ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 290

Nuclear Detectives Hunt Invisible Particles That Escaped the World’s Largest Atom Smasher

By Rafi Letzter

A few years from now, if a crew of physicists gets its way, a squat building will rise above the border between France and Switzerland. This warehouse-size annex will join a scientific facility so large it crosses national borders. And, if the researchers proposing the construction are correct, it just might find the missing pieces of the universe.

Separated by a few hundred vertical feet of bedrock granite from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new building would contain a scientific instrument called the MATHUSLA device (Massive Timing Hodoscope for Ultra Stable Neutral Particles), named after the longest-living man in the Book of Genesis. Its job: to hunt for long-lived particles that the LHC can’t detect itself.

There’s something strange about the idea. The LHC is the biggest, baddest particle accelerator in the world: a 17-mile (27 kilometers) ring of superconducting magnets that, 11,245 times per second, flings a few thousand protons at one another at significant fractions of the speed of light and then, whenever anything interesting happens, records the result.

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Oregon High School Principal and Resource Officer Fired For Anti-LGBTQ Discrimination, Including Telling Gay Students They Were Going to Hell

By Elise Herron

North Bend High School principal Bill Lucero and school resource officer Jason Griggs are being removed from their jobs in the district’s settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. The firings come after complaints from former and current students, including Liv Funk and Hailey Smith, about suffering anti-LGBTQ harassment and discrimination from classmates and administration.

In the past month, Funk and Smith, North Bend High School seniors, have shared disturbing accounts of school harassment in Oregon’s coastal Coos County.

The student-run legal clinic at the Willamette University College of Law first took on the girls’ case. Professor Warren Binford says she then went to the ACLU for help after discovering it to be “one of the worst cases of discrimination at a school that she had ever seen in Oregon.”

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Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study

By Damian Carrington

Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet.

The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.

The new work is the first comprehensive estimate of the weight of every class of living creature and overturns some long-held assumptions. Bacteria are indeed a major life form – 13% of everything – but plants overshadow everything, representing 82% of all living matter. All other creatures, from insects to fungi, to fish and animals, make up just 5% of the world’s biomass.

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Astronomers Spot Potential “Interstellar” Asteroid Orbiting Backwards Around the Sun

By Lee Billings

From time immemorial, people gazing up at the night sky have dreamed of reaching out to touch the stars. But today we know that even the closest ones are so far away that light itself, the fastest thing known, takes several years to make the trip. The dream of such a visit seems as remote as the stars themselves—unless, perhaps, the stars somehow send emissaries to us.

Remarkably, that may be happening. Last year astronomers spotted a curious body they called ‘Oumuamua, streaking through the solar system too fast to be caught in the sun’s gravitational clutches; its trajectory confirmed it was an interstellar voyager, tossed out from its unknown system long ago to drift alone through the galaxy. ‘Oumuamua was the first of its kind to be observed, and now it may have another newfound counterpart much closer to home.

Researchers Fathi Namouni of Côte d’Azur Observatory in France and Helena Morais of São Paulo State University in Brazil say they have identified an interstellar asteroid that, rather than passing through, somehow settled down in our solar system. If confirmed, the discovery would open the possibility for robotic missions to visit and investigate a piece of another planetary system without ever leaving our stellar home. The findings were published Monday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Texas Governor: ‘The Problem is Not Guns, It’s Hearts Without God’

By Michael Stone

Ten dead and ten injured in a high school shooting, but Texas Governor Greg Abbott believes “the problem is not guns, it’s hearts without God.”

Calling Friday’s shooting “one of the most heinous attacks that we’ve ever seen in the history of Texas schools,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott told reporters Friday that ten people died after the shooting at Santa Fe High School, a Houston-area high school.

More on Abbott’s statement via CNBC

The governor said the suspect had a shotgun and .38 revolver, which appeared to be legally owned by the suspect’s father. He says explosive devices including a molotov cocktail that had been found in the suspected shooter’s home and a vehicle as well as around the school and nearby.

The governor says the suspect said he originally intended to commit suicide but gave himself up and told authorities that he didn’t have the courage to take his own life.

While Abbott did mention the importance of mental health care in his statement, he said little about the dangerous epidemic of gun violence plaguing the nation’s schools.

