ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 316

That Teeny-Tiny Speck in This Image Is the Tesla Roadster

By Laura Geggel

See that unbelievably tiny speck of light? That’s the Tesla Roadster and Starman, its steadfast mannequin driver, that SpaceX launched into our solar system about two weeks ago on Feb. 6.

Starman and the Roadster were so remote — about 2.1 million miles (3.5 million kilometers) away from Earth — that it was challenging to get a good shot. But like any decent paparazzi, scientists tracked their target and captured an incredible image on Feb. 18.

“Its apparent brightness is extremely low, 40 million times fainter than the Polaris star,” Gianluca Masi, an astrophysicist, founder and director of the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy, which helped capture the photo, told Live Science in an email.

The image was assembled when Masi and his colleague — Michael Schwartz, the founder and president of Tenagra Observatories, in southern Arizona — took the average of 10, 300-second exposures they got from a telescope at Tenagra Observatories Ltd., Masi wrote online. 

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Deep learning for biology

By Sarah Webb

Four years ago, scientists from Google showed up on neuroscientist Steve Finkbeiner’s doorstep. The researchers were based at Google Accelerated Science, a research division in Mountain View, California, that aims to use Google technologies to speed scientific discovery. They were interested in applying ‘deep-learning’ approaches to the mountains of imaging data generated by Finkbeiner’s team at the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease in San Francisco, also in California.

Deep-learning algorithms take raw features from an extremely large, annotated data set, such as a collection of images or genomes, and use them to create a predictive tool based on patterns buried inside. Once trained, the algorithms can apply that training to analyse other data, sometimes from wildly different sources.

The technique can be used to “tackle really hard, tough, complicated problems, and be able to see structure in data — amounts of data that are just too big and too complex for the human brain to comprehend”, Finkbeiner says.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

For the first time, a woman and non-Christian will lead this group that thinks government is too involved in religion

By Michelle Boorstein

One of the country’s most prominent advocacy groups pushing to protect the boundaries between religion and government is getting its first new leader in a quarter-century.

Rachel Laser, a lawyer and longtime advocate on issues related to reproductive freedom, LGBT equality and racism, is the new executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She is the first woman and, as a Jew, the first non-Christian to lead the 71-year-old group.

Laser, 48, takes over the organization at a time when Americans are especially bitter and fragmented about religion’s role in public life. From President Trump’s travel ban on people from multiple Muslim-majority countries to a pending Supreme Court case over whether American businesses can legally refuse to serve same-sex couples on religious grounds, religion is colliding in new ways with other issues and rights.

And in an increasingly diverse America, there is little agreement on what is meant by “religion” and when the state is becoming too involved or not enough. Should the government protect health-care workers who don’t want to be involved in contraception or abortion on religious grounds — or the woman who seeks them, or both? Should the government direct public funding to public and religious schools equally? Should the government take special care to honor Christian holidays — because most Americans are Christian?

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Trump administration dismantles LGBT-friendly policies

By Dan Diamond

The nation’s health department is taking steps to dismantle LGBT health initiatives, as political appointees have halted or rolled back regulations intended to protect LGBT workers and patients, removed LGBT-friendly language from documents and reassigned the senior adviser dedicated to LGBT health.

The sharp reversal from Obama-era policies carries implications for a population that’s been historically vulnerable to discrimination in health care settings, say LGBT health advocates. A Health Affairs study last year found that many LGBT individuals have less access to care than heterosexuals; in a Harvard-Robert Wood Johnson-NPR survey one in six LGBT individuals reported experiencing discrimination from doctors or at a clinic.

The Trump administration soon after taking office also moved to change the agency’s LGBT-related health data collection, a window into health status and discrimination. Last month it established a new religious liberty division to defend health workers who have religious objections to treating LGBT patients.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

South Carolina Republicans Table Bill To Define Gay Marriage As ‘Parody Marriage’​

By David Brennan

Six South Carolina Republican lawmakers have introduced a bill to amend state law to define same-sex marriage as “parody marriage.”

The Marriage and Constitution Restoration Act argues that any marriages not between a man and a woman “fail to check out the human design.” The bill also defines marriage as a “union between a man and a woman.”

The legislation, which has been submitted to the House Judiciary Committee, seeks “to provide that ‘parody marriage’ policies are non-secular in nature” and “to prohibit the state from respecting, endorsing or recognizing any ‘parody marriage’ policy or policies that treat sexual orientation as a suspect class.”

Josiah Magnuson, Bill Chumley, Steven Long, Mike Burns, John McCravy and Rick Martin are the six representatives behind the bill. All are up for re-election in the 2018 general election.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Legal bill hits $700,000 in fight over Ten Commandments monument in rural New Mexico

By Dana Coffield

FARMINGTON, N.M.  — A northwest New Mexico community is considering using online fundraising to pay the $700,000 it owes from a lawsuit that stemmed from a dispute over a Ten Commandments monument that was formerly located outside of Bloomfield City Hall.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 sided with a lower court that ordered the monument’s removal, saying it violated the U.S. Constitution and represented a government endorsement of religion, the Farmington Daily Times reported .

