Richard Dawkins 24 Oct 2017   I had tweeted an invitation to attend lectures in various parts of Britain by Saba Douglas-Hamilton, who grew up among wild African elephants while her father, Iain Douglas-Hamilton was conducting his pioneering studies of their ecology and behaviour, and he and his wife Oria were fighting the poachers. Saba’s …

July 27, 2017 To: Mr. Quincy McCoy, General Manager of KPFA gm@kpfa.org From: Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D. & Kaleda Denton, Student We just met last night, one of us a professor at UC-Irvine (EL) and another a senior at UCLA (KD), and our conversation turned to the unfortunate events surrounding the disinvitation by KPFA of Richard …

By William J. Broad and Kenneth Chang Sixty-six million years ago, a giant meteor slammed into Earth off the coast of modern-day Mexico. Firestorms incinerated the landscape for miles around. Even creatures thousands of miles away were doomed on that fateful day, if not by fire and brimstone, then by mega-earthquakes and waves of unimaginable size. Now, scientists …

By Bobby Ross Jr. (RNS) — A highly publicized Pennsylvania grand jury report last year identified more than 300 predator Catholic priests who had sexually abused more than 1,000 children going back decades. But because the crimes were hidden by the church hierarchy, “almost every instance of abuse we found is too old to be prosecuted,” the statewide …

By Erin Cox, and Justin Wm. Moyer Two years ago, Maryland lawmakers made it easier for adults sexually abused as children to sue institutions that harbored predators. They may have also irreversibly granted some immunity to the Catholic Church. A provision tucked into a 2017 law now stands in the way of Maryland joining a nationwide …

By Hemant Mehta Over the past few years, the Democratic Party has approved the formation of a “Secular Caucus” in a handful of states. Texas, Utah, and Arizona have all said yes to taking into account atheists’ ideas when drafting platform measures and advising candidates. (The Libertarian Party has also done the same thanks to a former New Hampshire representative.) It’s …

By Charles Q. Choi The bizarre shapes and diverse colors seen in some of Saturn’s moons may now be explained, with the help of data taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft before it plunged to its doom. These moons likely coalesced from the planet’s rings and get their color from either ice volcanoes or a mysterious …

By Alexandra Witze The Woodlands, Texas At some point in the coming year, curators at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, will don protective suits and gloves, enter the high-tech laboratory that houses the United States’s trove of Moon rocks, and open a long metal tube that has been sealed since 1972. That’s when …