ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 311

‘News’ spreads faster and more widely when it’s false

By Philip Ball

Fake news spreads faster and more widely than true news, according to a study examining how 126,000 news items circulated among 3 million Twitter users.

“This is the most comprehensive descriptive account of true and false information spreading on social media that we have to date”, says Dean Eckles, a social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (MIT) who was not involved in the work1.

Untrue ‘news’ is as old as gossip, but its proliferation has become particularly troubling in the era of social media. False stories amplified on Facebook and Twitter, such as the claim that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump’s candidacy for the US presidency, have been implicated in tilting election outcomes.

The role of false stories in Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 election victory or the UK’s Brexit vote, for example, is subject to intense debate. Part of the answer hinges on understanding how fake news travels, say Sinan Aral and his team at MIT, whose study was published in Science on 8 March.

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Spacecraft Could Nuke Dangerous Asteroid to Defend Earth

By Mike Wall

The next time a hazardous asteroid lines Earth up in its crosshairs, we may be ready for the threat.

Scientists and engineers with the U.S. government have drawn up plans for a spacecraft that could knock big, incoming space rocks off course via blunt-force impact or blow them to bits with a nuclear warhead, BuzzFeed News reported.

The researchers announced the concept vehicle, known as the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response (HAMMER), in a study in the February issue of the journal Acta Astronautica. And the team will discuss HAMMER at an asteroid-research conference in May, according to BuzzFeed News.

Each HAMMER spacecraft would weigh about 8.8 tons (8 metric tons). If an asteroid threat is detected early enough, a fleet of the vehicles could be dispatched to collide, nuke-free, with the space rock, changing its trajectory enough to spare Earth from an impact.

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Can an atheist win public office in Tennessee? We’ll find out Tuesday.

By Holly Meyer

Gayle Jordan, a Democrat running for state senate in Trump country, will soon find out if an openly atheist candidate can win public office in Tennessee.

Jordan does not believe in God. It is a fact she shares, but not a focus of her campaign for the vacant District 14 seat that will be decided Tuesday in a special election.

“It’s incidental to who I am,” Jordan said.

But Shane Reeves, her Republican opponent, and state GOP leaders have made her lack of religious belief an issue in the Middle Tennessee race, which could have greater implications for how the November midterm elections unfold.

“I just feel like her views are radical,” said Reeves, a Murfreesboro businessman and Christian. “They’re out of touch with the district.”

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Iranian Woman Gets Two Years in Prison for Publicly Removing Her Hijab

By David G. McAfee

It’s International Women’s Day, a day in which we should be celebrating women’s rights, but in some areas of the world, women don’t even have the right to choose what they wear.

A woman in Iran, for instance, was sentenced to two years in prison for publicly removing her headscarf, or hijab, to protest an unjust law. It’s 2018 and women are still being punished in the Middle East for choosing not to wear a specific religious garment.

The woman (who wasn’t named) intends to appeal the verdict, but in a country like Iran, there’s no guarantee the courts will rule in her favor. In fact, the law is on the side of the prosecution, unfortunately.

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Neuron creation in brain’s memory centre stops after childhood

By Giorgia Guglielmi

Every day, the human hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning and memory, creates hundreds of new nerve cells — or so scientists thought. Now, results from a study could upend this long-standing idea. A team of researchers has found that the birth of neurons in this region seems to stop once we become adults.

A few years ago, the group looked at a well-preserved adult brain sample and spotted a few young neurons in several regions, but none in the hippocampus. So they decided to analyse hippocampus samples from dozens of donors, ranging from fetuses to people in their 60s and 70s. They concluded that the number of new hippocampal neurons starts to dwindle after birth and drops to near zero in adulthood. The results1, published in Nature on 7 March, are already raising controversy.

If confirmed, the findings would be a “huge blow” not only to scientists in the field, but also to people with certain brain disorders, says Ludwig Aigner, a neuroscientist at Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg, Austria. This is because researchers had hoped to harness the brain’s ability to generate new neurons to treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, he says.

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How ‘pro bono’ offers to defend religious monuments are stressing local governments

By Andrew L. Seidel

It’s a shrine on public land.

The Pere Jacques Marquette Shrine was put up in the 1950s to honor a missionary who may have died there, or maybe not. There’s no real evidence to suggest the spot is special, and, wherever he was first interred, Marquette was reburied in the nearby town of Ludington, Mich. In December, the Freedom From Religion Foundation pointed out that the shrine, as it has always been known and which takes the shape of an enormous cross atop a hill, is unconstitutional. The shrine was quickly rebranded as a “memorial” and the citizens rallied around it.

