ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 376

Energy Secretary Rick Perry says CO2 is not the main driver of climate change

By Tom DiChristopher

Energy Secretary Rick Perry told CNBC on Monday he does not believe carbon dioxide emissions from human activity are the main driver of climate change, joining the EPA administrator in casting doubt on the conclusion of some of the government’s top scientists.

Asked whether CO2 emissions are primarily responsible for climate change, Perry told CNBC’s “Squawk Box”: “No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.”

“The fact is this shouldn’t be a debate about, ‘Is the climate changing, is man having an effect on it?’ Yeah, we are. The question should be just how much, and what are the policy changes that we need to make to effect that?” he said.

In March, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told “Squawk Box” he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.

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Craig Venter’s ‘Digital-to-Biological Converter’ Is Real

By Jordan Pearson

Craig Venter thinks that sending living organisms to other galaxies on spaceships is “definitely” science fiction. It’s much more realistic, he thinks, to print them on-site using digital representations of their genome. He calls this “biological teleportation.”

Essentially emailing medicine and organisms back and forth between Earth and other planets is just one of the far-future implications of a device developed by Synthetic Genomics, a company founded by Venter, a superstar geneticist and biotechnologist. The tabletop device is called the Digital-to-Biological Converter, or DBC for short, and without a fancy box it looks like a bunch of complicated mechanical crap laid out on a table. The device accepts digital representations of DNA over the internet and reconstructs them on the spot using the chemical building blocks of life—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. You might recognize their initials from the movie Gattaca.

“Just like a printer, it needs cassettes, but instead of colours, it’s bottles of chemicals,” Venter said over the phone. “It’s packaging complex biology that each of our tiny cells do remarkably well at a much, much smaller scale.”

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Students can opt out of religious classes at Catholic school after complaint settled

By Michelle McQuigge

Students at an Ontario Catholic school board will soon have more flexibility to opt out of religious courses and programs thanks to a human rights settlement that could have implications across the province.

A human rights complaint lodged against the Simcoe Muskoka Catholic District School Board by a former student has resulted in changes to the board’s exemption policies and an agreement to encourage other boards to adopt a similar approach.

The complaint, filed by Claudia Sorgini in 2016, alleged the student was discriminated against when she sought an exemption from religious classes. The case was to go before the province’s human rights tribunal but was privately settled late last month.

Sorgini’s lawyer Paul Champ said the settlement represents a victory for students in Catholic schools across Ontario.

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Exasperated attendees give up on Gwyneth’s Goop summit

By Maureen Callahan

LOS ANGELES — Gwyneth Paltrow’s inaugural health-and-wellness summit on Saturday kicked off just as you’d expect: well-groomed women wearing yoga pants and expensive handbags hooking themselves up to IVs and oxygen tubes in a parking lot, experiences otherwise associated with the glamour of getting triaged at a disaster site.

This is Paltrow’s peculiar gift — or grift — and it was on full display at “In Goop Health,” her day-long event meant to bring her website’s “most requested and shared wellness content to life.” By last week, all 500 tickets, ranging from $500 to $1,500, had sold out; another event is planned for New York City in January.

Attendees were told via email to arrive at 9 a.m. The summit wouldn’t actually begin for another hour, which allowed enough time to shop inside a cavernous industrial space for Goop-branded products such as water bottles ($35), hoodies ($100) and a “G.”-branded flight pack consisting of four thin nesting canvas bags containing some magnesium packets, a sleep mask, earbuds and moisturizer ($198).

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Man sentenced to death for ‘blasphemy’ on Facebook in Pakistan

By Annie Gowen

A 30-year-old man in Pakistan has been sentenced to death after conviction for committing “blasphemy” on Facebook, the latest incident in the country’s widening crackdown on dissent on social media.

An anti-terrorism court in the city of Bahawalpur on Saturday sentenced Taimoor Raza, 30, after he was found guilty of making derogatory remarks about the prophet Muhammad, his wives and others, prosecutors said.

The details of Raza’s specific comments were unclear. But the sentence was the first such death sentence for a Facebook post in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s harsh anti-blasphemy law provides for due process and trial, but executions happen rarely. Human rights advocates have raised concerns that the law can be misused to attack personal enemies or kick off riots.

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Ten years in jail and 1,000 lashes: why we must defend Saudi blogger Raif Badawi

By Andrew Brown

It was the fifth anniversary yesterday of the arrest of the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, whose supposed crime was to argue for secularism, democracy and human rights. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes – a punishment that amounts to death by torture – although only 50 lashes were inflicted on him in the one session. Medical opinion was that he would not survive the remainder of that part of his sentence.

