ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 698
September 2, 2015
Floating Spoon Spotted On Mars
Photo credit:
Can you see the floating spoon? Mars Rover/NASA
Rats, iguanas, a woman watching the Rover on its travels, faces in the sand and perfectly shaped pyramids.
And now we give you... a floating spoon.
The newest case of Mars pareidolia has surfaced, this time in the form of a hovering piece of cutlery.
Cassini Returns Stunning Image Of Saturn And Dione
2/3 Of “Gluten Sensitive” People Can’t Tell The Difference Between Foods With Gluten And Foods Without Gluten
Photo credit:
Teri Virbickis / Shutterstock
Going gluten-free is bang on trend right now. While only around 1% of Americans have celiac disease, around one-third of U.S. adults are trying to cut gluten out of their diet. Why?
Sleep In To Stay Healthy
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Catching the common cold could be a sign you are not getting enough sleep. Credit: bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock
It’s no surprise that getting a good night’s sleep helps us avoid getting sick. Still, you might be surprised at just how much difference it makes. A new study finds that people who don’t get enough rest are four times more likely to come down with colds than those who do.
Brazilian Wasp Venom Kills Cancer Cells, But Not Healthy Cells
Photo credit:
Wasp close up. Attila Fodemesi/Shutterstock.
Wasps get their fair share of bad press. They have painful stingers, and they're not as useful (or cute) to us as bees. However, their time to step in the spotlight may be just around the corner: Their venom has been shown to attack cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone.
The Errors of Albert
Physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, talks about his article "What Einstein Got Wrong," in Scientific American’s September issue, devoted to the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s publication of general relativity.
NASA Science Zeros in on Ocean Rise: How Much? How Soon?
NASA
By Steve Cole
Seas around the world have risen an average of nearly 3 inches since 1992, with some locations rising more than 9 inches due to natural variation, according to the latest satellite measurements from NASA and its partners. An intensive research effort now underway, aided by NASA observations and analysis, points to an unavoidable rise of several feet in the future.
Members of NASA’s new interdisciplinary Sea Level Change Team will discuss recent findings and new agency research efforts during a media teleconference today at 12:30 p.m. EDT. NASA will stream the teleconference live online.
The question scientists are grappling with is how quickly will seas rise?
“Given what we know now about how the ocean expands as it warms and how ice sheets and glaciers are adding water to the seas, it’s pretty certain we are locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more,” said Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead of the Sea Level Change Team. “But we don’t know whether it will happen within a century or somewhat longer.”
Team scientists will discuss a new visualization based on 23 years of sea level data – the entire record of available satellite data — which reveals changes are anything but uniform around the globe. The record is based on data from three consecutive satellite missions, the first a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency, Centre National d’Études Spatiales, launched in 1992. The next in the series is Jason-3, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with participation by NASA, CNES and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).
Read the full article by clicking the name of the source below.
One-layer LED paves way for green lighting revolution
By Tereza Pultarova
An American researcher has developed a new low-cost type of LED light which he claims can lead to more widespread adoption of the technology.
Unlike other types of LED lights, which require engineers to carefully apply four or five layers of material on top of each other in order to achieve the desired performance, this novel new low-cost LED concept only requires one.
“It can potentially revolutionise lighting technology,” said Zhibin Yu, Assistant Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Florida State University. “In general, the cost of LED lighting has been a big concern thus far. Energy savings have not balanced out high costs. This could change that.”
Read the full article by clicking the name of the source below.
Huxley’s Paley, Part 1
Although William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) represented a tradition of thinking about the natural world that was supplanted by Darwin’s revolution, Darwin himself expressed admiration for Paley. In his autobiography, for example, he mentions having read Paley’s Natural Theology as well as his View of the Evidences of Christianity and Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy at Cambridge University: “The careful study of these works...was the only part of the academical course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind.” Writing to John Lubbock on November 22, 1859—two days before the publication of the Origin of
Species—he confided, “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology: I could almost formerly have said it by heart.—”
Darwin’s appreciation of Paley is tolerably famous. But what about that of his bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley (above)? I was skimming through a collection of Henry Fairfield Osborn’s essays, Evolution and Religion in Education (1926), recently. A paleontologist by training, who described and named Tyrannosaurus rex, Osborn (1857–1935) was nevertheless characterized by a biographer as “a first-rate science administrator and a third-rate scientist.” It was at the American Museum of Natural History that he performed the former function, initially as the first curator of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology and then as the president of the Board of Trustees from 1908 to 1933, making him a de facto spokesperson for science in the United States, offering such popularizations and defenses as he deemed necessary.
In “Evolution and Daily Living” (originally published in 1924), a passage about Huxley and Paley caught my eye. According to Osborn, “Huxley once told me that Paley’s argument for the direct handiwork of the Creator was so logically, so ingeniously and convincingly written that he always kept it at his bedside for last reading at night.” Of course, Huxley might have told Osborn that in a letter, but the choice of verb suggests a face-to-face communication, which in turn suggests that the conversation occurred in the winter of 1879–1880, when Osborn was studying comparative anatomy with Huxley in London. Huxley would have been fifty-four years old then: not the callow youth that Darwin was when Paley impressed him so, but a mature scientist ensconced in the burgeoning scientific establishment of his day. Quite a contrast!
Natural Theology was not new to the middle-aged Huxley, of course. According to a report published in Nature about his Rede Lecture (“The Origin of the Existing Forms of Animal Life: Construction or Evolution?”) delivered in 1883 at Cambridge University, Huxley quoted a passage from Natural Theology, without identifying the source, and then disclosed that the words he quoted “were more than eighty years old, and they were contained in the 23rd chapter of a book which was very much talked about, but, he was afraid, very little read, namely, the ‘Natural Theology’ of Archdeacon Paley.” The report added, “When he was a boy that book was a very great favourite of his, partly for its own merits, and partly because it was one of the few books he was allowed to read on Sundays. He found it much more entertaining than most of the books included in that category.”
Neither in his Rede lecture nor in his essay “On the Reception of the ‘Origin of Species’” (published in volume 2 of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin [1887]) is Huxley invoking Paley just for auld lang syne, though: there’s a clear agenda. In the latter, Huxley is explicitly addressing the objection to Darwin’s views that “they abolish Teleology, and eviscerate the argument from design.” His answer is that it is only “all the commoner and coarser forms of Teleology” that are imperiled, but “a wider teleology … is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution.” It is open to the teleologist, Huxley suggests, to defy the atheist to “disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement [“of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences”: today he might have said the Big Bang] was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe.”
It is here that Paley is invoked. Huxley writes, “The acute champion of Teleology, Paley, saw no difficulty in admitting that the ‘production of things’ may be the result of trains of mechanical dispositions fixed beforehand by intelligent appointment and kept in action by a power at the centre, that is to say, he proleptically [i.e., in advance] accepted the modern doctrine of Evolution; and his successors might do well to follow their leader, or at any rate to attend to his weighty reasonings, before rushing into an antagonism which has no reasonable foundation.” That rather obscure and complicated sentence—which lacks a crucial pair of quotation marks to boot—raises a few questions. How did Paley provide a way to avoid the abolition of teleology by Darwin’s views? And did he really accept evolution in advance? Answers will be offered in part 2 and part 3.
September 1, 2015
WDBJ Shooting & Racism
Vester Lee Flanagan shot 3 people last week, was it motivated by racism? This video is super important because I had no clue that a black guy was capable of a mass shooting. I originally thought that crime was limited to my disgusting white race. Guess I’ve been wrong all along…
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