ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 338

Ancient skull from China may rewrite the origins of our species

By Colin Barras

The origins of our species might need a rethink. An analysis of an ancient skull from China suggests it is eerily similar to the earliest known fossils of our species –found in Morocco, some 10,000 kilometres to the west. The skull hints that modern humans aren’t solely descended from African ancestors, as is generally thought.

Most anthropologists believe, based on fossil evidence, that our species arose in Africa around 200,000 years ago. What’s more, genetic studies of modern humans indicate that we are all descended from a single population that left Africa within the last 120,000 years and spread around the world. This African group is the source of all modern human genes, barring a few gained by interbreeding with other species like Neanderthals.

However, the Dali skull may not fit this story. Discovered in China’s Shaanxi Province in 1978, it is remarkably complete, preserving both the face and the brain case. A study published in April concluded the skull is about 260,000 years old.

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Early Medieval Farming Village Unearthed Near Famed Viking Site

By Tom Metcalfe

Archaeologists in Denmark have unearthed the remains of a 1,500-year-old farming village near the famed Viking site of Jelling in central Jutland.

The excavated village contains traces of up to 400 farm buildings, including several longhouses that would have each formed the center of a family farm.

Based on the distinctive shapes of the buildings, researchers have dated the remains to between A.D. 300 to 600 — a time known as the early medieval period in Europe, during the Germanic Iron Age in Denmark.

“The carbon-14 dates will come later,” said Katrine Balsgaard Juul, an archaeologist and curator with the Vejle Museums in southern Denmark, who led excavations at the site from October 2016 until this October. “We’ve taken soil samples from all the main houses, but they are still being processed.” (Dating sediments using the carbon-14 isotope can offer more precise ages, the researchers noted.)

“But in Denmark we have a very long tradition of excavating early medieval settlements, so we are quite confident with the dates, even without the carbon-14 dating,” she said.

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Trump thinks Scientology should lose tax-exempt status

By John Bowden

President Trump has thrown his support behind removing the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status, according to a Huffington Post report.

Twitter messages from a Trump family friend and top official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development claim that Trump and his family “couldn’t agree more” that the church should lose its tax-exempt status.

“From The moment I saw your series I told President Trump & his family we needed to revoke their tax exempt status. They couldn’t agree more, but please don’t publicize that yet,” Lynne Patton wrote to actress Leah Remini in the messages obtained by HuffPost. “This is going to get done in the next 4 years or I’ll die trying. Knock on wood!”

Patton is a longtime friend and business associate of the Trump family who has worked with the Trumps since 2009. Last year, she spoke in support of Trump at the Republican National Convention in June.

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Roy Moore Is Accused of Sexual Misconduct by a Fifth Woman

By Jonathan Martin and Sheryl Gay Stolberg

An Alabama woman accused Roy S. Moore on Monday of sexually assaulting her when she was 16, the fifth and most brutal charge leveled against the Republican Senate candidate. Senate Republicans are now openly discussing not seating him or expelling him if he wins the Dec. 12 special election.

The new accuser, Beverly Young Nelson, told a packed news conference in New York that Mr. Moore attacked her when she was a teenager and he was a prosecutor in Etowah County, Ala. Ms. Nelson was represented at the news conference by Gloria Allred, a lawyer who has championed victims of sexual harassment.

“I tried fighting him off, while yelling at him to stop, but instead of stopping, he began squeezing my neck, attempting to force my head onto his crotch,” Ms. Nelson said, growing emotional as she described the assault, which she said happened one night after her shift ended at a local restaurant, where she was a waitress.

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Stellar Zombie: Scientists Discover a Star That Won’t Die

By Harrison Tasoff

The appearance of a years-long supernova explosion challenges scientist’s current understanding of star formation and death, and work is underway to explain the bizarre phenomenon.

Stars more than eight times the mass of the sun end their lives in fantastic explosions called supernovas. These are among the most energetic phenomena in the universe. The brightness of a single dying star can briefly rival that of an entire galaxy. Supernovas that form from supermassive stars typically rise quickly to a peak brightness and then fade over the course of around 100 days as the shock wave loses energy.

In contrast, the newly analyzed supernova iPTF14hls grew dimmer and brighter over the span of more than two years, according to a statement by Las Cumbres Observatory in Goleta, California, which tracked the object. Details of the discovery appeared on Nov. 8 in the journal Nature. 

