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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists analyzed far-away bodies -- known as Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) -- and found varying traces of methanol. The discoveries are helping them better classify different TNOs and understand the complex chemical reactions in space that may relate to the formation of our solar system and the origin of life.

Researchers developed a more efficient way to control the outputs of a large language model, guiding it to generate text that adheres to a certain structure, like a programming language, and remains error free.

Combining two different kinds of signals could help engineers build prosthetic limbs that better reproduce natural movements, according to a new study. A combination of electromyography and force myography is more accurate at predicting hand movements than either method by itself.

Combining two different kinds of signals could help engineers build prosthetic limbs that better reproduce natural movements, according to a new study. A combination of electromyography and force myography is more accurate at predicting hand movements than either method by itself.

A new study uses AI to modify drug doses for personalized cancer treatment.

Carbon-containing meteorites look like they had less severe impacts than those without carbon because the evidence was blasted into space by gases produced during the impact. The discovery not only solves a 30-year-old mystery, but also provides guidelines for a future sampling mission to Ceres.

An international team has explored how in future aerial robots could process construction materials precisely in the air -- an approach with great potential for difficult-to-access locations or work at great heights. The flying robots are not intended to replace existing systems on the ground, but rather to complement them in a targeted manner for repairs or in disaster areas, for instance.

An international team has explored how in future aerial robots could process construction materials precisely in the air -- an approach with great potential for difficult-to-access locations or work at great heights. The flying robots are not intended to replace existing systems on the ground, but rather to complement them in a targeted manner for repairs or in disaster areas, for instance.

When bottom trawls are dragged across the seafloor, they stir up sediments. This not only releases previously stored organic carbon, but also intensifies the oxidation of pyrite, a mineral present in marine sediments, leading to additional emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2).

Scientists developed a machine-learning tool that can teach itself, with minimal external guidance, to differentiate between aerial images of flowering and nonflowering grasses -- an advance that will greatly increase the pace of agricultural field research, they say. The work was conducted using images of thousands of varieties of Miscanthus grasses, each of which has its own flowering traits and timing.

Plant-based seafood alternatives should have similar flavors, textures and nutritional content to the foods they mimic. And recreating the properties of fried calamari rings, which have a neutral flavor and a firm, chewy texture after being cooked, has been a challenge. Building off previous research, a team describes successfully using plant-based ingredients to mimic calamari that matches the real seafood's characteristic softness and elasticity.

Researchers trained and validated a deep learning model that can detect subtle changes across post-treatment brain scans and forecast glioma recurrence with up to 89 percent accuracy.

New research can transform how hospitals triage, risk-stratify, and counsel patients to save lives.

We associate complex chemistry with planets or other bodies, where energy and matter interact in dynamic associations. But as science advances, researchers are finding prebiotic chemistry in a wider variety of places, including in space itself. New research shows that some prebiotic chemicals, part of the recipe for life itself, can form in the cold vacuum of space.

The NYT’s associate editor Lauren Jackson is doing a year-long series on “belief” for the paper. In her latest piece (click below to read, or find it archived here), she pulls out all the stops, averring the several points that we’ve seen appearing over and over again in the MSM. To wit:

1.) America needs religion to hang together as a society. Religious people by almost any measure are happier, less lonely, more educated, and more well off than nonbelievers. That, she implies, is a reason to believe, even though she herself is a nonbeliever. (I guess she has “belief in belief”.)

2.) But religion is waning in America (this is based on a Pew survey that shows that the “Christian share of the U.S. population stabilizes.” But look at the data below she adduces! It’s pretty pathetic, showing a decline over two years as the percentage of “Americans who identify as Christian”, a figure that has been fairly constant since 2019 at about 63%. This is after nearly 20 years of a steady decline. The percentage of “nones” (people not affiliated with a particular denomination) has also dropped by 2-3% in one year (2022-2023) and all this has heartened believers (or “believers in belief”) to cheer for the perceived resurgence of religion in America.

3.) Jackson, an ex-Mormon and now nonbeliever, nevertheless applauds this trend as well, for, after she left the Latter-day Saints, she never found the happiness and connection she achieved as a Mormon. Her laments about this loss verge on a Big Whine, for one wants to keep asking her “Well, why don’t you go back to religion?” Jackson’s answer is unsatisfactory.

4.) And we get the usual palaver that most of us harbor a God-shaped “hole in our hearts”: a desperate need for religion that can’t be filled by any other activity or form of sociality.

I’ve argued against many of these claims before, and this post is a précis of Jackson’s long argument. But below I’ll show you how Richard Dawkins has answered her—far better than I.  What is worth pondering is why the media is making such a big brouhaha about religion’s resurgence now (see articles by Dreher, Douthat, and Hirsi Ali), and why they insist that only belief in God can quell our angst.  I attribute this largely to two things: the pandemic and Trump, both of which have made people unhappy and insecure. And when that happens people turn to faith.

