ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 373

Largest-ever study of controversial pesticides finds harm to bees

By Daniel Cressey

The largest study so far on the fraught question of whether neonicotinoid pesticides harm bees is providing new ammunition for those who argue against the use of the controversial chemicals.

The large-scale field study found that overall, exposure to neonicotinoids harms bee populations. In particular, the pesticides reduce honeybees’ ability to survive their winter hibernation, say researchers.

“We’re showing significant negative effects at critical life-cycle stages, which is a cause for concern,” says Richard Pywell, who studies sustainable land management at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology near Wallingford, UK, and is co-author of a paper resulting from the experiment, published on 29 June in Science1.

However, the work was mainly funded by two major neonicotinoid makers, Bayer CropScience and Syngenta. They question the scientists’ conclusions and defend the pesticides, which are already banned or restricted in several countries. The researchers who did the work say they were totally independent.

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Kentucky’s evangelical Gov. Matt Bevin signs bill allowing public schools to teach from the Bible

By Alessandra Maldonado

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin signed into law a bill that will allow courses on the Bible to be taught in public schools beginning on Friday. Overwhelmingly passed by Kentucky’s Republican-controlled state legislature, HB 128 gives Kentucky school boards the option to add elective courses on Bible literacy to their social studies curriculum.

“The idea that we would not want this to be an option for people in school, that would be crazy. I don’t know why every state would not embrace this, why we as a nation would not embrace this,” Bevin said during a public bill signing ceremony.

According to the bill, the courses must discuss all aspects of the Bible — such as characters, poetry, and narratives — because they are “prerequisites to understanding contemporary society and culture.”

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House Republicans Are Using a Budget Bill To Fully Gut the Johnson Amendment

By Hemant Mehta

Last month, Donald Trump signed an executive order supposedly weakened the Johnson Amendment. That’s the part of the law that says tax-exempt organizations, like churches, cannot endorse candidates from the pulpit. Nor can the ACLU, for example, tell members to vote for a Democrat. They can all talk about social issues and “sin,” but they can’t cross the line into telling their members who to vote for.

The Religious Right hates that amendment. They say it violates their freedom of speech, and they’ve been trying to get it repealed for years. Trump said he would do just that if elected. And it’s no doubt part of the reason evangelicals overwhelmingly supported him.

Yet his executive order didn’t quite go so far as a repeal, in part because Trump didn’t have the authority to do that. He merely told the IRS that it was okay to not go after churches that violated the rules of their tax exemptions. They weren’t going to be punished for looking the other way.

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Light Makes New Material Creep Like a Caterpillar

By Mindy Weisberger

It’s aliiiiiiive! Well, maybe not. But when activated by light, a new type of polymer — a material made of long chains of molecules — can inch along just like a caterpillar.

Scientists developed the light-sensitive substance and coaxed a small strip of it to “walk” by exposing it to a fixed light source.

The spotlight made one side of the paper-clip-sized material contract while the other side expanded, producing an undulating movement that carried it forward, the researchers reported in a recent study.

The secret to this groundbreaking light-activated locomotion lies in the liquid crystal network (LCN) in the polymer. LCNs are known for their ability to deform materials when exposed to light, but prior studies had only examined their ability to warp materials, not move them forward or backward, the scientists wrote in the study.

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A billion-year arms race against viruses shaped our evolution

By Amy Maxmen

Viruses and their hosts have been at war for more than a billion years. This battle has driven a dramatic diversification of viruses and of host immune responses. Although the earliest antiviral systems have long since vanished, researchers may now have recovered remnants of one of them embedded, like a fossil, in human cells.

A protein called Drosha, which helps to control gene regulation in vertebrates, also tackles viruses, researchers report today in Nature1. They suggest that Drosha and the family of enzymes, called RNAse III, it belongs to were the original virus fighters in a single-celled ancestor of animals and plants. “You can see the footprint of RNAse III in the defence systems through all kingdoms of life,” says Benjamin tenOever, a virologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and lead author of the paper.

Plants and invertebrates deploy RNAse III proteins in an immune response called RNA interference, or RNAi. When a virus infects a host, the proteins slice the invader’s RNA into chunks that prevent it from spreading. But vertebrates take a different approach, warding off viruses with powerful interferon proteins — while Drosha and a related protein regulate genes in the nucleus.

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Goodbye, Establishment Clause

By Perry Grossman and Mark Joseph Stern

Does the Constitution sometimes obligate states to subsidize religion? On Monday, the Supreme Court said it does. According to the court’s 7–2 ruling in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, when a state makes a funding program available to the public, it cannot deny funds to a church because of its status as a religious organization. This sets a dangerous precedent, one that betrays the court’s historical commitment to true religious freedom and threatens to obliterate the divide between church and state.

