ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 241

Angelenos celebrate first ‘Secular Day of the Dead’

By Aaron Schrank

The Day of the Dead holiday is rooted in Mexican indigenous tradition and closely tied to the Catholic Church’s All Souls’ Day, but one local celebration was explicitly religion-free.

About 50 people turned out Thursday for Los Angeles’ first “Secular Day of the Dead” at La Fonda Mexican restaurant in Koreatown.

“Remembering our deceased loved ones is not the sole territory of religions, and it’s part of who we are as a species,” said Christine Jones, with Atheists United, who helped organized the event. “We all need to feel like we can remember the people that we love.”

Jones is Latina and was raised Catholic by her Mexican-American mother. Now an atheist, she wanted an event where the growing number of Hispanics who don’t believe in God could celebrate an important cultural holiday without prayer or religious dogma.

“For me, this is a way to re-embrace a tradition I belong to,” Jones said.

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US Supreme Court allows historic kids’ climate lawsuit to go forward

By Emma Marris

A landmark climate-change lawsuit brought by young people against the US government can proceed, the Supreme Court said on 2 November. The case, Juliana v. United States, had been scheduled to begin trial on 29 October in Eugene, Oregon, in a federal district court. But those plans were scrapped last month after President Donald Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene and dismiss the case.

The plaintiffs, who include 21 people ranging in age from 11 to 22, allege that the government has violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by failing to prevent dangerous climate change. They are asking the district court to order the federal government to prepare a plan that will ensure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls below 350 parts per million by 2100, down from an average of 405 parts per million in 2017.

By contrast, the US Department of Justice argues that “there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’” — as the Juliana plaintiffs assert.

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Just Made Its First Close Pass by the Sun

By Meghan Bartels

One of humanity’s newest spacecraft faced a harrowing test late Monday night (Nov. 5), darting just 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) of the surface of our sun.

That spacecraft is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which launched in August with a daring mission to study the star that shapes our lives. To do so, it is flying a course of 24 close loops around the sun, the first of which reached what scientists call perihelion — the moment of closest approach — Monday at 10:28 p.m. EST (0328 GMT Nov. 6).

But there won’t be much of anything to watch or listen to during the daring approach, even for the scientists and engineers who run the mission.

All throughout the few days surrounding perihelion, the spacecraft is essentially on its own. That’s because the sun is such a powerful source of radio-wave light that it drowns out the spacecraft’s communications with Earth.

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Asia Bibi stuck in Pakistani prison over death fears

By Sophia Saifi

A Pakistani Christian woman whose death sentence for blasphemy charges was commuted last week is trapped in a prison that has been converted into a safe house, a source with direct knowledge of the facility told CNN on Monday.

Asia Bibi, a mother of five from Punjab province, is unable to leave the facility over fears that her life is in jeopardy, the source added.

In newly released details, CNN has learned that the Pakistani army and intelligence services have jurisdiction over the jail and are in charge of her safety, the source said.

Extra surveillance cameras have been installed at the converted jail in recent days and any individuals entering or leaving the location are searched, including those who are charged with preparing Bibi’s food, according to the police source.

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Here Are All the Non-Religious Candidates Running for State and Federal Office

By Hemant Mehta

How many non-religious candidates are on ballots all across the country on Tuesday?

With tremendous help from the Freethought Equality Fund PAC and the Center for Freethought Equality— both of which are affiliated with the American Humanist Association — we now have an answer to that question.

There are 140 non-religious candidates vying for seats in state legislatures. 31 are running for re-election.

15 non-religious candidates or members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus are running for federal office, 10 of whom are running for re-election.

None of them are Republicans.

Who are they? Which states do they represent? All of that information is now compiled in this spreadsheet, and I’ll be tracking every election tomorrow in real time. (I’ll also be posting about some victories separately on this site.)

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Astronomers Have Detected One of The Oldest Stars in The Entire Universe

By Michelle Starr

Whenever we hear of stars discovered that formed just after the Big Bang, they’re very far away, in the far reaches of the visible Universe. But now astronomers have spotted something new: a star that’s around 13.5 billion years old, right here in our own Milky Way galaxy.

It’s called 2MASS J18082002–5104378 B, and it could be one of the oldest stars in the Universe.

The smoking gun is its metal content. In the very early Universe, there were no metals. They were forged in the hearts of the first generations of stars, which spewed them forth into space upon their violent messy deaths.

This material was then mixed up in the formation of new stars, with each subsequent generation growing richer and richer in metals. The younger the star, the greater the metal content, or metallicity. (The Sun is around 100,000 generations from the Big Bang.)

