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Conservation projects in wealthy but nature-depleted countries can cause food and timber production to “leak” into poorer, biodiverse nations 

In mice, the neurons that dictate the feeling of being full are also the ones that cause sugar cravings, potentially explaining why people are still able to eat sweets after a filling meal

Perhaps I’m into sappy music today, but let’s end the day, as we started it, with romantic music, and one of my favorite pop songs. This one is “I’ll never love this way again,“, and no, even though it’s sung by Dionne Warwick, it wasn’t written by Burt Bachrach but by Richard Kerr and Will Jennings. And it was produced by Barry Manilow, whom you can see below.

This live version below has both Warwick on vocals and Manilow on the keyboard (and some vocal harmony).  It counts as one of my “lost love” songs (I have a list) because she realizes that her great romance is doomed to disappear (“before the good is gone”, “I won’t turn my head in sorrow if you should go away”).

Warwick was a great vocalist, and had a lot of good songs, but now she’s forgotten. Would anybody now in college have even heard her name?

Here’s what the Guardian considers her best song, though I don’t agree, though it’s very good. It was written by Burt Bachrach and Hal David, and performed here by Warwick the year after it was written (1964, when Warwick was 24).

A survey of workers who used generative AI to complete tasks found that they used critical thinking less when they trusted the AI to do the task accurately

I have a friend with Alzheimer’s so I was especially depressed to read Jesse Singal’s discussion of a new book, Doctored, claiming that research on both Alzheimer’s disease and drugs that purport to ameliorate is all badly flawed, even fraudulent. You can read Singal’s discussion below (free access by clicking on the headline), and access the book on Amazon by clicking on the cover below.

An excerpt from Singal:

In his book, Piller, an investigative reporter at Science magazine, presents copious evidence of severe fraud, negligence, and buck-passing in Alzheimer’s research. From fabricated images published in major research journals (many of them still unretracted) to data manipulation conducted by pharmaceutical companies to the complete negligence of federal watchdogs, Piller’s reporting demonstrates indisputably that the field of Alzheimer’s research is in sorry shape.

Things are so bad, in fact, that the dominant theory that has guided researchers’ efforts this century — that Alzheimer’s symptoms are caused by the buildup of proteins called “amyloid plaques” in the brain — is now in serious question. That might explain why, as Piller notes, a recent meta-analysis of the available research found no evidence that any of the available Alzheimer’s drugs cause noticeable improvements in the cognition or daily functioning of patients. We’re two decades and many billions of dollars into the modern era of Alzheimer’s research, and we have precious little to show for it — a particularly dire state of affairs given that this dread condition is only going to hit us harder as America’s population continues to age. Piller’s book, which was released February 4, tells the story of a wild and heartbreaking goose-chase.

While Doctored is gripping in its own right, it also serves as a warning about the collapse of trust in expert authority. Thanks to the capacious new markets for crankery carved out by social and “alternative” media — not to mention a worldwide populist revolt against “the establishment” in general — there’s more grifting and science-denial than ever before, and the worst purveyors of pseudoscientific sludge rake in millions precisely by positioning themselves in opposition to mainstream science.

The lesson for scientists is to clean up their act and to stop misleading people about their work. I mean, I never had any doubt whatever that Alzheimer’s was caused by plaques in the brain.  Now that is not at all certain; the plaques could be a byproduct or a correlate and not a cause. If there’s that much uncertainty about it, why haven’t I heard about it.  Of course, journalists are responsible for this, too, but good scientific journalism is a species going extinct.

I believe that Singal has already been demonized on BlueHairSky, though he hasn’t been banned. The reason: the place is full of immigrants from Twitter who are “progressive” liberals and couldn’t stand the free speech on X. Singal described his apostasy: 

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and TheEconomist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”

Back to his own Substack, though; Singal won’t win many friends by arguing that both scientists and liberals have exacerbated the problem, the former by acting precipitously or even duplicitously (the attempt to dismiss a lab-leak theory for the covid virus by scientific officials in the Biden ambit is a good example), while the left-wing public by always saying “trust the science” without realizing that a. scientists are human, with all the good and bad behavior that implies and b. science like investigating covid moves quickly, and what is true today could be false tomorrow.

