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The planets around a nearby star seem to be in the wrong order, hinting that they formed through a different mechanism than the familiar one by which most systems grow

Yep, here I go again pointing out the decline in the quality of rock and pop music. But this time I’m joined by the music maven Rick Beato, who has always had the same opinion.  In this video he compares music from 1984 vs. 2026, juxtaposing the Grammy nominees for Song of the Year from both years. Save for one song, he finds the 2026 nominees lame, so there’s no contest. Music, he argues implictly, has gone downhill in the past four decades.

I’ll list the nominees and make some comments below. The winner for both years is is at the top. My own comments are flush left.

1984

Song of the Year

• “Every Breath You Take” – The Police
  • Sting (songwriter)
• “All Night Long (All Night)” – Lionel Richie
  • Lionel Richie (songwriter)
• “Beat It” – Michael Jackson
  • Michael Jackson (songwriter)
• “Billie Jean” – Michael Jackson
  • Michael Jackson (songwriter)
• “Maniac” – Michael Sembello
  • Michael Sembello & Dennis Matkosky (songwriters)

Had I voted, there would be no hesitation in my dubbing “Billie Jean” as Song of the Year, but all of these songs, as Beato agrees, are good and memorable. They will last, and will still be popular years from now (they’re still listened to 42 years later!).

*******************

2026 (winner was announced on Feb. 1)

Song of the Year

• “Wildflower“
  • Billie Eilish O’Connell & Finneas O’Connell, songwriters (Billie Eilish)
• “Abracadabra”
  • Henry Walter, Lady Gaga & Andrew Watt, songwriters (Lady Gaga)
• “Anxiety”
  • Jaylah Hickmon, songwriter (Doechii)
• “APT.”
  • Amy Allen, Christopher Brody Brown, Rogét Chahayed, Henry Walter, Omer Fedi, Philip Lawrence, Bruno Mars, Chae Young Park & Theron Thomas, songwriters (Rosé & Bruno Mars)
• “DTMF”
  • Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, Scott Dittrich, Benjamin Falik, Roberto José Rosado Torres, Marco Daniel Borrero, Hugo René Sención Sanabria & Tyler Spry, songwriters (Bad Bunny)
• “Golden” (from KPop Demon Hunters)
  • Park Hong Jun, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seo, Ejae & Mark Sonnenblick, songwriters (Huntrix: Ejae, Audrey Nuna & Rei Ami)
• “Luther”
  • Jack Antonoff, Roshwita Larisha Bacha, Matthew Bernard, Ink, Scott Bridgeway, Sam Dew, Kendrick Lamar, Mark Anthony Spears, Solána Rowe & Kamasi Washington, songwriters (Kendrick Lamar and SZA)
• “Manchild”
  • Amy Allen, Jack Antonoff & Sabrina Carpenter, songwriters (Sabrina Carpenter)

Beato finds “Wildflower” the best for this year; it is, he says, a “great song”. (This is Eilish’s tenth Grammy.)  While I don’t think it’s great, it is very good, and miles above all the other nominees. And it won. I’ll put it below. He simply dismisses the other seven songs, though a few have some merit, like being “well produced.”

The reasons Beato finds this year’s songs worse are that they are in general lame, derivative, often include many songwriters (too many writers spoil the song), and sometimes include sampling from older songs.

In contrast, only one of the 1984 songs has more than one writer, and all include the singer as a composer.  (Note that one is by Bad Bunny, and Beato can’t understand the words!)  Beato’s takeaway is that nobody will remember songs written by so many people, and nobody will remember these latest songs more than three years from now.

Beato:

Here is “Wildflower,” live with Billie Eilish (the official release is here, and the lyrics are here). The only accompaniments are a guitar, bass, two sets of drums, and three backup singers.

The activity of certain neurons may influence our endurance for exercise, and these could be targeted to help us run faster for longer

There’s an potpourri of Darwin-related material at the Friends of Darwin Newsletter website, especially extensive because today is Darwin Day.  Click below to read it; it discusses pollination (Athayde’s favorite topic), recommends two new books, and has a bunch of evolution-related links. I’ll put those below the screenshot. Today’s newsletter was written by Richard Carter.

