ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 409

Antarctic ice has set an unexpected record, and scientists are struggling to figure out why

By Chris Mooney

There’s no mistaking it now. Even though we don’t have the final numbers, it is abundantly clear that the sea ice ringing the Antarctic continent has fallen precipitously — reaching a record low just a few short years after it reached a record high.

In 38 years of records dating back to 1979, the sea ice lows seen as of the end of February 2017 — a time of year when ice in the Antarctic is at its annual minimum — are unprecedented. The area of ocean covered by sea ice still appears to be shrinking, but as of Feb. 28, there were just 2.131 million square kilometers of floating ice surrounding Antarctica, according to near-real time data provided by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

That’s much less than the prior low of 2.29 million square kilometers on Feb. 27, 1997. The difference — about 159,000 square kilometers, or 61,390 square miles — amounts to an area nearly as large as Florida.

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That Cool Robot May Be a Security Risk

By John Markoff

In the coming age of robotics, many of those autonomous machines will be internet-connected and mobile.

What could possibly go wrong?

Significant security flaws were found in an examination of six home and industrial robots, according to a report to be released Wednesday by IOActive, a computer security consulting firm with headquarters in Seattle. The report notes that only four of the six companies responded to the firm’s alert, and only two said they planned to make patches after being informed of the problems.

The researchers, who described the categories of vulnerabilities they had discovered in the report but not the specific flaws, said their research was simply an early reconnaissance of the field.

“It’s important to note that our testing was not even a deep, extensive security audit, as that would have taken a much larger investment of time and resources,” the authors wrote. “The goal for this work was to gain a high-level sense of how insecure today’s robots are, which we accomplished.”

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One Anti-Science Resolution Breezes Through Indiana Senate; Another is Introduced in Alabama House

By Hemant Mehta

Senate Resolution 17 in Indiana passed this week on a 40-9 vote. While resolutions don’t always get attention because they’re usually symbolic in nature, this one is especially pernicious. It reinforces “support of teachers who choose to teach a diverse curriculum”… which is a fancy way of saying that teachers who chose to bring Creationism and Intelligent Design into their lessons about evolution should face no real consequences.

Just look at the language:

Whereas, The Indiana General Assembly further understands the recommendation by the U.S. Congress, as stated in the report language of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, namely, “Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), that the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics can generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society”

Apparently the “full range of scientific views” includes bullshit and pseudoscience.

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SpaceX Moon mission extends Elon Musk’s ambitions

By Jonathan Amos

Elon Musk, it seems, loves nothing more than to spin plates. When most of us might be looking to lighten the load, he’s piling on the ambition.

The serial entrepreneur’s latest gambit is to fly people around the Moon. Two wealthy individuals have apparently lodged significant deposits with his SpaceX company to make this journey.

We have no idea who they are, just that these space tourists include “nobody from Hollywood”.

That Mr Musk should announce his intention to carry out a Moon loop should not really be a surprise; such a venture is on the natural path to deep-space exploration and colonisation – his stated end goals.

What does take the breath away is the timeline.

He’s talking about doing this journey in late 2018, in hardware that has not yet even flown. That’s Elon for you.

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‘Best ever’ view of what a dinosaur really looked like

By Helen Briggs

A dinosaur that lived 160 million years ago had drumstick-shaped legs much like living birds, according to palaeontologists.

The feathered dinosaur also had bird-like arms similar to wings.

Scientists used high-powered lasers to reveal invisible details of what the creature looked like.

The research could give insights into the origins of flight, which is thought to have evolved more than 150 million years ago.

Michael Pittman of the University of Hong Kong said the study was a landmark in our understanding of the origins of birds.

“In this study, what we’ve done is we’ve used high-powered lasers to reveal unseen soft tissues preserved alongside the bones of a feathered dinosaur called Anchiornis,” he said.

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Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

By Carole Cadwalladr

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”.

That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?

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Pope suggests it’s better to be an atheist than a bad Christian

By Daniel Burke

If you’re a Christian who exploits people, leads a double life or manages a “dirty” business, perhaps it’s better not to call yourself a believer, Pope Francis suggested in a homily on Thursday in Rome.

