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Gases collected from boiling mineral springs in Zambia contain the chemical signature of having come directly from the Earth’s mantle, a sign of a rupture in the tectonic plates and the possible beginning of a new continental boundary

Hubble has revealed a giant planet-forming disk unlike anything astronomers have seen before. Nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito,” the enormous structure appears turbulent and oddly lopsided, with towering filaments visible on only one side. The disk contains enough material to potentially create multiple giant planets, making it a fascinating new laboratory for studying how planetary systems are born.

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have created the clearest map yet of the universe’s “cosmic web” — the enormous hidden structure that connects galaxies across space. By analyzing more than 164,000 galaxies through the massive COSMOS-Web survey, researchers were able to trace this vast network back to when the universe was just a billion years old.

A new study by planetary scientists at Harvard offers an explanation for one of Earth’s great climate puzzles: how the Sturtian glaciation, an ancient ice age when the planet was nearly entirely frozen, could have lasted 56 million years. A large igneous province in Canada helped them figure it out.

A new international scientific study by the Hellenic Space Center (HSC) has identified some of the most promising candidate cryovolcanic regions on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. These regions represent important targets for future observations by the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE).

Life on Earth depends on a critical dance of elements throughout the biosphere. One of these elements is Molybdenum, a transition metal that speeds up important biochemical reactions in cells. New research shows that despite its ancient scarcity, and despite the greater availability of other, similar metals, life "chose" Molybdenum earlier than thought.

An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 years ago. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how slings, ostrich eggs and wooden trays helped our ancestors survive

A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging

By the 1960s, two major contributions were made to the field of SETI, both of which considered how more advanced civilizations could be found based on the types of structures they might build and the levels of energy they could harness.

The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always questioned their origins. Now, he has a bold new proposal

Here’s a live Falcon Cam in New Jersey showing a breeding pair of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus).  The FB post about it says that one egg has already started to hatch.  The YouTube notes say this:

Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ is happy to partner with Union County to live stream the view of this peregrine falcon nest, which is located on the roof of the County Courthouse in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This view is from within the nestbox and captures more intimate moments between the breeding pair of falcons.

Tune in from time to time to see the babies.

Reader Jeremy “Jez” Grove went to Saturday’s Rally Against Antisemitism in London (he’s not Jewish, but a friend of the Jews), and sent me a nice report, along with photographs. Although all of us know that England is full of antisemitism these days, what with Jews getting stabbed and having their ambulances and schools set on fire or vandalized, I myself know little about the complex world of British politics, encompassing multiple parties. I was thus able to learn some things about the major parties and their attitude towards Jews.

I’ve indented Jez’s commentary, and the photos are his.

I’m on my way home from the rally against anti-Semitism, which was held outside the gates of Downing Street. Unsurprisingly, our prime minister didn’t manage to make the short walk to address the crowd and stand up against the rampant Jew hatred in the UK. (Instead, the Labour Party was represented by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Pat McFadden, whose empty platitudes were barely audible over the shouts of “Where’s Keir?” and general booing.)

By contrast, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative  Party, was met with rapturous applause and gave a barnstorming speech. I’d never vote Conservative, but Kemi has been outstanding on this issue and the fight for women’s rights.

Here’s part of Badenoch’s speech (you can see the full seven-minute version here):

I stand against antisemitism.

I stand against those people who want Jews to be afraid to go about their lives, and will never allow them to win.

I stand with the Jews of Britain. pic.twitter.com/rKBIs6Q1TX

— Kemi Badenoch (@KemiBadenoch) May 10, 2026

The Liberal Democrats also sent their party leader, Ed Davey. He made the right sounds, but the response from the crowd was pretty lukewarm. That’s probably a reflection of his irrelevancy in British politics and his party’s invisibility on the issue. He’s best known for his ridiculous attention-grabbing stunts – the only surprise was that he didn’t arrive on the stage on a skateboard! (I’m barely joking, btw.)

The Reform UK party (generally seen as right of the Conservatives, but who just won big victories in Labour Party heartlands in our elections on Thursday) sent their deputy leader.

To no-one’s surprise, there was no representative from the (hugely anti-Semitic) Green Party, despite the boasts from their party leader, Zack Polanski, that he’s the only Jewish leader of a British political party.

