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When analyzing artworks, understanding the visual clarity of compositions is crucial. Inspired by digital artists, researchers have created a metric to quantify clarity in digital images. As a result, scientists can accurately capture changes in structure during artistic processes and physical transformations. This new metric can improve analysis and decision-making across the scientific and creative domains, potentially transforming how we understand and evaluate the structure of images. It has been tested on digital artworks and physical systems.

People who started playing video games at an early school age developed problematic gaming more quickly compared to those who started playing a few years later.

Recent measurements with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cast doubt on the current understanding of the exoplanet Trappist-1 b's nature. Until now, it was assumed to be a dark rocky planet without an atmosphere, shaped by a billion-year-long cosmic impact of radiation and meteorites. The opposite appears to be true. The surface shows no signs of weathering, which could indicate geological activity such as volcanism and plate tectonics. Alternatively, a planet with a hazy atmosphere composed of carbon dioxide is also viable. The results demonstrate the challenges of determining the properties of exoplanets with thin atmospheres.

When one tectonic plate sinks beneath another, it generates magmas rich in volatiles such as water, sulphur and chlorine. As these magmas ascend, they release magmatic fluids, in which sulphur and chlorine bind to metals such as gold and copper, and transport these metals towards the surface of the Earth. As the extreme conditions relevant to natural magmas are very difficult to reproduce in the laboratory, the precise role of the different forms of sulphur in metal transport remains highly debated. However, an innovative approach has demonstrated that sulphur, in its bisulphide (HS-) form, is crucial for the transport of gold in magmatic fluids.

Scientists have developed a 3D concrete printing method that captures carbon, demonstrating a new pathway to reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry.

How does the Earth generate its magnetic field? While the basic mechanisms seem to be understood, many details remain unresolved. A team of researchers has introduced a simulation method that promises new insights into the Earth's core. The method simulates not only the behavior of atoms, but also the magnetic properties of materials. The approach is significant for geophysics, but could also support the development of future technologies such as neuromorphic computing -- an innovative approach to more efficient AI systems.

How can we ensure that as many households as possible adopt not only solar panels, but also their own battery to store solar energy, a heat pump, and an electric car? Researchers have looked into just this question.

Scientists have developed a new blood test that could screen cancer patients to help make their treatment safer and more effective.

A study is the first-of-its-kind to recognize American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet gestures using computer vision. Researchers developed a custom dataset of 29,820 static images of ASL hand gestures. Each image was annotated with 21 key landmarks on the hand, providing detailed spatial information about its structure and position. Combining MediaPipe and YOLOv8, a deep learning method they trained, with fine-tuning hyperparameters for the best accuracy, represents a groundbreaking and innovative approach that hasn't been explored in previous research.

Anthropologists argue physical artifacts of human exploration on Mars deserve cataloging, preservation and care in order to chronicle humanity's first attempts at interplanetary exploration.

This WaPo article below (click headline to read, or find the piece archived here), discusses the new case about gender transitioning being adjudicated by the Supreme Court. It’s judging the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that, according to the paper, “bans the use of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-transition treatments in minors on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates based on sex.” (23 other states have similar laws). I’m not sure how a ban on blockers can discriminate on the basis of sex if the hormones are banned in both males and females, but I’ll leave that up to the lawyers.

What’s important here is that the dispute about the blockers is now being discussed openly, in an Editorial Board op-ed in the Washington Post, while previously such discussion was taboo. Even questioning the use of such “affirmative treatments” was seen as “transphobic,” though there wasn’t good clinical evidence that they had good outcomes. They could even have been harmful, and in light of a lack of efficacy, they’re now banned in the UK and regarded as experimental treatments in much of Europe.

What we need, as the paper says, are “gold standard” studies: large controlled studies (double blind ones would be impractical given that the drugs have easily discernible effects) over a fairly long period of time.

Read below, and I’ll give some quotes (indented):

This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions — and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality. The issue is subject to legal dispute in part because the medical questions have not been properly resolved.

Multiple European health authorities have reviewed the available evidence and concluded that it was “very low certainty,” “lacking” and “limited by methodological weaknesses.” Last week, Britain banned the use of puberty blockers indefinitely due to safety concerns.

“Children’s healthcare must always be evidence-led,” British Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said in a press release. “The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.”