Shrine or memorial — and I lean more toward shrine, given the “pilgrimages” people once made to it — no court of final resort has ever permitted a giant Christian cross to remain on government property. Such crosses, without exception, are declared unconstitutional when challenged in court.

What might tempt a small Michigan town to fight a battle that the courts have already decided it cannot win?

Well, if the city thought it had nothing to lose it might be willing to take an inevitable defeat before a judge.

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GOP Candidate for NC House Wrongly Claims Prayer Is Banned in Schools

By Hemant Mehta

There are two candidates vying for a seat in the North Carolina House from District 23. The Democrat, Shelly Willingham, is the incumbent and he said at a recent forum he was all in on gun safety measures:

Willingham said some common-sense measures could prevent shootings and should be pursued: Universal background checks for all gun purchases; restoring cuts to funding for school counselors and school nurses; and investing in the state’s mental health treatment efforts.

He opposes arming teachers, too. Smart man. Let’s hope he wins another term.

His opponent is Republican Claiborne Holtzman, who thinks more guns is the solution to gun violence. But I was more interested in his views about school prayer:

Holtzman said new school policies need to be enacted that carry a greater penalty for disruptive behavior and bullying and allow teachers the ability to teach uninterrupted the students who truly want to learn instead of having to deal with unwanted behaviors from children who do not want to learn.

“Secondly, I believe that we need to allow prayer back in school for those that wish to pray without enduring criticism,” Holtzman said. “Thirdly, I believe that if we once again have order and a no-nonsense policy in reference to behaviors, we could cut down on the potential for this type of action.”

Let’s put aside, for a moment, the comment that will make every teacher’s eyes roll about how disruptive students should just be penalized more. (As if that would ever work.)

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How the Shape of Your Ears Affects What You Hear

By Veronique Greenwood

Ears are a peculiarly individual piece of anatomy. Those little fleshy seashells, whether they stick out or hang low, can be instantly recognizable in family portraits. And they aren’t just for show.

Researchers have discovered that filling in an external part of the ear with a small piece of silicone drastically changes people’s ability to tell whether a sound came from above or below. But given time, the scientists show in a paper published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience, the brain adjusts to the new shape, regaining the ability to pinpoint sounds with almost the same accuracy as before.

Scientists already knew that our ability to tell where a sound is coming from arises in part from sound waves arriving at our ears at slightly different times. If a missing cellphone rings from the couch cushions to your right, the sound reaches your right ear first and your left ear slightly later. Then, your brain tells you where to look.

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‘Self-domesticating’ mice suggest some animals tamed themselves without human intervention

By Roni Dengler

From the floppy ears of dogs to the curly tails of pigs, domesticated animals sport a different look than their wild cousins—a look that scientists chalked up to human intervention. Now, a new study of wild mice shows that they, too, can develop signs of domestication—white fur patches and short snouts—with hardly any human influence. The work suggests that the mice are able to tame themselves, and that other animals like dogs may have done the same before they were fully domesticated by humans.

Much of what we know about how animals change appearance during domestication comes from a famous experiment in Siberia in the 1950s. Researchers found that when they took wild foxes and let only the tamest breed, the foxes began to develop doglike features such as curly tails, smaller heads, and floppy ears. Nearly 100 years earlier, Charles Darwin dubbed this suite of traits “domestication syndrome.” But could these traits arise without any human intervention? An experimental accident suggests they can.

The accident began in 2002 when scientists studying mouse behavior and disease transmission trapped a dozen wild mice in a barn in Illnau, Switzerland. The animals were free to come and go and nest and mate as they pleased. Their new digs were also safe from predators—the mouse doorways were too small to allow domestic cats, owls, and martens to enter. The barn also contained plenty of free food and water, provided by the researchers every few weeks. The mice that didn’t mind the visits stuck around and eventually blossomed to a steady population of 250–430 animals. Some even began to run over the researchers’ shoes instead of scurrying away. That’s a sign that these animals had lost their fear of humans, even without the researchers deliberately breeding the most human-friendly mice, as scientists had done with the foxes.

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House panel gives blessing to ‘God enriches’ bill

By Howard Fischer

Saying it just translates a Latin word already in the state motto, a House panel voted Monday to let schools literally put the word “God” into classrooms – as long as it’s connected to the word “enriches.”

Existing Arizona law says teachers and administrators may read or post a variety of things in any classroom. They range from the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem to published decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the writings and speeches of the “founding fathers” and presidents.

It also includes the national motto which is “In God we trust.”

SB 1289, which now needs approval of the full House, would add the state motto which is “Ditat Deus.”

But the proposal by Sen. Gail Griffin, R-Hereford, also says that can be translated into its English version of “God enriches.” That got the attention — and objection — of Tory Roberg, lobbyist for the Secular Coalition for Arizona.

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