But I shouldn’t exculpate the Right as well. After all, that’s the side of the political spectrum that still pushes creationism as well as quacks like RFK Jr. And Trump and his cronies are busy slashing scientific research almost willy-nilly. Singal, though, concentrates on the Left, perhaps because that’s where he resides:

At a time of such uncertainty and such dangerous overcorrection, it can feel awkward or difficult to point out, as Piller does in Doctored, just how broken some of our cherished mainstream scientific institutions are. Isn’t that playing right into Trump’s hands?

I don’t think so. The strategy adopted by many mainstream liberals in response to the populist surge — effectively, plugging our ears and chanting “trust the science” over and over — might be comforting, in that it offers a Manichaean worldview in which improving the world is a relatively straightforward matter of convincing people of their own ignorance so that they will board the science train with the rest of us.

But this effort has clearly failed. Some populist distrust of mainstream science is unwarranted and harmful, such as most strains of vaccine skepticism, but in plenty of instances, they are more or less correct not to automatically trust mainstream scientists, even if they arrive at that conclusion for reasons some of us might find uncouth. (Update: I added ‘automatically’ post-publication because I think it’s an important modifier here.)

In other words, while it’s easy to accuse those red-staters out there of exhibiting an alarming lack of faith in science, especially now that their wrecking-ball avatar is in power, it’s harder — and arguably just as important — to ask whether perhaps we have too much faith in it. The scientific establishment hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory in recent decades, given the replication crises that have roiled multiple fields, the data-fraud scandals popping up everywhere from cancer research to business-school psychology, and the frequently overconfident proclamations experts made about thorny Covid-era issues like mask mandates and school closures. And yet liberals tend to continue to reflexively trust many institutions that haven’t earned it, to the point where some of us have turned this sentiment into a mantra: “Science is real,” you will see on signs planted in front of many liberal homes.

I will read this book, as I’m particularly interested in how “fraud” was involved in Alzheimer’s research. Here’s one bit from Singal:

Piller’s book provides numerous damning examples of the difference between science as we idealize it and science as it is practiced by real-life human beings. For example, much of the data fraud in Alzheimer’s research, alleged and proven, involves doctored images. This fraud was uncovered not by journal editors or peer-reviewers — the individuals supposedly responsible for such quality-control — but by unpaid sleuths “who use pseudonyms to post comments” online, as he writes, in the hopes of someone who matters noticing and acting. (One notable exception is Elizabeth Bik, a Dutch microbiologist and legendary image sleuth who has taken on Alzheimer’s fraud.)

Who would have thought that we’d be catching so much fraudulent work by analysis of published images. One might conclude that reviewers of manuscripts aren’t doing their work, but I suspect that a lot of the fraud involves the same images repeated in different papers, and no reviewer has time to compare images in a submitted manuscript to other images by the same authors, but in different journals.

Doctored was released February 4 of this year.

To avoid making this post too long, I’ve put the book-publisher’s (Simon and Schuster’s) description below the fold. Click “read more” to see it:

Simon and Schuster description here

Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer’s disease, a tragedy that is already projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of pharmaceutical breakthroughs keep coming up short, investigative journalist Charles Piller’s Doctored shows that we’ve quite likely been walking the wrong path to finding a cure all along—led astray by a cabal of self-interested researchers, government accomplices, and corporate greed.

Piller begins with a whistleblower—Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag—whose work exposed a massive scandal. Schrag found that a University of Minnesota lab led by a precocious young scientist and a Nobel Prize–rumored director delivered apparently falsified data at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease. Piller’s revelations of Schrag’s findings stunned the field and the public.

From there, based on years of investigative reporting, this “seminal account of deceit that will long be remembered” (Katherine Eban, author of Bottle of Lies and Vanity Fair special correspondent) exposes a vast network of deceit and its players, all the way up to the FDA. Piller uncovers evidence that hundreds of important Alzheimer’s research papers are based on false data. In the process, he reveals how even against a flood of money and influence, a determined cadre of scientific renegades have fought back to challenge the field’s institutional powers in service to science and the tens of thousands of patients who have been drawn into trials to test dubious drugs. It is a shocking tale with huge ramifications not only for Alzheimer’s disease, but for scientific research, funding, and oversight at large.

 

Batteries built on quantum principles could offer fast charging and discharging – and the technology may just have moved a little closer to the real world

Venus is very variable. Its surface constantly changes from volcanic activity, and the difference between its lower and upper atmosphere is night and day, with a dramatic change in sulfuric acid concentration. So, designing a system that works for all parts of Venus is particularly challenging. NASA thinks they might be on to a new idea of how to do so and has funded Ben Hockman, a roboticist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to work on a tethered atmospheric sensor attached to a balloon as part of the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts Phase I program.

