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The nightmare has come true. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been confirmed as HHS Secretary and didn't wait long to start dismantling federal science and health programs. The White House even formed a "MAHA commission" to draw up a battle plan.

The post So it begins: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as HHS Secretary and immediately starts dismantling US federal science infrastructure first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Here’s Bill Maher’s latest 9-minute comedy/news schtick from Real Time, called “New Rule: In Love with A.I.”  It’s based on the rising number of American women who are engaged in relationships or romantic role-playing with AI. After all real men come with a number of disadvantages, like cheating and dressing like John Fetterman, while AI can be programmed to be caring, empathic, and even match the kind of temperament that a woman wants.

As for men, well, Maher likes the old-fashioned real kind, as do I.

Notice that Pamela Paul is on the show, and was introduced as a NYT op-ed columnist, so perhaps she wasn’t fired.

As you probably know, Hagan Scotten, an assistant U.S. attorney, was asked to dismiss the corruption indictment against NYC mayor Eric Adams after U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon (a Republican) resigned from the Department of Justice rather than be involved in dismissing a criminal indictment on political tit-for-tat grounds.  Here’s Scotten’s own letter of resignation to Trump’s goon Emil Bove, who ordered Sassoon to get Scotten to do the dirty work.

You can download the letter here from the NYT.

The last sentence of the second paragraph will live on as a defense of our Republic, which I fully believe will stand over the next four years.

h/t: David

Four days ago I presented NYT columnist Ross Douthat’s favorite argument for God’s existence. (Douthat is a pious Catholic.) That argument turned out to be pretty lame: it was the claim that “the universe was intelligible and we can use reason to understand it.” On top of that sundae, he placed the cherry of “also, humans can go far beyond this: they can do stuff like playing chess or the piano—things we couldn’t possibly have evolved to do.” (I am giving my characterizations here, not his quotes.)

If you have two neurons to rub together, and know something about evolution, you can easily see why this argument is not convincing evidence for a deity, much less the Catholic deity. Nor is it evidence for the existence of an afterlife, a crucial claim that bears on Douthat’s latest column, one that lays out what he sees as the best argument against the existence of God. That argument is what I’ve called the “Achilles heel of theism”: the existence of physical evil that inflicts suffering and/or death on undeserving (“innocent”) people.

The previous column was an excerpt from his new book, Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and I’m sure the “evil” issue is also an important one in his book. But this column doesn’t say it’s an excerpt, so it’s not self-plagiarism. Nevertheless, I find Douthat’s reasoning still pretty weak, for he gives five lame arguments why we should dismiss the existence of evil as a telling argument against God.

Douthat is turning into the C. S. Lewis for Generation X, someone who proffers superficially appealing but intellectually weak arguments simply to buttress the longings of those who want there to be a God.  I think the NYT itself is catering to this slice of society, for it’s increasingly touting religion to its readers. Do you agree? And if you do, why would the NYT be doing this?

You can read Douthat’s arguments by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can find the full article archived here:

Douthat begins by again dismissing naturalism as strong evidence against a god:

The most prominent argument that tries to actually establish God’s nonexistence is the case for naturalism, the argument that our world is fundamentally reducible to its material components and untouched in its origins by any kind of conscious intention or design. But unfortunately, no version of the case for naturalism or reductionism is especially strong.

Well, I’d say that two things do strengthen “the case for naturalism.” The first is that the laws of physics appear to apply everywhere in the universe, and quantum mechanics predicts what we see to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. There is no “god parameter” in these laws; they are perfectly naturalistic. (I suppose Douthat would respond that our ability to discern the laws of physics is itself evidence for God.)

Second, even in our own everyday life, the known laws of physics seem to account for everything without anything major missing. I won’t go into this; just read Sean Carroll’s two pieces,  “The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood” and “Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood.” Carroll is not maintaining that we understand everything about physics (e.g., black energy); his thesis is this:

Obviously there are plenty of things we don’t understand. We don’t know how to quantize gravity, or what the dark matter is, or what breaks electroweak symmetry. But we don’t need to know any of those things to account for the world that is immediately apparent to us. We certainly don’t have anything close to a complete understanding of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world — we don’t understand high-temperature superconductivity, or for that matter human consciousness, or a cure for cancer, or predicting the weather, or how best to regulate our financial system. But these are manifestations of the underlying laws, not signs that our understanding of the laws are incomplete. Nobody thinks we’re going to have to invent new elementary particles or forces in order to understand high-Tc superconductivity, much less predicting the weather.

But I digress, but so did Douthat, who says that “the anti-reductionist argument” (against god) “clearly wins out.” Perhaps in his mind it does, but he’s hardly unbiased!

Douthat then specifies the argument from evil that he finds the most telling argument against God, but for the rest of the article he manages to argue that it’s not very telling:

So instead of talking about an argument for disbelief that I struggle to take seriously, I’m going to talk about an argument that clearly persuades a lot of people not to have religious faith and does have a form of empirical evidence on its side. That’s the argument from evil, the case that there simply can’t be a creator — or at least not a beneficent one — because the world is too laden with suffering and woe.

He then, like C. S. Lewis, hastens to reprise what he just said: that this is an argument against a particular kind of god, one that is beneficent or omnbeneficent. And that god, of course, is the Abrahamic God, including Douthat’s. So if God is kindly and all-good, why does he let little children die of leukemia, or get other diseases that cause immense suffering, not to mention the same suffering in innocent adults (or are they all sinners?).  And why do tsunamis, volcanoes, and earthquakes kill millions of people, many of whom don’t deserve to die regardless of your criteria for whether someone is a “good person”.

Douthat responds with some answers that I’ve put under headings I invented. His responses rest largely on his claim that we don’t know that there is too much suffering.

