ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 272

There’s water on Mars! Signs of buried lake tantalize scientists

By Alexandra Witze

A large saltwater lake seems to lurk under ice near Mars’s south pole. If confirmed, it would be the first body of liquid water ever detected on the red planet and a significant milestone in the quest to determine whether there is life there.

“It’s a very promising place to look for life on Mars,” says Roberto Orosei, a planetary scientist at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy. “But we do not know for sure if it is inhabited.” On Earth, similar ‘subglacial’ lakes are home to microbial life.

A team of Italian researchers, led by Orosei, reported the discovery on 25 July in Science1. They spotted evidence of the buried lake in radar data from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft.

Others say that the work is tantalizing but, like anything else in the controversial hunt for water on Mars, it needs more supporting evidence. “It’s not quite a slam dunk yet,” says Jeffrey Plaut, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who has searched for water using data from Mars Express2.

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How Catholic Bishops Are Shaping Health Care In Rural America

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Almost as soon as President Trump took office, he began rolling back health care rules that had angered religious groups for much of the last decade. First, Trump signed an executive order declaring that his administration would protect religious freedom. Then, his administration ruled that health insurance plans offered by large employers don’t have to cover contraception for employees, an about-face from a contentious Obama policy. The Department of Health and Human Services created a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, signaling a new focus for the agency. A proposed rule could require all 5,500 hospitals in the U.S. to post notices informing individuals and entities that they are protected from religious discrimination.

The changes are all designed to ensure that employers, health care institutions and providers don’t have to participate in health care practices they object to for ethical or moral reasons. But even decades before the Trump administration moved to roll back Obamacare policies, some religious hospitals — in particular, Catholic hospitals — already had the green light from the government to deny certain treatment options to their patients. These hospitals’ right to refuse care is generally unquestioned, creating a dilemma for the people who walk in the door: What happens when you need or want a standard medical service, but the hospital won’t provide it?

In a growing number of communities around the country, especially in rural areas, patients and physicians have access to just one hospital. And in more and more places, that hospital is Catholic. That sounds innocuous — a hospital is a hospital, after all. But Catholic hospitals are bound by a range of restrictions on care that are determined by religious authorities, with very little input from medical staff. Increasingly, where a patient lives can determine whether Catholic doctrine, and how the local bishop interprets that doctrine, will decide what kind of care she can get.

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GOP Candidate Claims the Founding Fathers Put “One Nation Under God” in the Pledge

By Hemant Mehta

Rev. Jerry Carter is a Republican running for State House in North Carolina’s District 65, and he made a rather bizarre claim during a recent meet-and-greet.

He wanted to explain how the Founding Fathers didn’t support separation of church and state. That’s not true, and we know that for a number of reasons. The First Amendment prohibits an establishment of religion. Thomas Jefferson talked about the “wall of separation” in a letter to the Danbury Baptists. And the word “religion” only appears twice in the Constitution, both times preceded by the word “no.”

But Carter insisted they were against it, and he had proof.

His proof was, “If they did [support church/state separation], then why did they put ‘one nation under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance?”

The crowd applauded him, and he sat, smiling.

Um…

Okay.

Wow.

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To Prevent Alzheimer’s, We Must Study Differences between the Sexes

By Rebecca Nebel

Growing older may be inevitable, but getting Alzheimer’s disease is not. While we can’t stop our advancing age (which is the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer’s), there are many other factors that can be modified to reduce our risk for the disease.

Determining how these risk factors may differentiate between women and men could help us understand why Alzheimer’s can present, progress, and respond to treatments differently in each sex, providing new therapeutic avenues to explore.

Unfortunately, most studies of Alzheimer’s risk factors look at combined data for women and men and do not analyze data by sex to identify risk factors that are more common or more predictive in women versus men.

In a review paper just published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, I, along with researchers from the Society for Women’s Health Research Interdisciplinary Network on Alzheimer’s Disease call for more research into sex differences in Alzheimer’s disease to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

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The Libertarian Party Now Has a Secular Caucus Led by an Atheist State Rep.

By Hemant Mehta

Earlier this month, during the Libertarian Party’s national convention, a Secular Caucus was formed, led by New Hampshire State Rep. Brandon Phinney — one of only a handful of openly non-theistic state officials in the country.

The Secular Coalition for America helped launched the caucus, after doing something similar in 2016 and 2018 at the Texas Democratic Convention, and celebrated its formation:

“We would like to applaud the Libertarian Party for being the first political party in U.S. history to establish a Secular Caucus at its national convention,” said Larry T. Decker, Executive Director of the Secular Coalition for America. “This caucus is a milestone in our push to be recognized as a constituency with our own unique set of interests, issues, and secular values. The nonreligious are a rapidly growing demographic that make up an increasingly large share of every political party. It is our hope that the Democratic, Republican, and Green parties will take notice and follow in the Libertarian Party’s footsteps. Nonreligious voters of every political affiliation deserve to have their values respected and their voices heard.”

