ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 308

Civil Rights Chief At HHS Defends The Right To Refuse Care On Religious Grounds

By Alison Kodjack

When Roger Severino tells his story, discrimination is at its heart.

“I did experience discrimination as a child. And that leaves a lasting impression,” he tells me.

Severino directs the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. When I meet with him at his office in the shadow of the Capitol, he talks about his childhood as the son of Colombian immigrants growing up in Los Angeles.

“I remember a white kid coming up, as I was in the pool, [who] said a racial epithet,” Severino recalls. “My response as a kid was — I was confused, in a way. Why would they say such a thing?”

Later, when he entered high school, Severino’s counselor tried to steer him to shop class and vocational training.

“And I said, ‘Well, don’t you offer honors classes?’ ” Severino says. “And the counselor, who was white, said, ‘Yeah, but you’ll have to take a test.’ “

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The Difficult Birth of the “Many Worlds” Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

By Adam Becker

Over several rounds of sherry late one night in the fall of 1955, the Danish physicist Aage Petersen debated the mysteries at the heart of quantum physics with two graduate students, Charles Misner and Hugh Everett, at Princeton University. Petersen was defending the ideas of his mentor, Niels Bohr, who was the originator of the “Copenhagen interpretation,” the standard way of understanding quantum physics. The Copenhagen interpretation, named after the home of Bohr’s famous institute, stated that the quantum world of the ultra-tiny was wholly separate from the ordinary world of our everyday experiences.

Quantum physics, Petersen said, applied only to that ultra-tiny realm, where individual subatomic particles performed their strange tricks. It could never be used to describe the world of people and chairs and other objects composed of trillions of trillions of those particles—that world could only be described by the classical physics of Isaac Newton. And, Petersen claimed, this was itself dictated by quantum physics: the mathematics of quantum physics reduced to the mathematics of Newton’s physics once the number of particles involved became large.

But Everett incisively attacked the orthodox position advocated by Petersen with alcohol-fueled bravado. Quantum physics, Everett pointed out, didn’t really reduce to classical physics for large numbers of particles. According to quantum physics, even normal-sized objects like chairs could be located in two totally separate places at once—a Schrödinger’s-cat–like situation known as a “quantum superposition.” And, Everett continued, it wasn’t right to appeal to classical physics to save the day, because quantum physics was supposed to be a more fundamental theory, one that underpinned classical physics.

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Dream-Like Video Captures Minke Whale Gliding Beneath Antarctic Ice

By Jeanna Bryner

In what looks like a stereotypical hallucination of a whale floating beneath puffy clouds, rare footage reveals a very real minke whale swimming with sinuous grace beneath a blanket of floating ice chunks.

The dream-like whale video was captured by Regina Eisert, a marine mammal expert at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, during a recent Antarctic expedition. She was trying out a new underwater-camera prototype designed by Anthony Powell, an Antarctic filmmaker at production company Antzworks, only realizing later that she might have captured the first underwater video of a minke whale in sea ice in the Ross Sea, she said.

“The whole whale glides past — this is such a lucky shot,” Eisert said in a statement, referring to the footage.

hese black-and-white minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) can grow to be 33 feet (10 meters) long and weigh some 10 tons (9 metric tons), according to Antarctica New Zealand, the government agency responsible for carrying out New Zealand’s scientific and environmental-protection projects in Antarctica. Like other baleen whales, minke whales use sieve-like plates in their mouths to filter out tiny prey for food. In the case of minke whales, they filter out krill, which are small crustaceans near the bottom of the Southern Ocean’s food web.

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‘Christianity as default is gone’: the rise of a non-Christian Europe

By Harriet Sherwood

Europe’s march towards a post-Christian society has been starkly illustrated by research showing a majority of young people in a dozen countries do not follow a religion.

The survey of 16- to 29-year-olds found the Czech Republic is the least religious country in Europe, with 91% of that age group saying they have no religious affiliation. Between 70% and 80% of young adults in Estonia, Sweden and the Netherlands also categorise themselves as non-religious.

The most religious country is Poland, where 17% of young adults define themselves as non-religious, followed by Lithuania with 25%.

In the UK, only 7% of young adults identify as Anglican, fewer than the 10% who categorize themselves as Catholic. Young Muslims, at 6%, are on the brink of overtaking those who consider themselves part of the country’s established church.

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Head of Christian College: When You See LGBTQ, “Replace Those Letters With ISIS”

By Hemant Mehta

Everett Piper is the President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and one of the original signers of the Nashville Statement, a document that set in stone all the different flavors of Christian bigotry against LGBTQ people.

But in a recent op-ed piece for the conservative Washington Times, Piper went way beyond Bible-based hate. In an effort to show everyone why we shouldn’t even have a conversation about LGBTQ rights — since his God says homosexuality is wrong, period — he offers this thought experiment:

If you’re still not feeling a bit unstable on this slippery slope, I recommend this simple exercise: Go to any article in any magazine or website that argues for “conversations” about sexual morality and simply replace the acronym of the day with another set of letters.

For example, every time you see LGBTQ in an article, simply replace those letters with ISIS. Change nothing else. Do this throughout the entire column in question.

In doing this, something will quickly become quite obvious. Sentences will emerge such as these: “Love is love and ISIS has the right to love who they want to love.” “The ISIS community simply wants to be accepted and affirmed.” “What right does anyone have to refuse to bake a cake for an ISIS wedding?”

As such absurdities jump off the page, hopefully it becomes clear how absolutely ridiculous our culture’s game of sexual politics has become.

No…

What that shows is how simple-minded bigots are.