“So many Christians are like this, and these people scandalize others,” Francis said during morning Mass at Casa Santa Marta, according to Vatican Radio. “How many times have we heard — all of us, around the neighborhood and elsewhere — ‘But to be a Catholic like that, it’s better to be an atheist.’ It is that: scandal.”

“But what is scandal? Scandal is saying one thing and doing another.”

In the Catholic Church, causing scandal also a grave offense.

Examples of such sins abound, the Pope said, from money launderers to business owners who take beach vacations while stiffing their employees.

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The Religious Origins of Fake News and “Alternative Facts”

By Christopher Douglas

Perhaps one of the strangest instances of fake news that proliferated in the final months of the 2016 election was the conspiracy known as “Pizzagate.” Supposedly, a D.C. restaurant housed a pedophilia ring involving members of the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. Podesta’s emails—released by WikiLeaks, and probably hacked by Russia—revealed phrases like “cheese pizza” and other code words for child sex-trafficking. Hillary Clinton herself may have been involved. The ring seemed to include Satanic rituals. The Clinton campaign was engaged, on the side, with running a child sex-trafficking business.

As German Lopez noted at Vox.com, the story seems to have begun on 4chan and spread through news aggregation websites and social media. The restaurant quickly “got hundreds of death threats on their phones and social media.” Then a North Carolina man decided to investigate the pedophilia ring himself, bringing an assault rifle that he fired in the restaurant. (No one was hurt.) As the man later explained about the absence of child sex slaves there, “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.”

As we’ve moved from an election dominated by fake news to a new Trump administration run on the principle of “alternative facts,” it’s worth taking some time to ponder what seems to be contemporary conservative credulity. We should certainly be reminded of the term “truthiness” that Stephen Colbert invented in October 2005 to capture some of the pronouncements of the George W. Bush administration. As he explained then, truthiness was the truth that “comes from the gut,” not from actual facts—“the truth we want to exist,” that feels right.

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Something rotten: Why secular Denmark is using a sledgehammer to protect the sacred

by ERASMUS

DENMARK is one of the least religious countries in the world; a poll has found that barely one in five Danes considers faith to be a really important factor in daily life. Yet as of this week, it looks as though Denmark may be one of the very few countries in the Western world where a blasphemy law is in active use.

The country’s state prosecution service has emphatically defended its decision to bring blasphemy charges (and the suggestion of a fine, not a prison term) against a 42-year-old man who burned a copy of the Koran in his garden and then posted a video of the deed on an anti-Islamic Facebook group. “Such an act may be a violation of the blasphemy section of the Criminal Code which concerns public mockery or scorn with reference to a religion,” a prosecutor said.

What lies behind this decision? It’s easy to think of reasons why the authorities in any Western country would view the public burning of Islam’s holy text as something against the public interest, an act to be discouraged in any possible way. When Pastor Terry Jones, a Florida-based preacher, threatened to to stage a Koran-burning spectacular, he was told by bigwigs like the then defence secretary, Robert Gates, and David Petraeus, perhaps America’s best-known general, that such an act would put many lives, including those of American soldiers, in danger. But utimately it proved impossible to prevent the pastor from carrying out his incendiary acts, given that country’s robust tradition of freedom of religious and anti-religious expression.

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A giant neuron found wrapped around entire mouse brain

By Sara Reardon

Like ivy plants that send runners out searching for something to cling to, the brain’s neurons send out shoots that connect with other neurons throughout the organ. A new digital reconstruction method shows three neurons that branch extensively throughout the brain, including one that wraps around its entire outer layer. The finding may help to explain how the brain creates consciousness.

Christof Koch, president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, explained his group’s new technique at a 15 February meeting of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative in Bethesda, Maryland. He showed how the team traced three neurons from a small, thin sheet of cells called the claustrum — an area that Koch believes acts as the seat of consciousness in mice and humans1.

Tracing all the branches of a neuron using conventional methods is a massive task. Researchers inject individual cells with a dye, slice the brain into thin sections and then trace the dyed neuron’s path by hand. Very few have been able to trace a neuron through the entire organ. This new method is less invasive and scalable, saving time and effort.

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