ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 197

World Health Organization decides against declaring Ebola emergency as outbreak worsens

By Amy Maxmen Despite a spike in Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over the past few weeks, the World Health Organization (WHO) says that the outbreak there is not a public health emergency of international concern. The WHO decided against declaring the emergency on 12 April because the outbreak is …

Republicans’ Near Total Abortion Ban Is Dead in South Carolina—for Now

By Auditi Guha South Carolina Republicans’ near total ban on abortion likely won’t pass through the legislature this year, advocates told Rewire.News. Introduced in January, the “South Carolina Fetal Heartbeat Protection From Abortion Act” is an attempt to criminalize abortion six weeks into pregnancy, before many know they are pregnant. The legislation is part of a nationwide GOP effort to …

Mike Pence’s Upcoming Commencement at a Christian Univ. is Already Causing Chaos

By Hemant Mehta A week after Mike Pence delivers a commencement address at Liberty University (where else?), he’ll be giving another one at Taylor University, a small Christian school in Upland, Indiana. That doesn’t sit well with everyone at the school, though. They have no problem with an evangelical Christian speaker, of course, but unlike Liberty, they have …

Why Are There Religious Exemptions for Vaccines?

By Ginia Bellafante This week the City of New York declared a public health emergency because of a measles outbreak that had been escalating since the fall in ultra-Orthodox communities in Brooklyn and finally reached the point of crisis. In December the Health Department had made an effort to contain the disease, ordering yeshivas and child …

What a Year in Space Did to Scott Kelly

By Marina Koren In the debate over whether human beings should set off to other worlds beyond Earth, one of the most compelling cons is this: Our bodies don’t like it. Few people know this better than Scott Kelly, the NASA astronaut who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station from 2015 to …

Moon Landing by Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Ends in Crash

By Kenneth Chang A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed into the moon on Thursday. “We had a failure in the spacecraft,” Opher Doron, the general manager of Israel Aerospace Industries’ space division, which collaborated on building the spacecraft, said …

Women Sexually Abused By Catholic Nuns Speak Up: She Told Me It Was ‘God’s Love’

By Carol Kuruvilla and Jessica Blank The predator nun walked into Trish Cahill’s life straight out of the blue, on a busy summer day in the late 1960s. Cahill was a teenager back then, wire thin with long, chestnut brown hair framing her face. She was babysitting her cousins in Glen Rock, New Jersey, and …

Ex-Pope Benedict XVI breaks silence on church’s sex abuse crisis and blames the sexual revolution and liberals

By Delia Gallagher Pope Benedict XVI has broken his silence in a rare essay on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, claiming that it was caused in part by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the liberalization of the church’s moral teaching. In the 11-page analysis published today in a German magazine …

That image of a black hole you saw everywhere today? Thank this grad student for making it possible

By Michelle Lou and Saeed Ahmed Imagine trying to take a photo of an orange that’s on the moon with your smartphone. It seems impossible. That’s what it was like for scientists trying to capture an image of a black hole in space. Despite the tall order, an international team of more than 200 researchers …

Is Dark Matter Fuzzy?

By Mara Johnson-Groh Physicists have long sought to uncloak dark matter and get an actual look at the mysterious substance that makes up a quarter of the universe. One idea for what’s hiding beneath the cloak of invisibility? Many tiny, fuzzy particles that behave like one gigantic particle. But the most recent hunt for such fuzzy, ultralight particles, …