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February 6, 2017
3 Things You Might Not Know About Charles Darwin
By Tania Lombrozo
This Sunday, Feb. 12, is Darwin Day, an international day of celebration commemorating the birth of Charles Darwin and his contributions to science.
It’s also an excuse for science- and evolution-themed events around the globe, and for all of us to take a moment to appreciate the value of science and the wonders of the natural world.
As you prepare to celebrate, here are a few things you might want to know about Darwin — some insights new and old to impress your friends and family.
1. Darwin developed the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Studies consistently find that many Americans — including college students and even pre-service teachers — misunderstand critical features of how the process works. You can read through common misconceptions here, or review the key ingredients for natural selection — heritable variation that leads to differential reproduction — in this easy nursery-rhyme created for 13.7.
2. Darwin wasn’t only a meticulous observer of the natural world, he was also a careful reader and a diligent record-keeper when it came to his own habits. Beginning in 1838, Darwin kept a notebook in which he recorded the books he was reading. From 1837 to 1860, he reported reading 687 distinct works of English non-fiction. These years span an important period in the development of his thinking, from his return to England from the Galapagos Islands to the publication of On the Origin of Species.
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February 3, 2017
What it would take to reach the stars
Anybody who longs to see an alien world up close got an exciting gift last year. In August, researchers reported the discovery of a potentially habitable, Earth-sized planet orbiting the Sun’s closest stellar neighbour — Proxima Centauri, a mere 1.3 parsecs, or 4.22 light years, away.
It’s a tempting — some might say irresistible — destination. Sending a spacecraft to the planet, dubbed Proxima b, would give humans their first view of a world outside the Solar System. “Clearly it would be a huge step forward for humanity if we could reach out to the nearest star system,” says Bruce Betts, director of science and technology for the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. The data beamed back could reveal whether the alien world offers the right conditions for life — and maybe even whether anything inhabits it.
The idea of reaching Proxima b is not just science fiction. In fact, a few months before the discovery of the exoplanet, a group of business leaders and scientists took the first steps towards visiting the Alpha Centauri star system, thought to be home to Proxima. They announced Breakthrough Starshot, an effort backed by US$100 million from Russian investor Yuri Milner to vastly accelerate research and development of a space probe that could make the trip. When Proxima b was found (G. Anglada-Escudé et al. Nature 536, 437–440; 2016), the project gained an even more tantalizing target.
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Your oldest ancestor was really weird and had a big mouth
Don’t take this the wrong way, but your oldest ancestor was not exactly a beauty.
Scientists on Monday said a tiny marine creature from China that wriggled in the seabed mud about 540 million years ago may be the earliest-known animal in the lengthy evolutionary path that eventually led to humans. It was a weird-looking beastie with a bag-like body and, for its size, a really big mouth.
University of Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris noted that humans, who appeared a relatively recent 200,000 years ago, have a series of “evolutionarily deeper ancestors” than monkeys and apes. That point is exemplified by the unique-looking creature called Saccorhytus, whose name means wrinkled sack.
“And is not beauty in the eye of the beholder?” Conway Morris asked.
Saccorhytus, measuring about four-hundredths of an inch (1 millimeter), appears to be the most primitive member of the broad animal group called deuterostomes.
This group includes vertebrates – fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals including people – as well as animals called echinoderms including starfish and sea urchins and obscure creatures called hemichordates including acorn worms.
Saccorhytus lived during the Cambrian Period, a time of exceptional evolutionary experimentation. The primitive biological traits possessed by Saccorhytus helped pave the way for the various deuterostomes including vertebrates. Fish, the vanguard of the vertebrates, appeared roughly 10 to 15 million years after Saccorhytus.
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The March for Science is Set to Happen on Earth Day
By Brian Kahn
Scientists officially have a date where they’ll be taking to the streets.
The March for Science has been scheduled for Saturday, April 22 in Washington, D.C. A growing constellation of marches are also scheduled for that day in cities across the U.S.
