ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 350

Sloshing, supersonic gas may have built the baby universe’s biggest black holes

By Joshua Sokol

A central mystery surrounds the supermassive black holes that haunt the cores of galaxies: How did they get so big so fast? Now, a new, computer simulation–based study suggests that these giants were formed and fed by massive clouds of gas sloshing around in the aftermath of the big bang.

“This really is a new pathway,” says Volker Bromm, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas in Austin who was not part of the research team. “But it’s not … the one and only pathway.”

Astronomers know that, when the universe was just a billion years old, some supermassive black holes were already a billion times heavier than the sun. That’s much too big for them to have been built up through the slow mergers of small black holes formed in the conventional way, from collapsed stars a few dozen times the mass of the sun. Instead, the prevailing idea is that these behemoths had a head start. They could have condensed directly out of seed clouds of hydrogen gas weighing tens of thousands of solar masses, and grown from there by gravitationally swallowing up more gas. But the list of plausible ways for these “direct-collapse” scenarios to happen is short, and each option requires a perfect storm of circumstances.

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Blasphemy and Other “Hate Speech”

By Ronald A. Lindsay

You have International Blasphemy Rights Day (IBRD) on your calendar, right? It’s only a couple of days from now—September 30—in case for some bizarre reason you forgot.

The Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit organization of which I was formerly the president, launched IBRD in 2009 in part to draw attention to the fact that criticism of religious beliefs is prohibited through legal sanctions or social pressure in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, although there is now a formal campaign to end blasphemy laws, and this campaign has met with some success in Western countries—Demark abolished its centuries-old blasphemy law in June—many countries, especially those with majority Muslim populations, still retain laws that impose harsh penalties for blasphemy. Pakistan, to cite just one such country, continues to have a number of blasphemy cases each year, often targeting religious minorities and sometimes resulting in death sentences.

Even when blasphemy laws are not enforced by the state, the underlying mentality that supports such laws often results in social pressure to refrain from questioning majoritarian religious views. This pressure can take the form of homicidal violence from those outraged by the questioning of their beliefs. Consider, for example, the several Bangladeshi bloggers who have been hacked to death by religious extremists over the last few years.

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5 faith facts about Roy Moore: Evangelical in excelsis

By Yonat Shimron

(RNS) — Former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore just won the GOP Senate primary runoff. He has an excellent chance of becoming the state’s next U.S. senator, filling the seat left open when Jeff Sessions was appointed U.S. attorney general.

If Moore does, he would become one of the nation’s most prominent evangelical torchbearers. (He has already received the support of the Rev. Franklin Graham and the endorsement of evangelical radio personality James Dobson.)

Here are five faith facts about Moore:

1. Moore is a Christian nationalist.

He believes the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Christian nation and that the government should privilege Christianity (or Judeo-Christianity) over other religions when it comes to policy.

“The First Amendment was established on Christian principles, because it was Jesus that said this: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and render unto God the things that are God’s,’” Moore told Vox’s Jeff Stein.

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Massive Iceberg’s Split Exposes Hidden Ecosystem

By Jo Marchant

Biologists are racing to secure a visit to a newly revealed region of the Southern Ocean as soon as it is safe to sail there. One of the largest icebergs ever recorded broke free from the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula in July. As it moves away into the Weddell Sea, it will expose 5,800 square kilometres of sea floor that have been shielded by ice for up to 120,000 years. If researchers can get to the area quickly enough, they’ll have the chance to study the ecosystem beneath before the loss of the ice causes it to change.

“I cannot imagine a more dramatic shift in environmental conditions in any ecosystem on Earth,” says Julian Gutt, a marine ecologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.

It is difficult for Antarctic scientists to respond quickly to sudden events, because polar-research vessels are usually booked  months, if not years, in advance. A German research mission led by Boris Dorschel, head of bathymetry at the Alfred Wegener Institute, was already scheduled to visit the Larsen area and will now include a biodiversity survey of the exposed region in March 2019. 

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Latest gravitational wave isn’t from neutron stars after all

By Leah Crane

Another gravitational wave has been detected, this time by the new Virgo detector in Italy. The observation comes on the tail of rumours of a possible detection of neutron stars merging, which could cause gravitational waves we can observe on Earth. But that’s not what they found.

On 14 August, the Virgo detector and the two US detectors that make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) all observed the ripples in space-time caused by two black holes smashing into each other and merging.

This is the fourth gravitational wave detection ever. All four have come from pairs of black holes spiraling towards one another and then colliding, their colossal masses warping space-time as they merge. Like its forerunner, LIGO, Virgo spotted its first gravitational wave shortly after it began taking data.

