ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 348

The sun’s energy could speed up dark matter so we can detect it

By Lean Crane

We don’t yet know what dark matter is made of, but the sun might help us find out. If dark matter particles are extremely light, they could bounce off atomic nuclei within the sun and gain enough energy in the process that we could detect them.

Chris Kouvaris at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and his colleagues calculate that particles of this “sub-GeV” dark matter could be accelerated to speeds in excess of 600 kilometres per second in this way.

Dark matter permeates the cosmos, so if these sub-GeV particles exist some of them should be hitting the sun all the time. As they bounce around within the sun, some would gain enough speed to escape towards Earth.

Faster particles are easier to detect because they have more energy, so this solar boost could be the key to making dark matter visible to us.

But the sub-GeV dark matter particles will need to interact with the normal matter in our detectors. For this to happen, they will need a helper particle to mediate that interaction. For example, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), another leading contender for dark matter, interact with ordinary matter by exchanging subatomic particles called W and Z bosons.

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Cryo-electron microscopy wins chemistry Nobel

By Daniel Cressey & Ewen Callaway

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for work that helps researchers see what biomolecules look like.

Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson were awarded the prize on 4 October for their work in developing cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a technique that fires beams of electrons at proteins that have been frozen in solution, to deduce the biomolecules’ structure.

For decades, biologists have used X-ray crystallography — blasting X-rays at crystallized proteins — to image biomolecular structures. But labs are now racing to adopt the cryo-EM method, because it can take pictures of proteins that can’t easily be formed into large crystals. The tool has “moved biochemistry into a new era”, says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize.

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Brownback pressed at Senate hearing over rescinding LGBT order

BY JONATHAN SHORMAN, LINDSAY WISE AND HUNTER WOODALL

Gov. Sam Brownback defended his decision to rescind protections for gay and transgender state workers before a U.S. Senate panel considering his nomination as ambassador for international religious freedom.

Brownback faced skeptical questioning from Democrats and friendly questioning from Republicans during his confirmation hearing before the Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.

The hearing placed Brownback one step closer to confirmation by the full U.S. Senate. He will presumably resign as governor to take the position once that happens, but there is no set timeline.

Overall, Brownback emphasized that he would pursue freedom for religious minorities around the world.

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Egypt Expands Crackdown on Gay and Transgender People

By Nour Youssef and Liam Stack

CAIRO — At least 34 people have been arrested in Egypt as part of an expanding crackdown on the gay and transgender community following a rock concert last month when audience members waved a rainbow flag.

The crackdown has been fueled by social media, where images of the flag-waving were widely shared, and by dating apps and other websites, which the Egyptian police have used to entrap people suspected of being gay and transgender, activists and officials say.

Photographs and video of Ahmed Alaa, a 22-year-old law student, and others waving the flag at the concert by Mashrou’ Leila, a Lebanese band with an openly gay singer, stoked public outrage and vituperative news coverage that described the flag-waving as an assault on Egypt and its morals.

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More than 20% of countries have official state religions – survey

By Harriet Sherwood

More than one in five countries has an official state religion, with the majority being Muslim states, and a further 20% of countries have a preferred or favoured religion.

A slim majority (53%) of counties has no official or preferred religion, and 10 (5%) are hostile to religion, according to a report by the Washington-based Pew Research Center.

Most of the 43 countries with state religions are in the Middle East and North Africa, with a cluster in northern Europe. Islam is the official religion in 27 countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as well North Africa and the Middle East.

Thirteen countries – including nine in Europe – are officially Christian, two (Bhutan and Cambodia) have Buddhism as their state religion, and one (Israel) is officially a Jewish state. No country has Hinduism as its state religion.

The Pew report says: “In some cases, state religions have roles that are largely ceremonial. But often the distinction comes with tangible advantages in terms of legal or tax status, ownership of real estate or other property, and access to financial support from the state. In addition, countries with state-endorsed (or ‘established’) faiths tend to more severely regulate religious practice, including placing restrictions or bans on minority religious groups.”

