ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 294

Egypt authorities arrest atheist blogger

[Webmaster’s note: Sherif Gaber announced on Twitter yesterday that he is now free, but “details will follow.”]

By AFP

CAIRO — Egyptian police have arrested an atheist blogger who was previously detained for promoting his views, a rights lawyer said on Saturday.

Sherif Gaber was in police custody on Saturday and set to be questioned by the prosecution on Sunday, Gamal Eid, head of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, told AFP.

“He has been arrested and should be questioned tomorrow,” Eid said.

It was not immediately clear when Gaber was arrested.

In late March, Gaber tweeted that “some Muslim lawyers” filed a complaint against him with the attorney general.

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The latest faith group to launch a congressional caucus? The nonreligious.

By Tara Isabella Burton

A new religious group in the US House of Representatives is advocating for more representation and influence. Those members? The nonreligious.

This week, Democratic Reps. Jared Huffman (CA), Jamie Raskin (MD), Jerry McNerney (CA), and Dan Kildee (MI) announced the formation of a new caucus, known as the Congressional Freethought Caucus, to safeguard the interests of nontheists in government, and to promote policies based, in their view, on reason and science.

A press statement emailed to journalists said, “The mission of the caucus is to promote public policy based on reason and science, to protect the secular character of our government, and to champion the value of freedom of thought worldwide.”

According to the statement, the caucus will actively work to “protect the secular character of our government”; promote science-bred public policy; counter discrimination against atheists, agnostics, and humanists; and provide a “forum for Members of Congress to discuss their moral frameworks, ethical values, and personal religious journeys.”

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Trump signs executive order giving more freedom to federally funded religious groups

By Gregory Korte

WASHINGTON — President Trump signed an executive order revamping the White House office on faith issues on Thursday, restoring a Bush-era initiative to get religious groups more involved in providing federally funded social services.

The executive order repeals Obama administration rules limiting the ability of groups getting federal funds to preach to those they serve. Under the Trump order, faith-based groups will no longer have to refer beneficiaries to alternative programs if they object to the religious teachings.

“As president, I will always protect religious liberty,” Trump said.

Trump signed the order in a Rose Garden ceremony for the National Day of Prayer, where he declared, “Faith is more powerful than government, and nothing is more powerful than God.”

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Meet the Ocean Creatures that Use Mucous Nets to Catch Their Food

By Kelly Sutherland, University of Oregon

All animals must eat to survive. If you’ve heard the term “grazer” before, it may bring to mind familiar farm animals, such as cows or sheep munching on pastureland. But the ocean has its own suite of grazers, with very different — even bizarre — body forms and feeding techniques. Instead of teeth, one group of these invertebrates uses sheets of mucus to consume huge quantities of tiny plant-like particles. In our new paper, my colleagues and I suggest a new categorization for this overlooked group: “mucous-mesh grazers,” in recognition of their unusual feeding strategy.

Unlike the mucus in our noses, which appears amorphous and blobby, the mucous sheets of these ocean grazers can be structured into ornate meshes and nets. These mucous sheets can function like a filter to ensnare food as small as bacteria. The grazers themselves are mammoth in comparison: up to 10,000 times bigger than their food. If people ate food that small, you’d be picking salt and sugar grains off your dinner plate.

Marine biologists like me used to think mucous grazing was a “catch-all” feeding strategy – the idea was these guys would just chow down on whatever their mucous sheet caught. But recent technological advances are helping us understand that mucous grazers can be picky eaters. And what they consume — or don’t — influences ocean food webs.

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Your Body Acquires Trillions of New Mutations Every Day

By Sarah Zhang

As you read this article, the cells in your body are dividing and the DNA in them is being copied, letter by letter. So long is the human genome—more than 3 billion letters—that even an astonishingly low error rate of one in many million letters could amount to 10 new mutations every time a cell divides.

Oh, perhaps you’re also catching some sun (ultraviolet rays) while you read this, or enjoying a beer (alcohol), or have recently been high in the atmosphere on an airplane (cosmic rays). Congratulations, you’ve given yourself even more mutations. In a typical day, scientists estimate, the 37 trillion cells in your body will accumulate trillions of new mutations.

Are you horrified yet? Good, me too.

But somehow we are not all walking bags of cancer. Somehow we accumulate bajillions of mutations and are, mostly, okay. How?

“It sounds very scary,” acknowledges Cristian Tomasetti, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins. “Fortunately for us,” he says, “the great majority of places where these mutations may hit don’t have important consequences.”

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Winter Garden (FL) Commissioners Refuse to Let Atheist Deliver Invocation

By Hemant Mehta

Atheist Joseph Richardson is still in the middle of a seemingly never-ending battle to deliver a secular invocation at a meeting of the Winter Garden City Commission in Florida.