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Science Educators Raise Alarms about Revised K-12 Standards

By Melissa Sevigny

The standards for teaching Science, and History, to Arizona schoolkids are undergoing their first revisions in more than a decade. A committee of 100 educators, parents and community members hammered out the Science document in a year-long process. But the Department of Education made unexpected last-minute changes, shifting from big ideas to vocabulary words and watering down the concept of evolution. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny reports, some experts are alarmed.

If you think back to your grade school science classes and Schoolhouse Rock episodes, you might remember memorizing a lot of vocabulary words.

But science is more than words. It’s about wonder, curiosity and experimentation. The new Arizona Science Standards are meant to encourage a messy, hands-on approach to science. The Department of Education’s revisions [shown in green, here] shifted the focus—backward.

“As a professional, as a science educator, I just could not support teaching students this incorrect idea of what science is,” says Lacey Wieser, the department’s former director of K-12 science education. She resigned rather than implement the changes made during an unprecedented internal review.  

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Creationist Cynthia Dunbar Fails to Win GOP Nomination for U.S. House Seat

By Hemant Mehta

Remember earlier today when I posted about how Creationist Cynthia Dunbar was on the verge of winning the Republican nomination for a U.S. House seat from Virginia’s 6th District?

You can breathe out now. It looks like that’s not going to happen.

Remember that this wasn’t a regular primary election. The GOP changed the rules to help her out. They opted for a nominating convention instead of a typical everyone-can-vote primary, and they even made sure that a candidate could win the nomination with a plurality of the votes instead of a majority, which is fantastic if you have a slight edge in an eight-way race.

Despite the advantages, though, Dunbar couldn’t pull it out at today’s nominating convention.

Some of the no-chance-in-hell candidates threw their support behind Ben Cline, a state delegate who probably won’t draw much negative attention this November, just to make sure the controversial Dunbar wouldn’t get the nod.

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Everything You Need to Know about the Ebola Vaccine

By Dina Fine Maron

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) just got worse. In what the World Health Organization’s top response official is calling a “game changer” event, one case has now been confirmed in Mbandaka—a city of 1.2 million people about 150 kilometers from the rural rainforest area where the other confirmed Ebola cases have been found.

The country has been grappling with 44 reported cases, three of which have been confirmed. Another 20 of these cases have been categorized as probable, and 21 are suspected. At least 23 of these individuals have died, according to the latest WHO figures.

The Geneva-based Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, a public-private partnership that has purchased 300,000 doses of the experimental Ebola vaccine for an emergency stockpile, has already committed funding to deploy thousands of doses during this outbreak. This Merck-produced vaccine has been through clinical trials but is not yet licensed by any health authority. The DRC government, however, approved its deployment under what are known as compassionate-use regulations.

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The Virginia GOP wants to get this creationist elected to Congress

By Casey Michel

A few years ago, Cynthia Dunbar played a central role in the great Texas textbook controversies, moving to inject creationism into the curricula and eliminate Thomas Jefferson from American history — all while blasting public schools as “tyrannical” and calling for making the judicial branch “subordinate” to Congress.

Now, she’s gunning for the Republican nomination for Virginia’s 6th congressional district.

And she appears favored to win — but not without stirring a brand new round of controversy that stems from watching the district GOP re-write the rules to all but ensure her nomination.

With Dunbar’s rise, national voices on both sides of the aisle are perking up about the controversy. After all, whoever comes out of Saturday’s convention for the Republican nomination seems close to a lock to win in November — except Dunbar, who Republicans fear will torpedo their chances at holding onto the solid red district.

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MIT Now Has a Humanist Chaplain to Help Students With the Ethics of Tech

By Isabel Fattal

Even some of the most powerful tech companies start out tiny, with a young innovator daydreaming about creating the next big thing. As today’s tech firms receive increased moral scrutiny, it raises a question about tomorrow’s: Is that young person thinking about the tremendous ethical responsibility they’d be taking on if their dream comes true?

Greg Epstein, the recently appointed humanist chaplain at MIT, sees his new role as key to helping such entrepreneurial students think through the ethical ramifications of their work. As many college students continue to move away from organized religion, some universities have appointed secular chaplains like Epstein to help non-religious students lead ethical, meaningful lives. At MIT, Epstein plans to spark conversations about the ethics of technology—conversations that will sometimes involve religious groups on campus, and that may sometimes carry over to Harvard, where he has held (and will continue to hold) the same position since 2005.

I recently spoke with Epstein about how young people can think ethically about going into the tech industry and what his role will look like. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

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