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Researchers at Google have used their Willow quantum computer to demonstrate that "quantum contextuality" may be a crucial ingredient for its computational prowess

arXiv:2512.15858v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite numerous search campaigns based on a diverse set of observational techniques, exomoons - prospective satellites of extrasolar planets - remain an elusive and hard-to-pin-down class of objects. Yet, the case for intensifying this search is compelling: as in the Solar System, moons can act as proxies for studying planet formation and evolution, provide direct clues as to the migration history of the planetary hosts and, in favourable cases...

Big hitter Peter F. Hamilton has a new sci-fi novel out this month – and Booker winner George Saunders ventures into speculative fiction with his latest book, Vigil

An analysis of several experiments aimed at detecting the mysterious neutrino has identified a hint of a crack in the standard model of particle physics

Wealthy tech bro turned antivax crank Steve Kirsch attacked Paul Offit for refusing to debate antivaxxers, while Dr. Mike was "surrounded" by MAHA stans. These recent events led me to revisit the question: Is it ever a good strategy to publicly debate cranks?

The post Revisiting the question of debating science deniers first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Scientists have found a way to see ultrafast molecular interactions inside liquids using an extreme laser technique once thought impossible for fluids. When they mixed nearly identical chemicals, one combination behaved strangely—producing less light and erasing a single harmonic signal altogether. Simulations revealed that a subtle molecular “handshake” was interfering with electron motion. The discovery shows that liquids can briefly organize in ways that dramatically change how electrons behave.

Tiny bits of Earth’s atmosphere have been drifting to the moon for billions of years, guided by Earth’s magnetic field. Rather than blocking particles, the magnetic field can funnel them along invisible lines that sometimes stretch all the way to the moon. This explains mysterious gases found in Apollo samples and suggests lunar soil may hold a long-term archive of Earth’s history. It could also become a valuable resource for future lunar explorers.

Inside high-energy proton collisions, quarks and gluons briefly form a dense, boiling state before cooling into ordinary particles. Researchers expected this transition to change how disordered the system is, but LHC data tell a different story. A newly improved collision model matches experiments better than older ones and reveals that the “entropy” remains unchanged throughout the process. This unexpected result turns out to be a direct fingerprint of quantum mechanics at work.

The first results on the iconic active galactic nucleus MCG–6-30-15 captured with the XRISM mission show the most precise signatures yet of its supermassive black hole’s extreme gravity and the outflows that shape its galaxy.

New research shows that AI doesn’t need endless training data to start acting more like a human brain. When researchers redesigned AI systems to better resemble biological brains, some models produced brain-like activity without any training at all. This challenges today’s data-hungry approach to AI development. The work suggests smarter design could dramatically speed up learning while slashing costs and energy use.

Researchers using China’s “artificial sun” fusion reactor have broken through a long-standing density barrier in fusion plasma. The experiment confirmed that plasma can remain stable even at extreme densities if its interaction with the reactor walls is carefully controlled. This finding removes a major obstacle that has slowed progress toward fusion ignition. The advance could help future fusion reactors produce more power.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary announced that 2022 saw a 1740 percent increase in searches for gaslighting “with high interest throughout the year.” Merriam-Webster refines the term:

The idea of a deliberate conspiracy to mislead has made gaslighting useful in describing lies that are part of a larger plan. Unlike lying, which tends to be between individuals, and fraud, which tends to involve organizations, gaslighting applies in both personal and political contexts.1

The term “gaslighting” entered the popular consciousness through a 1944 film, the American psychological thriller Gaslight, in which a husband wants to make his newlywed wife lose her mind to have her locked up in an asylum. His agenda is to steal jewels that he knows are hidden in her late aunt’s house where they are living. The movie’s name is symbolic of the many manipulations the husband undertakes to gaslight his wife into believing she’s insane. 

The film is set in London in the late nineteenth century when lamps were fueled by gas. The wife notices that their lamps randomly go dim. One way the husband destabilizes her is by denying that the gaslights are indeed dimming. It really is such a small manipulation. It’s so minor that you might not make much of it. The husband has been showering his new wife with adoration—referred to in abusive relationships as “love bombing”—making it unlikely for her to think he’s being deceptive. When the wife is told that the gaslights are not dimming, she chooses to believe her devoted husband and doubt her own perceptions. This is the beginning of what could be the end. 

