ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 167

Atheist parents take primary school to court as they say assembly prayers breach children’s human rights

By Camilla Turner Atheist parents are taking their children’s primary school to the High Court, claiming that biblical re-enactments and praying in assembly are a breach of their human rights. Lee Harris and his wife Lizanne have won permission to bring a judicial review against Oxford Diocesan Schools Trust (ODST) after arguing that Burford Primary …

How Astronomers Missed the Massive Asteroid That Just Whizzed Past Earth

By Yasemin Saplakoglu A large asteroid just whizzed past our planet — and astronomers weren’t expecting it. Ranging in size from 187 to 427 feet (57 to 130 meters) wide, the space rock named 2019 OK snuck up on us Thursday morning (July 25). It swung as close as 45,000 miles (73,000 kilometers) from Earth, …

Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments

By David Cyranoski A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans …

Unmarked buildings, quiet legal help for accused priests

By Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman, and Garance Burke The visiting priests arrived discreetly, day and night. Stripped of their collars and cassocks, they went unnoticed in this tiny Midwestern town as they were escorted into a dingy warehouse across from an elementary school playground. Neighbors had no idea some of the dressed-down clergymen dining at …

Have an STI? This infamous evangelical preacher wants to sell you a (fake) cure.

By Gwendolyn Smith Jim Bakker — yes, the former host of the Praise the Lord (PTL) club with his then wife Tammy Faye Bakker who was busted for fraud and sexual misconduct in the late 1980s and early 1990s — has been making a comeback over the last few years, combining hard-right religious conservatism with …

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Holds Up Around a Supermassive Black Hole

By Charles Q. Choi By analyzing the extraordinarily strong gravitational pull of the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way on a star near it, astronomers have shown that Einstein’s ideas about space and time still hold true as the best description yet of how gravity works. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity …

Lebanese pop band faces death threats over ‘blasphemous’ song

By Tim Fitzsimons Lebanon’s best-known pop band, Mashrou’ Leila, is facing death threats from local Christian groups who say one of its songs is “blasphemous.” Each summer, Byblos — the 7,000-year-old city in Lebanon that gave birth to the modern alphabet — plays host to the Byblos International Festival, which lights up a massive amphitheater on …

Who is the Museum of the Bible really for? Scholarly book examines multiple problems

By Yonat Shimron To say that biblical scholars have been critical of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is an understatement. Since it opened in late 2017, the pet project of  Oklahoma billionaire and outspoken evangelical Steve Green, CEO of Hobby Lobby, has been accused of privileging the Protestant Bible over other versions, …

Inside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear’

By Will E. Young In my first week as editor in chief of the Champion, Liberty University’s student-run weekly, our faculty adviser, Deborah Huff, ordered me to apologize. I’d noticed that our evangelical school’s police department didn’t publish its daily crime log online, as many other private university forces did, so I searched elsewhere for …

What Tick Saliva Does to the Human Body

By Sarah Zhang José Ribeiro was 33 when he got his first tick bite, in the 1980s, and he remembers it as a momentous occasion. He had recently started studying tick saliva, a complex molecular cocktail that ticks inject into their hosts to inhibit pain, prevent blood clotting, and suppress the immune system—all so the …