ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 370

CERN Physicists Find a Particle With a Double Dose of Charm

By Kenneth Chang

Physicists have discovered a particle that is doubly charming.

Researchers reported on Thursday that in debris flying out from the collisions of protons at the CERN particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, they had spotted a particle that has long been predicted but not detected until now.

The new particle, awkwardly known as Xi-cc++ (pronounced ka-sigh-see-see-plus-plus), could provide new insight into how tiny, whimsically named particles known as quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, interact with each other.

Protons and neutrons, which account for the bulk of ordinary matter, are made of two types of quarks: up and down. A proton consists of two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron contains one up quark and two down quarks. These triplets of quarks are known as baryons.

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Richard Dawkins and Carlo Rovelli on science and culture – books podcast

This week we’re talking science and culture, and how to bridge the divide between the two, with Richard Dawkins and Carlo Rovelli.

As well as being the high priest of atheism, Dawkins is also a pioneering scientist. His books have sold more than 8m copies and he’s the only evolutionary biologist to have 1.3 million followers on Twitter. He joins us to discuss his latest collection of essays, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.

Rovelli is a professor of theoretical physics who became an unexpected publishing success in 2014 with his short introduction to the science of the very big and the very small, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. It was published in more than 41 languages and sold more than 1m copies. Rovelli’s latest book, Reality Is Not What It Seems, grounds the cutting edge of contemporary physics in an intellectual tradition stretching back to the ancient Greeks.

 

Listen to the full interview here.

OPEN DISCUSSION

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Tiny fossil reveals what happened to birds after dinosaurs went extinct

By Carolyn Gramling

The fossils of a tiny bird found on Native American land in New Mexico are giving scientists big new ideas about what happened after most dinosaurs went extinct. The 62-million-year-old mousebird suggests that, after the great dino die-off, birds rebounded and diversified rapidly, setting the stage for today’s dizzying variety of feathery forms.

“This find may well be the best example of how an unremarkable fossil of an unremarkable species can have enormously remarkable implications,” says Larry Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University in Athens who was not involved in the research.

The newly discovered fossils, described online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are a scrappy collection of bits and pieces rather than a complete skeleton. But certain tell-tale characteristics—such as its fourth toe, which it could turn around forward or backward to help it climb or grasp—convinced the team that it was an ancient mousebird. Researchers unearthed the fossils in New Mexico on ancestral Navajo lands, in rocks dating to between 62.2 million and 62.5 million years old. They named the creature Tsidiiyazhi abini—Navajo for “little morning bird.” Its mousebird descendants—about the size of a sparrow and marked by their soft, grayish or brownish hairlike feathers—still dwell in trees in sub-Saharan Africa today.

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White House’s dwindling science office leaves major research programmes in limbo

By Sara Reardon

US President Donald Trump has pledged to shrink the federal government, and he seems to be starting with science. Nearly six months after taking office, Trump has not chosen a science adviser, and the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has dwindled from around 130 staff members under former president Barack Obama to 35.

The vacancies have diminished the White House’s ability to coordinate science policy and spending between agencies, and have left government-wide programmes on topics such as cybersecurity, regulation of genetically modified organisms and science education without clear direction. And the problem is expected to worsen, with the continuing exodus of the OSTP’s non-political (or ‘career’) staff; four senior people left on 30 June alone. Many are frustrated that the White House is not calling on scientific expertise when making decisions.

OSTP insiders fear that it may be difficult for the next science adviser — who normally directs the office — to restore it to its role of scientific coordinator. “Anyone who is nominated, if they are confirmed, is going to have to play catch-up,” says a former OSTP staff member, who is still a government employee and not authorized to speak to the press. “And I don’t know if they’re ever really going to have a seat at the table.”

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Church of England demands ban on conversion therapy

By Harriet Sherwood

The Church of England has called on the government to ban conversion therapy and has condemned the practice, which aims to change sexual orientation, as unethical and potentially harmful.

At the end of an emotional debate in which two members of the C of E synod described their experiences as spiritual abuse, the church’s governing body overwhelmingly backed a motion saying the practice had “no place in the modern world”.

