ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 760
April 10, 2015
The Radium Girls
SciShow explores the harrowing tale of the so-called Radium Girls, factory workers who were the first who for years worked with one of the world’s most radioactive substances — and suffered the consequences.
Hosted by: Hank Green
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Today’s President of Space:
http://goo.gl/kLT65q
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http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-08/healthy-glow-drink-radiation
http://blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscience/2011/03/24/the-radium-girls/
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/radium.html#discovered
http://www.wired.com/2009/12/1221curies-discover-radium/
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/podcast/Interactive_Periodic_Table_Transcripts/Radium.asp
http://helium.imascientist.org.au/2012/05/14/if-radiation-causes-cancer-how-does-it-treat-cancer/
April 7, 2015
After Publisher Blocks Book’s Release Over Mention of Author’s Same-Sex Boyfriend in Bio, There’s a Happy Ending
In 2013, David Powers King and Michael Jensen were in the final stages of publishing their young-adult fantasy novel Woven when they saw a mistake on the back cover.
The biographical information for King was fine, but Jensen’s was missing this line: “He lives in Salt Lake City with his boyfriend and their four dogs.”
The Acquisitions Editor for publisher Cedar Fort, Inc. told him the reason in an email:
I was concerned about your bio and wondered what effect it would have with our [Mormon] buyers, so I spoke with [Cedar Fort owner] Lyle [Mortimer] about it. He says we can’t risk ruining our relationship with them by stating you live with your boyfriend, so we need to cut that part out.
APPEARANCES: My interview with Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Here’s the episode of Dogma Debate where I took over to interview Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu from Mystery Science Theater 3000:
I can tell that I’m nervous, but I thought the pacing was pretty good. Overall I was happy, even if I was shaking for an hour after the interview was over.
Thank you to David Smalley. This is an experience I will not soon forget.
Misconception Monday: Let’s Start at the Beginning, Part 2
Last week I made a case that origins-of-life research doesn’t usually fall under the evolution umbrella. I offered my analogy that the first spark of life was a bit like a baton hand-off from chemical evolution to biological evolution. Today, I’ll get into some aspects of the topic that tend to evoke the most, well, heated and let’s say spirited discussion.
Perhaps the single biggest lightning rod is that chemical evolution is the quest to understand how non-life could have come to form life. Aside from the obvious conflicts with a literal interpretation of many creation stories, there’s also the suggestion that life coming from non-life would violate the law of biogenesis. What’s next? Maggots The Miller-Urey Experiment (Wikimedia Commons)
forming spontaneously from rotting meat? (Ew.) Relax. While superficially the two situations seem similar, they really aren’t. That maggots can’t spring from a sealed-off hunk of steak in your kitchen does not disprove the idea that under the conditions of early Earth, organic molecules could have formed a living cell. And of course there’s plenty of research, going back to the classic Miller-Urey experiment, which suggests that the conditions of early Earth were suitable for the formation of complex organic molecules.
Another common objection to chemical evolution is that it seems so unlikely! I mean, random chemicals just kind of come together to form nucleic acids and a cell membrane? What are the chances? Some naysayers have even tried to put a number on it—the Institute for Creation Research’s textbook Scientific Creationism (1974), for example, estimated that the probability would have been less than 1 in 1053. But, as NCSE’s Genie Scott and Glenn Branch point out in their 2012 article on this topic, such estimations usually fall into one or more traps, assuming this process would have been entirely random, for example, or that the first cell would have resembled a modern one.
Another favorite drum to beat on this topic is that the Miller-Urey experiment was wrong, all wrong! Well, it wasn’t. It’s true that the mixtures of gases used originally weren’t perfect in terms of replicating Earth’s early atmosphere, but 1) the experiments have been replicated with the right mixture and the same results were obtained, and 2) not all origins-of-life research rests on the Miller-Urey experiment anyway. It’s more than fifty years since the experiment, and plenty of smart scientists have been working on the origin of life in that time!
I’m reminded of the crux of “intelligent design” arguments, that life is all so complicated, so perfect that it can’t be explained by natural forces alone. And that always frustrates me because it’s such a cop-out. Just because we can’t at this moment explain everything we should give up the quest and ascribe it to a deus ex machina? What kind of lesson does that impart to our kids? By parity of reasoning, I guess a kindergarten teacher should be okay with an excuse from a five-year-old along the lines of, “I don’t get quadratic equations, so clearly all math is too complicated to be understood, so I’m going to 
“There is no point trying to understand anything unless we already understand it” is not the best philosophy, if you ask me. (Iantresman via Wikimedia Commons)
abstain from all math-related activities.” (This five-year-old has very advanced language skills, however.)
So what should a teacher do? I’m sure that some of you have been tempted to say, or have even said, that it’s okay for students to think that a supernatural force created the first life, as long as they accept that evolution took over from there. But I’d urge you not to do that. Besides the obvious issue with crossing the line into non-science with your students, saying that kind of a thing effectively slams a door shut in their faces. It’s like suggesting that they don’t need to worry about the science before cells if they don’t want to—but why shouldn’t they want to? It’s fascinating stuff! Sure, there isn’t currently a detailed and generally accepted scenario for the origin of life, but that doesn’t make it okay to invoke the supernatural. Just because we don’t know now doesn’t mean we’ll never know.
