ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 345

A tech-destroying solar flare could hit Earth within 100 years

By Leah Crane

The sun could be one of our biggest threats in the next 100 years. If an enormous solar flare like the one that hit Earth 150 years ago struck us today, it could knock out our electrical grids, satellite communications and the internet. A new study finds that such an event is likely within the next century.

“The sun is usually thought of as a friend and the source of life, but it could also be the opposite,” says Avi Loeb at Harvard University. “It just depends on circumstances.”

Loeb and Manasvi Lingam, also at Harvard, examined data on other sun-like stars to see how likely solar “superflares” are and how they might affect us.

They found that the most extreme superflares are likely to occur on a star like our sun about every 20 million years. The worst of these energetic bursts of ultraviolet radiation and high-energy charged particles could destroy our ozone layer, cause DNA mutations and disrupt ecosystems.

But in the shorter term, the researchers say that less intense superflares of a type we know can happen on our sun could still cause problems. In 1859, a powerful solar storm sent enormous flares towards Earth in the first recorded event of its kind. Telegraph systems across the Western world failed, with some reports of operators receiving shocks from the huge amounts of electrical current forced through the wires.

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Mysterious particles spotted in Saturn’s atmosphere

By Alexandra Witze

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft continues to yield surprising discoveries, more than a month after it burned up on its mission-ending dive into Saturn. New data from the probe suggest that Saturn’s majestic rings are showering tiny dust particles into the planet’s upper atmosphere, where they form a complicated and unexpected chemical mix.

A mass spectrometer aboard Cassini detected the strange chemistry as the probe spent its final five months looping between Saturn and its rings.

“We really hit the jackpot,” said Mark Perry, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. He reported the findings on 17 October at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Provo, Utah.

Mission scientists had expected Cassini’s mass spectrometer to spot the signature of water molecules as the spacecraft slipped between the planet and its rings. In the 1970s and 1980s, NASA’s Pioneer and Voyager missions found fewer charged particles than expected in Saturn’s uppermost atmosphere. Based on that data, researchers proposed in 1984 that water molecules coming off the rings — mostly in the form of ice — acted as a catalyst to strip charged particles from the atmosphere1. Cassini’s final months gave scientists their first opportunity to test this idea directly.

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Hundreds protest proposed changes to NM science curriculum

By KRQE News 13 and Jackie Kent

SANTA FE, N.M. (KRQE) – People have passionate feelings about the Public Education Department’s proposal to change the way science is taught in the state.

Many at a heated public forum in Santa Fe Monday said they worry this is an attack on teaching evolution and climate change while the PED maintained the move is about giving teachers more flexibility.

“This is about an assault on the law between church and state,” one man said during the forum.

More than 100 people had no hesitation laying into the PED’s proposed STEM-Ready Standards, which challenge evolution, climate change and questions the age of the earth.

Educators, students and others expressed concern over what they described as a politically driven, flawed curriculum from an economical and educational standpoint.

“Companies would be unwilling to relocate here,” Los Alamos Public School Board Secretary Ellen Ben-Naim said. “And Los Alamos — we have the National Lab, of course — and I’m worried about scientists even wanting to relocate here and to raise their families.”

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Survey: Most Americans No Longer Believe You Need God To Be Good

By Hemant Mehta

The Pew Research Center has found that more Americans than ever before believe that you don’t need to believe in God to be moral and have good values.

In 2011, only 49% of Americans believed you could be good without God. That number has since risen to 56%. More than half. That’s not insignificant.

And while you’d expect the number to rise as we witness the growth of the “Nones,” these numbers also reflect the changing opinions of religious people who are having a harder time maintaining the lie that religion is what makes somebody moral.

In fact, says Pew, with one (very slight and statistically meaningless) exception, every single religious demographic is more likely today to say you don’t need God to be good than they did six years ago.

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Why wolves are better team players than dogs

By Elizabeth Pennisi

Dogs may be social butterflies, but wolves are top dog when it comes to working together as a team.  That’s because unlike dogs, wolves haven’t evolved to avoid conflict; instead, members of a pack “sort things out” as they forage together, according to a new study. The work calls into question a long-held assumption that domestication fostered more cooperative individuals.

“This study is a fabulous first go at experimentally comparing the ability of wolves and dogs to cooperate with their groupmates,” says Brian Hare, a dog cognition expert at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved with the work. “Wolves run circles around dogs.”

