ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 364

‘God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un,’ evangelical adviser says

By Sarah Pulliam Bailey

Texas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, one of President Trump’s evangelical advisers who preached the morning of his inauguration, has released a statement saying the president has the moral authority to “take out” North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“When it comes to how we should deal with evildoers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil,” Jeffress said. “In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.”

Jeffress said in a phone interview that he was prompted to make the statement after Trump said that if North Korea’s threats to the United States continue, Pyongyang will be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

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With Snowflakes and Unicorns, Marina Ratner and Maryam Mirzakhani Explored a Universe in Motion

By Amie Wilkinson

The mathematics section of the National Academy of Sciences lists 104 members. Just four are women. As recently as June, that number was six.

Marina Ratner and Maryam Mirzakhani could not have been more different, in personality and in background. Dr. Ratner was a Soviet Union-born Jew who ended up at the University of California, Berkeley, by way of Israel. She had a heart attack at 78 at her home in early July.

Success came relatively late in her career, in her 50s, when she produced her most famous results, known as Ratner’s Theorems. They turned out to be surprisingly and broadly applicable, with many elegant uses.

In the early 1990s, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, a professor tried to persuade Dr. Ratner to be my thesis adviser. She wouldn’t consider it: She believed that, years earlier, she had failed her first and only doctoral student and didn’t want another.

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Richard Dawkins in conversation with Dave Rubin- 8/8/2017

Source: https://livestream.com/92Y

Mars’s surface hosts millions of towering dust devils every day

By Leah Crane

The Red Planet is plagued by devils. It now seems that Mars’s surface is teeming with 10 times as many dust devils as we thought.

These rotating columns of dust form around low-pressure air pockets and are common on Mars, where they send dust into the atmosphere, controlling the planet’s climate. To get a better understanding of the Martian climate, as well as potential risks for future Mars missions, we need to know how many dust devils there are, but the barometers on landers there can’t detect all of them.

“They are only going to detect the biggest dust devils that have the strongest dips in pressure, and when they do detect them they’re going to give you a skewed image of the structure of those dust devils,” says Brian Jackson at Boise State University in Idaho. That’s because there’s no way to determine if they’re sensing pressure changes at the edges or in the middle of a whirlwind.

Sensors can give us a snapshot of a small piece of the environment, but Jackson and his colleagues applied statistical methods to the barometer data to get a better idea of the full story.

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‘Nones’ want to join Evangelicals with seat at Trump’s table

By Shannon Levitt

There’s been a plethora of stories of late outlining how conservative Evangelical Christians have been very pleased with their relationship to President Donald Trump, and how well he has been serving their agenda.

Now, another significant and fast-growing religious constituency in America is clamoring for some of his attention: “Nones,” meaning Americans with no religious affiliation, who are now more than twenty percent of the country’s 245 million adults.

As for the Evangelicals, it’s easy to see why, despite Trump’s dwindling approval ratings overall, they remain fairly solidly in his camp.

Almost immediately upon entering office he reinstated the ‘Mexico City Policy,’ which bans using U.S. foreign aid for abortion-related activities, pleasing both Evangelicals and Catholics. Next came an executive order on religious liberty, telling the IRS to weaken enforcement of the Johnson Amendment which prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations from political speech.

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Gene Editing for ‘Designer Babies’? Highly Unlikely, Scientists Say

By Pam Belluck

Now that science is a big step closer to being able to fiddle with the genes of a human embryo, is it time to panic? Could embryo editing spiral out of control, allowing parents to custom-order a baby with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s imagination or Usain Bolt’s speed?

News that an international team of scientists in Oregon had successfully modified the DNA of human embryos has renewed apprehensions that babies will one day be “designed.” But there are good reasons to think that these fears are closer to science fiction than they are to science.

Here is what the researchers did: repair a single gene mutation on a single gene, a defect known to cause — by its lonesome — a serious, sometimes fatal, heart disease.

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Atheists tend to be seen as immoral – even by other atheists: study

By Agence France-Presse

Atheists are more easily suspected of evil deeds than Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists – even by fellow atheists, according to the authors of a new study.

The finding suggests that in an increasingly secular world, many – including some atheists – still hold the view that people will do bad things unless they fear punishment from all-seeing gods.

The results of the study “show that across the world, religious belief is intuitively viewed as a necessary safeguard against the temptations of grossly immoral conduct,” an international team wrote in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. It revealed that “atheists are broadly perceived as potentially morally depraved and dangerous”.

he study measured the attitudes of more than 3,000 people in 13 countries on five continents. They ranged from “very secular” countries such as China and the Netherlands, to those with high numbers of religious believers, such as the United Arab Emirates, the US and India.

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Is Brain Damage an Inevitable Result of Playing Football?

By Russell M. Bauer

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

For many, American football is a beautiful game that is simple to enjoy but complex to master. Choreographed with a mixture of artistry and brutality, it features the occasional “big hit” or bone-jarring tackle, forcing a fumble and turning the tide of the game.

But with this part of football comes justified concern about the long-term health effects of engaging in this type of activity over time, concerns that abound in practically every high-impact contact sport. It is possible that effects of continued involvement may accumulate quietly in the background until they show themselves, later in life.

A recent study appeared to give a “big hit” to the game of football itself, with findings that nearly all the brains of 111 deceased NFL players studied showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

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Chronic diseases spike in Middle East as conflicts rage

By Amy Maxmen

Ibrahim Hassan is propped up on pillows on a cement floor when a physician comes to check on him. Hassan fled to Jordan from southern Syria after conflict erupted there in 2011. The 65-year-old can no longer walk as a result of multiple strokes, which his doctor blames on high blood pressure — but Hassan blames on fear. One stroke hit just as Hassan (whose name has been changed to protect him) made it to Syria’s border with Jordan, after 18 hours of dodging bullets, bombs and hostile soldiers.

Hassan’s encounter with tragedy is all too common here. Across the Middle East, deaths resulting from violence grew by 850% between 1990 and 2015, according to a series of reports published on 3 August in the International Journal of Public Health1–15. The increase accelerated after 2010, corresponding with the beginning of the Arab Spring movement and wars in Syria and Iraq. At the same time, the authors found, the incidence of many chronic diseases has also risen dramatically; the death rate from diabetes, for instance, grew 216% over the study period.

Taken together, the analyses describe a disturbing deterioration in health across a broadly defined Middle Eastern region, which includes 22 countries — including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and the United Arab Emirates — that are home to more than 580 million people.

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A Picture of Malaysian Atheists Has Led to a Government Crackdown on Ex-Muslims

By Hemant Mehta

Atheist Republic, an online Facebook group with more than 1.7 million followers around the world, frequently holds meetups for members in larger cities. It’s not just a chance to interact in person, though the importance of that shouldn’t be understated. They can do a lot more when they get to organize in person. The Metro Manila “Consulate,” for example, even raised money for disaster victims in the Philippines.

Last week, the Consulate of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia got together for dinner and drinks and they took a picture of the group to celebrate the occasion.

Taking that picture may have been a mistake.

Malaysia ostensibly has freedom of religion… but the rules don’t apply to Muslims who want to leave the faith. There are rules to prohibit — or at least make it very difficult to go through — such a (de)conversation.

So back to that picture. The Malaysian government caught wind of the photo and began wondering if there were any secret Muslims in there… because they had to be punished.

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