ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 560

NECSS Executive Committee Statement & Richard’s response

STATEMENT FROM THE NECSS EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Posted: February 14th, 2016

We wish to apologize to Professor Dawkins for our handling of his disinvitation to NECSS 2016. Our actions were not professional, and we should have contacted him directly to express our concerns before acting unilaterally. We have sent Professor Dawkins a private communication expressing this as well. This apology also extends to all NECSS speakers, our attendees, and to the broader skeptical movement.

We wish to use this incident as an opportunity to have a frank and open discussion of the deeper issues implicated here, which are causing conflict both within the skeptical community and within society as a whole. NECSS 2016 will therefore feature a panel discussion addressing these topics. There is room for a range of reasonable opinions on these issues and our conversation will reflect that diversity. We have asked Professor Dawkins to participate in this discussion at NECSS 2016 in addition to his prior scheduled talk, and we hope he will accept our invitation.

This statement and our discussions with Professor Dawkins were initiated prior to learning of his recent illness. All of NECSS wishes Professor Dawkins a speedy and full recovery.

The NECSS Executive Committee

Source: http://necss.org/2016/02/14/statement...

 

Richard’s Response

Dear Jamy,

Please convey my thanks to the entire Executive Committee for their gracious apology and for reinviting me to the NECSS conference. I am sensitive to what a difficult thing it must have been to rescind an earlier, publicised decision. I am truly grateful. Politicians are regularly criticised for changing their minds, but sceptics, rationalists and scientists know that there are occasions when the ability to change ones mind is a virtue. Sympathy for the victim of a medical emergency is not one of those occasions, and I therefore note with especial admiration that the Executive Committee’s courageous and principled change of mind predated my stroke.

That stroke, however, does make it impossible for me to accept the invitation, much as I would like to do so. I shall especially miss the pleasure of an on stage conversation with you. I hope another opportunity for that conversation will arise. I wish the conference well. May it be a great success. You certainly have managed to put together a starry list of speakers.

With my best wishes to you and the whole Executive Committee

Richard

Immersive Virtual Reality Could Help Treat Depression

Health and Medicine

Photo credit:



The study was small, but the results are encouraging. oatawa/Shutterstock

From deep space to wildlife parks, there are few places that virtual reality can’t take you. And while that may all be fun and games, scientists are beginning to find uses for it that may offer solutions to real world problems. It’s already helped surgeons carry out complex operations, and now it may have another place in the clinic: helping patients with depression.

Intelligent Robots Could Threaten Millions Of Jobs

Technology





Photo credit:

Will unemployment rise due to artificial intelligence? Mopic/Shutterstock

In fiction, artificial intelligence is often seen a menace that allows robots to take over and enslave humanity. While some share these concerns in real life, a researcher suggests the robot-conquest might be more subtle than imagined.

According to Moshe Vardi, director of the Institute for Information Technology at Rice University in Texas, in the coming 30 years, advanced robots will threaten tens of millions of jobs.

Scientists 3D Print Human-Scale, Living Tissues

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

3D-printed ear system. Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Need some new muscle? We’ll print that for you.

In a tremendous stride forwards for the field of regenerative medicine, researchers in the U.S. have managed to invent a 3D printer capable of churning out human-scale, living tissues that survived and integrated when implanted into an animal. While it’s still early days, the team demonstrated that the tissues developed the right strength and function required for human application, raising the possibility that the technique could one day be used to help people whose tissue has been damaged by disease or trauma.

Giant Flightless Bird Once Roamed The Arctic

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Despite its fearsome appearance, the bird was probably a herbivore. Marlin Peterson/University of Colorado Boulder

Around 53 million years ago the Arctic Circle's freezing, windswept Ellesmere Island would have been unrecognizable. Damp, humid and lush, the place would have been covered by thick cypress swamps not unlike what still survives in southern Louisiana. Swinging through the trees would have been primates, while alligators patrolled the waterways and tapirs grazed on the land. In among all this, new research shows that a giant, flightless bird stalked the wetlands searching for food.  

Finding Beauty in the Darkness

Photo credit: Julian Stratenschulte/European Pressphoto Agency

By Lawrence M. Krauss

With presidential primaries in full steam, with the country wrapped up in concern about the economy, immigration and terrorism, one might wonder why we should care about the news of a minuscule jiggle produced by an event in a far corner of the universe.

The answer is simple. While the political displays we have been treated to over the past weeks may reflect some of the worst about what it means to be human, this jiggle, discovered in an exotic physics experiment, reflects the best. Scientists overcame almost insurmountable odds to open a vast new window on the cosmos. And if history is any guide, every time we have built new eyes to observe the universe, our understanding of ourselves and our place in it has been forever altered.