We don’t know that there’s too much suffering!

The other interesting point about this argument is that while its core evidence is empirical, in the sense that terrible forms of suffering obviously exist and can be extensively enumerated, its power fundamentally rests on an intuition about just how much suffering is too much. By this I mean that many people who emphasize the problem of evil would concede that a good God might allow some form of pain and suffering within a material creation for various good reasons. Their claim, typically, is that our world experiences not just suffering but a surfeit of suffering, in forms that are so cruel and unusual (whether the example is on the scale of the Holocaust or just the torture of a single child) as to exceed anything that an omnipotent benevolence could allow.’

Indeed, various apologists have countered the Argument from Suffering by saying that suffering is an inevitable concomitant of the kind of world that God would want to create, presumably the best of all possible worlds. (Unless, that is, he’s created the world as a theater for his own amusement.) Suffering, they say, is an inevitable byproduct of free will, which we must have because to get to Heaven we must freely choose Jesus as our savior.  Putting determinism aside (while accepting its truth), this is not a satisfactory answer. God knows already (as do the laws of physics) whether we’ll choose Jesus, and he could make us all choose Jesus while still thinking that it really was a free choice. (It’s not free if God knows it in advance!)  Besides, how does a kid with a terrible, fatal disease result from free will? Free will for cancer cells?  And what about other non-moral “physical evils” like earthquakes?

Well, theologians have worked that one out, too. To have a viable planet, they say, we have to have tectonic plates, whose shifting results in earthquakes and other sources of mortality.  But if God was omnipotent, he could have created such a world!  Here we see another dumb argument, but theologians are paid to make such arguments, not to find the truth.

Finally, I see “too much suffering” as is “any more suffering than is required by God’s plan”. But how do we judge that? Even if everything is made right on Judgment Day, with the kids who die young automatically going to Heaven (this is another inane theological response), there was more suffering than necessarily to achieve that end. Kids could die painlessly! I say that any suffering at all that cannot be explained by human reason is too much suffering, and if Douthat responds, “well, we don’t know God’s plan,” I would say, “Well, you don’t seem to know much about God. How do you know that he’s benevolent and that there’s a Heaven?”  And here I must stop to recount a passage from Hitchens’s book attacking Mother Theresa: The Missionary Position:

Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview. She described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.”

At any rate, it’s in this section of this article that Douthat reveals his confirmation bias. He’s making counterargument only to knock them down, because, of course, he has to believe. (I’d love to ask him, “Ross, since you can rationalize evil this way, is there anything that would make you reject belief in God?” Look at this:

Of course, as a Christian, I don’t think [the Argument from Evil is] a good reason to choose against my own tradition, which brings me to the second challenge. . .

Of course!  He will never find a good reason to choose against his own “tradition.” (Note: In Faith Versus Fact I at least lay out a scenario that would make me tentatively accept the existence of Jesus and the Christian God.)  This brings us to Douthat’s second reason to downplay the force of the Argument from Evil:

The Bible shows a lot of evidence for undeserved evil.  This is a “this-I-know-because-the-Bible-tells-me-so” argument, and it’s dumb, because it doesn’t touch the problem. It only says that God was not omnibenevolent in the Bible.

To the extent that you find the problem of evil persuasive as a critique of a God who might, nevertheless, still exist, you would do well to notice that important parts of that critique are already contained within the Abrahamic tradition. Some of the strongest complaints against the apparent injustices of the world are found not in any atheistic tract, but in the Hebrew Bible. From Abraham to Job to the Book of Ecclesiastes — and thence, in the New Testament, to Jesus (God himself, to Christians) dying on the cross — the question of why God permits so much suffering is integral to Jewish and Christian Scripture, to the point where it appears that if the Judeo-Christian God exists, he expects his followers to wrestle with the question. Which means that you don’t need to leave all your intuitive reactions to the harrowing aspects of existence at the doorway of religious faith; there is plenty of room for complaint and doubt and argument inside.

This is the kind of palaver that C. S. Lewis shoveled down the gaping maws of British Christians, as if they were baby birds begging for a meal. Because there is contradictory evidence for an omnibenevolent God in the Bible (cf., the story of Job), God wants us to ponder the question and raise doubts. The problem with this is that the Bible doesn’t give us any answers to the question of evil.

We shouldn’t rely on our intuitions about whether there’s “too much evil” to count against God’s existence.  This is simply the first argument above, repeated:

Then the third challenge: Having entered into that argument, to what extent should you treat your personal intuitions about the scale of suffering as dispositive? I don’t just mean the intuition that something in the world is out of joint and in need of healing. I mean the certainty that those wounds simply cannot be healed in any way that would ever justify the whole experience, or the Ivan Karamazov perspective that one should refuse any eternal reconciliation that allows for so much pain. Those are powerful stances, but should a mortal, timebound, finite creature really be so certain that we can know right now what earthly suffering looks like in the light of eternity? And if not, shouldn’t that dose of humility put some limit on how completely we rule out God’s perfect goodness?

This is the “suffering will be compensated in ways we can’t understand” argument.  But if Douthat believes in God because experience tells him it’s right to believe,  how can his experience allow him to dismiss arguments against his benevolent God?  This is just a “God works in mysterious ways” argument, but I could note that it’s more reasonable to assume that God is playing with people for his own amusement, and doesn’t really care whether good always prevails. But wait! There’s more!

Suffering is overrated. Things aren’t as bad as they seem because privileged atheists exaggerate how bad suffering is. 

