ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 334

How Do Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles Work?

By Laura Geggel

How do intercontinental ballistic missiles — including the one North Korea launched Tuesday (Nov. 28) that flew more than 10 times higher than the International Space Station — work?

The answer depends on the type of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), but most of these rockets launch from a device on the ground, travel into outer space and finally re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, plummeting rapidly until they hit their target.

As of now, no country has fired an ICBM as an act of war against another country, although some countries have tested these missiles in practice exercises, said Philip Coyle, a senior science adviser with The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a nonprofit headquartered in Washington, D.C. But even though North Korea’s tests are also exercises, the provocative nature of these tests has many world leaders on edge, according to news reports.

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‘Alien’ DNA makes proteins in living cells for the first time

By Ewen Callaway

Life has spent the past few billion years working with a narrow vocabulary. Now researchers have broken those rules, adding extra letters to biology’s limited lexicon.

Chemist Floyd Romesberg of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues manipulated Escherichia coli bacterial cells to incorporate two types of foreign chemical bases, or letters, into their DNA. The cells then used that information to insert unnatural amino acids into a fluorescent protein1.

Organisms naturally encode heritable information using just four bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). These form pairs that hold together DNA’s double helix, and different three-letter sequences code for each of the 20 amino acids that make up the proteins in living cells. The new work is the first to show that unnatural bases can be used to make proteins within a living cell.

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One of the biggest threats to international religious freedom is also a biblical commandment

By Kelsey Dallas

SALT LAKE CITY — In August, “The Book of Mormon” came to Salt Lake City for the second time in three years, bringing its irreverent depiction of Mormon missionaries to a theater just a few blocks from the worldwide headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The show was “back by popular demand” in a city where many residents object to its message, a phenomenon that illustrates Americans’ ability to stomach insults aimed at their faith, said Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice.

“Here you have a wildly successful dramatic production that clearly ridicules and defames the founding prophet of a significant faith community,” she said. “And yet because of our robust religious freedom protections in the U.S., I don’t think there are many if any LDS Church members who have thought it should be their right to shut down this production.”

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Using ‘Free Speech’ to Trump Civil Rights

By Garrett Epps

In “Chicken Heart,” the most famous episode of Arch Oboler’s 1930s radio series, “Lights Out,” scientists in Chicago keep a chicken’s heart alive indefinitely—but when a careless lab visitor breaks open the heart’s container, the heart begins to spread … and spread … and spread.

“For some reason I cannot even imagine, this tissue is doubling in size every hour,” one savant tells the authorities. “Do you know what that means? In another hour it will be twice the size it is now, and long before that it will break open the building with the force of its pressure. And then it will be free in the streets—do you hear me, free in the streets! And then those tentacles of protoplasm stretching out to feed on anything they can reach …”

As of this writing, Chicago has not been eaten. But in the last few years, the First Amendment has become a kind of constitutional chicken heart, spreading its tentacles into new areas, growing and growing until it crowds out other areas of the law.

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Feathered Jurassic Dinosaurs Were Fierce and … Fluffy?

By Dan Robitzski

During the Jurassic period, some feathered dinosaurs — including the 160-million-year-old, crow-size Anchiornis huxleyi — were downright fluffy, unlike many of their sleek, modern bird relatives, a new study finds.

The finding shows that the feathers of Anchiornis, and another feathered dinosaur known as Sinosauropteryx, were simpler — and fluffier — than previously thought. Moreover, the dinosaur fossils in the study indicate that modern wings and feathers likely developed later along the evolutionary timeline than researchers had assumed.

“Overall, it does suggest that truly modern feathers and wings could have evolved later in time or in extinct bird lineages more closely related to modern birds than we might have expected,” Evan Saitta, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who conducted the research, told Live Science. 

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Rise in malaria cases sparks fears of a resurgence

By Amy Maxmen

The number of malaria cases rose in many countries in 2016, suggesting that progress has halted in the global fight against the disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a report on 29 November1.