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World’s carbon emissions set to spike by 2% in 2017

By Jeff Tollefson

Humanity’s carbon emissions are likely to surge by 2% in 2017, driven mainly by increased coal consumption in China, scientists reported on 13 November1–3. The unexpected rise would end a three-year period in which emissions remained flat despite a growing global economy.

Researchers with the Global Carbon Project, an international research consortium, presented their findings at the United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany. Countries there are ironing out details of how to implement the 2015 Paris climate accord, which calls for limiting global warming to 1.5–2 °C. The projected jump in the world’s greenhouse-gas output underlines the challenges ahead; if the latest analysis proves correct, global carbon dioxide emissions will reach a record-breaking 41 billion tonnes in 2017.

“We were not particularly surprised that emissions are up again, but we were surprised at the size of the growth,” says Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, UK, and co-author of the work, which was published in the journals Nature Climate Change, Environmental Research Letters and Earth System Science Data Discussions. To Le Quéré, the question now is whether 2017 is a temporary blip or a return to business as usual. “If 2018 is as big is 2017, then I will be very discouraged,” she says.

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Moore seeks to refocus campaign on conservative religious values amid firestorm

By Elise Viebeck, Dino Grandoni, and John Wagner

Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama sought to refocus his campaign on the conservative religious ideals most likely to motivate his base voters, dismissing the national firestorm over allegations that he pursued teenage girls when he was in his 30s.

Addressing a gathering at the Huntsville Christian Academy in Huntsville, Ala., on Sunday night, the former judge suggested that he was investigating his accusers, threatened to sue The Washington Post and called on the United States to restore its culture by going “back to God.”

“We can be proud of where we came from and where we’re going if we go back to God,” Moore said at his second public event since The Post reported the allegations of misconduct last week. “If we go back to God, we can be unified again,” he said.

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Tax bill’s repeal of ‘Johnson Amendment’ could cost taxpayers more than $1 billion

By Paul Singer

A provision in the tax bill to allow churches to be more directly engaged in politics could cost the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars, congressional experts say, because some political donors would shift their money to tax-exempt charities.

The House Ways and Means Committee approved a sweeping overhaul of the tax code Thursday, including a provision to do away with the “Johnson Amendment,” a 1954 provision that forbids non-profit charities — called 501(c)(3)s  — from endorsing political candidates.

President Trump has also promised to undo the Johnson Amendment through his executive powers.

When the tax bill was introduced last week, it included language that would ensure churches would not be deemed to have engaged in political activity “because of the content of any homily, sermon, teaching, dialectic, or other presentation made during religious services or gatherings.” On Thursday the committee expanded that provision to all 501(c)(3) charities.

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Science Says These Police Tactics Reduce Crime

By Dina Fine Maron

When Bill de Blasio first ran for New York City mayor four years ago, ending “stop-and-frisk” police searches was a cornerstone of his campaign. Critics warned halting the practice would fuel crime. But this week de Blasio coasted into reelection against a backdrop of historically low crime rates.

The city of more than 8.5 million people has seen fewer than 300 murders so far in 2017. That puts its body count lower than much-smaller jurisdictions including Baltimore, a city of fewer than 620,000 people where 303 people have been murdered this year, and Chicago, where the number has risen above 580 in a population of 2.7 million.

So what factors can really help drive down crime? The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said in a report released Thursday that certain “proactive” policies aimed at preventing crime before it happens—including stop and frisk—show mixed results. Yet it is not enough to simply identify what policies appear to reduce crime, a panel convened by the National Academies cautions in the report. Authorities must also consider the real-world risks of applying these approaches in ways that are racist, biased or illegal, they wrote.

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Neptune’s other moons were normal until Triton crashed the party

By Leah Crane

It came in like a wrecking ball. Neptune has one of the weirdest collections of moons in our solar system, and it’s Triton’s fault. The planet’s largest moon probably smashed into the calm moon system that was there before it arrived, knocking everything out of sync.

Planetary scientists have long suspected that the huge moon Triton is an interloper from outside the Neptune system. Now they have calculated what the other moons may have looked like before the intrusion.

All of the other gas giants in our solar system – Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus – have fairly similar systems of moons. In each of these systems, the mass of the planet is about 10,000 times bigger than the total mass of all the moons together. For the most part, these planets have several small moons, all orbiting in the same direction as the planet spins.

But Neptune is different. It has several tiny moons either very close in or far away from the planet – most of which orbit in the direction of the planet’s spin – and one huge one, Triton, orbiting in the opposite direction.

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