ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 333

A Tax That Would Hurt Science’s Most Valuable — And Vulnerable

By Adam Frank

As the tax bill moves through Congress, an issue has risen that hits dangerously close to U.S. efforts in science.

The problem focuses on a provision that would tax graduate students for tuition waivers that universities set up long ago. These waivers were meant to foster advanced education in the sciences and elsewhere. The change in the tax law would mean graduate students would be hit with whopping tax bills for “income” they never received. For more on the proposed changes and reaction to them go here, here and here.

Today, however, I thought it might be useful to briefly review how graduate education in the U.S. works. This might help to explain why changing the tax code can have profound impacts on science (in what follows I am going focus solely on the sciences).

A student will spend anywhere between five and seven years completing the work for a Ph.D. in the sciences. It begins with a year or so of intensive classes. During this period, students basically give up on the idea of sleep for months at a time to grind through one impossible homework set after another.

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The Biggest Myth About the ‘Bee Apocalypse’

By Ross Pomeroy

In 2006, an ominous term entered the public lexicon: colony collapse disorder. The mysterious, somewhat vague word describes instances where entire colonies of honeybees abruptly disappear, leaving behind their queens. Colony collapse disorder (CCD) has since fueled claims of an ongoing “bee apocalypse,” which summarizes the perilous plight of our pollinator pals.

But despite panicked claims of an apocalypse, managed honeybee colonies in the United States have actually been rising since 2008. In fact, as of April 2017, U.S. honeybee colonies are at their highest levels in more than 23 years! According toUniversity of Sussex Professor Dave Goulson, perhaps the foremost expert on bees, the trend is the same globally.

Herein lies the biggest myth of the “bee apocalypse”: that there actually is one. Fret not, bees aren’t going extinct anytime soon. Our food supply is not imminently imperiled.

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Universe’s baby picture wins $3 million

By Zeeya Merali

Astrophysicists who captured an image of the Big Bang’s afterglow — and confirmed the standard model of cosmology — won a US $3-million Breakthrough Prize on 3 December.

The team behind NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) provided key evidence backing the theory that the cosmos is composed mainly of dark energy and dark matter, with a small serving of ordinary matter.

“It is a well-deserved award for an amazing experiment,” says astrophysicist Andrew Jaffe at Imperial College London, who is a member of the team behind the rival European Space Agency’s Planck satellite. “The WMAP experiment is the one that made our current cosmological paradigm almost impossible to get out of.”

The prizes, which total $22 million, were announced at a glamorous ceremony hosted by actor Morgan Freeman at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Other prizes were awarded for work in the life sciences and mathematics. The initiative was set up six years ago by Google founder Sergey Brin, Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner, artist Julia Milner, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, paediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan and Anne Wojcicki, founder of genomics company 23andMe. Previous laureates judged the entries.

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Here Are Ark Encounter’s Attendance Numbers for the Past Several Months

By Hemant Mehta

For more than a year now, it’s been a guessing game for a lot of Ark Encounter’s critics as to what the attendance really is over there.

Anecdotally, when atheists visit (on weekdays or not during the summer), we’ve heard reports that things are relatively empty. When Ken Ham brags about attendance numbers (on weekends and holidays, especially over the summer), he doesn’t give specifics but always acts as if the crowds are overflowing. It’s possible both groups are telling the truth.

We finally got a hint this past August about actual numbers and it was all thanks to a new ordinance passed by the city of Williamstown, Kentucky.

You may recall that officials called for all ticket-taking attractions in the city to pay a surcharge of $0.50 per ticket as a “Safety Fee” to help pay for fire trucks, police cars, etc. — the very things that make the city a safer place for residents and tourists. While there are two other attractions the fee applies to, Ark Encounter would be the lion’s share of the income, and even if Ken Ham wanted to keep his attendance numbers secret, the city’s Safety Fee amounts were a matter of public record.

That’s why Ham admitted (or bragged, depending on your perspective) in August that he had paid Williamstown more than $70,000 to cover the Safety Fee for the month of July.

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Bill that would allow churches to receive FEMA aid advances in Congress

By Chris Mathews

WASHINGTON (RNS) — Churches, synagogues, mosques and other faith-based community centers damaged in a natural disaster could be eligible for federal disaster relief funds under a measure approved by a congressional committee.

The Disaster Recovery Reform Act, also known as H.R. 4460, was approved on Thursday (Nov. 30) by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and will next move to the House floor for deliberation.

The bill received strong support from both sides of the aisle despite objections that using taxpayer funds to rebuild houses of worship would violate the separation of church and state. Proponents of the measure argue that religious groups, which are often at the forefront of disaster relief efforts, are being unfairly disadvantaged.

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Huge haul of rare pterosaur eggs excites palaeontologists

By John Pickrell

A remarkable fossil slab containing hundreds of pterosaur eggs and some embryos has been discovered in China1. The find looks set to transform palaeontologists’ understanding of these enigmatic creatures.

