ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 379

EPA’s Scott Pruitt wants to set up opposing teams to debate climate change science

By Jason Samenow

Multiple scientific assessments have concluded that man-made climate change is real and poses risks to human health and the environment. Even so, Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, told Breitbart News on Monday that he would like to essentially re-litigate the science of climate change.

In an interview with Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, Pruitt proposed setting up opposing teams to debate key climate science issues.

“What the American people deserve, I think, is a true, legitimate, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2,” Pruitt said.

Pruitt voiced support for a “red team-blue team” exercise to foster such a discussion. The red-blue team concept gained prominence in a Wall Street Journal commentary by Steven Koonin, a professor at New York University.

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Our species may be 150,000 years older than we thought

By Colin Barras

Has our species been hiding its real age? Fossils found in Morocco suggest the Homo sapiens lineage became distinct as early as 350,000 years ago – adding as much as 150,000 years to our species’ history.

“It was indeed a big wow [moment],” says Jean-Jacques Hublin at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who led the analysis with Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer at the National Institute of Archaeology and Heritage in Rabat, Morocco.

On a literal reading of the fossil record, H. sapiens was thought to have emerged in East Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. But some researchers have long suspected that the roots of our species are deeper, given that H. sapiens-like fossils in South Africa have been tentatively dated at 260,000 years old.

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Hubble sees light bending around nearby star

By Alexandra Witze

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted light bending because of the gravity of a nearby white dwarf star — the first time astronomers have seen this type of distortion around a star other than the Sun. The finding once again confirms Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

A team led by Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, watched the position of a distant star jiggle slightly, as its light bent around a white dwarf in the line of sight of observers on Earth. The amount of distortion allowed the researchers to directly calculate the white dwarf’s mass — 67% that of the Sun.

“It’s a very difficult observation with a really nice result,” says Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, who was not involved in the discovery. The findings were published in Science1 and presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas, on 7 June.

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The Man Behind Trump’s Religious-Freedom Agenda for Health Care

By Emma Green

The offices inside the Department of Health and Human Services are aggressively tan. Roger Severino, the newly appointed head of its Office for Civil Rights, hasn’t done much by way of decoration. Aside from a few plaques and leftover exhibits from old cases, his Clarence Thomas bobblehead doll and crucifix are the only personal touches in his work space.

The media spends a lot of time tracking Donald Trump’s every move and chasing down members of Congress, but much of governing happens in these bland halls. Under Trump, HHS may see more changes than any other agency, in part because the president’s predecessor left his biggest mark here. As Congress stalls on passing a new health-care bill, the Trump administration can still fight Obamacare with revised regulations, rejiggered budgets, and lackluster enforcement.

Severino leads the office that could shape the future of two of the most high-stakes aspects of the health-care debate: abortion and contraception access and LGBT rights. OCR, as it’s known, is responsible for investigating civil-rights violations in health-care settings, including discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, and national origin. Under Barack Obama, HHS faced religious objections to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that most employers cover birth control in their insurance plans, and OCR has dealt with the fall-out of those fights. It developed strict requirements for the language services hospitals have to provide to non-English speakers. Most controversially, it was responsible for interpreting Section 1557, the part of the health-care law that prohibits discrimination.

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Asked About Discrimination, Betsy DeVos Said This 14 Times

By Cory Turner

Over and over again, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos deflected a barrage of pointed questions with one answer:

“Schools that receive federal funds must follow federal law.”

Appearing Tuesday before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, DeVos was asked repeatedly by lawmakers if, under a federal voucher program, she would prohibit private schools from discriminating against LGBTQ students and children with disabilities. Recent reports, including an NPR investigation of Indiana’s voucher program, have documented private schools excluding these students.

When Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington asked if private schools would be required to follow IDEA, the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, DeVos began the pattern:

“Any institution receiving federal funding is required to follow federal law.”

When Murray followed up, she got the same answer, again.

Later, Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, pointed out that federal anti-discrimination laws are “somewhat foggy” and asked DeVos if private schools that take federal dollars should be allowed to turn away LGBTQ students.

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Coral-reef fish suck up meals with slime-covered lips

By Erin Ross

For hungry fish, corals make a difficult meal: venomous, coated with mucus and embedded in a razor-sharp, calcified skeleton. But one species, the tubelip wrass (Labropsis australis), has developed an unusual strategy to evade these stinging defences. The fish gives corals slime-covered kisses.

The finding, published on 5 June in Current Biology1, adds to scientists’ understanding of how corals and the fish that feed on them affect each other.

Wrasses that don’t feed on corals have thin lips and protruding teeth that resemble a beak. But tubelip wrasses have elongated, fleshy lips that they use to suck up a reef’s protective mucous coating. A scanning electron microscope reveals that the lips are furrowed with tiny channels and divots, soft and ribbed like gills on the underside of a mushroom. Those grooves contain mucous glands that can cover the wrasses’ lips in protective slime.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” says David Bellwood, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and a co-author of the paper. “Self-lubricating lips! Who would have predicted that?”

