ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 355

Cassini Flies Toward a Fiery Death on Saturn

By Dennis Overbye

The Cassini spacecraft that has orbited Saturn for the last 13 years would weigh 4,685 pounds on Earth and, at 22 feet high, is somewhat longer and wider than a small moving van tipped on its rear. Bristling with cameras, antennas and other sensors, it is one of the most complex and sophisticated spy robots ever set loose in interplanetary space.

On Friday morning, the whole world will hear it die.

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the scientists of the Cassini mission will figuratively ride their creation down into oblivion in the clouds of Saturn. They will be collecting data on the makeup of the planet’s butterscotch clouds until the last bitter moment, when the spacecraft succumbs to the heat and pressure of atmospheric entry and becomes a meteor.

So will end a decades-long journey of discovery and wonder.

The Cassini-Huygens mission, as it is officially known, was hatched in the 1980s partly to strengthen ties between NASA and the European Space Agency and partly because, well, where else in the solar system would you want to go? With mysterious, mesmerizing rings and a panoply of strange moons (62 and counting), Saturn was the last outpost of the known planets before the discoveries of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

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EPA chief on Irma: The time to talk climate change isn’t now

By Daniella Diaz

Washington (CNN)–Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told CNN in an interview about Hurricane Irma on Thursday that the time to talk about climate change isn’t now.

“Here’s the issue,” Pruitt told CNN in a phone interview. “To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm; versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced.”

He continued: “What we need to focus on is access to clean water, addressing these areas of superfund activities that may cause an attack on water, these issues of access to fuel. … Those are things so important to citizens of Florida right now, and to discuss the cause and effect of these storms, there’s the… place (and time) to do that, it’s not now.”

President Donald Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax” and Pruitt has led a push to roll back EPA regulations regarding greenhouse gas emissions.

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Mexico on tsunami alert after biggest earthquake in 85 years

By New Scientist staff and Press Association

A major earthquake off Mexico’s southern coast has killed at least five people, sparking tsunami warnings. Further dangerous aftershocks are also expected.

The US Geological Survey reported the earthquake’s magnitude as 8.1, making it the biggest earthquake in Mexico since 1932.

The USGS said the quake struck at 11.49pm local time on Thursday and its epicentre was 165 kilometres west of Tapachula in Chiapas, not far from Guatemala. It had a depth of 69.7 kilometres.

Aftershock warning

The quake was so strong that it caused buildings to sway violently in Mexico’s capital, more than 1,000 kilometres away. Houses toppled and the quake produced tsunami waves and sent people running into the streets in panic. President Enrique Pena Nieto said 62 aftershocks followed the quake and it was possible one as strong as 7.2 could hit in the next 24 hours.

“The house moved like chewing gum and the light and internet went out momentarily,” said resident Rodrigo Soberanes, who lives near San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.

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Here’s How Atheists Are Helping People in Houston After Hurricane Harvey

By Hemant Mehta

There was a strange letter to the editor in the Kentucky-based Glasgow Daily Times yesterday. Ronald W. Curry, a man who has apparently never used Google before, had a simple question for readers: How come no atheists are helping out in Houston?

Where are the atheist relief groups? Where are their fleet of trucks loaded with supplies? Where are their crews that help dry out and clean up? Where are their construction crews that rip out water-damaged carpet, floors and drywall and install new materials? If there is a single group of atheists involved in this effort — or for that matter, in any effort such as this, it is not known to the writer.

And how many hospitals and orphanages were founded by atheists? Where are the thrift shops, clothes closets or food pantries under the surveillance of atheist groups?

There are so many ways to respond to this…

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Coolest science ever headed to the space station

By Adrian Cho

Atomic physicists tend to tinker away on their own, preferably in dark, hushed labs. When Eric Cornell started as a postdoc with Carl Wieman at JILA, an institute run jointly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado in Boulder, in 1990 he did his best to transform their second-floor lab into a basement. “We had these beautiful windows that looked out over the mountains,” Cornell says, “and we bought 3-inch-thick Styrofoam and cut it into squares and taped it over them.” The quiet and darkness made it easier to fiddle with the homemade lasers they were using to coax atoms into a new state of matter.

Cornell and Wieman were trying to cool a puff of rubidium gas to within a few billionths of a degree of absolute zero—colder than any place in nature, even the 2.73 kelvins of space. They hoped to produce a long-predicted state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), in which the atoms shed their individual identities and crowd en masse into a single quantum wave. In 1995, they succeeded—a triumph that earned them a share of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. “We finally unplugged that experiment just 2 years ago,” Cornell says.

Now, Cornell and other physicists are taking their atomic wisps out of seclusion and into space. Early next year, NASA will launch its $70 million Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) to the International Space Station (ISS). Once in orbit, the fully automated rig will create BECs and do other cold atom experiments, taking advantage of weightlessness to attain record-low temperatures and break ground for ambitious studies of quantum mechanics and gravity. Miniaturization is the key: Experiments that once required a room full of lasers, optical elements, and vacuum systems can now fit in a device the size of an ice chest, with the atoms trapped on the surface of a microchip. The effort will stretch the culture of atomic physicists, forcing them to share a single remote facility, like users of a space telescope.

