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A remarkably clean gravitational-wave detection has confirmed long-standing predictions about black holes, including Hawking’s area theorem and Einstein’s ringdown behavior. The findings also provide the strongest support yet that real black holes follow the Kerr model.

A remarkably clean gravitational-wave detection has confirmed long-standing predictions about black holes, including Hawking’s area theorem and Einstein’s ringdown behavior. The findings also provide the strongest support yet that real black holes follow the Kerr model.

A hybrid grolar bear saga is unfolding in the Arctic, and the tale of this strange family has much to tell us about nature on our changing planet

Children regularly exposed to temperatures over 30°C (86°F) have lower scores on literacy and numeracy tests at age 3 to 4, according to UNICEF data from six countries

We have a bunch of kangaroo photos from Scott Ritchie of Cairns, Australia. Scott’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. (His Facebook page is here.)

My last report from my Melbourne to Sydney trip. From Depot Beach New South Wales. It was epic. We stayed in a national park cabin that looked out over the ocean. And at 5 o’clock our front lawn became the bar for Eastern Grey Kangaroos [Macropus giganteus]. And in the morning, you could take pictures of the kangaroos watching the sunrise. What could be better for a boy from Iowa?

We had a ringside seat for roos. Would have been over a dozen here, not including joeys in the pouch:

The boys like a bit of rough and tumble:

They are smart to avoid those claws: ..just barely:

Squaring off:

I missed the kick shot. A sudden loud thump. Then the fight was over. One kick!:

I don’t know how this is going work!:

But somehow it does:

White-faced Heron [Egretta novaehollandiae] loves a roo too:

Cute:

Hanging loose:

Just in time for smoko:

I love pan pipes:

It’s a tight fit:

Come on big fella. I’m already familied up:

 

Sunrise at Depot Beach:

Roo at sunrise:

Great way to start the day:

Isn’t it lovely?

A new study reinforces the evidence for the safety and efficacy of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. That’s the TLDR, but let’s dive into the details.

Medical evidence is always rolled out in stages. First there is what we would consider preclinical evidence, or basic science. This could be initial uncontrolled clinical observations, or mechanistic animal or in vitro research. At some point we have sufficient evidence to generate a hypothesis that a specific treatment could be effective in treating a specific disease, enough to progress to human research. For FDA qualifying research, there are four specific phases. Phase I trials look at the safety of the intervention in usually healthy controls, while also answering basic questions and mechanism and effects. If there are no safety red-flags then the research progressed to a phase II trial, which look for preliminary evidence of efficacy, and further safety data. Again, if that data continues to look encouraging we can progress to a phase III trial, which is a larger and more rigorous trial designed to be definitive. Usually the FDA requires several phase III trials to grant approval of a drug for a specific indication. Then, once on the market there is phase IV trials, which look at data from more widespread use to confirm safety and effectiveness in the real world.

Looked at another way, we do research in the lab, then on dozens of people, then score to hundreds of people, then hundreds to thousands of people, and then finally on thousands to millions of people. Each step of the way we gain the ability to detect less and less common side effects in a broader set of people. Further, the types of evidence are designed to be complementary. Phase III trials, for example, are rigorously experimental, with highly defined populations with randomization to control as many variables as possible. Phase IV trials, on the other hand, are generally observational, designed to look at very large numbers of people in an uncontrolled setting – to determine how safe and effective the treatment is in real-world conditions.

The mRNA vaccines for COVD all went through phase I-III trials before getting approval. Operation Warp Speed to accelerate the process was not about cutting corners, but about doing the trials more in parallel rather than sequentially (they could at least begin to recruit for the phase III trial while the phase II data was still being analyzed) and streamlining the red tape, but the science still had to get done. Since the vaccine has been in use we have the opportunity to gather phase IV type data. Billions of people have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, so that is a lot of data to pour through.

In the recent study:

“This cohort study used data from the French National Health Data System for all individuals in the French population aged 18 to 59 years who were alive on November 1, 2021. Data analysis was conducted from June 2024 to September 2025.”

Some countries have socialized medicine including centralized health data banks, which allows for very convenient sources for such observational research. This study was able to compare 22 ,767, 546 vaccinated and 5, 932, 443 unvaccinated individuals. The strength of this kind of study is that it is very representative, because it is so inclusive, and it is statistically robust. The challenge is that it is uncontrolled, so there is always potential confounding factors – differences between those who choose to get vaccinated or not get vaccinated. So how do the researchers deal with these confounding factors? Through weighting of the evidence.

