ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 293

DeVos Moves to Loosen Restrictions on Federal Aid to Religious Colleges

By Erica L. Green

WASHINGTON — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a lifelong advocate of Christian education, moved on Wednesday to loosen federal regulations on religious colleges and universities, after a Supreme Court decision that restricted states from denying some kinds of aid to religious institutions.

The measure is part of a sweeping deregulatory agenda for the Education Department announced on Wednesday by the White House budget office, which outlined several rules and regulations for the department to scrap or amend. Among those are rules that restrict faith-based entities from receiving federally administered funding.

“Various provisions of the department’s regulations regarding eligibility of faith-based entities and activities do not reflect the latest case law regarding religion or unnecessarily restrict religion,” said Liz Hill, an Education Department spokeswoman. “The department plans to review and to amend such regulations in order to be more inclusive.”

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AI recreates activity patterns that brain cells use in navigation

By Alison Abbott

Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to recreate the complex neural codes that the brain uses to navigate through space. The feat demonstrates how powerful AI algorithms can assist conventional neuroscience research to test theories about the brain’s workings — but the approach is not going to put neuroscientists out of work just yet, say the researchers.

The computer program, details of which were published in Nature on 9 May1, was developed by neuroscientists at University College London (UCL) and AI researchers at the London-based Google company DeepMind. It used a technique called deep learning — a type of AI inspired by the structures in the brain — to train a computer-simulated rat to track its position in a virtual environment.

The program surprised the scientists by spontaneously generating hexagonal-shaped patterns of activity akin to those generated by navigational cells in the mammalian brain called grid cells. Grid cells have been shown in experiments with real rats to be fundamental to how an animal tracks its own position in space.

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Fake Clinics Don’t Just Receive State Funding in Texas. They Get Very Little Oversight

By Teddy Wilson

Nearly a dozen state-funded fake clinics in Texas have not received required annual inspections since September 2016, as inspections of these fake clinics revealed dozens of discrepancies, including violations of basic safety protocols, according to documents reviewed by Rewire.News.

Republicans in the Texas legislature have created burdensome regulations for abortion clinics, while lawmakers have funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to so-called crisis pregnancy centers, fake clinics that deploy anti-choice propaganda.

Alexa Garcia-Ditta, communications director at NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, told Rewire.News that the documents revealed predictable results from a program with no measurable goals or oversight.

“It is shameful that Texas continues to pour millions of taxpayer dollars into fake women’s health centers that operate with no accountability or oversight,” Garcia-Ditta said. “In shutting down licensed abortion clinics and instead legitimizing crisis pregnancy centers, Texas officials have made it clear that they do not truly care about the health and safety of pregnant Texans.”

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LGBTQ students at Christian colleges refuse to choose between sexuality and faith

By Lauren Slagter

The pastor’s booming voice filled the Spring Arbor University chapel as he grew more passionate, testifying to students about the power of prayer.

“I don’t have the time to tell you the history of those who have come to our church transgender and given their heart to God and changed,” the visiting pastor said during the hour-long service on Nov. 6, moving around the stage in jeans and a button-down shirt as he spoke. He held a Bible in one hand and gestured with the other to underscore his points.

“I don’t have time to tell you the stories of lesbians that come to our church and repent of their sins and now are living straight lives. I don’t have time to tell you about murderers who walk in and they get changed by the power of God,” he continued, his voice rising with each refrain. “I can’t tell you the drug dealers who actually hand me drugs and say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ And it’s not by my might, it’s not by my power, it is by the spirit of the Lord.”

He paused. Applause filled the room.

But the LGBTQ people in the audience who’d just been compared to murderers and drug dealers were not inspired. They were filled with sadness and frustration. And they wanted to do more than sit in silence.

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Christian-Only Michigan Town Isn’t Exempt from Housing Discrimination Laws

By Hemant Mehta

In 1942, the board of the Bay View Association of the United Methodist Church (in Michigan) said that anyone who owned a cottage on their property had to meet two requirements: They had to be white and they had to be Christian. (Those requirements, even more disturbingly, did not apply to “servants within a household” or employees.)

They wisely dropped the “white” requirement more than a decade later, but the Christian requirement remained. Only a certain kind of Christian, too — there was a 10% quota on the maximum number of Roman Catholics who could own property there even after the race requirement was dropped. (In one case, a Catholic doctor who bought a cottage was “required to sell due solely to his religion and the religious quota.”) Even now, prospective buyers have to include a recommendation letter from a pastor.

Defenders might say that private organizations are allowed to set their own membership rules, disgraceful as they might be to outsiders. And the Bay View Association is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, so it’s not subject to the same rules as public places.

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How science will suffer as US pulls out of Iran nuclear deal

By Jeff Tollefson

On 8 May, US President Donald Trump announced his decision to exit the Iran nuclear deal, hampering ongoing efforts to establish scientific collaborations between researchers in the two countries. Scientists say that the move will make a bad situation worse.

Under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran agreed to scale back its nuclear programme and allow international inspections of its facilities in exchange for the removal of economic sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, Britain, Russia and China. At the time, many researchers saw the agreement as an opportunity to bolster Iranian science and to expand international collaborations.