What began as a Reddit conversation has grown into a movement of scientists and science lovers standing up for evidenced-based policy making and inclusivity in the science community.
The date of the march isn’t just an average Saturday. April 22 is Earth Day, first celebrated in 1970.
The original Earth Day is seen by many as a turning point in the environmental movement. The year itself also marks a major turning point for the U.S. government and environmental policy. In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into existence and it began operating that December.
The circumstances from the March for Science are a bit different in 2017. For one, it isn’t focused solely on environmental science but all disciplines from astronomy to zoology. There’s also not a swell of support for science in the federal government. In fact, the march was inspired by a Congress and president that appear hostile to science, particularly in regards to climate change.
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Galactic X-rays could point to dark matter proof
By Edwin Cartlidge, Science writer
A small but distinctive signal in X-rays from the Milky Way could be key to proving the existence of dark matter.
That is the claim of US scientists who analysed the energy spectrum of X-rays gathered by Nasa’s Chandra satellite.
They found more X-ray photons with a particular energy than would be expected if they were produced only by familiar processes.
Those photons could in fact have been generated by the decay of dark matter particles, say the researchers.
This is not the first time that scientists have seen extra photons with an energy of about 3,500 electronvolts (3.5 keV) in the spectra recorded by X-ray satellites.
But previously, according to Kevork Abazajian, a cosmologist at the University of California, Irvine, it was not clear whether the bump, or “line”, created by the photons in the otherwise smooth spectrum was merely an instrumental artefact.
“This result is very exciting,” said Dr Abazajian, who was not involved in the research. “It makes it more likely that the line is due to dark matter.”
Scientists reckon that dark matter makes up more than 80% of all the mass in the Universe. As its name suggests, it gives off no light, but reveals its presence through the gravitational tug it exerts on stars within galaxies.
However, we still have little idea about what dark matter actually is.
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January 31, 2017
January 30, 2017
January 26, 2017
Steven Weinberg: the 13 best science books for the general reader
by Steven Weinberg
The Nobel laureate on making science accessible – from Ptolemy to Darwin to Dawkins.
If you had a chance to ask Aristotle what he thought of the idea of writing about physical science for general readers, he would not have understood what you meant. All of his own writing, on physics and astronomy as well as on politics and aesthetics, was accessible to any educated Greek of his time. This is not evidence so much of Aristotle’s skills as a writer, or of the excellence of Greek education, as it is of the primitive state of Hellenic physical science, which made no effective use of mathematics. It is mathematics above all that presents an obstacle to communication between professional scientists and the general educated public. The development of pure mathematics was already well under way in Aristotle’s day, but its use in science by Plato and the Pythagoreans had been childish, and Aristotle himself had little interest in the use of mathematics in science. He perceptively concluded from the appearance of the night sky at different latitudes that the Earth is a sphere, but he did not bother to use these observations (as could have been done) to calculate the size of our planet.
Physical science began seriously to benefit from mathematics only after Aristotle’s death in 322BC, when the vital centre of science moved from Athens to Alexandria. But the indispensable use of mathematics by Hellenistic physicists and astronomers began to get in the way of communication between scientists and the public. Looking over the surviving highly mathematical works of Aristarchus, Archimedes and Ptolemy, we can feel a twinge of sympathy for Greeks or Greek-speaking Romans who tried to keep up with the latest discoveries about light, fluids or the planets.
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January 24, 2017
Question of the Week – 1/25/17
Now that you’ve seen some of the wonderful signs and displays from the Women’s March, which do you think were the best and most effective for communicating support for reason, science, and critical thinking?
Our favorite answer wins a copy of A Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins (no repeat winners).
And please don’t forget to send in your submissions for Question of the Week! You can suggest a question by emailing us at QotW@richarddawkins.net. Please remember this is for “Question of the Week” suggestions only, and answers to the Question of the Week should be submitted through the comments section on the Question of the Week page Thank you!
January 23, 2017
Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year
By Justin Gillis
Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.
The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming a Chinese plot and vowed to roll back his predecessor’s efforts to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases.
In reality, the Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization.
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