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This will be the penultimate reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have several Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired many photos for posting. (Note: no AI picturess like the ones I made below.)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; Christmas and Koynezaa Eve.  It’s simple: just send a photo the name you want to go by, and then the name of the cat and some information about it.

First, an interfaith celebration (Hanukkah is over):

But we can’t forget the atheist cats!!!

One of the primary goals of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to detect atmospheres around exoplanets, to try to suss out whether or not they could potentially support life. But, in order to do that, scientists have to know where to look, and the exoplanet has to actually have an atmosphere. While scientists know the location of about 6000 exoplanets currently, they also believe that many of them don’t have atmospheres and that, of the ones that do, many aren’t really Earth-sized. And of those, many are around stars that are too bright for our current crop of telescopes to see their atmosphere. All those restrictions mean, ultimately, even with 6000 potential candidates, the number of Earth-sized ones that we could find an atmosphere for is relatively small. So a new paper available on arXiv from Jonathan Barrientos of Cal Tech and his co-authors that describes five new exoplanets around M-dwarf stars - two of which may have an atmosphere - is big news for astrobiologists and exoplanet hunters alike.

From vitamin C to your microbiome and mindset, the latest science of immunity is often counterintuitive. Here's how to give your system a fighting chance to overcome infection

Astronomers thought they had seen the "first hints of life on an alien world" this year, but they disappeared under closer scrutiny

Black holes are among the most extreme objects in the universe, and now scientists can model them more accurately than ever before. By combining Einstein’s gravity with realistic behavior of light and matter, researchers have built simulations that closely match real astronomical observations. These models reveal how matter forms chaotic, glowing disks and launches powerful outflows as it falls into black holes. It’s a major step toward decoding how these cosmic engines actually work.

Black holes are among the most extreme objects in the universe, and now scientists can model them more accurately than ever before. By combining Einstein’s gravity with realistic behavior of light and matter, researchers have built simulations that closely match real astronomical observations. These models reveal how matter forms chaotic, glowing disks and launches powerful outflows as it falls into black holes. It’s a major step toward decoding how these cosmic engines actually work.

Mysterious ‘little red dots’ seen by the James Webb Space Telescope can be explained by a new kind of black hole enshrouded in an enormous ball of glowing gas

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s CDC just funneled a $1.6 million dollar grant to researchers to carry out an unethical and scientifically unjustified randomized clinical trial of the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine in Guinea-Bissau. With MAHA, it's Tuskegee all over again.

The post Every accusation is a confession (or a statement of intent): MAHA’s new Tuskegee experiment first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A new AI developed at Duke University can uncover simple, readable rules behind extremely complex systems. It studies how systems evolve over time and reduces thousands of variables into compact equations that still capture real behavior. The method works across physics, engineering, climate science, and biology. Researchers say it could help scientists understand systems where traditional equations are missing or too complicated to write down.

We have only just started to understand how our brains clean themselves, but columnist Helen Thomson finds promising evidence for how to boost this process

During November 2025, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) used five of its science instruments to observe 3I/ATLAS. The instruments collected information about how the comet is behaving and what it is made of.

A reader sent me a video-containing email with the header “John Oliver destroys Bari Weiss”, with the message below saying, “Somebody had to do it.”  Well, yes, somebody should criticize the Free Press, which is becoming, in my view, more political (right-centrist) and less full of news. And even news stories aren’t really written by seasoned reporters, and it shows.  Plus the site has a lot of clickbait.

Further, CBS New’s decision to make Bari Weiss a big macher in the news division shows questionable judgment at best. Weiss, who’s enormously ambitious, has simply spread herself too thin, and it shows.

Those are some of the things criticized by “comedian” John Oliver in his 34-minute rant below. Oliver is rightfully distressed that Bari Weiss has suddenly become editor-in-chief of CBS News, something that concerns me.  CBS has a distinguished history of reporting, including Edward R. Murrow, who took down Joe McCarthy on that network, as well as America’s Most Trusted Anchor, Walter Cronkite. Granted, Weiss is not an anchorperson, and editors usually stay off the air, but she’s already hosted a town hall interview with Erika Kirk, something I found cringeworthy. And Weiss promises that there will be many more town halls to come. Oy!

But Oliver, whom I almost never watch, goes after Weiss and CBS in the too-long and unfunny rant below.  I’m always mystified that people find Oliver worthy of watching. He’s like the latter-day Jon Stewart, all sweaty, ranty, and, most sinfully, not funny at all.  He doesn’t make you think, as Maher does: he goes after the low-hanging fruit that his followers want to eat.  To me, his humor and political perspicacity are far less engaging than Bill Maher’s.  And Oliver is hyperbolic, and when he characterizes Weiss’s written resignation from the NYT as “self-mythologizing.”  He also faults her for having control over the direction of CBS news but “not being a reporter.” Well, she was a columnist and surely engages with the news, so I don’t find being a “reporter” disqualifying from being an editor.  But others may disagree.

