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Researchers have confirmed the mass of a free-floating planet thanks to a lucky convergence of ground- and space-based telescopes

Chess960 involves shuffling the pieces at the back of the board, and an analysis suggests doing so can increase the complexity of the game to favour white, black or neither player

A newly discovered exoplanet is rewriting the rules of what planets can be. Orbiting a city-sized neutron star, this Jupiter-mass world has a bizarre carbon-rich atmosphere filled with soot clouds and possibly diamonds at its core. Its extreme gravity stretches it into a lemon shape, and it completes a full orbit in under eight hours. Scientists are stunned — no known theory explains how such a planet could exist.

We start the new year with clouds, which, though some say they’re loaded with bacteria (and created by the bacteria as a means of dispersal), we’ll consider nonliving atmospheric phenomena.  This montage could be called, “I’ve looked at clouds that way,” and comes from reader David Jorling in Oregon.  David’s captions are indented, and the photos can be enlarged by clicking on them.

First of all here is an overly simple chart that I used to identify the clouds: UCAR/L.S. Gardiner

 

As to these three photos, the first was taken at Mary S Young State Park while I was walking my dog.  These are “cirrus” clouds which, as I understand it, means there are strong winds in the upper atmosphere:

As to the following two pictures, which were taken from my yard amongs the Douglas Fir Trees.  My best guess (and perhaps one of your readers has more expertise is that these are a mixture of cirrostratus and cirrocumulus clouds.  perhaps in a state of transition:

More pictures taken from my yard. Again my best guess as is cirrrostratus clouds:

Perhaps these are in transition from cirrostratus to cirrus:

My suspicious is that these are Cirrostratus transitioning to cirrus:

This one was taken at sunset near Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood. They may have appeared lower perhaps because I was at about 6000 feet elevation instead of about 300 feet where I live. So my suspicion is that these are either cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds:

This is a picture from my yard toward some neighboring Douglas Firs and assorted evergreens.  I suspect these are cirrocumulus clouds:

 

This is a picture I took from my car during a nationally forecast “Atmospheric River”. (In Oregon we call it “Rain”.) The picture was taken westbound on the Ross Island Bridge.  The building above the Stratocumulus cloud (in Oregon we call it a “Fog Bank”) is one of the buildings of the Oregon Health Sciences University, which is the main medical school in Oregon:

Olivia Remes, a mental health researcher at the University of Cambridge, says these are the three things everyone should do this New Year to cultivate a more positive mindset

It's the responsibility of our medical establishment to protect the vulnerable and keep schools open.

The post The Murray Hill Declaration first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A philosopher at the University of Cambridge says there’s no reliable way to know whether AI is conscious—and that may remain true for the foreseeable future. According to Dr. Tom McClelland, consciousness alone isn’t the ethical tipping point anyway; sentience, the capacity to feel good or bad, is what truly matters. He argues that claims of conscious AI are often more marketing than science, and that believing in machine minds too easily could cause real harm. The safest stance for now, he says, is honest uncertainty.

ESA’s Gaia space telescope has achieved something astronomers thought nearly impossible, detecting planets while they’re still forming inside the dusty discs surrounding newborn stars. By measuring the subtle gravitational wobbles that unseen companions induce on their host stars, Gaia has found hints of planets, brown dwarfs, and companion stars in 31 young stellar systems out of 98 surveyed.

The Champagne Cluster is a rare and beautiful example of two galaxy clusters smashing together. Its festive name comes from both its New Year’s Eve discovery and its bubbly appearance in space. Images reveal superheated gas and galaxies spread across a massive collision zone. Astronomers believe this system could help explain how dark matter responds when giant structures collide.

The iconic 2019 and 2022 photographs of black holes M87* and Sagittarius A* captivated astronomers worldwide with their fuzzy orange doughnut shapes. Now, scientists are preparing to take the next giant leap by creating the first ever 3D movies of black holes that could fundamentally reshape our understanding of gravity and the universe’s most violent phenomena.

