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 [email protected] 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 Laura Geggel There’s a giant void hiding under the Antarctic ice, and it’s growing larger and more menacing by the day, a new study using satellite data finds. The cavity is colossal, about two-thirds the area of Manhattan and nearly 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall. It’s growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in …

By Liam Stack The Roman Catholic Church in Texas on Thursday released the names of almost 300 priests who it said had been credibly accused of child sex abuse over nearly eight decades. The action was the latest in a wave of disclosures by the church as it faces a series of federal and state …

By Sara Boboltz President Donald Trump gave Bible literacy legislation a shout-out on Monday with a tweet praising states that are “starting to make a turn back” to an unspecified time when public schools apparently relished in Bible study. As The Washington Post’s Mark Chancy noted, there was no such time in American history. And …

By Hemant Mehta Next month, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association. The case involves the 40-foot-tall “Peace Cross” (a.k.a. the Bladensburg Cross), a World War I memorial in Prince George’s County, Maryland. While supporters of the cross say it’s a perfectly legal war memorial, the AHA argues …

By Kendra Pierre-Louis In 2013, starfish — including the morning sun star, the richly hued ochre star and the sunflower star, whose limbs can span four feet across — started dying by the millions along the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Alaska. They were succumbing to a wasting disease. It began with white lesions on their …

By George Dvorsky Denisova cave in southern Siberia was home to Neanderthals and Denisovans for thousands of years, but questions remain about the timing of their stay. A pair of new studies traces the history of archaic human occupation at the site, showing who lived there and when—including a possible era during which the two now-extinct …