The “missing links” (indents are quotes from article)

Some Darwin-related articles you might find of interest:

1. The importance of Charles Darwin’s documentary archive has been recognised by its inclusion on the UNESCO International Memory of the World Register. The Darwin Archive comprises documents held at Cambridge University Library, the Natural History Museum in London, the Linnean Society of London, Darwin’s former home at Down House in Kent, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the National Library of Scotland.
2. Podcast episode: The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Darwin.
   David Runciman talks to geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about the book that fundamentally altered our understanding of just about everything: Darwin’s On The Origin of Species.
3. Video: Darwin’s unexpected final obsession with earthworms.
4. Darwin Online has published Charles Darwin’s address book. Here’s their introduction, and here’s the address book.
5. The University of Edinburgh recently completed a five-year programme to catalogue, preserve, and enhance access to the Charles Lyell Collection. Geologist Lyell was a close friend of Darwin, and major influence on his work. Here’s the collection’s snazzy new website.
6. Leonard Jenyns on the variation of species and Charles Darwin on the origin of species 1844–1860
   At the 1856 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Rev. Leonard Jenyns (1800−1893) delivered one of the most significant statements on the nature and the origin of species in the years immediately preceding Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Jenyns was a long-standing friend of Darwin and had turned down the place aboard HMS Beagle subsequently taken by Darwin.
7. The November 2025 issue of the journal Paleobiology contained a collection of papers exploring Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould’s 1972 paper on punctuated equilibria, in which they argued that species don’t always evolve through slow, steady change. Instead, the fossil record shows long periods in which species remain remarkably stable, interrupted by relatively brief bursts of evolutionary innovation linked to the origin of new species. The Paleobiology papers include a retrospective review of the importance of the idea of punctuated equilibria, and Niles Eldredge’s personal reflections.
8. Talking of brief evolutionary bursts, a recent paper finds that most living species derived from large groups which evolved in relatively short periods of time; or, as they put it, rapid radiations underlie most of the known diversity of life.
9. Talking even more of evolutionary bursts, another recent study suggests changes in solar energy fuelled high speed evolutionary changes 500-million years ago. (See also the original journal paper Orbitally‐driven nutrient pulses linked to early Cambrian periodic oxygenation and animal radiation.)
10. The case for subspecies—the neglected unit of conservation
    To lump or to split? Deciding whether an animal is a species or subspecies profoundly influences our conservation priorities. (See also my old post Lumpers v Splitters.)
11. Sexual selection in beetles leads to more rapid evolution of new species, long-term experiments show
    40 years of experiments following 200 generations of beetles show the importance of sexual selection in the emergence of new species. (See also the original journal paper: The effects of sexual selection on functional and molecular reproductive divergence during experimental evolution in seed beetles.)
12. Why did life evolve to be so colourful? Research is starting to give us some answers
    If evolution had taken a different turn, nature would be missing some colours.
13. Some of the biggest fossils Darwin sent home from the Beagle voyage were those of extinct giant ground sloths, Megatherium and Mylodon. Scientists have figured out how extinct giant ground sloths got so big and where it all went wrong.
14. Large brains and manual dexterity are both thought to have played an important role in human evolution. A new study has found that primates with longer thumbs tend to have bigger brains, suggesting the brain co-evolved with manual dexterity. (See also the original journal paper Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand.)
15. Thumbs and brains are all well and good, but paleoanthropologist John Hawks explores another human characteristic that remains an enduring evolutionary enigma: what the heck are chins for?

I haven’t looked at them all, but I did look at two related to my own field—speciation. I like article #10, called “In praise of subspecies,” which explains what subspecies are (they’re called “races” of plants and animals by many biologists), and  tells us how recognizing them will reduce the number of species. (This won’t satisfy all biologists, for many disagree with me that modern humans and Neanderthals are subspecies, not distinct species.) But I disagree with the author, Richard Smyth, who thinks that all subspecies should be units of conservation. That is, genetically and morphologically different populations of a species should all be conserved if they are considered “endangered”.  One should do that when possible, of course, but I feel the unit of conservation—the thing that must be saved, is the biological species. But Smyth gives a good summary of what subspecies are.