The project, known as the Tethered Observatory for Balloon-based Imaging and Atmospheric Sampling (TOBIAS—assumedly not after the Arrested Development character), is based on a simple principle. On Venus, a very distinct cloud layer, between 47 and 52 km in altitude, separates the relatively stable upper atmosphere similar to Earth’s, with a hellish surface that no probes have yet lasted longer than a few minutes on. 

TOBIAS would float a helium-filled balloon in the upper atmosphere, where conditions are Earth-like. Then it would release a “towbody” – a stand-alone sensing platform connected to the balloon by a tether. That tether is intended to be several kilometers long, allowing the towbody to pass through the hazardous cloud layer and, hopefully, take accurate, high-resolution images of Venus’ surface.

Fraser interviews Ben Hockman, the PI for the TOBIAS project.

Several design decisions will be the focus of the Phase I NIAC grant. According to Dr. Hockman’s interview with Fraser, one of the most important aspects will be the tether design. The most significant force on the tether wouldn’t be from the towbody itself but from the wind shear. The wind conditions are different enough from where the balloon is located (50-60km altitude) to where the towbody is intended to reside (45km altitude) that the forces on the tether would be strong enough to rip it apart if it’s not designed correctly.

Also, the tether’s material is essential. Standard copper wire could potentially power the towbody, but it would be too heavy to survive the mission’s expected wind shear conditions. Optical fiber could prove a viable alternative, but there are some concerns about the amount of power that could be transmitted that way. According to Dr. Hockman, “People have put power over fiber before.”

Much of that power would go to a cooling system that would make the temperature in that part of the Venusian atmosphere manageable. Dr. Hockman suggests alternative power sources, like solar panels (which would be affected by the same cloud layer that obscures the surface) to wind turbines, which would do well because of the high energy available from the wind but might lead to stability issues with the towbody.

Fraser explains why Venus is a critical step in our space exploration program.

Ultimately, if they can get the cable, power, and communication systems on the towbody to work, it could provide atmospheric sensing, and more importantly, direct imaging of the surface of Venus, in a variety of wavelengths. Near-infrared images, which TOBIAS could supply, could help answer outstanding questions about the history of Venusian volcanism.

Dr. Hockman even speculates about the potential for a tethered impactor to land on the surface, grab a sample, and reel itself back up to the balloon. That concept was the subject of a previous year’s NIAC grant, though it’s unclear whether further progress has been made.

TOBIAS would benefit from additional information about the Venusian atmosphere from DaVinci and Veritas, which will also contain instruments to peer through to the surface, just not in the wavelengths that the towbody would enable. Data from those missions could inform the design of TOBIAS’s balloon and tether system, hopefully making it more likely to survive Venus’ extreme conditions.

Venus presents a ton of engineering challenges, as Fraser discusses here.

The project still has a long way to go before it has to survive anything, though. NIAC grants, especially Phase I, are meant to encourage very early design studies, many of which are unlikely to receive further funding. But, if Dr. Hockman proves the idea more and receives a Phase II grant sometime in the next few years, a balloon tugging along some sensors might one day reach Venusian skies.

Learn More:
NASA / Ben Hockman – TOBIAS: Tethered Observatory for Balloon-based Imaging and Atmospheric Sampling
UT – A Balloon Mission That Could Explore Venus Indefinitely
UT – The Best Way to Learn About Venus Could Be With a Fleet of Balloons
UT – Is There Seismic Activity on Venus? Here’s How We Could Find Out

Lead Image:
Artist’s concept of TOBIAS
Credit – Ben Hockman / NASA

The post A Balloon With a Tether Could Explore Venus’ Surface appeared first on Universe Today.

Ancient DNA from 348 individuals suggests that pale skin became the predominant characteristic of people living in Europe much later than assumed

As I reported recently, the Presidents of three organismal-biology societies, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN) and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) sent a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress. Implicitly claiming that its sentiments were endorsed by the 3500 members of the societies, the declaration also claimed that there is a scientific consensus on the definition of sex, and that is that sex is NOT binary but rather some unspecified but multivariate combination of different traits, a definition that makes sex a continuum or spectrum—and in all species! The bolding below is mine:

Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex. Accordingly, sex (and gendered expression) is not a binary trait. While some aspects of sex are bimodal, variation along the continuum of male to female is well documented in humans through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one’s identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.