They looked at sociodemographic characteristics and 41 comorbidities and then weighted the results accordingly. They could still be missing something, but that is a pretty thorough analysis. Their main outcomes were death due to COVID-19 and all-cause mortality over a four year period. They also did a separate analysis for all-cause mortality in the six months following vaccination. For the unvaccinated group, another end-point was getting vaccinated (after which, of course, they were no longer considered vaccinated).

The results are fairly dramatic. The vaccinated group had a 74% lower risk of death from COVID-19, indicating that the vaccine is effective in preventing death from COVID. But also, over the four year period the vaccinated group had a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality, even when you eliminate death from COVID. Mortality was 29% lower in the first six months after getting vaccinated.

This data pretty clearly reflects that the mRNA vaccines were effective, at least in preventing death from severe COVID. The data is also very reassuring that the vaccines are safe. There could still be extremely rare, one in a million type side effects, but there does not appear to be any significant negative effects from the vaccine that could contribute to the risk of death. Medical interventions are all about risk vs benefit – no intervention is risk free, so having zero risk is not a rational or reasonable criterion. What we like to see is a robust increased benefit vs risk.

The bottom line is that if you chose to get an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 you were much less likely to die of either COVID-19 or all-cause mortality. Clearly there is significant benefit in excess of any risk, which all the data indicates is tiny.

The post New Study on the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Small bursts of mindfulness practices lasting a minute or less can have unexpected benefits for those with busy lives - here’s how

Do I really need to go over the evidence for dark matter again? Okay, fine, for those of you in the back who weren’t paying attention the first time.

Removing, or “scrubbing”, carbon dioxide from the air of confined spaces is a critical component of any life support system on a spacecraft or submarine. However, modern day ones are energy intensive, requiring temperatures of up to 200℃ to operate. So a research lab led by Dr. Hui He at Guangxi University in China has developed what they call “micro/nano reconfigurable robots” (MNRM) to scrub CO2 from the air much more efficiently. Their work is described in a new paper in Nano-Micro Letters.

Researchers have built a fully implantable device that sends light-based messages directly to the brain. Mice learned to interpret these artificial patterns as meaningful signals, even without touch, sight, or sound. The system uses up to 64 micro-LEDs to create complex neural patterns that resemble natural sensory activity. It could pave the way for next-generation prosthetics and new therapies.

The idea that we might be living in a simulated reality has worried us for centuries. Now physicists have found some tantalising clues – and devised an experiment that might reveal the truth

The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met last week, eliminating the universal recommendation for the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. There was, however, a more insidious threat to vaccines in a White House press release after the meeting.

The post “Best practices”: The buzzword that the Trump administration will use to eliminate as many vaccines as RFK Jr. can first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

XRISM’s high-precision X-ray data revealed unusually strong signatures of chlorine and potassium inside the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant. These levels are far higher than theoretical models predicted, showing that supernovae can be major sources of these life-critical elements. Researchers believe powerful mixing deep inside massive stars is responsible for the unexpected boost. The findings reshape our understanding of how the building blocks of planets and life were created.

XRISM’s high-precision X-ray data revealed unusually strong signatures of chlorine and potassium inside the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant. These levels are far higher than theoretical models predicted, showing that supernovae can be major sources of these life-critical elements. Researchers believe powerful mixing deep inside massive stars is responsible for the unexpected boost. The findings reshape our understanding of how the building blocks of planets and life were created.

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists believe they may have resolved a 39-year-old mystery about the radiation belts around Uranus.

This eclectic ZeFrank video was sent to me via reader Keith, who notes that ZeFrank is also on an “educational channel” containing videos that have been bowdlerized for educational use. But this one isn’t on it, and I think we’re all adults here. (“Jerry”, referred to several times, must be the producer.)

The first bit is about nematodes (“roundworms”), which inhabit a variety of environments and have a variety of lifestyles, including gross but fascinating parasites.  The discussion of how parasitic nematodes infect insects, using electrostatic charge, is amazing, and the same method is used by ticks and mites. (There’s an ad between 4:22 and 5:38 but it’s for Planet Wild, which has a good mission.)

We then learn that electrostatic fields promote the pollination of flowers by bees. We also see again how bees use thoracic vibration to gather pollen, something that Athayde Tonhasca Júnior wrote about the other day. Finally, we get a lesson on the physics of how hatchling spiders disperse by spinning threads that they release into the atmosphere to drag them away from the hatch site: this is a way of finding a new and possibly better habitat.

