome—the trillions of tiny organisms that inhabit the bodies of humans and other animals. Along the way, he tells host Kishore Hari about Wolbachia—one of nature’s most successful land-based bacteria—and its potential to aid the fight against Zika and other mosquito-borne illnesses. Wolbachia, says Yong, has “tremendous promise in bringing tropical diseases to heal.”

Wolbachia is extremely versatile; it can infect more than 40 percent of all arthropod species, including spiders, insects, and mites. Research has shown that female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infected with the bacteria are unable to transmit common viruses, including Zika and dengue. And because Wolbachia passes from a female mosquito to her offspring, it could spread easily through a wild population. That means releasing a small batch of mosquitoes infected with the bacteria could help eradicate mosquito-borne diseases in a potentially short amount of time, says Yong. For a mosquito whose global range spans six continents—and includes a large chunk of the United States, the impact on global public health could be substantial. You can listen to the full interview below:

Despite years of research, treatments for many mosquito-borne illnesses is limited. Clinical trials for a Zika vaccine are underway, but researchers don’t expect one to be available to the public for at least 18 months. “There are no vaccines,” Yong says. “There are no good treatments for dengue. We need better ways of controlling these diseases.” Field trials of Wolbachia-carrying mosquitos have been underway in Australia since 2011, and in Brazil, Indonesia, and Vietnam since 2014. The results have shown great promise, with no ill effect on people or the environment.

Yong argues that Wolbachia is safer and more cost-effective than traditional vector control methods, such as spraying with insecticides. And unlike insecticides, bacteria are self-perpetuating. And Wolbachia doesn’t appear to affect mosquito populations, so other insects and animals that feed on these pests won’t miss a meal. “It’s not about killing mosquitos,” Yong says, “it’s about turning them into dead ends for viruses.”

To learn more about the incredible world of the microbiome, you can check out Yong’s new book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Scientists May Have Found a Way to Stop Zika Cold

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The Border Patrol Is in Chaos. Can Its New Chief Make a Difference?

by YAZSammy65 Posted on July 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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A new chief took over the US Border Patrol this month, and for the first time in 92 years, it isn’t someone who rose through the ranks. Mark Morgan—a former FBI official who once specialized in intelligence and counterterrorism—has stepped in to lead the scandal-plagued group once described as “America’s most out-of-control law enforcement agency.”

Predictably, Morgan’s hiring has caused a stir among Border Patrol agents, who expected one of their own to take the helm. The Border Patrol union—which recently endorsed Donald Trump and has vocally opposed Obama’s immigration actions—urged Morgan to remember that those who protect the border every day are “the real experts in border security.” Joshua Wilson, a spokesman for the union’s San Diego chapter, asked the Los Angeles Times, “How can someone who has never made an immigration arrest in his career expect to lead an agency whose primary duty is to make immigration arrests?”

But Border Patrol critics have been pushing for a shakeup at the top for years. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the umbrella agency that encompasses the Border Patrol, is the largest law enforcement agency in the country with 44,000 armed officers, double the size of the FBI and larger than the New York Police Department. Since its rapid expansion in the wake of 9/11, critics have said that CBP’s training and capacity to investigate employee misconduct hasn’t kept up, leaving new recruits green and often unaccountable.

Here are some of the biggest complaints about the Border Patrol in recent years:

Corruption

Reports of corrupt Border Patrol agents have led journalists and politicians to question whether officers are doing enough to secure the borderlands against illegal drugs and gang activity. In fact, CBP as a whole has long been plagued by allegations of corruption within its ranks. A recent investigation by the Texas Tribune and Reveal found that at least 134 officials have pleaded guilty or been convicted in the last 12 years on corruption charges, often for allowing drugs and undocumented immigrants to cross into the United States. Fifty-two of those were Border Patrol agents.

For example, two brothers, both Border Patrol agents in San Diego, made more than $1 million smuggling 1,000-plus undocumented immigrants across the border, according to the Justice Department. Another agent in El Paso allegedly smuggled weapons, including high-powered pistols and flare guns, into the country with the help of his girlfriend. In Texas, yet another agent has been linked to a gruesome cartel-linked beheading. He now faces murder and organized crime charges. A CBP spokeswoman told Mother Jones that the agency plans to cooperate fully with that investigation. CBP also says that it does not tolerate corruption within its ranks and that the overwhelming majority of its officers and agents perform their duties with honor.