An early Dutch study of blockers showed “promising results”, but the sample was too small to give definitive results, and wasn’t replicable:

Yet as other doctors began copying the Dutch, clinical practice outraced the research, especially as treatment protocols rapidly evolved. A British study attempting to replicate the Dutch researchers’ success with puberty blockers “identified no changes in psychological function” among those treated.

Some clinicians appear reluctant to publish findings that don’t show strong benefits. The British lackluster results were published nine years after the study began, after Britain’s High Court ruled that children younger than 16 were unlikely to be able to form informed consent to such treatments.

And here is the unconscionable censorship on the part of both the American government and the WPATH organization that I haven’t yet written about:

Internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH] suggest that the group tried to interfere with a review commissioned from a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University

Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, told the New York Times that a government-funded study of puberty blockers she helped conduct, which started in 2015, had not found mental health improvements, and those results hadn’t been published because more time was needed to ensure the research wouldn’t be “weaponized.” Medical progress is impossible unless null or negative results are published as promptly as positive ones.

Weaponized?  WEAPONIZED? The study is done, but the results aren’t ideologically pleasing to gender activists, and so the study languishes, unpublished. That is unethical, for whether or not one uses blockers can have permanent effects on the well being and future fertility of adolescents.

And so we have one more example of science being suppressed because it didn’t give the results activists wanted. But this story isn’t over. As the Post recommends, Congress should fund larger and wlll-conducted trials of blockers with followups on adults who have gone on to estrogen or testosterone therapy. Given the increasing number of people who want to transition, such studies are imperative. But now we lack evidence, and without that the use of blockers should, I think, be stopped. Anecdotal evidence is not enough.

A cheap method for forming the tiny components of chips, such as transistors and diodes, harnesses simple fluid physics to make the electronics self-assembling

The age of the rings that encircle Saturn is under dispute thanks to calculations that show they could have been formed billions – rather than millions – of years ago

The past 12 months have been packed for the world’s wealthiest person as he has juggled Tesla, X, Neuralink, SpaceX and relations with Donald Trump – has it been a success?

Researchers have discovered proteins with emulsifying action that can be readily released from yeast cell walls. One of them exhibited emulsifying activity comparable to that of casein, a milk-derived emulsifier.

This past year saw some significant solar activity. This was especially true during the month of May, which saw more than 350 solar storms, solar flares, and geomagnetic storms. This included the strongest solar storm in 20 years that produced aurorae at far lower latitudes than usual and the strongest solar flare observed since December 2019. Given the threat they pose to radio communications, power grids, navigation systems, and spacecraft and astronauts, numerous agencies actively monitor the Sun’s behavior to learn more about its long-term behavior.

However, astronomers have not yet determined whether the Sun can produce “superflares” or how often they might occur. While tree rings and samples of millennia-old glacial ice are effective at records of the most powerful superflares, they are not effective ways to determine their frequency, and direct measurements of solar activity have only been available since the Space Age. In a recent study, an international team of researchers adopted a new approach. By analyzing Kepler data on tens of thousands of Sun-like stars, they estimate that stars like ours produce superflares about once a century.

The study was conducted by reseMax-Planck-Institut for Solar System Research (MPS), the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO) and the Space Physics and Astronomy Research unit at the University of Oulu, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCF), the National Solar Observatory (NSO), the Commissariat of Atomic and Alternative Energies of Paris-Saclay and the University of Paris-Cité, and multiple universities. The paper that addresses their research recently appeared in the journal Science.

Superflares are notable for the intense amount of radiation they emit, about 1032 erg, or 6.2444 electron volts (eV). For comparison, consider the Carrington Event of 1859, one of the most violent solar storms of the past 200 years. While this solar flare caused widespread disruption, leading to the collapse of telegraph networks in northern Europe and North America, it released only a hundredth of the energy of a superflare. While tree rings and glacial samples have recorded powerful events in the past, the ability to observe thousands of stars at a time is teaching astronomers a lot about how often the most powerful flares occur.

This is certainly true of the Kepler Space Telescope, which monitored about 100,000 main-sequence stars continuously for years for signs of periodic dips indicating the presence of exoplanets. These same observations recorded countless solar flares, which appeared in the observational data as short, pronounced peaks in brightness. As Prof. Dr. Sami Solanki, a Director at the MPS and a co-author of the paper, explained in a MPS press release:

“We cannot observe the Sun over thousands of years. Instead, however, we can monitor the behavior of thousands of stars very similar to the Sun over short periods of time. This helps us to estimate how frequently superflares occur.”