When Galileo turned his telescope toward Jupiter in 1609, he observed moons orbiting the giant planet, a discovery that destroyed the Aristotelian notion that everything in heaven orbited the Earth. When in 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories detected radio waves emitted by celestial objects, they discovered that the universe began in a fiery Big Bang.

One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein used his newly discovered general theory of relativity (which implies that space itself responds to the presence of matter by curving, expanding or contracting) to demonstrate that each time we wave our hands around or move any matter, disturbances in the fabric of space propagate out at the speed of light, as waves travel outward when a rock is thrown into a lake. As these gravitational waves traverse space they will literally cause distances between objects alternately to decrease and increase in an oscillatory manner.

This, of course, is far from the realm of human experience. In the absence of alcohol, your living room doesn’t appear to shrink and grow repeatedly. But, in fact, it does. The oscillations in space caused by gravitational waves are so small that those ripples in length had never been seen. And there was every reason to suspect they would never be seen.

Yet on Thursday, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, announced that a signal from gravitational waves had been discovered emanating from the collision and merger of two massive black holes over a billion light-years away. How far away is that? Well, one light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Mississippi Republican Lawmaker Pushes Bill That Would Allow The Teaching Of Creationism In Science Classes

Photo credit: Shutterstock

By Ed Mazza

A bill under consideration in Mississippi would allow science teachers to bring creationism and climate change denial into the classroom.

House Bill 50 “encourages students to explore scientific questions” and allows teachers to discuss “weaknesses” in the approved curriculum. The bill doesn’t mention creationism by name but refers specifically to biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning.

While the text claims it does not promote religious doctrine, one of its sponsors admitted the bill is geared toward allowing educators to teach creationism in science classes.

“I just don’t want my teachers punished in any form or fashion for bringing creationism into the debate. Lots of us believe in creationism,” Rep. Mark Formby told the Clarion-Ledger newspaper. “To say that creationism as a theory is any less valuable than any other theory that nobody can scientifically prove I just think is being close-minded.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

W.Va. Clerk Cannot Verbally Abuse Same-Sex Couples Seeking Marriage Licenses, Says Americans United

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

By Americans United

A Gilmer County, W.Va., deputy clerk who verbally abused a same-sex couple seeking a marriage license has no right to harass or attempt to evangelize the people she is obligated to serve, Americans United for Separation of Church and State says.

In a letter sent today to Gilmer County commissioners and County Clerk Jean Butcher, Americans United explained that Deputy Clerk Debbie Allen violated the constitutional rights of a same-sex couple that recently obtained a marriage license from the Gilmer County Clerk’s office when she told them they would be judged by God.

“It is both cruel and unacceptable for a government employee to berate anyone he or she serves in an official capacity,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Even though Ms. Allen did not refuse to issue a license in this instance, she still deprived an innocent couple of their rights when she treated them like second-class citizens.”

Recently, Samantha Brookover and Amanda Abramovich sought a marriage license at the Gilmer County Courthouse. It has been reported that Allen, who processed their license, told the couple that she did not agree with their marriage and allegedly called their actions “an abomination” during a rant that lasted two to three minutes.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Nashville filmmaker aims to untangle ‘Love, Hate, Church & State’

Photo credit: Submitted

By Heidi Hall

Nashville filmmaker Jen Sheridan doesn’t even pretend she’ll be unbiased in shooting her upcoming documentary, “Love, Hate, Church & State.” The tagline is “LGBT rights. Freedom of religion. And preaching politics from the pulpit in Tennessee.”

Although these days, she’s more concerned about religion preached from the state legislature than the reverse.

Tennessee lawmakers this year took up a “natural marriage” bill that fell in subcommittee, and now some are formally supporting a Williamson County lawsuit that contends last year’s Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage invalidated all future Tennessee marriage licenses. The same attorney filed a similar suit in Bradley County.

Sheridan, a native of Toronto, a lesbian and an 18-year resident of Nashville, is flummoxed. Raised in the United Church of Canada, she remembers pleasant, pep-talk-style sermons without a lot of talk about sexuality. “I was taught, basically, Jesus loves you, love one another, try to help people. That was about the entire message,” she said.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

This Week in Science (Feb. 7 – 14)

This is a collection of the 10 best and most popular stories from science and technology over the past 7 days. Scroll down and click the individual images below to read the stories and follow the This Week in Science on Wakelet (here) to get these weekly updates straight to your inbox every Sunday.