ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 384

Pakistanis say their government has ‘weaponized’ its blasphemy law

By Naila Inayat

Mashal Khan was studying journalism at Pakistan’s Abdul Wali Khan University in the northern city of Mardan when rumors began to spread around campus that he’d posted “blasphemous” content on Facebook. On April 13, a mob of angry students dragged the 23-year-old out of his dormitory, beat him with wooden planks and stones, and shot him to death.

“April 13 was an unlucky day for every single person who believes in humanity,” said Iqbal Khan, the victim’s father and a local poet. “Mashal was a tolerant man. Those who were close to him knew he was a humanist in a true sense. I only appeal to the government for justice. My son may never come back, but may his memory live on forever.”

Khan was known for holding progressive views. On the walls of his dorm room he put up images of Karl Marx and Che Guevara, and wrote slogans like, “Freedom is the right of every individual.”

Videos of his killing were recorded and posted online within minutes. The sight of young people on a university campus violently murdering a fellow student with such impunity fueled national and international outrage.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Way More Americans May Be Atheists Than We Thought

By Daniel Cox

After signing an executive order earlier this month that seeks to relax restrictions on the political activities of tax-exempt churches, President Trump said the order was an important affirmation of the American identity. “We’re a nation of believers,” he said. Trump is right in one sense — 69 percent of Americans say a belief in God is an important part of being American — but he’s wrong demographically: Atheists constitute a culturally significant part of American society.

We’re not sure how significant, though. The number of atheists in the U.S. is still a matter of considerable debate. Recent surveys have found that only about one in 10 Americans report that they do not believe in God, and only about 3 percent identify as atheist. But a new study suggests that the true number of atheists could be much larger, perhaps even 10 times larger than previously estimated.

The authors of the study, published earlier this year, adopted a novel way to measure atheist identity. Instead of asking about belief in God directly, they provided a list of seemingly innocuous statements and then asked: “How many of these statements are true of you?” Respondents in a control group were given a list of nine statements, such as “I own a dog” and “I am a vegetarian.” The test group received all the same statements plus one that read, “I do not believe in God.” The totals from the test group were then compared to those from the control group, allowing researchers to estimate the number of people who identify as atheists without requiring any of the respondents to directly state that they don’t believe in God.1 The study concludes that roughly one-quarter (26 percent) of Americans likely do not believe in God.2

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Coming Out Atheist, pg 245

“Another piece of good news: You are part of the most secular generation in history. There are almost certainly lots of other atheist students at your school, even if you don’t know it yet. You know how I keep telling people throughout this book that if they come out as atheists, there’s a good chance that other atheists will start coming out of the woodwork? If you’re a student, multiply that chance by at least two or three. (About 5-15% of Americans don’t believe in God, depending on which poll you look at. For Americans under 35, that number jumps to 36%.) And even your fellow students who aren’t atheists are more likely to be familiar and comfortable with atheism than older folks. If for no other reason, they’re more likely to live large parts of their lives on the Internet – and atheism is all over the Internet. “

—Greta Christina, Comig Out Atheist, pg 245

Weird energy beam seems to travel five times the speed of light

By Joshua Sokol

Please welcome to the stage a master illusionist. An energy beam that stabs out of galaxy M87 like a toothpick in a cocktail olive is pulling off the ultimate magic trick: seeming to move faster than the speed of light.

Almost five times faster, in fact, as measured by the Hubble Space Telescope. This feat was first observed in 1995 in galaxy M87,  and has been seen in many other galaxies since. It might have you questioning your entire reality. Nothing can break the cosmic speed limit, right? You can’t just flaunt the laws of physics… can you?

If you want to just enjoy the illusion from your seat in the audience, stop reading. Otherwise, I welcome you backstage for a look at how the trick works – and how it’s helping astronomers to understand the fate of entire galaxies.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

The Anti-Vaccine And Anti-GMO Movements Are Inextricably Linked And Cause Preventable Suffering

By Kavin Senapathy

The thoroughly answered question of whether vaccines cause autism isn’t really a question outside of conspiracy-theorist circles. The body of evidence shows that vaccination has eradicated smallpox and vastly reduced suffering and death from other diseases, and that vaccines don’t cause autism, cancer, dementia, or long term health problems, and that any minute risk is vastly outweighed by benefits to individuals and society.

Yet with the backing of prominent leaders like Robert DeNiro and Robert Kennedy Jr., anti-vaccine groups fuel common narratives that keep herd immunity down, directly leading to suffering and death. Now with Donald Trump embracing vaccine skeptics, the anti-vaccine movement has earned a hallowed place on the shelf next to other tinfoil hat clad schools of thought. The question of the safety of genetically engineered crops (GMOs) has been answered just as thoroughly, and the anti-GMO movement deserves its own place on the same shelf, not just for being wrong but for its role in unconscionable suffering.

The most notorious figure in anti-vaccine movement history, Andrew Wakefield—the former gastroenterologist and researcher known for a fraudulent 1998 paper linking the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism—has been thoroughly discredited time and again. Yet the effect of his antics is stubborn, with report after report of doctors and scientists combating outbreaks of preventable disease, suffering, and death in the wake of attack after attack on public confidence in vaccines. That this widespread injustice has endured and thrived is nothing short of tragic.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Genetic Tidying Up Made Humped Bladderworts Into Carnivorous Plants

By Joanna Klein

Greetings, human. Have you met the humped bladderwort?

