ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 337

Donald Trump lifts ban on importing elephant hunt trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia

By Chris Baynes

Donald Trump‘s administration is to allow the remains of endangered elephants legally hunted in two African countries to be imported to the US, reversing a ban introduced by Barack Obama.

The US government has scrapped regulations which forbid elephant trophies being brought into the country from Zimbabweand Zambia, arguing hunting could help conservation efforts.

The Obama administration banned imports of trophies from Zimbabwe in 2014 after finding the nation’s management of legal hunting did not “enhance the survival of the African elephant the wild”.

The species is listed as “threatened” under the US Endangered Species Act and importing African elephant ivory to America is banned unless certain conditions are met.

But the US Fish and Wildlife Service, announcing the lifting of the ban in Zimbabwe and Zambia, said money raised through hunting permits could boost conservation efforts. “Legal, well-regulated sport hunting as part of a sound management programme can benefit the conservation of certain species by providing incentives to local communities to conserve the species and by putting much-needed revenue back into conservation,” a spokesman said.

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Rabbi: Roy Moore Just Sat There While I Got Bullied Over a Christian Monument

By Hemant Mehta

Every day now seems to bring new stories about how Roy Moore allegedly hit on teenage girls (in the creepiest possible ways) and assaulted some while in his early 30s. Those stories should be front and center on the list of why Moore has no business being in the U.S. Senate.

But it’s not like he was qualified before these allegations began coming out. Moore was someone who defied the rule of law multiple times — as the highest ranking judge in the state of Alabama — and someone whose primary goal, it seemed, was to use his public positions to promote his theology. Spreading fundamentalist Christianity meant far more than upholding the rule of law or being a decent human being.

Moore first burst onto the national scene in 2001 when he installed an illegal Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama Supreme Court building, but that was the culmination of a goal to install similar monuments all across the country.

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We just sent a message to try to talk to aliens on another world

By Dan Falk

Are you there, aliens? It’s us, Earth. Astronomers have sent a radio message to a neighbouring star system – one of the closest known to contain a potentially habitable planet – and it’s nearby enough that we could receive a reply in less than 25 years.

“I think that’s an unlikely outcome, but it would be a welcome outcome,” said Douglas Vakoch, president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) International. METI is an offshoot of the more familiar SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

The target star is GJ 273, also known as Luyten’s star, a red dwarf in the northern constellation of Canis Minor, just 12 light years away. In March of this year it was discovered to have two planets. One of them, known as GJ 273b, orbits within the star’s “habitable zone” and could potentially harbor liquid water, and perhaps life.

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Judge Throws Out Atheists’ Lawsuit Over WV School’s Bible Indoctrination Class

By Hemant Mehta

A few months ago, I posted about how the Freedom From Religion Foundation had sued the Mercer County Schools in West Virginia over an “elective” Bible class that had been offered for more than 75 years to students in elementary and middle school.

There’s a reason “elective” deserves to be in quotation marks. It wasn’t really optional. Students who didn’t take the class were bullied by their peers, and there were multiple indications that the District’s administration and staff wanted students to take the class. For example, they didn’t offer any alternative classes during the time the Bible was being taught.

In the case of one parent whose daughter didn’t take the class, the girl sat in the library reading a Harry Potter book, only to have a student come up to her and say, “You need to be reading the Bible.”

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New Roy Moore accuser: ‘He didn’t pinch it; he grabbed it’

By Anna Claire Vollers

A Gadsden woman says Roy Moore groped her while she was in his law office on legal business with her mother in 1991. Moore was married at that time.

In the past week, Moore has been accused by five other women of a range of behaviors that include sexual misconduct with a woman when she was 14, and sexual assault of another when she was 16. This is the first public accusation of physical contact that happened after Moore was married.

In recent days, Moore has publicly denied any wrongdoing, and has denied knowing some of the women.

Tina Johnson

In interviews with AL.com, Tina Johnson recalls that in the fall of 1991 she sat in the law office of then-attorney Roy Moore on Third Street in Gadsden. Her mother, Mary Katherine Cofield, sat in the chair next to her. Moore sat behind his desk, across from them. Johnson remembers she was wearing a black and white dress.

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First Digital Pill Approved to Worries About Biomedical ‘Big Brother’

By Pam Belluck

For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a digital pill — a medication embedded with a sensor that can tell doctors whether, and when, patients take their medicine.

The approval, announced late on Monday, marks a significant advance in the growing field of digital devices designed to monitor medicine-taking and to address the expensive, longstanding problem that millions of patients do not take drugs as prescribed.

Experts estimate that so-called nonadherence or noncompliance to medication costs about $100 billion a year, much of it because patients get sicker and need additional treatment or hospitalization.

