ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 382

Ravenous Supermassive Black Holes May Sterilize Nearby Planets

By Shannon Hall

The center of any galaxy is a hazardous home. There, supernovae explosions shower nearby planets with x-rays, gamma rays and ultraviolet photons that obliterate any ozone layer present. Gamma-ray bursts hurtle even more damaging shock waves, blasting any biosphere into oblivion. Even encounters with nearby stars knock planets around, driving them out of their habitable zones. “We don’t expect life to be easy within the inner kiloparsec of the Milky Way,” says Abraham Loeb from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But now we can add one more menace to the list that tops the rest: supermassive black holes.

Every large galaxy’s center hosts a supermassive black hole that is wont to throw wild tantrums in its youth. Although many astronomers have speculated these behemoths, called quasars when they are active, would likely wreak havoc on any nearby planets, no one had taken a quantitative look at those effects—until now. A new study, posted on the preprint server arXiv and submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, provides the first calculations that show when, where and how planets are harmed by quasars. And the quota alone is surprisingly high. Loeb and his postdoctoral researcher, John Forbes, found half the planets throughout the universe have lost the equivalent of Mars’s atmosphere, 10 percent have lost the equivalent of Earth’s atmosphere and 0.2 percent have lost the equivalent of Earth’s oceans—all thanks to quasars alone.

Although quasars are known to drive strong winds and jets of relativistic particles that can be dangerous in their own right, Forbes and Loeb looked at the damage caused by their light alone. The accretion disk of debris that orbits the black holes, funneling gas and dust in, are so bright they can outshine all the stars in their galaxies, which are 100,000 times larger. And when that light illuminates the atmosphere of a planet, the high-energy photons transfer energy to those atmospheric particles, giving them the boost to escape the planet’s gravitational pull altogether. Outside experts like Duncan Forgan from the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland are quick to point out the amount of loss depends greatly on the atmosphere’s composition and the planet’s mass. This finding is one piece in a several-million-piece, three-dimensional puzzle, he says, but nonetheless it is still that crucial first piece.

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WV School District Temporarily Suspends Bible Indoctrination Classes for Kids

By Hemant Mehta

An elective Bible course offered in West Virginia’s Mercer County Schools has been suspended for a year while administrators decide whether it’s actually legal, the result of a lawsuit from the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Some background on the issue: The Mercer County Schools have been offering “elective” Bible courses at the elementary and middle school levels for the past 75 years, but students who don’t participate in the courses are basically treated like pariahs and bullied by their peers.

What made the courses illegal, in FFRF’s mind, wasn’t that the District was teaching about the Bible as literature. This was indoctrination, pure and simple, and their lawsuit laid out the evidence for that claim:

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Challenging Mainstream Thought About Beauty’s Big Hand in Evolution

By James Corman

Not long ago, a physicist at Stanford posed a rhetorical question that took me by surprise.

“Why is there so much beauty?” he asked.

Beauty was not what I was thinking the world was full of when he brought it up. The physicist, Manu Prakash, was captivated by the patterns in seawater made as starfish larvae swam about. But he did put his finger on quite a puzzle: Why is there beauty? Why is there any beauty at all?

Richard O. Prum, a Yale ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, offers a partial answer in a new book, “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us.” He writes about one kind of beauty — the oh-is-he/she-hot variety — and mostly as it concerns birds, not people. And his answer is, in short: That’s what female birds like.

This won’t help with understanding the appeal of fluid dynamics or the night sky, but Dr. Prum is attempting to revive and expand on a view that Charles Darwin held, one that sounds revolutionary even now.

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Can terrorists be deradicalized?

By Michael Price

Investigators are still piecing together exactly what drove Salman Abedi, the suspected assailant in the recent concert bombing in Manchester, U.K., to kill 22 people and wound dozens more, but early indications suggest he had become a radicalized jihadist. How formerly harmless members of society go on to embrace violent extremist ideologies is a looming question in the world of counterterrorism, yet increasingly so is the problem of “deradicalization,” or convincing people to abandon an extremist mindset.

Worldwide, hundreds of deradicalization programs have sprung up. They typically consist of trained counselors either convincing the extremists their religious views aren’t founded in proper theology, treating the subject’s extremism as a mental health issue, or trying to nudge the extremist’s value system away from violence.

Despite their ubiquity, there’s been precious little effort spent evaluating whether these programs actually work, writes Daniel Koehler, director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies based in Stuttgart, in a commentary published today in Nature Human Behaviour. He discussed his work with Science, as well as the dangers of failing to establish deradicalization program standards. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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This researcher may have discovered the antidote to health bullshit

By Julia Belluz and Alvin Chang

Andy Oxman is obsessed with the study of bullshit health claims and how to prevent them from spreading.

For decades, he’s been trying to find ways to get adults to think critically about the latest diet fads, vaccine rumors, or “miracle cures.” But he realized these efforts are often in vain: Adults can be stubborn old dogs — resistant to learning new things and changing their minds.

