ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 267

These half-billion-year-old creatures were animals—but unlike any known today

By Colin Barras

So-called Ediacaran organisms have puzzled biologists for decades. To the untrained eye they look like fossilized plants, in tube or frond shapes up to 2 meters long. These strange life forms dominated Earth’s seas half a billion years ago, and scientists have long struggled to figure out whether they’re algae, fungi, or even an entirely different kingdom of life that failed to survive. Now, two paleontologists think they have finally established the identity of the mysterious creatures: They were animals, some of which could move around, but they were unlike any living on Earth today.

Scientists first discovered the Ediacaran organisms in 1946 in South Australia’s Ediacara Hills. To date, researchers have identified about 200 different types in ancient rocks across the world. Almost all appear to have died out by 541 million years ago, just before fossils of familiar animals like sponges and the ancestors of crabs and lobsters appeared in an event dubbed the Cambrian explosion. One reason these creatures have proved so tricky to place in the tree of life is that some of them had an anatomy unique in nature. Their bodies were made up of branched fronds with a strange fractal architecture, in which the frond subunits resembled small versions of the whole frond.

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Strange ‘rogue planet’ travels through space alone

By Ashley Strickland

A strange 200 million-year-old object with the mass of a planet has been discovered 20 light-years from Earth, outside our solar system. The “rogue,” as it’s referred to by researchers, is producing an unexplained glowing aurora and travels through space alone, without a parent star.

The object, named SIMP J01365663+0933473, has 12.7 times the mass of the gas giant Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. It also has a strong magnetic field that is more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter’s.

The temperature on its surface is more than 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Although this sounds hot, it’s quite cool compared with the sun’s surface temperature of about 9,932 degrees Fahrenheit.

So what exactly is this rogue object?

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Saudi Arabia Orders 16,000 Students To Leave Canada Amid Escalating Clash

By Jason Lemon

Saudi Arabia has canceled the scholarships of 16,000 of its students studying in Canada, also ordering them to leave the country and find academic programs elsewhere.

The move comes amid a growing diplomatic row between the kingdom and the North American country, following comments by Canada’s foreign ministry that criticized Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and called on Riyadh to release detained activists. Responding to the criticism, Saudi Arabia also cut diplomatic ties with Canada, frozen all new trade and investment and canceled flights via its national carrier to Toronto.

Now, thousands of Saudi students who were studying in Canada through scholarship, training, and fellowship programs have seen their funding canceled, Saudi Gazette reported. While the kingdom will continue to pay for these students’ academic programs, they will be forced to find new opportunities in other countries. Government sources told the Saudi newspaper this would most likely be in the U.S.

Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi national who has been a political refugee in Canada since 2014, toldNewsweek he was contacted by Saudi authorities, who threatened to arrest his brothers and friends back in the kingdom if he continued to comment on the diplomatic row.

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FOX News Guest Blames School Shootings on Coaches Who Don’t Pray with Students

By Hemant Mehta

This morning on Fox & Friends, Former Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden was invited to talk about Joe Kennedy, the former Bremerton High School football coach whose contract wasn’t renewed after he continued praying on the field while working. Kennedy sued — and lost repeatedly — but his lawyers are now asking the Supreme Court to consider his case.

Bowden said Kennedy had done nothing wrong, before blaming a lack of coerced prayer for school shootings.

He explained the illegal theory to co-host Steve Doocy:

BOWDEN: Just like I said at the first of the program, by golly, if we’re not gonna raise our children, and not give them good things, and not have prayer with them, or for them, where are they gonna get it? Where are they gonna get it? If we’re going to fire everybody that has a prayer with a team, man, I wonder what’s gonna happen to our young people? It’s — surely everybody sees the problem going on in our schools today. People walking in off a street and killing 11 of ’em. Killing 12 of ’em. Killing two of ’em, and things like that. You know it? I mean, we need something stronger than us to seize this. I think we need to go to the Man upstairs.

DOOCY: Ultimately you would like to see Coach Kennedy get his job back or be able to coach somewhere else. But Bobby, you know how things are these days. We’re in a very litigious society now, and when you introduce religion into things in the public square ultimately there is going to be somebody who may take offense to it. You talked about the two families who asked that you not take their sons to church. There’s going to be somebody who objects to it. So going forward, he might get his job back, but if he does this again he’s going to get in trouble.

BOWDEN: Well let me ask you this, can you do anything without somebody objecting to it? If you do it, some are going to object. If you don’t do it, some are going to object. I believe I’d rather be on the right side, and to me, that’s on God’s side.

Needless to say, school shootings have nothing to do with forcing kids to pray to a Christian God. Maybe we can point to a combination of easy access to guns and a desire for vengeance against classmates (especially girls who ignored you), but a lack of coercive prayers aren’t on the list of symptoms.

