ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 396

On eve of science march, planners look ahead

By Lindzi Wessel

This past January, just days after millions of people marched on behalf of women—and in reaction to the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump—Caroline Weinberg, a health writer and educator in New York City, began dreaming of a similar march on behalf of science. “Seems like it would be pretty easy” to organize, she texted a friend. “Just reach out to academics at local universities.”

Now, on the eve of the 22 April March for Science in Washington, D.C., and some 400 sister marches around the world, Weinberg concedes that organizing the sprawling event has been anything but easy. Soon after that text, Weinberg and two other march enthusiasts she met online found themselves leading a global movement that has attracted millions of followers, with goals that include dramatizing concerns that political leaders are ignoring scientific evidence and demonstrating broad support for science. To turn that vision into reality, the trio has recruited scores of volunteer coordinators, negotiated partnerships with dozens of science groups, and raised some $1 million to pay for everything from security to portable toilets.

“Every step of the way has been completely terrifying,” Weinberg says. “‘Seems like it would be pretty easy’ will be on my tombstone,” she jokes.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Saturn spacecraft begins science swan-song

By Alexandra Witze

After 13 years exploring Saturn and its moons, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has just 5 months left to live. But it will go out with a scientific bang.

On 22 April, Cassini will slingshot past Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, for the last time. Four days later, the probe will hurtle into the unexplored region between the giant planet and its rings. Cassini will thread that 2,400-kilometre-wide gap 22 times before its kamikaze dive into Saturn’s atmosphere on 15 September.

This unprecedented journey promises to yield fresh discoveries for the venerable spacecraft. “It will be like a whole new mission,” says Linda Spilker, Cassini’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “There are fundamental new scientific measurements to make.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Mars’s atmosphere hosts metal layers that shouldn’t exist

By Leah Crane

Mars’s atmosphere harbours a layer of electrically charged metal atoms, and they’re not behaving as expected.

NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Emission) spacecraft found layers of atmospheric metal ions that defy models based loosely on Earth’s atmosphere.

“Mars is giving us observations both like and unlike Earth, and that’s very exciting,” says Joseph Grebowsky at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, head of the team that found these Martian metals.

The space between planets is full of metallic dust and rocks. As they are drawn into a planet’s atmosphere, they burn up, leaving behind metal particles like iron and magnesium. On Earth, the behaviour of those particles is mostly controlled by the planet’s strong magnetic field. They use magnetic fields as a sort of highway, and stream along the magnetic field lines to form thin layers throughout the atmosphere.

But Mars has no such field. The planet does have small regions with weak magnetic fields in its southern hemisphere, but without a global field like Earth’s, it should not be able to form the layers that MAVEN sees.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Faith of the faithless: Is atheism just another religion?

By Graham Lawton

I recently discovered that I am a member of a downtrodden minority, one of the most mistrusted and discriminated-against in the world. As a white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-gender male, this is not something I’m used to. But my minority status is undeniable. I am an atheist.

I’m not complaining. I live in one of the world’s most secular countries and work for a science magazine, so it hasn’t got in the way. But for atheists living in societies with a strong religious tradition, discrimination is a real problem. In the US, atheists have one of the lowest approval ratings of any social group. Non-believers are the only significant minority considered unelectable as president – and “unelectable” turns out to be a pretty low bar.

Even when atheists don’t face open hostility or discrimination, we often have to endure put-downs about the sincerity of our (lack of) beliefs. One of the most common is that “atheism is just another religion anyway”. There is no way to prove or disprove the existence of god, the argument goes, so to deny it is a leap of faith. Ergo, atheism is just like a religion.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Where Does the Brain Store Long-Ago Memories?

By Simon Makin

When the now-famous neurological patient Henry Molaison had his brain’s hippocampus surgically sectioned to treat seizures in 1953, science’s understanding of memory inadvertently received perhaps its biggest boost ever. Molaison lost the ability to form new memories of events, and his recollection of anything that had happened during the preceding year was severely impaired. Other types of memory such as learning physical skills were unaffected, suggesting the hippocampus specifically handles the recall of events—known as “episodic” memories.

Further research on other patients with hippocampal damage confirmed recent memories are more impaired than distant ones. It appears the hippocampus provides temporary storage for new information whereas other areas may handle long-term memory. Events that we are later able to remember appear to be channeled for more permanent storage in the cortex (the outer layers of the brain responsible for higher functions such as planning and problem-solving). In the cortex these memories form gradually, becoming integrated with related information to build lasting knowledge about ourselves and the world.