It’s worth mentioning that there was a decent number of Iranian and Kurdish supporters of Israel present, who got the hearty applause that they deserved.

When I told Jez that it was ironic that the best speech of the day came from a Tory, he answered, “I guess the Tories aren’t much further to the right than your Dems. Maybe they’re even to the left of them – most Tories wouldn’t dare openly saying that they want to dismantle our (socialised) NHS. .”

More:

I’ve attached a photo of the October Declaration flag. It was good to be amongst so many like-minded people standing up against anti-Semitism. Hopefully, the full event will be available to watch at some point soon.

Here’s the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s report on today’s rally. It contains a list of the speakers and some extracts from their speeches

Here are some of my (not very good) photos:

The airport-style security arches (I don’t believe that these have been required for pro-Palestine marches – because there has been no security threat posed to them): Note that the Jewish Community Security Trust (CST) felt it necessary to be present behind the London Metropolitan Police’s own barrier:

The  view looking from Trafalgar Square towards the stage outside Downing Street. One of the speakers claimed that the crowd was 20,000 strong. That seemed high to me, but given the security arrangements may have been a more accurate figure than is usual for protests of this type:

The view looking from Downing Street towards Trafalgar Square . This photo was taken before everyone had arrived:

Support from the Iranians. The group were applauded as they left at the end of the event chanting “Long live Iran! Long live Israel”. They were also thanked for their presence from the stage as were those flying Kurdish flags:

Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition (leader of the Conservative Party). Her speech is here:  [JAC: it’s above along with a link to her full speech]:

The pale blue flags are held by non-Jews who signed the October Declaration in support of Jews following the 7th October atrocities:

A guy holding a “This Mensch is with You” sign:

More:

I can’t remember who today’s speaker was who said he’d recently met the prime minister. And the PM audibly gasped when he was told that one synogogue alone was spending £20,000 a month on security. And the PM assured him that the “full weight of the law” would be used against those who had tried to burn down another synagogue. The speaker told him, “The 17-year-old suspect has just been released on bail and the only condition is that he doesn’t enter any synogogue”. The prime minister gasped again. But he didn’t have the guts to show up today. And nor did the deputy prime minister, or the chancellor, or any of the big names from the government’s cabinet. Instead, the Labour Party sent Pat McFadden (Secretary of State for the department of Work and Pensions). Only a political geek (guilty as charged) would know who he is. (My politically engaged wife recognised his name but couldn’t name his post.)

Shame on Labour – but even more shame on the anti-Semitic Green Party of England and Wales, who had two electoral candidates arrested for horrendous social media posts. [From the Guardian link below, the posts came from Saiqa Ali, a Lambeth Green candidate for Streatham St Leonard’s ward, and Sabine Mairey, who was standing in Lambeth’s Clapham Town.]

And according to the BBC, arrests were made of people trying to get knives into the rally.

When I asked Jez what those odious Green Party social media posts said, he responded:

The Guardian (!) reported (I can’t seem to do indented quotes, but what follows is all from The Guardian article archived here.

‘Ali’s Instagram account is set to private but screenshots indicated she had posted an image of an armed man wearing a headband of the banned Islamist group Hamas along with the slogan: “Resistance is freedom”.

Another screenshot indicated that Mairey had shared a post which included the text: “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge.” ‘

Mark Sturtevant is back with some arthropod photos for us. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Today we have another set of pictures of arthropods from my area in eastern Michigan. Some of these were taken in the field and others were in a staged setting on the faithful dining room table.

During recent summers, I have been using cheap black lights on the front and back porch to attract more insects, and many new species have arrived as a result. One was this floofy moth that is clearly in the tiger moth (Arctiidae) family, but it was new to me. I believe this to be Spilosoma latipennis. If so, it should have hot pink legs, as shown in the link, but I did not know at the time to check for that:

Another arrival was this species of chafer beetle. This is an Oriental Beetle (Anomala orientalis). It is an invasive species from Asia that is becoming a minor pest here on turf grasses and other plants:

Moving on to spiders, here is a new species of spider called the Western Lynx Spider (Oxyopes scalaris). Lynx spiders can be easily recognized by their form, and especially by those prominent leg spines. They are sit-and-wait predators on plants. This male was missing one of its pedipalps, so I used editing tricks to replace it:

