ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 361

Supernova’s messy birth casts doubt on reliability of astronomical yardstick

By Shannon Hall

The exploding stars known as type Ia supernovae are so consistently bright that astronomers refer to them as standard candles — beacons that are used to measure vast cosmological distances. But these cosmic mileposts may not be so uniform. A new study finds evidence that the supernovae can arise by two different processes, adding to lingering suspicions that standard candles aren’t so standard after all.

The findings, which have been posted on the arXiv preprint server1 and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, could help astronomers to calibrate measurements of the Universe’s expansion. Tracking type Ia supernovae showed that the Universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and helped to prove the existence of dark energy — advances that secured the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The fact that scientists don’t fully understand these cosmological tools is embarrassing, says the latest study’s lead author, Griffin Hosseinzadeh, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “One of the greatest discoveries of the century is based on these things and we don’t even know what they are, really.”

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Malaysian Police Official: Atheists Have To Stop Causing Anxiety Among Muslims

By Hemant Mehta

Earlier this month, a picture of an Atheist Republic gathering in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia went viral, leading to a government crackdown. This is a nation that, in theory, celebrates the freedom of religion, but those rules don’t apply to Muslims who leave their faith — and certainly not to Muslims who become atheists. Government officials wanted to know if there were any ex-Muslims in that picture because they could be fined or prosecuted.

Shahidan Kassim, a minister in President Najib Razak‘s Cabinet, even said on camera that atheists in the country must be “hunted down,” because their lack of religion amounted to illegal thought crimes.

Now the Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar has weighed in with even more idiotic advice. He just issued a warning… to atheists.

Stop hurting the feelings of Muslims.

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Trump’s first list of science priorities ignores climate—and departs from his own budget request

By Jeffrey Mervis

President Donald Trump has translated his campaign promise to “make America great again” into his administration’s first blueprint for federal investment in science and technology.

The White House today issued a four-page memo telling federal agencies that their research dollars should be focused on delivering short-term dividends in strengthening national defense and border security, the economy, and “energy dominance,” as well as improving public health. It says achieving those goals should not require additional spending, and that agencies should focus primarily on basic science, and then step aside as quickly as possible to let industry pursue any results that show commercial promise.

The memo, written jointly by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), is an annual reminder of the administration’s research priorities sent to agencies before they submit their next budget request. Those requests are due next month for the 2019 fiscal year that starts in October 2018. (Congress has yet to act on the budget for the 2018 fiscal year, which begins 1 October; most observers expect lawmakers to extend current spending levels well into the new fiscal year.)

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2017 Total Solar Eclipse: Everything You Need to Know

By Jeanna Bryner and Denise Chow

On Monday, Aug. 21, the Great American Eclipse will give those in the United States a rare sight — the moon will slip in front of the sun, blocking the rays from hitting Earth and resulting in a gorgeous solar eclipse for those in the path of totality, from Oregon to South Carolina, and a partial one for those outside that path. The U.S. won’t be privy to such a view until April 8, 2024, when those in North American will be able to see the total solar eclipse.

To help you prepare for a fun and safe eclipse-viewing, Live Science has compiled everything you need to know, from where to watch, how to watch and the science behind the event.

What is a solar eclipse?

About every 18 months, the moon, sun and Earth are perfectly aligned and the moon casts a shadow over Earth. Just a small portion of our planet falls within the center of that shadow (the path of totality), while other spots see a partial solar eclipse. Every two to five years, on average, Earthlings are treated to a partial solar eclipse in which the moon, sun and Earth aren’t exactly lined up. Though spectacular, solar eclipses are pure coincidences, astronomers say.

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Texas Bathroom Bill Dies Again, Raising Republican Acrimony

By David Montgomery and Manny Fernandez

AUSTIN, Tex. — A bill to restrict which bathroom transgender people can use in public buildings and schools died in the Texas Legislature on Tuesday evening, a rare defeat for social conservatives in a state they usually dominate.

The failure of the so-called bathroom bill at the end of a special legislative session was the second time in three months that the bill had fallen short, and it deepened the ideological discord within the Texas Republican Party. But it did not kill the issue entirely.

The Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who pushed for the bill’s North Carolina-style restrictions on transgender bathroom use, virtually guaranteed that the issue would arise again in future legislative sessions. And it is still possible that Gov. Greg Abbott, who supported the bill, will recall lawmakers for a second special session to give the bill another chance at passage.

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CEOs Are Abandoning Donald Trump, But His Evangelical Advisors Are Staying Put

By Hemant Mehta

Earlier today, in response to Donald Trump‘s support of white nationalist groups and his bizarre Nazi-approved press conference, the Council on Strategic and Policy Forum chose to disband. This came after several members of Trump’s Council on Manufacturing left independently and put pressure on other members to do the same. Trump later announced he was ending both councils anyway… even though one was already disbanded.

