ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 357

This Teen Troll Fled To The US For Political Asylum. Now He’s Stuck In A Detention Center

By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

In March 2015, as Singaporeans were publicly mourning the death of their country’s revered founder, Lee Kuan Yew, a 16-year-old named Amos Yee was busy putting together a celebratory YouTube video entitled “Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead!”

Addressing an imagined audience of millions in a pubescent falsetto, from the apartment he shared with his mother, the teen called Lee a megalomaniac, a dictator, and a fraud. He called the late president a “horrible person” and “awful leader”; later in his eight-minute rant, he compared Lee to Jesus Christ. The analogy was not meant to flatter: Yee is a committed internet atheist who looks up to the secularist writer Richard Dawkins, chafes at political correctness, and admits to particularly enjoying going after Islam. Yee ended his monologue wishing the dead politician “good riddance.”

The rant spread quickly. (It’s now been viewed over a million times.) Eager to extend his 15 minutes, Yee followed the video by posting a drawing of Lee having anal sex with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Two days after he posted his video, he was arrested and thrown in jail under Singapore’s draconian speech laws. Over the next year and a half, his lawyers argue, he suffered sustained political persecution in his native country. After a slew of criminal charges, two trials, weeks in prison and jail, and a court order to stop posting on social media, Yee decided he’d had enough. On Dec. 16, 2016, he flew to Chicago and declared his intention to seek political asylum in the United States.

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The Cheap Prosperity Gospel of Trump and Osteen

By Anthea Butler

Before it began to rain in Houston last week, the spectacularly wealthy pastor Joel Osteen could have opened up his megachurch to serve as a logistics center. He could have announced that evacuees were welcome to take shelter there when Hurricane Harvey landed. Instead he wrote tweets like “God’s got this” and “don’t drift into doubt and fear … stay anchored to hope.” Only a couple of his posts on Twitter offered “prayers.”

On Sunday, Mr. Osteen’s church announced that it was inaccessible because of “flooding.” But intrepid journalists proved otherwise. After Mr. Osteen was humiliated on social media, he finally opened the 16,800-seat church to the public on Tuesday. When asked about the delay, Mr. Osteen said that “the city didn’t ask us to become a shelter.”

President Trump, too, revealed his morally bankrupt soul during the storm when he said that he timed his pardon of the racist former sheriff Joe Arpaio to coincide with the hurricane’s landfall because he assumed that it would garner “far higher” TV ratings than usual. Mr. Trump did visit Texas, but there was apparently no mention of dead or displaced Texans, and no expressions of sympathy.

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We still don’t really know what CRISPR does to human embryos

By Michael Le Page

The results of a much-publicised study claiming mutations in human embryos can be safely corrected with CRISPR have been called into question by other researchers.

The team behind the work say they stand by their findings, but at the very least the dispute shows there are still major issues that need to be resolved before anyone should attempt to use gene-editing to prevent children inheriting disease-causing mutations.

“There are lots of unanswered questions,” says embryologist Anthony Perry of the University of Bath in the UK.

The first studies to try using the CRISPR genome-editing technique to alter the DNA of human embryos revealed several major problems. For instance, it only corrected mutations in a small proportion of embryos.

Last month, however, a team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University claimed they had managed to improve efficiency while avoiding other key problems such as unwanted alterations. The study was widely proclaimed as a breakthrough.

Now doubts have been raised. Genome editing works by breaking DNA, and letting a cell’s natural repair mechanisms fix it. This is usually quite haphazard, and precise repairs were thought to be rare.

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OPEN DISCUSSION – SEPTEMBER 2017

This thread has been created for open discussion on themes connected to reason and science for which there are not currently any dedicated threads.

Please note it is NOT for general chat, and that all Terms of Use apply as usual.

Explosions heard at flooded Texas chemical plant after hurricane

By New Scientist Staff and Press Association

Two explosions have been heard at a flooded chemical plant in a small town outside Houston.

The Arkema plant lies around 40 kilometres away in Crosby, Texas, and the last of its employees evacuated on Tuesday. The flooded facility lost power and backup generators after Hurricane Harvey swept in, leaving it without refrigeration for organic peroxides that become volatile as the temperature rises.

A statement on the website of French company Arkema this morning says that two explosions have been heard and black smoke has been spotted. Residents within 2.5 kilometres of the plant have been told to leave.

“The fire will happen. It will resemble a gasoline fire. It will be explosive and intense in nature,” said Janet Smith, spokeswoman for the French company, said yesterday.

