Another Hovind sliming his way across the country

Kent Hovind may be rotting in jail, but his son Eric is continuing the family tradition of lying to the public. Eric Hovind is going to be here in Minnesota on 28 October,
giving a talk at the Russian Evangelical Christian Church in Shakopee. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it, but this could be interesting. Not Hovind — I understand he’s just doing his daddy’s same old patented high-speed babble with corn-pone jokes — but these new Russian evangelicals have been in the news lately, and have been exhibiting a particularly virulent strain of hate and ignorance. I know nothing about this particular Shakopee church, but I’d be curious to find out if there’s any connection to Watchmen on the Walls. If anyone goes, let me know.

Uh, and if you’re gay, you might not want to go. Just in case.

It’s all just metaphor … and toys

Weird ol’ Target is now selling talking Jesus toys. Isn’t there something in the Bible about idols? Isn’t it turning their divine prophet into a cheap gimmick, literally? It seems to me that the real blasphemies seem to emanate from the Christians themselves, rather than us atheists.

It might be a useful toy for breaking indoctrination, though, when the kiddies discover that Jesus has “Made in China” imprinted on the sole of his foot, and that they can play games that have him shacking up with Barbie. And Ken.

This is the Hitchens I like

The debate between Hitchens and McGrath is well worth listening to. Hitchens is cogent and sharp; he makes exactly the same points about the fundamental immorality of religion that he made at the FFRF convention, but in less time, and with fewer distracting digressions. He’s on fire. Of course, he also doesn’t get sucked into anti-Islamic fervor, but addresses the deplorable universal qualities of religion.

McGrath is simply awful. This is his argument in summary:

  • I was an atheist once, but I got better

  • Being religious has health benefits

  • It’s the fringe fanatics that give religion a bad name

  • Here, I have some tedious praise for Jesus that you’ve all heard before

It’s dreadful laid out like that, but it’s worse hearing him plummily drone on about it all. Even worse, Hitchens specifically asked him to state his beliefs — does he truly believe that a human sacrifice two thousand years ago relieves him of certain moral responsibilities? — and he doesn’t touch that one. All he had to offer was murky blathering.

Hitchens asked some clearly worded questions about the meaning of the central events of Christianity, and McGrath didn’t answer any of them. Clearly, the man needs to be wrestled into a corner, given one sharply worded question, and told to simply answer it … something I doubt the obfuscatory babbler can do. We saw the same thing in the outtakes from The Root of All Evil? — the reason the McGrath interview didn’t make the final version was obvious. He’s dead boring and waffly.

By the way, as it turns out, I’ve volunteered to enter a debate at the U of Minnesota on 7 February, on the compatibility of religion and science, with a Templeton-award winner, Loyal Rue. I don’t think I’m going to be as lucky as Hitchens in getting a pompous, tedious cloud of gas for an opponent.

But what about a Post-Republican reality?

Perhaps you are interested in knowing how to survive the end of civilization in an alternate universe. Or perhaps you’d like to know how to take advantage of the apocalypse to shape this universe into an alternate reality. Then you are part of the rarefied market for A SteamPunk’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse. There are actually some useful suggestions in there for any cultural upheaval.

(via Our Descent Into Madness)

TRPV1 Ion Channels

I noticed that PZ posted one of our take-home exam questions on Pharyngula and so I decided to make an entry with my answer (I okayed this with PZ first although he did warn me of the certainty of harsh reader criticism). The question referred us to a recent article in Nature about TRPV1 ion channels and asked us to describe TRPV1 ion channels and the testing that was done on them.

The transient receptor potential cation channel (TRPV1), also referred to as vanilloid receptor subtype 1, is a ligand-gated cation channel (2). This means that the channel contains organic molecules that can form covalent bonds with positive ions and is thus operated chemically. TRPV1 ion channels are non-specific and can be found on TRPV1 nociceptor (pain sensing) neurons in the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system. It may be related to thermal hyperalgesia (abnormally increased sense of pain) in both regions (2). The TRVP1 ion channel The opening in the TRPV1 ion channel was determined experimentally to be large enough to pass a 452 Da (1 Dalton = 1.657×10-24 g) dye molecule through (1). The TRPV1 ion channel, when opened by the proper agnostic, can allow anesthetic molecules to be introduced into nociceptic neurons, making it an important channel some regional anesthesics.

