ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 374

Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize

By Justin Gillis

CAPE GRIM, Tasmania — On the best days, the wind howling across this rugged promontory has not touched land for thousands of miles, and the arriving air seems as if it should be the cleanest in the world.

But on a cliff above the sea, inside a low-slung government building, a bank of sophisticated machines sniffs that air day and night, revealing telltale indicators of the way human activity is altering the planet on a major scale.

For more than two years, the monitoring station here, along with its counterparts across the world, has been flashing a warning: The excess carbon dioxide scorching the planet rose at the highest rate on record in 2015 and 2016. A slightly slower but still unusual rate of increase has continued into 2017.

Scientists are concerned about the cause of the rapid rises because, in one of the most hopeful signs since the global climate crisis became widely understood in the 1980s, the amount of carbon dioxide that people are pumping into the air seems to have stabilized in recent years, at least judging from the data that countries compile on their own emissions.

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No, NASA Hasn’t Found Alien Life

By Mike Wall

NASA is not preparing to drop an alien-life bombshell, despite what you may have heard.

Last week, the hacking group Anonymous posted a video on YouTube suggesting that the space agency is about to announce the discovery of life beyond Earth. The video has made a big splash online — so big that NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen addressed the rumor today (June 26).

“Contrary to some reports, there’s no pending announcement from NASA regarding extraterrestrial life,” Zurbuchen said via Twitter, where he posts as @Dr_ThomasZ.

“Are we alone in the universe? While we do not know yet, we have missions moving forward that may help answer that fundamental question,” he added in another tweet today.

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Ozone layer recovery will be delayed by chemical leaks

By Fred Pearce

The healing of the ozone layer could be delayed for 30 years or more by rising emissions of a substance hitherto ignored by environmental regulators. Ironically, its principal use is as a feedstock to make “ozone-friendly” chemicals for air conditioners and refrigerators.

As emissions of CFCs and other ozone-eating chlorine compounds are curbed under the 30-year-old Montreal Protocol, emissions of another chemical called dichloromethane – also known as methylene chloride – have been rising, says Ryan Hossaini of Lancaster University, UK. They now total over a million tonnes a year, and concentrations of dichloromethane in the lower atmosphere have doubled since 2004.

The chemical, a volatile gas, has many uses, including as an industrial solvent and paint remover. The recent growth in its emissions – stemming either from production leaks or deliberate venting – are particularly tied to its increasing role in the manufacture of a hydrofluorocarbon called HFC-32, a widely used replacement for CFCs.

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Success of gravity-wave satellite paves way for three-craft mission

By Davide Castelvecchi

Europe’s gravitational-wave hunters are celebrating. On 1 July, a satellite will wrap up its mission to test technology for the pioneering quest to measure gravitational ripples in the stillness of space. Over the past year, the craft has performed much better than many had hoped. That success has convinced the European Space Agency (ESA) to give the go-ahead to a full-scale version able to sense cataclysmic events that can’t be felt on Earth. 

The LISA Pathfinder mission, launched in late 2015, beat its precision target by a factor of 1,000 and quieted critics who have doubted its potential, says project scientist Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at ESA in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. “This is not the impossible task that some people believed it was.” 

Currently set to fly in 2034, the full-scale Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be the space analogue of the Laser Interfero-meter Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), two machines in the United States — each with a pair of 4-kilometre-long arms — that first detected the ripples by ‘hearing’ the merger of two black holes. LISA’s three probes will fly in a triangle, millions of kilometres apart, making the mission sensitive to much longer gravitational waves, such as the ripples produced by the collisions of even larger black holes.

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Fire May Be the Only Remedy for a Plague Killing Deer and Elk

By Carl Zimmer

Mark D. Zabel wants to set some fires.

Dr. Zabel and his colleagues are developing plans to burn plots of National Park Service land in Arkansas and Colorado. If the experiments turn out as the researchers hope, they will spare some elk and deer a gruesome death.

Across a growing swath of North America, these animals are dying from a mysterious disorder called chronic wasting disease. It’s caused not by a virus or bacterium, but a deformed protein called a prion.

When ingested, prions force normal proteins in the animal’s body to become deformed as well. Over the course of months, prions can gradually wreck the animal’s nervous system, ultimately killing it.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the discovery of chronic wasting disease. In the September issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, Dr. Zabel, an immunologist at Colorado State University, and his former graduate student Aimee Ortega survey what scientists have learned about the slow-spreading plague.