Abuse

Numerous reports have indicated that Border Patrol agents and other CBP employees often operate with impunity. The advocacy group American Immigration Council reported that more than 800 abuse complaints against CBP agents were filed between 2009 and 2012—and only 13 resulted in disciplinary action. In one case, a Border Patrol agent was accused of kicking a pregnant woman and causing her to miscarry. Another group of agents was accused of stripping an undocumented immigrant, leaving him naked in a cell, and calling him a “faggot” and a “homo.” Yet another allegedly forced female immigrants into sex. A CBS News investigation also found that sexual misconduct within CBP is significantly higher than at other federal law enforcement agencies. And in 2012, Border Patrol agent Luis Hermosillo was sentenced to eight years in prison for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a Mexican tourist. (CBP has said that it has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to sexual assault.)

To make matters worse, the agency has also been notoriously slow in processing complaints. Among those cases that were closed, CBP took an average of 122 days to come to a decision. The rest were often in limbo for more than a year. After R. Gil Kerlikowske became CBP commissioner in 2014, he created a CBP Integrity Advisory panel to assess the agency’s progress toward greater accountability. However, as recently as this March, the panel described the agency’s internal affairs team as “woefully understaffed” and its disciplinary system as “broken.” The panel recommended that CBP add 350 criminal investigators to look into employee misconduct. (The agency has made room in next year’s budget request for 30 new investigators and is seeking $5 million for cameras, including body cameras.)

Interestingly enough, Morgan has experience overseeing such internal probes: In 2014, he served as acting assistant commissioner for internal affairs at CBP, during which he launched an investigative unit dedicated to criminal and serious misconduct.

High-Profile Deaths

More than 50 people have died during altercations with CBP agents since 2010, including at least 19 US citizens. Several of those incidents involving the Border Patrol have gained nationwide attention. In 2011, Jesús Alfredo YanÌ&#131;ez Reyes was shot in the head after allegedly throwing rocks and a nail-studded board at Border Patrol agents attempting to take his companion into custody. The next year, a Mexican teenager named José Antonio Elena Rodríguez was walking along a street near his hometown when an agent on the other side of the border opened fire, killing Rodríguez. Another cross-border shooting case, in which unarmed teenager Sergio Adrian Hernandez Güereca was shot near El Paso, is currently being considered by the Supreme Court.

In 2013, the Police Executive Research Forum, a policy and research group focused on law enforcement agencies, issued a report criticizing CBP agents’ practice of shooting rock-throwers and vehicles that don’t pose an immediate threat to agents’ lives. The report noted that in some fatal incidents, the shots appeared to have been taken “out of frustration.” The agency eventually changed its use of force policy, but its initial response was to challenge the recommendations and suppress the report for weeks.

Since then, CBP has announced that its agents have been using force less frequently. The agency says on its website that last year, use-of-force incidents fell by roughly 26 percent. The American Civil Liberties Union, however, reports that the number of people hurt or killed during encounters with CBP agents actually increased during that same time period.

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The Border Patrol Is in Chaos. Can Its New Chief Make a Difference?

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Here’s a Cure for America’s Latest Zika Panic

by SamaraWaylen4 Posted on July 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Health officials have reported that four cases of Zika in Florida were likely spread from person to person by domestic mosquitoes. This is the moment Democratic politicians—and a few southern Republicans—have been warning about. The finding is bound to create a lot more scary rhetoric and dire headlines.

But here’s the thing: There’s no need to freak out—not yet, at least.

We knew this was going to happen. Back in May, I spoke with Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is leading US efforts to create a Zika vaccine. Here’s what he said:

It is likely that we will have restricted local transmission—small local outbreaks? My call would be that we will. Because we’ve had dengue and chikungunya, which are in the same regions of South and Central America and the Caribbean, and are transmitted by exactly the same mosquito. Historically we’ve had small local outbreaks of dengue in Florida and Texas, and a small local outbreak of chikungunya in Florida, which makes me conclude that sooner or later, we have going to have small local outbreaks of Zika—whether that’s five cases or 30—likely along the Gulf Coast.

This is exactly what we’re seeing. And why is this not a huge problem? Because we’re almost certainly not going to let it become one. Just as Fauci predicted, this likely outbreak—scientists haven’t actually found any infected mosquitoes yet—is highly isolated. According to the New York Times, the suspected “area of active transmission is limited to a one-square-mile area” near downtown Miami.

Aedes aegypti, the most likely culprit, is what University of California-Davis geneticist Greg Lanzaro calls a “lazy mosquito.” It doesn’t fly far. In its entire lifespan of two to three weeks, it might travel a few hundred meters, another expert told me. So it’s not coming for you. The mosquitoes that picked up the virus may be limited in to one small neighborhood.