Arkema submitted a plan to the government in 2014 outlining a worst-case scenario that said potentially 1.1 million residents could be affected by such an event over a distance of 23 miles (37 kilometres), according to information compiled by a non-profit group.

But the company said on Wednesday that a worst-case scenario was “very unlikely”.

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When It Comes to Evolution, Microbes Have to Pick and Choose

By Michael Waldholz

To survive hostile environments, an organism often has to acquire new traits. But the rules of evolution appear to restrict how many such characteristics it can optimize at once. In a new study, researchers say they found that some bacteria make a genetic trade-off: the microbes involved were able to develop only one of two new traits and selected the one that best helped them thrive in a given setting.

The results could provide a model for studying how infectious microbes become resistant to antibiotics. “We want to understand the rules, if there are rules, for how organisms adapt,” says senior study author Seppe Kuehn, a biological physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “If we can, maybe there’s a chance to make great breakthroughs in terms of treatment.”

David Fraebel, a graduate student in Kuehn’s laboratory, grew Escherichia coli in either a nutrient-rich or nutrient-poor growth medium and measured how quickly the microbes spread. A mathematical model predicted that the fastest-spreading microbes would be those that combined two traits: swimming speed and growth rate. But instead the microbes chose just one trait: in the nutrient-rich environment, those that migrated farthest had opted for speedy swimming. In contrast, in the nutrient-poor medium, the fastest reproducers won out.

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In Colorado, a global flood observatory keeps a close watch on Harvey’s torrents

By Jason Plautz

BOULDER, COLORADO—While the media is gripped with pictures of waters swallowing freeways and pouring into homes and offices in southeastern Texas, geoscientist Robert Brakenridge is waiting for images of his own.

Brakenridge directs the Dartmouth Flood Observatory at the University of Colorado in Boulder, which creates real-time maps of flooding events around the world. The lab, which he founded in 1993, uses satellite imagery to monitor changing water levels, and is experimenting with other methods—such as using satellite-based microwave sensors—to track river levels. Such efforts have not only helped identify areas that are prone to floods, but also can provide real-time help during emergencies, guiding responders away from impassable areas and toward people that need help.

During past disasters, the lab has provided public maps and geospatial data that have been put to humanitarian use, and worked with the World Food Program to guide food delivery convoys. During Hurricane Harvey, the lab has been part of daily conference calls in which government agencies, researchers, and other groups share data on the storm and work to develop new and more useful maps.

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Who was — and wasn’t — invited to Betsy DeVos’s education roundtable

By Valerie Strauss

An office manager was invited. So were politicians, ministers and school administrators. But it’s more interesting who wasn’t invited to the education roundtable that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos attended in Tallahassee on Wednesday with the Baptist minister who convened the event.

The event was convened by the Rev. R.B. Holmes, leader of the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in the Florida capital and a prominent advocate of school choice in the state. DeVos is a longtime proponent of school choice too, saying once that traditional public education in the United States was a “dead end.”

The Education Department said that DeVos met with “a broad spectrum of education leaders in Florida”  in two 45-minutes sessions, the first titled “Saving, Sustaining and Strengthening Public Education and Schools of Choice” and the second titled “Saving, Sustaining and Strengthening HBCUs and Higher Education.”

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Climate change did not “cause” Harvey, but it’s a huge part of the story

By David Roberts

Several people have written some version of “what you can say about Hurricane Harvey and climate change” in the past few days. I’ll link to some of them below.

But I think they are all saying too little. There’s much more to say, so much more! In fact, here are nine things you can say about Harvey and climate change.

1) Harvey is not centrally about climate change

Talking about climate change during a disaster always runs the risk of insensitivity. The story that most matters about Harvey right now is the effect it’s having on lives and land in Texas and the efforts underway to prevent more suffering.

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150 religious leaders sign anti-gay ‘manifesto’ on sexuality

By Holly Meyer

NASHVILLE — A nationwide coalition of more than 150 conservative Christian leaders signed a statement, released Tuesday, affirming their beliefs on human sexuality, including that marriage is between one man and one woman and approval of “homosexual immorality” is sinful.

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s list of 14 beliefs, referred to as the Nashville Statement, is a response to an increasingly post-Christian, Western culture that thinks it can change God’s design for humans, according to the statement.

“Our true identity, as male and female persons, is given by God. It is not only foolish, but hopeless, to try to make ourselves what God did not create us to be,” the statement from the coalition members reads.

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood convened a meeting of evangelical leaders, pastors and scholars Friday at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission’s annual conference in Nashville. The coalition discussed and endorsed the statement.

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