A number of biologists I talked to had strong objections to both this wonky declaration, which of course is based not on biology but on ideology (see my posts here and here), as well as to its implication that biologists, including members of the three societies, generally agreed with it. But the societies did not poll their members before issuing a general statement in their name!

The statement is in fact is a prime but embarrassing example of societies being ideologically captured to the extent that they misrepresent science to cater to “progressive” liberalism. The object of course is not foxes, horses, or oak trees, but humans; this is meant to reassure people who feel that they are “nonbinary” in gender that nature is just like them. (For an excellent analysis of the issue, and a defense of the binary nature of sex, see Richard Dawkins’s article here.)

Luana Maroja of Williams College, my frequent partner in crime, was even more concerned, and so she penned a letter which she sent last night to the Presidents of the three societies.  With a little help from me, she managed to get 23 biologists to sign the letter (as expected, many demurred and wouldn’t sign). I reproduce Luana’s letter below with permission; Except for Luana and me, I have left off the signers’ names because I didn’t ask them if they wanted to go public about such a touchy subject.

To wit:

Dear presidents of the Tri-societies: ASN, SSB and SSE,

We, Tri-society members and/or biologists, are deeply disappointed by your recent letter “Letter to the US President and Congress on the Scientific Understanding of Sex and Gender” issued last Wednesday, Feb 5, 2025, in response to Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”.

While we agree that Trump’s executive orders are misleading, we disagree with your statements about the sex binary and its definition. In animals and plants, binary sex is universally defined by gamete type, even though sexes vary in how they are developmentally determined and phenotypically identified across taxa. Thus, your letter misrepresents the scientific understanding of many members of the Tri-societies.

You state that: “Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics.”

However, we do not see sex as a “construct” and we do not see other mentioned human-specific characteristics, such as “lived experiences” or “[phenotypic] variation along the continuum of male to female”, as having anything to do with the biological definition of sex. While we humans might be unique in having gender identities and certain types of sexual dimorphism, sex applies to us just as it applies to dragonflies, butterflies, or fish – there is no human exceptionalism.   Yes, there are developmental pathologies that cause sterility and there are variations in phenotypic traits related to sexual dimorphism. However, the existence of this variation does not make sex any less binary or more complex, because what defines sex is not a combination of chromosomes or hormonal balances or external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The universal biological definition of sex is gamete size.

If you and the signers of this letter do not agree on these points, then the Tri-societies were wrong to speak in our names and claim that there is a scientific consensus without even conducting a survey of society members to see if such a consensus exists. Distorting reality to comply with ideology and using a misleading claim of consensus to give a veneer of scientific authority to your statement does more harm than just misrepresenting our views: it also weakens public trust in science, which has declined rapidly in the last few years. Because of this, scientific societies should stay away from politics as much as possible, except for political issues that directly affect the mission of the society.

Respectfully,

Jerry Coyne, Professor Emeritus, Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago
Luana S. Maroja, Professor of Biology, Williams College

THE NAMES OF 21 OTHER SIGNERS ARE REDACTED

I doubt the Societies will pay this letter any attention, as they seem to be doubling down on the sex-is-a-spectrum-in-all-species view. This is performative flaunting of virtue that will accomplish nothing.  But we and the other signers want the public to know that this view of biological sex is not held by all biologists, and hardly represents a scientific consensus. (If there is a consensus, it is most likely the gametic definition described by Dawkins.) If you want to write your own letter rather than sign a group effort, the email addressed of two Presidents are given in their letter, and it’s easy to google that of the ASN President. And if you did sign the letter and want that to be public, simply say it in the comments below.

As a former President of the SSE, I am ashamed of what that society has done, and they should be ashamed of themselves for truckling to the latest ideology. They can of course issue statements bearing on issues of evolution, but this one simply distorts the facts. And, as I reported yesterday, the SSE has seen fit to make more general declarations about politics.

In a step towards suspended animation of people, slices of mouse brains have shown near-normal activity after being stored at -150°C for up to a week

Electrolyte drinks are very popular - but are they necessary?