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Texas Governor Revives Stalled Transgender Bathroom Bill

By MANNY FERNANDEZ and DAVID MONTGOMERY

Gov. Greg Abbott reignited one of the most divisive issues in Texas politics on Tuesday, calling lawmakers back to the Capitol for a special session of the Legislature in part to consider a bill that would reinforce the state’s effort to regulate bathroom use by transgender people in public buildings.

An attempt during the regular session by conservative lawmakers and pastors to pass legislation to regulate bathroom use had been unsuccessful by the time the session ended on Memorial Day. But on Tuesday, Mr. Abbott, a Republican, ordered a 30-day special session starting in July and put on the agenda a bathroom bill that would prevent municipalities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances designed to protect transgender people. The special-session agenda also includes bills that would limit property taxes and keep several state agencies operating.

Opponents of bathroom restrictions, including moderate Republicans, say such rules are discriminatory and would cause economic damage similar to that in North Carolina last year after the state passed transgender bathroom restrictions that spurred widespread boycotts and the cancellation of concerts and sporting events. Supporters say the restrictions protect public safety and privacy in public buildings. They believe the predicted economic fallout has been exaggerated.

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Question of the Week, 6/7/2017

While the U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, Americans themselves are not giving up on the the great project to stop catastrophic climate change. What are some of the efforts coming from cities, businesses, or everyday citizens that are particularly innovative, or that you think can make a real difference?

Our favorite answer will receive a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins

Want to suggest a Question of the Week? E-mail submissions to us at qotw@richarddawkins.net. (Questions only, please. All answers to bimonthly questions are made only in the comments section of the Question of the Week.)

LIGO’s Latest Black-Hole Merger Confirms Einstein, Challenges Astrophysics

By Lee Billings

Some three billion years ago, when Earth was a sprightly ocean world dotted with protocontinents and inhabited solely by single-celled organisms, a pair of black holes spiraled together and collided in a far-off region of the universe, leaving behind a single black hole some 50 times heavier than our sun. Emitting no light, the entire affair should have remained forever lost to the void.

Instead, the invisible violence of the pair’s final moments and ultimate merging was so great that it shook the fabric of reality itself, sending gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—propagating outward at the speed of light. In the early morning hours of January 4, 2017, those waves washed over our modern Earth and into the most precise scientific instrument ever built, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). There the waves shifted the positions of vacuum-insulated, laser-bathed mirrors by less than the radius of a single subatomic particle. Traveling at light-speed, the waves first perturbed LIGO mirrors set up in Hanford, Wash., before passing through a second set of mirrors in Livingston, La., some three milliseconds later. Synced together from each station’s moving mirrors and converted to audible frequencies, the cosmos-quaking gravitational waves sounded like a single, soft “chirp.” Analyzing it, researchers are teasing out remarkable and otherwise-inaccessible details about the hidden lives of black holes. Announced Thursday by members of the LIGO team, the findings are described in Physical Review Letters.

As inconceivable as it may seem, tuning in to such chirps is now becoming routine. First predicted by Einstein more than a century ago as a consequence of his theory of general relativity, gravitational waves were long thought to be beyond observational reach—if not entirely nonexistent. But the chirp from January 4, dubbed “GW170104,” is actually LIGO’s third and farthest-reaching detection of gravitational waves, coming from somewhere about 3 billion light-years away. It follows earlier chirps from two other events detected separately in late 2015 that each occurred closer by, yet still more than a billion light-years distant.

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Richard Dawkins On Terrorism And Religion

By Scott Simon

Richard Dawkins, the scientist and outspoken atheist, speaks with NPR’s Scott Simon about terrorism, and how the world has changed since he first began talking about his opposition to religion.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Richard Dawkins is on tour. The scientist, humanist and skeptic of religion is making a series of appearances to benefit the Center for Inquiry, including in Los Angeles, Boulder, Colo., Washington, D.C. and Miami. Of course, he’s a pioneering biologist who’s now an Emeritus fellow at New College in Oxford and is, of course, perhaps, the best known public atheist in the world. Dr. Richard Dawkins joins us in our studios. Thanks so much for being with us.

RICHARD DAWKINS: Thank you for having me.

SIMON: I want to begin this way. Terrible crime this week – a suicide bomber in Manchester blew himself up during a concert, more than 20 people, many of them youngsters, were killed. The British government have identified the bomber. ISIS has claimed responsibility. There is, of course, an ongoing investigation. You’ve been outspoken and unbowed in your beliefs that religion plays a role in terrorism.

DAWKINS: Well, I think it obviously does. I mean, every time one of these things happened – and we know what the person says. It’s usually, Allahu Akbar. This is in the name of religion. That – of course, it’s very important to say this doesn’t mean all Muslims agree with it. But nevertheless, it is true…

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