ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 397

I watched Alex Jones give his viewers health advice. Here’s what I learned.

By Julia Belluz

The YouTube video shows girls convulsing in hospital beds, on the floors of their schools, losing control of their bodies, unable to walk or talk.

The young women have allegedly just been given shots of the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Instead of a lifesaving treatment, they’re left crippled, “chemically lobotomized.”

A voice over the disturbing footage screams: “I am not a slave. You cannot force me to inject my kid with this poison. This is sick!”

That voice belongs to Owen Shroyer, a reporter for Infowars, the right-wing, conspiracy theory–laden “news” site. He’s anchoring a classic Infowars health segment, featuring a passionate rant against mainstream medicine. In this case, the subject is a favorite on Infowars: “vaccines and the damages they do to our youth.”

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Global Restrictions on Religion Rise Modestly in 2015, Reversing Downward Trend

By Pew Research Center

Government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion increased in 2015 for the first time in three years, according to Pew Research Center’s latest annual study on global restrictions on religion.

The share of countries with “high” or “very high” levels of government restrictions – i.e., laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs and practices – ticked up from 24% in 2014 to 25% in 2015. Meanwhile, the percentage of countries with high or very high levels of social hostilities – i.e., acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society – increased in 2015, from 23% to 27%. Both of these increases follow two years of declines in the percentage of countries with high levels of restrictions on religion by these measures.

When looking at overall levels of restrictions in 2015 – whether resulting from government policies and actions or from hostile acts by private individuals, organizations or social groups – the new study finds that 40% of countries had high or very high levels of restrictions, up from 34% in 2014.

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Life Driven Purpose, pg 66

“Daniel Dennett, in Freedom Evolves, writes that it makes no difference whether our moral impulses are evolved or learned. “[T]he theory that explains morality … should be neutral with regard to whether our moral attitudes, habits, preferences, and proclivities are a product of genes or cultures.” I think this is true because culture itself is ultimately a product of evolution. Whether you think “instinct” is purely biological or a learned habit, or a combination of the two, it comes down to the same goal: the minimization of harm to biological organisms.”

–Dan Barker, Life Driven Purpose, pg 66

Big, Shiny Asteroid to Fly (Safely) Past Earth on April 19

By Hanneke Weitering

A whopper of an asteroid will make a close approach to Earth on April 19. There’s no need to panic, though; NASA says it won’t collide with our planet. But it will get extremely close for an asteroid of that size.

Named 2014 JO25, this giant space rock measures approximately 2,000 feet (650 meters) across — about the height of the Shanghai Tower, China’s tallest building and the second-tallest building in the world. It will pass by Earth at a safe distance of 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or nearly five times the distance between the Earth and the moon.

“Small asteroids pass within this distance of Earth several times each week, but this upcoming close approach is the closest by any known asteroid of this size, or larger, since asteroid Toutatis, a 3.1-mile (five-kilometer) asteroid, which approached within about four lunar distances in September 2004,” NASA officials said in a statement.

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Transcendental Meditation Pseudoscience

By Steven Novella

It’s fun to run into such a wonderful example of pure pseudoscience. Let’s deconstruct this one: Field Effects of Consciousness and Reduction in U.S. Urban Murder Rates: Evaluation of a Prospective Quasi-Experiment. This study comes from the Maharishi University of Management.

The idea here (which, let’s be clear, is a tenet of religious faith, not a scientific theory) is that consciousness is a field, and that there is a universal field of consciousness of which we are all a part. When individuals engage in transcendental meditation (TM) they are not only affecting their own consciousness, they are affecting the entire field.

The point of this and other similar TM studies is to confirm the belief (they are not testing the belief) that if enough people put good vibrations into the universal field of consciousness, society in general will benefit. How many is enough? Well apparently they have an answer for that. It is the square root of 1% of the population. Why? Because math.

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Paleo Profile: The Whale Caiman

By Brian Switek

Crocodylians are deceptive. I’m not just talking about their skill as aquatic ambush predators, concealed until the moment they’re a blur of teeth and scales. Rather, the existing species of alligators, crocodiles, and gharials have often been incorrectly characterized as “living fossils” that have changed little since the Mesozoic. The fossil record readily dispels this notion, proving that crocodylians were even more varied in the past. With that in mind, Mourasuchus is a wonderful example of the greater crocodylian variety that once existed on our planet.