This again is a repeat of previous arguments with a twist thrown in. I can’t believe Douthat really makes this argument, but he does:

From what perspective are you offering this critique of God? If you are in the depths of pain and suffering, staring some great evil in the face, adopting atheism as a protest against an ongoing misery, then the appropriate response from the religious person is to help you bear the burden and not to offer a lecture on the ultimate goodness of God. (Indeed, in the Book of Job, the characters who offer such a lecture stand explicitly condemned.)

But given that atheism has increased with human wealth and power and prosperity, we can say that some people who adopt this stance are doing so from a perspective of historically unusual comfort, in a society that fears pain and death as special evils in part because it has contrived to hide them carefully away. And such a society, precisely because of its comforts and its death-denial, might be uniquely prone to overrating the unbearability of certain forms of suffering, and thereby underrating the possibility that a good God could permit them.

I’m dumbfounded. Is this even an argument? I’ll leave smarter readers to deal with it, and pass on to Douthat’s fifth way of dismissing the Argument from Evil:

There’s a lot of good in the world as well, perhaps too much good! So we need God to explain why things are so good. 

This is a defense I haven’t heard before, probably because it’s so weird and lame. Let’s look at it first:

Then the last challenge: If the intuition against a benevolent God rests on the sense that we are surfeited with suffering, the skeptic has to concede that we are surfeited in other ways as well. Is it possible to imagine a world with less pain than ours? Yes, but it’s also very easy to imagine a world that lacks anything like what we know as pleasure — a world where human beings have the same basic impulses but experience them merely as compulsions, a world in which we are driven to eat or drink or have sexual intercourse, to hunt and forage and build shelter, without ever experiencing the kind of basic (but really extraordinary) delights that attend a good meal or a good movie, let alone the higher forms of eros, rapture, ecstasy.

Indeed, it is precisely these heights of human experience that can make the depths feel so exceptionally desolating. This does not prove that you can’t have one without the other, that there is a necessary relationship between the extremes of conscious experience.

But it makes the problem of good — real good, deep good, the Good, not just fleeting spasms and sensations — at least as notable a difficulty for the believer in a totally indifferent universe as the problem of evil is supposed to be for the religious believer.

Well, we’re evolved to seek out those things that increase our survival and reproduction, and that seeking is facilitated by neurologically connecting these fitness-conferring features with pleasurable or appealing feelings. We love sweets and fats because for most of our evolutionary history they were good for us, so natural selection worked on our taste buds and brain to make their consumption pleasurable. Orgasms almost certainly evolved as a form of extreme pleasure that drives us to reproduce: those who get the most pleasure leave the most genes. Further, for most of our evolutionary history we lived in small, close-knit groups in which members knew each other. That would lead to the evolution of reciprocity: doing good and helping others because it keeps the group together (with you retaining your fitness) and leading to various forms of “moral” thinking and behavior. As for “eros, rapture, and ecstasy,” why can’t they be byproducts of seeking the kind of enjoyment associated with higher fitness?  I will grant here that I don’t understand how the widespread making of and appeal of music occurred, but does that give evidence for God? Do music and art simply constitute too much good stuff to appear in a secular world?

In the end, I see naturalism (including evolution) as able to explain good and especially physical evil, while Douthat’s idea of God can explain good by assumption, but has to be stretched further than Gumby to explain physical evil.

But again I would level this challenge at Douthat, whom I see as deluded:  What observations or occurrences would convince you that your belief in the Christian God, and in your Catholicism, is wrong?   If kids dying in intractable pain won’t do it, I don’t think anything will.

Further, Mr. Douthat, what evidence would convince you that there is an afterlife: a Heaven, a Hell, or both?  Even if you accept Douthat’s specious evidence for the existence of a divine being, I have no idea why, aside from the Bible and propagandizing by believers, he accepts the existence of an afterlife. Yet its existence would seem to be crucial for justifying how evil can exist in God’s world.

Here’s a guy far smarter and more eloquent than I making the argument from evil on Irish television. Stephen Fry got into trouble for saying this, and almost was charged with blasphemy or hate speech.

It’s Sunday, and that means photos (of butterflies now) by John Avise. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 10 

This week continues my many-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  Now we’re up to some of the M’s.  Most of this week’s photos happen to have been taken in Florida.

Malachite (Siproeta stelenes), upperwing:

Malachite, underwing:

Mallow Scrub-Hairstreak (Strymon istapa):

Mangrove Buckeye (Junonia genoveva), upperwing:

Mangrove Buckeye, underwing:

Mangrove Skipper (Phocides pigmalion), upperwing:

Mangrove Skipper, underwing:

Marine Blue (Leptotes marina):

Marine Blue, female above:

Marine Blue female below:

Martial Scrub-Hairstreak (Strymon martialis) upperwing:

Martial Scrub-Hairstreak, underwing:

The Habitable Worlds Observatory, NASA’s planned successor to the James Webb Space Telescope, will be a monster of an instrument. Using the same origami-like technique pioneered by the James Webb, the HWO will unfold a mirror spanning 6-8 meters across. Among its many science goals, its primary mission will be to directly image promising nearby exoplanets to hunt for biosignatures, which are signs of life as we know it.

The HWO is expected to take cost $11 billion and launch in the first half of the 2040’s. But if the tortured history of the James Webb is any indication, then those numbers are highly optimistic lower bounds.

After all those resources, all that money and time and talent devoted to one single telescope, designers of the HWO hope to survey a grand total of 25 potentially habitable Earth-like worlds.

Surely there’s a better way.

We need to heavily invest in a program of diversification to have the best – and cheapest – chances of success when it comes to finding life outside the Earth. That means we need to search for life in all the places where we least expect it.

