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A preliminary analysis suggests that industrially useful quantum computers designs come with a broad spectrum of energy footprints, including some larger than the most powerful existing supercomputers

This year's funding for the Mars Sample Return mission has been cut. It seems unlikely that the mission will be revived in the coming years, barring some unforeseen development. This isn't a surprising development, so maybe NASA has some contingency plans.

I haven’t had a look at Da Roolz (the commenting rules) for a while, and, having a gander, made one modification in them, as well as a change in the instructions aboout “How to send me wildlife photos“.  Both of these instructional posts are on the left sidebar of the site, and look like this. You can click on them to read them.

The main change in the Roolz affects #12, which now reads like this:

Be judicious about posting videos and very long comments.  I like good discussion, but essays are not on, particularly if you have your own website where you can post it.  Embedded videos are okay, but please think before posting: do they add to the discussion? If your comment is longer than, say, 400 words, it is probably too long. If you want to write stuff longer than that, please get your own website!

I’ve decided that 600 words was too long for any comments, and thus ask readers to limit them to 400 words. I’m not going to quibble if you go a few words over that, but I am asking for comments and not essays. I will enforce this limit.

I continue to urge readers not to overcomment, with the guideline being about 10% of the comments in a given post. If you’re writing more than that, please ratchet back.  In the interests of, yes, comment diversity, I do not want to see a few people making most of the comments.

As for wildlife photos, they come in huge variety of formats, and it sometimes takes me a long time to get them into a properly formatted post. To make this easier, I’m asking readers to zip their photos if they can, number them, and then enclose a Word document describing the caption for each numbered photo. Be sure to give the common name plus the Latin binomial. What I’m trying to avoid is having to cut and paste words from a document into WordPress, which sometimes is wonky. And if you really want to please me, use the Times or Times New Roman typeface.

If you are a new reader and haven’t read Da Roolz, please do so before you post again. And if you want to send me photos, the link for that should give you all the information you need, including the address where you should send them.

Finally, if you have any questions, you are welcome reach PCC(E) at the email address you all know (it’s also at the “wildlife photos” link).

Thanks!

In this shortish (23-minute) video, Sam Harris and John McWhorter discuss whether wokeness is finally dead.  The short answer is “nope.”  It may have lain down, but it refuses to die.

The YouTube notes (there’s a transcript you can see as well):

Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about language, ideology, and moral certainty. They discuss the rise and persistence of “wokeness” and DEI, the legacy of George Floyd’s death, the role of social media in amplifying moral panic, how identity shapes perceptions of Israel-Palestine, the linguistics of Donald Trump, the rise of casual speech, conspiracy thinking, positions McWhorter has reconsidered, and other topics.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia University and writes a column for the New York Times. He earned a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University and is the author of several books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Word on the Street, and, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He is also the host of the language podcast Lexicon Valley.

When asked whether the damage of wokeness is unfixable, McWhorter (who wrote Woke Racism ) notes that academics continue to pass on wokeness—not mainly to undergraduates but to graduate students. This ensures, he thinks, that woke ideology will be perpetuated because in that way it gets imbued in future professors as well as in academia as a whole. McWhorter cannot imagine anything will change this pathway. Asked by Harris whether Trump isn’t uprooting DEI from schools, McWhorter suggests that DEI isn’t really disappearing, but simply going underground, branded with a new name. (I agree; that is happening everywhere, including my own school.)

McWhorter teaches music appreciation at Columbia, and discusses a claim by Philip Ewell that music theory is inherently racist, a view that McWhorter considers absurd, and yet Ewell is greatly lionized. In response, Harris muses about whether the defeat of the woke Kamala Harris was the “high water mark” of the ideology.  McWhorter responds that while “high woke” has indeed has peaked (McWhorter means by that “an eternal and punitive battle against whiteness”), the same fury and lack of reason has shifted, and can be seen in the pervasive support for Hamas among progressives as well as in “trans issues, especially surgery and sports”. Ergo, the old woke ideology is being applied to new issues, but with the same concentration on power issues.

How to solve it? McWhorter’s own solution is simply to call attention to this stuff over and over again, but in writing rather than via podcasts—though he finds that tedious given the variety of his interests.

At the end, Harris asks McWhorter what the elites, the intelligentsia, and the MSM “got wrong” in response to the tsunami of emotion and ideology that followed the death of George Floyd.  I’ll let you hear his answer in the last five minutes.  Thrown in at the end is a description of a rupture that McWhorter had with his erstwhile podcast pal, Glenn Loury.

McWhorter and Harris pretty much agree that, for the nonce, wokeness is here to stay. Though it may manifest itself in new ways, the underlying ideology (derived from postmodernism) of power differentials and “personal truths”, most notably in emphasizing inequities between blacks and whites, shows no signs of disappearing.

So it goes.

h/t: Bat

Satellite photos show meltwater on the surface of iceberg A23a collecting in an unusual way, which may be a sign that the huge berg is about to break apart

It’s been a while since we had some photo from evolutionary ecologist Bruce Lyon at UC Santa Cruz, but he came through yesterday with some lovely photos of DUCKS! Bruce’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. It comes in the form of a letter to me:

Dear Dr Coyne

Please step away from the duck. Don’t hurt the duck. I have a friend who is a doctor and who can help you (PhD and he studies ducks). He can help your duck syndrome (yes there is such a thing).

While you are waiting for help to arrive, here are some photos to calm your frayed nerves and stop the incessant paddling.