For their study, the team analyzed data obtained by Kepler from 56,450 Sun-like stars between 2009 and 2013. This consisted of carefully analyzing the images for signs of potential superflares, which were only a few pixels in size. The team was also careful in their selection of stars, taking into account only those whose surface temperature and brightness were similar to the Sun’s. The researchers also ruled out potential sources of error, including cosmic radiation, transient phenomena (asteroids or comets), and other types of stars flaring up near a Sun-like star.

In total, the Kepler data provided the team with evidence of 220,000 years of stellar activity. From this, they were able to identify 2,889 superflares from 2,527 of the observed stars, producing an average of one superflare per star per century. While previous surveys have found average intervals of a thousand or even ten thousand years, these studies could not determine the exact source of the observed flares. They also had to limit themselves to stars without any close neighbors, making this latest study the most precise and sensitive to date.

Nevertheless, previous studies that considered indirect evidence and observations made in the past few decades have yielded longer intervals between superflares. Whenever the Sun has released a high level of energetic particles that reached Earth’s atmosphere in the past, the interaction produced a detectable amount of radioactive carbon-14 (C14). This isotope will remain in tree and glacial samples over thousands of years of slow decay, allowing astronomers to identify powerful solar events and how long ago they occurred.

This method has allowed researchers to identify five extreme solar particle events and three candidates within the past twelve thousand years – suggesting an average rate of one superflare per 1,500 years. However, the team acknowledges that it is possible that more violent solar particle events and superflares occurred in the past. “It is unclear whether gigantic flares are always accompanied by coronal mass ejections and what is the relationship between superflares and extreme solar particle events,” said co-author Prof. Dr. Ilya Usoskin from the University of Oulu. “This requires further investigation.”

While the new study does not reveal when the Sun will experience its next superflare, the results urge caution. “The new data are a stark reminder that even the most extreme solar events are part of the Sun’s natural repertoire,” said co-author Dr. Natalie Krivova from the MPS. In the meantime, the best way to stay prepared is to monitor the Sun regularly to ensure reliable forecasting and advanced warning. By 2031, these efforts will be bolstered by the ESA’s Vigil probe, which the MPS is assisting through the development of its Polarimetric and Magnetic Imager (PHI) instrument.

Further Reading: MPS, Science

The post New Research Indicates the Sun may be More Prone to Flares Than we Thought appeared first on Universe Today.

At least 37 men, woman and children were brutally murdered in the largest massacre known in Bronze Age Britain, possibly in a performance of ritualistic violence

The Greater Mekong region of Asia hosts a wealth of rare and unstudied species – 173 new species of plants, 26 reptiles, 17 amphibians, 15 fish and three mammals were described last year. Here are six of them

Over at the Heterodox STEM site, Anna Krylov (a Professor of Chemistry at USC) just posted a recent 40-minute lecture she gave about the ongoing erosion of the concept of merit in science (the alternative to merit, of course, is “equity”).  Because the original video was poor, Anna went ahead and re-recorded the lecture slide for slide and word for word. You can see the new version of the lecture at the video below, and read transcript by clicking on the headline just below.

The video:

Her lecture begins by citing a paper that many of us collaborated on, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” finally published in Peter Singer’s Journal of Controversial Ideas. Let me just put down a short excerpt about the paper from Anna’s talk, referring to its rejection from the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science:

Ben Gibran writes: “It’s crazy enough that an article entitled “In Defense of Merit in Science” needs publishing; it’s mind-blowing that it’s published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. What next, “In Defense of Not Drinking Battery Fluid”?

But PNAS editors had a different opinion.

Here is the feedback we received following our initial inquiry. The board was concerned with the word MERIT in the title of the paper. They wrote: “The problem is that the concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as implemented…” They finish with an advice: “If the authors could use a different term, I would encourage that.”