Globally, malaria infections increased by about 5 million from 2015 to 2016, for a total of 216 million, with apparent jumps in parts of Asia, Africa and South America. The number of people who died from the disease remained relatively steady, at around 445,000, the WHO found. Although data on malaria is often inexact in countries with weak health-care systems, many researchers are concerned by the trends described in the WHO report, which the agency attributes to flat funding levels for anti-malaria programmes.

“For the first time, we can confidently say that we have stopped making progress,” says Pedro Alonso, the director of the Global Malaria Programme at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland. Alonso worries that governments and donors have become complacent about malaria, given that deaths from the disease fell by an estimated 62% between 2000 and 2015. “We know what happens when we stop applying pressure,” Alonso says. “Malaria comes back with a vengeance.”

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This IN High School Doesn’t Get Why Football Coaches Can’t Pray with Athletes

By Hemant Mehta

You’ve heard this script before: Football coach prays with students. Someone in the community notices and alerts the Freedom From Religion Foundation. FFRF sends a letter to the school district letting them know that’s illegal. District promises to put a stop to it.

In the case of Reitz High School in Evansville, Indiana however, District officials don’t even seem to understand the problem.

Football coach Andy Hape joined his team in prayer after an October game and a photographer captured the moment for a local newspaper. FFRF asked the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. to look into the issue.

The response?

EVSC spokesman Jason Woebkenberg confirmed the district received the letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

EVSC attorneys are reviewing the letter, Woebkenberg said.

“Please know student-led prayer is acceptable at any of our schools, and we stand by those who stand with our students during student-led prayer,” he said in an email Tuesday morning.

What the hell sort of response is that? Literally zero people are arguing about student-led prayer. The only issue here is coaches participating in those prayers.

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Same-sex marriage bill clears Australia’s Senate

By Reuters Staff

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia’s upper house Senate on Wednesday passed a measure to legalize same-sex marriage, perhaps as soon as next week, after lawmakers dismissed a conservative push to allow religious objectors to refuse service to same-sex couples.

Australians overwhelmingly endorsed legalizing same-sex marriage in a postal survey run by the national statistics agency and the bill easily passed the Senate by 43 votes to 12.

Conservative lawmakers had pressed for broad protections for religious objectors, among them florists, bakers and musicians, to refuse service to same-sex couples.

But amendments for lay celebrants to refuse to solemnize same-sex marriages and permitting caterers opposed to the unions to refuse service at wedding receptions were either defeated or abandoned during two days of debate in the senate, where same-sex marriage supporters are in the majority.

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How an underwater sensor network is tracking Argentina’s lost submarine

By Davide Castelvecchi

On 15 November, Argentina’s Navy lost contact with the ARA San Juan, a small diesel-powered submarine that had been involved in exercises off the east coast of Patagonia.

About a week later, on 23 November, the Vienna-based Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) announced that its International Monitoring System — a network of sensors designed to detect nuclear explosions wherever they happen around the globe — had picked up a sound consistent with that of an explosion near the vessel’s last-known location. The submarine is carrying 44 crew members.

The CTBTO’s system has numerous scientific applications and this is not the first time that it has been put to use in the aftermath of a possible disaster. In 2000, for example, researchers searched its data for signs of the lost Russian submarine Kursk, and in 2014 they used it to try to determine the fate of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. Nature spoke to CTBTO hydroacoustic engineer Mario Zampolli about the latest search.

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Oddly Behaving Blobs Beneath Earth’s Surface Finally Explained

By Dan Robitzski

The boundary between the Earth’s outermost layer, the crust, and the underlying mantle is speckled with mysterious, blob-like regions. Scientists have long known about these odd pockets, which are called ultralow-velocity zones. They slow down the seismic waves caused by earthquakes and may be the culprit for deep mantle plumes, which can lead to volcanic hotspots like those that created Yellowstone National Park or the Hawai’ian Islands.

Researchers have postulated a number of explanations for what these ultralow-velocity zones are made of and how they’re formed. But none of those ideas quite fit the data, especially given how differently some of the zones behave from one another.

Now, a team of scientists is proposing a new model that includes not only a feasible composition but also a plausible origin story for ultralow-velocity zones. Even so, the scientists behind the study concede that there could be different or even individual variations for other types of these mysterious, subterranean regions beyond their new findings.

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