Here’s what happens when we have such an outbreak: Mosquito-control workers and public health officials swarm all over it. Aegypti is an elusive little bugger, but you can bet that within that one square mile, eradication specialists and epidemiologists will be going house to house until they get to the bottom of this, figure out where the aegypti are breeding, and wipe them out.

Compared with, say, Puerto Ricans, Americans are also protected by our lifestyle. People in the Deep South tend to have air conditioning and screens on their windows. We also don’t usually store drinking water in open containers, as families often do in the tropics. We spend more time indoors, out of the heat. And all of this helps minimize contact with the mosquitoes. Consider that before Zika became a problem, as Fauci mentioned, we also had periodic outbreaks of dengue and Chikungunya, spread by the same mosquito. As I pointed out previously:

When was the last time you worried about Chikungunya or dengue—or malaria, for that matter? Those diseases are far scarier than Zika. WHO estimates (conservatively) that malaria infected at least 214 million people last year and killed 438,000, mostly children under five. Then there’s dengue, named from the Swahili phrase ki denga pepo (“a sudden overtaking by a spirit”)—which tells you something about how painful it is. Each year, dengue, also called “breakbone fever,” infects 50-100 million people, sickens about 70 percent of them—half a million very severely—and kills tens of thousands. Brazil, in addition to its Zika problem, is experiencing a record dengue epidemic. Health authorities there tallied 1.6 million cases and 863 deaths last year—and the 2016 toll is on track to be worse. Zika is seldom fatal.

This doesn’t mean we should ignore the latest news, of course. If you’re pregnant, especially in southern Florida, you’re probably already taking precautions to avoid mosquito bites, like using repellents and eliminating any standing water on your property. FDA officials are asking people in Miami-Dade and Broward counties to refrain from giving blood until we know what’s going on. But most Americans, even most southerners, have little reason to freak out.

Only one of the six scientists I interviewed was concerned that Zika might take off in the continental United States. “You would never see Zika virus, Chikungunya virus, or dengue virus sweep across the country the way West Nile did, even in the regions where these mosquitoes are,” UC-Davis epidemiologist Chris Barker told me. “Because that’s just not how it works in our country.”

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Here’s a Cure for America’s Latest Zika Panic

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GOP Convention Protesters Clash With Alex Jones, Police

by MaryellPrada Posted on July 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tensions flared in downtown Cleveland Tuesday afternoon following a day of peaceful protests and lively debate among various political groups gathered in the city’s Public Square. After a near-brawl between conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and a group of self-proclaimed communists, police cleared the square, which has been the site of many rallies and speeches during the Republican National Convention. A smaller group of protesters then led police on a chase through the streets around the convention.

The incidents represented the first major conflicts between protesters and police in Cleveland this week.

Shortly before 4 p.m. local time, a group of communists were on a set of stairs at the edge of the square debating some supporters of Donald Trump, according to Pat Mahoney, one of the communists. Mahoney said he was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a leftist workers’ organization.

“We were singing, and all I heard was someone saying, ‘Communists,'” Mahoney told Mother Jones. He added that Jones “tried to come up the stairs, and pushed us back, and then he shoulder-checked us, and that’s when the melee went in.”

Jones, an Austin-based radio host and Trump ally who is best know for his 9/11 conspiracy theories, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

As the situation began to spiral out of control, police converged on the group and, along with Jones’ private security guards, surrounded Jones. They ushered him through the crowd and across the square and then loaded him into the back of an SUV that was quickly surrounded by protesters. Police cleared space around the car before it sped away.

Mahoney and his group have been participating in marches and protesting against Trump in the area surrounding the convention since it began on Monday. He said everything up until that point had been peaceful.

“We did this yesterday, and we came out here, and we were just talking with people and having discourse,” Mahoney said. “There was good discourse. There’s plenty of people here who are conservative that we talked to yesterday and we had good discourse. Sometimes it got heated, but it was never like, ‘Oh, I’m going to kill you!”

“Forty-five minutes before the melee happened it was awesome down here,” said Gabe, another man standing with Mahoney, who declined to provide his last name. “Positive atmosphere. It was great.”

After the dust-up, police flooded the square, quickly forming lines that divided it into four quadrants. The police then gradually cleared the square. Several hundred people began chanting and yelling at the police.

About an hour after police cleared the square and tensions calmed, a small group of protesters who were milling around the area broke off from the other demonstrators and were immediately followed by dozens of police. The police and protesters clashed at one point when police tried to block some of the demonstrators from rejoining the rest of the group.

No arrests were made, according to the City of Cleveland Joint Information Center, and the protesters ran off down another street and were followed by police.

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GOP Convention Protesters Clash With Alex Jones, Police

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