But I digress: here’s the article. I’ll give some indented quotes:

Here’s her reason for giving up Mormonism. It seems to have little to do with the religions’s ludicrous truth claims, but with her desire to conform to her peers.  But she couldn’t, as Barry Manilow sang, “get the feeling again,” no matter what she did:

I never really wanted to leave my faith. I wasn’t interested in exile — familial, cultural or spiritual. But my curiosity pulled me away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and toward a secular university. There, I tried to be both religious and cool, believing but discerning. I didn’t see any incompatibility between those things. But America’s intense ideological polarity made me feel as if I had to pick.

My story maps onto America’s relationship to religion over the last 30 years. I was born in the mid-1990s, the moment that researchers say the country began a mass exodus from Christianity. Around 40 million Americans have left churches over the last few decades, and about 30 percent of the population now identifies as having no religion. People worked to build rich, fulfilling lives outside of faith.

That’s what I did, too. I spent my 20s worshiping at the altar of work and, in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well. I built a community. I volunteered. I cared for my nieces and nephews. I pursued wellness. I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas and subscribed to meditation apps. I tried book clubs and running clubs. I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram. Nothing has felt quite like that chapel in Arkansas.

And her proclamation that religion is back!:

America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.

Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion. Secularization is on pause in America, a study from Pew found this year. This is a major, generational shift. [JAC: Generational?] People are no longer leaving Christianity; other major religions are growing. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults, both inside and outside of religion — say they hold some form of spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world.” The future, of course, is still uncertain: The number of nonreligious Americans will probably continue to rise as today’s young people enter adulthood and have their own children. But for now, secularism has not yet triumphed over religion. Instead, its limits in America may be exposed.

Well, if she admits that religion will probably continue to wane, then what is she celebrating? The “limits”—-the pathetic “limits” you see in the graph above?

She goes on at length about studies showing the palpable advantage of religion in promoting happiness and well-being, and I’m not familiar with much of that work. Even so, if we don’t believe in God for various reasons (mine is “no evidence”) are we supposed to force ourselves to believe because if we pretend to, we might actually lapse back into belief? And there are all those friendly people you can meet in church.

Yes, Ms. Jackson longs and pines for her God, but she just can’t get that feeling again. Here’s the biggest whine, which makes me want to shake her and say, “Go back to church, for crying out loud!”: Bolding is mine:

But many of these “nones” have had a dawning recognition that they had thrown “the baby out with the baptismal water,” as my colleague Michelle Cottle said.

“I would love to find a way to have what I had then without compromising who I feel I am now,” Ms. Mahoney told me.

Like Ms. Mahoney and many other “nones,” I too feel stuck. I miss what I had. In leaving the church, I lost access to a community that cut across age and class. I lost opportunities to support that community in ways that are inconvenient and extraordinary — when the baby arrives, the moving truck comes or grief overwhelms. I lost answers about planets, galaxies, eternity. I still find it odd to move through the world, going to the gym and sending Slack messages, with these questions threatening to overtake me. Shouldn’t I be dumbstruck, constantly? Shouldn’t we all?

. . . In a country where most people are pessimistic about the future and don’t trust the government, where hope is hard to come by, people are longing to believe in something. Religion can offer beliefs, belonging and behaviors all in one place; it can enchant life; most importantly, it tells people that their lives have a purpose.

Well, as I’ve discussed sporadically, and readers mostly agree, our lives do NOT have a purpose imposed by the outside, including by belief in God. The idea of your “life’s purpose” is confected: it is a made-up construct incorporating the things you’ve done that you find satisfying, meaningful, or enjoyable.  And this brings up the question of evidence for God, something that’s pretty much neglected by Jackson.

Bolding is mine below.  I don’t see why she can’t go back—perhaps not to Mormonism, but there are plenty of more humanistic faiths, including deism and pantheism. There’s even Unitarian Universalism, a non-goddy faith that’s currently riven by social-justice issues. But what about Quakerism?

And if her beliefs have changed, perhaps, just perhaps, she sees that it’s really impossible for her to regain faith because she realized that there’s simply no evidence for a god.  So we have the equivalent of a child who can’t take her teddy bear to school and yet desperately longs for it because it gives her such comfort.  Again, bolding is mine.

But I don’t feel I can go back. My life has changed: I enjoy the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the sabbath) that were once off limits to me. Most importantly, though, my beliefs have changed. I’ve been steeped in secularism for a decade, and I can no longer access the propulsive, uncritical belief I once felt. I also see too clearly the constraints and even dangers of religion. I have written about Latter-day Saints who were excommunicated for criticizing sexual abuse, about the struggles faced by gay people who want to stay in the church.

I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.

Part of my response is in 1 Corintians 13:11, and I’ll substitute “woman” for “man”:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a woman, I put away childish things.

Time to ditch the teddy bear.