We considered to change the title to this: “In Defense of M**** in Science,” but ultimately we were not able to address all editorial concerns. So this is how we ended up in the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

And, in a bit of self-aggrandizement, but one that’s relevant, Anna and I wrote an editorial about this mishigass in the Wall Street Journal (click to read, or, if you don’t subscribe, find the article archived here):

A year before last September, I spent three weeks in Israel, visiting Tel Aviv for a week and Jerusalem for two weeks. I also got two one-day tours, one to Masada and the Dead Sea for sightseeing, and the other a “security tour” of the defensive environs of Jerusalem given by the head of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). While there, I deliberately looked for signs of apartheid within Israel: signs of Israeli Arabs being treated as inferiors by Israeli Jews. I didn’t see any: Arabs and Jews seemed to mix completely in restaurants, trains, and trams. But of course my visit was short, superficial, and there might have been discrimination that I simply didn’t see. In light of that, all I can say is that “I didn’t see any apartheid, but my visit to Israel was short and superficial.”

Unfortunately, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose visit to Israel and Palestine was much shorter than mine (10 days total) does not refrain from making sweeping pronouncements. And that is because he clearly went to the area (sponsored and guided by anti-Israeli groups) with a preconception: he wanted to show that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is closely analogous to American’s treatment of blacks, even during slavery.  His visit was thus tendentious and what he wrote about it (the last of four essays in the book below) is incomplete, misguided, and, to be honest, shameful.

Below is Coates’s new the book of essays; click on it to go to the Amazon site.  I read only the last (but most talked-about) essay, “The Gigantic Dream,” 117 pages long.  If you know anything about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and the history thereof, you will spot immediately how tendentious, erroneous, and damaging to Israel Coates’s essay is. And some reviewers have called him out for it, though of course the Israel-haters defend him.

Using the four categories of lies that Francis Collins lays out in his own new book The Road to Wisdom, I would say that Coates’s dilations on Israel fall between “delusions” and “bullshit.” That is, he is not intentionally lying, but I think his view is warped by his immersion in American racism, and I believe he knows that there is far more to the story than he’s telling. In fact, he has been corrected by both interviewers and reviewers about his distortions, but he hasn’t changed his mind.

The theme of his book could be summarized by saying, à la Orwell, “Israel bad, Palestine good.”  To arrive at this theme, he has to completely neglect anything bad ever done by the Palestinians and anything good ever done by Israel. But I’m getting ahead of myself:

There are the usual accusations of genocide and apartheid on Israel’s part (the apartheid is supposed to occur within Israel, with Jews oppressing Israeli Arabs), but the most obvious omissions are those of Palestinian terrorism and of Israel’s repeated offers of a state to Palestine.

What, for example, do you make of Coates’s repeated beefing about having to wait for long periods at checkpoints, or about Israeli soldiers at those checkpoints glaring at him?  Could the plethora of checkpoints have something to do with Palestinian terrorism and an attempt to keep murderers out of Israel? You won’t hear that from Coates. Nor does he mention the First and Second Intifada.  Will you hear that Palestine won’t allow a single Jew to live in Gaza or the Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank (areas A and B)? Isn’t that apartheid? If not, why not? Remember that fully 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, like the one in the first video below.

If you didn’t know about the Palestinian terrorism that’s killed Israelis ever since the seventh century (with two big pogroms in 1929 and 1936), you wouldn’t realize the context of much of Coates’s complaints. But he has a point to make: the treatment of Israel towards Palestinians—or, indeed, of its own Arab citizens—is precisely analogous to Americans’ treatment of slaves and the subsequent Jim Crow laws.  But you’d have to squint pretty hard to see Israel doing anything in Israeli that resembles even slightly the purchase and use of slaves, or of forcing Israeli Arabs to bow and kowtow to Israeli Jews.

Coates mentions the two-state solution, floated by one person he met, but he doesn’t mention that such a solution has been offered to the Israelis four or five times, and every time it has been rejected—by the Palestinians.  If there is apartheid and genocide to be seen, simply look at the first charter of Hamas, as well as its behavior and the statements of Iran, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and many other Arab groups sworn to extirpate Israel. There is of course no mention of the events of October 7, 2023, but the book came out on October 1, 2024, and perhaps, given that there’s about a year’s lead time on publishing many books, Coates couldn’t fit that event in. But I don’t believe Coates would have mentioned it anyway (not even one inserted footnote?), for the butchery of that day spoils his narrative. Would Coates admit now the truth that Hamas, proud of that day, has sworn to repeat it over and over again? Remember, Coates says not one word about Palestinian terrorism.

