ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 406

Flecks of Extraterrestrial Dust, All Over the Roof

By William J. Broad

After decades of failures and misunderstandings, scientists have solved a cosmic riddle — what happens to the tons of dust particles that hit the Earth every day but seldom if ever get discovered in the places that humans know best, like buildings and parking lots, sidewalks and park benches.

The answer? Nothing. Look harder. The tiny flecks are everywhere.

An international team found that rooftops and other cityscapes readily collect the extraterrestrial dust in ways that can ease its identification, contrary to science authorities who long pooh-poohed the idea as little more than an urban myth kept alive by amateur astronomers.

Remarkably, the leader of the discovery team — and co-author of a recent paper in Geology, a monthly journal of the Geological Society of America — turns out to be a gifted amateur who devoted himself to disproving the skeptics.

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Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Press Release

Contact: Gordon Ross

EvoRevo Ltd

Phone: +34 697 964989

www.EvoRevo.biz

Press Release
Richard Dawkins announces Evolution video game
Britsoft game developer Gordie Ross plans on teaching America a lesson

Edinburgh, March 10, 2017: Richard Dawkins and EvoRevo Ltd, the video game team founded by veteran Britsoft game developer Gordie Ross, today launch their Kickstarter campaign for their new entertainment product Richard Dawkins: Evolution.

The video game is set in a solar system similar to the newly charted Trappis 1 where 7 Earth-sized planets were recently discovered by NASA. The game relies on cutting-edge cloud technology to simulate a population of hundreds of thousands of lifeforms as they evolve in wonderful ways.

Richard Dawkins said, “Evolution is happening all the time; however in most cases, the rate of change is so small that it is difficult for a human to come to terms with the length of time involved. Our goal is to strike a balance between explaining that it is a gradual process and showing it happening at a rate that is entertaining to our audience.”

Like The Oregon Trail, an entertaining yet brilliantly educational video game which blazed its own trail in the classrooms of the 1980s, Gordie Ross (the game´s creator) envisions the Richard Dawkins: Evolution video game will ultimately make its way out of the home and into the classroom alongside exciting and entertaining learning resources.

Gordie Ross said, “Ultimately we see America as the greatest challenge where roughly 40% of the population believes the Earth is less than 10 thousand years old. Using a video game, we hope to additionally talk to this different audience who generally do not read science books. It´s Richard and I´s hope to trigger a curiosity about Evolution and Science that sets a new generation on an amazing journey of discovery.”

The Kickstarter runs until the 10th of April and the minimum goal is £50K ($62.5K US dollars) to support the running of the community and game servers. Kickstarter backers will be invited to help shape the features of the game and enjoy free early access plus heavily discounted subscription rates with some rewards including unlimited lifetime access. Flexible academic licenses are available during the Kickstarter for those who wish to provide Richard Dawkins: Evolution and learning materials to whole classrooms or schools.

For more information and to back the creation of Richard Dawkins: Evolution, visit the project’s Kickstarter page: http://bit.ly/RDEvolution

You can also follow the progress of the funding campaign and the creation of the game on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RichardDawki...

“I’ve read many of his (Richard Dawkins) books over the years, including The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker…. I consider him to be one of the great scientific writer/explainers of all time.” – Bill Gates

Synthetic yeast chromosomes help probe mysteries of evolution

By Amy Maxmen

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once pondered what would happen if the cassette “tape of life” were rewound and played again. Synthetic biologists have tested one aspect of this notion by engineering chromosomes from scratch, sticking them into yeast and seeing whether the modified organisms can still function normally.

They do, according to seven papers published today in Science that describe the creation, testing and refining of five redesigned yeast chromosomes1–7. Together with a sixth previously synthesized chromosome8, they represent more than one-third of the genome of the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. An international consortium of more than 200 researchers that created the chromosomes expects to complete a fully synthetic yeast genome by the end of the year.

The work the team has already done could help to optimize the creation of microbes to pump out alcohol, drugs, fragrances and fuel. And it serves as a guide for future research on how genomes evolve and function.

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Trump’s Order May Foul U.S. Drinking Water Supply

By Annie Sneed

Pres. Donald Trump insists he wants clean water. In a speech to Congress last week, he vowed to “promote clean air and clean water.” And in an interview with The New York Times last November, he said, “Clean water, crystal clean water is vitally important.” Ironically, though, the president just signed an executive order that could pollute many Americans’ drinking water sources.

On February 28, Trump ordered a review of the Clean Water Rule, with the aim of rolling it back. Pres. Barack Obama finalized the Clean Water Rule in June 2015 to clear up confusion over which water bodies the federal government can regulate under the 1972 Clean Water Act, the main federal law for water pollution. Now, legal experts say, Trump appears to want to restrict what types of waters are regulated, much more so than the Clean Water Rule and the regulations before it. Specifically, his executive order—if and when it leads to a final rule—would likely cut protections for many wetlands and smaller streams that help keep U.S. waters clean. All of this could result in dirtier drinking water supplies for millions of Americans. “Almost certainly, some water bodies will face increased pollution under a narrower federal Clean Water Rule,” Daniel Esty, professor of environmental law and policy at Yale Law School, wrote to Scientific American. “It would leave some critical water resources less protected.” Of course, federal agencies will first need to go through a lengthy rule-making process before Trump’s directive becomes a final rule.