The city of Bloomfield must now pay the legal fees for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the complaint in 2012 on behalf of two Bloomfield residents, Janie Felix and Buford Coone.

Bloomfield has until June 30, 2021, to pay the $700,000 it owes for the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal fees, City Manager Eric Strahl said.

If the city is unable to raise money through donations to pay the $700,000, it will have to pay the sum out of its general fund, Strahl said.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

In Iowa, a GOP-Sponsored Bill Promoting Bible Classes in Public Schools Is Dead

By Hemant Mehta

A pointless bill in Iowa aimed at getting Bible lessons into public schools is dead.

HF 2031 was proposed by a dozen state legislators and would’ve allowed public schools to teach classes on the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament in order for students to learn (among other things) of their influence on “law, history, government, literature, art, music, customs, morals, values, and culture.”

The courses would not have been mandatory, but just as with other states, it was really just a backdoor approach to getting the Bible taught in public schools. Very often, these kinds of courses which claim to provide an objective look at an influential holy book turn into biased courses peddling indoctrination and treating Christian mythology as actual history.

While the bill passed through the Education Subcommittee earlier this month, it didn’t survive last week’s “funnel,” a method taking all proposed legislation and narrowing them down to ones that actually have a chance at passing.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

In Idaho, medical-care exemptions for faith healing come under fire

By Carissa Wolf

BOISE, Idaho — As Willie Hughes walked around the weathered plots and mounds of dirt at Peaceful Valley Cemetery, he remembered family that died too young and his brother Steven, who was born with spina bifida.

Steven never saw a doctor or physical therapist or used a wheelchair. He crawled around on his forearms and died of pneumonia at age 3.

“I remember his was the first body that I saw and touched. It was traumatic for a 4½ -year-old to see his little brother in a coffin. I can’t tell you how many dead bodies I’ve seen,” said Hughes, a Boise truck driver who grew up in the Followers of Christ church.

Nearly one-third of the roughly 600 grave sites in Peaceful Valley Cemetery belong to a child, advocates say. Spotty records make it difficult to identify how and why the children died before their burial at the graveyard used by the Followers of Christ, a splinter sect that practices faith healing and believes that death and illness are the will of God. But coroner and autopsy reports gathered by advocates, and former church members’ childhood memories, tell a story of children needlessly dying from a lack of medical care.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Fighting back against ‘alternative facts’: Experts share their secrets

By Dan Ferber

Days after President Donald Trump took office, his spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway coined a term that ricocheted around the world. Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, confronted her about an overinflated White House estimate of the crowd size at the president’s inauguration. “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck,” she shot back. “You’re saying it’s a falsehood. [But] Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts.”

The exchange became fodder for a thousand late-night TV monologues, and it seemed to launch a new era of degraded public discourse, in which falsehoods become “alternative truths,” and unwelcome news for politicians becomes “fake news.” At a lively brainstorming session here yesterday at the annual meeting of AAAS, which publishes Science, approximately five dozen researchers, teachers, journalists, students, and science advocates brainstormed ways to push back.

Session leader Mark Bayer, an Arlington, Virginia-based consultant and former longtime aide to Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.), opened up with some cold water for the crowd. “Facts were never enough” to make a convincing case to people, he said, “so let’s just get over that.” Even Aristotle, in his classic Rhetoric, writes about the need to persuade the audience that you’re credible (ethos) and appeal to their emotions (pathos), as well as using logical arguments (logos), Bayer said.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Secret to Great Pyramid’s Near Perfect Alignment Possibly Found

By Owen Jarus

Though slightly lopsided, the towering, Great Pyramid of Giza is an ancient feat of engineering, and now an archaeologist has figured out how the Egyptians may have aligned the monument almost perfectly along the cardinal points, north-south-east-west — they may have used the fall equinox.

The fall equinox occurs halfway between the summer and winter solstices, when Earth’s tilt is such that the length of the day and nightare almost the same.

About 4,500 years ago, Egyptian pharaoh Khufu had the Great Pyramid of Giza constructed; it is the largest of the three pyramids — now standing about 455 feet (138 meters) tall — on the Giza Plateau and was considered a “wonder of the world” by ancient writers.

Turns out, the pyramid builders somehow designed this ancient wonder with extreme precision.

“The builders of the Great Pyramid of Khufu aligned the great monument to the cardinal points with an accuracy of better than four minutes of arc, or one-fifteenth of one degree,” wrote Glen Dash, an engineer who studies the Giza pyramids, in a paper published recently in the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Architecture.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.