ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 356

Jupiter’s powerful aurora is surprisingly different from Earth’s

By Leah Crane

Not all auroras are created equal. Jupiter’s auroral glow is much stronger than Earth’s, so researchers assumed it was caused by the same process that generates our planet’s brightest auroras. But new observations from NASA’s Juno spacecraft show that’s not true.

“For many years we thought we understood Jupiter’s aurora,” says John Clarke at Boston University. “But then Juno got there and it went through these magnetic fields right above an active aurora, and it didn’t see what we thought it would.”

Now, Barry Mauk at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and his colleagues have analysed Juno’s data and found that the likely cause of powerful auroras on Jupiter is one does something quite different on Earth.

On our planet, most intense auroras are the result of powerful electric fields building up along Earth’s magnetic fieldlines. This creates wells of electric potential – areas where the electric field changes sharply – that accelerate electrons from the solar wind toward the ground.

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What’s Next after Creating a Cancer-Prevention Vaccine?

By Dina Fine Maron

Imagine a vaccine that protects against more than a half-dozen types of cancer—and has a decade of data and experience behind it.

We have one. It’s the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, and it was approved for the U.S. market back in June 2006. It can prevent almost all cervical cancers and protect against cancers of the mouth, throat and anus. It also combats the sexually transmitted genital warts that some forms of the virus can cause.

On Wednesday, two researchers who completed fundamental work on these vaccines received one of this year’s prestigious Lasker Awards, a group of medical prizes sometimes called the “American Nobels.” Douglas Lowy and John Schiller, whose research provided the basis for the HPV vaccine, were selected alongside a researcher who separately unraveled key aspects of metabolic control of cell growth. Planned Parenthood was also given an award, for its public service. Lowy and Schiller, who both work at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), received the Lasker for their research on animal and human papillomaviruses—work that enabled the development of a vaccine against HPV-16 type, a form of the virus that fuels many HPV malignancies. The duo’s experiments proved that the vaccine is effective in animals, and they also conducted the first clinical trial of an HPV-16 vaccine in humans. That gave pharmaceutical companies the evidence they needed to invest in their own vaccines designed to protect against multiple kinds of HPV, and ultimately led to the versions administered around the world today.

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Can You Be Good Without God?

By Brandon Withrow

“If God did not exist, then we would have to invent him,” said the French philosopher Voltaire. His point: that without a divine being to check right and wrong, any number of atrocities are possible and could go unpunished.

A recent study (of more than 3,000 people in 13 countries) published in the journal Nature Human Behavior echoes Voltaire’s maxim. Looking at intuitive thinking—presumptions drawn by individuals through unconscious biases—researchers led by Will M. Gervais, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, discovered that most individuals intuitively conclude that a serial killer is more likely to be an atheist (approximately 60 percent) than religious (approximately 30 percent).

While this assessment may resonate with many religious individuals, it undoubtedly is far from the conscious conclusions of most atheists, who find social prejudice difficult to overcome.

The idea that atheism is a gateway to moral anarchy, for example, is not new. Other studies on public views of atheism indicate that 40 percent of Americans disapprove of nonreligion and 27 percent see atheists as not sharing their values.

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EPA now requires political aide’s sign-off for agency awards, grant applications

By Juliet Eilperin

The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the unusual step of putting a political operative in charge of vetting the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the EPA distributes annually, assigning final funding decisions to a former Trump campaign aide with little environmental policy experience.

In this role, John Konkus reviews every award the agency gives out, along with every grant solicitation before it is issued. According to both career and political employees, Konkus has told staff that he is on the lookout for “the double C-word” — climate change — and repeatedly has instructed grant officers to eliminate references to the subject in solicitations.

Konkus, who officially works in the EPA’s public affairs office, has canceled close to $2 million competitively awarded to universities and nonprofit organizations. Although his review has primarily affected Obama administration priorities, it is the heavily Republican state of Alaska that has undergone the most scrutiny so far.

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We ignore what doesn’t fit with our biases – even if it costs us

By Jessica Hamzelou

We can’t help but be more welcoming of information that confirms our biases than facts that challenge them. Now an experiment has shown that we do this even when it means losing out financially.

Most research on confirmation bias has focused on stereotypes that people believe to be true, says Stefano Palminteri at École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. In such experiments, people hold on to their beliefs even when shown evidence that they are wrong. “People don’t change their minds,” says Palminteri.

But those kinds of beliefs tend not to have clear repercussions for the people who hold them. If our biases cost us financially, would we realize that they are not worth holding on to?

To find out, Palminteri and his colleagues at ENS and University College London set 20 volunteers a task that involved learning to associate made-up symbols with financial reward. In the first of two experiments, the volunteers were shown two symbols at a time and had to choose between them. They then received a financial reward that varied depending on their choice.

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Neandertals and early modern humans probably didn’t meet at rumored rendezvous site

By Michael Price

Croatia’s scenic Vindija Cave was thought to be a potential trysting site for Neandertals and early modern humans some 32,000 years ago. Now, a new study questions that idea, using a more exacting form of radiocarbon dating to suggest instead that Neandertals used the cave 40,000 years ago—some 8000 years before modern humans lived in that part of Europe. If true, the find casts doubt on the long-held assumption by some that the two hominids overlapped in the region.

“Many of us have long suspected [this],” writes Erik Trinkaus, a biological anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis who wasn’t involved in the work, in an email. He points out that the dating of sites across Europe have generally put the Neandertal’s demise there about 40,000 years ago. “This article puts to rest an anomalous occurrence of late Neandertals in this region, and allows us to move on from it.”

