ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 562

Why The Hell Does This Soil Set Fire When It’s Poked?

Environment





Photo credit:

Jover Lim Pelones/Facebook

A strange video has emerged that shows soil appearing to smoulder, smoke and flick up embers when it is poked with a stick.

The footage was filmed in Maasim, Sarangani, on the southern tip of the Philippines and later posted to Facebook.

One-Third Of U.S. Science Teachers Bring Climate Change Denial Into the Classroom

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The report also found that 7 percent of teachers taught that climate change was natural. Air Images/Shutterstock

As the effects of climate change really kick in, it won’t be the adults alive now who will have to deal with the increased flooding, heat waves, and food shortages, it will be their children. Considering the burden that they will have to bear, you might hope that they will be given the full facts about climate change and its causes. But a worrying report, published this week in Science, has found that many teachers in the U.S. are failing their students.

You Can Now Sense Earthquakes On Your Smartphone

Photo credit: Japanexperterna.se/Flickr CC by SA 2.0

By Mary Beth Griggs

Your phone, yes, the one you’re (probably) reading this on, can detect earthquakes. All you need is an app.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley announced today the release of a new app called MyShake, available as a free download for Android smartphones in the Google Play store.

It uses the accelerometer in your phone (the device that lets your phone adjust the screen when you turn it sideways) and GPS to measure how much shaking is happening in a given location. The hope is that eventually, if enough people download it, the app will allow your phone to function as both a personal seismometer and an early warning system.

When the app detects shaking that resembles an earthquake, the information is sent to a server. If enough phones detect shaking, that data is pooled together in a computer and analyzed. If it’s a large earthquake, in the future alerts can be generated from the phones of people closest to the earthquake’s epicenter, and sent out ahead of the shaking, giving people further away (also equipped with the app) the chance to drop, cover, and hold on.

But in order for the app to be effective as an early warning system, a decent number of people have to download it. The researchers estimate that in order to accurately detect the origin and start time of large earthquakes in a location, there need to be at least 300 phones equipped with the app in a roughly 4,761 square mile area. The more MyShake-equipped phones in an area, the faster the team can get accurate information.

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History-Making Philae Lander Faces ‘Eternal Hibernation’ On Comet

Photo credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA

By Bill Chappell

Exactly 15 months after it completed a seemingly impossible journey to land on the surface of a comet, the Philae lander now faces “eternal hibernation,” as officials at the European Space Agency say the craft doesn’t get enough sunlight to power its batteries.

“The chances for Philae to contact our team … are unfortunately getting close to zero,” says Stephan Ulamec, Philae project manager at the German Aerospace Center, DLR. He added, “We are not sending commands any more, and it would be very surprising if we were to receive a signal again.”

Philae is the lander from the Rosetta spacecraft, which for months now has been orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and listening for signs of activity from its companion craft. But after an encouraging period of contact last summer, Philae has been silent since July 9.

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Why People Are Confused About What Experts Really Think

Photo credit: Gérard DuBois

By Derek J. Koehler

Given the complexities of the modern world, we all have to rely on expert opinion. Are G.M.O. foods safe? Is global warming real? Should children be vaccinated for measles? We don’t have the time or the training to adjudicate these questions ourselves. We defer to the professionals.

And to find out what the experts think, we typically rely on the news media. This creates a challenge for journalists: There are many issues on which a large majority of experts agree but a small number hold a dissenting view. Is it possible to give voice to experts on both sides — standard journalistic practice — without distorting the public’s perception of the level of disagreement?

This can be hard to do. Indeed, critics argue that journalists too often generate “false balance,” creating an impression of disagreement when there is, in fact, a high level of consensus. One solution, adopted by news organizations such as the BBC, is “weight of evidence” reporting, in which the presentation of conflicting views is supplemented by an indication of where the bulk of expert opinion lies.

But whether this is effective is a psychological question on which there has been little research. So recently, I conducted two experiments to find out; they are described in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Both studies suggest that “weight of evidence” reporting is an imperfect remedy. It turns out that hearing from experts on both sides of an issue distorts our perception of consensus — even when we have all the information we need to correct that misperception.

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Disparity in Life Spans of the Rich and the Poor Is Growing

Photo credit: Joshua Bright for The New York Times

By Sabrina Tavernise

Experts have long known that rich people generally live longer than poor people. But a growing body of data shows a more disturbing pattern: Despite big advances in medicine, technology and education, the longevity gap between high-income and low-income Americans has been widening sharply.