This unusual plant grows pretty, yellow flowers, and it has no roots to hold it down. To get the nutrients it needs, it spends its time floating in lakes and waterways eating miniature crustaceans, called water fleas, and other things. It operates sort of like an aquatic Venus flytrap, but a hundred times faster. It feeds by dangling tiny vacuous sacs from its stems into the water.

These bladders, just a few millimeters big (with walls only two cells thick), are normally filled with water. But when the trap is set, the plant pumps the water out, creating a vacuum and a mouth, which is covered in tiny hairs.

“When a prey animal stimulates those trigger hairs — whoosh,” said Victor Albert, an evolutionary plant biologist at the State University of New York, University at Buffalo. The bladderwort can trap dinner in less than a millisecond.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

A Creationist Sues the Grand Canyon for Religious Discrimination

By Sarah Zhang

“How did the Grand Canyon form?” is a question so commonly pondered that YouTube is rife with explanations. Go down into the long tail of Grand Canyon videos, and you’ll eventually find a two-part, 35-minute lecture by Andrew Snelling. The first sign this isn’t a typical geology lecture comes about a minute in, when Snelling proclaims, “The Grand Canyon does provide a testament to the biblical account of Earth’s history.”

Snelling is a prominent young-Earth creationist. For years, he has given lectures, guided biblical-themed Grand Canyon rafting tours, and worked for the nonprofit Answers in Genesis. (The CEO of Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham, is also behind the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter theme park.) Young-Earth creationism, in contrast to other forms of creationism, specifically holds that the Earth is only thousands of years old. Snelling believes that the Grand Canyon formed after Noah’s flood—and he now claims the U.S. government is blocking his research in the canyon because of his religious views.

Last week, Snelling sued park administrators and the Department of Interior, which administers the national parks program, because they would not grant him a permit to collect 50 to 60 fist-sized rocks. All research in the national park is restricted, especially if it requires removing material. But the Grand Canyon does host 80 research projects a year, ranging from archaeology digs to trout tracking.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Fidget toys aren’t just hype

By Katherine Isbister

The fidget spinner craze has been sweeping elementary and middle schools. As of May 17 every one of the top 10 best-selling toys on Amazon was a form of the hand-held toy people can spin and do tricks with. Kids and parents are even making them for themselves using 3D printers and other more homespun crafting techniques.

But some teachers are banning them from classrooms. And experts challenge the idea that spinners are good for conditions like ADHD and anxiety. Meanwhile, the Kickstarter online fundraising campaign for the Fidget Cube – another popular fidget toy in 2017 – raised an astounding US$6.4 million, and can be seen on the desks of hipsters and techies across the globe.

My research group has taken a deep look at how people use fidget items over the last several years. What we found tells us that these items are not a fad that will soon disappear. Despite sometimes being an annoying distraction for others, fidget items can have some practical uses for adults; our inquiry into their usefulness for children is underway.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Our brains prefer invented visual information to the real thing

By Clare Wilson

Seeing shouldn’t always be believing. We all have blind spots in our vision, but we don’t notice them because our brains fill the gaps with made-up information. Now subtle tests show that we trust this “fake vision” more than the real thing.

If the brain works like this in other ways, it suggests we should be less trusting of the evidence from our senses, says Christoph Teufel of Cardiff University, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Perception is not providing us with a [true] representation of the world,” he says. “It is contaminated by what we already know.”

The blind spot is caused by a patch at the back of each eye where there are no light-sensitive cells, just a gap where neurons exit the eye on their way to the brain.

We normally don’t notice blind spots because our two eyes can fill in for each other. When vision is obscured in one eye, the brain makes up what’s in the missing area by assuming that whatever is in the regions around the spot continues inwards.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Chemists may be zeroing in on chemical reactions that sparked the first life

By Robert F. Service

DNA is better known, but many researchers today believe that life on Earth got started with its cousin RNA, because that nucleic acid can act as both a repository of genetic information and a catalyst to speed up biochemical reactions. But those favoring this “RNA world” hypothesis have struggled for decades to explain how the molecule’s four building blocks could have arisen from the simpler compounds present during our planet’s early days. Now, chemists have identified simple reactions that, using the raw materials on early Earth, can synthesize close cousins of all four building blocks. The resemblance isn’t perfect, but it suggests scientists may be closing in on a plausible scenario for how life on Earth began.

RNA’s four building blocks are called nucleotides. Each is composed of ribose, a ring-shaped sugar molecule, connected to one of four different ring-shaped “bases,” adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and uracil (U). C and U are structurally similar to each other and collectively known as pyrimidines, whereas A and G resemble each other and are known as purines. In 2009, researchers led by Matthew Powner and John Sutherland at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, U.K., came up with the first plausible chemical reactions that could have synthesized pyrimidines on early Earth. But very different reactions, in different conditions, seemed necessary to make purines. That begged the question of how all four nucleotides could have wound up in the same place to give rise to the first “living” RNA molecules.

Powner, who moved to University College London in 2012, and colleagues have now found a way to extend their earlier pyrimidinemaking chemistry to create purine cousins. As before, they start with a simple sugar called an aldehyde, thought to have been present on early Earth. A handful of simple steps transformed the aldehyde into two compounds resembling adenine- and guanine-containing nucleotides, they report today in Nature Communications. The resemblance wasn’t perfect: In the base of each, a carbon atom was bound to an oxygen atom instead of a hydrogen atom as in the familiar purines.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.