The wife not only notices that the gaslights are dimming, but also that sounds are coming from the attic. Her husband denies the sounds. She can’t find her brooch even though she knows it was in her purse. He has removed it without her knowing. She finds a letter from one “Sergis Bauer,” and her once-adoring husband becomes furious with her. Later, he explains that he became upset because she was upset (which she wasn’t). 

The husband tells his wife that the gaslights are not dimming; there are no sounds from the attic; she lost the brooch as it was not in her purse; she didn’t see a letter from Sergis Bauer. On top of all that, he tells her that she stole a painting, and he has found out that her mother was put in an asylum. He convinces his wife that not only is she fabricating things that don’t exist, but also that she’s a kleptomaniac, too high strung and unwell to be in public. She must be crazy like her mother. Stealing the aunt’s jewels is symbolic of a much more deadly crime: stealing his target’s sanity. The husband is building a case for how his wife is obviously unstable and untrustworthy. Slowly but surely, the wife begins to lose her grip on what’s real and what’s false. She loses faith in her own perceptions. 

Luckily for the 1944 wife in the movie Gaslight, it being a Hollywood movie and all, a policeman takes an interest in the unfolding manipulation. It turns out that the wife is merely useful to the husband, and he exploits her for his own means. In the movie, it turns out that the husband is the one who is untrustworthy and who steals, not his destabilized wife. 

Publicity still from the film Gaslight © 1944 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Gaslighting in a marriage is disturbing. Gaslighting in an institution such as a corporation, church, school, sports club, courthouse, retirement home, government agency, news station, or political party is deeply disturbing. The target in the marriage may lose her mind and come to believe that she is, in fact, corrupt and insane. Her relationship to reality becomes unhinged. As has been demonstrated throughout history, the target in institutional gaslighting leads to whole segments of society losing their minds and coming to believe whatever alternative facts and fabricated events they are being fed by those in positions with power, credibility, and social status. This collective madness can occur in cults, even in nations. We are well-informed by history how incredibly dangerous and destructive this manipulation can be. 

In 2022, the term “gaslighting” was published in a United Kingdom High Court judgment for the first time in what is being called a “milestone” hearing in a domestic abuse case. Describing the case, Maya Oppenheim defines the act as follows: 

Gaslighting refers to manipulating someone by making them question their very grasp on reality by forcing them to doubt their memories and pushing a false narrative of events. 

Although this is being legally identified as manipulation in a marriage, it applies equally well to the workplace. Those who tell the lies of bullying and gaslighting at work make targets question their grasp on reality, force them to doubt their memories, and push a false narrative of events. This false narrative is often believed by higher-ups who have been carefully groomed over time to believe in the power, credibility, and social standing of the one bullying. In this legal ruling, gaslighting is viewed as part of a campaign of psychological abuse that uses coercion and control to destabilize someone. 

Controlling the narrative, silencing questions and concerns, forcing the community to adhere to the institution’s fabricated facts all prop up the harms of institutional complicity. Lawyer and workplace bullying expert Paul Pelletier finds that the lies of workplace bullying flourish when the leadership operates from a coercion and control model as identified in the manipulative and dysfunctional marriage under scrutiny in the UK High Court. Coercion and control as a leadership model sets the stage for the drama of bullying, gaslighting, and institutional complicity to unfold. Psychiatrist Dr. Helen Riess discusses leaders who use fear and intimidation to exert their authority: “This type of failed leadership tends to spread across organizations like the plague.”2

A year later, in 2023, a lawsuit was launched in New Jersey. Once again, gaslighting is one of the alleged behaviors that drove Joseph Nyre, former president of prestigious Seton Hall University, from his institution. As reported by Ted Sherman, Nyre alleges violations of the law against the former chairman of the board at Seton Hall, including the sexual harassment of Nyre’s wife. As a whistleblower, Nyre alleges he was targeted with “gaslighting, retaliation, and intimidation,” which led him to resign. Institutional complicity in silencing those who speak up uses textbook methods and gaslighting is long overdue to be understood as one of the weapons in their arsenal. Dr. Dorothy Suskind, an expert in workplace bullying, refers to the specific abuse meted out to those with “high ethical standards” as a “degradation ceremony.”3

The problem is, those who tell the lies of bullying and gaslighting do not experience self-reflection.

