A Plague of Worms on the Religious!

Once again the FT's Breaking News section comes up with gold. As with yesterday the nugget comes from  Phys org which reports that one is  more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by visiting a porn site.

According to the recently released Symantec report "Internet Security Threat Report" websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of "threats" that those featuring adult content. In fact porn are not in the top five of categories for vituses or other malware; porn is ranked tenth, and Symantec hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; basically it's not good for repeat business."

The report was based on information gathered last year by the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, which monitors cyber attack activity in more than 200 countries through its services and sensors. Symantec said that it blocked 5.5 billion attacks in 2011 in an increase of 81 percent from the prior year.

So there you have it. The lowlife that release viruses seem to have released a plague of worms on the Godly! It only remains to say that if you want to keep safe surfing go for porn rather than God!

Meanwhile in a Mexican cave…

For centuries a group of indigenous people asked their gods for bountiful rain by stunning the cave's fish with a natural plant toxin. Once the fish have succumbed, the Zoque people scoop them into baskets for eating. Live Science scientists have found that the practice has impacted on the fish's evolution.

Perhaps unsurprisingly those fish that are resistant to the anaesthesia survive to pass on their genes, while the others simply die

The religious ceremony is held in the Cueva del Azufre at the end of the dry season during the holy week before Easter. The Zoque grind up the toxic, carrot-shaped roots of the tropical barbasco plant and mix them with lime to form a paste, which they wrap in leaves. They place the bundles about 110 yards (100 meters) into the cave to poison its waters and anesthetize fish, which the Zoque believe are gifts from gods that inhabit the underworld. The collected fish supplement the meals of the Zoque until crops are ready for harvest.

Michael Tobler, an ecologist from Oklahoma State University Tobler and his colleagues were in the area investigating the Atlantic molly (Poecilia mexicana), to figure out how these fish made their way from the surface all the way underground. And once in the dark reaches of the cave, Tobler wondered how they survived in the cave system despite the presence of toxic hydrogen sulphde there.

They learned about the ceremony in 2007 and so to see whether it influenced the evolution of these fish, the researchers collected specimens from the annually poisoned waters as well as areas upstream that hadn't been affected by the ritual. They next placed barbasco root toxin into tanks holding the fish.

Fish exposed to the annual ritual indeed proved more resistant to the toxin than fish that lived elsewhere, able to swim in poisoned waters for roughly 50 percent longer. As such, the poison from the ceremony apparently has over time helped select fish that can tolerate it — fish that cannot get captured and killed by the Zoque.

Ironically the fish do not seem to be good eating: "We actually got to eat some of these cave fish," Tobler "They're not very good, by the way.”

Religion aiding evolution who’d a thunk it?