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Medicine Nobel awarded for work on circadian clocks

By Ewen Callaway & Heidi Ledford

Three scientists who studied the workings of organisms’ inner circadian clocks have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash, both at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, will split the award of 9 million Swedish kronor (US$1.1 million) with Michael Young at Rockefeller University in New York City.

Beginning in the 1980s, the three researchers isolated and characterized a gene in fruit flies, period, that encodes a protein that builds up each night, only to be broken down the following day. In subsequent work, the trio, as well as other scientists, unpicked the molecular regulation of theperiod gene (and the protein that it encodes, called PER) and identified additional components of the circadian clock.

All multicellular organisms possess circadian clocks, and human versions of the genes that comprise their clocks have been implicated in sleeping disorders and other medical conditions.

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Humanist services at Lackland raise eyebrows — but draw crowds

By J.p. Lawrence

“Please don’t jump down my throat,” Taylor Grin thought as he approached his training instructor with a request.

It was 2013, and Grin was a few weeks into Air Force basic training at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. He had just learned which religious services were available to trainees — Catholic, several Protestant denominations, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist, among others.

Grin, then 26, considered himself a secular humanist, someone who pursues an ethical life without a belief in God. With no chaplain-facilitated service for trainees like him, he wanted to start one — and became a key player in a national culture war playing out within the U.S. military.

With a commander’s blessing, Grin and seven others met in a lobby Sundays, picking up new members from recruits headed to nearby restrooms. The weekly meetings now attract 1,000 trainees or more, a major share of the roughly 3,800 who attend religious services each week.

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Fox News Host: Maybe the Las Vegas Shooter Just “Didn’t Believe in God”

By Hemant Mehta

This morning, on Fox & Friends, host Ainsley Earhardt offered her theory as to the motives of the man who killed 59 and injured several hundred more in Las Vegas.

Maybe, she said, he just didn’t have enough God in his life, and that made him hate people who do.

… what’s interesting, our last guest, the forensic psychiatrist said, “When you have someone who’s young that does something like this, they do it for notoriety; when you have someone who is older, they do it for a cause.”

And maybe this guy heard that song, God Bless America. His brother said he didn’t believe in God, or didn’t have a God, or didn’t have faith in his life, so maybe this is all speculation, but that possibly could be the reason, because he knows country musicians or country music fans are normally pro-God and go to church on Sundays. Maybe he has a problem with that or had a problem with that.

Then there was a long awkward pause while even her co-hosts seemed to wonder what the hell she was talking about…

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We’re nearly ready to use CRISPR to target far more diseases

By Michael Le Page

The race is on to edit the DNA in our body to fight or prevent disease. Promising results from animal studies targeting the liver, muscles and the brain suggest that the CRISPR genome-editing method could revolutionise medicine, allowing us to treat or even cure a huge range of disorders.

The CRISPR genome-editing method was only developed in 2012, but it is proving so powerful and effective that around 20 trials in humans have already begun or will soon. Almost all of these involve removing cells from an individual’s body, editing their DNA and then putting them back into the body.

This approach has immense promise, for instance, it is being used to alter immune cells to make them better at killing cancers. It’s relatively easy to remove immune cells or blood stem cells, edit them, and then return them to the body, but this isn’t possible with most bodily tissues.

So editing cells inside the body would allow us to treat far more conditions – from genetic disorders to high cholesterol – and would also be cheaper than growing and editing cells outside the body. What diseases could be treated this way? “Absolutely everything,” says Irina Conboy of the University of California, Berkeley.

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Nobel Prize Awarded for Sensational Gravitational Waves Discovery

By Megan Gannon

BERLIN—As expected by many, the 2017 Nobel Prize for physics went to three scientists who helped detect gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein.

“This year’s prize is about a discovery that shook the world,” said physicist Thors Hans Hansson, announcing the winners from Stockholm.

Half of the 9 million Swedish krona ($1.1 million) award will go to Rainer Weiss of MIT. The other half will go jointly to Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of Caltech. All three were founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which detected gravitational waves for the first time in 2015.

Albert Einstein had theorized that space-time can be stretched and compressed by collisions of massive objects in the universe. However, experimental proof for such events eluded scientists for 100 years. 

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