Although gaslighting is being recognized in the law, it is not fully understood from a psychological and brain science perspective, and it is rarely applied to workplace culture. Only recently, in 2023, psychologists Priyam Kukreja and Jatin Pandey developed a “Gaslighting at Work Questionnaire” (GWQ) that revealed two key components in workplace gaslighting: trivialization and affliction. According to psychologist Mark Travers, trivialization may take the form of “making promises that don’t match their actions, twisting or misrepresenting things you’ve said, and making degrading comments about you and pretending you have nothing to be offended about.” Victims start down the path of wondering if they’re being “too sensitive.” Affliction may take the form of excessive control, making you self-critical, creating dependence, or being “very sweet to you and then flipp[ing] a switch, becoming hostile shortly after.”4 Again, this kind of maltreatment causes self-doubt. Kukreja and Pandey conclude: 

The GWQ scale offers new opportunities to understand and measure gaslighting behaviors of a supervisor toward their subordinates in the work context. It adds to the existing literature on harmful leader behaviors, workplace abuse, and mistreatment by highlighting the importance of identifying and measuring gaslighting at work.5

Introducing a questionnaire on gaslighting is an effective way to draw attention to how this form of manipulation occurs. Equally important, it provides vocabulary for workplaces to understand and discuss this specific form of abuse. In recent years, Forbes began publishing articles on gaslighting in the workplace indicating that it is on the leadership radar. Jonathan Westover advises on “How to Avoid and Counteract Gaslighting as a Leader,” and his approach is insightful: 

• Practice regular self-reflection and foster intellectual humility. 
• Actively listen to the perceptions of your team members. 
• Practice vulnerability and own up to your mistakes. 
• Develop and sustain authentic relationships of mutual accountability and trust.6

The problem is, those who tell the lies of bullying and gaslighting do not experience self-reflection. They do not feel humility as an emotion, just like they don’t feel guilt or remorse. They are disinterested in others’ perceptions as their brain tends to objectify targets especially. They often experience a roller coaster of shame and grandiosity, and they deny vulnerability or the possibility that they have made a mistake. In short, they cannot have authentic relationships. They follow an abusive script that turns them—if not stopped—into a caricature who repeats bullying lies and gaslighting manipulations over and over. They avoid accountability and see trust as a game that they want to win. Using psychological research to understand how the brains of manipulators work hopefully will give us a better chance to prevent their negative impacts in the workplace. 

Manzar Bashir describes several textbook gaslighting behaviors: trivializing your feelings, shifting blame, projecting their behavior, insulting and belittling, and creating confusion and contradictions, but he articulates one in particular—withholding information—that is very tricky to identify and yet can have devastating impacts. “Gaslighters often use a tactic of withholding information and keeping you in the dark about crucial matters. By selectively sharing or concealing facts, they manipulate your perception of reality and limit your ability to make informed decisions.”7 It’s insightful: gaslighting, along with a great deal of psychological manipulation, is harmful in its omissions and passivity. In other words, it’s the opposite of how we measure the harms of physical abuse. When you hurt someone’s body, we assess severity by how much active damage was done. But when the brain is being manipulated, we need to find ways to figure out how much lack of action causes damage. Physical assaults are designed to weaken and harm the body; assaults via gaslighting are designed to weaken and destabilize the brain and the mind. Injuries to the body are far more likely to get immediate treatment, whereas neurological damage to brain architecture and disruption of the mind’s ability to function healthily are too often ignored. 

The more aware we are of how abusive brains operate … the better able we are to prevent workplace bullying and gaslighting.

Psychologists and brain scientists have developed extensive evidence about the way in which gaslighting brains operate, notably different from brains that do not manipulate. Knowledge of psychopathic brains and the way they work can better protect us from the gaslighters’ domineering manipulation and their cruel capacity to exploit us for their own purposes. 