As usual, the video is terrific and the science accurate.

 

This morning I posted a photo showing animal tracks in the snow. Here it is again, along with a bonus photo:

Well, it’s not a d*g or cat or squirrel. Nope, it’s one of my friends whom I often see walking to work.  Here’s a photo taken in 2012:

Yep, it’s an Eastern cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus). Several of them live near the spot where I took the photos above, and there’s no doubt in my mind.  If you want confirmation, check the photos from a Google search of “rabbit tracks in snow”. ]

Why the big prints followed by small ones?  Backpack explains:

As it hops, an animal’s smaller front feet tend to land first, followed by the larger back feet, which plant ahead of the front feet. Picture a rabbit planting its front paws and swinging its back paws in front as it bounces through the snow. Clumps of four prints indicate that a hopper has passed through.

Well, it looks as though the front feet often land in the same small area, but there’s no doubt it’s a bunny. And, like me, Mr. Bun-Bun is bereft of food, for the grass he eats is covered with snow.

How much genetic difference separates us from our closest relatives? The conventional wisdom about humans and our closest ape relatives (chimps and bonobos) is that we share 98% of our DNA. That’s a big similarity, and implies that if we lined up our genomes side by side, only about 2 out of 100 DNA bases would differ. This figure is often used to show that we have only a tiny genetic difference from our closest relatives. To quote W. S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, “Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.”  Well, the differences go farther than mere shaving.

The “98% similarity figure” is wrong. And it’s wrong for several reasons. First, most ape genomes (chimps, gorillas, orangs, etc.) have not been as thoroughly sequenced as was the human genome. A lot of the data that went into the 98% figure was missing.  Second, you can’t just compare genomes by lining them up and looking for differences in base pairs at similar sequences.

Why not? Because the notion of “similar sequences” is ambiguous and, sometimes, meaningless. Since we diverged from our ape ancestors, there have been a lot of changes in every species’ DNA that prohibit us from simply “lining up the genomes”.  Transposable elements have invaded some species but not others, bits of the DNA have been duplicated, so there are species that have sequences that are not homologous. Bits of the genome have been inverted (turned around and reinserted), causing big differences in sequence in previously similar sequences. Further, pieces of the DNA have been moved from one chromosome to another, so DNA sequences previously in the same place are now in another place, leading to a difference in total sequence.

All this leads to a substantially greater DNA divergence between humans and chimps than the 98% figure.  These extra genomic differences were sussed out by Yoo et al. in a Nature paper  from April of last year that you can read by clicking below (or find the pdf here).They did a much improved job in sequencing six of our ape relatives: the chimp (Pan troglodytes), bonobo (Pan paniscus), Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii), and the siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus), an endangered species of gibbon from SE Asia.

First, the authors give a revised set of divergence times based on DNA differences between living species.  The human vs. chimp/bonobo species, for example, split from their common ancestor about 5.5-6.3 million years ago (mya), roughly in line with previous estimates. The divergence between humans and other African apes (gorillas) occurred between 10.6 and 10.9 mya, and that between humans and orangutans about 18.2-19.6 mya.

There is a ton of genomic information in the paper, including a lessening of the similarity between humans and chimps, but also specific information about what genes and regulatory bits of DNA differ among species. These differences suggest some some intriguing future research. I’ll mention just a couple, but will refer you instead to a long tweet below which shows why the human-chimp differences have increased. It’s an excellent tweet that you can read pretty quickly, though it doesn’t detail all the many differences that the researchers describe in the Nature paper, which is exhausting for those outside the field. There are also genes whose sequences changed very rapidly, suggesting that they were acted on by natural selection.

There are a gazillion sequence and structural differences revealed among the species, including 229 bits of ape DNA (all species) that have evolved rapidly and are thus candidates for natural selection. The paper also reveals parts of the DNA that have evolved especially rapidly in the human lineage since we split from chimps/bonobos. These regions are called HAQERS, and could be candidates for the Holy Grail of such work: seeing “what makes us human”. But that question is a bit misguided.

Nevertheless, the authors found one gene, ADCYAP1, that “is differentially regulated in speech circuits.” The implication is that the changes may have something to do with why humans are the only ape with syntactic spoken language, but that gene does a lot of other stuff, too, so I don’t take that implication seriously. The FOXP2 gene, which evolved rapidly in the modern human genome relative to other species, has mutations that impede people’s ability to speak, and I well remember when it was touted as “the language gene” that enabled humans to speak. But further research showed that the accelerated human evolution of the gene was an artifact, and that the normal function of the gene is manyfold, so nobody these days takes FOXP2 seriously as the “speech gene”. All claims should be regarded as caveat emptor.