2MASS J18082002–5104378 B has the lowest metallicity of any star ever discovered – only about 10 percent of the metallicity of Earth. Its discovery could mean that the star-dense disc of our galaxy is much older than the 8-10 billion years previously estimated.

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Supreme Court will take case on constitutional challenge to Maryland’s Peace Cross

By Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether a 40-foot cross in the median of a busy suburban Maryland highway is a secular memorial to those who died during World War I or an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.

The Peace Cross, made of granite and cement, was built in 1925 as a tribute to local men who died during World War I. It was paid for by local families, businesses and the American Legion. But the giant cross sits on a piece of land that has been owned since 1961 by a state commission that pays for its maintenance and upkeep.

The challenge to the 93-year-old cross began with the American Humanist Association, a nonprofit atheist organization that has filed similar lawsuits throughout the country. In September, the group won a similar case in which it sought the removal of a 34-foot-tall cross displayed in a city-owned park in Florida.

The high court has sent mixed messages when it comes to public displays of religion, allowing some monuments with religious content to stand while rejecting others.

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Pre-Election Billboard Ads Portray Donald Trump as Second Coming of Jesus

By Bo Gardiner

Still thinking about not voting on Tuesday because you’re annoyed with politics and the system? Considering casting some type of protest vote? Maybe this new digital billboard will scare you into voting to fight Trumpism. Appearing in at least two states, the ad suggests Donald Trump is literally the Second Coming of Jesus.

Multiple independent reports on social media point to at least two billboards carrying this message — one in St. Louis, Missouri and another outside Waco, Texas. It seems likely there are more out there.

A Facebook group, created on Oct. 9th, called “Make the Gospel Great Again,” is taking credit for the billboards:

This is one of our efforts, yes! We are nationwide, bringing the good news of God re-taking his country, and making it a stronger, more Christian place… We are a group of evangelicals from both Baptist and non-denominational backgrounds who love Jesus and the Bible. We don’t have an office or website other than this facebook page. It’s sparse, but we moved up our plans for the election this year. We expect liberals and other non-Christians to attack our faith and mock us. They will stop at nothing to deceive believers and overthrow our President so we are fine with this.

 

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Oumuamua and the Alien Hypothesis

By Steven Novella

One year ago, in October 2017, astronomers detected the first confirmed interstellar visitor to our solar system – an asteroid dubbed Oumuamua. The name is Hawaiian for “scout”, as if the asteroid is a messenger from a distant system. A Hawaiian name was chose because the object was discovered by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) in Hawaii. Determining that Oumuamua was an interstellar object was not difficult – the determination was based on its trajectory. It was traveling really fast, too fast for any object originating from our own system. It’s velocity would also take it out of our system – it was moving too fast to be captured by the gravity of our sun.

All of that is cool enough, but astronomers carefully analysing the trajectory of Oumuamua discovered (and published their findings in June 2018) that its acceleration could not be explained entirely by gravity. Some force was pushing, ever-so-slightly, on the object. This acceleration could be explained by outgassing, if there were any volatiles on Oumuamua that were heating up as it got closer to the sun. These gases would be like tiny rocket engines. Observations of the object did not detect any comet-like tail, which is why it was thought to be an asteroid. But if this new observation were correct, then it would have the ices and gases associated with a comet.

Oumuamua was discovered 40 days after its closest approach to the sun, when it was already on its way out of our solar system. At this point it should have been slowing down a bit from the pull of the sun’s gravity, but instead it was speeding up slightly. This could be explained by outgassing caused by heat from the sun.

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The Galactic Collision That Reshaped Our Milky Way

By Shannon Hall

Roughly 10 billion years ago the Milky Way—then a smaller galaxy that did not contain its current spiral structure or diffuse halo of surrounding stars—suffered a massive head-on collision that shook it to its very core.

That is when our galaxy’s gravity pulled a smaller companion, roughly one quarter its mass, into a dangerous dance: One where the dwarf galaxy plunged into and out of the Milky Way’s disk, oscillating back and forth until it was finally swallowed whole. Although our galaxy survived, it has never been the same. The collision scrambled the orbits of stars in its disk, making it much puffier, and sent alien stars flying all around the Milky Way, thus building much of its halo. The smash up also funneled new gas toward the galactic center, adding fuel that mixed and mingled with the Milky Way’s existing reservoirs to form new generations of stars.

Over time the dwarf galaxy faded away, but the scars from its collision never really disappeared—not that they have been easy to find. Astronomers, who have long thought the Milky Way likely grew from a vast number of merging dwarf galaxies, have struggled to uncover the signs of the largest mergers—until today. Now a new paper published in Nature provides proof—or something close to it. “It’s like uncovering a fossil or an archaeological piece of evidence for how the galaxy got started,” says James Bullock, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, who is unaffiliated with the new research.

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