Episodic memories that are intended for long-term storage accumulate to form the “autobiographical” memory that is so essential for our sense of identity. Neuroscientists know a lot about how short-term memories are formed in the brain but the processes underlying long-term storage are still not well understood.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Antarctica’s sleeping ice giant could wake soon

By Jane Qiu

On a glorious January morning in 2015, the Australian icebreaker RSV Aurora Australis was losing a battle off the coast of East Antarctica. For days, the ship had been trying to push through heavy sea ice. It rammed into the pack, backed up and crashed forward again. But the ice, several metres thick, hardly budged. Stephen Rintoul, an oceanographer at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, nearly gave up his goal — to reach a part of the continent that had thwarted all previous expeditions. “I really thought that would be it,” he says. “It’d be another failed attempt.”

Then the weather came to the rescue, with a wind change that blew the ice away from the shore, opening a path through the pack. The ship managed to break free and wove its way through 100 kilometres of ice, reaching the edge of the frozen continent shortly after midnight. Rintoul and his team were the first scientists to reach the Totten Ice Shelf — a vast floating ice ledge that fronts the largest glacier in East Antarctica. “It was a really exhilarating experience,” says Rintoul, chief scientist of the expedition.

The team had to work fast before the ice closed again and blocked any escape. For more than 12 hours, Rintoul and his colleagues carried on non-stop, probing the temperature and salinity of the water, the speed and direction of ocean currents as well as the shape and depth of the ocean floor. They also deployed instruments that would continue taking measurements after the ship had departed.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Sea urchin emits a cloud of venomous jaws to deter predators

By Sandhya Sekar

Species: The collector sea urchin (Tripneustes gratilla) – also called the cake or Parson’s hat sea urchin

Habitat: Coral reefs, seagrass meadows and algae forests in the tropical seas of the Indo-Pacific

The collector sea urchin looks like a pretty pincushion lying on the ocean floor, going about its business of munching on algae and seaweed.

But when threatened, this sedate pincushion has a most extraordinary defence. It releases a cloud of semiautonomous weapons: hundreds of tiny jaws that are still capable of biting and releasing venom even when separated from the sea urchin’s body.

Sea urchins have a hard, chalky shell covered in long spikes. Nestled among the spikes are tubular stalks topped with biting jaws known as pedicellariae.  One type of these appendages even has venom as well.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Alabama Senate Passes Controversial Bill Allowing Church to Create Its Own Police Force

By Hemant Mehta

Earlier this year, we learned about an Alabama church that wanted permission from state legislators to operate their own police force. (So much for the power of prayer…)

Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Vestavia Hills made the request, which became the subject of House Bill 180 (sponsored by State Rep. Arnold Mooney) and Senate Bill 193 (sponsored by State Sen. J.T. “Jabo” Waggoner).

Yesterday, the Senate version of the bill passed by a 24-4 vote. The House, which was still debating its own version of the bill, will now consider this one.

The whole premise, though, raises so many questions.

Like why does a church need its own cops? They say it’s “a way to create a safer campus in a fallen world,” but there are a whole host of constitutional concerns.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Octopuses Do Something Really Strange to Their Genes

By Ed Yong

Octopuses have three hearts, parrot-like beaks, venomous bites, and eight semi-autonomous arms that can taste the world. They squirt ink, contort through the tiniest of spaces, and melt into the world by changing both color and texture. They are incredibly intelligent, capable of wielding tools, solving problems, and sabotaging equipment. As Sy Montgomery once wrote, “no sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange” as an octopus. But their disarming otherness doesn’t end with their bodies. Their genes are also really weird.

A team of scientists led by Joshua Rosenthal at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Eli Eisenberg at Tel Aviv University have shown that octopuses and their relatives—the cephalopods—practice a type of genetic alteration called RNA editing that’s very rare in the rest of the animal kingdom. They use it to fine-tune the information encoded by their genes without altering the genes themselves. And they do so extensively, to a far greater degree than any other animal group.

“They presented this work at a recent conference, and it was a big surprise to everyone,” says Kazuko Nishikura from the Wistar Institute. “I study RNA editing in mice and humans, where it’s very restricted. The situation is very different here. I wonder if it has to do with their extremely developed brains.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Neil Gorsuch Confirmed by Senate as Supreme Court Justice

By ADAM LIPTAK and MATT FLEGENHEIMER

WASHINGTON — Judge Neil M. Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate on Friday to become the 113th justice of the Supreme Court, capping a political brawl that lasted for more than a year and tested constitutional norms inside the Capitol’s fraying upper chamber.

The moment was a triumph for President Trump, whose campaign appeal to reluctant Republicans last year rested in large part on his pledge to appoint another committed conservative to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. However rocky the first months of his administration may have been, Mr. Trump now has a lasting legacy: Judge Gorsuch, 49, could serve on the court for 30 years or more.

“As a deep believer in the rule of law, Judge Gorsuch will serve the American people with distinction as he continues to faithfully and vigorously defend our Constitution,” the president said.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.