There are also several genes that are not only unique to humans, but are “associated with human evolution of the frontal cortex”, suggesting these account for our big brains. The photo below comes from the tweet shown next, and its caption comes from that tweet. (The average chimp brain is about 400 g in mass—less than a third the mass of the human brain, which weighs in at 1300-1400 g in adults.)  Again, caveat emptor with regard to the two specified genes.

Figure 3. Radiograph illustrating cranial expansion in the human lineage, which is associated with increased neocortical growth – Chimpanzee skull (left), Modern Human skull (right).

Other genes that differ strongly among ape species involve those producing immunoglobulin, major histocompatibility products (MCH) and T-cell receptors, but especially immunoglobulin genes—involved in production of antibodies. Why have these evolved so rapidly within apes? Your guess is as good as mine, but suggests that reaction to antigens was an important element of ape evolution.

Here is the authors’ summary, and most of the paper will be of interest only to geneticists familiar with the argot (not necessarily me):

The complete sequencing of the ape genomes analysed in this study significantly refines previous analyses and provides a valuable resource for all future evolutionary comparisons. These include an improved and more nuanced understanding of species divergence, human-specific ancestral alleles, incomplete lineage sorting, gene annotation, repeat content, divergent regulatory DNA and complex genic regions as well as species-specific epigenetic differences involving methylation. These preliminary analyses revealed hundreds of new candidate genes and regions to account for phenotypic differences among the apes. For example, we observed an excess of HAQERS corresponding to bivalent promoters thought to contain gene-regulatory elements that exhibit precise spatiotemporal activity patterns in the context of development and environmental response99. Bivalent chromatin-state enrichments have not yet been observed in fast-evolving regions from other great apes, which may reflect limited cross-species transferability of epigenomic annotations from humans. The finding of a HAQER-enriched gene, ADCYAP1, that is differentially regulated in speech circuits and methylated in the layer 5 projection neurons that make the more specialized direct projections to brainstem motor neurons in humans shows the promise of T2T genomes to identify hard to sequence regions important for complex traits. Perhaps most notably, we provide an evolutionary framework for understanding the about 10–15% of highly divergent, previously inaccessible regions of ape genomes. In this regard, we highlight a few noteworthy findings.

The importance of the paper for now seems to be the presentation of the sequences and their differences rather than explaining the differences or their significance in ape adaptations—especially in humans—for studying adaptive hypotheses involves a lot of work for each single region that differs among species or evolved quickly. Nevertheless, useful questions have been raised—like why genes involved in the immune response changed so rapidly—that will be subject to future work.

I am not sure who runs the Origins Unveiled site dealing with evolutionary anthropology, but based on the clarity of the tweet below from that site (click on screenshot to see the tweet in situ), it deserves more followers. It’s only about a year old, which may explain the follower issue.

This tweet from September of this year explains why the 98% similarity between humans and chimps drops to 84.7% when you take translocations, inversion, duplications, insertions, and other genomic rearrangements into account. And these rearrangements are not necessarily trivial, for duplications can lead to divergent gene families, and insertions can act to regulate genes in a new way.

Again, click below and read; it’s short and lucid:

I’ve shown one figure from the tweet above: the brain differences. Below is another figure showing how the 99% similarity between humans and chimps has traditionally been calculated, requiring alignment of nearly identical but perhaps slightly different bits of DNA. All captions come from the tweet. This figure shows how they line up chimp and human sequences (you see the gross similarity), but also that here there’s been a single nucleotide substitution in one of the two lineages, rendering this sequence 92.3% similar. (This is a made-up sequence for purposes of illustration.)  When you did that with the whole genome comparison based on earlier data, you got about a 2% difference. The problem, as I said, is that we didn’t have great chimp (or any ape) sequences and there are parts that you simply couldn’t line up this way. And those parts, when compared among species, increase the genetic difference between us and our closest relatives.

Figure 1 — Simplified Mock Alignment Illustrating Nucleotide Sequence Similarity Between Chimpanzee and Human Genomes. Out of 13 positions, one substitution (single-nucleotide variant, circled in red) results in ~92.3% DNA similarity. This example demonstrates the methodology behind the misleading 98–99% human-chimpanzee DNA similarity figures.