But those plans have encountered roadblocks since the 2015 deal. For example, when Trump took office last year, long-standing efforts to establish scientific exchanges between Iran and the United States came to a halt. And workshops organized by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) between 2010 and 2017 — meant to bolster collaborations in diverse fields including solar energy and water resource management — stopped after the Trump administration raised questions about Iran and the nuclear deal, says Glenn Schweitzer, who spearheaded the NASEM work in Washington DC.

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The Milky Way’s Speediest Stars Could Solve a 50-Year-Old Mystery

By Shannon Hall

Ken Shen was racing against the sun. It was 3 A.M. on April 25 and Shen—an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley—was sitting at his kitchen table in his pajamas. At that precise moment the scientists behind the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft released the mission’s second batch of data. And Shen was on a mission to comb that data to find the Milky Way’s fastest-moving stars, then to verify their identities via independent observations on ground-based telescopes. With 30 minutes to go before the sun’s glare started to hit the west coast, Shen managed to find his first target and send its coordinates along to a collaborator at the Lick Observatory near San Jose.

But he could not crawl back into bed. For the next 24 hours Shen and his colleagues scoured the Gaia data for a handful of candidates to observe with telescopes in South Africa, the Canary Islands, Arizona and California. After a week of careful analysis the researchers were certain they had found three of our galaxy’s fastest stars. Not that they were only interested in speed: such rapid-moving stars were the smoking-gun evidence Shen was seeking for his novel theory of how certain stars explode. On April 30 the team posted their results to the preprint server arXiv and submitted them to The Astrophysical Journal for peer-reviewed publication.

Shen’s theory concerns type Ia supernovae, stellar explosions so consistently and uniformly bright that astronomers have used them as benchmarks to measure the vastness of the cosmos. Whether right here in the Milky Way or in a galaxy on the other side of the observable universe, these cataclysmic explosions always display almost the exact same luminosity, allowing precise calculations of their distances. Such work has demonstrated the universe’s expansion is accelerating—an advance that netted the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics—and has helped validate the existence of dark energy. Type Ia explosions also create and disperse heavy elements (including the iron in the hemoglobin running through our veins), and so play crucial roles in studies of galactic evolution.

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Gov. Fallin Signs Bill To Add Churches To ‘Stand Your Ground’ Law

By the Associated Press

OKLAHOMA CITY –

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has signed into a law bill that adds churches to the list of places where the so-called “Stand Your Ground” law is in effect and where people can use deadly force with greater impunity.

House Bill 2632 was one of eight measures signed into law by the Governor on Monday.

The bill adds places of worship to the list of locations where Oklahoma citizens have a “right to expect absolute safety.” The list already includes a person’s home and place of business.

Under the law, a person in these locations can use deadly force against a person who enters “unlawfully or forcefully.”

Fallin is still considering a separate gun bill that would allow people to carry firearms publicly without a license or training.

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OR School District Allegedly Made LGBTQ Students Read Bible Verses as Punishment

By Hemant Mehta

The North Bend School District in Oregon is being accused of two wildly discriminatory practices.

According to a letter sent back in March from the Oregon Department of Education to District Superintendent Bill Yester, one LGBTQ student was allegedly told to read Bible passages as punishment while others in the school were supposedly discriminated against after reporting harassment.

The hope was to reach a private settlement between the two sides within a month of that first letter, but it never happened. Now there will be a hearing on May 24 to discuss the issues.

In a written statement to The World, the North Bend School District said that these alleged events occurred over the course of several years, “most of which had not been brought to the district’s attention.”

“The district participated in the ODE investigation process, resulting in preliminary finding that… discrimination may have occurred,” the statement said.

“May” have occurred? The evidence that the problems did occur seems reliable enough:

Even though the district denies [using Bible reading as a punishment] in a letter sent on Aug. 23, while the investigation was ongoing, ODE stated in the March 6 letter that the building administrator contradicted that claim. In fact, he acknowledged in an interview with ODE that he required students to read the Bible for punishment. Not only that, but the building administrator’s supervisor confirmed this.

…

There was also substantial evidence that using the Bible as punishment had a “chilling effect on LGBTQ students’ use of the district’s complaint process.”

The building administrator plays a role in the other accusation as well. His child (“Student 4”) reportedly yelled out a slur at two same-sex students holding hands. The District told the administrator to “discuss the matter” as a parent, which suggests a more formal punishment wouldn’t be in play.

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These plants are napping their way through climate change

By Marlene Cimons

Some plant species have found a novel way to cope with environmental dangers like a prolonged climate change-induced drought: They sleep through it.

An international research team has discovered at least 114 species capable of living dormant under the soil for up to two decades. Dubbed “Rip Van Winkle plants” by scientists, they are still alive — they just don’t poke their heads out every spring. This extended snoozing underground enables them to survive tough times in a wide variety of ecosystems.

The adaptation has evolved over many decades and may well become more common as plants change in response to climate change, according to the researchers. “The condition has evolved many, many times, and I see no reason to believe that it cannot evolve quickly in other species,” said Richard Shefferson, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Tokyo and lead author of the recent study, published in the journal Ecology Letters. “I don’t think it can be ‘learned,’ but perhaps if environmental conditions were right, then many species that we do not think go dormant might actually do so.”

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