ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 324

Major Earthquake Strikes Off Alaska

By Megan Gannon

Update: This story was updated to indicate the cancellation of the tsunami watches and warnings.

A strong earthquake struck off the southern coast of Alaska early Tuesday (Jan. 23), prompting a tsunami warning, which was later canceled.

The earthquake, which had a magnitude of 7.9, hit 175 miles (280 kilometers) southeast of the island of Kodiak at 12:31 a.m. local time (4:31 a.m. EST), according to the U.S. Geological Survey(USGS). The quake struck at a depth of about 16 miles (25 km).

Some people on Kodiak felt light shaking, according to community reports sourced by the USGS, but the bigger danger was in the possibility of a tsunami striking afterward.

The Kodiak Police Department urged residents to get to higher ground, and tsunami sirens sounded the alarm in the middle of the night, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

According to the National Tsunami Warning Center (NTWC), a tsunami warning was in effect along a large stretch of coastline, from Canada’s British Columbia province to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

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To Combat Loneliness, Promote Social Health

By Kasley Killam

Last week, the United Kingdom appointed a Minister for Loneliness to address the finding that nine million British people often or always feel lonely. To some, this may come as a surprise.

It should not. Loneliness and social isolation are on the rise, leading many to call it an epidemic. In recent decades, the number of people with zero confidants has tripled, and most adults do not belong to a local community group. Consequently, more than one third of Americans over the age of 45 report feeling lonely, with prevalence especially high among those under 25 and over 65 years old. “We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization,” writes the former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, “yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s.”

While this alarming trend has grown, so has understanding of its impact. By now, the evidence is abundant and decisive: social connection significantly affects health. When you believe that you have people in your life who care about you, and you interact with them regularly, you are better off. For instance, you may be less likely to catch a cold, have a stroke or heart disease, slip into early cognitive decline, and develop depression. You may even be more likely to overcome socio-economic disadvantages, recover quickly from illness, and live longer. A study at Harvard University that followed hundreds of people for 75 years identified the quality of people’s relationships as the single clearest predictor of their physical health, longevity, and quality of life.

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Mississippi Bill Would Force Teachers to Recite the Ten Commandments Every Day

By Hemant Mehta

A Mississippi legislator, Credell Calhoun, has proposed a bill that would force teachers to recite the Ten Commandments at the beginning of every school day. Because what Mississippi needs in its public schools is more Jesus.

House Bill 1100 would amend existing laws in the following ways:

What used to be an optional moment of silence would be required in every public school.

A copy of the Ten Commandments would also have to be displayed in every classroom (alongside the already-required “In God We Trust” signs).

And then, since his hand was already on the dial, Calhoun turned it up to 11 for the final request:

The school board of each school district shall require the teachers in that school district to have the Ten Commandments recited aloud at the beginning of the first hour of class each day that school is in session. Any student or teacher who objects to reciting the Ten Commandments must be excused from participating without penalty.

What exactly is the educational benefit of telling children they can’t have other gods before the one true Christian God? Or that they can’t make false idols? Or they can’t take God’s name in vain? Or that they have to rest on Sunday? Or that they can’t have sex with people they’re not married to? Or they can’t want what their neighbors have?

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The religious activists on the rise inside Trump’s health department

By Dan Diamond

A small cadre of politically prominent religious activists inside the Department of Health and Human Services have spent months quietly planning how to weaken federal protections for abortion and transgender care — a strategy that’s taking shape in a series of policy moves that took even their own staff by surprise.

Those officials include Roger Severino, an anti-abortion Catholic lawyer who now runs the Office of Civil Rights and last week laid out new protections allowing health care workers with religious or moral objections to abortion and other procedures to opt out. Shannon Royce, the agency’s key liaison with religious and grass-roots organizations, has also emerged as a pivotal player.

“To have leaders like Roger, like Shannon, it’s so important,” said Deanna Wallace of Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group that was frequently at odds with the Obama administration. “It’s extremely encouraging to have HHS on our side this time.”

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A solar shield could save us from climate change. But its sudden collapse would doom the planet

By Katie Langin

Last year, the planet was plagued by powerful hurricanes, blistering fires, and temperatures that ranked as some of the hottest on record—ratcheting up concern that we’re already knee-deep in climate change. To stave off the heat, some scientists have proposed blanketing Earth in a sheet of sunlight-reflecting particles called aerosols. This solar shield could cool the planet and buy us time, but a new study suggests that if politicians turned off the hypothetical cloud, they could plunge the planet into a sudden ecological Armageddon.

The idea of injecting aerosols into the atmosphere first came to prominence in 2006, when Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen argued that scientists should actively explore the possibility. He said it would be similar to what happens naturally following some volcanic eruptions. For example, the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption cooled the planet by 0.5⁰C, after spewing some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The gas created a sulfate aerosol cloud that reflected sunlight back to space for 2 years.