The post Do you need to drink electrolytes? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Pioneer Works is “an artist and scientist-led cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn that fosters innovative thinking through the visual and performing arts, technology, music, and science.” It’s a cool place: if you’re in the New York area, check them out! Among many other activities, they host a series called “Picture This,” in which scientists ruminate over scientific images that they particularly like. My own contribution to this series has just come out, in which I expound upon the importance and meaning of this graph from the CMS experimental collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]. (The ATLAS experimental collaboration at the LHC has made essentially identical images.)

The point of the article is to emphasize the relation between the spikes seen in this graph and the images of musical frequencies that one might see in a recording studio (as in this image from this paper). The similarity is not an accident.

Each of the two biggest spikes is a sign of an elementary “particle”; the Z boson is the left-most spike, and the Higgs boson is the central spike. What is spiking is the probability of creating such a particle as a function of the energy of some sort of physical process (specifically, a collision of objects that are found inside protons), plotted along the horizontal axis. But energy E is related to the mass m of the “particle” (via E=mc2) and it is simultaneously related to the frequency f of the vibration of the “particle” (via the Planck-Einstein equation E = hf)… and so this really is a plot of frequencies, with spikes reflecting cosmic resonances analogous to the resonances of musical instruments. [If you find this interesting and would like more details, it was a major topic in my book.]

The title of the article refers to the fact that the Z boson and Higgs boson frequencies are out of tune, in the sense that if you slowed down their frequencies and turned them into sound, they’d be dissonant, and not very nice to listen to. The same goes for all the other frequencies of the elementary “particles”; they’re not at all in tune. We don’t know why, because we really have no idea where any of these frequencies come from. The Higgs field has a major role to play in this story, but so do other important aspects of the universe that remain completely mysterious. And so this image, which shows astonishingly good agreement between theoretical predictions (colored regions) and LHC data (black dots), also reveals how much we still don’t understand about the cosmos.

Fast-moving stars zooming through our galaxy might have been slingshotted from a black hole inside the neighbouring Large Magellanic Cloud

Hydrogel protection could be crucial for safe human space exploration.

Space radiation: the threat is real. Credit: ESA

It’s a key problem that will need to be addressed, if humans are to attempt deep-space, long duration missions. Not only is radiation exposure a dangerous health risk to humans, but it also poses a hazard to equipment and operating systems. Now, a team at Ghent University in Belgium are testing a possible solution: 3D printed hydrogels, which could provide deformable layers of water-filled protection.

Water acts as a great radiation shield. Relatively dense, the hydrogen-laden H2O molecule can slow down radiation particles as they zip past. Plus, water is something that astronauts will have to bring lots of on deep space missions. We have our own built-in water shielding on Earth with the atmosphere above, with the added benefit of the Earth’s magnetic field beyond.

Exposure sources are mainly two types: space weather (from the Sun) and cosmic (from outside the solar system) from ancient and exotic sources, such as supernovae explosions. The 11-year solar cycle intensifies solar activity, while we see and uptick in cosmic radiation when our Sun is at a lull.

Radiation and its risk to spaceflight. Credit: ESA Radiation Exposure on the ISS

From the earliest days of the Space Age, astronauts have reported seeing occasional flashes in their eyes… even when closed. We now know this is due to high energy particles zipping through and interacting with the aqueous and vitreous humors (fluids) in the eye, and (somewhat disturbing to think about) the brain. Astronauts in low Earth orbit aboard the ISS have sheltered from solar storms in the past, taking advantage of the core modules which are at least surrounded by the bulk of the station.

But as far as providing personal protection, water poses a challenge. Bulky suits can limit movement and spring a leak: a bad thing to have happen in space. Super-absorbent polymers (SAPs) designed by the Chemistry and Biomaterials Group (PBM) at Ghent University could function as an alternative, and are more effective versus circulating water.

Enter Hydrogel

SAP can absorb a hundred times its weight in liquid. This makes it an ideal lightweight and portable material to work with. Think of the ‘monster toys’ that expand in size, just add water. Unlike traditional circulation systems, the water in hydrogel is not free-flowing, making it resistant to leakage during a puncture.

Timelapse of an expanding hydrogel, absorbing water. Credit: ESA

“The beauty of this project is that we are working with a well-known technology,” says Lenny Van Daele (Ghent University) in a recent press release. “Hydrogels are found in many things we use every day.”

Hydrogels are common in consumer products, including soft contact lenses, bio-materials, and medical bandage gels.