The facts of the case are simple. Trinity Lutheran Church owns a “Learning Center” that is used “to teach the Gospel to children.” The learning center’s facilities include a playground that is, in the church’s words, part of “an education program structured to allow a child to grow spiritually, physically, socially, and cognitively.” In 2012, the church applied for a grant through Missouri’s Scrap Tire Grant Program to help pay for playground resurfacing. The state rejected its application, citing a provision of the Missouri Constitution that bars the use of taxpayer money “in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religion.” Trinity Lutheran sued, alleging a violation of its Free Exercise rights under the First Amendment.

In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts held that Missouri had run afoul of the Free Exercise Clause by denying Trinity Lutheran a “public benefit solely because of [its] religious character.” According to Roberts, the Missouri rule “puts Trinity Lutheran to a choice: It may participate in an otherwise available benefit program or remain a religious institution.” This “clear infringement on free exercise,” he asserted, “is odious to our Constitution.” Thus, Trinity Lutheran must be allowed to compete in the scrap tire program.

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Australian Cardinal and Aide to Pope Is Charged With Sexual Assault

By Jacqueline Williams

SYDNEY, Australia — Australia’s senior Roman Catholic prelate, and one of Pope Francis’ top advisers, has been charged with sexual assault, the police in the Australian state of Victoria said on Thursday.

The prelate, Cardinal George Pell, became the highest-ranking Vatican official in recent years to face criminal charges involving accusations of sexual offenses. The case will test the credibility of Francis’ initiatives to foster greater accountability after abuse scandals that have shaken the church around the world.

“Cardinal Pell has been charged on summons, and he is required to appear at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court” on July 18, Shane Patton, the deputy police commissioner, said at a news conference.

The charges were served on the cardinal’s legal representatives in Melbourne. Commissioner Patton said there were multiple complainants but refused to provide further details about them, including their ages.

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Saudi Crown Prince Must Use Promotion To End Raif Badawi’s Prison Ordeal, Wife Says

By Jack Moore

The wife of Saudi writer and blogger Raif Badawi, Haider, has called on the newly appointed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman to “write a new history,” release prisoners of conscience and end her husband’s ordeal, in an exclusive interview with Newsweek.

Last week marked five years since Saudi Arabia jailed Badawi for advocating greater freedoms in the Gulf Kingdom. Badawi was charged with “insulting Islam” in 2014 after his arrest in 2012 for publishing liberal blog posts in a country where ultraconservative Islamic law and censorship rule supreme.

His sentence was 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, of which he received 50 in January 2015. He was due to receive the lashes weekly in a public square in Jeddah, but they were halted for medical reasons.

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More Millennials Are Having Strokes

By Dina Fine Maron

Not all of Mitchell Elkind’s stroke patients are on social security. In recent years he has treated devastating attacks in people as young as 18. And he is not alone. A growing body of research indicates strokes among U.S. millennials—ages 18 to 34—have soared in recent years.

But an analysis by Scientific American has revealed significant differences in where these strokes are occurring, depending both on region and whether people live in rural or urban settings. The investigation, which used data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), was reviewed by five stroke experts and found that the West and Midwest have seen especially worrisome increases among younger adults. Moreover, large cities appear to have seen bigger increases than rural areas. The analysis employed hospital discharge data from 2003 to 2012 from the AHRQ’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) database.

The findings align with earlier studies that pointed to nationwide increases in strokes in this age group: In a study published earlier this year in JAMA Neurology, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that in a nine-year span from 2003 to 2012 there was a 32 percent spike in strokes among 18- to 34-year-old women and a 15 percent increase for men in the same range. Scientific American’s analysis sought to dig deeper into the data by exploring whether the stroke trend differed by location.

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The Christian Lawyers Quietly Working to Erase LGBTQ Rights

By Matt Baume

The future of safe schools may have just been decided by a few skinned knees on a Missouri playground.

The playground in question belongs to Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Missouri, where the rough gravel surface was hurting children when they fell. In 2012, the church applied for a state grant to replace the rocky surface with soft rubber mats.

The state rejected the church’s grant application, though, due to a constitutional provision that bars the distribution of taxpayer funds to religious organizations. Lawsuits followed, and this week, the Supreme Court ruled in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer that the state cannot withhold taxpayer funding from churches.

A major force behind the case—and indeed, behind much of the country’s recent anti-LGBTQ activism—is a little-known group called The Alliance Defending Freedom. Over the last few years, ADF has been stealthily seizing power in the nation’s public school systems, with queer youth squarely in their crosshairs.

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