But injecting aerosols would require constant maintenance—and continuous global support. If a severe drought, a new government, or an economic downturn triggered its sudden collapse, the planet would rapidly warm to the steamy temperatures we otherwise would have been facing. “The minute you stop it you get the full force of the total emissions you’ve put out and that are still in the atmosphere,” says Camille Parmesan, a climate change biologist at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom and the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the new study.

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Controversial femur could belong to ancient human relative

By Ewen Callaway

When anthropologists meet in France at the end of January, one of the most provocative fossils in the study of human evolution will not feature on the agenda. The approximately 7-million-year-old femur1 was examined more than a decade ago by scientists in the French city of Poitiers, but has yet to be thoroughly described in a published scientific paper.

The fossil may belong to the earliest known hominin, the group that includes humans and their extinct relatives. Few people have had access to it, but two scientists who analysed the bone briefly in 2004 have prepared a preliminary description of it. They had hoped to present their analysis at the meeting, which is organized by the Anthropological Society of Paris and is taking place in Poitiers. But the proposal by Roberto Macchiarelli, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Poitiers and France’s National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Aude Bergeret, director of the Museum of Natural History Victor-Brun in Montauban, France, was rejected by the conference organizers.

“This specimen is really important. It’s critical,” says Macchiarelli, who has shared his unpublished report with Nature’s news team. The femur probably belongs to a species called Sahelanthropus tchadensis, he says. The bone is important because it could settle whether the species is the earliest hominin yet found, as its discoverers have claimed after analysing the skull2. “This is a fantastic occasion to finally tell people what we have, and what we know about this specimen.”

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Bonobos Might Not Be So Laid-Back after All

By Jason G. Goldman

Given a choice, most humans would rather spend their time with nice people and avoid befriending jerks. Developmental psychologists have even found that by three months of age, human infants can tell the difference between the two—and seem to prefer those who help to those who hinder. According to a study published Thursday in Current Biology, the opposite seems to be true for bonobos.

“Of our two closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, [bonobos] are the ones known to show less extreme aggression. They’re socially tolerant in food settings, and they share food and cooperate in ways chimpanzees might not,” says Duke University evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Krupenye (now at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland), who led the study. “So we thought if either of them are likely to share with humans this motivation to prefer helpers, it may be bonobos.”

Together with Duke University anthropologist Brian Hare, Krupenye tested a group of 43 bonobos living in a sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The researchers used a range of experiments designed to see whether bonobos, like human infants, can distinguish individuals according to their social behaviors—and whether they prefer the helpers, like we do.

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The Ocean Is Suffocating, and It’s Our Fault

By Mindy Weisberger

Ocean “dead zones” — regions of the sea where oxygen is severely or entirely depleted and most forms of life can’t survive — are becoming more numerous, and scientists warn that they will continue to increase unless we curb the factors driving global climate change, which is fueling this alarming shift in ocean chemistry.

Even outside these near-lifeless ocean regions, rising global temperatures and influxes of nutrient pollution are throttling oxygen levels in the open ocean and in coastal areas, threatening communities of sea life around the world.

This sobering view of the “suffocating” ocean was described in a new study, published online today (Jan. 4) in the journal Science. The study is the first to present such a comprehensive evaluation of ocean oxygen depletion and its causes. And less oxygen in the ocean doesn’t just spell trouble for marine plants and animals — it could carry serious repercussions for life on land as well, the researchers cautioned. 

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US adds Pakistan to ‘special watch list’ for religious freedom violations

By Julia Manchester

The State Department on Thursday announced Pakistan had been added to a “special watch list” due to its treatment of religious minorities within the country’s borders.

Pakistan was added to the list under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 last month, with the announcement citing the country’s “severe violations of religious freedom.”

The department also announced that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson moved to redesignate Myanmar, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as countries of “particular concern.”

The law was passed during the Clinton administration as part of an effort to make religious freedom a key objective of U.S. foreign policy.

Pakistan, which is an Islamic republic, has been under scrutiny for its treatment of religious minorities in the country.

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These Proposed Bills in Mississippi Are a Huge Gift to the Christian Right

By Hemant Mehta

Two bills introduced by legislators in the Mississippi House this week would essentially enshrine Christian supremacy in the law, at least as far as the Constitution will allow.

The first is House Bill 281, sponsored by State Rep. William Tracy Arnold.

You know how those Ten Commandment monuments in Oklahoma and Arkansas were erected outside the State Capitol buildings, then vandalized (by the same guy)?

This bill would allow the Ten Commandments — along with the Beatitudes and the phrase “In God We Trust” — to be displayed on state property. Such monuments, since they would be deemed as having “historical” merit, could also not be removed from the Capitol grounds (other than for, say, maintenance issues).

The bill goes even further when it comes to Confederate statues, which have “historical significance.” If you vandalize those, you could end up paying a fine of up to $10,000 and spend up to 20 years in jail. (Because Mississippi.)

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