Biologists have long thought (and Allen Orr and I have a chapter on this in our book Speciation) that sexual selection promotes speciation by driving isolated populations in different directions, eventually leading to some of them becoming reproductively incompatible, through either unwillingness to mate or creating problems in hybrids. The experiments described in #11 are interesting, and show more divergence in populations of beetles that are subject to sexual selection than in those constrained to be monogamous, but they don’t show the advent of reproductive barriers between populations. They do, however, show more divergence in the sexually-selected population, which is posited to be the first step in speciation.

Remember, Darwin’s greatest book was called On the Origin of Species (a shortened title).  Yet he didn’t help us understand species very much, as he had no concept of species being groups separated by reproductive barriers. It wasn’t until the 1930s that biologists began to understand how new species originated when they realized that the key to understanding the “lumpiness” of nature—distinct species in one area—was figuring out how those groups could coexist, and that meant understanding how reproductive barriers arise. Darwin’s book would have been more appropriately titled On the Origin of Adaptations.

And that is my pronouncement for Darwin Day. I do recommend reading the first chapter of Speciation, but if you’re not an evolutionary biologist you can forget about the rest, which becomes technical at times.

xh/t: Athayde

In conjunction with its new sponsor, The Free Press, CBS News is launching a series of debates and town hall presentations. One of them is a debate about God featuring Steve Pinker and Ross Douthat, which should be a barn-burner. I am informed that that debate will take place on February 26, and will be broadcast live.

Douthat, as you know, has been flogging his new pro-Christianity book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and I’ve discussed excerpts published by Douthat here. It appears to be the usual guff, arguing that stuff about the Universe that we don’t understand, like consciousness and the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics, comprise evidence for a creator God. Assessing all gods, Douthat (a pious Catholic) finds that the Christian one appears to be the “right” god. Are you surprised?

Pinker is an atheist, and has written about nonbelief from time to time in his books, but has not written an entire book on it.  I look forward to this debate, which will be broadcast live on THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, so mark your calendars. Pinker will surely be ready to answer Douthat’s shopworn “evidence,” so it should be fun.

Click below to access the general announcement.

Below: the series’ rationale and its upcoming debates and interviews. No dates and times have been announced save my finding out that Pinker vs. Douthat is on February 26.

This is, of course, the result of Bari Weiss becoming Editor of CBS News, and I’m not sure how I feel about this endeavor. Note that it’s sponsored by the Bank of America.

We live in a divided country. A country where many cannot talk to those with whom they disagree. Where people can’t speak across the political divide – or even sometimes across the kitchen table.

THINGS THAT MATTER aims to change that.

Sponsored by Bank of America, THINGS THAT MATTER is a series of town halls and debates that will feature the people in politics and culture who are shaping American life. The events will be held across the country, in front of audiences who have a stake in the topics under discussion.

This launch comes on the heels of CBS News’ successful town hall with Erika Kirk, which drove double-digit ratings increases in its time slot and generated 192 million views across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X – making it CBS News’ most-watched interview ever on social media.

JAC: Note that the town hall with Erika Kirk was NOT a success; it was lame and uninformative. There’s a link to the video below. Back to the blurb:

The events take Americans into the most important issues that directly affect their lives – immigration, capitalism, public health, criminal justice, foreign policy, artificial intelligence and the state of politics. The debates echo the country’s 250th anniversary, showing how the power of America’s earliest principles – civil, substantive discussion, free of rancor – have immense value today.

“We believe that the vast majority of Americans crave honest conversation and civil, passionate debate,” said Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News. “This series is for them. In a moment in which people believe that truth is whatever they are served on their social media feed, we can think of nothing more important than insisting that the only way to get to the truth is by speaking to one another.”

Bank of America has joined THINGS THAT MATTER as its title sponsor. Tracing its lineage to 1784, Bank of America is sponsoring the series in support of dialogue and debate during the country’s 250th anniversary year.

THINGS THAT MATTERwill kick off in the new year. An early look includes:

Town Halls:

• Vice President JD Vance on the state of the country and the future of the Republican Party.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on artificial intelligence.

• Maryland Governor Wes Moore on the state of the country and the future of the Democratic Party.

• In case you missed it: Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk on political violence, faith and grief – watch it here.

Debates:

• Gen Z and the American Dream: Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson. Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?

• God and Meaning: Ross Douthat and Steven Pinker. Does America Need God?