Most of us who are targeted for bullying at work are caught off guard. Because we are not trained to anticipate manipulation, we’re easily victimized. The more aware we are of how abusive brains operate and how our brains are completely thrown off our game by them, the better able we are to prevent workplace bullying and gaslighting. The more leaders, managers, and HR are informed, the less likely they’ll be drawn into institutional complicity. 

Those who tell the self-serving lies of bullying and gaslighting—with ease—are part of a formidable trio referred to in psychology as the Dark Triad: narcissists, Machiavellians, and psychopaths.8 How can we identify these manipulative people more quickly and refuse to believe them? What if there were a way to protect ourselves, and more specifically our sanity, from lies? These are the questions that drove the researching and writing of The Gaslit Brain. I needed to answer them because I was being gaslit at work. 

Excerpted and adapted by the author from The Gaslit Brain, published by Prometheus, an imprint of The Globe Pequot Publishing Group. © 2025 by Jennifer Fraser.

UPDATE:  I can still see the viewable-by-all post of David Hillis; perhaps you have to be on Facebook yourself to read it. Here is the full text:

“Joao Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Lisbon, noted, with a trace of sarcasm, that the push to classify Neanderthals as a separate species frequently arises from a reluctance, especially among geneticists, to fully accept them as a geographically distinct, but interbreeding, branch of humanity.” Exactly. Neanderthals were a geographically distinct population of Homo sapiens, rather than a distinct species. The two populations interbred extensively, and many modern people (including me) have both as ancestors. If pure Neanderthals were around today, no one would call them a different species, which would be considered highly insulting and racist. Why does the fact that we interbred them to extinction (actually intergradation) change that? Given that much of modern humanity carries Neanderthal genes in their genomes, it is time to stop making this misleading distinction. Neanderthals are Homo sapiens, too. ***********************************************

For a long time I’ve maintained that Neanderthals, which most anthropologists seem to think are a species different from Homo sapiens, in fact constituted a population that was H. sapiens. That, at least, is a reasonable conclusion if you use the Biological Species Concept, which defines populations as members of the same species if, when they meet under natural conditions in nature, can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. And we know that’s true of  Neanderthals and “modern” H. sapiens, because we carry some Neanderthal genes (I have some), and that means the two groups hybridized and that the hybrids backcrossed to our ancestors—and were fertile.

The bogus “species” is known to some as Homo neanderthalensis, which I reject. I have no objections, however, to Neanderthals being called a “subspecies,” or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, as a subspecies is just a genetically differentiated population that lacks reproductive barriers from other populations.

The four or five “species” of giraffes that have recently been “recognized” are in fact just like Neanderthals and modern humans: bogus entities said to be “real species”; but in the case of the giraffes they don’t meet in nature so we can’t test their ability to interbreed in the wild. But they can do in zoos (and produce fertile offspring). There is likely only one species of giraffe. You cannot rationally separate species that live in different places by their DNA divergence alone. Those who love to divide up species for any reason whatsoever are known as “splitters.”

I’m glad to see that David Hillis, a widely-respected evolutionary systematist at UT Austin, agrees with me. Here’s his post on Facebook about the topic, prompted by an article in the NYT.

As we all know by now, American universities are starting to follow the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, which declares that our school is to be “institutionally neutral.” This means that no moiety of the University—no department, no center, and no official unit—can make an official ideological, moral, or political pronouncement unless it has to do with the mission of our University.  (In reality, such statements, as I note below, are really the purview of  only the University President, not subunits.)

But what is our mission? It’s pretty much outlined in the page on the foundational principles of the University of Chicago.  In short, it combines the usual goals of a university—the promotion, promulgation, and preservation of knowledge, as well as teaching it—with a fierce dedication to preserving free expression.

And it’s the latter, free expression, that institutional neutrality is meant to preserve.  If there were some departmental or university presidential statement, for instance, endorsing Governor Pritzker as a better Presidential candidate than J. D. Vance (I’m looking ahead), that would chill the speech of those favoring Vance. Because the statement is official, it could inhibit the speech of pro-Vance untenured faculty (or even tenured ones) as well as students, who would fear punishment or other sanctions for bucking what’s is an official stand.  The Kalven Report, of course, emphasizes that any member of the University community can speak privately on any issue (we have First-Amendment-ish free speech). And we’re encouraged to speak our minds as individuals. But in fact, the only person who can decide what the University can say publicly about such issues is the University President. (This has been violated in the past, but we try to police it. Because of some violations, President Bob Zimmer issued a clarification of Kalven in 2020, affirming that it applied to all official units of the University.)