That said, I am losing interest in the Free Press as well, and yet I keep subscribing—almost entirely because I love Nellie Bowles’s Friday TGIF columns.

I’ll quote with permission from an email sent me by reader Jim Batterson when I sent him the link to the rant below. He stopped subscribing to the Free Press a while ago. Bat:

I think Bari lost her focus. She had a good focus on Israel and antisemitism as well as the excesses of Woke back when she left the New York Times. She started off Common Sense and early versions of The Free Press with proper in-depth critique if I recall correctly, but at some point spread herself all over the map…more chaos than heterodoxy.  I unsubscribed from TFP somewhere around when she was giving oxygen to the “it escaped from a lab” speculation, piling on Fauci, and starting her love affair with religion (I had thought her Judaism was much like my ow—cultural— and that she was of the Jewish people, not a deeply observant Jew).

Listening to Oliver is a painful experience to me.  Freddie deBoer points out the problem with Oliver’s sneering, progressive condescension.  deBoer’s column is largely about gender, but I’m highlighting the problems with Oliver’s progressivism combined with his hyperbolic humorlessness:

I get it: nominating John Oliver as a symbol of liberalism’s failures was well-worn territory a decade ago. This argument has already been made, all the ideological fruit plucked. And the broader debate about liberal condescension as a profound political advantage for the right has percolated in its current form since the 2016 election and in a more general sense for longer than any of us have been alive. I hate to fight yesterday’s war, and I hate to bore you with arguments that have already been made. But at some point, when you see liberals share the same videos week after week of an annoying British man sneering down a camera lens to tell you how stupid everyone else is, you do have to ask if the American left-of-center has any sense at all of how much their project has been damaged by their reputation for patronizing self-righteousness. If the Trump era has proven anything, it’s just how wildly sensitive voters are to the perception that someone somewhere is judging them. That level of sensitivity to vague slights is stupid and the grievance usually disingenuous, but that’s politics, baby. And Oliver is such a pitch-perfect caricature of progressive self-regard – snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious – that I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation.

One of the great weaknesses of contemporary liberalism is the absolute inability to take an L on any issue; scroll around on BlueSky and you’ll find, for example, vast throngs of progressives who are completely unwilling to admit that mass immigration of unskilled labor into the United States is deeply unpopular. I think the left’s control of our arts, culture, and ideas industries have left too many of us thinking that we can’t lose a culture war. But in the broad sense, we currently are.

A pox on both their houses. Without further ado:  Oliver tires to take down Weiss.

At the moment this post appears—9:03 Chicago time—winter has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere.  Time to celebrate Yule!

In Chicago, however, it feels as if winter has been her for several weeks. The good news is that the days will begin getting longer.

Once again I tender a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have several Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired the requisite 20 photos for posting. (Note: no AI pictures like the one I made below. Especially with the wrong number of candles on the menorah, like the two superfluous ones in the photo below!)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; the day before Koynezaa.

 

Spanish researchers have created a powerful new open-source tool that helps uncover the hidden genetic networks driving cancer. Called RNACOREX, the software can analyze thousands of molecular interactions at once, revealing how genes communicate inside tumors and how those signals relate to patient survival. Tested across 13 different cancer types using international data, the tool matches the predictive power of advanced AI systems—while offering something rare in modern analytics: clear, interpretable explanations that help scientists understand why tumors behave the way they do.

Engineers need good data to build lasting things. Even the designers of the Great Pyramids knew the limestone they used to build these massive structures would be steady when stacked on top of one another, even if they didn’t have tables of the compressive strength of those stones. But when attempting to build structures on other worlds, such as the Moon, engineers don’t yet know much about the local materials. Still, due to the costs of getting large amounts of materials off of Earth, they will need to learn to use those materials even for critical applications like a landing pad to support the landing / ascent of massive rockets used in re-supply operations. A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Shirley Dyke and her team at Purdue University describes how to build a lunar landing pad with just a minimal amount of prior knowledge of the material properties of the regolith used to build it.

Astronomers have uncovered a massive hidden planet and a rare “failed star” by combining ultra-precise space data with some of the sharpest ground-based images ever taken. Using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaiʻi, the OASIS survey tracked subtle stellar wobbles to pinpoint where unseen worlds were lurking—then captured them directly.

Superconductors promise loss-free electricity, but most only work at extreme cold. Hydrogen-rich materials changed that—yet their inner workings remained hidden because they only exist under enormous pressure. Now, researchers have directly measured the superconducting state of hydrogen sulfide using a novel tunneling method, confirming how its electrons pair so efficiently. The discovery brings room-temperature superconductors a step closer to reality.

By studying tiny distortions in the shapes of distant galaxies, scientists mapped dark matter and dark energy across one of the largest sky surveys ever assembled. Their results back the standard picture of the universe and show that even archival telescope images can unlock cosmic mysteries.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of international researchers has discovered chemical fingerprints of gigantic primordial stars that were among the first to form after the Big Bang.