Below is another figure showing how various rearrangements, insertions, deletions, and translocations reduce similarity, but I’ll show only four of the six parts of the figure, giving the captions for a-d. You can see how these changes make humans and chimps less genetically similar than previously thought (again, captions come from the tweet; click to enlarge).  These are also “mock alignments” meant for purposes of illustration, but they do show the kind of thing seen in the Yoo et al. paper:

Figure 2 — Simplified Mock Alignments Illustrating Structural Variation Between Chimpanzee and Human Genomes. Note: Structural variants are not taken into account when calculating the 98–99% Chimpanzee-Human DNA similarity figures.
( a) Insertions and deletions contributing to sequence divergence. Out of 34 positions, 3 indels (insertions circled in orange; deletions in yellow) result in ~91.2% DNA similarity. Note: These indels are relative, as without a suitable outgroup (i.e. gorilla), an insertion in one genome appears as a deletion in the other.
(b) Duplication contributing to sequence divergence. Out of 34 positions, a duplication of 12 bases (duplicated segment encircled in blue; original in purple) results in ~64.7% DNA similarity.
(c) Inversion contributing to sequence divergence. Out of 34 positions, an inversion of 11 bases (encircled in green) results in ~67.6% DNA similarity. Note: Although bases may match within the inverted region, they do not contribute to sequence similarity due to misalignment. Without a suitable outgroup (i.e. gorilla), it is unknown whether the inversion occurred on the chimpanzee or human genome.
(d) Translocation contributing to sequence divergence. Out of 34 positions, a translocation of 20 bases (encircled in brown) results in ~41.2% DNA similarity. Note: A translocation is a DNA segment that has been “copy and pasted” or “cut and pasted” from another part of the genome.

So, when you hear that we’re nearly genetically identical to our closest relatives, just say, “Wait a tick. Not all that identical.” We have about 15% difference in sequence, which is not trivial.

UPDATE: I’m aware now that creationists and IDers have been using this 85% to cast doubt on human evolution, our place in the ape family tree, and whether evolutionists are honest.  This is bogus: the 85% vs. 98% depends on two different methods of calculating similarity. Which ever method you choose (alignment vs. total genomic similarity), the same family tree of the great apes appears, with chimps/bonobos our closest ancestors, then gorillas a bit more distance, and then orangutans, and then other apes.  The point of this post is not to cast doubt on human or ape evolution, but to show different ways of calculating genetic similarity.

Today we have some marine mammal photos taken by Marcel van Oijen. Marcel’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  Here’s a screenshot of the site, the island of Inchkeith:

Seal pup counting on the island of Inchkeith

Marcel van Oijen

The island of Inchkeith lies a few km from Scotland’s capital Edinburgh in the Firth of Forth, the sea-arm to the north. The last human to live on the island, the lighthouse-keeper, left in 1986. (The lighthouse is now controlled remotely from Edinburgh as are most lighthouses in Scotland.) Wildlife has since come back, and there is now a thriving colony of grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) producing around 900 pups each year. I took the photos below during the pup count of 29 November organised by the Forth Islands Heritage Group of volunteers.

This is near the harbour where we arrived, and we had to be careful not to get too close. Fortunately the female was busy keeping the male away from her pup. Cannibalism does happen occasionally.

Looking back to the harbour with the second group of volunteers just arriving. Note the many seals on the beach and in the water

Mating couple. The female life cycle is intense: a few weeks after giving birth and after the pup is weaned, they can be impregnated again:

This pup has moulted (i.e., lost its fluffy white baby-coat called the lanugo), so it will be three to four weeks old. At that age pups will be weaned and have to fend for themselves.

Two young pups who have just begun moulting, starting from the head:

Female seals carefully watching us:

This pup is nearly done moulting, some fluff left on top:

A moulted pup with an unusual colour, not the standard dappled grey:

Overview of ‘our’ patch of the island where we counted around 200 pups:

The most affectionate mother we saw on the island. She occasionally rolled on her back with eyes closed but always kept patting her pup with her front flipper:

Looking back to Inchkeith with fond memories!:

Knotted structures once imagined by Lord Kelvin may actually have shaped the universe’s earliest moments, according to new research showing how two powerful symmetries could have created stable “cosmic knots” after the Big Bang. These exotic objects may have briefly dominated the young cosmos, unraveled through quantum tunneling, and produced heavy right-handed neutrinos whose decays tipped the balance toward matter over antimatter.