ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 346

Colliding stars spark rush to solve cosmic mysteries

by Davide Castelvecchi

Gold, platinum, uranium and many of the rare-earth elements that are crucial to today’s high-tech gadgets are generated during the formation of black holes, astronomers have said. The collision of two small but dense stars simultaneously solved several cosmic mysteries, researchers announced at a press conference in Washington DC on 16 October. More than 30 papers have been published so far in five journals — Physical Review Letters, Science, Nature, Nature Astronomy and Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers watched as two neutron stars — small but very dense objects formed after the collapse of stars bigger than the Sun — collided and merged, forming a black hole, in a galaxy 40 million parsecs (130 million light years) away, according to two dozen researchers interviewed by Nature’s News team.

The collision generated the strongest and longest-lasting gravitational-wave signal ever seen on Earth. And the visible-light signal generated during the collision closely matches predictions made in recent years by theoretical astrophysicists, who hold that many elements of the periodic table that are heavier than iron are formed as a result of such stellar collisions.

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Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

By Carl Zimmer

For centuries, skin color has held powerful social meaning — a defining characteristic of race, and a starting point for racism.

“If you ask somebody on the street, ‘What are the main differences between races?,’ they’re going to say skin color,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.

On Thursday, Dr. Tishkoff and her colleagues showed this to be a profound error. In the journal Science, the researchers published the first large-scale study of the genetics of skin color in Africans.

The researchers pinpointed eight genetic variants in four narrow regions of the human genome that strongly influence pigmentation — some making skin darker, and others making it lighter.

These genes are shared across the globe, it turns out; one of them, for example, lightens skin in both Europeans and hunter-gatherers in Botswana. The gene variants were present in humanity’s distant ancestors, even before our species evolved in Africa 300,000 years ago.

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Origins of Friday the 13th: How the Day Got So Spooky

By Stephanie Pappas

Bad luck comes in twos in 2017. This year features a duo of Friday the 13ths, the second of which occurs today (Oct. 13). The first myth-mired Friday fell on Jan. 13 this year.

Today, it’s taken for granted that Friday the 13th is an inauspicious day, but that wasn’t always the case. Until the late 1800s, no one felt that Fridays that happen to fall on the 13th day of the month were anything special at all.

Exactly how the date became mired in the mind as an unlucky one is murky. Certainly the idea was firmly implanted in the cultural consciousness by 1980, when the slasher flick “Friday the 13th” was released. The hockey-masked villain of that tale, Jason Voorhees, has taken on a life of his own, driving 12 films as well as multiple novellas and comic books. Thus, it’s no surprise that a Google Ngram search of the phrase “Friday the 13th” finds the term shot up in use in books in 1980. 

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Planet Nine Does Exist, NASA Evidence Suggests

By Samantha Mathewson

Planet Nine is out there, and astronomers are determined to find it, according to a new statement from NASA. In fact, mounting evidence suggests it’s hard to imagine our solar system without the unseen world.

The hypothetical planet is believed to be about 10 times more massive than Earth and located in the dark, outer reaches of the solar system, approximately 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune is. While the mysterious world still has yet to be found, astronomers have discovered a number of strange features of our solar system that are best explained by the presence of a ninth planet, according to the NASA statement.

“There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine,” Konstantin Batygin, a planetary astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, said in the statement. “If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them.” 

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Distant dwarf planet near Pluto has a ring that no one expected

By Ken Croswell

A ring has been found around Haumea, a world more than 2 billion kilometres beyond Pluto. The ring is the most distant ever seen in our solar system.

“This is a landmark discovery,” says Alan Stern at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “It’s very exciting.”

Until recently, the only known rings circled giant planets such as Saturn. In 2013, however, astronomers found two rings around Chariklo, an odd little rock about 250 kilometres across between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. Chiron, one of Chariklo’s neighbours, may also have a ring.

Now astronomers have found a ring beyond Neptune. José-Luis Ortiz and Pablo Santos-Sanz at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain, and their colleagues watched the dwarf planet Haumea pass in front of a dim red star in the constellation Boötes on 21 January this year. A total of 12 telescopes in six European countries tracked the eclipse.