The early life of pterosaurs — the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight — has been a mystery. It was only in 2004 that scientists even confirmed that they laid eggs, and until now, only a handful of eggs had been found. The newly discovered trove, belonging to a species called Hamipterus tianshanensis that lived around 120 million years ago, offers clues into the development and anatomy of freshly hatched pterosaurs. It also provides the first solid evidence that these animals nested in groups, similarly to many dinosaurs species2, 3.

The fossils, reported in the 1 December issue of Science1, were discovered in the Turpan-Hami Basin in Xinjiang, northwestern China. From 2006 to 2016, Wang Xiaolin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and his colleagues excavated a 3-square-metre sandstone block to reveal at least 215 squashed and cracked eggs among jumbled pterosaur bones. They think that up to 300 eggs could be present, some buried below the upper layers of fossils. The team used computed tomography scanning to peer inside 42 eggs, and found 16 that contained the remains of embryos at various stages of development, with partial skulls and limb bones.

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Moms, should you eat your placentas?

By Roni Dengler

Celebrity socialite Kim Kardashian West says it boosted her energy level. Mad Men’s January Jones touts it as a cure for postpartum depression. But does eating one’s placenta after birth—an apparently growing practice around the globe—actually confer any health benefits? Not really, according to the first in-depth analyses of the practice.

In two new studies, researchers conclude that new moms who consume their placentas experience no significant changes in their moods, energy levels, hormone levels, or in bonding with their new infant, when compared with moms ingesting a placebo. “It really does show that most of what’s going on, if not all, is a placebo effect,” says Mark Kristal, a behavioral neuroscientist at the State University of New York in Buffalo who has studied the practice—known as placentophagy—in other animals for more than 40 years.

Humans aren’t the only species that eat their placentas. In fact, nearly all mammals do. In rats, placentophagy spurs moms to start taking care of their pups and relieves birthing pain; both amniotic fluid and placentas contain a factor that acts as a morphine-related analgesic. But whether placentophagy confers such benefits in humans has been unclear. What is clear is that the practice is gaining in popularity. Before the 1970s, it was used occasionally in traditional Chinese medicine to treat a host of ailments in men and women. Now, there are cookbooks that offer guidelines for the storage and preparation of placenta-based smoothies and meals. Most contemporary consumers first steam and dehydrate the placenta before pulverizing it and fashioning it into a vitaminlike pill.

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‘Celebrating Merry Christmas again’: Trump opens new front in the culture wars

By David Nakamura

In a St. Louis suburb this week to sell the Republican tax bill, President Trump appeared on stage with twin symbols of his vision of the country’s heritage — a pair of American flags and a row of Christmas trees, adorned with red, white and blue ornaments.

“I told you that we would be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” Trump said, eliciting roars of approval from hundreds of supporters at the St. Charles Convention Center.

The theme had little to do with the president’s push on taxes, aside from a reference early in his 46-minute speech that tax cuts would serve as a“big, beautiful Christmas present” to the economy. But the backdrop made clear that a president who has repeatedly used the flag to win leverage in a debate over the meaning of NFL players’ protests during the national anthem was prepared to weaponize the trees in another front in the culture wars.

Trump was signaling to his base that he was following through on a campaign promise to shelve what he and his supporters view as political correctness aimed at marginalizing the nation’s Christian majority in the name of diversity.

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From Roy Moore To Tax Debate, A Spotlight On Christian Nationalism

By Tom Gjelten

From the U.S. Senate race in Alabama to the tax debate in the U.S. Congress, the role of religion in American politics is once again front and center.

In Alabama, Republican candidate Roy Moore is an unabashed Christian nationalist, arguing that the United States was established as a Christian nation, to be governed by Christian principles.

“I do believe what the Bible says, and I believe for our country it’s historically been true,” Moore declared at his most recent campaign rally. “I have vowed, when I go to Washington, D.C., as a United States senator, to take a knowledge of the Constitution and the God upon whom it is founded.”

As an Alabama judge, Moore installed a stone monument to the Ten Commandments in the state judicial building. “The institutions of our society are founded on the belief that there is an authority higher than the authority of the State,” he said at the installation, “[and] that there is a moral law which the State is powerless to alter.” He subsequently defied a court order to remove the monument, and he told lower courts in Alabama to ignore the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, because he considered it contrary to the teachings of the Christian Bible.

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OPEN DISCUSSION – DECEMBER 2017

This thread has been created for open discussion on themes relevant to Reason and Science for which there are not currently any dedicated threads.

Please note it is NOT for general chat, and that all Terms of Use apply as usual.

If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, they can be found here (but please continue any discussions from them here rather than on the original threads):

OPEN DISCUSSION

OPEN DISCUSSION – SEPTEMBER 2017

OPEN DISCUSSION – OCTOBER 2017

https://www.richarddawkins.net/2017/10/open-discussion-november-2017/