Phinney told me he began this group because “as someone who is openly atheist, I wanted to give Libertarian Party members a place to discuss secular values and how to take the LP platform, apply it to public policy solutions all while defending the separation of church and state.”

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Questioning real-world learning at ultra-Orthodox schools

By Karen Matthews

At the ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools Pesach Eisen attended in Brooklyn, most of the day was spent studying religious texts with classes taught in Yiddish. One class at the end of the day was spent on secular subjects including English and math, enough to be “able to go to the food stamps office and apply.”

“Everything was super basic. … Nobody took it seriously, so even if you were a studious person you had no chance,” said the now-32-year-old Eisen, who had to take remedial classes and study intensively on his own before he succeeded in graduating from college in 2016.

Complaints that schools like Eisen’s run by New York’s strictly observant Hasidic Jews barely teach English, math, science or social studies have fueled a movement to demand stricter oversight by state and local educational authorities. Critics plan to file a lawsuit on Monday in federal court, seeking to stop the state from enforcing legislation that was intended to shield the schools, called yeshivas, from some government oversight.

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Judgment days

By Stephanie McCrummen

Clay Crum opened his Bible to Exodus Chapter 20 and read verse 14 one more time.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery,” it said.

He prayed about what he was going to do. He was the pastor of First Baptist Church in the town of Luverne, Ala., which meant he was the moral leader of a congregation that overwhelmingly supported a president who was an alleged adulterer. For the past six weeks, Crum had been preaching a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments, and now it was time for number seven.

It was summer, and all over the Bible Belt, support for President Trump was rising among voters who had traditionally proclaimed the importance of Christian character in leaders and warned of the slippery slope of moral compromise. In Crenshaw County, where Luverne is located, Trump had won 72 percent of the vote. Recent national polls showed the president’s approval among white evangelical Christians at a high of 77 percent. One survey indicated that his support among Southern Baptists was even higher, surpassing 80 percent, and these were the people arriving on Sunday morning to hear what their pastor had to say.

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NASA Mission to ‘Touch the Sun’ Due to Launch Next Month

By Meghan Bartels

NASA is preparing to launch a historic probe to “touch the sun” — which scientists hope will crack decades-long mysteries about our star — in early August.

The mission, called the Parker Solar Probe, will loop around the sun 24 times, flying within the star’s million-degree atmosphere, called the corona.

The spacecraft’s daunting flight plan isn’t just a daring lark; it’s a necessity to answer questions about the sun that have stumped scientists for decades. In some cases, their answers will affect our lives on Earth. But scientists are also taking advantage of convenient access to the sun to understand all stars by proxy.

“We need to go to the corona because we have done so much science by looking at the star,” project scientist Nicola Fox, a solar scientist at Johns Hopkins University, said on July 20 during a NASA news conference about the upcoming mission. “We’ve looked at it in every single different way you can imagine, every wavelength; we’ve traveled beyond the orbit of Mercury even. But we need to get into this action region and into the region where all of these mysteries are really occurring.”

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Ecologists try to speed up evolution to save Australian marsupial from toxic toads

By April Reese

On an island off Australia’s north-central coast, researchers are conducting an unprecedented experiment: mixing endangered animals that have evolved genetic defences against their biggest foe with those that haven’t, in the hope that their offspring will take after the wiser parent.

The subject of the experiment is one of Australia’s most imperiled marsupials, the northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus). This squirrel-sized carnivore is struggling to survive a decades-long onslaught of poisonous and invasive cane toads, which quolls mistake as prey, with devastating results. The team now working on Indian Island has successfully tested the match-making technique in captive-bred quolls, and reported the results last month in Conservation Biology1.

If a further study now underway in wild animals is successful, it could provide some of the first real-world evidence that targeted gene flow — which involves pushing an adaptive trait through an at-risk population to boost resiliency — could be used to save an endangered species.

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Two Notable South Asian Atheists Face Blasphemy Charges in Their Countries

By Hemant Mehta

Two activists are facing separate charges of blasphemy for calling into question harmful religious traditions and superstitious thinking.

Babu Gogineni, a former director of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), is kind of like India’s James Randi. He’s known for appearing in the media and debunking charlatans. Last year, in a clip that went viral, he debunked two “pranic healers” who said energy could heal your body and that they could cure your problems over the phone.

So what did he do that was so awful?

Petitioner Veera Narayana Chowdary said he was watching Gogineni’s speeches online… and that’s literally it.

He filed this unbelievable litany of charges against Gogineni that include obscenity, insulting religion, and “public mischief.”

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