This weird caiman was first described in 1964 under the name Mourasuchus amazonensis. A handful of other species have been recognized since then, with the latest being Mourasuchus pattersoni named just this year by paleontologist Giovanne Cidade and colleagues from the Miocene strata of Venezuela. It’s odd for a caiman. This was not a short-snouted little nipper, like the black caimans you’ve likely seen on natural history documentaries, but a long-faced crocodylian that looks like it’s trying to do an impression of a baleen whale.

Such a strange skull is a sure sign Mourasuchus was doing something different than its modern relatives. But what? The long, wide snout with small teeth indicate that this caiman probably eschewed large, struggling prey for smaller fare. Following from this hypothesis, Cidade and coauthors suggest Mourasuchus a “gulp feeder” – a caiman that captured various small mollusks, crustaceans, and small fish en masse with its broad jaws. This wasn’t filter feeding, the authors caution, as the caiman had no mechanism to separate sediment or plants from protein, but rather a uniquely crocodylian way of snaffling up little morsels in great quantities.

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Mass bleaching hits Great Barrier Reef for second year in a row

By Richard Schiffman

The bad news for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef just keeps on getting worse.

Last month, scientists from James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, reported that the northern third of the reef was severely bleached in 2016. Well over half the corals there were lost in that event.

Today, the same team announced that the central portion of the reef, a popular tourist area, is now suffering a similar fate. Corals bleach – and can die – when stresses such as abnormal heat make them expel their symbiotic algae.

In 2016, the bleaching was caused by El Niño, a periodic global climate event that heats up a vast band of the ocean’s surface in the equatorial Pacific.

But this year’s bleaching is occurring during a so-called “normal” year without such an event.

“The water is just too damn hot,” says Terry Hughes, the leader of the survey, who fears that climate change is creating a new norm that corals are unable to endure.

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Violent end as young stars dramatically collide

By Matt McGrath

Scientists have captured a dramatic and violent image of the collision between two young stars that tore apart their stellar nursery.

Located in the constellation of Orion, the explosive event happened some 500 years ago sending giant streamers of dust and gas across interstellar space.

Researchers say the clash produced as much energy as our Sun would over 10 million years.

Details of the event have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Huge explosions in space are mostly associated with supernovas, which can take place in the dying moments of giant, ancient stars.

This new image though shows an explosion taking place at the other end of the stellar lifecycle.

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A Kansas School District Has Been Accused of Multiple Violations of Church/State Separation

By Hemant Mehta

We’ve seen public schools in which coaches participate in prayers. And schools where there are prayers over the loudspeakers before football games. And schools where the Board of Education prays at meetings. And schools where students formally pray at graduation.

But even in Kansas, it’s disturbing to see all of those things happening in a single school district. The Freedom From Religion Foundation explains:

A concerned parent has informed FFRF that Liberal Unified School District 480 in Liberal, Kan., has regularly incorporated prayers into several school events. This includes:

Prayers before girls’ soccer games led by a coach-designated student.
Prayers after boys’ soccer games done in a similar fashion as the girls’ soccer games.
Prayers before kickoff at home football games given over the loudspeaker.
Reportedly, students as well as Christian clergymen have led the prayers.
An opening prayer regularly scheduled during school board meetings. According to the board’s published minutes for this school year, either a board member or local Christian clergymen gives the opening prayer.
A designated student reciting a prayer at commencement ceremonies.

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What does a black hole look like? Astronomers are on a quest to find out.

By Sarah Kaplan

By its very nature, the black hole at the heart of our galaxy is impossible to spot. Its overwhelming gravity allows nothing to escape, not even light. Massive enough to send shivers through space-time itself, yet perfectly invisible, it lurks in the darkness like a monster from a child’s nightmare — felt but unseen.

It is the stuff of physicists’ wildest dreams.

“Black holes are basically the most mysterious objects in the cosmos,” said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Even Albert Einstein almost didn’t believe they were real, even though it was his theory of general relativity that helped predict them more than 100 years ago.

In the century since, scientists have been able to sense black holes through observations of their influence on nearby matter. And with last year’s detection of gravitational waves emitted by two colliding black holes, they’ve also heard them. But no one has ever seen a black hole. The enigmatic objects hide behind an “event horizon” — the boundary at which gravity acts like an invisibility cloak, wrapping around light and matter and swallowing them whole. No telescope on Earth is powerful enough to penetrate that abyss.

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