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Why Total Solar Eclipses Are Total Coincidences

By Tom Metcalfe

Total solar eclipses, when the moon nearly perfectly covers the sun, have fascinated humans since at least the time of the earliest civilizations. Some of the very oldest historical records, written on clay tablets in Babylonia around 2,500 years ago, are devoted to observations of eclipses. Astronomers at the time interpreted the events as omens of disaster, while folktales around the world typically explained eclipses as a conflict between the sun and a devouring celestial dragon, wolf or rat.

A few solar eclipses have even changed human history — for instance, by affecting the outcome of a pivotal ancient battle, or by inspiring scientists as they unlocked the secrets of humanity’s place in the universe. That’s a lot of responsibility for a phenomenon that astronomers sometimes describe as “a celestial coincidence.” After all, that’s what a total solar eclipse really is: a total coincidence.

“The [diameter of the] moon is almost exactly 400 [times] smaller than the sun’s diameter, and the sun is almost exact 400 times further away than the moon,” said Mark Gallaway, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. “The consequence of this is that the angular diameter, or the size we see, of the sun and the moon in the sky are almost exactly the same.”

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Supreme Court allows parts of travel ban to take effect

By Ariane de Vogue

The Supreme Court Monday allowed parts of President Donald Trump’s travel ban to go into effect and will hear oral arguments on the case this fall.

The court is allowing the ban to go into effect for foreign nationals who lack any “bona fide relationship with any person or entity in the United States.” The court, in an unsigned opinion, left the travel ban against citizens of six majority-Muslim on hold as applied to non-citizens with relationships with persons or entities in the United States, which includes most of the plaintiffs in both cases.

Examples of formal relationships include students accepted to US universities and an employee who has accepted a job with a company in the US, the court said.

This is the first time the high court has weighed in on the travel ban, and a partial victory for the Trump administration, which has been fighting lower court rulings blocking the ban from taking effect. Justices did not address Trump’s tweets which have caused legal problems for his administration previously.

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SpaceX has launched and landed two used rockets in one weekend

By Leah Crane

SpaceX just did a double-header. Two of the firm’s Falcon 9 rockets were launched within 49 hours of each other, one from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and one from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. That’s a first for SpaceX and provides a proof-of-concept for efficiently reusing rockets in the future.

The launches, on 23 and 25 June, marked the second and third time that Elon Musk’s spaceflight company reused rocket boosters that had already been to space, landed and been refurbished. After successfully releasing their payloads into orbit, each booster returned to Earth and safely landed on a drone ship. Now they will be examined for damage and possibly refurbished and launched a third time – a feat which SpaceX hasn’t yet attempted.

The 23 June launch, pictured, lifted Bulgaria’s first communications satellite – its second satellite ever – into orbit. The 25 June launch carried 10 communications satellites for the Iridium company, marking the second of seven planned batches that will make up a global satellite constellation called Iridium NEXT.

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Supreme Court sides with religious institutions in a major church-state decision

By Robert Barnes

The Supreme Court concluded its work for this session on Monday siding with religious institutions in a major church-state decision and with no indication that pivotal Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is retiring.

The speculation about Kennedy, who has served on the court for nearly three decades and is almost always the deciding vote in divisive cases on the nation’s biggest controversies, dominated the end of a relatively quiet Supreme Court term.

But the court’s announcement of final decisions came and went without any word from Kennedy, whose former clerks had speculated he was considering leaving. The rumors were closely watched at the White House, where a vacancy would give President Trump the chance to solidify a more conservative Supreme Court.

In the church-state case, the court ruled 7-2 that it violates the Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion to exclude churches from state programs with a secular intent — in this case, making playgrounds safer.

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Montana Initiative Would Limit Transgender Use of Bathrooms

By Bobby Caina Calvan

A conservative group wants to let Montana voters decide whether transgender people must use public restrooms and locker rooms designated for their gender at birth — a move that could thrust the state into the national debate over transgender rights.

The Montana Family Foundation launched its campaign to place the matter on next year’s fall ballot after lawmakers declined to do so.

If approved by voters, the measure would affect how public schools, universities and other government agencies accommodate transgender people. Facilities designated for use by one sex would have to exclude the opposite sex.

The foundation called the effort a necessary step to protect “the privacy, safety and dignity” of Montana children and help guard against sexual predators.

“There are active lawsuits in other states, and we wanted to take a proactive role in protecting privacy,” said Bowen Greenwood, director of government affairs for the foundation.

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