Planet Humanism

Take a huge oceanic catamaran, stick a hydroelectric turbine underneath it, and hitch it to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air. That’s a Korean research team’s new proposal for generating gigawatts of clean energy.

As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the turbine, which generates electricity. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced would separate seawater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and the hydrogen would then be stored on-board the ships.

“The calculation shows that, with a large such ship, a gigawatt order electrical power may be harvested by this system,” wrote Park Chul of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Kim Jongchul of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in the journal Energy in March.

“If such ships are deployed at 20-km (12.4-mile) intervals over two temperate zones, one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere and the other everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, the total power produced will be many times that needed by the world,” they wrote.

Continues: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/hydro-paraplant/

Irish police today arrested seven suspects over an alleged plot to kill a Swedish artist who drew the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog.

The target of the alleged assassination was Lars Vilks, who had a $100,000 (£67,000) bounty put on his head by al-Qaida in 2007, with a 50% bonus if Vilks was “slaughtered like a lamb” by having his throat cut. Another $50,000 was said to have been put on the life of Ulf Johansson, editor-in-chief of Nerikes Allehanda, the local newspaper that printed the cartoon.

The four men and three women, who were detained at about 10am this morning, are in their mid-20s to late-40s and are being held at stations in Waterford, Tramore, Dungarvan and Thomastown. Garda sources have confirmed that some of those arrested hold Irish citizenship and a number are from the Middle East. Some of those questioned have been confirmed as converts to Islam.

The suspects are being held under Ireland’s Criminal Justice Act 2007. Under Irish law they can be held in custody for up to seven days.

Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/09/seven-arrested-ireland-muhammad-cartoon

A pharmacist refused to issue contraceptive pills prescribed by a doctor because it was against her religion.

Janine Deeley, 38, thought the woman was joking when she took her on one side and said : “I don’t give out contraceptive pills because of my religion.”

The mother of two teenage daughters, from Wybourn , Sheffield, said : “I couldn’t believe the arrogance of the woman . Who is she to refuse to give me properly prescribed legal drugs?

“The irony is that one reason why I am prescribed the pill is because I suffer from endometriosis which causes painful periods.

“But that’s not the point I don’t see why I need to be treated like a child and explain myself to her. I am a responsible adult.

“She had no right to refuse to dispense my prescription except if the drugs weren’t in stock or if she thought the dosage was incorrect.

“The pharmacy is adjoining the doctor’s surgery and I have been using it for years without a problem. But this time I went in gave the assistant the prescription but then the pharmacist came out, took me to one side and said she had the painkillers I had been prescribed but not the contraceptive pill.

“I asked ‘oh why not?’ and she said ‘I don’t give them out because of my religion.’ I honestly thought she was joking and I said ‘Pardon?’.

“She repeated it and I said ‘ You’re not giving ME the pills because of YOUR religion? and she replied ‘yes’.

“I was absolutely stunned. She said I could go to another chemist or return the next day when someone else was on duty. I was fuming and just stormed out.”

She added : “I had no idea what religion the woman was and I don’t remember if she has served me before. The other staff looked very embarrassed but obviously it was the pharmacist’s decision.

“There’s a lot of things in society you might not like or agree with, but you can’t do anything about them.This type of thing shouldn’t be happening, it’s not right.”

Continues: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7404786/Pharmacist-refuses-to-issue-pill-because-of-her-religion.html

In findings sure to gladden the heart of anyone who’s ever wondered whether tiny acts of kindness have larger consequences, researchers have shown that generosity is contagious.

Goodness spurs goodness, they found: A single act can influence dozens more.

In a game where selfishness made more sense than cooperation, acts of giving were “tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more,” wrote political scientist James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University.

Their findings, published March 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the latest in a series of studies the pair have conducted on the spread of behaviors through social networks.

In other papers, they’ve described the spread of obesity, loneliness, happiness and smoking. But there was no way to know whether those apparent behavioral contagions were actually just correlations. People who are overweight, for example, might simply tend to befriend other overweight people, or live in an area where high-fat, low-nutrient diets are the norm.

The latest research was designed to identify cause-and-effect links.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/kindness-spreads/

Christopher Hitchens, for Slate magazine, attacks the lawyers threatening Danish publishers over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons.

I have just finished reading one of the most astoundingly stupid and nasty documents ever to have landed on my desk. It consists of a letter from a law firm in Saudi Arabia, run by a man named Ahmed Zaki Yamani, to a group of newspapers in Scandinavia. I quote directly from its main paragraphs:

Over the past months my law firm has been contacted by several thousand descendants of the Prophet, who have learned about your newspaper’s republication of the drawing, depicting their esteemed ancestor as a terrorist suicide bomber with a bomb in his turban.

As descendants of the Prophet, these individuals feel personally insulted, emotionally distressed and defamed by your newspaper’s re-publication of the drawing. They have therefore retained my law firm and instructed me to approach you …

So that’s the stupid part—the idea that people who claim descent from a seventh-century warlord and preacher have standing to sue for hurt feelings. The nasty bit comes a few paragraphs later:

[I]t is my belief that your newspaper’s fulfillment of the above-mentioned conditions would be perceived as a sign of respect and understanding throughout the Muslim world in general, and your newspaper might thus help resolve the severe conflict, which your re-publication of the drawing has created. As you may be aware, this conflict is still affecting Danish and Arab interests, in particular in the Middle East, where a number of Danish products are still being boycotted.