This is where Richard Dawkins enters.  Ms. Jackson, wracked with doubt, had read Richard’s books, which had some influence on her. So she called him up and asked him about the need for faith:

A few weeks ago, I called Mr. Dawkins, the famous atheist whose book had so shaken me all those years ago. I wanted to know what he made of the fact that America’s secularization had stagnated.

He remained hopeful that secularism can replace religion. “It seems to me, should be reasonably easy to sort out,” he said. For ethics, he encouraged people to take civics classes and host a weekly discussion club. For community? “Play golf.”

He said he understood that churches in particular could provide moral instruction (and he said he valued the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man). But he insisted people should be able to fulfill their spiritual desires outside of faith: “It should be quite easy to show documentary films: David Attenborough films, Carl Sagan films, Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are lots of substitutes to spirituality that those can provide.”

But many of the people I have spoken to say those kinds of alternatives aren’t enough.

Well, there was nothing else for me to do than forward the article to Richard, since he was quoted.  It turns out he hadn’t seen it.  But, in about a day, he knocked out a short but trenchant response to Jackson’s agonized lucubrations. His piece is a masterpiece of defending humanism. I am not going to quote it except for the very last bit, for you can read it on his Substack by clicking on the link below (it’s also archived here).

The ending:

Who needs New Age spirituality (“sound baths”, “energy healing”, “astrology”),who needs to thumb-suck under a mental comfort blanket, who needs gods, when reality is there for the taking?

I’d say, “Touché.”

A fossilised 113-million-year-old hell ant from Brazil adds to the evidence that the first ants evolved in the southern hemisphere before moving north – and beyond

I do love the names of the European Southern Observatory installations. You are familiar I’m sure with the Very Large Telescope but have you heard of the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope? It was intended to house a 100m mirror but never got commissioned due to its complexity. There is however, an Extremely Large Telescope with a 39 metre mirror and its due to be completed in a couple of years. This image was taken on 12 April 2025 by photographer Eduardo Garcés showing its progress.

A new “installation” appeared in the Quad yesterday next to the tent that appeared the other day; both were designed by the Students for Justice in Palestine and were erected with permission of the University.  That makes a total of three “hatey” installations on the quad, and it makes the area look like a mess. Prospective students and parents are now visiting the campus, and I wonder what they think of it, especially if they’re Jewish.

This one below may have had a tent nearby, as it looks as if something collapsed, or there is some canvas at the bottom. At any rate, this shows four of our Trustees, all accused of “financing genocide.”   I disagree:it is Hamas that is committing genocide, not Israel.

The tent is nearby, showing our President, Paul Alivisatos (with a dollar sign for the “s”), looking satanic and bearing the blood-dripping label, “genocide normalizer”.  At the top we read “Israel Bombs” along with an Israeli and American flag.  At the bottom we see the useless cry to “divest,” for the University has already said it won’t.  SJP is fighting a battle they’ve already lost, but they can’t help acting out. This is the equivalent of a tantrum by a petulant child.

The tent. You can enter it to “find out more,” but a herd of elephants couldn’t push me inside that den of admiration for terrorism and antisemitism:

The official University permission, required for any such installation:

Somebody seems to have complained, because at the bottom of the “permission” sign, highlighted in yellow, is a note that the OEOP is investigating this installation for whether it violates university policy. Until that determination is made, the installation will stay up, though it has to come down this Saturday. That’s in two days, so the “investigation” is more or less a sham.  But if the Trump administration sees this, what with its use of antisemitism as an excuse to control universities and remove federal funding, who knows what will happen? I wonder if the University thinks of that.  Still, giving permission for these “art installations” is making a statement in favor of free speech, and for that I admire them.

Below is the old sign before the updated replacement above. At the bottom it reads:

Installation Description

A 15 X 15 foot tent with a presentation inside about on going [sic]genocide in Palestine and the University’s ties to Israel. Art will be displayed.

They don’t say what’s on the outside, which I showed the other day: hateful caricatures of administrators and trustees embellished with symbols of red hands, a widely-understood symbol of killing Jews. Some art!

I wonder if there’s any number of installations that reaches a threshold of constituting harassment of Jews. For the meantime, I construe this as free speech, but, as I said, even our free-speech advocates are debating whether the Quad should be free of banners and signs and used as a place for discussion and speech, since some construe a plethora of signage as actually chilling speech. For the time being, I am on the pro-sign side, but there should be a limit on the number and size of signs allowed on the central part of our campus.

And the hatred evinced by these signs makes me detest the ideology behind them, for the ideologues have already lost–both on campus and in Gaza.  And remember, after the extremists take care of the Jews, their next aim is to destroy Western civilization and its Enlightenment values.

People in the US are reading for pleasure less and less, despite it being linked to better sleep, improved mental health and even a longer life

Occasionally, the Universe seems to literally smile upon us. If skies are clear Friday morning on April 25th, early rising sky watchers may witness a rare scene, as brilliant Venus and fainter Saturn form the ‘eyes’ and a thin crescent Moon nearby completes the ‘grin’ low to the east at dawn.