Right now our life-hunting programs focus on Earth-like planets orbiting their parent stars within the so-called Habitable Zone, the band where the star’s radiation is just right to allow for liquid water on the surface. On one hand, these expectations are built on a solid foundation. The only known life to exist in the universe – ours – thrives in exactly that environment. And we know what our kind of life looks like and what it does to planetary atmospheres, increasing the chances of a confirmed detection of a biosignature.

But the other hand, our preconceived notions have been challenged in the past, and assuming that nature is as limited as our current thinking could be a costly mistake, as we spend billions on future programs with little chance of success.

Take the methanogens, a broad group of Archaea that “eat” hydrogen and emit methane as a by-product. Mars might be a suitable home for them. Not on the surface, but kilometers underground.  

Additionally, the last place you might think to look for life is in the outer reaches of the solar system, home to the giant planets and their icy moons. And yet many of those moons host liquid water oceans vaster than the Earth’s – and they are now prime candidates for extraterrestrial life in our own solar system. If we had forged ahead with Habitable Zone searches in our own solar system, we would have spent decades fruitlessly digging in the Martian dirt, ignoring the potential watery goldmines of the outer moons.

We should take the lesson offered by our own backyard and extend that thinking to the wider galaxy. There have already been researchers exploring the edges of what life could be and where it could thrive, pulling their examples from extreme lifeforms on Earth and cutting-edge research into the definition of habitability. Before we invest billions of dollars in a next-generation mega-observatory, we should carefully consider all the options.

The post Is the Habitable Worlds Observatory a Good Idea? appeared first on Universe Today.

The asteroid belt beckons – it contains enough resources for humans to expand into the entire rest of the solar system and has no biosphere to speak of. Essentially, it is a giant mine just waiting to be exploited. So, a student team from the University of Texas at Austin has devised a plan to exploit it as part of the Revolutionary Aerospace System Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL), a competition sponsored by NASA to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to develop innovative ideas to solve some of space exploration’s challenges. UT Austin’s submission to the competition last year, known as the Autonomous Exploration Through Extraterrestrial Regions (AETHER) project, certainly fits that bill.

AETHER was submitted to the AI-Powered Self-Replicating Probes sub-section of RASC-AL 2024, which solicited ideas that would advance John von Neumann’s idea of a self-replicating space probe. AETHER addresses those challenges in two distinct ways.

First, it combines a spring-loaded landing system and a metal-burning rocket engine to hop between different asteroids in the belt. To fuel its rocket, it uses a system to harvest water and metal (specifically aluminum) from the surface of the asteroid it’s currently on, splits it into its components, and then dumps them into a fuel tank that can be used to power its next trip to a different asteroid. All of this is powered by a Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling TechnoloY (KRUSTY) nuclear reactor that has been undergoing NASA and DoE testing for over a decade.

Fraser discusses the concept of von Neumann probes.

The springs in AETHER’s legs have a two-fold purpose. First, they allow for a soft landing on the surface of the gravitationally weak asteroid and can transfer some of the energy created by that landing into stored energy, which can be used to launch the system from its landing place later. It also has a set of wheels to navigate around the asteroid’s surface. When it’s time to jump off again, it replants its legs and springs back into space – with a little help from its rocket engine.

The rocket engine designed as part of AETHER can burn metal, such as aluminum, that the craft harvests from the asteroid to use as fuel. It is the primary system designed to take the craft from asteroid to asteroid, and it is meant to be a high-delta-v option for doing so quickly.

AETHER also tries to mimic a von Neumann probe by using a machine-learning algorithm to improve its resource-harvesting efforts. It would take data from various sensors, including synthetic aperture radar and a spectrometer, and estimate where the best spot would be to land to refuel. While collecting that additional fuel material, it would communicate back with Earth via a high-speed optical communication link, allowing an Earth-based server to update the machine learning parameters and improve the algorithm’s outcome for the next hop.

Fraser’s interest with self-replicating robots goes back a long way – here’s his explanation on HeroX about the concept.
Credit – HeroX YouTuBe Channel

The original mission design for AETHER has it stopping at two specific asteroids before moving on to as-yet-unnamed ones. The first, which is probably no surprise, is Psyche, the big metallic asteroid that is about to be visited by its own dedicated probe. Data from that probe will help inform the first iteration of AETHER’s learning algorithm, and the input the sensors provide from its visit will update it before its next step – Themis. That asteroid, though smaller, is expected to contain a large amount of water ice, which is a necessary component for AETHER’s rocket engines.

After visiting the first two asteroids, the mission moves on to places unknown, as completing those steps would be considered a success. But given the longevity of the KRUSTY reactor and the craft’s ability to refill its own fuel tank, it is possible, or even likely, that AETHER would consider operating well past its rendezvous with Themis.

The UT Austin team was comprised entirely of undergraduate students, though it’s unclear what year of study they were in. But, given their experience with the 2024 version of RASC-AL, they would seem well-placed to submit a project proposal for the recently announced 2025 version. If they do, hopefully, their idea will be just as innovative as AETHER’s.

Learn More:
Flores et al – AETHER
UT – Miniaturized Jumping Robots Could Study An Asteroid’s Gravity
UT – NASA Funds the Development of a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon That Would Last for 10 Years
UT – Engineers Design a Robot That Can Stick To, Crawl Along, and Sail Around Rubble Pile Asteroids

Lead Image:
Landing and take-off depiction of AETHER.
Credit – Flores et al.

The post Spring-loaded Robot Could Explore the Asteroid Belt Almost Indefinitely appeared first on Universe Today.

RCW 38 is a molecular cloud of ionized hydrogen (HII) roughly 5,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Vela. Located in this cloud is a massive star-forming cluster populated by young stars, short-lived massive stars, and protostars surrounded by clouds of brightly glowing gas. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) recently released a stunning 80-million-pixel image of the star cluster that features the bright streaks and swirls of RCW 38, the bright pink of its gas clouds, and its many young stars (which appear as multi-colored dots).