One example of a political issue on which the University of Chicago spoke publicly was to favor DACA, as the University believed that its mission would be enhanced by allowing all students to compete for admission (or, if admitted, remain here) regardless of their immigration status. (The “Dreamers” came to America as children and grew up here.) And we have a policy that we do not reveal anything about the immigration status of students, for losing them would make our student body depauperate of diversity. (Yes, “diversity” is a principle of the U of C, too: see our Foundational Principles of Diversity and their codification here), but we are seeking viewpoint and experiential diversity, not ethnic diversity.

The University of Chicago was the first school to officially codify institutional neutrality, but now, according to FIRE, 41 universities have adopted neutrality. That’s still pathetically few: only 1% of the 4,000-odd degree-granting institutions in America.  In contrast, 115 have adopted the Chicago Principles of Free Expression. But the list of Kalven-adopting schools is growing fast, for we’ve seen what happens when universities take gratuitous political stands.

However, Brian Soucek, a law professor at UC Davis, disagrees, claiming that it’s impossible for universities to be neutral.  In his misguided and poorly-written piece at the Wall Street Journal‘s “Education News section”, Soucek  says that “the neutrality so many are touting and pledging is an illusion.” That’s wrong, which becomes clear when you read his argument. Further, he says that “by one estimate, over 150 universities” have adopted the principles of the Kalven report.  He gives no link, and I don’t believe it, because FIRE is punctilious in keeping the list linked above and, as I said, it lists but 41 schools.

I argue that, with the exception of schools like Brigham Young and Catholic University, in which promulgating faith is part of their mission, and schools like West Point and Annapolis, which produce future military officers, all universities should adopt institutional neutrality, for neutrality promotes free speech and free speech promotes learning, teaching, and academic freedom. (I may have missed a few exceptions, but I can’t think of any.)

Click the headline below to read:

So why is it impossible for universities to be truly neutral? Why is neutrality “largely an illusion”?  It may be hard to maintain, and be violated in some schools, but the reason Soucek gives for the “illusory” nature of neutrality (which should apply to many companies, too!) are unconvincing.  I’ll summarize his two main reasons in bold, but indented statements are from the article.

1). Universities sometimes have buildings named after people, expressing admiration for them. And sometimes those names are taken down. Both acts are, says Soucek, political. 

More common are the choices around the names that universities give to their schools, buildings, scholarships and chairs. Schools express something with each of these choices.

At UC Davis, I am lucky to work at King Hall, named after Martin Luther King, Jr., but some neighboring law schools haven’t been so fortunate. UC Berkeley no longer refers to its law school as Boalt Hall, having discovered how grossly anti-Chinese its namesake was. And the first law school in California, once known as UC Hastings, is now UC Law SF—less catchy but no longer associated with the massacre of Native Americans. Renaming efforts may strike some as hopelessly woke, but choosing to keep a name for the sake of tradition, or branding, is no less value laden.

Even the University of Chicago has dealt with this. A few years ago, the university renamed what was formerly its Oriental Institute, partly to avoid the “pejorative connotations” of the word “oriental.” Chicago also quietly gave its Robert A. Millikan chair a new title after other schools had removed Millikan’s name because of his ties to eugenics. In each of these decisions, Chicago, like other universities, did exactly what its former provost, Geoffrey Stone, said universities shouldn’t do: “make a statement about what is morally, politically and socially ‘right’”—and wrong.