We tend to think of dogs as team players because they work with us to hunt, rescue trapped people, herd livestock, and play. But though  dogs can be easily trained to work with people, it’s much harder to get them to work with fellow dogs. That’s especially true of village dogs, free-ranging canines with no owners or training that make up some 80% of the world’s pooches. They hang out in loose packs, surviving primarily on garbage and scraps. And there’s very little study of them, says Clive Wynne, a comparative psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

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How to clean up the dirty water Puerto Ricans are drinking

By Aylin Woodward

It is almost a month since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, yet nearly 80 per cent of the island is still without electrical power and more than 30 per cent of people there don’t have access to potable drinking water.

The US Environmental Protection Agency reports that some citizens are so desperate for drinkable water that they have resorted to obtaining it from wells on a contaminated site, despite signs warning of danger.

The Dorado Ground Water Contamination site, which lies west of capital city San Juan on Puerto Rico’s northern coast, contains wells that once provided water to nearly 67,000 people. The EPA added it to its Superfund list of hazardous sites last September, but had not started cleaning it up when Maria struck.

EPA information from two years ago shows that some wells in the western part of the site are contaminated, whereas some of those in the eastern part meet drinking water standards. On Sunday, the agency said it had taken samples from three western locations that people had used for drinking water and expected results “by the end of next week”. The EPA says it has also reinstalled fences to secure the contaminated wells so people can’t access them.

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The Danger of President Pence

By Jane Mayer

On September 14th, the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, who last year published a book titled “In Trump We Trust,” expressed what a growing number of Americans, including conservatives, have been feeling since the 2016 election. The previous day, President Trump had dined with Democratic leaders at the White House, and had impetuously agreed to a major policy reversal, granting provisional residency to undocumented immigrants who came to America as children. Republican legislators were blindsided. Within hours, Trump disavowed the deal, then reaffirmed it. Coulter tweeted, “At this point, who doesn’t want Trump impeached?” She soon added, “If we’re not getting a wall, I’d prefer President Pence.”

Trump’s swerve did the unthinkable—uniting Coulter and liberal commentators. After Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, Gail Collins, the Times columnist, praised Vice-President Mike Pence as someone who at least “seems less likely to get the planet blown up.” This summer, an opinion column by Dana Milbank, of the Washington Post, appeared under the headline “ ‘president pence’ is sounding better and better.”

Pence, who has dutifully stood by the President, mustering a devotional gaze rarely seen since the days of Nancy Reagan, serves as a daily reminder that the Constitution offers an alternative to Trump. The worse the President looks, the more desirable his understudy seems. The more Trump is mired in scandal, the more likely Pence’s elevation to the Oval Office becomes, unless he ends up legally entangled as well.

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Trump says he’s fulfilled his promises to Christians, but he really means white evangelicals

By Eugene Scott

President Trump promised that if he got to the White House, he would restore conservative Christians to the place of prominence in America that they believed had been lost during the Obama administration.

Months before 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, he told attendees at the 2016 Values Voter Summit:

So let me say this right up front: A Trump administration, our Christian heritage will be cherished, protected, defended, like you’ve never seen before. Believe me. I believe it. And you believe it. And you know it. You know it.

And when he returned to the gathering this weekend, he told the group that in less than a year in the White House, he has delivered on that promise.

I pledged that in a Trump administration our nation’s religious heritage would be cherished, protected and defended like you have never seen before. That’s what’s happening. That’s what’s happening. You see it. Every day you’re reading it.

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Trump Panders To Christian Extremists At Values Voter Summit

By Michael Stone

Theocracy alert: President Donald Trump defecates on the U.S. Constitution while delivering red meat to Christian extremists at the Values Voter Summit.

In a new low, President Donald Trump becomes the first sitting president to address the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of anti-gay Christian extremists who aim “to preserve the bedrock values of traditional marriage, religious liberty, sanctity of life, and limited government that make our nation strong.”

The annual Values Voter Summit is sponsored by Christian hate groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, groups that engage in the demonization of LGBT people by falsely portraying them as sick, vile, incestuous, violent, perverted, and a danger to the nation.

The event featured extreme rhetoric and hate from politicians and conservative media members from across the nation.

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Supreme Court Won’t Hear Controversial Case Involving Christian Monument in NM

By Hemant Mehta

Back in July, a conservative legal group asked the Supreme Court to hear a case involving a Ten Commandments monument outside a municipal building in Bloomfield, New Mexico.

You can read the full backstory here, but here’s the short version: The monument was put up for religious reasons in 2011 and was ruled unconstitutional by multiple courts in subsequent years. City officials later surrounded it with secular displays to deemphasize the whole Christianity thing, but any study of the history of this monument shows it was erected to promote a Christian worldview.

After the most recent loss, attorneys for Alliance Defending Freedom filed a motion asking the Supreme Court to take up this case. Specifically they want SCOTUS to answer two questions (I’m paraphrasing): How should the Establishment Clause be applied to passive monuments like this one, and who is allowed to bring forth any lawsuits against them?

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