Most anesthetics are hydrophobic, cell membrane permeable, and function by blocking sodium ion channels on the inside of the cell. This blocks sensory nerves as well as motor and autonomic nerves (1). The main idea behind Binshtok, Bean, and Woolf’s experiment was to formulate an anesthetic that blocks the pain of sensory nerves but not motor and autonomic functions. They sited multiple sources stating that when QX-314, a charged derivative of lidocane, is introduced to the inside of a nerve cell it can inhibit sodium channels and produce analgesia. QX-314 was experimentally found to have no significant effect on nociceptor neurons externally. QX-314 is impermeable to nerve cell membranes but with a mass of 263Da is small enough to fit through TRPV1 ion channels. Capsaicin is a TRPV1 agonist, meaning it has an affinity for TRPV1 channel receptors and can affect them physiologically, in this case causing them to open.

Binshtok, Bean, and Woolf observed the membrane potential changes of rat dorsal root ganglia of various diameters exposed to QX-314 (an anesthetic), capsaicin (a TRPV1 agonist), and a mixture of the two. The voltage clamp method was used to determine whether or not the neuronic sodium nerve channels were inhibited and also which nerves channels were inhibited on. The voltage clamp method involves two wires placed in the axoplasm of a nerve cell. The first wire measures potential across the membrane and the second wire propagates electrical current (3). The voltage across the membrane is controlled while the ionic current is measured. Using this method, they found that QX-314 and capsaicin applied together could block the generation of action potentials (1). This effect can be attributed to neuronic sodium channel inhibition. If sodium channels are blocked then the depolarization phase of the action potential cannot take place and a wave of depolarization, a nervous signal, cannot be propagated along the neuron (3). The voltage clamp method used in this experiment involved blocking potassium and calcium ion currents so that the sodium ion current could be recorded by itself.

Binshtok, Bean, and Woolf concluded that neither QX-314 nor capsaicin produced significant effects on nociceptor neurons when applied individually but almost entirely block nociceptor sodium channel function when applied together. The brilliant idea behind all of this is that, if QX-314, an anesthetic, is introduced along with capsaicin, a TRPV1 agnostic, it will only travel through the TRPV1 ion channels of nociceptor neurons. Sodium channels in nociceptor neurons will be blocked while other neurons that lack TRPV1 will remain unaffected. The end result is an anesthetic that blocks painful sensation but does not compromise autonomic and motor nerve function.

References:
1. Alexander M. Binshtok, Bruce P. Bean, & Clifford J. Woolf. Inhibition of nociceptors by TRPV1-mediated entry of impermeant sodium channel blockers. Nature. 4 October 2007. Vol449 pp607-610.

2. M.Cui, P.Honore, C.Zhong, D.Gauvin, J.Mikusa, G.Hernandez, P.Chandran, A.Gomtsyan, B.Brown, E.K.Bayburt, K.Marsh, B.Bianchi, H.McDonald, W.Niforatos, T.R.Neelands, R.B.Moreland, M.W.Decker, C.H.Lee, J.P.Sullivan, C.R.Faltynek. TRPV1 receptors in the CNS play a key role in broad-spectrum analgesia of TRPV1 antagonists. 13 September 2006. Neuroscience Research. Global Pharmaceutical Research and Development. Abbott Laboratories.

3. Elaine N. Marieb. Human Anatomy and Physiology. Sixth Edition. Pearson, Benjamin, Cummings. 2004.

Depressing stuff from my university

UMM recently hosted the University of Minnesota board of regents, and we got a look at the status of the whole U of M system. It’s not a happy story. We have an administration with ambitious goals (that’s good), but they seem to be a bit divorced from reality — they want to turn us into one of the top three public research universities in the world. That sounds like a great 50 year plan, but I’d rather see an ambitious and feasible 5-year goal, myself.

One of my colleagues at the Twin Cities branch campus has analyzed some of the statistics. The most telling one to me is that, despite our goals, our increase in research spending is the least of all of our competitors — we aren’t keeping up. It’s fine to be at the tail end of the pack in a race and plan to pick up your pace to win, but to talk big while slowing down does not give one much confidence.

Here’s a summary of the summary:

Is it really credible to continue on with this “ambitious aspiration” to “become one of the top three public research universities [in the world]?” Let’s admit we have some serious problems here and concentrate on fixing them. Let’s also commit to getting the University of Minnesota at least to the mid-point of the BigTen rankings outlined above. That will be a difficult enough task.

The ultimate problem is declining investment in education, both in higher ed and our source of students, the Minnesota public schools. Rather than touting grand dreams, it might be wiser of our administrators to highlight the deficiencies in the support our government is giving us, and get them to quit taking the UM system for granted.

Oh, and throwing money into stadiums doesn’t seem like the best use of our limited resources.