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Why Secular Advocates Say Alabama GOP Senate Pick Is Dangerous

By Antonia Blumberg

Controversial former judge Roy Moore won Alabama’s Republican Senate nomination on Tuesday over incumbent Luther Strange. The only thing between Moore and the Senate now is the Dec. 12 special election against Democrat Doug Jones, whose odds in the solidly red state are decidedly low.

Moore was twice suspended from court as chief justice of Alabama for putting his religious views before his duty to uphold the law of land ― first for refusing to remove a 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument from the state Supreme Court building in 2003, and again in 2016 for telling judges to defy a federal ruling on same-sex marriage.

And yet a man who has said “homosexual conduct should be illegal” and who recently called Islam a “false religion” could soon fill the Senate seat vacated by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The former judge’s unabashed religious views and apparent disregard for the legal establishment have won hearts in the overwhelmingly Christian Alabama. But they have also raised a red flag for secular advocates who work to uphold the separation of church and state.

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U.S. No Longer Playing Leading Role in UN’s LGBTQ Human Rights Group

By Julie Moreau

The 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly concluded this week, and among the packed events during the two-week gathering was a meeting of the U.N.’s LGBTI Core Group. Now 9 years old, the group is composed of representatives from 26 member states, along with the U.N.’s Office of Human Rights and two advocacy organizations — Human Rights Watch and OutRight International. The group’s mission is to advocate for the rights of sexual and gender minorities globally, with an emphasis on ending violence and discrimination.

But while the U.S. had taken a leading role in the U.N. LGBTI Core Group during the Obama years, its participation this year was noticeably muted.

“Historic Advances”

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein addressed the forum, noting the recent “historic advances” in LGBTQ rights globally, including Malta’s 2015 Gender Identity, Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics Act. The measure allows for individuals to alter identity documents to reflect their gender identity quickly, and without requirements to undergo medical evaluation or surgical procedures. The Act has been praised by intersex advocates because it prohibits any surgical intervention on children that can be deferred until the child is old enough to consent.

Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, also present, remarked on what he called the country’s “transformation” with respect to LGBTQ rights — from one that actively opposed European Union reforms regarding LGBTQ discrimination to one leading the European pack. “It can be done,” he said.

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Flint’s lead-poisoned water had a ‘horrifyingly large’ effect on fetal deaths, study finds

By Christopher Ingraham

The fertility rate in Flint, Mich., dropped precipitously after the city decided to switch to lead-poisoned Flint River water in 2014, according to a new working paper.

That decline was primarily driven by what the authors call a “culling of the least healthy fetuses” resulting in a “horrifyingly large” increase in fetal deaths and miscarriages. The paper estimates that among the  babies conceived from November 2013 through March 2015, “between 198 and 276 more children would have been born had Flint not enacted the switch in water,” write health economists Daniel Grossman of West Virginia University and David Slusky of Kansas University.

In April 2014, Flint decided to draw its public water supply from the Flint River, a temporary measure intended to save costs while the city worked on a permanent pipeline project to Lake Huron. Residents immediately began complaining about the odor and appearance of the water, but well into 2015 the city was still assuring residents that the water was safe to drink.

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Trilobite Tummies Revealed in New Fossils

By Stephanie Pappas

Trilobite tummies were more complex than previously believed, new fossils reveal.

The fossils, which hail from China, preserve the guts of trilobites in long, iron-rich strips. Trilobite fossils are a dime a dozen — sort of like cockroaches of the sea in that respect. They were abundant for nearly 300 million years before they went extinct about 252 million years ago — but trilobite fossils that reveal internal organs are rare, according to a new study on the fossils published Sept. 21 in the journal PLOS ONE.

The fossils show that early trilobites had crops, or stomach-like pouches that were once thought to have evolved only later in the trilobite lineage. One trilobite species even boasted a crop along with more simplified digestive glands, suggesting that the evolution of the trilobite digestive system was complicated, the researchers found. 

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Louisiana Attorney General: “We Will Get Prayer Back in Public Schools”

By Hemant Mehta

On Thursday night, Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry spoke to a group of conservative Christians at a private event for the Louisiana Family Forum, a Religious Right group. And he told them it was his goal to bring prayer back to public schools.

As if it ever left.

The Times-Picayune reports:

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is vowing to fight for prayer in public schools, telling a friendly audience of several hundred people: “With your prayers, and an offense, we will get prayer back in public schools.”

…

Landry said he was encouraged recently by a court ruling that a Michigan county board may open its meetings with a Christian prayer and invite audience members to join. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati rejected assertions that the prayers violated the Constitution.

…

“I just want you to know that we are winning, and we will get God back into this country,” Landry said.

Does anyone want to tell the state’s top attorney that he doesn’t understand the law he’s sworn to uphold?

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