ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 260

Here’s What Happens When a Higgs Boson Dies — and What It Means for Particle Physics

By Chelsea Gohd

Six years after discovering the Higgs boson, physicists have observed how the particle decays — a monumental contribution to scientists’ understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics and the universe at large, study researchers said.

Excitement swirled in the physics community when, in 2012, physicists discovered the Higgs boson, an elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that relates to how objects have mass. But this discovery didn’t mark the end of Higgs boson exploration. In addition to predicting the existence of Higgs boson particles, the Standard Model posits that 60 percent of the time, a Higgs boson particle will decay into fundamental particles called bottom quarks (b quarks).

In research presented yesterday (Aug. 28) at CERN, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the LHC at CERN say they have observed the Higgs boson decay into b quarks. The finding provides major support for the Standard Model, which has many implications for how we understand the world and the universe. “The Higgs boson is the least well-known and in many ways the most baffling particle in the standard model.  Observing its decay to bottom quarks is a major milestone in our understanding of its properties,” Jessie Shelton, a high-energy particle physicist at the University of Illinois who was not involved in this research, said in an email to Space.com. 

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Ancient ‘Monster Galaxy’ Is Forming Stars a Thousand Times Faster Than the Milky Way

By Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Chile’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has observed a galaxy that looks nothing like what researchers expected. It’s forming stars at an absolutely incredible rate.

The “Monster Galaxy”, also known as COSMOS-AzTEC-1, formed just 2 billion years after the Big Bang, and it turns more than a thousand Suns worth of gas into stars each year. Scientists still don’t understand these early galaxies very well, but now they have some new information that can shed light on why they form stars so blisteringly fast.

Essentially, the clumpy gas inside the galaxy has a stronger gravitational pull on itself than the force of the galaxy’s rotation or repulsion from stars and supernovae, according to the observations published today in Nature.

Scientists discovered galaxies like AzTEC-1 only two decades ago, according to the paper, and have studied them to try and understand extreme starburst events. By extreme, I mean the galaxy is forming stars a thousand times faster than the Milky Way does. These ancient galaxies are thought to be the ancestors of today’s elliptical galaxies, according to a press release. 

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Catholic Church insiders are calling for Pope Francis to resign. Here’s why.

By Tara Isabella Burton

Reeling from new claims of unfettered sexual abuse at the hands of priests and cover-ups by high-ranking officials, the Catholic Church is facing one of its most serious and divisive crises of the 21st century.

Last weekend, a former Vatican official, ex-papal nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò, published an incendiary open letter calling for Francis to resign for willfully turning a blind eye to ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s decades of sexual abuse and harassment against junior seminarians under his authority. (McCarrick has also been accused of abusing two minors; Viganò does not make any mention of those cases and does not imply Francis knew about them.)

Viganò claims that Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had imposed sanctions against McCarrick, mandating that he carry out the remainder of his life in prayer and seclusion, only for Francis to lift the ban upon ascending to the papacy in 2013. During Francis’s papacy, McCarrick served as a trusted Vatican adviser and influential voice on both internal church appointments and global affairs.

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The Culture War Is On

By Sarah Jones

At a White House dinner with roughly 100 evangelical leaders on Monday, President Donald Trump warned of trouble to come if the Democrats win control of Congress in the November midterms. “You’re one election away from losing everything that you’ve got,” he said. “They will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently. There’s violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups—these are violent people.” But his remarks, first reported by The New York Times, also contained a noteworthy canard: that he got “rid of” the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches—and any other 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations—from endorsing political candidates.

In truth, Trump has not, and cannot, get rid of that law; repealing it would require an act of Congress, which has failed to do so. Trump is likely making the claim based on an executive order, which many consider to be , urging the Treasury Department to be lenient with religious organizations. His lie, then, raises a familiar question for white evangelicals, who form Trump’s most consistent base of support: What have they really gotten from him?

To answer that question, many would point to Neil Gorsuch’s presence on the U.S. Supreme Court, and to Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy. Gorsuch’s confirmation did thrill evangelicals, and though Kavanaugh reportedly told Senator Susan Collins that he believes Roe v. Wade is “settled law,” evangelical leaders have largely fallen behind the campaign to get him on the bench. Evangelicals also have reason to celebrate Jeff Sessions’s tenure as attorney general. He rescinded an Obama-era memo protecting transgender people from workplace discrimination, and launched a “religious liberty task force” to counter a “dangerous movement, undetected by many but real, [that] is now challenging and eroding a great tradition of religious freedom.”

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Two New Skirmishes Break Out over Church/State Divide

By Martin Levine

Last summer, the Supreme Court ruled in the Trinity Lutheran case that Missouri must provide funds to an otherwise qualified church-sponsored preschool under a program designed to improve playground safety. At the time, NPQ warned that “the repercussions will send ripples through public and parochial school programs across the country.” Now, two new suits have been filed, one in the state of Washington and one in Maine, seeking further easing of the separation between church and state when it comes to school funding.

In Maine, communities that are too small to financially support their own schools provide financial support to families that can be used to pay tuition at other public or private schools. Currently, Maine, based on the need to separate church from state, does not allow those funds to be used for a church-sponsored school. According to Maine’s Sun Journal, the suit filed last week in Bangor’s US District Court challenges this decades-old law. The personal nature of the issue is illustrated by the story of one of the Maine litigants.