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Protein aggregates caught stalling

By Laura Pontano Vaites & J. Wade Harper

Neurodegenerative diseases are often associated with genetic mutations that cause repetition of short sequences of nucleotides. In the disorders amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as motor neuron disease) and frontotemporal dementia, such an expansion in a non-protein-coding region of the C9orf72 gene1,2, leads to aberrant translation products that contain repetitive stretches of glycine and alanine amino-acid residues. These ‘poly(GA)’ products form aggregates in neurons, and have been implicated in the disruption of a key cellular process in which complexes called proteasomes degrade proteins3,4. However, the biochemical basis for this disruption, and how it might promote disease, is poorly understood. Writing in Cell, Guo et al.5 precisely map the organizational and structural features of poly(GA) aggregates and associated macromolecular complexes in neurons using a technique called 3D cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), to provide direct visualization of how proteasomes are disrupted by poly(GA) proteins.

Cryo-ET in 3D uses electron microscopy to view very thin, frozen but hydrated sections of a cell from various angles. The resulting images are combined to produce a 3D image called a tomogram. Guo et al. used 3D cryo-ET to visualize neurons that had been genetically engineered to express a poly(GA) tract that contained either 175 or 73 repeats. The tracts were fused with a green fluorescent protein that enabled their precise position to be determined using correlative light microscopy. The engineered protein mimics poly(GA) tracts that are produced fromC9orf72 expansion, which take a long time to form in vivo. The authors found that poly(GA) proteins form highly clustered and often bifurcated twisted ribbon structures that are of relatively uniform thickness, but of variable length and width, similar to poly(GA) structures previously observed by conventional electron microscopy in vitro6.

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There’s a small chance an asteroid will smack into Earth in 2135. NASA is working on a plan.

By Cleve R. Wootson Jr.

Here’s a tip for the planners among us: If you have dinner reservations or theater tickets for Sept. 22, 2135 (it’s a Thursday), now might be a good time to scuttle them.

Sometime the day before, scientists say, there is a small chance that an asteroid the size of the Empire State Building will smack into Earth, destroying a lot of living things on the planet.

But don’t worry. NASA has got you covered.

Forward-thinking astrophysicists and people who specialize in blowing things up with nuclear weapons have come up with a plan, which they swear was not drawn up by Bruce Willis.

If the asteroid — it is named Bennu — decides to go rogue, they could send a nearly nine-ton “bulk impactor” to push it out of Earth’s orbit. Or, more likely, they would gently nudge it out of its apocalyptic path using a nuclear device.

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Memphis Pastor Andy Savage, Who Assaulted Teen Girl, Finally Resigns from Church

By Hemant Mehta

Andy Savage is the megachurch leader from Memphis who sexually assaulted a 17-year-old girl two decades ago when he was her youth pastor. The victim went public with her story earlier this year, detailing how Savage drove her to a secluded area, whipped out his penis, and pressured her into giving him oral sex.

Or, as he now refers to the whole encounter, that “incident.”

Savage finally came clean to the entire Highpoint Church congregation in January — without going into any of the details — and the members gave him a standing ovation for it. His colleagues subsequently announced that Savage would be taking a “leave of absence” while they investigated the situation.

The church also took down the video of his “apology,” perhaps hoping they could destroy evidence of how low evangelicals have sunk, but the New York Times saved a copy before it was taken down and recently posted a video of Jules Woodson — the woman Savage assaulted all those years ago — watching it and reacting.

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John Oliver’s Gay Bunny Book Outsells the Pences’

By Kevin Fallon

Literally overnight, the biggest star in the literary world has become a gay bunny named Marlon Bundo.

On Sunday night John Oliver announced on HBO’s Last Week Tonight that A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a children’s book about a gay bunny, named after a pet rabbit owned by the family of Vice President Mike Pence, would be available immediately. That meant it beat a rival children’s book, Marlon Bundo’s Day in the Life of the Vice President, written by Pence’s daughter Charlotte, and illustrated by his wife, Karen, by mere hours to the digital shelves.

As of Monday afternoon, Last Week Tonight’s book—which was written by Jill Twiss and illustrated by E.G. Keller, an artist from Pence’s home state of Indiana—was the No. 1 seller on Amazon, with the Pences’ book lagging noticeably behind at No. 6. With over 1,200 user reviews by that time, the Last Week Tonight book earned a rare five-star rating. The Pences’ effort had less than 50 reviews, and a woeful one-and-a-half-star rating.

The battle of the books began after the surprise release of A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo Sunday night, orchestrated in response to the Pence book tour’s stop at Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian group that the Human Rights Campaign calls “one of the most well-funded anti-LGBTQ organizations in America.”

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Russian Scientists Tested Their Asteroid-Nuking Plan with Powerful Lasers

By Rafi Letzter

Russian scientists have a plan to deal with a hypothetical asteroid threat that’s straight out of the movie “Armageddon.”

A team of government scientists has proposed that nuclear weapons well within the power of those already developed could be used to break up incoming asteroids, protecting the planet from a major asteroid strike. They then demonstrated, in a paper published online March 8 in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, the effect of a nuclear strike on an asteroid using scale model “asteroids” and powerful lasers.

Striking a tiny model asteroid with a powerful laser on Earth is obviously not the exact same thing as striking a full-size asteroid with a laser out in space. But there’s a reasonable degree of comparison between the two situations.

The researchers took careful steps to make sure the scale models were created from the same materials and had similar structures to chondrites (common, stony asteroids). And the immense energy deposited by a pulsed laser onto a single point on the model was reasonably similar to the effect of a nuclear blast on a single point on the asteroid’s surface. They wrote that their experiment showed they could use a a 3-megaton bomb to blast a 656-foot-wide (200 meters) asteroid — 10 times wider than the asteroid that detonated over Russia in  2013 — to harmless bits that would spread out and miss Earth.

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