Next up is a lovely Orchard Orbweaver (Leucauge venusta), which had built its web across a seldom-used path in the woods. I had to stand on tippy-toes to get several partial focus stacks, and this final picture was grafted together by hand, piece by piece from those pictures. I really like their iridescent abdomens that look like antique porcelain, and those beautiful green legs. She was eating an unidentified Syrphid fly:

The next two pictures show a flashy jumping spider that I have only seen a few times. This is the Thin-spined Jumping Spider (Tutelina elegans), but to me it will always be called ‘the purple jumper’. The pictures were both taken in a staged setting, where the first is a focus stack, again needing much assembly, and the second was a “lucky shot” single frame. Lucky because she never once stood still, and she was always waving her front legs. I wonder if these spiders are trying to be ant mimics:

Back to insects. Folks here will have seen this one many times now, but it is still special. This is the Wasp Mantidfly (Climaciella brunnea). I won’t repeat again the improbable life cycle it has as a parasitoid on spider egg sacs. You can clearly see that it shows convergent evolution on praying mantids, and at the same time it is a wasp mimic. More specifically, it mimics various species and regional color variations of paper wasps (Polistes sp.). A detail about that which I think is really neat are its two-toned pigmented wings, which is an ersatz way to get its wings to resemble the wings of its models.

I show our local model wasp (P. fuscatus) in the next picture for comparison. Paper wasps have an extra crease that folds their wings length-wise, so the wings are dark and narrow. The mantidfly does not have the crease, so it fakes it with pigment:

Speaking of mantids, I finish with an amusing story about the next picture. This is a Chinese Praying Mantis (Tenodera sinensis), in hand, and the picture was taken with the Opteka 15mm wide angle macro lens. This fully manual lens is the most difficult lens that I own since to get the depth of focus that is much of the point for this kind of photography, one has to stop down the aperture to about f/32. As a result you are taking pictures with a pinhole camera, and focusing is done by guesstimation. Meanwhile, the working distances are extremely short so an insect subject is practically touching the lens. Anyway, she wasn’t having any of it, and quite honestly I was having a hard time keeping this big girl under control. So I made a short movie about the struggle, and attached an appropriate sound track to it. For those who have handled one of these insects, you know they will do what they want to do, and what they want to do is climb:

Sound up for the movie!

Scientists have pulled off a mind-bending quantum experiment that sounds almost impossible: they showed that tiny metal particles made of thousands of atoms can exist in multiple places at once. Using advanced laser techniques, researchers at the University of Vienna observed quantum interference in sodium nanoparticles far larger than the kinds of particles usually seen behaving this way. The finding pushes quantum mechanics into a new realm, suggesting that even surprisingly “large” objects still obey the bizarre rules of the quantum world.

Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry

The search for Earth 2.0 has begun in earnest. But there’s a huge variety of exoplanets out there, so narrowing down the search to focus valuable telescope time on only the best candidates is critical. One variable of a planet that will have a huge impact on its habitability is its size. A new paper, now available in pre-print on arXiv, by researchers at the University of California Riverside, looks into the impact of a planet’s size on one of its more critical features for habitability - whether it holds onto an atmosphere - and determines that slightly smaller than Earth is likely the smallest a planet can be and still be viable for life to develop.

If I were a UFO enthusiast, someone who believes that some UFOs (now UAPs) are aliens visiting the Earth and that the US government knows this and is covering it up, I would be really disappointed. I might engage in some serious motivated reasoning to convince myself that the recent release of documents by the Pentagon was somehow dramatic, but down deep how could you escape crushing devastation. Lucy once again put the football out there for Charlie Brown and then yanked it.

Trump wrote that his administration will, “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” The Pentagon announced they will make their files available to the public. The NASA director applauded this transparency. The media is now hyping up these
“never before seen” documents.

And the result – an absolute nothingburger. We get more indistinct blobs, dots of light, blurry nothings, camera artifacts, and stories of people seeing dots of light. The Pentagon acknowledges – there is no evidence that any of these things are alien phenomena, but also that some of the blobs and lights have not been fully explained. So we are exactly where we have always been – there is no compelling or unambiguous evidence of aliens. Believers can weave whatever anomaly-hunting stories they want from the terrible evidence. Skeptics will continue to point out that the evidence does not tell us anything. Conspiracy theorists will continue to argue that the government is covering up the “real” evidence, and this data dump must be a false flag.