Well, sometimes buildings are named after donors, and it may be in the donation papers that the donors’ names must stay on the building.  Renaming the “Oriental Institute,” is not chilling speech, but expressing the faculty’s feeling that the word “Oriental” had bad connotations (thanks, Edward Said). And renaming a chaired professorship in the rush to purge people who had views we considered reprehensible may be something to argue about, but one thing it does not do is chill speech.  There was no official statement about the badness of eugenics (actually, some eugenics is still practiced today, but not in the way it was once conceived). This was simply a renaming. Further, will not see any official statement of our University about eugenics or about prenatal screening for genetic diseases, or aborting genetically defective fetuses. In fact, you will find no official statement in our University about abortion at all.  (I was told that OB-GYN had a big argument about this when the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision, and the upshot was that this medical department could not make any official statement about Dobbs.) That was the right decision. I myself opposed Dobbs, but I would not want universities saying so officially.

This stuff about renaming, while you might be able to squeeze a drop of juice out of it, misses the main point, which is not about names but official statements. The latter chill speech; the former almost never do.

2). Universities have different missions, and so even if they adopt neutrality, they will make different exceptions to neutrality. 

Soucek shows that he misunderstands Kalven when he says stuff like this:

The University of Chicago itself has spoken out on any number of politically fraught issues in recent years, from abortion to DACA to Trump’s Muslim ban, which Chicago filed a legal brief to oppose. Some see this as hypocrisy. I see these choices as evidence of what Chicago considers integral to its mission. In its brief, Chicago claimed it “has a global mission,” which is what justified its stance on immigration law. Not every university shares that global mission; some exist to serve their states, their local community or people who share their faith. We’re not all Chicago, and that is OK. We can be pluralists about universities’ distinctive missions.

First, the University of Chicago has not spoken out officially on abortion. If it has, let Soucek give a reference.There are no official statements I know of.  As far as DACA and banning Muslims, those are both conceived of as limiting the pool of students we could have, and that violates the University’s mission.  This is well known, and doesn’t violate Kalven.  Ergo, “having a global mission” was not the justification for our stands on immigration. Those came from seeing our mission to allow qualified faculty and students to form a diverse community regardless of immigration status.

Second, I am baffled by Soucek’s statements that “some universities exist to serve their states and their local community” (serving faith is okay for religious schools and allows Kalven violations, but faith-based universities are inimical to free thought and as an atheist I don’t approve of them). Even a community college or a state school should maintain institutional neutrality as a way to promote free speech.  “Serving your community” can be one mission of a school, but it’s not one that should allow a school to make official pronouncements on morality, ideology, or politics.

Soucek goes on to explain that he taught a “great books” curriculum at three different schools (Chicago, Columbia, and Boston College, with the latter a Jesuit school, but one that encourages free expression).  Again, with the exception of religious and military schools, most universities should share a similar mission, one that I outlined above. And insofar as they do that, they should have institutional neutrality. Because Columbia and Chicago taught great books courses for different missions (they used to, but no longer!) does not mean they should differ in what political/moral/ideological statements they make officially. It is the commonality of missions that lead to a commonality of reasons for neutrality.

In fact, Soucek himself seems to realize that secular schools shouldn’t make Kalven-violating statements, and in a weird paragraph, he endorses neutrality (bolding is mine).

The real question universities need to be asking, then, isn’t whether some statement, policy or investment strategy counts as “political,” especially in a world where nearly every aspect of higher education has become politicized. Instead, I would replace all of the recent committee reports and neutrality pledges with something like this: “The university or its departments should make official statements only when doing so advances their mission.”

The last paragraph is in fact what institutional neutrality is for.

One more confusing paragraph.  What is the sweating professor trying to say here?

Some issues, for some schools, so thoroughly implicate their mission that they need to be addressed no matter how controversial. Catholic University and the University of California were both right to talk about Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, though in opposite ways, and for different reasons.

Maybe Catholic University was okay to talk about Dobbs, as its stated mission is cultivation of Christianity (read Catholicism) for CU says this in its “aims and goals” statement:

As a Catholic university, it desires to cultivate and impart an understanding of the Christian faith within the context of all forms of human inquiry and values. It seeks to ensure, in an institutional manner, the proper intellectual and academic witness to Christian inspiration in individuals and in the community, and to provide a place for continuing reflection, in the light of Christian faith, upon the growing treasure of human knowledge.