I took a class on the social impact of scientific revolutions when I was in college. The professor was a science historian and taught his courses using images. Every lecture was based around a slide show. The one image that has stuck with me more than any other was a medieval-like (but actually nineteenth-century) image of a man reaching through the last celestial sphere in the standard Ptolemaic or Copernican concentric model of the universe. Some have interpreted the image to represent the sixteenth-century Italian monk Giordano Bruno, who questioned the idea of fixed celestial spheres, If it’s true, Bruno wondered, then what’s beyond the last sphere? What I love about the image is that it displays such an obvious question. How could anyone in the 
Of course we should wonder. (wikimedia commons)
sixteenth century not wonder what was beyond the edge of the universe? In my opinion, research into the origins of life is akin to wondering what happens if you try reach beyond the sphere of stars. Of course we should ask! Of course we should try to find out how life began! And to go in search of these answers doesn’t take away any mysteries. If anything, it opens more up. Isn’t science grand?
Are you a teacher and want to tell us about an amazing free resource? Do you have an idea for a future Misconception Monday or other post? See some good or bad examples of science communication lately? Drop me an email or shoot me a tweet keeps3.
World’s Largest Asteroid Impact Site Could Be Right Here In Australia
Photo credit:
Our solar system is far from empty. A rogue asteroid or comet may have been responsible for the largest impact site yet discovered in Warburton in central Australia. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CC BY-SA
Not long ago, asteroid impacts weren’t considered as a significant factor in the evolution of Earth. Following the Late Heavy Bombardment, which pummelled the inner solar system around 3.8 billion to 3.9 billion years ago, asteroid impacts were generally regarded as minor events.
Baby star before-and-after shows how it gets massive
Image: Wolfgang Steffen, Instituto de Astronomía, UNAM
By Michael Slezak
The violent birth of massive stars has been captured for the first time in dramatic before-and-after images, which are already overturning theories about how these planet-factories form.
Massive stars – those at least eight times the mass of our sun – are relatively rare in the universe. They act as factories that create the heavier elements required for the formation of planets and life.
But exactly how they grow so massive is a mystery. They emit so much radiation that it counters gravity, pushing away incoming material, so it’s difficult to see how they gather mass.
One way is if the outflow of radiation comes mostly from the poles of the forming star, allowing material to fall in around its equator. But all the star-formation models that work this way depend on the outflow being focused from the very beginning of the star’s formation, says Carlos Carrasco-González of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Read the full article by clicking the name of the source located below.
Vani Hari, the “Food Babe,” Doesn’t Know What She’s Talking About, Says Scientist Who Does
Yvette d’Entremont does an excellent job of explaining why Vani Hari, the “Food Babe,” has no idea what she’s talking about (which is the main qualification you need before appearing on Dr. Oz, which she’s done multiple times):
Vani Hari, AKA the Food Babe, has amassed a loyal following in her Food Babe Army. The recent subject of profiles and interviews in the New York Times, the New York Post and New York Magazine, Hari implores her soldiers to petition food companies to change their formulas. She’s also written a bestselling book telling you that you can change your life in 21 days by “breaking free of the hidden toxins in your life.” She and her army are out to change the world.
She’s also utterly full of shit.
I am an analytical chemist with a background in forensics and toxicology. Before working full-time as a science writer and public speaker, I worked as a chemistry professor, a toxicology chemist, and in research analyzing pesticides for safety. I now run my own blog, Science Babe, dedicated to debunking pseudoscience that tends to proliferate in the blogosphere. Reading Hari’s site, it’s rare to come across a single scientific fact. Between her egregious abuse of the word “toxin” anytime there’s a chemical she can’t pronounce and asserting that everyone who disagrees with her is a paid shill, it’s hard to pinpoint her biggest sin.
How a tiny songbird can fly 1,700 miles over open ocean
Laura Erickson/Cornell Lab of Ornithology/AP
By Joseph Dussault
It weighs only as much a tablespoon of sugar, and it flies almost two thousand miles over open ocean, without a single break.
Scientists can now conclusively say that the pocket-sized blackpoll warbler makes the longest overseas migration of any land bird. By fitting the birds with tiny geolocating “backpacks,” researchers were able to map out the grueling migration. Their findings appeared Tuesday in Biology Letters.
The blackpoll warbler, or Setophaga striata, is a songbird native to North America, weighing on average a mere 12 grams. Every winter, these tiny birds migrate to South America in droves – but for more than a half-century, scientists have been unsure exactly how they got there.
Other warblers native to the continent fly south through Mexico. But reports of blackpolls landing on boats in stormy weather suggest that they were taking an alternate route over the Atlantic Ocean. Some ornithologists were skeptical – the trek would be perilous, and a water landing would mean certain drowning for a fatigued bird. So an international team of researchers fit 40 birds in Vermont and Nova Scotia with tracking devices to follow the journey. And amazingly, the little blackpoll proved its mettle.
Read the full article by clicking the name of the source located below.
Kasey Jones – Openly Secular Project
Video short for the Openly Secular Project by Kasey Jones
Question of the Week: April 8, 2015
Is the United States beginning to overemphasize the STEM fields at the cost of more traditional liberal arts studies? Do STEM and the liberal arts mix?
Our favorite answer wins a copy of Richard Dawkins An Appetite for Wonder.
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