ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 247

Laurie Anderson’s VR installation flies you to the moon

By CNN

The moon has been receiving a lot of attention lately. From Elon Musk’s SpaceX trip around the moon — which recently signed on its first billionaire passenger — to NASA’s renewed plans for moon exploration, it seems we’re in a new lunar space race.

The latest exhibition at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, “The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space,” looks at how artists have been looking upward to Earth’s satellite — not only from a scientific point of view, but also to the moon as a cultural symbol imbued with different meanings.

“I was the first artist in residence at NASA,” said artist-musician Laurie Anderson, whose work, co-created with fellow mixed-media artist Hsin-Chien Huang, is one of the highlights of the exhibition. “For three years, I just was a fly on the wall at Mission Control in Houston, Jet Propulsion lab in Pasadena, the Hubble in Maryland. Artists have a different point of view and that should be represented.”

Anderson has never shied away from drawing upon science for technological advancements to use in her work, which often has a futuristic tone. Her 1981 self-directed video for the song “O Superman,” which brought her progressive aesthetic into pop culture, is no exception and cleverly shows Anderson’s fascination with technology.

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Percentage of young U.S. children who don’t receive any vaccines has quadrupled since 2001

By Lena H. Sun

A small but increasing number of children in the United States are not getting some or all of their recommended vaccinations. The percentage of children under 2 years old who haven’t received any vaccinations has quadrupled in the last 17 years, according to federal health data released Thursday.

Overall, immunization rates remain high and haven’t changed much at the national level. But a pair of reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about immunizations for preschoolers and kindergartners highlights a growing concern among health officials and clinicians about children who aren’t getting the necessary protection against vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles, whooping cough and other pediatric infectious diseases.

The vast majority of parents across the country vaccinate their children and follow recommended schedules for this basic preventive practice. But the recent upswing in vaccine skepticism and outright refusal to vaccinate has spawned communities of under-vaccinated children who are more susceptible to disease and pose health risks to the broader public.

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‘I love him so much I can hardly explain it’: Evangelical leaders praise Trump after pastor’s release

By Lorraine Woellert

When a Turkish court released American Andrew Brunson after two years of confinement, it was a profound moment for Christian evangelicals, who had made the pastor a symbol of religious persecution worldwide.

In Brunson’s case and others, they had prayed for deliverance. And President Donald Trump, they said, delivered.

Trump on Friday said there was “no deal at all” with Turkey to win Brunson’s release, but the administration had brought significant political and economic pressure to bear. In an unusual move, the administration had used a religious freedom law to target Turkish officials, the first time such economic sanctions had been brought against a NATO ally.

Again and again, evangelical activists say, the administration has made good on promises made to the faith voters who lifted Trump into office — a group he will sorely need to turn out again for his 2020 reelection bid.

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Latinx Humanist Alliance Launches to Support and Amplify Voices in the Community

By Hemant Mehta

The American Humanist Association announced today that they were launching a new arm of the organization called the Latinx Humanist Alliance in order to help bring together and amplify the voices of the 20% of U.S. Latinx people who have no religious affiliation.

The Latinx Humanist Alliance’s mission is to facilitate social justice activism among, expand the visibility of, and foster safe spaces for Latinx humanists. In service of their mission, the alliance will develop a speakers bureau, build a nationwide network of Latinx humanists, and advise and work alongside the AHA on social justice legislative advocacy.

Dr. Juhem Navarro-Rivera and Luciano Gonzalez, two people who have spent a lot of time writing about and discussing the issues unique to their community, will co-chair the group.

This group will join others that also receive resources from the AHA, including the Feminist Humanist Alliance, Black Humanist Alliance, and LGBTQ Humanist Alliance.

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Philadelphia Archbishop: ‘Joy and wholeness’ requires denying existence of LGBTQ Catholics

By Zack Ford

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has rejected the possibility that LGBTQ Catholics exist. The Catholic Church’s position on sexuality “is the only real path to joy and wholeness,” he insisted, even if young people see it as a barrier to connecting with the Church.

Chaput made the comments earlier this month as part of the Church’s Synod 2018 on Young People, The Faith and Vocational Discernment, a global assembly of bishops occurring all month. It was among the objections he voiced regarding how the synod was catering to the perspectives of young people (ages 18-29), insisting that if they feel disconnected from the Church, then the Church must redouble its efforts, rather than change to accommodate them.

A presentation at the pre-synodal meeting earlier this year included a reference to “LGBT youth” who wish to feel more closeness with the Church, including support from it. Though that language appears to have been removed from the subsequent documents, Chaput still objected that it had ever been used at all.