But no, it was not okay for the University of California to talk about Dobbs. I don’t know what they said, but if they officially attacked the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, which is what Dobbs did, they would chill speech of those who are opposed to abortion, and members of the University community should have the right to say that without fear of retribution. Again, Soucek seems to misunderstand why Kalven is there, and gives no reason why the University of California should be okay with violating it.

Soucek also seems to think that maintaining silence in the face of a controversy means that you are taking sides–and defining your “mission”. He’s wrong. Have a gander at this:

More recently, when the Trump administration has denied the existence of transgender people and demanded that universities do so as well, so-called neutrality pledges give them nowhere to hide. If universities must speak out about threats to their mission but can’t speak otherwise, every choice about when to speak ends up defining what their mission is. Staying quiet when trans students, faculty and staff are under attack isn’t silence in that case. It is a loud expression that trans rights, and trans people, aren’t relevant to that school’s mission. There is nothing neutral about that.

In the end, Kalven’s loophole ensures that universities will always be saying something—about their mission, if nothing else—even when they maintain the institutional silence the Kalven Report has become so famous for recommending.

The University is not “hiding” about various transgender controversies. Au contraire, it is encouraging discussion about them by refusing to take any official position, which would squelch debate.  A school not saying anything about Trump’s views on trans people does not mean that the University endorses those views. Rather, each person is free to say what they want without fear of retribution from the school.  I, for example, think that Trump is wrong to ban transgender people from the military. Others may feel differently, and that difference leads to the kind of debate that college is about.  Soucek’s big error is to think that by NOT issuing statements, the University is making statements,  That’s the old ‘silence = violence” trope and again shows the authors’s ignorance of Kalven, an ignorance surprising coming from a professor of constitutional law. Soucek seems a bit short on logic.

As one of my colleagues said:

[Soucek] complains that if the university does not speak up against Trump’s statements about trans people, then trans people are not part of the university’s mission.  Well, that seems reasonable to me.  I don’t see that any particular group or identity is the “university’s mission”, no matter how topical.  Individual faculty, students, and staff who research, treat, and advocate for trans people have that mission. But that’s not the university’s mission.

Is that so hard to understand?

Just when I finished this post, Luana sent me this tweet, saying “I hope he means it.” So do I.

NEW: Harvard President Alan Garber said the University “went wrong” by allowing faculty activism in the classroom, arguing professors’ political views have chilled free speech and debate on campus.@EliseSpenner and @HugoChiassonn report.https://t.co/CsyA2gfQNK

— The Harvard Crimson (@thecrimson) January 3, 2026

Scientists have discovered a rogue planet roaming the Milky Way after combining observations from Earth and a space telescope. This rare dual perspective allowed them to weigh the planet and pinpoint where it lies in the galaxy. With a mass similar to Saturn, the planet likely formed around a star before being thrown out. The finding opens a new window into how planets are lost to interstellar space.

Seeing plastic trash while hiking inspired a Rutgers chemist to rethink why synthetic plastics last forever while natural polymers don’t. By mimicking tiny structural features used in DNA and proteins, researchers designed plastics that remain durable but can be triggered to fall apart naturally. The breakdown speed can be precisely tuned, from days to years, or switched on with light or simple chemical signals. The discovery could reshape everything from food packaging to medicine delivery.

A new study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam shows how gravitational waves from black holes can be used to reveal the presence of dark matter and help determine its properties. The key is a new model, based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, that tracks in detail how a black hole interacts with the surrounding matter.

Scientists have developed molecular devices that can switch roles, behaving as memory, logic, or learning elements within the same structure. The breakthrough comes from precise chemical design that lets electrons and ions reorganize dynamically. Unlike conventional electronics, these devices do not just imitate intelligence but physically encode it. This approach could reshape how future AI hardware is built.

Scientists have developed molecular devices that can switch roles, behaving as memory, logic, or learning elements within the same structure. The breakthrough comes from precise chemical design that lets electrons and ions reorganize dynamically. Unlike conventional electronics, these devices do not just imitate intelligence but physically encode it. This approach could reshape how future AI hardware is built.

Terrestrial planets such as Earth need an early solar system rich in short-lived radioisotopes. But the supernovae that create these elements would tend to rip an early system apart. A new study suggests that these isotopes are produced by a bath of cosmic rays from more distant supernovae.