The image was captured by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), located at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The telescope is the world’s largest survey telescope and combines a 4.1-meter (~13.5-foot) mirror, the most highly curved mirror of its size. The extremely high curvature reduces the focal length, making the telescope’s structure extremely compact. This design enables VISTA to map large areas of the southern sky quickly, deeply, and systematically.

The telescope also has a wide field of view and a huge camera weighing three metric tons (3.3 U.S. tons) with 16 state-of-the-art infrared-sensitive detectors. VISTA’s surveys in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum have revealed completely new views of the southern sky. Star clusters are often called “stellar nurseries” since they contain all the ingredients for star formation, including dense gas clouds and opaque clumps of cosmic dust.

When clumps of this gas and dust collect to the point that they undergo gravitational collapse, new stars are born. The strong radiation produced by these newborn stars causes the gas shrouding the star cluster to glow brightly, creating the colorful display we see in this image. Despite that, many of the cluster’s stars cannot be observed in visible light because they are obscured by dust. However, these stars are still visible in infrared light, which passes through clouds of dust unimpeded.

This allowed the VISTA telescope and the VISTA InfraRed CAMera (VIRCAM) to capture the interior of the RCW 38 stellar cluster and reveal the true extent of its beauty. Visible in the cluster’s interior are young stars within dusty cocoons and colder “failed” stars known as brown dwarfs. The roughly 2000 stars in RCW 38 are very young, less than a million years old compared to our Sun (4.6 billion years old). Through its six public surveys, the telescope has mapped small patches of sky for long periods to detect extremely faint objects.

These range from distant galaxies, red dwarf stars, and brown dwarfs to small bodies in our Solar System. The newly-released infrared image was taken as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey, which studied the central parts of the Milky Way in five near-infrared bands. This survey took over 200,000 images of our galaxy and captured more than 355 open and 33 globular clusters. The data was used to create the most detailed infrared map of our home galaxy ever made. In fact, this map contains 10 times more objects than a previous one released by the same team back in 2012.

A catalog is also being created from VISTA data that will contain about a billion point sources and will be used to create a three-dimensional map of the central bulge of the Milky Way. Since the image of RCW 38 was taken, the VIRCAM camera has been retired after seventeen years of service. Later this year, it will be replaced by a new instrument, the 4-meter Multi-Object Spectrograph Telescope (4MOST). This second-generation instrument will give new life to the VISTA telescope, allowing it to obtain spectra of 2400 objects at once over a large area of the sky.

Further Reading: ESO

The post Stunning 80 Megapixel Image of a Stellar Nursery appeared first on Universe Today.

When astronomers detected the first known interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, in 2017, it sparked a host of new studies trying to understand the origin and trajectory of the galactic sojourner.

‘Oumuamua’s unique properties – unlike anything orbiting our sun – had scientists pondering how such an object could have formed. Now, a pair of researchers, Xi-Ling Zheng and Ji-Lin Zhou, are using numerical simulations to test out possible solar system configurations that could result in ‘Oumuamua-like objects. Their findings show that solar systems with a single giant planet have the necessary orbital mechanics at work to create such an object – but that other explanations may still be required.

Zheng and Zhou published their findings in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in February 2025.

They began their study by working backward from the known properties of ‘Oumuamua.

When it was visible to Earth’s telescopes for just a few months in 2017, it showed an intensely variable brightness, changing from bright to dim every four hours. Astronomers interpreted this variability as an elongated, cigar-shaped object tumbling through space.

Two other things made ‘Oumuamua unique. First, it appeared to have a dry, rocky surface, akin to the asteroids known in our solar system. But it also changed its orbit in a way that could not purely be explained by the laws of gravity – something else made it change direction.

Redirections like this are sometimes seen in icy comets. As they approach the Sun, off-gassing released from the heated ice acts like a thruster, changing the comet’s trajectory.

An artist’s depiction of the interstellar comet ‘Oumuamua, as it warmed up in its approach to the sun and outgassed hydrogen (white mist), which slightly altered its orbit. (Image credit: NASA, ESA and Joseph Olmsted and Frank Summers of STScI)

Somehow, ‘Oumuamua displayed a mix of both comet-like and asteroid-like properties.

One plausible explanation, proposed in 2020, is that ‘Oumuamua-like objects are formed by tidal fragmentation. That’s when a ‘volatile-rich’ parent body (like a large comet) passes too close to its star at high speeds, shattering it into long, thin shards. The heating process in these extreme interactions causes the formation of an elongated rocky shell, but preserves an interior of subsurface ice. This unique combination, not seen in our own solar system, would explain ‘Oumuamua’s orbital maneuvers despite its rocky composition.

It also explains why we don’t tend to see them in our solar system, because “ejected planetesimals experienced tidal fragmentation at more than twice the rate of surviving planetesimals (3.1% versus 1.4%),” the authors write. In other words, if the orbital forces are strong enough for tidal fragmentation to happen, it also means they’re strong enough to kick the object out of the system entirely.

Interstellar space may therefore be full of dagger-shaped shards of rock and ice (an exaggeration, but a fun quote for dinner parties nonetheless).

The white dwarf Sirius B compared to Earth. Credit: ESA and NASA

The simplest star system that could cause this type of tidal fragmentation are those home to white dwarfs. These are the extremely dense, dead cores of old exploded stars. A white dwarf, encircled by a belt of distant comet-like objects, similar to the Sun’s Oort cloud, could spawn ‘Oumuamua clones with regular frequency.

But the process is enhanced in systems that host Jupiter-sized planets.