The photos were taken at Neary Lagoon, a city park near my home. It is the best place to see wood ducks (Aix sponsa) locally. They hang out in the wetlands in the park and often fly over to feed on settling ponds at the nearby sewage treatment facility. Delicious! The park also has lots mallards (Anas platyrhynchos).

The wood ducks are often hidden from view—they perch on branches in dense vegetation at the edge of the lagoon. But sometimes they come out and paddle around, giving nice views. Ducks pair up earlier than many other birds and many birds are in pairs but some are courting.

Darwin famously said that peacocks made him feel ill—”The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” (expressed in a letter to his friend Asa Gray). The peacock’s ornamentation is so crazy complex that Darwin found it hard to explain. Sure, sexual selection explains why animals are ornamented, but this is just crazy. I feel the same way about male wood ducks, but I feel awe instead of nausea:

This male was courting a female that was perched above him out of frame. He would do head tilts while puffing out part of his plumage:

The courting male photographed mid head tilt. Note his fanned out buffy flanks with the nice black and white edging. Clearly, fanning out a specific part of the plumage like this suggests that is an important part of the display:

A lovely female wood duck but not the object of the above male’s desire:

In fact, the above male, who was courting a female perched out of sight above him, often pecked at the female that was sitting right next to him. Perhaps she was interested in him, but the attraction was not mutual:

A male wood duck on the water:

Not far away, mallards provided great opportunities for getting flight shots. I like this one because the out-of-focus males in the background add a pleasing element:

Flight shots can be challenging but these mallards made it easy. They wanted to roost on the floating walkway in the marsh and would swim up close to the walkway and bob their head rapidly up and down a few seconds before launching into flight. Made it easy. Here is a female mallard approaching the railing:

Nearly everything in the universe is made of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, yet we can’t see either of them directly. Scientists are developing detectors so sensitive they can spot particle interactions that might occur once in years or even decades. These experiments aim to uncover what shapes galaxies and fuels cosmic expansion. Cracking this mystery could transform our understanding of the laws of nature.

Nearly everything in the universe is made of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, yet we can’t see either of them directly. Scientists are developing detectors so sensitive they can spot particle interactions that might occur once in years or even decades. These experiments aim to uncover what shapes galaxies and fuels cosmic expansion. Cracking this mystery could transform our understanding of the laws of nature.

A man’s severe reaction to a tattoo, which made all his hair fall out and destroyed his sweat glands, has reignited concerns about the immune effects of some tattoo inks

Einstein’s claim that the speed of light is constant has survived more than a century of scrutiny—but scientists are still daring to test it. Some theories of quantum gravity suggest light might behave slightly differently at extreme energies. By tracking ultra-powerful gamma rays from distant cosmic sources, researchers searched for tiny timing differences that could reveal new physics. They found none, but their results tighten the limits by a huge margin.

Einstein’s claim that the speed of light is constant has survived more than a century of scrutiny—but scientists are still daring to test it. Some theories of quantum gravity suggest light might behave slightly differently at extreme energies. By tracking ultra-powerful gamma rays from distant cosmic sources, researchers searched for tiny timing differences that could reveal new physics. They found none, but their results tighten the limits by a huge margin.

When scientists repeatedly drove a strongly interacting quantum system with laser “kicks,” they expected it to heat up and grow chaotic. Instead, the atoms abruptly stopped absorbing energy and locked into a stable pattern of motion. This strange effect arises from quantum coherence, which prevents the system from thermalizing despite constant forcing. The results overturn classical intuition and offer new insight into how quantum systems can resist disorder.

Scientists have detected a surprisingly hot galaxy cluster dating back to the universe’s infancy. The cluster formed far earlier and burned far hotter than current models predict. Researchers believe supermassive black holes may have rapidly heated the surrounding gas. The finding could force a major rethink of how galaxy clusters grow.

Europa’s buried ocean has made it one of the most exciting places to search for life beyond Earth. However, new calculations suggest its seafloor may be calm, cold, and largely inactive, with little energy to support living organisms. Unlike Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, Europa experiences weaker tidal forces that fail to drive underwater geology. The ocean may exist, but it could be a very quiet place.

Researchers have built a new platform that produces ultrashort UV-C laser pulses and detects them at room temperature using atom-thin materials. The light flashes last just femtoseconds and can be used to send encoded messages through open space. The system relies on efficient laser generation and highly responsive sensors that scale well for manufacturing. Together, these advances could accelerate the development of next-generation photonic technologies.

Researchers have built a new platform that produces ultrashort UV-C laser pulses and detects them at room temperature using atom-thin materials. The light flashes last just femtoseconds and can be used to send encoded messages through open space. The system relies on efficient laser generation and highly responsive sensors that scale well for manufacturing. Together, these advances could accelerate the development of next-generation photonic technologies.

Researchers at TU Wien have discovered a quantum system where energy and mass move with perfect efficiency. In an ultracold gas of atoms confined to a single line, countless collisions occur—but nothing slows down. Instead of diffusing like heat in metal, motion travels cleanly and undiminished, much like a Newton’s cradle. The finding reveals a striking form of transport that breaks the usual rules of resistance.

A new video shows the evolution of Kepler’s Supernova Remnant using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory captured over more than two and a half decades.

A comprehensive review confirms the benefits of exercise for treating depression, even if the exact reasons remain unclear

So let’s say you set up an experiment to measure a quantum property of subatomic particles. Like, I don’t know, spin.