He’s been trying to do this for years with no luck. (Another atheist delivered an invocation in Winter Garden once, in 2015, but the commissioner who invited him won’t invite Richardson for some reason.)

Richardson’s given the commissioners examples of recent secular invocations (or policy changes) that went off without a hitch, and they listened, but nothing happened.

When he made public comments about this in January, someone in the crowd shouted out “Fake news”… as if explaining how the constitution works was no longer legitimate. The commissioners said nothing to the heckler.

Richardson’s latest attempt to get the commission to change its ways involves an online petition, currently signed by 480 people. (When you include paper signatures, it’s over 1,000.)

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Dr. Oz is a quack. Now Trump’s appointing him to be a health adviser.

By Julia Belluz

If you’ve wondered whatever happened to the snake oil–peddling celebrity physician Dr. Oz, and whether he’s still going strong, look no further than this news nugget today: President Donald Trump just announced he’ll appoint Oz to his Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.

Along with other sports and health celebrities — including the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick — Oz is expected to serve on the council, created in 1956 with the aim of promoting “regular physical activity and good nutrition.”

According to Axios, the administration is concerned that “youth sports participation has declined over the last decade, particularly among young girls and children from economically distressed communities.” And of all the health experts to turn to, the president chose Oz.

Trump did this presumably not only because he has a penchant for celebrity and showmanship, both of which Dr. Oz has in droves. He did this because, despite Oz’s years of misuses and abuses of science, his years of misleading the public on health, Oz remains “America’s doctor.”

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Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano Erupts Dramatically After a 5.0-Magnitude Quake

By Tia Ghose

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano has erupted dramatically, several hours after a magnitude-5.0 quake struck the Big Island on Thursday (May 3).

The eruption spewed lava into residential subdivisions in the Puna district of the Big Island, prompting mandatory evacuations of the Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens subdivisions, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported.

A Puna local, Ikaika Marzo, told the Star-Advertiser that jets of lava were spraying 150 feet (45 meters) into the air and that the eruption sounded like a jet engine.

Steam began spewing from a crack that had opened up in the Leilani Estates subdivision around 5:23 p.m. local time, and soon after, red-hot lava began pouring across the subdivision.

Earlier in the day, a magnitude-5.0 quake struck near one of two of Kilauea’s active vents, the Pu’u ‘Ō’ō crater, causing rockfalls in the crater, NPR reported. The Pu’u ‘Ō’ō crater is located on the eastern side of the volcano’s rift zone and has been erupting since 1983, Janet Babb, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Hawaii Volcano Observatory, told Live Science’s Laura Geggel earlier in the day. More than 600 earthquakes have struck the Big Island since Monday, according to the USGS, with most being between magnitude 2.0 and magnitude 2.5.

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Water filter inspired by Alan Turing passes first test

By Mark Zastrow

Researchers in China have developed a filter that removes salt from water up to three times as fast as conventional filters. The membrane has a unique nanostructure of tubular strands, inspired by the mathematical-biology work of codebreaker Alan Turing.

The filter is the most finely constructed example of the mathematician’s ‘Turing structures’ yet, and their first practical application, say researchers. “These 3D structures are quite extraordinary,” says Patrick Müller, a systems biologist at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory in Tübingen, Germany. The filter’s tubular strands, just tens of nanometres in diameter, would be impossible to produce by other methods, such as 3D printing, he says. The work is published on 3 May in Science1.

British mathematician Alan Turing is best known for his codebreaking exploits for the UK government during the Second World War, and as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. But he also produced a seminal work2 in the then-nascent field of mathematical biology in 1952, just two years before his death.

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Kansas, Oklahoma approve religious veto on LGBT adoptions

By Mitchell Willetts

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — State lawmakers in Kansas and Oklahoma have approved legislation to grant legal protections to faith-based adoption agencies that cite their religious beliefs for not placing children in LGBT homes.

Supporters of such measures argued that the core issue is protecting a group’s right to live out its religious faith, while critics saw them as attacks on LGBT rights. Both Kansas and Oklahoma have GOP-controlled legislatures and governors, but in Kansas, the proposal split Republicans.

The Kansas Senate approved a bill early Friday morning, 24-15, that would prevent faith-based agencies from being barred from providing foster care or adoption services for the state if they refuse to place children in homes violating their “sincerely held” religious beliefs. The House had approved it late Thursday, 63-58.

The action in Kansas came after the Oklahoma House voted 56-21 for a similar measure, sending it to Gov. Mary Fallin, who has not said whether she would sign it. Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer supported his state’s legislation, with his administration arguing that it would encourage faith-based groups to place more abused and neglected children in state custody.

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