• The Sexual Revolution: Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey. Has Feminism Failed Women?

Readers are welcome to weigh in below on the topics and format of this forum.

Astronomers want to collect as much data as possible using as many systems as possible. Sometimes that requires coordination between instruments. The teams that run the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the upcoming Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (Ariel) missions will have plenty of opportunity for that once both telescopes are online in the early 2030s. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from the Ariel-JWST Synergy Working Group details just how exactly the two systems can work together to better analyze exoplanets.

There are many ways in which our brains can be hacked. It is a complex overlapping set of algorithms evolved to help us interact with our environment to enhance survival and reproduction. However, while we evolved in the natural world, we now live in a world of technology, which gives us the ability to control our environment. We no longer have to simply adapt to the environment, we can adapt the environment to us. This partly means that we can alter the environment to “hack” our adaptive algorithms. Now we have artificial intelligence (AI) that has become a very powerful tool to hack those brain pathways.

In the last decade chatbots have blown past the Turing Test – which is a type of test in which a blinded evaluator has to tell the difference between a live person and an AI through conversation alone. We appear to still be on the steep part of the curve in terms of improvements in these large language model and other forms of AI. What these applications have gotten very good at is mimicking human speech – including pauses, inflections, sighing, “ums”, and all the other imperfections that make speech sound genuinely human.

As an aside, these advances have rendered many sci-fi vision of the future quaint and obsolete. In Star Trek, for example, even a couple hundred years in the future computers still sounded stilted and artificial. We could, however, retcon this choice to argue that the stilted computer voices of the sci-fi future were deliberate, and not a limitation of the technology. Why would they do this? Well…

Current AI is already so good at mimicking human speech, including the underlying human emotion, that people are forming emotional attachments to them, or being emotionally manipulated by them. People are, literally, falling in love with their chatbots. You might argue that they just “think” they are falling in love, or they are pretending to fall in love, but I see no reason not to take them at their word. I’m also not sure there is a meaningful difference between thinking one has fallen in love and actually falling in love – the same brain circuits, neurotransmitters, and feelings are involved.

Researchers generally consider there are three neurological components to falling in love (lust, romance, attachment). There is sexual attraction and lust, mediated by estrogen and testosterone. There is the romantic feeling of being in love mediated by dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. During sex and other forms of physical intimacy endorphins are released which make us feel happy, and also oxytocin which is associated with feelings of attachment. Vasopressin is also involved, linked also to long term attachment and feelings of protectiveness. Do we experience the same biochemical reactions to interacting with AI? The data so far says yes.

In fact, this data goes back far before AI. Psychologists and neurologists have know for a long time that people can form emotional attachments to inanimate objects (objectophilia). This it the teddy bear phenomenon – even as young children we can form an attachment to an object and treat it as if it were a living thing, even if we know objectively it isn’t. This likely has to do with the cues that our brains use to divide up the world. We mentally categorize objects as either agents (things able to act on their own) and non-agents. For some reason we evolved algorithms to determine this that are not dependent on whether or not the object is actually alive, but simply if it moves and acts as if it is alive. If something acts like an agent, or even looks like an agent, our brains categorize them that way and link them to our emotional centers, so we feel things about them.

As one researcher put it – AI is a teddy bear on steroids. Chatbots are designed to act human, to push our buttons and make us feel as if they are agents, and therefore activate all the the circuitry involved with how we feel about things our brain treats as agents. Not only that, but chatbots can be programmed to be friendly, available, a “good listener”, accommodating, and flattering. Some of these traits may be inadvertently (or deliberately, depending upon how cynical you’re feeling) triggering of romantic feelings. There are, of course, apps that deliberately design AI chatbots to be sexual and romantic (come meet your new AI girlfriend), complete with alluring AI generated imagery, all custom-made, if you wish.

So yes, people can really fall in love with an AI. Why not? That fits with everything we know about psychology and how our brains work. It is an extreme example of us adapting our environment to hack our own adaptive circuitry, to engineer feedback to maximally stimulate our reward circuitry. There are many ways in which we do this – porn, recreational drugs, roller coasters, gambling, ridiculously delicious foods. This can be harmless and fun, adding a little spice to our life, but pretty much every manifestation of hacking our reward circuitry is also associated with what we generally categorize as “addiction”. Addiction is one of those things that is hard to operationally define, because it is such a multifaceted spectrum, but in generally something is considered an addiction when it becomes a net negative for your life. Addictions cause dysfunction in some way.