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Judge Says It’s Okay for U.S. House to Ban Atheists from Offering Invocations

By Hemant Mehta

Atheist Dan Barker will not be allowed to deliver an invocation in the U.S. House of Representatives, despite meeting all the traditional requirements, after a judge dismissed his discrimination complaint earlier today.

All of this began last year, and it stems from the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Greece v. Galloway, in which the justices said invocations, if they’re adopted at all, must be open to people of all religious backgrounds, including people without religion. It specifically applied to city councils, but what about Congress?

That’s what Barker wanted to know. So he went through all the proper channels to deliver an invocation in the House.

He asked Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin, to sponsor him. Check.

After being told “guest chaplains” needed to be ordained, Barker, a former Christian minister, submitted his ordination paperwork, which he still uses to perform weddings. Check.

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Trump confirmed as keynote speaker for anti-LGBT conference

By Chris Johnson

President Trump has been confirmed as the keynote speaker at the upcoming Values Voters Summit in D.C. hosted by the anti-LGBT Family Research Council, marking the first-time ever a sitting U.S. president has spoken at the annual event.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, announced late Tuesday in a statement Trump would speak on Friday at the conference, which is taking place over the weekend at the Omni Shoreham Hotel.

“Values voters have waited eight years for a leader who puts America’s mission first and respects the values that made America into a great nation,” Perkins said. “Values voters are coming to our nation’s capital thankful to hear from a president who is fulfilling the promises that he campaigned on. Since the early days of the campaign, President Trump allied himself with values voters, promising to put an end to the 8 years of relentless assault on the First Amendment.”

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Greece passes gender-change law opposed by Orthodox church

By Helena Smith

Greece’s leftwing government has passed legislation enabling citizens to determine their gender identity amid fierce condemnation from the Orthodox church and accusations the law would “destroy human beings”.

After two days of highly charged debate, the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, rallied parliament to endorse policies that would permit people to legally change their gender on all official documents without undergoing sterilisation.

The law, which was passed with 171 votes in favour and 114 against, had exposed political divisions and entrenched beliefs in one of Europe’s most socially conservative societies. It will allow trans individuals to affirm their desired gender from the age of 15 and brings Greece in line with most EU member states.

“No tradition, no religion, no perception of family requires citizens to remain on the margins or be pushed into institutional and social oblivion,” Tsipras told MPs before the vote.

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California’s wildfires powered by perfect storm of fire hazards

By Andy Coghlan

Fire has devastated large areas of northern California, killing at least 17, with 155 people missing, and destroying at least 2000 homes. Wildfires have torched almost 30,000 hectares, mostly in the wine-growing regions of Napa and Sonoma counties, including the area around Santa Rosa.

The US National Weather Service (NWS) issued a red-flag warning on Tuesday, blaming near-perfect fire conditions. Warm offshore winds gusting at up to 50 kilometres per hour served as bellows, spreading fire in conditions of low humidity and parched vegetation. “Any fires that develop will likely spread rapidly,” warned the NWS. “Shifting winds may push ongoing fires in new directions.”

The Californian fires are the latest in a year that has seen abnormally high wildfire activity in the US. On 1 October, the US National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho predicted that northern California was at especially grave risk. “Weather patterns along the West Coast allowed fuels to dry and become receptive to fire,” it warned.

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In Newspaper Rant, Pastor Dreams of Nation In Which Non-Christians Are Banished

By Hemant Mehta

The best and worst thing about local newspapers is that anyone gets a chance to be published. That means people like Dr. Robert Lewis, the pastor at Solon Road Baptist Church in Waxahachie, Texas get a chance to share their views on how all non-Christians shouldn’t be in the country.

His letter begins with a claim that we live in a nation “Under God,” like in the Pledge of Allegiance. Referring to the Founding Fathers writing the Constitution, he says he doesn’t “know anybody who could have done it without being ‘Under God.’”

I guess no one told him the words were only inserted into the Pledge in 1954, that many of the Founding Fathers were Deists or non-religious, and that religion was purposely left out of the Constitution except to say it couldn’t be forced upon anyone by the government and that it couldn’t be a legal deal-breaker for political office.

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