Coates dwells heavily on the nakba, or “catastrophe,” originally seen as the humiliation suffered by five Arab armies (and volunteers from two other Arab states) who invaded Israel right after independence but was routed by a lowly army of Jews.  The nakba was subsequently reconceived by Arafat to mean the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel” after the invasion.  Coates implies repeatedly that, without provocation, the Jewish military simply slaughtered Arabs wholesale after their invasion.  This is not the case: many Arabs fled because they were frightened, many other because Arab countries ordered them to leave so the Jews could be destroyed before Arabs could return, and some fled because they started trying to kill Jews and were driven out militarily or destroyed.

The Arab invasion of Israel, beginning on its day of independence in 1948, was certainly not a genocide of Palestinians. Coates discusses the “massacre” by Israeli soldiers of the Arab village of Deir Yassin (an event badly distorted by Wikipedia, which repeatedly mentions rapes that never happened), but he doesn’t note that the attack was prompted by the infiltration of the village by Arabs who fired on Israelis. About hundred people died and, unfortunately, some non-combatants were bystanders in the line of fire.

To see another view of this battle (one that Coates, not interested in hearing all sides, neglects), read The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (and a review of that book in the Middle East Quarterly).

As for Coates’s writing, one petulant reviewer (the reviews are mixed) called Coates a “narcissist”. When I saw that after reading the essay myself, I said, “Precisely right.” Not only is there Coates’s hubris of assessing a messy, complex, and historically convoluted conflict after only a ten-day visit, but his writing is deeply self-absorbed. Coates is far more interested in his own reactions than in talking to people on both sides. A soldier glares at him, and he’s off to the races.

But Coates’s mission is not to talk to Israelis and Palestinians, but to show that Israel’s racism parallels that of America’s. It’s as if he needs to fill in a jigsaw puzzle, and is looking for just the right pieces to unite Israel and American segregationism.  I won’t dwell on the folly of such comparisons, except to say that Coates has a bill to sell. He seems to have been prompted in this solipsism by the success of his famous Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations”—a good piece of writing—an article that he brings up repeatedly.

And since Coates is tendentious, let me just give the other side, but in the words of other people.  First, how is Israel enacting apartheid against its own people? (I am construing this accusation as one of intra-Israel apartheid, not the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine.) I have tried to find laws in which Arab Israelis are discriminated against by Jewish Israelis. I could find only one discriminatory law, and it discriminates in favor of Arabs: they are not required to serve three years in the IDF unless they want to. There are also laws that discriminate among Jews themselves, with—until recently—Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews being exempt from military service as well, though that is supposed to end in a few years.  It is curious that those who level accusations of apartheid against Israel Israeli Arabs never come up with tangible examples.

If you want to dig deeper into the apartheid accusation, here are two videos, one long and one short. In the first short one (ten minutes), an Israeli Arab who served in the IDF fields a number of hard questions about whether he experienced discrimination. The answer was “no”:

. . . and here is the stupendous Natasha Hausdorff discussing the “apartheid” accusation with an American professor Professor Orde Kittrie from Arizona State. Kittrie is a specialist in international and criminal law, and, as I’m presenting this as a palliative to the ignorance of Coates. You will hear Kittrie’s opinion that the apartheid accusation is baseless. (At 31 minutes in, Natasha gives some viewers’ questions—and some of her own—that Kittrie answers.)

Here are the YouTube notes:

Chair: Natasha Hausdorff

A new UN Commission of Inquiry of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is poised to accuse Israel of apartheid.

Professor Kittrie discusses this Inquiry and its mandate, and the potential relationship with prosecutions by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The mandate’s reference to apartheid was apparently inspired by a lengthy report, accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid, published by Human Rights Watch (HRW). However this report is based on a definition of “apartheid” which is not found in the ICC’s Statute or the International Convention on Apartheid. Professor Kittrie discusses the different definitions of apartheid, reasons why the apartheid charge is wrong even under HRW’s definition, and options for responding.

Finally, here’s an article from Fathom taking apart Amnesty International’s 2022 accusation that Israel was an “apartheid state.”   Click to read:

Read, watch, and judge for yourself. In my view, Coates, while his writings on American racism may be good (I’ve read only the Atlantic article), his piece on Israel and Palestine is reprehensible, misguided, full of distortions, and, in the end, is pretty much racist, if not antisemitic. If you read it, please do so with some knowledge of the politics and history of the region.

h/t: Malgorzata