The poor are losing ground not only in income, but also in years of life, the most basic measure of well-being. In the early 1970s, a 60-year-old man in the top half of the earnings ladder could expect to live 1.2 years longer than a man of the same age in the bottom half, according to an analysis by the Social Security Administration. Fast-forward to 2001, and he could expect to live 5.8 years longer than his poorer counterpart.

New research released on Friday contains even more jarring numbers. Looking at the extreme ends of the income spectrum, economists at the Brookings Institution found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to 14 years.

For women, the gap grew to 13 years, from 4.7 years.

“There has been this huge spreading out,” said Gary Burtless, one of the authors of the study.

The growing chasm is alarming policy makers, and has surfaced in the presidential campaign. During the Democratic debate Thursday night, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton expressed concern over shortening life spans for some Americans.

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Two-Thirds of the World Faces Severe Water Shortages

Photo credit: Mesfin M. Mekonnen and Arjen Y. Hoekstra

By Nicholas St. Fleur

About four billion people, or two-thirds of the world’s population, face severe water shortages during at least one month every year, far more than was previously thought, according to Arjen Y. Hoekstra, a professor of water management at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

In a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Hoekstra and his colleague Mesfin M. Mekonnen designed a computer model to create what they say is a more accurate picture of water scarcity around the world. Severe water scarcity can lead to crop failure and low crop yields, which could cause food price increases as well as famine and widespread starvation.

An area experiences severe water scarcity when its farms, industries and households consume double the amount of water available in that area.

“That means that groundwater levels are falling, lakes are drying up, less water is flowing in rivers, and water supplies for industry and farmers are threatened,” Dr. Hoekstra said in an email.

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The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap

Photo credit: COD Newsroom

By Stephen J. Dubner

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

The gist: discrimination can’t explain why women earn so much less than men. If only it were that easy.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript.

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On Darwin Day, a Darwin Descendant On Science and the Election

Photo credit: Tasos Katopodis via Getty Images

By Matthew Chapman

My great-great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, was born on this day 207 years ago. The Origin of Species was published over 150 years ago. Although he had the central ideas in mind long before, Darwin spent 20 years accumulating and marshaling his evidence before publication. Yesterday, it was announced that an idea Einstein proposed 100 years ago, the last prediction of his general theory of relativity, had been confirmed. Most people, myself included, will have some trouble understanding this. Many Americans, as with Darwin’s theory, will refuse to understand it.

That’s okay — science is patient.

The American public, however, should NOT be patient about another extraordinary thing that happened yesterday: at the Democratic Primary debate in Wisconsin, there was not one single science question. Although there were a few vague references to the environment, neither of the candidates revealed any aspect of their science policy agendas. Think about that. Were it not for medical science, at least half of the four people on stage would be dead — they’d either not have survived birth or died several years ago. Were it not for science, our economy would collapse. Were it not for science we would have little understanding of what we are doing to our planet that may make it impossible to live on.

You could take these three areas of science — medicine, science and the economy, and the environment — and give each a debate, and you’d still only scratch the surface. But no debates on literally the most important issues on earth? Not even a single question last night? That’s verging on insane.

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Why the Middle East Never Went Secular

Photo credit: Miguel Montaner

By Geopolitics Made Super

The great struggles in the Middle East are tinged with religion: Sunni supremacists in the Islamic State, Shi’a supremacists in Tehran, Arabs and Jews waging war on one another over the old mandate of Palestine, to name just a few.

And yet, not so long ago, many Middle Eastern states were using the language of socialism, nationalism, and even communism – ‘isms’ that brook little competition from religion.  Inconsistent, yes, but also truth of a wider trend: once upon a time, many Arab states were actively switching their social glue from Islam to modern ideologies.

Consider the national anthem of the United Arab Emirates, whose notes were penned in 1971 and whose lyrics were written in 1996.  Full of socialist and nationalist language, the anthem extols work, Arabism, and the Emirati homeland.  The Egyptian Constitution of 1971 cried out for Arab unity, while Qaddafi’s Green Book was an odd hodgepodge of nationalism and socialism.  The Palestinian Liberation Organization’s founding charter of 1964 doesn’t even mention Islam.

Algeria practiced Algerian socialism until the 1990s; the largest party today in Tunisia, Nida Tunis, draws heavily from secularism and socialism.  Officially Arab socialist states included Mubarak’s Egypt, Saddam’s Iraq, and Assad’s Syria.  Even after a communist coup in 1971, Sudan continued to pursue socialism.

Once the United States fretted it was losing the Arab world to communism; now, hardly anyone even mutters the world “socialism.”  The Middle East has taken a trajectory that seemed to aim for ideological parity with Europe to one that has gone almost entirely the opposite.

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