What was not in the data dump from the Pentagon? There were no alien bodies. The US government is not in the possession of an alien spacecraft or any part of an alien spacecraft. There were no unambiguous alien artifacts. There were no videos or pictures of clear alien spacecraft or aliens. There was no evidence that would have ended the debate. The government did not acknowledge that it was ever covering anything up about aliens.

There were also no obvious fakes – no “alien autopsy” videos, no shaky flying saucers, no CG videos. These were all, at least, legitimate pictures and videos. That’s why their quality was so consistently terrible. As I have said numerous times – the low quality of the evidence is the phenomenon. UAPs are low quality evidence by definition, because high quality evidence is not unidentified. It is not the strangeness of the phenomena that makes it hard to identify definitively, it is the low quality of the evidence. When objects come into focus, they are birds, planes, balloons, and other aircraft.

The simplest explanation for this situation is – aliens are not visiting the Earth, or if they are they have the technology to remain completely hidden from us. So we are just getting the residue of low quality evidence that the Pentagon was unable to explain, a residue that will always exist given enough data and is not predictive that something strange is going on. It would be remarkable if the Pentagon were able to positively identify 100% of every blurry photo or blob of light one of their people ever recorded.

UFO skeptics like Mick West will spend some time carefully examining videos to show that the claims of enthusiasts are not accurate and nothing preternatural is going on. Some of the videos look like birds to me – when you are flying above a bird which is flying over the water it creates the illusion that the bird is moving much faster than it is. Some are clearly camera artifact, like the star distortion patterns or afterglow. These careful analyses are convincing to skeptics and dismissed by believers.

How is the mainstream media dealing with these Pentagon releases? Total failure, in my opinion. They talk about it with a smile and a glint in their eye – “Ooh, we get to talk about UFO’s with a veneer of legitimacy because it’s coming from the Pentagon.” But they give no context, no useful analysis, and often not a hint of skepticism. At most you get a dry qualifier, “The Pentagon says there is no evidence of aliens,” but that’s like the fine print that wizzes by in a commercial. Some of the more gullible journalists think there is actually something going on here, likely because of profound ignorance of the UFO phenomenon over the last 80 years. They often don’t even feel the need for token skepticism.

If you are holding out for the really juicy evidence to be released in a later batch – don’t hold your breath. It seems unreasonable to assume that the Pentagon is holding onto smoking gun evidence at this point, and starting off with a bunch of crap. To think the government is holding on to solid evidence at this point you need to believe that Trump is impotent on this issue, or that he is lying and is now part of the cover up. Neither of these hypotheses seem likely. As is typical, you have to deepen the conspiracy in order to explain away the lack of credible evidence.

I know I have said all of the above before – because there is nothing new or interesting in the Pentagon release. As I said – this is all more of the same, and everything remains status quo. UAPs are all blurry nothings and fish stories. There is no compelling evidence of aliens. The government is not covering up their knowledge of aliens. The press are loving the clickbait. I can only hope more people will see this as the giant nothing it is.

The post Pentagon Releases More Boring UFO Videos first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is about to pull off a dramatic close flyby of Mars, skimming just 2,800 miles above the planet to get a powerful gravitational boost on its journey to the mysterious metal-rich asteroid Psyche. The maneuver will save propellant while giving mission scientists a rare chance to test and calibrate the spacecraft’s instruments using Mars as a target. As Psyche approaches from the planet’s dark side, it’s expected to capture striking crescent views of Mars, search for faint dust rings around the planet, and even gather magnetic and cosmic ray data during the encounter.

PNAS recently published credulous nonsense about acupuncture so bad that I thought it couldn't be topped. "Hold my beer!" cried National Geographic, as it proceeded to top PNAS.

The post More credulous nonsense about acupuncture, this time from National Geographic first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

NASA’s Curiosity rover had an unexpectedly stubborn Mars souvenir after drilling into a rock nicknamed “Atacama” — the entire chunk ripped loose from the ground and stayed stuck to the rover’s drill. Engineers watched as Curiosity shook, vibrated, tilted, and spun the drill over several days in an effort to free the rock, while cameras captured the strange scene on the Red Planet.