Two spiral galaxies locked in a slow motion collision have been captured in stunning detail by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The pair grazed past each other millions of years ago, triggering spectacular waves of star formation and distorting their elegant spiral arms into sweeping silver blue streamers. This celestial dance, playing out over hundreds of millions of years, offers astronomers a rare glimpse into the violent yet creative process that shapes galaxies across the universe.

New high-resolution images show that novae are anything but simple stellar fireworks. One exploded with multiple gas streams colliding almost immediately, while another shockingly delayed its eruption for more than 50 days before unleashing a powerful blast. These complex outflows create shock waves that produce intense gamma rays, confirming long-standing theories with direct visual evidence. The findings reveal novae as evolving, multi-stage events rather than single, instant explosions.

As we age, our immune system quietly loses its edge, and scientists have uncovered a surprising reason why. A protein called platelet factor 4 naturally declines over time, allowing blood stem cells to multiply too freely and drift toward unhealthy, mutation-prone behavior linked to cancer, inflammation, and heart disease. Researchers found that restoring this protein in older mice — and even in human stem cells in the lab — made aging blood and immune cells behave strikingly younger again.

Understanding the chemical properties of a molecule is an inherently quantum problem, making quantum computers a good tool for the job – and we may start seeing this take off in 2026

One of my colleagues’ students is going to take the MCAT, the test required to get into med school. (As far as I know, it’s still required.) The student found this question in a practice exam they were taking on a laptop.

I’ll print out what’s above:

Which of the following statements is NOT an accurate description of gender?

A. Gender is a biological distinction.
B. Gender ideals and expectations vary by culture.
C. Some societies recognize more than two genders.
D. Gender is a performative aspect of individual identity.

I know the right answer, but perhaps you can vote to see which one was deemed correct by those who made the test.  It’s unclear to me why this is on a test designed to assess students’ ability to succeed in medical school.  Well, you get a chance to answer it below, as here’s a poll. Pick one,and remember, you’re looking for an INACCURATE description of gender.

 

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Mars once had sprawling river systems that rivaled major watersheds on Earth, and scientists have now identified the biggest ones for the first time. Researchers mapped 16 massive drainage basins where water likely flowed long enough to support life. Even though these areas cover just 5% of ancient Martian terrain, they account for a huge share of erosion and sediment movement. That makes them some of the most promising places to search for ancient life.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “abandon,” came with this note:

Ending the year on a hopelessly optimistic note. Happy New Year to all youl ovely patrons! Here’s the article upon which today’s strip is based.

After many tries, I managed to call up that archived article, but here’s the same one I found in the Times from December 2 that you can probably access for free (click on screenshot).  They’re the same.

And an excerpt:

Paganism is the most popular spiritual destination for British Christians who convert to another faith, outstripping Buddhism, Islam and Judaism, a study has found.

Religious faith is “fragmenting” in the UK as more than one in ten people who abandon Christianity in Britain take up paganism, wicca or another form of “spiritualism”, according to the report.

While Christianity is still gaining new adherents, these arrivals are outnumbered by people quitting the faith, figures showed. This is leading Christianity to dwindle in Britain overall, casting doubt on recent reports suggesting that a revival may be under way.

So much for a slowdown in the waning of Christianity!  Here the barmaid explains the decline to the pair, BUT note that many of these apostates still accept some form of woo.

Astronomers have found a system of three supermassive black holes, all actively feeding, that appear to be combining into a single system – a rare event that will help elucidate the physics of complex mergers

A supernova observed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in 1181 CE didn’t fully explode, instead it sputtered and left behind a rare “zombie star” surrounded by long filaments resembling fireworks. New research by Syracuse University physicist Eric Coughlin explains how these unusual structures formed. After the failed detonation, the surviving white dwarf launched a fast, dense wind that slammed into surrounding gas. The collision created finger-like plumes through a fluid instability, but a second instability that normally tears such structures apart never activated. In some sense, the stars didn’t quite die!

A female mouse that spent two weeks aboard China’s space station has successfully given birth to healthy pups after returning to Earth. This marks the first time offspring have been born from mammals that have traveled in space. The birth demonstrates that short term spaceflight doesn’t impair reproductive capability and provides crucial data for understanding how space environments affect mammalian development, a critical question for future long-l duration human missions beyond Earth.