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Most GOP candidates for top Arizona schools post support teaching creationism

By Ricardo Cano

Four out of the five Republican candidates running for state superintendent of public instruction said they believe Arizona students should be taught creationism and intelligent design as part of science learning requirements.

The candidates’ comments came during Wednesday night’s debate hosted by The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com.

Jonathan Gelbart was the sole Republican candidate who opposed teaching students creationism and intelligent design. He is joined by Democrats Kathy Hoffman and David Schapira.

The four others — Bob Branch, Frank Riggs, Tracy Livingston and incumbent Diane Douglas — each said they believed students should be taught those topics in some capacity.

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Christian-Led CA School Board Wants to Throw More Money at Illegal Prayer Case

By Hemant Mehta

On July 25, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Directors (in California) was indeed violating the Establishment Clause by promoting Christianity at meetings.

They read Bible verses, said explicitly Christian prayers at the exclusion of all other beliefs, railed against marriage equality (presumably in the name of Jesus), etc. It was absolutely illegal, and the judges knew it.

If you’re looking for details of that case, you can read them here. But there’s one important aspect of it that won’t get a lot of attention: Money.

When the Board lost the initial case in 2016, U.S. District Judge Jesus G. Bernal said they had to pay the Freedom From Religion Foundation a whopping $202,971.70 for attorneys’ fees and other costs. That’s a ton of money for a District that could’ve hired four teachers instead.

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Poll suggests religious freedom push is having an effect

By Yonat Shimron

Standing beneath the cast aluminum statue of Lady Justice in the Department of Justice’s Great Hall, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a bold statement last week: “Many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack.”

He spoke of Catholic nuns being forced to buy contraceptives. (Actually, the Affordable Care Act required the nuns to cover the costs of contraceptives in their employees’ health plans.) He cited judicial nominees questioned about their faith.

And in a nod to Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who won a Supreme Court case after refusing to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, Sessions said, “We’ve all seen the ordeal faced so bravely by Jack Phillips,” who was seated nearby.

An increasing number of Americans appear to agree with Sessions.

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The Justice Department Is Keeping Secrets About Its New Religious Liberty Task Force

By Dominic Holden

Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a spectacle of announcing his Religious Liberty Task Force last Monday, when he said a “dangerous movement” threatening people of faith must be “confronted intellectually and politically and defeated.” Hosting a Religious Liberty Summit inside the Department of Justice headquarters, Sessions had surrounded himself largely with players from the religious right, including anti-LGBT, anti-abortion organizations, which led to widespread condemnation from civil rights groups.

Despite the fanfare, however, Justice Department officials haven’t provided basic information about Sessions’ new task force or what it will actually do.

Who will be on it? When will it meet? Is there an agenda for its meeting? Will its proceedings be open to the public?

The Justice Department didn’t answer those questions from BuzzFeed News. A DOJ point person for the task force, Jeffrey Hall, referred inquiries to a DOJ spokesperson, who cited a transcript of Sessions’ speech and a memo, which also didn’t provide answers. Follow-up questions went unanswered.

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Astronomers Have Detected an Intense And Mysteriously Low Frequency Radio Signal Coming From Space

By Fiona MacDonald

Astronomers have detected yet another mysterious and powerful fast radio burst hitting Earth from an unknown source in space.

If that’s not strange enough, this particular fast radio burst is incredibly low, in the 580 megahertz frequency range – nearly 200 MHz lower than any other fast radio burst we’ve picked up on before.

If you haven’t heard of fast radio bursts (FRBs), they’re some of the most explosive and mysterious events in the Universe.

They can generate as much energy as 500 million Suns in mere milliseconds, and there could be as many as one happening every second. The problem is, we still don’t know what’s causing them.

One of the signals we’ve detected has repeated, sending out multiple FRBs from the same location, and this has allowed us to pinpoint where in the Universe it’s coming from (spoiler: not our galaxy).

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Maryland asks Supreme Court to protect cross on public land

By Erin Cox

Maryland’s attorney general has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve a controversial cross-shaped memorial on public land, weighing in for the first time about the future of the Peace Cross that honors men killed in World War I.

Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) this week filed an amicus brief in the case, which challenges the constitutionality of a 40-foot-tall cross in Prince George’s County that stands on public land and is maintained by taxpayer money.

Frosh wrote that when the state assumed ownership of the nearly century-old private monument from the American Legion in 1961, it did so only to maintain public safety. The cross sits in a median at a busy intersection in Bladensburg.

“States should have flexibility to take commonsense steps to ensure that aging monuments do not become a public safety risk without dooming the monuments themselves,” Frosh wrote. “The monument is used only by private parties, and only for secular purposes, and any message the monument conveys is, and always has been, their message” and not the government’s.

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