It is impossible not to notice the element of threat and menace contained in the second extract. It’s not difficult to remind Danes of the organized campaign of hysterical retribution, ranging from the burnings of embassies to the mob-killing of civilians, that followed the first publication of some mild caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in 2005. Only a little further backstory is required: In 2008, it was discovered that a cell of eager murderers was planning to kill those who authored the caricatures, and in solidarity a large number of Danish newspapers reprinted the drawings in order to express their support for freedom of speech. Then, on New Year’s 2009, a Somali fundamentalistchopped his way into the house of 74-year-old cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who was having a sleepover with his granddaughter, and very nearly succeeded in axing them both to death. The apology for all this, however, is supposed to be forthcoming not from the aggressors and inciters but from their victims. Late last month, Copenhagen newspaper Politiken agreed to make a public apology on the terms dictated by the Yamani law firm.

Continues: http://www.slate.com/id/2247256/

The evidence that human activity is causing global warming is much stronger than previously stated and is found in all parts of the world, according to a study that attempts to refute claims from sceptics.

The “fingerprints” of human influence on the climate can be detected not only in rising temperatures but also in the saltiness of the oceans, rising humidity, changes in rainfall and the shrinking of Arctic Sea ice at the rate of 600,000 sq km a decade.

The study, by senior scientists from the Met Office Hadley Centre, Edinburgh University, Melbourne University and Victoria University in Canada, concluded that there was an “increasingly remote possibility” that the sceptics were right that human activities were having no discernible impact. There was a less than 5 per cent likelihood that natural variations in climate were responsible for the changes.

The study said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had understated mankind’s overall contribution to climate change. The IPCC had said in 2007 that there was no evidence of warming in the Antarctic. However, the panel said that the latest observations showed that man-made emissions were having an impact on even the remotest continent.

Continues: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7050341.ece

Professor Brian Cox, who will be delivering the Voltaire Lecture 2010 for the British Humanist Association and the South Place Ethical Society next month, is presenting a new series on BBC2, Wonders of the Solar System. “Science is different to all the other systems of thought, the belief systems that have been practiced in this city for millennia,” he says at one point, “because you don’t need faith in it, you can check that it works.”

Professor Brian Cox visits some of the most stunning locations on earth to describe how the laws of nature have carved natural wonders across the solar system.

In this first episode Brian explores the powerhouse of them all, the sun. In India he witnesses a total solar eclipse – when the link to the light and heat that sustains us is cut off for a few precious minutes.

But heat and light are not the only power of the sun over the solar system. In Norway, Brian watches the battle between the sun’s wind and earth, as the night sky glows with the northern lights.

Beyond earth, the solar wind continues, creating dazzling aurora on other planets. Brian makes contact with Voyager, a probe that has been travelling since its launch 30 years ago. Now 14 billion kilometres away, Voyager has just detected the solar wind is beginning to peter out. But even here we haven’t reached the end of the sun’s rule.

Brian explains how its greatest power, gravity, reaches out for hundreds of billions of kilometres, where the lightest gravitational touch encircles our solar system in a mysterious cloud of comets.

You can watch the first episode on iPlayer until next Sunday.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rf172/Wonders_of_the_Solar_System_Empire_of_the_Sun/

Galileo Galilei was right: Earth moves around the Sun, just as Nicolaus Copernicus said it did in 1543. But had Galileo followed the results of his observations to their logical conclusion, he should have backed another system — the Tychonic view that Earth didn’t move, and that everything else circled around it and the Sun, as developed by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century.

This is the conclusion that Christopher Graney, a physicist at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky, came to after reading manuscripts from another astronomer who was active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, at the same time as Galileo.

Graney suggested in 2008 that Galileo’s observations of stars were actually diffraction patterns called Airy disks — patterns of concentric circles that arise when light from a point source, such as a star, passes through a hole. Diffraction hadn’t been discovered in Galileo’s time, so he was unaware of the phenomenon and believed what his eyes, or his telescope, were telling him and used the observations to estimate the size and distance of stars. As a result, he got the distances of the stars too short by a factor of thousands (see ‘Galileo duped by diffraction‘).

Continues: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100305/full/news.2010.105.html

Rambling Daily Mail article gawps – without a hint of irony, let alone critical reflection – at dancer who claims regular homeopathy and the wearing of “infrared” knickers keeps them healthy.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1256435/As-MPs-NHS-scrap-homeopathy-dance-boss-seen-GP-42-years-thanks-natural-remedies.html

Nigeria’s security forces have been put on high alert after a new burst of sectarian violence left over 500 people dead, most of them women and children hacked to death by machete wielding gangs.

The attack happened before dawn on Sunday morning when gangs of men descended on several mainly Christian villages near the central city of Jos, firing guns as they approached. Witnesses of the attack, which centred on the village of Dogo-Nahawa, described how victims were caught in animal traps and fishing nets as they tried to flee their attackers.

A resident of Dogo-Nahawa said that the attackers had fired guns as they entered the village, to lure their victims out of their houses. “The shooting was just meant to bring people from their houses and then when people came out they started cutting them with machetes,” said Peter Gyang, who lost his wife and two children .

Dan Manjang, a state government advisor, confirmed that 500 people had been killed. “We have been able to make 95 arrests but at the same time over 500 people have been killed in this heinous act … by Fulani herdsmen,” Mr Manjang said in a telephone interview.

Continues: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article7053487.ece