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 Natalie Wolchover On a 1987 voyage to the Antarctic, the paleoceanographer James Kennett and his crew dropped anchor in the Weddell Sea, drilled into the seabed, and extracted a vertical cylinder of sediment. In an inch-thick layer of plankton fossils and other detritus buried more than 500 feet deep, they found a disturbing clue about …

By Juliet Eilperin, Josh Dawsey, and Brady Dennis The White House plans to create an ad hoc group of select federal scientists to reassess the government’s analysis of climate science and counter conclusions that the continued burning of fossil fuels is harming the planet, according to three senior administration officials. The National Security Council initiative …

By Jack Hitt When you’re setting up fake Facebook pages, it’s the little details that can mess things up. On a group computer call last winter, Susan Gerbic was going through her checklist of tips for her team’s latest sting operation — this one focused on infiltrating the audience of a psychic. It all started …

By Asaf Ronel Genesis (“Beresheet” in Hebrew), Israel’s first spacecraft on its way to land on the moon, is having some complications. After the launch on Friday morning, engineers from the SpaceIL organization and Israel Aerospace Industries discovered that sensors on the craft needed for navigation are overly sensitive to sunlight. They discovered another problem with the robotic …

By David Cyranoski In the three months since He Jiankui announced the birth of twin girls with edited genomes, the questions facing the scientific community have grown knottier. By engineering mutations into human embryos, which were then used to produce babies, He leapt capriciously into an era in which science could rewrite the gene pool …

By Melissa Davey It was at 3.45pm on Tuesday 11 December that Cardinal George Pell, one of Pope Francis’s most trusted officials and the third most senior Catholic in the world, found out that he would, in all likelihood, be going to jail. Room 4.3 at the county court in Melbourne was silent as the jury foreman …