The Clean Water Act protects major water bodies like large streams, rivers, bays and other coastal waters, along with streams and wetlands that flow into them from being destroyed or polluted—or, at least, not polluted without federal oversight. It covers a large range of pollutants, including sewage, garbage, biological and radioactive materials, and industrial and agricultural waste. The 2015 Clean Water Rule clarified that federal agencies could also regulate certain types of smaller or more isolated waters, like seasonal streams and wetlands near them, which have a less obvious connection to larger waters. Previously, oversight for those waters was decided on a case by case basis, although protection was often granted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or Army Corps of Engineers. The 2015 rule never really went into effect, however, because a federal court stopped its implementation until judges decide a lawsuit against it, which is still in progress.

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Robber fly: Hunting secrets of a tiny predator revealed

By Victoria Gill

The mid-air hunting strategy of a tiny fly the size of a grain of rice has been revealed by an international team of scientists.

Holcocephala, a species of robber fly, is able to intercept and “lock on” to its prey in less than a second.

Researchers used high-speed cameras to show exactly how the fly positioned itself to capture a moving target in mid-air.

The results are published in the journal Current Biology.

Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido from Cambridge University explained that, normally, “when we think of hunting animals we think of excellent vision and speed, but when you’re so very tiny, you have a very small brain and limited sensory capacity”.

She added: “We wanted to know how [this fly manages] this predatory behaviour.”

Dr Gonzalez-Bellido and her colleagues created a miniature outdoor studio – filming the fly from two angles to capture its movement in 3D.

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E.P.A. Head Stacks Agency With Climate Change Skeptics

By Coral Davenport

WASHINGTON — Days after the Senate confirmed him as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference and was asked about addressing a group that probably wanted to eliminate his agency.

“I think it’s justified,” he responded, to cheers. “I think people across the country look at the E.P.A. the way they look at the I.R.S.”

In the days since, Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built a career out of suing the agency he now leads, has moved to stock the top offices of the agency with like-minded conservatives — many of them skeptics of climate change and all of them intent on rolling back environmental regulations that they see as overly intrusive and harmful to business.

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Activists Rush to Save Government Science Data — If They Can Find It

By Amy Harmon

As the presidential inauguration drew near in January, something bordering on panic was taking hold among some scientists who rely on the vast oceans of data housed on government servers, which encompass information on everything from social demographics to satellite photographs of polar ice.

In a Trump administration that has made clear its disdain for the copious evidence that human activity is warming the planet, researchers feared a broad crusade against the scientific information provided to the public. Reports last week that the administration is proposing deep budget cuts for government agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have fueled new fears of databases being axed, if only as a cost-saving measure.

“We’ll probably be saying goodbye to much of the invaluable data housed at the NCEI,” Anne Jefferson, a water hydrology professor at Kent State University, wrote on Twitter Saturday, referring to the National Centers for Environmental Information. “Hope it gets rescued in time.”

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Scientists Track, For the First Time, One of the Rarest Songbirds on Its Yearlong Migration

By Wendy Mitman Clarke

At .48 ounces, your average Kirtland’s warbler weighs about as much as a handful of tortilla chips (seven, stacked), or about the same as one baby carrot. And every year, this rare North American songbird travels nearly 4,000 miles round trip, across mountain ranges, the body of a continent, the Gulf Stream and open ocean. Most of this journey has been a mystery, until now.

Using light-level geolocators, Smithsonian scientists have for the first time tracked and mapped the migratory paths of Kirtland’s warblers for an entire year, following them from their breeding grounds in Michigan to their winter homes in the central Bahamas and back. The scientists hope the data will enable conservation managers to better understand how to manage habitat for the warblers, which were close to extinction in the 1970s and have made a significant comeback as an endangered species.

The research, published in the Journal of Avian Biology, also represents a breakthrough for studying other small species’ migrations, which are an elusive but pivotal element of their lives.

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New insight into secret lives of Neanderthals

By Helen Briggs

Neanderthals dosed themselves with painkillers and possibly penicillin, according to a study of their teeth.

One sick Neanderthal chewed the bark of the poplar tree, which contains a chemical related to aspirin.

He may also have been using penicillin, long before antibiotics were developed.

The evidence comes from ancient DNA found in the dental tartar of Neanderthals living about 40,000 years ago in central Europe.

Microbes and food stuck to the teeth of the ancient hominins gives scientists a window into the past.

By sequencing DNA preserved in dental tartar, international researchers have found out new details of the diet, lifestyle and health of our closest extinct relatives.

“Their behaviour and their diet looks a lot more sophisticated and a lot more like us in many ways,” said Prof Alan Cooper, director of the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.

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The Dilemma Facing Ex-Muslims in Trump’s America

By Simon Cottee

“Challenging Islam as a doctrine,” Ali Rizvi told me, “is very different from demonizing Muslim people.” Rizvi, a self-identified ex-Muslim, is the author of a new book titled The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason. One of the book’s stated aims is to uphold this elementary distinction: “Human beings have rights and are entitled to respect. Ideas, books, and beliefs don’t, and aren’t.”

The problem for Rizvi is that the grain of Western political culture is currently against him. Those in the secular West live in an age when ideas are commonly regarded as “deeds” with the potential to wound. So, on the left, self-critique of Islam is often castigated as critique of Muslims. Meanwhile, the newly elected president of the United States and his inner circle have a tendency to conflate the ideas of radical Islam with the beliefs of the entire Muslim population. So, on the right, the very same self-critique of Islam is used to attack Muslims and legitimize draconian policies against them.

One possible response to this problem is to back down and stay silent. The Atheist Muslim is a sustained argument for why silence is not an option. I met up with Rizvi in his hometown of Toronto recently to discuss his reasoning.

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