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NASA’s Roman Space Telescope could revolutionize the search for alien worlds by discovering around 100,000 exoplanets—far more than all previous missions combined. It will look deep into unexplored parts of the Milky Way, helping scientists compare planetary systems across very different galactic environments. The mission will also uncover rare Earth-sized planets, study thousands of exotic alien atmospheres, and provide a treasure trove of data that could reshape our understanding of how planets form.

A long-overlooked organ may hold surprising clues to healthy aging and cancer survival. Researchers at Mass General Brigham used AI to analyze CT scans from tens of thousands of adults and found that people with healthier thymuses—a small immune-system organ once thought to become largely irrelevant after childhood—lived longer and had substantially lower risks of heart disease, cancer, and death.

Two companies are aiming to preserve Arctic ice by pumping water onto the sheet and letting it freeze, but only one of the trials found that this delayed melting in the summer

A remarkable crystal called molybdenum oxychloride could help make futuristic technologies like smart contact lenses and ultrathin AR glasses a reality. Scientists have created the first detailed experimental map of its optical properties, revealing the strongest light-bending effect ever measured in a natural material. The crystal can act either like a reflective metal or transparent glass, allowing it to manipulate light with extraordinary efficiency while being thousands of times thinner than a human hair.

A remarkable crystal called molybdenum oxychloride could help make futuristic technologies like smart contact lenses and ultrathin AR glasses a reality. Scientists have created the first detailed experimental map of its optical properties, revealing the strongest light-bending effect ever measured in a natural material. The crystal can act either like a reflective metal or transparent glass, allowing it to manipulate light with extraordinary efficiency while being thousands of times thinner than a human hair.

From the beginning, Trump science policy has been Lysenko 2.0, in which ideology, not scientific promise and rigor, dictates federal grantmaking. OMB Director Russell Vought's proposed rules de-emphasizing peer review and placing political appointees in charge of final grantmaking decisions do Lysenko proud.

The post The Lysenko-ization of federal science takes a big step forward first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

It’s 2234, you’re on your annual class field trip touring exoplanets, and your teacher informs everyone they can pick one more exoplanetary system to explore before heading back to Earth. You and your classmates are exhausted from the day’s activities and you’re hungry. However, you get really excited because you already know what everyone will want. You and your classmates all shout in unison, “The young and far away puffy ones!”

It’s June 2027, and you’re fresh off defending your PhD studying the direct imaging of exoplanets while starting your postdoctoral journey at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The trauma of eating ramen and living off a sub-living wage for the last five years of your life is still fresh in your brain. But you’re excited to finally get your real career started with funding you received for viewing time on the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman for short). You begin to download the first set of data as your eyes tear up knowing your entire journey in research and academia is about to be worth it.

It’s 2165, and methane is in high demand, especially after the Titan Treaty of 2145 made it illegal to harvest methane from Saturn’s moon, Titan. But the advent of interstellar travel has made exoplanetary exploration far easier, enabling corporations to identify and harvest methane from exoplanets. However, it’s far cheaper and easier to harvest methane from exoplanets with reasonable (also called temperate) temperatures, because it means higher quantities of methane. The Exoplanet Exploration Corporation decides to send its first ship to one such exoplanet loaded with methane that could bring their quarterly financial statements back into the green.

Before any spacecraft can survive the Moon, it has to survive something almost as brutal, a giant metal chamber in Houston that strips away every molecule of air and swings temperatures from scorching to freezing in minutes. Blue Origin's lunar lander just spent time in exactly that chamber and it came out the other side ready for the real thing.

We are closer than ever to detecting signs of life on another world. The James Webb Space Telescope is already ‘sniffing’ alien atmospheres, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory is being built specifically to find biology beyond Earth. But a new paper raises an uncomfortable question; when we do find that first biosignature, will it actually tell us anything meaningful about life in the universe? The answer, it turns out, might be no.

In recent decades, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has seen a revival, and future surveys will benefit from new technologies. Similarly, our perception of what technologies an advanced civilization might use has expanded.

Every galaxy we know of spins. It's one of those rules of the universe so fundamental that astronomers barely think about it anymore. So when the James Webb Space Telescope pointed at one of the most massive galaxies in the early universe and found…well nothing. No spin, just stillness. They had to look twice.