It’s heartening to know that CEOs are either listening to the Americans who denounce Trump’s bigotry or at least felt it was more harmful to their companies to stay onboard than leave the council.

But there’s one group of people still not leaving Trump’s side: His Evangelical Advisory Board.

Jerry Falwell, Jr., the head of Liberty University who’s been a Trump supporter since early in his campaign, celebrated Trump’s “bold truthful” statement about Charlottesville. (Which one? The first one which denounced “many sides”? The second one which was read off a teleprompter? Or the third one where he took back his condemnation of the alt-right and neo-Nazis?)

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Against discrimination

By the Editors of Nature

Physicians like to say that average patients do not exist. Yet medicine depends on them as clinical trials seek statistical significance in the responses of groups of people. In fact, much of science judges the reliability of an effect on the basis of the size of the group it was measured in. And the larger and more significant the claimed difference, the bigger is the group size required to supply the supporting evidence.

Difference between groups may therefore provide sound scientific evidence. But it’s also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination against individuals — witness last weekend’s violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the controversy over a Google employee’s memo on biological differences in the tastes and abilities of the sexes.

This is not a new phenomenon. But the recent worldwide rise of populist politics is again empowering disturbing opinions about gender and racial differences that seek to misuse science to reduce the status of both groups and individuals in a systematic way.

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Tiny robots crawl through mouse’s stomach to heal ulcers

By Timothy Revell

Tiny robotic drug deliveries could soon be treating diseases inside your body. For the first time, micromotors – autonomous vehicles the width of a human hair – have cured bacterial infections in the stomachs of mice, using bubbles to power the transport of antibiotics.

“The movement itself improves the retention of antibiotics on the stomach lining where the bacteria are concentrated,” says Joseph Wang at the University of California San Diego, who led the research with Liangfang Zhang.

In mice with bacterial stomach infections, the team used the micromotors to administer a dose of antibiotics daily for five days. At the end of the treatment, they found their approach was more effective than regular doses of medicine.

The tiny vehicles consist of a spherical magnesium core coated with several different layers that offer protection, treatment, and the ability to stick to stomach walls. After they are swallowed, the magnesium cores react with gastric acid to produce a stream of hydrogen bubbles that propel the motors around. This process briefly reduces acidity in the stomach. The antibiotic layer of the micromotor is sensitive to the surrounding acidity, and when this is lowered, the antibiotics are released.

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Missions to probe exoplanets, galaxies, and cosmic inflation vie for $250 million NASA slot

By Daniel Clery

From exoplanet atmospheres to the dynamics of galaxies to the stretch marks left by the big bang, the three finalists in a $250 million astrophysics mission competition would tackle questions spanning all of space and time. Announced last week by NASA, the three missions—whittled down from nine proposals—will receive $2 million each to develop a more detailed concept over the coming 9 months, before NASA selects one in 2019 to be the next mid-sized Explorer. A launch would come after 2022.

Explorer missions aim to answer pressing scientific questions more cheaply and quickly than NASA’s multibillion-dollar flagships, such as the Hubble and James Webb (JWST) space telescopes, which can take decades to design and build. The missions are led by scientists, either from a NASA center or a university, and NASA has launched more than 90 of them since the 1950s. Some Explorers have had a big scientific impact, including the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which last decade mapped irregularities in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), an echo of the universe as it was 380,000 years after the big bang; and Swift, which is helping unravel the mystery of gamma-ray bursts that come from the supernova collapse of massive stars.

One finalist, the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), will map galaxies across a large volume of the universe to find out what drove inflation, a pulse of impossibly fast expansion just after the big bang. “The physics behind inflation is unclear,” says Principal Investigator Jamie Bock of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and it happened at energy scales too high for earthbound particle accelerators to investigate. The prevailing theory is that a short-

lived quantum field, mediated by a hypothetical particle called an inflaton, pushed the universe’s rapid growth. But rival theories hold that multiple fields were involved. Those fields would have interfered with each other, leaving irregularities in the distribution of matter across the universe that would differ statistically from the distribution expected in conventional inflation.

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Pakistan court seeks to amend blasphemy law

By Saba Aziz

Blasphemy and accusations of the crime have led to the deaths of dozens of people in Pakistan since 1990.

Rights groups have repeatedly criticised and called for the reform or repeal of the country’s controversial blasphemy laws, which date back to the British empire.

The Islamabad High Court asked parliament on Friday to make changes to the current decree to prevent people from being falsely accused of the crime, which is punishable by death if the Prophet Muhammad is insulted.

Other punishments include a fine or prison term, depending on the specific offence.

In a lengthy 116-page order, Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui suggested that parliament amend the law to require the same punishment of the death penalty for those who falsely allege blasphemy as for those who commit the crime.

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