“The super-absorbent polymer that we are using can be processed using multiple techniques, which is a rare and advantageous quality amongst polymers,” says Manon Minsart (Ghent University) in the same ESA press release. “Our method of choice is 3D printing, which allows us to create a hydrogel in almost any shape we want.”

3D printed hydrogel models of a space shuttle and an astronaut. Credit: ESA/University of Ghent. Radiation Exposure En Route to Mars

The problem posed by space radiation on long duration missions cannot be overstated. It’s something that will have to be solved, if humans are to make the long round trip journey to Mars.

Curiosity’s RAD experiment carried on its journey to the Red Planet in 2012 demonstrated the magnitude of the dilemma. Astronauts on a Mars mission would receive 60 rem/0.6 Sieverts… about a career’s-worth of acceptable radiation exposure, in one mission.

The RAD detector mounted aboard Curiosity. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The problem is far from solved, but hydrogels may provide a solution in the years to come. It will be exciting to see hydrogels used as a common feature on future deep space missions, to keep astronauts and equipment safe.

The post Hydrogels Could Be Ideal Radiation Protection For Astronauts appeared first on Universe Today.

I see in the NYT that there’s a new “authorized biography” of the Bangles, recounting their rise and fall. An excerpt:

The first time Susanna Hoffs and the Peterson sisters sang together and their voices blended, the frisson was unmistakable. “We knew we had something,” Hoffs said. “We created a band in that moment.”

Hoffs, 66, beamed at the memory, sitting in her kitchen on a late January afternoon. Dressed in a sweater and slacks, the diminutive [she’s 5″2′] singer and guitarist sipped coffee, an old Margaret Keane painting hanging above her. Her airy home in Brentwood is just a few blocks from where the Bangles were born, on a cool evening in early 1981 in her parents’ garage.

“It’s an overused word, but we were organic,” the guitarist Vicki Peterson, 67, said. “We formed ourselves, played the music we loved, we really were a garage band.” But a garage band “that somehow became pop stars,” the drummer Debbi Peterson, 63, noted. Both sisters were interviewed in video conversations.

The Bangles broke big, scoring five Top 5 hits and storming MTV with inescapable songs like “Manic Monday” and “Eternal Flame.” They were one of the era’s rare all-girl groups — and became one of the most successful female bands of all time — a crew of puckish 20-somethings showcasing their collective songwriting and vocal chops.

But one of the defining bands of the 1980s also ended in spectacular fashion. Less than a decade after its birth, the group imploded in its manager’s Hollywood mansion, the sisterhood of its members lost amid a farrago of fame and mental fatigue.

That story plays out vividly in “Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of the Bangles” by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, out on Feb. 18. Bickerdike — the author of books about Nico and Britney Spears — fashioned a history of a bygone era in the music business, one in which the outsize influence of major labels, domineering producers and Machiavellian managers could routinely make or break a band.

. . . The notion of the Bangles as a band of equals quickly went out the window. “Susanna [Hoffs] was pushed forward as the sex symbol,” Bickerdike said. “But Sue is really smart and goofy, she’s actually kind of a dork, you know? So I think that was an uncomfortable role for her.”

And this is a crime:

While the Go-Go’s were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, the Bangles have yet to be nominated.

Here’s Susannah singing my favorite Bangles song, “Eternal Flame,” for which she wrote the lyrics, in 2021—when she was sixty (she turned 66 on January 17). She remains beautiful and alluring, and her voice is still lovely. She’s also Jewish, and I’d marry her in a second—if she wasn’t already married.

Here’s a good live version (1996) with just Hoffs and a guitarist. A live version with all the Bangles is here and you can hear the original recording here.  The song topped the charts in both the U.S. and U.K.

A comprehensive analysis pours cold water on claims that using carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere to drive oil extraction can result in carbon-neutral fossil fuel

Software developers entering the International Obfuscated C Code Contest must write programs that look baffling, but perform unusual, unexpected or catastrophic tasks

Researchers are designing a global real-time monitoring system to help save the world's coral reefs from further decline, primarily due to bleaching caused by global warming.

When massive stars reach the end of their life cycle, they undergo gravitational collapse and shed their outer layers in a massive explosion (a supernova). Whereas particularly massive stars will leave a black hole in their wake, others leave behind a stellar remnant known as a neutron star (or white dwarf). These objects concentrate a mass greater than the entire Solar System into a volume measuring (on average) just 20 km (~12.5 mi) in diameter. Meanwhile, the extreme conditions inside neutron stars are still a mystery to astronomers.

