by Richard Dawkins Donald Trump was surely right when he said, in 2012, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy . . . A total sham and a travesty”. And he confirmed his sensible view on November 13th, 2016 (after winning the election by the Electoral College system, but losing the popular vote) …

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 …

By Paul Voosen Using a robot dropped through a 700-meter hole in the ice, scientists stationed on Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier have captured the first video of the glacier’s grounding line, the mysterious boundary where ice meets land and where warm ocean water could be slowly melting the glacier’s base—putting it at risk of collapse (above). Battling …

By Peggy Fletcher Stack and David Noyce It turns out that the very Latter-day Saints who may have the biggest stake in how their tithing contributions are spent have the least interest in forcing churches to disclose those finances. While a new poll for The Salt Lake Tribune shows that 54% of Utahns support the …

By Neil Vigdor Three leaders of a megachurch based in the Philippines were arrested on Wednesday in California and Virginia on charges that they ran a human trafficking ring, one that the Justice Department said had arranged for dozens of sham marriages in the United States to support a fraudulent charity. The arrests coincided with …

By Teo Armus As legislative efforts across the country put abortion protections into doubt last year, Democratic lawmakers in Rhode Island decided to take matters into their own hands. Like their counterparts in other left-leaning states, legislators in Providence passed a bill that would enshrine safeguards at the state level. They wanted to make sure federal restrictions could not …

By Matthew Bailes and Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan One of the predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is that any spinning body drags the very fabric of space-time in its vicinity around with it. This is known as “frame-dragging”. In everyday life, frame-dragging is both undetectable and inconsequential, as the effect is so ridiculously tiny. Detecting the …

By Chrissy Stroop On Jan. 8, Cindy Wang Brandt, a podcaster and author of “Parenting Forward: How to Raise Children with Justice, Mercy, and Kindness,” tweeted: “Do not evangelize a child. Do not colonize a child’s spirituality. Do not threaten a child with religious control. Your religion does not have a right to stake claim to …