His cause has been taken up by humanist organisations, as well as by Amnesty International. He has been honoured with the EU’s Sakharov prize. Even Prince Charles raised his case on a visit to Saudi Arabia. We may be sure that neither Theresa May nor Donald Trump would do so. It is one thing to coat huge arms deals in the rhetoric of defending western freedoms, but quite another to risk any of the profits for the sake of a Saudi man who wished to enjoy those same freedoms.

The Badawi case is illuminating about the nature of the Saudi regime and the ideas that it understands as an existential threat. These include Badawi’s brisk dismissal of the role of Islam in public life: “No religion at all has any connection to mankind’s civic progress … the codes governing the administration of the state can hardly be derived from religion.” Such ideas are obviously incompatible with the practice of theocracy. And perhaps they are so strange to the Saudi authorities that they can’t be taken seriously – after all, those convicted of “sorcery” in the kingdom are beheaded, whereas Badawi may survive his sentence, given enough attention and support from the outside world.

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Buckyballs mysteriously show up in cold space and warp starlight

By Joshua Sokol

Regular readers may have the same expectations of this column as they would a safari: something huge has to show up.

Greedy black holes. Giant lava lakes. Stars too big to exist.  Even the comparatively small stuff in outer space, like asteroids or geologic features on a world’s surface, would effortlessly dwarf you if stood in front of them in a space suit.

But on scale far below the cosmic megafauna is a different world, one of tiny carbon molecules mixing and changing in the void. Its poster child is the charming buckyball, a curious round agglomeration of carbon atoms.

This chemical ecosystem can be a nuisance for astronomers, because the little molecules block out parts of the light we see from stars and galaxies. But it’s also important on its own.

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The big problem with what Trump just said about religion in schools

By Valerie Strauss

On the day that Washington was riveted by the testimony on Capitol Hill of former FBI director James Comey, President Trump made a speech to a group of religious conservatives during which raised the issue of religion and schools. Here is what he said on June 8, according to a White House transcript:

So we want our pastors speaking out. We want their voices in our public discourse. And we want our children to know the blessings of God. (Applause.) Schools should not be a place that drive out faith and religion, but that should welcome faith and religion with wide, open, beautiful arms. (Applause.) Faith inspires us to be better, to be stronger, to be more caring and giving, and more determined to act in selfless and courageous defense of what is good and what is right. It is time to put a stop to the attacks on religion. (Applause.) Thank you.

It’s no surprise that Trump would say this to the Faith and Freedom Coalition; 80 percent of white evangelicals who voted in the November 2016 selected supported him, and polls show that most of them approve the job he is doing as president.

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World’s Most Powerful Particle Collider Taps AI to Expose Hack Attacks

By Jesse Emspak

Thousands of scientists worldwide tap into CERN’s computer networks each day in their quest to better understand the fundamental structure of the universe. Unfortunately, they are not the only ones who want a piece of this vast pool of computing power, which serves the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. The hundreds of thousands of computers in CERN’s grid are also a prime target for hackers who want to hijack those resources to make money or attack other computer systems. But rather than engaging in a perpetual game of hide-and-seek with these cyber intruders via conventional security systems, CERN scientists are turning to artificial intelligence to help them outsmart their online opponents.

Current detection systems typically spot attacks on networks by scanning incoming data for known viruses and other types of malicious code. But these systems are relatively useless against new and unfamiliar threats. Given how quickly malware changes these days, CERN is developing new systems that use machine learning to recognize and report abnormal network traffic to an administrator. For example, a system might learn to flag traffic that requires an uncharacteristically large amount of bandwidth, uses the incorrect procedure when it tries to enter the network (much like using the wrong secret knock on a door) or seeks network access via an unauthorized port (essentially trying to get in through a door that is off-limits).

CERN’s cybersecurity department is training its AI software to learn the difference between normal and dubious behavior on the network, and to then alert staff via phone text, e-mail or computer message of any potential threat. The system could even be automated to shut down suspicious activity on its own, says Andres Gomez, lead author of a paper describing the new cybersecurity framework.

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NASA eyes Neptune and Uranus for missions in the 2030s

By John Wenz

Uranus and Neptune have never got much attention from us – we’ve only passed each once and never hung around. But that could change. A NASA group has now outlined possible missions to make it to one of these outer worlds to gather data on their composition. This should teach us about them and similar planets in other solar systems.

“The preferred mission is an orbiter with an atmospheric probe to either Uranus or Neptune – this provides the highest science value, and allows in depth study of all aspects of either planet’s system: rings, satellites, atmosphere, magnetosphere,” says Amy Simon, co-chair of the Ice Giants Pre-Decadal Study group.

There are four proposed missions – three orbiters and a fly-by of Uranus, which would include a narrow angle camera to draw out details, especially of the ice giant’s moons. It would also drop an atmospheric probe to take a dive into Uranus’s atmosphere to measure the levels of gas and heavy elements there.

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