In 2017, the first collision between two neutron stars was detected from the gravitational waves (GWs) it produced. Since then, astronomers have theorized how GWs could be used to probe the interiors of neutron stars and learn more about the extreme physics taking place. According to new research by a team from Goethe University Frankfurt and other institutions, the GWs produced by binary neutron star (BNS) mergers mere milliseconds after they merge could be the best means of probing the interiors of these mysterious objects.

The research was conducted by a group led by Luciano Rezzolla, a professor from the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP) at Goethe University and a Senior Fellow with the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS). The research team also includes members of the ExtreMe Matter Institute (EMMI-GSI), Darmstadt Technical University (TU Darmstadt), and the University of Stavanger in Norway. The paper detailing their findings appeared on February 3rd in Nature Communications.

Light bursts from the collision of two neutron stars. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

Originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (GR), gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime caused by the merger of massive objects (like white dwarfs and black holes). While the most intense GWs are produced from mergers, BNS emit GWs for millions of years as they spiral inward toward each other. The post-merger remnant (a massive, rapidly rotating object) also emits GWs in a strong but narrow frequency range. This last signal, the team argues, could hold crucial information about how nuclear matter behaves at extreme densities and pressures (aka. “equation of state“).

As the team explained in their paper, the amplitude of post-merger GWs behaves like a tuning fork after it is struck. This means that the GW signal goes through a phase (which they have named the “long ringdown”) where it increasingly trends toward a single frequency. Using advanced simulations of merging neutron stars, the team identified a strong connection between these unique characteristics and the properties of the densest regions in the core of neutron stars. As Dr. Rezzolla explained in a University of Goethe press release:

“Thanks to advances in statistical modeling and high-precision simulations on Germany’s most powerful supercomputers, we have discovered a new phase of the long ringdown in neutron star mergers. It has the potential to provide new and stringent constraints on the state of matter in neutron stars. This finding paves the way for a better understanding of dense neutron star matter, especially as new events are observed in the future.”

By analyzing the long ringdown phase, they argue, astronomers can significantly reduce uncertainties in the equation of state for neutron stars. “By cleverly selecting a few equations of state, we were able to effectively simulate the results of a full statistical ensemble of matter models with considerably less effort,” said co-author Dr. Tyler Gorda. “Not only does this result in less computer time and energy consumption, but it also gives us confidence that our results are robust and will be applicable to whatever equation of state actually occurs in nature.“

An artist’s concept of how LISA will work to detect gravitational waves from orbit in space. Credit: ESA

In this sense, post-merger neutron stars could be used as “tuning forks” for investigating some of the deepest cosmic mysteries. Said Dr. Christian Ecker, an ITP postdoctoral student, and the study’s lead author:

“Just like tuning forks of different material will have different pure tones, remnants described by different equations of state will ring down at different frequencies. The detection of this signal thus has the potential to reveal what neutron stars are made of. I am particularly proud of this work as it constitutes exemplary evidence of the excellence of Frankfurt- and Darmstadt-based scientists in the study of neutron stars.”

This research, added Dr. Ecker, compliments the work of the Exploring the Universe from Microscopic to Macroscopic Scales (ELEMENTS) research cluster. Located at the Giersch Science Center (GSC), this cluster combines the resources of Goethe University, TU Darmstadt, Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU-Gießen), and the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (GSI-FAIR). Their aim is to combine the study of elementary particles and large astrophysical objects with the ultimate goal of finding the origins of heavy metals (i.e. platinum, gold, etc.) in the Universe.

While existing GW observatories have not detected post-merger signals, scientists are optimistic that next-generation instruments will. This includes the Einstein Telescope (ET), a proposed underground observatory expected to become operational in the next decade, and the ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), the first GW observatory ever proposed for space, currently scheduled for deployment by 2035. With the completion of these and other third-generation GW observatories, the long ringdown could serve as a powerful means for probing the laws of physics under the most extreme conditions.

Further Reading: Goethe University

The post To Probe the Interior of Neutron Stars, We Must Study the Gravitational Waves from their Collisions appeared first on Universe Today.