The exception is ‘Hot Jupiters’ that orbit close to their star. These are less likely to interact with objects subject to tidal fragmentation.

But Jupiter-sized planets distant from their host star are very effective at producing ‘Oumuamua clones, especially if they have eccentric orbits. But even here, it’s not a perfect match for the origin of ‘Oumuamua, because these interactions tend to produce shards that are not as elongated, and at a rate lower than what is expected for ‘Oumuamua-type objects.

The authors conclude that the planetary systems most likely to have spawned ‘Oumuamua are those with many planets, which are more “efficient at producing interstellar objects,” the authors say, though they propose a few other possibilities too.

So while there is now a strong, plausible explanation for the process that birthed ‘Oumuamua, the type of solar system that produced it is still very much an open question.

Xi-Ling Zheng amd Ji-Lin Zhou, “Configuration of single giant planet systems generating ‘oumuamua-like interstellar asteroids.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The post Many Stars Could Have Sent Us ‘Oumuamua appeared first on Universe Today.

Take this for what you will, since my first view came from the New York Post. However, the Post reported a piece by the science editor of the Telegraph, a more respectable paper. Both sites are below; click on the headlines to go to the articles.

NY Post:

Telegraph:

An excerpt from the Telegraph:

The difference between sex and gender has become an increasingly incendiary topic as activists, scientists and politicians all debate the terms and the implications they have for policy.

But a survey of almost 200 scientists at British universities, conducted by The Telegraph and Censuswide, found 58 per cent of respondents think sex is binary, except in rare cases such as intersex individuals.

Less than a third (29 per cent) agreed with the statement “sex is not binary”, while one in eight people (13 per cent) had no views or preferred not to answer.

However, almost two thirds of scientists (64 per cent) said gender was fluid, while 22 per cent said gender is binary, and 14 per cent gave no answer.

The Telegraph figure:

I like the snark of this scientist, but Dr. Goymann is correct (further excerpt from the Telegraph piece):

“To me this just means that at least 29 per cent of the academics that filled out this questionnaire do not understand the biological concept of sex, and at least 22 per cent of them do not know what gender means,” Dr Wolfgang Goymann, professor for behavioural biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, told The Telegraph.

Yes, I think that a fair number of academics, and that includes biologists and doctors like Steven Novella, don’t understand the nature of biological sex, and why the gamete-based definition that leads to the binary conclusion derives from a long history of observing plants and animals. (Again, for a clear explanation of all this, see Richard Dawkins’s article on his site “The Poetry of Reality.”)

It strikes me that those who say that sex isn’t binary, invoking other factors like hormones, chromosomes, genital configuration, and so on, never really tell us how we should define males and females, implying that the sexes comprise some unspecified multivariate mixture of these traits.  How do you define a male and a female, then? Even the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biologists, riddled with ideology and the desire to flaunt their virtue, have fallen into this misguided multivariate trap. Further, they imply that sex is a non-binary spectrum in all species, not just humans (see  their original statement here and my post with a group response here). The embarrassing statement of these three societies has been archived here in case they change their minds.

But I digress, so let’s continue with the Telegraph piece:

Dr Goymann recently published an article in the journal BioEssays, where he said some scientists are arguing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait.

“Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view, thereby opposing fundamental biological facts,” he said.

“While we fully endorse efforts to create a more inclusive environment for gender-diverse people, this does not require denying biological sex.

“On the contrary, the rejection of biological sex seems to be based on a lack of knowledge about evolution and it champions species chauvinism, inasmuch as it imposes human identity notions on millions of other species.”

. . . .The survey touched on a range of topics that are divisive in the scientific community such as the origin of Covid, the Government’s pandemic modelling and gain-of-function research, as well as the gender/sex debate.

Only UK lecturers were invited to fill in the form and more than half were educated to PhD level or higher. The faculty of social sciences accounted for 18 per cent of the participants, 13 per cent were medicine and 12 per cent were life sciences.

. . . . Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, a human rights organisation that campaigns for clarity on sex in law and everyday life, told The Telegraph: “This survey has two remarkable findings. The first is that 29 per cent of academics are apparently unaware of the obvious fact that sex is binary.

“The second is that nearly two-thirds of academics say that ‘gender is fluid’. That is a strikingly confident statement about a nebulous concept.

“Most ordinary people think “gender” is just a polite alternative to “sex”, so are these academics talking about personal style – masculinity or femininity; or assertions about “identity” – that is, states of mind?

“This muddle feeds through into academic research and public policy. It’s concerning that people supposedly among our best and brightest are seemingly blind to this confusion.”

Here’s Goymann’s essay (with two coauthors), which you can access for free by clicking on the headline:

Goymann uses the gametic definition of sex with which we’ve become familiar. From that paper:

BIOLOGICAL SEX AS A BINARY VARIABLE

Biological sex is defined as a binary variable in every sexually reproducing plant and animal species. With a few exceptions, all sexually reproducing organisms generate exactly two types of gametes that are distinguished by their difference in size: females, by definition, produce large gametes (eggs) and males, by definition, produce small and usually motile gametes (sperm).[9–12] This distinct dichotomy in the size of female and male gametes is termed “anisogamy” and refers to a fundamental principle in biology (Figure 1).

. . . . A widespread misconception among philosophers, biomedical scientists and gender theorists – and now also among some authors and editors of influential science journals – is that the definition of the biological sex is based on chromosomes, genes, hormones, vulvas, or penises, etc. (e.g., Ref.[1, 3, 6, 26–28]) or that biological sex is a social construct.[2] These notions very much reflect our own anthropocentric view. In fact, femaleness or maleness is not defined by any of these features that can, but do not need to be associated with the biological or gametic sex.