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Irma Smashes Turks And Caicos; Category 4 Storm On Its Way To Florida

By Bill Chapppell and Scott Neuman

Hurricane Irma slammed through the Turks and Caicos Islands en route to a destructive encounter with Florida this weekend. Although the storm has been downgraded slightly, it remains a massively powerful and “extremely dangerous” system, forecasters say.

The extent of the damage to the low-lying Turks and Caicos island chain, located just east of the Bahamas, was not immediately known. Winds at the top end of the hurricane scale and waves as high as 20 feet had been forecast; tropical-force winds will keep hitting the islands through Friday morning.

The National Hurricane Center downgraded Irma a notch from the highest Category 5 ranking to Category 4 in its latest bulletin at 8 a.m. ET. Winds that screamed through the Caribbean at up to 185 mph, turning houses into piles of debris and killing at least 14 people, had fallen to 150 mph, the NHC said.

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Hurricane Irma’s epic size is being fueled by global warming

By Michael Le Page

It’s a monster. As the eye of Hurricane Irma approached the tiny island of Barbuda this morning, wind speeds soared to 250 kph before the instrument broke.

At the time of writing, all contact with the island had been lost and it is unclear how the 1600 inhabitants have fared. But already reports of severe destruction are coming in from other islands in Irma’s path.

The destruction could be extreme. Hurricane Irma has the strongest winds of any hurricane to form in the open Atlantic, with sustained wind speeds of 295 kph.

It is also huge. The strongest winds are limited to a relatively small area around its center, but hurricane-force winds of 118 kph or more extend out 85 kilometers from its eye.

Irma could yet grow stronger and is going to graze or directly hit many densely-populated islands in the Caribbean before possibly making landfall in Florida on Sunday – but there is still a lot of uncertainty about its path and intensity this far ahead.

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Spinning metal sails could slash fuel consumption, emissions on cargo ships

By Katherine Kornei

U.K. soccer star David Beckham was known for “bending” his free kicks over walls of defenders and around sprawling goal tenders. Now, the physics behind such curving kicks is set to be used to propel ocean ships more efficiently.

Early next year, a tanker vessel owned by Maersk, the Danish transportation conglomerate, and a passenger ship owned by Viking Cruises will be outfitted with spinning cylinders on their decks. Mounted vertically and up to 10 stories tall, these “rotor sails” could slash fuel consumption up to 10%, saving transportation companies hundreds of thousands of dollars and cutting soot-causing carbon emissions by thousands of tons per trip.

Rotor sails rely on a bit of aerodynamics known as the Magnus effect. In the 1850s, German physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus noticed that when moving through air a spinning object such as a ball experiences a sideways force. The force comes about as follows. If the ball were not spinning, air would stream straight past it, creating a swirling wake that would stretch out directly behind the ball like the tail of a comet. The turning surface of a spinning ball, however, drags some air with it. The rotation deflects the wake so that it comes off the ball at an angle, closer to the side of the ball that’s rotating into the oncoming air. Thanks to Isaac Newton’s third law that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, the deflected wake pushes the ball in the opposite direction, toward the side of the ball that’s turning away from the oncoming air. Thus, the spinning ball gets a sideways shove.

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Gauri Lankesh: Indian journalist shot dead in Bangalore

By BBC

A prominent Indian journalist critical of Hindu nationalist politics has been shot dead in the southern state of Karnataka, police say.

Gauri Lankesh, 55, was found lying in a pool of blood on her doorstep in the city of Bangalore.

She was shot in the head and chest by gunmen who arrived by motorcycle. The motive for the crime was not clear.

The most high profile Indian journalist murdered in recent years, Ms Lankesh was buried with full state honours.

The chief minister of Karnataka, Siddaramaiah, was among those who attended the funeral.

There were also protests against her killing in several Indian cities, including the capital, Delhi.

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‘Christian America’ dwindling, including white evangelicals, study shows

By Kimberly Winston

The future of religion in America is young, non-Christian and technicolor.

Almost every Christian denomination in the U.S. shows signs of growing diversity as white Christians, once the majority in most mainline Protestant and Catholic denominations, give way to younger members, who tend to be of different races, according to a study released Wednesday (Sept. 6) by the Public Religion Research Institute.

And American evangelicals — once seemingly immune to the decline experienced by their Catholic and mainline Protestant neighbors —  are losing numbers and losing them quickly.

Americans are also continuing to move away from organized religion altogether, as atheists, agnostics and those who say they do not identify with any particular religion — the group known as the “nones”  — hold steady at about one-quarter (24 percent) of the population.

The study, “America’s Changing Religious Identity,” contacted 101,000 Americans in 50 states, and has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 0.4 percentage points. And while the survey spotlights transformations afoot in many religious groups, it also shows a seismic shift for a long-standing American religious powerhouse: white evangelicals.

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