Planets are born in swirling disks of gas and dust around young stars. Astronomers are keenly interested in the planet formation process, and understanding that process is one of the JWST’s main science goals. PDS 70 is a nearby star with two nascent planets forming in its disk, two of the very few exoplanets that astronomers have directly imaged.

Researchers developed a new, innovative approach to observing PDS 70 with the JWST and uncovered more details about the system, including the possible presence of a third planet.

PDS 70 is an orange dwarf star about 370 light-years away and hosts two young, growing planets: PDS 70b and PDS 70c. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) imaged both of the planets directly, and PDS 70b has the distinction of being the very first protoplanet every imaged directly. The VLT accomplished the feat in 2018 with its groundbreaking SPHERE instrument.

The SPHERE observations, along with other observations, allowed astronomers to get a much more detailed look at the planets’ atmospheres, masses, and temperatures.

Now, the JWST has taken another look at the pair of young planets. The results are in a new paper in The Astronomical Journal. It’s titled “The James Webb Interferometer: Space-based Interferometric Detections of PDS 70 b and c at 4.8 ?m,” and the lead author is Dori Blakely. Blakely is a grad student in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada.

The JWST’s Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) has a feature called Aperture Masking Interferometry (AMI), which allows it to function as an interferometer. It uses a special mask with tiny holes over the telescope’s primary mirror. The interferogram it creates has a much higher resolution because the effective size of the telescope becomes much larger.

“In this work, we present James Webb Interferometer observations of PDS 70 with the NIRISS F480M filter, the first space-based interferometric observations of this system,” the authors write. They found evidence of material surrounding PDS 70 b and c, which strengthens the idea that the planets are still forming.

“This is like seeing a family photo of our solar system when it was just a toddler. It’s incredible to think about how much we can learn from one system,” lead author Blakely said in a press release.

This is a colour-enhanced image of millimetre-wave radio signals from the ALMA observatory from previous research. It shows the PDS 70 star and both exoplanets. Image Credit: A. Isella, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

Previous observations of the PDS 70 planets were made at shorter wavelengths, which were best explained by models for low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. But the JWST observed them at longer wavelengths, the longest they’d ever been observed with. These observations detected more light than previous observations, and the low-mass/brown dwarf models couldn’t account for the light.

The JWST observations hint at the presence of warm material around both planets, which is interpreted as material accreting from a circumplanetary disk. “Our photometry of both PDS 70 b and c provides tentative evidence of mid-IR circumplanetary disk emission through fitting spectral energy distribution models to these new measurements and those found in the literature,” the authors write.

This image from the study shows PDS 70 and its two planets with circumplanetary disks. The disks indicate that the planets are still growing by accumulating material, likely gas, from their disks. The larger orange feature is part of the larger disk surrounding the star and the planets. Image Credit: Blakely et al. 2025.

The results indicate that PDS 70 and its planets are vying for the same material needed to grow larger. The star is a T-Tauri star that’s only about 5.4 million years old. It won’t reach the Main Sequence for tens of millions more years and is still actively accreting material.

“These observations give us an incredible opportunity to witness planet formation as it happens,” said co-author Doug Johnstone from the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre. “Seeing planets in the act of accreting material helps us answer long-standing questions about how planetary systems form and evolve. It’s like watching a solar system being built before our very eyes.”

The new research also presents additional evidence supporting a third planet around the stars, putatively named PDS 70d.

A 2024 paper presented hints of a third planet. However, there was much uncertainty. The authors of that paper wrote that they may have found another exoplanet, but it could also be a dust clump or an inner spiral of material. “Follow-up studies of d are therefore especially exciting,” the authors wrote.

While this new research isn’t solely a follow-up study on the potential exoplanet, it has constrained some of the object’s properties, whatever it may be.

This image from the research shows PDS 70 and the two planets. On the right side of the image is part of the larger circumstellar disk. This image shows increased emissions as a bright triangle. Current observations can’t discern whether this is a disk feature, a spiral or clumpy structure of gas, a stream of gas between PDS 70 b and c, or an additional planet, as suggested by previous research. Image Credit: Blakely et al. 2024.

If there is a third planet, it is significantly different from the other two. “… if the previously observed emission at shorter wavelengths is due to a planet, this putative planet has a different atmospheric composition than PDS 70 b or c,” the authors explain.

“Follow-up observations will be needed to determine the nature of this emission.”

The post The JWST Gives Us Our Best Image of Planets Forming Around a Star appeared first on Universe Today.