. . . . CONCLUSION: DENYING BIOLOGICAL SEX ERODES SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND TRUST IN SCIENCE

It is clear that the biological definition of the sexes cannot be the basis for defining social genders of people, as forcefully pointed out by the philosopher Paul Griffiths.[8] Likewise, the socio-cultural, and thus anthropocentric, construct of gender cannot be applied to non-human organisms.[7] There is a red line that separates humans with their unique combination of biological sex and gender from non-human animals and plants, which only have two distinct sexes – both of which are either expressed in the same or in different individuals. As much as the concept of biological sex remains central to recognize the diversity of life, it is also crucial for those interested in a profound understanding of the nature of gender in humans. Denying the biological sex, for whatever noble cause, erodes scientific progress. In addition, and probably even worse, by rejecting simple biological facts influential science journals may open the flood gates for “alternative truths.”

News Items: Demographics of Misinformation, The Toll of Fake Research, Dangerous Street Drugs, Nearby Habitable Zone Exoplanet, Reverse Engineering Alien Technology<"br>Who's That Noisy; Science Quiz; Your Questions and E-mails: Starlink Reentries; Science or Fiction

Here’s a good headline from the NYT (click to read, or find it archived here). You may remember Palmerston, the the resident Chief Mouser of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) at Whitehall in London, who lived on Downing Street and often got into tiffs with Larry, the Chief Mouser of the Cabinet Office. Well, Palmerston, once rumored to have died, is very much alive, and has been transferred to Bermuda.  Click to read, or find it archived here.

We interrupt this program for a special bulletin.

In a major government shake-up, Palmerston, the cat who left the British Foreign Office in 2020, will come out of retirement and take up a new posting working with the governor of Bermuda.

Palmerston stepped down from the Foreign Office in 2020. At the time of his retirement, he was said to have been looking forward to a more low-key lifestyle. Although there was talk of him writing his memoirs, he instead spent his time climbing trees. But the lure of service to crown and country seems to have been too strong.

“I’ve just started work as feline relations consultant (semi-retired) to the new Governor of Bermuda,” Palmerston wrote on X on Tuesday. “I’ve been busy meeting very welcoming Bermudians.”

Andrew Murdoch, who had served with Palmerston in the Foreign Office and had maintained a residence with him in retirement, was appointed to the governor’s role in September.

A black-and-white cat, Palmerston is named after Lord Palmerston, a two-time prime minister in the 1850s and ’60s. Lord Palmerston was known for promoting British nationalism and intervention. Palmerston is known for mousing.

As a rescue cat, Palmerston is of uncertain age, although he was reported to be roughly 2 years old when appointed in 2016. His relatively low profile in recent years had led to rumors of his demise.

Lord Simon McDonald, formerly the most senior civil servant at the foreign office, said the most frequent question he had received since leaving office was what had happened to Palmerston. “The answer — retirement to countryside — usually treated as euphemism for ‘He died.’” he wrote. “Now we have proof of life in Bermuda! Enjoy your latest assignment.”

Much as Palmerston’s eponymous prime minister could never get along with another prime minister, William Gladstone, Palmerston has had a longtime rivalry with Larry, the chief mouser at 10 Downing Street. Although many details remain murky, reports say that in 2016, Larry tried to enter the Foreign Office in London, leading Palmerston to claw him. Larry was injured enough to need veterinary treatment. Bitterness lingered.

Larry is currently serving under his sixth prime minister. With Palmerston now more than 3,000 miles away, their feud is likely to diminish, political analysts say.

This video shows Larry confronting Palmerston, but also chasing a fox and rejecting Liz Truss’s attempt to pet him:

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Here’s Jenn, who posts only good news, talking about Browser the Library Cat for Life (what a good name!), who kept his job after a curmudgeon tried to oust him.

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And The Kiffness with a great riff on a cat’s vocals: “Sometimes I’m Alone”.  The cat is named George, as you’ll see at the end, and The Kiffness is on tour!

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Lagniappe:  Two today!  First, a cat misuses a store display.

pic.twitter.com/wkcmkCkkWF

— Meonk! (@majeliskucing) February 12, 2025

And wait! There’s more!  The cat movie “Flow,” which I’ve mentioned before, has now been nominated for two Oscars. It’s for everyone, not just cat lovers, for it features adventures and many animals. You can read about it in the NYT below by clicking the headline, or find it archived here, and I’ve put the trailer below. SEE IT!

An excerpt:

“We beat James Cameron!” the filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis said with a shy smile during a recent video interview. “Flow,” his second animated feature, is now one of the highest grossing films ever in his native Latvia, surpassing even Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise at the local box office.

Latvia has a population of roughly 1.8 million people, and “Flow” has sold more than 255,000 admissions since it was first released in August 2024. The film is still playing in Latvian theaters.

“We still have sold-out screenings in week 23 now,” Zilbalodis, 30, said.

A critical and commercial success, Zilbalodis’s computer-animated, dialogue-free film follows a group of animals helping each other survive a flood. It received two Oscar nominations last month, for best animated feature and best international feature, and is the first Latvian production nominated for any Academy Award.

. . . . The “Flow” craze has reached far beyond Latvia. Here in the United States, the animated adventure, which opened in theaters in late November, has become the all-time highest-grossing release for the distributors Janus Films and Sideshow, bringing in $4 million so far.

“Flow” has received terrific ratings on Rotten Tomatoes: 97% from the critics and 98% from the public. You don’t see ratings like that for most movies, especially animated ones with no words!

The American Trailer:

h/t Michael, Laura

Although many doctors who spread COVID misinformation act as if its in poor taste to bring it up today, we don't need their permission to remember.

The post “Don’t Worry About the NIH” From the Same Doctors Who Brought You “Don’t Worry About COVID.” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth.