For nearly thirty years, dark energy has been cosmology's great get out of jail free card, the invisible, mysterious force we invented to explain why the universe is expanding faster than it should be. Now a team of mathematicians says we may never have needed it at all. And the implications are stranger than you might think.

An early galaxy cluster named after an Indian lake is teaching astronomers about influences on galaxy evolution in the infant Universe. Astronomer Ronaldo Laishram of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) used the Subaru Telescope’s wide-field camera, Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), to conduct a large sky survey to look for early galaxies with active star formation. The result was the discovery of a massive protocluster of galaxies that existed some 12.6 billion years ago, very early in cosmic time. Detailed study of this region could give new insight into how galaxies and their clusters form and evolve.

I have only three horrible words today, but I saw them all this week, and I want to get them off my chest before they tangle up my kishkes. Here they are, with examples.  Two of them appear in just one article—at the New York Times.

1.) Tradwife: This word seems to have appeared recently, and is a shortening of “traditional wife”—that is, as AI sees it, “It refers to a woman who chooses to embrace traditional gender roles, centering her life around being a homemaker, raising children, and submitting to her husband’s role as the primary.”  It’s an example of how the young people shorten phrases in order to look cool.  I had to look it up the first time I saw it, but that’s the case for many odious neologisms.

2.) Cosplay. This has been around for a longish while, and yet I still don’t know whether to pronounce it with a short or a long “o”. And you’ll never hear me using it.  But no matter, as it will never pass my lipes.

Again, here’s an AI definition:

Cosplay is a portmanteau of “costume” and “play.” It is a performance art and hobby where participants wear costumes and accessories to represent a specific character from a work of fiction, such as anime, comic books, video games, or movies. In other words, it’s Halloween for adults.

Here are both of them used in a single piece from the NYT written by Lauren Jackson in her weekly column “Believing,” designed to tell the paper’s readers how wonderful religion is (Jackson claims to be a nonbeliever, but her lips are firmly affixecd to the posterior of faith).

The book “Yesteryear” has a fantastic, pithy pitch: A tradwife influencer named Natalie wakes up in the world she was cosplaying online, in the year 1855. It’s a thriller and a scathing critique of how women perform for the internet. It’s also a book all about religion, belief — and delusion.

It’s at the top of the Times best-seller list, and I bet it will hang out there for a while. Before it even came out, Anne Hathaway decided she’d adapt it into a movie.

I loved every page. So I called the author, Caro Claire Burke, to talk to her about it.

Both words in one sentence! Jackson thinks this kind of writing is au courant.  Seriously, Jackson should jettison her breezy prose, which I guess is designed to lure sheep into the fold.

And my Worst Word of the Year:

3.) Bougie.  I think this one is pronounced “boo-szhee”, and is a shortening of “bourgeois,” often used derisively to mock wealth and status.  Here’s its usage in the Free Press by Suzy Weiss, the younger sister of Bari Weiss who was nepotistically given a slot as a writer for the FP. She hasn’t yet grown into her role:

Everyone who moves to the bougie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope does so with big ideas about how their new life there will go. How they’re going to jog in Prospect Park; how their brownstone apartments will be an oasis in the concrete jungle, a place to read on-trend books and host delightful dinner parties for erudite neighbors.

Isn’t that so cool?  She uses “bougie”. (I won’t go after “on-trend”, which is ridiculous; why not use “trendy”?) I can’t bear to go on. . .

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and his erstwhile friend Vincent van Gogh, are two of my favorite painters, though I like van Gogh’s work better. But nobody from the post-Impressionist era ever went off to Polynesia like Gauguin, bent on living and depicting what he conceived as the natural life, unspoiled by the trappings of the West.  He produced some marvelous paintings (and sculptures, which he also was good at), though he was largely unappreciated and ignored during his life.

I first saw a lot of Gauguins at the famous Boston Museum of Fine Art’s exhibit in 2004, which displayed more than 150 of the painter’s works. I was mesmerized, not only by the colors and exoticism, but by narrative works like “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (see below).