“When patients don’t adhere to lifestyle or medications that are prescribed for them, there are really substantive consequences that are bad for the patient and very costly,” said Dr. William Shrank, chief medical officer of the health plan division at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

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Scientists Unearth Revealing Details about the World’s Biggest Mud Volcano

By Annie Sneed

In May 2006 boiling mud, gas, water and rock started gushing out of the ground in northeastern Java, one of the islands in the Indonesian archipelago. The massive mud volcano—nicknamed “Lusi”—has continued to spew its hot contents even today, more than 11 years later. Experts say Lusi is the largest mud volcano in the world, now covering seven square kilometers of land. Since 2006 Lusi has dislocated some 60,000 people and caused more than $4 billion in economic damages.

Mud volcanoes are not actual volcanoes—their temperatures are much cooler, and they erupt a mix of rock, clay and mud rather than lava. Some say Lusi is a combination of these two systems, although others debate this. In fact, Lusi remains a mystery to scientists in many ways. One of the biggest and most contentious questions about Lusi concerns what triggered the eruptions: an earthquake or natural gas drilling? Now, in a new study, researchers have imaged the subsurface plumbing system of Lusi. Their work reveals that—regardless of what triggered the eruption—Lusi likely connects at deep depths to a nearby volcanic system.

Several studies had already analyzed the geochemistry of the materials bursting from Lusi. They showed its innards had a volcanic origin, says Adriano Mazzini, a geoscientist at the Center for Earth Evolution and Dynamics at the University of Oslo in Norway. “We could already infer that somehow Lusi and a neighboring volcanic complex are connected at depth,” he says. “What we were missing was a real image of the subsurface that could visually prove this connection between the two.” For the new study, published in October in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Mazzini and his team installed a large network of seismometers in three areas: Lusi; the volcanic system; and a tectonic fault zone spanning the two. The group then collected 10 months of data from the seismometers and used that information to piece together a picture of the subsurface across these locations.

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280-Million-Year-Old Fossil Forest Discovered in … Antarctica

By Stephanie Pappas

Antarctica wasn’t always a land of ice. Millions of years ago, when the continent was still part of a huge Southern Hemisphere landmass called Gondwana, trees flourished near the South Pole.

Now, newfound, intricate fossils of some of these trees are revealing how the plants thrived — and what forests might look like as they march northward in today’s warming world.

“Antarctica preserves an ecologic history of polar biomes that ranges for about 400 million years, which is basically the entirety of plant evolution,” said Erik Gulbranson, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Trees in Antarctica?

It’s hard to look at Antarctica’s frigid landscape today and imagine lush forests. To find their fossil specimens, Gulbranson and his colleagues have to disembark from planes landed on snowfields, then traverse glaciers and brave bone-chilling winds. But from about 400 million to 14 million years ago, the southern continent was a very different, and much greener place. The climate was warmer, though the plants that survived at the low southern latitudes had to cope with winters of 24-hour-per-day darkness and summers during which the sun never set, just as today.

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Porpoises twist laws of physics to aim their focused sonar beams

By Sam Wong

PORPOISES have the combination of acoustic controls built into their heads to thank for their ability to focus a directed beam of sonar on prey. The bone, air and tissues in their skulls behave like a metamaterial, a material designed to defy the normal laws of physics. These sea mammals can convert non-directional sound waves into a narrow laser of sound.

Like dolphins, porpoises use echolocation to detect prey under water up to 30 metres away. To do this, they emit high frequency clicks in a focused beam in front of their faces, controlling the direction of the beam without moving their heads. They can also widen the beam as they approach their target, helping them catch fish that try to escape.

How they focus the beam is something of a mystery, particularly as the structures that produce the sound – called phonic lips – are smaller than the wavelength of the clicks they produce. This should result in the waveform being spread out instead of targeted. A large fatty organ in the front of the head, called the melon, appears to be important, but the details of the role it plays have been unclear.

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Australia says yes to same-sex marriage in historic postal survey

By Paul Karp

Australia has taken a decisive step towards legislating marriage equality by Christmas after 61.6% of voters in an unprecedented national postal survey approved a change to the law to allow couples of the same sex to marry.

The result, announced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday, will lead to consideration of a same-sex marriage bill in parliament with the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, promising marriage equality should be law by Christmas.

With a turnout of 79.5% the result in the voluntary survey is considered a highly credible reflection of Australian opinion and gives marriage equality advocates enormous momentum to achieve the historic social reform. Australia’s chief statistician, David Kalisch, announced the results at a press conference in Canberra at 10am on Wednesday, revealing 7,817,247 people voted in favour and 4,873,987 voted against.

At a press conference in Canberra, Turnbull said that Australians had “spoken in their millions and they have voted overwhelmingly yes for marriage equality”.

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