The process of separating useful molecules from mixtures of other substances accounts for 15% of the nation's energy, emits 100 million tons of carbon dioxide and costs $4 billion annually. In a new study, researchers have found these manufactured separation materials don't function as intended because the pores are so packed with polymer they become blocked. That means the separations are inefficient and unnecessarily expensive.

Researchers have explored a 'quantum-inspired' technique to make the 'ones' and 'zeroes' for classical computer memory applications out of crystal defects, each the size of an individual atom. This turns milimeter-sized crystals into computer memory devices capable of storing terabytes of data. This interdisciplinary revolution in computer memory took its inspiration from the radiation dosimeters worn by hospital employees working with X-ray machines.

Researchers have explored a 'quantum-inspired' technique to make the 'ones' and 'zeroes' for classical computer memory applications out of crystal defects, each the size of an individual atom. This turns milimeter-sized crystals into computer memory devices capable of storing terabytes of data. This interdisciplinary revolution in computer memory took its inspiration from the radiation dosimeters worn by hospital employees working with X-ray machines.

Three innovative design techniques substantially enhance wireless transmitter performance and can boost power efficiency and elevate data rates concurrently. This effectively aligns with the growing demand for speed and efficiency, accelerating the widespread deployment of wireless devices. This enables synergistic operation of wireless electronic devices and better quality of modern life.

Three innovative design techniques substantially enhance wireless transmitter performance and can boost power efficiency and elevate data rates concurrently. This effectively aligns with the growing demand for speed and efficiency, accelerating the widespread deployment of wireless devices. This enables synergistic operation of wireless electronic devices and better quality of modern life.

NASA continues to progress with the development of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST), the next-generation observatory with a target launch date of 2027. As the direct successor to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will build on the successes of Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, the “mother of the Hubble,” the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a panoramic field of view 200 times greater than Hubble’s infrared view, enabling the first wide-field maps of the Universe.

Combined with observations by the ESA’s Euclid mission, these maps will help astronomers resolve the mystery of Dark Matter and cosmic expansion. The development process reached another milestone as the mission team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center successfully integrated the mission’s sunshade—a visor-like aperture cover—into the outer barrel assembly. This deployable structure will shield the telescope from sunlight and keep it at a stable temperature, allowing it to take high-resolution optical and infrared images of the cosmos.

Similar in function to Webb‘s sunshield, Roman’s is designed to make its instruments more sensitive to faint light sources, allowing the telescope to resolve distant galaxies, dimmer stars, brown dwarfs, and the gas and dust that permeate the interstellar medium (ISM). The shield consists of two layers of reinforced thermal blankets that will remain folded during launch, allowing the telescope to fit inside its payload fairing. It will deploy once the telescope has reached space using a system of three booms that are triggered electronically.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy.
Credits: NASA

The integration took a few hours, during which the technicians joined the sunshield and outer barrel assembly in the largest clean room at NASA Goddard. In addition to protecting the telescope from micrometeoroid impacts, the outer barrel assembly will also prevent light contamination and keep the telescope at a stable temperature. This will be accomplished by a series of heaters that prevent the telescope’s mirrors from experiencing temperature swings that would cause them to expand and contract. Said Brian Simpson, Roman’s deployable aperture cover lead at NASA Goddard, in a NASA press release:

“We’re prepared for micrometeoroid impacts that could occur in space, so the blanket is heavily fortified. One layer is even reinforced with Kevlar, the same thing that lines bulletproof vests. By placing some space in between the layers we reduce the risk that light would leak in, because it’s unlikely that the light would pass through both layers at the exact same points where the holes were.”

With this integration complete, the mission has now passed the Key Decision Point-D (KDP-D) milestone, the transition from fabrication to the assembly phase. This will be followed by the integration and testing phases, which Roman is on track for completion by fall 2026, followed by the launch phase no later than May 2027. The sunshade and outer barrel assembly were built by Goddard engineers and have been individually tested many times. Following the integration, the engineers conducted a deployment test that verified that they function together.

Since the sunshade was designed to deploy in space, the system isn’t powerful enough to deploy in Earth’s gravity, so the test involved a gravity negation system to offset its weight. Next, the team will conduct a thermal vacuum test to ensure the components function in the temperature and pressure environment of space. After that, they will put the assembled components through a shake test to simulate the intense vibrations they will experience during launch.

The view from below the Roman Space telescopes Outer Barrell Assembly’s baffles towards the deployed Deployable Aperture Cover. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

In the coming months, technicians will attach the telescope’s solar panels (which completed testing this past summer) to the outer barrel assembly and sunshade. The team expects to have these components integrated with the rest of the observatory by the end of the year. Said Laurence Madison, a mechanical engineer at NASA Goddard:

“Roman is made up of a lot of separate components that come together after years of design and fabrication. The deployable aperture cover and outer barrel assembly were built at the same time, and up until the integration the two teams mainly used reference drawings to make sure everything would fit together as they should. So the successful integration was both a proud moment and a relief!”

In addition to surveying billions of galaxies and investigating the mystery of Dark Energy, Roman will use its wide-field imagers and advanced suite of spectrometers to directly image exoplanets and planet-forming disks, supermassive black holes (SMBHs), stellar nurseries, and small bodies in our Solar System. Said Sheri Thorn, an aerospace engineer working on Roman’s sunshade at NASA Goddard:

“It’s been incredible to see these major components go from computer models to building and now integrating them. Since it’s all coming together at Goddard, we get a front row seat to the process. We’ve seen it mature, kind of like watching a child grow up, and it’s a really gratifying experience.”

Further Reading: NASA

The post Construction of Roman Continues With the Addition of its Sunshade appeared first on Universe Today.