In the late 1990s, researchers dated the Neandertal remains from the cave, which included fragments of skulls, thighs, and other assorted bones, using radiocarbon dating, which measures an isotope known as carbon-14 that decays over time at a fixed rate. By seeing how much carbon-14 is left, scientists can get a roughly accurate idea of when the Neandertal lived. Using the carbon-14 in bone collagen from skull fragments and other bones found inside the cave, the original studies returned an estimated age of 29,000 to 34,000 years old. That was about the same time that early modern humans moved into Europe—as evidenced by modern human remains and tools also found in the cave—raising the specter that the two groups met, competed, and even mated with one another.

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Record number of British people say they have no religion

By May Bulman

The number of Britons who say they have no religion has hit a record high, new data has revealed.

More than half of the British public (53 per cent) say they are not at all religious – a figure that has increased by five percentage points since 2015 and by 19 percentage points since 1983, when just three in 10 people deemed themselves non-religious.

The news has prompted fresh calls for the Government to cut the amount of public money going to the church and reduce its influence in society.

The decline in religious affiliation is hitting the Church of England particularly hard, with the number of people considering themselves Anglican having halved since 2000 – at just 15 per cent. Young people were particularly underrepresented, with just 3 per cent of those aged 18-24 describing themselves as Anglican, compared with 40 per cent of those aged 75 and over.

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Atheists Say Program Letting Prisoners Leave Jail To Go To Church Is Illegal

By Hemant Mehta

The Maury County jail in Tennessee has a bizarre program to help prisoners get adjusted to life back in the outside world: They’re allowed to leave prison in casual clothing with no armed supervision… to go to church. The only person with them is a “spiritual mentor.”

“Inmates are checked out by spiritual mentors who have been vetted through our jail chaplain and have been volunteers in our facility as mentors or program leaders and has completed TCI training for volunteers,” [Maury County Sheriff Bucky] Rowland said.

The churches aren’t told that prisoners are in the congregation. Rowland doesn’t see that as a problem, though: “They are going to church with sinners.” So what’s one more, right?

The “Church Work Release” program — it’s unclear what “work” is being done — began in December of last year and it has already created problems. One prisoner was “caught smuggling drugs and tobacco” back into the jail. That, however, appears to be the only stain on the program. Rowland says that prisoners must be near the end of their sentences (60 days from release) and have a clean disciplinary record to be allowed to go to an outside church. The program was temporarily suspended after the inmate brought back contraband, but it has since resumed.

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Dawkins Carries Forward The Lamp Of Science In His Latest, And It Burns Just As Bright

by Aravindan Neelakandan

Richard Dawkins is one of the best science popularisers of our times. He is also an eminent evolutionary biologist. Starting from his book Selfish Gene in 1976, for more than four decades, he has made science a part of popular culture in an uncompromising way. A staunch Darwinian, he is the no-nonsense science writer every peddler of pseudo-science would do well to avoid. His forthright questioning of Deepak Chopra, cornering him over the now customary misappropriation and misuse of the ‘Q’ (quantum physics) word is one of the most delightful exposes of pseudo-scientific word jugglery purporting to be science.

The Oxford zoologist has provided many terms in his popular science books which have become very famous today. The word meme was coined by him in The Selfish Gene (1976). His concept of ‘extended phenotype’, dealt with in the book of the same title (1982), just like his ‘memes’, has had a tremendous influence on social sciences. In his Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), he introduced Petwhac (Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental), which aims to demystify the Jungian synchronicity, though Dawkins does not mention synchronicity explicitly. His other books, The Blind watchmaker (1986), to his two-volume autobiographical works, An Appetite for Wonder (2013) and Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science (2015), have consistently furthered the cause of science, both in polity and culture, in a combative yet uncompromisingly scientific style. In this list now comes the latest book, Science in the Soul.

The book is a collection of 42 essays, written on various occasions and issues, spanning over three decades, with one connecting thread running through them all – taking a scientific approach that’s central to the question in hand.

Consider for example the case of eugenics. It is reprehensible by human value system if a commercial venture or a state (like that of the Nazis) tries to breed people for a particular mental trait or physical ability. Such a eugenic policy would be politically and morally wrong, proclaims Dawkins, but cautions us not to get our moral compass decide the truth and thus declare it to be impossible. Because Dawkins says, “Nature, fortunately or unfortunately, is indifferent to anything so parochial as human values.” The caution Dawkins exercises is very important given the critical history of the brief but intense romance the British science establishment, particularly the biologists like JBS Haldane, had with Marxism (until they were rudely awakened by the Lysenko-pseudoscience affair). The ideological attack on science was carried forward well after the Lysenko affair too – there continued a vibrant lineage of British scientists wedded to the theory, or rather ‘The Theory’.

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How Long Will It Take Houston’s Floodwaters to Drain?

By Laura Geggel

Houston has turned into a giant bathtub after being inundated with relentless rains from Tropical Storm Harvey, which made landfall in Texas as a hurricane but has since been downgraded to a tropical depression.

But while most bathtubs drain quickly (as long as they aren’t clogged), it could take days, if not weeks, for the water in Houston to subside, experts told Live Science.

Just like a bathtub, the city is largely covered with impermeable surfaces, such as asphalt and buildings. This means that most of the water can’t seep through the ground, but rather has to travel through the area’s system of canals and slow-moving bayous, which can become clogged with debris, said Richard Luthy, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

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