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Millennial Evangelicals Diverge From Their Parents’ Beliefs

By Eliza Griswold

On a muggy evening earlier this summer, a hundred and fifty sticky worshippers poured out of the Clef Club, in Center City, Philadelphia. On Sunday nights, the jazz club hosts the Block Church, a group of young evangelicals who planted thriving congregations in Philadelphia, in 2014, and Mesquite, Texas, in 2017. Worship involves a lot of high-energy hopping around while Christian rockers shred onstage. “There’s no wall you won’t kick down, lie you won’t tear down!” the Block worship team sang before a congregation clad in black T-shirts with white crosses, Vans, and jeans ripped out at the knees.

After the service, the earnest crowd filled a block of South Broad Street, chatting about the beginning of the Book of James, the subject of that evening’s sermon, which Pastor Joey Furjanic, who was on vacation, had delivered by recorded video. James, he’d preached, had been speaking to a scattered church, early followers of Jesus who’d left Jerusalem and were wandering around the ancient world as “immigrants and refugees.” James was telling young Christians how to put their faith into action, which the Block Church attendees were discussing. Across the street, two firefighters, occupying lawn chairs outside a firehouse, looked on at the unusually effervescent and sober group. Although such images of hipster Christians have grown familiar, the spirit among them reflected something new.

At the Block Church, black, white, and Latino evangelicals were worshipping together, which is still a rare sight. During the past decade, evangelicalism has grown more diverse: as the number of white believers has declined, the Latino evangelical population has increased dramatically.

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Biographer: Pence thinks God ‘calling him’ to be president

By Aris Folley

Michael D’Antonio, a CNN contributor and biographer who wrote “The Truth About Trump,” said in a new interview that Vice President Pence believes God is “calling him” to “function as a president-in-waiting.”

“Absolutely everything Mike Pence does is oriented toward him becoming president,” D’Antonio said during an appearance on CNN on Tuesday in promotion of his new book, “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence.”

Pence did not participate in the writing of the book or provide access to D’Antonio.

“His decision to accept Donald Trump‘s offer to be his running mate — it even goes back much further,” D’Antonio claimed. “By the time he had left high school, he had decided that he was going to be president of the United States. … He thought God was calling him to, now, be vice president and function as a president-in-waiting.” 

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Trump warns evangelicals of ‘violence’ if GOP loses in the midterms

By Jeff Zeleny and Kevin Liptak

US President Donald Trump, facing scrutiny for hush money payments to a porn star and a former Playboy model, pleaded with evangelical leaders for political help during closed-door remarks on Monday, warning of dire consequences to their congregations should Republicans lose in November’s midterm elections.

“This November 6 election is very much a referendum on not only me, it’s a referendum on your religion, it’s a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment. It’s a referendum on so much,” Trump told the assemblage of pastors and other Christian leaders gathered in the State Dining Room, according to a recording from people in the room.

“It’s not a question of like or dislike, it’s a question that they will overturn everything that we’ve done and they will do it quickly and violently. And violently. There is violence. When you look at Antifa — these are violent people,” Trump said, describing what would happen should his voters fail to cast ballots. “You have tremendous power. You were saying, in this room, you have people who preach to almost 200 million people. Depending on which Sunday we’re talking about.”

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A Blended Family: Her Mother Was Neanderthal, Her Father Something Else Entirely

By Carl Zimmer

In a limestone cave nestled high above the Anuy River in Siberia, scientists have discovered the fossil of an extraordinary human hybrid.

The 90,000-year-old bone fragment came from a female whose mother was Neanderthal, according to an analysis of DNA discovered inside it. But her father was not: He belonged to another branch of ancient humanity known as the Denisovans.

Scientists have been recovering genomes from ancient human fossils for just over a decade. Now, with the discovery of a Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid, the world as it was tens of thousands of years ago is coming into remarkable new focus: home to a marvelous range of human diversity.

In 2010, researchers working in the Siberian cave, called Denisova, announced they had found DNA from a scrap of bone representing an unknown group of humans. Subsequent discoveries in the cave confirmed that the Denisovans were a lineage distinct from modern humans.

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Pope Francis Long Knew of Cardinal’s Abuse and Must Resign, Archbishop Says

By Jason Horowitz

DUBLIN — On the final day of Pope Francis’ mission to Ireland, as he issued wrenching apologies for clerical sex abuse scandals, a former top Vatican diplomat claimed in a letter published on Sunday that the pope himself had joined top Vatican officials in covering up the abuses and called for his resignation.

The letter, a bombshell written by Carlo Maria Viganò, the former top Vatican diplomat in the United States and a staunch critic of the pope’s, seemed timed to do more than simply derail Francis’ uphill efforts to win back the Irish faithful, who have turned away from the church in large numbers.

Its unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks amounted to an extraordinary public declaration of war against Francis’ papacy at perhaps its most vulnerable moment, intended to unseat a pope whose predecessor, Benedict XVI, was the first pontiff to resign in nearly 600 years.

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