It’s good to be reminded every now and then that the human species can go extinct pretty much any minute – that’s certainly what happened to half the species on the planet 200 million years ago.
Massive volcanic eruptions were thought to have caused the mass extinction, and now new evidence has pinpointed these eruptions as occurring 201,564,000 years ago – exactly when half the planet’s species abruptly disappeared (at least that’s what the fossil record reflects. They may have all been abducted by aliens for all we know, but… no.)
The study, including Mohammed Et-Touhami from Morocco, lends new evidence to the tight chronology between the eruptions and extinction, further suggesting that the former caused the latter.
Fast forward through the millions of years that Young Earth advocates don’t believed ever happened, and we arrive to our modern world of mammals, cars, and alas, HIV. Being HIV-positive can cause significant cognitive deficits with time, but it now seems these may be reduced by using a steroid hormone called dehydroepiandrosterone – at least among cats.
A team of researchers, including Moroccan researcher Samir Ahboucha (Morocco’s on a roll this week!), found that giving this steroid to “FIV-infected cats” – an animal model of HIV infection – significantly reduced their cognitive and behavioural deficits.
Finally, if we can get away with it, most of us are unlikely to tell our bosses we screwed up if it means we’ll get a nasty mark on our record. It’s an understandable tendency that seems to be stopping healthcare providers in Lebanon from reporting mistakes due to the “culture of blaming rather than learning” that seems to be troubling hospitals there.
A survey of nearly 7000 healthcare providers from over half of Lebanon’s hospitals found that over 80% of them believed mistakes were held against them and recorded in their personal files, making them reluctant to report any mishaps – not a huge problem if you are the hospital’s accountant, but potentially a serious issue if you are a heart surgeon.
Beyond the hood
It’s been annoyingly called the “God particle”, but the “Higgs-like” particle that was discovered at CERN eight months ago is officially now just the “Higgs boson” – it’s already somewhat confirmed existence has been well, re-confirmed.
The positive identification came after researchers were able to examine how the discovered particle decayed into smaller particles – that is, two Z bosons, which in turn break down into two muons each – exactly as the Standard Model predicts.
That’s it for this week but stay tuned to next week’s roundup of what’s happening in the world of science in the Middle East and beyond!