Gauguin is buried on Atuona in the Marquesas Islands, his grave sporting a bronze cast of one of his wood sculptures:

Gauguin’s grave. Attribution: makemake, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I just finished a recent biography of Gauguin: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, written by Sue Prideaux and published by W. W. Norton in May of last year.  You can see the Amazon version by clicking on the cover below, which shows  a photo of the painter.  It’s thorough and well documented but not academic: that is, the narrative is up to date, replenished by recently available sources, and it’s an engaging read. If you have any interest in art, I’d recommend it highly.  Gauguin was an important figure in the history of art, sui generis in his work but influential in the work of painters like Matisse and Picasso.

One could characterize Gauguin’s life as that of the classic “tortured artist”—tortured not by mental illness (as was van Gogh) but by an endless search for a place to escape civilization, a tortuous marriage, an endless search for money to live on, and, in the latter part of his life, severe medical issues. (His heart was bad, he had chronic eye problems, and he suffered from open sores on his legs, the result of a stomping in France by clog-wearing bullies.) That, combined with his love of lots of red wine and an odious diet of tinned food, led to his death at only 54.

Yet he had moments of great joy and beauty, and this is expressed on his canvas. In that way he resembled van Gogh. His most pleasurable moments were at his easel, where he spent a lot of time, and his paintings from Brittany, but especially Tahiti and the Marquesas, are splendid. I show a few below.

Prideaux’s book recounts a tumultuous life, with four years of Gauguin’s infancy spent in Peru (he called himself “the Peruvian savage” for the rest of his life) and later a stultifying stint as a stockbroker in Paris.  He was a self-taught painter who married a Danish woman. Circumstances forced her and their two children to move back to Denmark, where Gauguin joined them on occasion. Money was always an issue, and Gauguin, like van Gogh, simply couldn’t gin up much interest in his paintings. His need to sell his art to buy food, paints, and lodging persisted throughout his life.

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, obsessed with the idea of starting a colony of artists, invited Gauguin to live with him at the famous “yellow house” in Arles, France.  They didn’t get along well, and it was during this period that, after an argument with Gauguin, van Gogh cut off his own ear and deposited it at a brothel.  After only nine weeks, Gauguin fled, but not before they had painted each other’s portraits. Here is van Gogh’s depiction of Gauguin:

Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret), 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam:

via Wikimedia Commons And Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh as “The Painter of Sunflowers.”  Gauguin really did love and admire van Gogh, but couldn’t tolerate his eccentricities and periods of lunacy; yet for the rest of his life he would sometimes paint a sunflower in honor of his friend, even in Polynesia, where Gauguin planted some (van Gogh committed suicide two years after Gauguin fled Arles). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The rest is history—and in Prideaux’s book.  Gauguin took off for Tahiti in 1891, returned to France for a few years, and set out for his second visit to Tahiti in 1895, where he took up residence with young Tahitian women (13 or 14 was the age of “marriage” for many of them) and produced many canvases. But dissatisfied with the fact that French colonialism was spoiling his “paradise,” Gauguin repaired to the Marquesas in 1901, where he spent the last three years of his life. After becoming integrated into local society, he eventually stopped partying and took seriously to painting. He was found dead in his bed on May 8, 1903.

Here are a few paintings I like from Gauguin’s stay in Polynesia. Click to enlarge them.

Below is his most famous painting. Gauguin captioned it Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, (1897, oil on canvas, 139 × 375 cm (55 × 148 in), Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is his vision of the span of life, starting with an infant on the right and moving an old woman on the left. Prideaux explains all the imagery of this and other paintings, which are reproduced in color in her book. 

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maternity, 1899:

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. This was apparently painted after Gauguin returned home at night, with his young mistress, left in the dark, scared to death.  There is a lot going on here; note the iconography at the bottom and the weird figures at the upper right. 

Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Among the Mangoes (La Cueillette des Fruits), 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Gauguin loved color and lots of it; he was always sending back to Europe for more and different paints. 

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Tehura (Teha’amana), 1891–3, polychromed pua wood, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Public Domain, CCo, Wikimedia Commons

Here’s Gauguin about 1891. The book describes him as a handsome man, one who had no trouble attracting ladies either in Europe or Polynesia, where he lived with several women from the islands. But he was often laid low by his many maladies.

Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And here is his last self-portrait, painted only a year before he died. To me this image looks like the middle-aged Eric Clapton:

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Below is the NYT review by Jennifer Szalai. Click the headline to read from the NYT site or find it archived here:

As you see, it’s laudatory.  One excerpt from the review:

For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris. . .

. . . Given how eventful Gauguin’s life was, it’s remarkable how much Prideaux packs into this briskly readable volume, which clocks in at barely 400 pages. She elegantly recounts his artistic struggles and his persistent money worries. She offers lucid re-creations of key moments, like the time Vincent van Gogh, his friend and roommate in the south of France, ran at him with a razor. (The next morning, Gauguin learned that van Gogh had cut off his own ear and handed it to a brothel worker.)

But it’s Gauguin’s experiences in French Polynesia that have understandably become the most notorious. (The last major biography of Gauguin, published in 1995, called him a “syphilitic pedophile.”) By the time he died, at 54, on the tiny island of Hiva Oa in 1903, he had gotten two Indigenous girls — each about 14 years old — pregnant. Prideaux does not deny this fact, reminding us only that in France and the colonies, the age of consent at the time was 13.

“Wild Thing” is not a whitewash of Gauguin’s legacy; instead, Prideaux fills it in with more detail. As a Frenchman in a French colony, he excoriated himself for his moral hypocrisy and became a pamphleteer, taking a job writing for the opposition party’s newspaper. He also helped locals with their petitions against the colonial authorities. In a letter to the inspector of the colonies, he noted the “singular irony” of “the hypocritical proclamation of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” when it came to “men who are no more than tax fodder in the hands of a despotic gendarme.”

Toward the end of his life, Gauguin — who never fully healed from a nasty leg injury sustained in Brittany when he was almost kicked to death in a melee by a clog-wearing mob — hobbled around his island paradise, subsisting mainly on a calamitous diet of canned food. After his death, the administrator in charge of selling the contents of Gauguin’s home did not believe it would be possible to pay back creditors in full: “The liabilities will considerably exceed the assets, as the few pictures by the late painter, who belonged to the decadent school, have little prospect of finding purchasers.”

Again, I highly recommend Wild Thing.  And tell us below what you’ve read and liked lately.

Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine. Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away from the working surface, preventing clogging. The process was successfully tested with water from three oceans and can recover nearly all salts as solids. Those leftover materials could even become a source of valuable lithium for batteries.

We have a short RWP today as there are more posts to come.  First we hear from Robert Lang, who sees a surprising amount of wildlife near his home in the eastern LA “suburb” of Altadena. Robert’s intro is indented, and you can enlarge the photo by clicking on it.

Although every day sees another few housing starts in post-fire Altadena, it’s still mostly empty of people, but after a year that included plenty of rain, the vacant lots are lush with plants—a mix of native coastal sage scrub, invasive weeds, and landscaping gone wild. This temporary rewilding provides plenty of cover for the local wildlife to come down out of the hills and hang out. Yesterday the workers at our site reported that a bear had stopped by and done a walk-through of the framed house (fortunately, just lookie-looing, no damage). Today I did a short hike on the Gabrielino Trail above my old stomping ground of JPL and saw a different (younger) California black bear (Ursus americanus californiensis) just off the trail, and I shot the photo below. . .

. . .  also this video.

This isn’t the bear species on the California state flag, which is the California grizzly bear (Ursus arctos californicus); that was native to this area but was hunted to extinction in the early 20th century. In the 1930s, 28 “problem bears”, California black bears, were taken from Yosemite and released in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. The black bear species is highly variable in coloration, ranging from black through brown, blond, and even white (the so-called “spirit bears” of British Columbia). Most of the bears we see in Altadena are brown, like this youngster, all descended from the original Problematic Twenty-Eight.

JAC: Here’s the California state flag sporting a grizzly:

Original: Donald Graeme Kelley. Vectorization: Devin Cook, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Researchers have developed a compact quantum detector that makes terahertz radiation much easier to detect. A specially designed metasurface funnels incoming energy into tiny active regions, greatly strengthening the electrical signal produced. The approach boosted efficiency by roughly 20 times compared to earlier designs and could pave the way for more practical THz devices in healthcare, communications, and scientific research.