Can someone be “addicted” to their chatbot, whether the relationship is platonic or romantic? It seems so. But even short of an addiction, is it a good idea to spend a significant amount of time in an artificial relationship that mimics a human relationship, but is crafted to give you all the power and to be maximally flattering without demanding anything of you? Some psychologists are raising the alarm bells, worrying about a spoiler effect. Such AI relationship can potentially spoil us for relationships with living humans, who have their own wants, desires, flaws, and demands. Relationships are work – but why do all that work when you can have a submissive mate that is perfectly happy making the relationship entirely about you? Of course, there is the physical intimacy part, but there are partial ways around that as well. This does, however, raise the question about how important physical intimacy is compared to emotional intimacy. I suspect there is a lot of individual variation here.

Again, we seem to be running a massive social experiment with some very real concerns. This also does get me back to the sci-fi retcon – perhaps it would be better for chatbots to not be too human. They can still fulfil their functions (other, of course, than being a romantic companion or similar) if they had an affect that was obviously artificial. This is a form of transparency – you know when you are talking to an AI because they talk like an AI, and they interact in a way that is designed to be functional but specifically not provoke any emotions, or pretend to have emotions themselves. I suspect this would be a good thing for society, but also that nothing like this will happen on its own.

The post Falling In Love With AI first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A newly identified planet candidate, HD 137010 b, looks strikingly Earth-like in size and orbit — but it may be colder than Mars due to its dimmer star. If it has a thick enough atmosphere, though, this icy world could still surprise us.

Scientists studying a rock sample collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover have uncovered something tantalizing: the largest organic molecules ever detected on Mars. The compounds — decane, undecane, and dodecane — may be fragments of fatty acids, which on Earth are most often linked to life. While non-living processes like meteorite impacts can also create such molecules, researchers found those sources couldn’t fully explain the amounts detected.

Anti-science health legislation doesn't just reflect misinformation; it institutionalizes it, cementing false beliefs into population-level risks.

The post 2026: State Legislatures as Vectors of Health Misinformation and Anti-Science first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

DOI: arXiv:2602.04840 | arXiv:2602.04840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope (EXCITE) is a balloon-borne mission dedicated to measuring spectroscopic phase curves of hot Jupiter-type exoplanets. Phase curve measurements can be used to characterize an exoplanet's longitude-dependent atmospheric composition and energy circulation patterns. EXCITE carries a 0.5 m primary mirror and moderate resolution diffraction-limited spectrograph with spectral coverage from 0.8--3.5 um. EXCITE is...

The idea of self-amplifying gene editing is to get cells to pass on packages of CRISPR machinery to their neighbours, boosting the effect

A fleet of wind-propelled robot boats could act as a sensor network covering a wide area and relay acoustic signals to a submarine

Deep inside a nearby galaxy cloaked in thick clouds of gas and dust, astronomers have uncovered a surprising treasure trove of organic molecules using the James Webb Space Telescope. Peering through the cosmic veil in infrared light, researchers detected an extraordinary mix of carbon-rich compounds — including benzene, methane, and even the highly reactive methyl radical, never before seen outside the Milky Way.

NASA’s Magellan Mission to Venus is the gift the keeps on giving, providing Italian researchers with the first solid detection of a massive subsurface lava tube on Venus. They detail their findings in a new paper appearing in the journal Nature Communications.

The commercial space giant SpaceX, which Elon Musk founded in 2002 to build a self-sustaining city on Mars, is no longer focusing on the Red Planet. According to a recent statement on X, SpaceX is now pivoting to the Moon as its intended destination for a human settlement.

Many researchers thought that earthquakes in the Himalayas recur at regular intervals – but an analysis of sediment cores has shown they are largely random, and the region has seen far more than we previously realised

The Chincha Kingdom was transporting seabird excrement from islands to valleys as early as the 13th century, and this powerful fertiliser may have been key to its economic success

We must find a balance between haste and getting mired in medical inertia

There are huge benefits to ringing the changes when it comes to exercise, finds committed runner Grace Wade when she analyses the science