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Trump: Climate change scientists have ‘political agenda’

By the BBC

US President Donald Trump has accused climate change scientists of having a “political agenda” as he cast doubt on whether humans were responsible for the earth’s rising temperatures.

But Mr Trump also said he no longer believed climate change was a hoax.

The comments, made during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, come less than a week after climate scientists issued a final call to halt rising temperatures.

The world’s leading scientists agree that climate change is human-induced.

Last week’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the leading international body evaluating climate change – warned the world was heading towards a temperature rise of 3C.

Scientists say that natural fluctuations in temperature are being exacerbated by human activity – which has caused approximately 1C of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

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Medical Doctor: 90% of Goop’s “Wellness” Products Aren’t Supported by Science

By Hemant Mehta

Gwyneth Paltrow recently sat down for an interview with the BBC, and when the reporter pointed out that many of the products she sells on Goop are in the “area of pseudoscience,” she offered this jaw-dropping defense: “We disagree with that whole-heartedly.”

Paltrow also claimed she was met with resistance because she was trying to help women “empower” themselves… by selling them expensive crap with no scientific backing. Of course it’s pseudoscience. Jesus Christ, she sells jade eggs women are supposed to stick up their vaginas in order to “cultivate sexual energy,” “develop and clear chi pathways in the body,” and create “kidney strength.” Good luck finding any of that backed by a paper in a major journal.

But now, Dr. Jen Gunter, a frequent critic of Paltrow and Goop, has done the world a favor and fact-checked every “wellness” product on Goop’s website in order to gauge the amount of pseudoscience on it.

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Stephen Hawking feared race of ‘superhumans’ able to manipulate their own DNA

By Isaac Stanley-Becker

Stephen Hawking, the physicist whose bodily paralysis turned him into a symbol of the soaring power of the human mind, feared a race of “superhumans” capable of manipulating their own evolution.

Before he died in March, the Cambridge University professor predicted that people this century would gain the capacity to edit human traits such as intelligence and aggression. And he worried that the capacity for genetic engineering would be concentrated in the hands of the wealthy.

Hawking mulled this future in a set of essays and articles being published posthumously Tuesday as “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” a postscript of sorts to his 1988 “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,” which has sold more than 10 million copies.

An excerpt released two days in advance by the Sunday Times sheds light on the final musings of the physicist and best-selling author beset by a degenerative motor neuron disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

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Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper Was Just Released

By Yasemin Saplakoglu

Stephen Hawking’s final paper was just published by his colleagues in the pre-print journal arXiv. The team had completed the research a few days before Hawking’s death in March.

It was the third in a series of papers that dealt with a concept Hawking spent decades pondering: the black hole information paradox. Here’s how it goes:

Black holes are extremely dense, time-space-warping objects that can form when stars collide or giant stars collapse in on themselves. Classical physics suggests that nothing could escape a black hole, even light. But in the 1970s, Hawking proposed that black holes might have a temperature and could slowly leak out quantum particles. This “Hawking radiation” effect means that, eventually, the black hole will evaporate, leaving behind a vacuum that will look the same for each evaporated black hole, no matter what it ate during its lifetime.

This idea posed a problem: During its lifetime, the black hole swallowed a lot of information in the form of celestial objects, but where did that information go? The laws of physics dictate that no information should be lost: If information existed in the past, we should be able to recover it. Hence, the paradox.

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Trump chooses Arab authoritarianism over Jamal Khashoggi

By Ishaan Tharoor

The mystery surrounding Jamal Khashoggi has turned even more dark. The Saudi journalist vanished Oct. 2 after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Within days, leaks from Turkish officials suggested Khashoggi had been killed by Saudi agents flown in to take out the writer. The Saudis have denied the accusation, saying Khashoggi left the consulate on his own — but have provided no evidence to back up their claim.

On Wednesday night, my colleagues reported that none other than Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered an operation to lure Khashoggi, a prominent writer and Washington Post contributor, from his de facto exile in Virginia and detain him, according to U.S. intelligence intercepts.

“The intelligence pointing to a plan to detain Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia has fueled speculation by officials and analysts in multiple countries that what transpired at the consulate was a backup plan to capture Khashoggi that may have gone wrong,” wrote Post national security reporter Shane Harris.

On Thursday, my colleagues reported that Turkish officials told their U.S. counterparts that they had audio and video evidence apparently confirming their conclusion that Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate.

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