So Oxman, now the research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, started to wonder whether the best hope for bullshit prevention lay with children. To put this idea to the test, back in 2000 he visited his then-10-year-old son’s class.

“I told them that some teenagers had discovered that red M&Ms gave them a good feeling in their body and helped them write and draw more quickly,” Oxman said. “But there also were some bad effects: a little pain in their stomach, and they got dizzy if they stood up quickly.”

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Brood Awakening: 17-Year Cicadas Emerge 4 Years Early

By Knvul Sheikh

Swarms of cicadas are unexpectedly crawling out from under trees from North Carolina to New Jersey. The red-eyed insects are almost impossible to miss; they fly around lazily, plunking into backyard barbeques and crashing into cars. They litter the ground with their crunchy husks as they molt. Most noticeably, they chirp en masse for their mates, producing a relentless, shrill buzz that is recognized as a song of summer. And within a month they are gone.

Different populations, or broods, of “periodical” cicadas emerge in distinct geographical regions during specific years, after spending a 13- or 17-year span growing underground. (Some “annual” species just emerge yearly.) Scientists were expecting to see Brood VI bugs in South Carolina and Georgia, which happened, but they got a surprise when Brood X cicadas also started appearing in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Ohio and Indiana last week—four years earlier than anticipated.

Experts suspect a warming climate, with more warm weeks a year during which the underground nymphs can grow, could be triggering some cicadas to emerge ahead of their brood. “Temperature is everything,” says Marlene Zuk, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota. “When temperature changes, insects don’t just feel hot or cold. Their whole body doesn’t function normally.” And cicada nymphs may be growing to a threshold size so quickly that their internal biological clock is miscalculating when it is time to emerge, says Keith Clay, a biologist and cicada expert at Indiana University Bloomington. To calibrate these clocks, periodical cicadas likely rely on a variety of environmental cues such as changing seasons and ground temperature, he says. Nymphs feed on the xylem fluid (sap) from tree roots, and changes in the fluid composition as trees leaf out each spring may also help them gauge the passage of time. Entomologists reached this conclusion back in 2000 when they artificially sped up the blooming cycle of peach trees supporting cicada nymphs that were in their 15th year and tricked the insects into emerging a year early.

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Monument to peer review unveiled in Moscow

By Quirin Schiermeier

A 1.5-tonne stone tribute to peer review is the latest addition to Moscow’s rich cultural heritage.

On 26 May, a good-humoured crowd of more than 100 people — including students, researchers and Russia’s deputy minister of education and science — gathered outside Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE) to witness the unveiling of what is probably the world’s first monument to peer review.

The sculpture takes the form of a die displaying on its five visible sides the possible results of review — ‘Accept’, ‘Minor Changes’, ‘Major Changes’, ‘Revise and Resubmit’ and ‘Reject’.

Last year, the director of the HSE’s Institute of Education, Isak Froumin, had asked his faculty for ideas about how to turn a useless block of concrete outside the university into something attractive and meaningful.

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GOP candidate accused of body-slamming reporter has said retirement is ‘not biblical’

By Jonnelle Marte

Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican candidate charged with assaulting a reporter, has not quite reached retirement age. But based on what he has said in the past, he might never stop working anyway.

In a 2015 talk at the Montana Bible College, Gianforte said the idea of retirement doesn’t exactly match his religious beliefs.

“There’s nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement. And yet it’s been an accepted concept in our culture today,” he said at the time, according to  a report in HuffPost. “Nowhere does it say, ‘Well, he was a good and faithful servant, so he went to the beach.’ It doesn’t say that anywhere.”

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Science Advocates Will Protest Outside Ark Encounter On Its First Anniversary

By Hemant Mehta

When Ark Encounter celebrates its first anniversary this July, atheists and other science advocates will be on hand to protest. And they’re bringing along the same sign that was rejected by billboard companies last year.

You might recall the peaceful protest that took place last year near the highway ramp en route to the giant ship. It was the first thing many visitors saw as they made their way to Ken Ham‘s park.

Organizers also tried paying for a version of this billboard:

(You can see a high resolution version of it here. Look closely and you might spot a familiar face!)

Unfortunately, the sign for “Genocide and Incest Park” was rejected by advertisers. An alternative version of the billboard, with a giant “censored” sticker over the main words, didn’t work either. So the organizers eventually just made their own banner and hoisted it at eye-level.

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Jupiter’s secrets revealed by NASA probe

By Alexandra Witze

The sharpest look yet at Jupiter has revealed a number of surprises — including a surge of ammonia welling up from its gassy depths, a startlingly powerful magnetic field and what could be a large, but poorly defined, core.

NASA’s Juno mission began to capture these insights on 27 August last year, during the first of a series of close swoops past the planet. Preliminary results appeared on 25 May in Science and Geophysical Research Letters.

As the first spacecraft to explore Jupiter in more than a decade, Juno “is revolutionizing how we thought giant planets work”, says Scott Bolton, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and the mission’s principal investigator.

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