Conversion therapy is usually described as an attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Some churches in the C of E and other denominations have encouraged LGBT members to take part in prayer sessions and other activities to rid them of their “sin”.

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To Test Your Fake News Judgment, Play This Game

By Tennessee Watson

Fake news has been on Maggie Farley’s mind further back than 2016 when President Trump brought the term into the vernacular.

Farley, a veteran journalist, says we’ve had fake news forever and that “people have always been trying to manipulate information for their own ends,” but she calls what we’re seeing now “Fake news with a capital F.” In other words, extreme in its ambition for financial gain or political power.

“Before, the biggest concern was, ‘Are people being confused by opinion; are people being tricked by spin?’ ” Now, Farley says, the stakes are much higher.

So one day she says an idea came to her: build a game to test users’ ability to detect fake news from real.

Voilà, Factitious. Give it a shot. (And take it from us, it’s not as easy as you might think!)

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Climate change lets invaders beat Alpine plants in mountain race

By Andy Coghlan

As the climate warms up, invasive weeds are outpacing native Alpine plants to the tops of mountains, threatening them with extinction.

To avoid warming temperatures, Alpine plants can migrate to cooler habitats higher up mountains, but new research is showing that invasive species are beating them to it.

“We find that invasive species are responding to climate change far more quickly than the native ones,” says Matteo Dainese of the University of Würzburg in Germany, who led the team studying the phenomenon.

Dainese and his colleagues discovered the unequal race to the summit after studying the distributions of 1300 plant species over 20 years – from 1989 to 2009 – on an Alpine mountain area around Mount Baldo in northeast Italy.

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How Canadian researchers reconstituted an extinct poxvirus for $100,000 using mail-order DNA

By Kai Kupferschmidt

Eradicating smallpox, one of the deadliest diseases in history, took humanity decades and cost billions of dollars. Bringing the scourge back would probably take a small scientific team with little specialized knowledge half a year and cost about $100,000.

That’s one conclusion from an unusual and as-yet unpublished experiment performed last year by Canadian researchers. A group led by virologist David Evans of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says it has synthesized the horsepox virus, a relative of smallpox, from genetic pieces ordered in the mail. Horsepox is not known to harm humans—and like smallpox, researchers believe it no longer exists in nature; nor is it seen as a major agricultural threat. But the technique Evans used could be used to recreate smallpox, a horrific disease that was declared eradicated in 1980. “No question. If it’s possible with horsepox, it’s possible with smallpox,” says virologist Gerd Sutter of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany.

Evans hopes the research—most of which was done by research associate Ryan Noyce—will help unravel the origins of a centuries-old smallpox vaccine and lead to new, better vaccines or even cancer therapeutics. Scientifically, the achievement isn’t a big surprise. Researchers had assumed it would one day be possible to synthesize poxviruses since virologists assembled the much smaller poliovirus from scratch in 2002. But the new work—like the poliovirus reconstitutions before it—is raising troubling questions about how terrorists or rogue states could use modern biotechnology. Given that backdrop, the study marks “an important milestone, a proof of concept of what can be done with viral synthesis,“ says bioethicist Nicholas Evans—who’s not related to David Evans—of the University of Massachusetts in Lowell.

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Why planetary scientists want better fake space dirt

By Alexandra Witze

James Carpenter just needed some fake Moon dirt. Carpenter, a lunar-exploration expert at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, works on a drill designed to hunt for buried ice on the Moon. His team recently ordered half a tonne of powdery material to replicate the lunar surface from a commercial supplier in the United States. But what showed up was not what the team was expecting. “The physical properties were visibly different,” says Carpenter.

His experience underscores a longstanding problem with artificial space soils, known as simulants: how to make them consistently and reliably. But now there is a fresh effort to bring the field into line. Last month, NASA established a team of scientists from eight of its research centres to analyse the physical properties and availability of existing simulants. And, for the first time, an asteroid-mining company in Florida is making scientifically accurate powders meant to represent the surfaces of four classes of asteroid. It delivered its second batch to NASA on 28 June.

“NASA is trying to conquer the Wild West of simulants,” says Philip Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

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