News Feeds

Parents report loving their partners less within the first year of having a child, but that doesn't mean the feeling is permanent or inevitable

A patch of ocean south-east of Greenland is the only place on Earth that is cooling, and it could be a sign that the warm water "conveyor belt" in the Atlantic is slowing down

Researchers at EPFL have developed a chip-scale ultrafast laser that performs on par with traditional tabletop femtosecond lasers. The innovation could make advanced laser technologies far smaller, cheaper, and more accessible for applications ranging from medical diagnostics to atomic clocks.

. . . is dire. It is in fact so dire that although I have movies and photos of Vashti and of the last hen and her brood of nine, I am not mentally prepared to put them up, as they evoke bad memories and deep sadness. (As you may recall, both broods left the pond, almost certainly because they were harassed by drakes.) Vashti came back and re-nested in her old nest (!); she’s now sitting on a brood of seven eggs. The second hen, who was never named, has also returned but hasn’t (yet) nested, but is accompanied by an aggressive drake.

I have been keeping a careful eye on what is going on in the pond, and I’m quite worried about Vashti, whose brood is set to hatch within two weeks. Once a day I call her down to the pond for a feeding and a bath. She stays for about 15 minutes, gobbling up a big meal, preening for a while, and then quickly flying back to her nest to incubate the eggs. But over the past week or so, the damn drakes have been chasing her when they see her, driving her out of the pond, quacking and hiding nearby. It is only with considerable effort that I can get her away from the drakes so she can eat and go back to her nest. Note that the drakes aren’t trying to attack her; they want to mate with her. And she doesn’t want to mate!

What this means is that when she finally comes down with ducklings, she and her brood will be mercilessly harassed, just like the last hen and her brood. And that means that in all likelihood they will flee the pond, which means certain death for the ducklings.

I thus have a hard choice: let them come to the pond and take their chances, or arrange for the brood (and mother, if all possible) to be captured and either taken to a distant body of water or to a wildlife rehab facility.  The first alternative is unpalatable, as it involves the death of the entire brood, but I think it’s likely if I don’t intervene. Lately I have been moving towards to the second alternative:  letting Facilities and the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors take over and recover everyone if they can. Getting the ducklings is relatively easy, though they’ll be in the water very quickly after they jump. But getting Mom is a job for pros, as she can fly away.

My priority is to save lives, not entertain the University community with the sight of ducklings—ducklings who won’t last on the Pond more than a day or two.

It’s always been a great joy for me to help rear the babies up to fledging, but compared to the loss of lives, that is a selfish attitude. I think I will go by the words of Maimonides, “If you save one life, it is as if you saved the world entire.”  To me that means that I could save an entire life for each duckling rescued. It’s a hard decision and a sad one, but if the goal is to save lives, the strategy is clear.

The good news is that all five turtles put in the pond last fall survived the winter. Here they are sunning on a rock yesterday. There are four red-eared sliders and one yellow-bellied slider—two subspecies of a single species.

 

It’s a familiar annual question, that we’re already hearing as we enter into June. “What are those two bright objects in the west?” They’re none other than the two brightest planets in the sky, Jupiter and Venus. Keep an eye on the dusk sky over the next week, and you’ll see the two worlds getting ever closer to each other in the west. Though this happens every year or so, an evening conjunction assures that lots of the general public will see one of the best planetary pairings of 2026.

Reader Mark Joseph, inspired by my post on leucistic Australian ducks, went in an example and some other photos. Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Your post this morning coincidentally arrived as did this photo from a person in our birdwatching group; it’s a leucistic house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus):

And, to give you a small set instead of a singleton, here are a couple of my feeble efforts, all taken with an iPhone in suburban southwestern Michigan. Hopefully, you can use them. I know even less about flowers and insects than I do about birds, so all identifications are courtesy of Gemini.

A zinnia (This specific variety is likely a Zinnia elegans, such as the ‘Canary Bird’ or ‘Benary’s Giant Yellow’ cultivar”) with a bumblebee (“specifically consistent with the Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens). I have enjoyed taking photos of flowers and insects together:

Spotted Knapweed (Centaurea stoebe, sometimes classified as Centaurea maculosa). Unfortunately, it is invasive:

A crabapple tree and a closeup.  This closeup helps narrow it down to a Sargent Crabapple (Malus sargentii) or a Siberian Crabapple (Malus baccata).

Sargent Crabapple (Malus sargentii) or a Siberian Crabapple (Malus baccata):

This is a Big Brown Bat (Eptesicus fuscus) or a Little Brown Bat (Myotis lucifugus).These two species look nearly identical from a distance and are the two most common bats found roosting on residential brick walls across North America.

Brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys).When we first moved here and I decided to take some pictures, I got all excited because I was able to get a really good picture. Then I found out it was a stink bug, and invasive to boot. So, not a new species of peacock. But, it’s one of the things evolution has produced. Order Hemiptera, the “true bugs.”

A Shaggy Inkcap (Coprinus comatus), commonly known as a Shaggy Mane or Lawyer’s Wig. The next day the cap is just black goo, and the day after, nothing is left but the stem:

My mental map of the universe has evolved over my life, partly due to new scientific discoveries and partly due to my own education. As if often the case, as you learn more, things get more complicated. The simplistic picture I had as a child was that the universe consisted of many galaxies in which there are many stars and around which there are planets, likely something similar to our own solar system. I have had to modify this model dozens of times, and perhaps I need to make another little tweak. This has to do with where planets exist.

First, galaxies are not randomly distributed throughout the universe. They are bound together in local groups, those groups are gravitationally bound into galaxy clusters, which in turn are part of superclusters which are finally organized into giant filaments, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe. So our universal address is – the Sol system within the Milky Galaxy, part of the Local Group within the Virgo Cluster which is part of the Laniakea Supercluster.

At some point I also learned that not all stars (and therefore, not all planets) exist within galaxies. Estimates of the number of stars within and between galaxies just overlap, so they may be equal, but the average estimates indicate that likely 1-10% of all stars are not in galaxies. They are wandering between galaxies, mostly within galaxy clusters. The first intergalactic star was discovered in 1997. It is likely that most such stars were formed within galaxies (you need clouds of gas and gravitational disturbances for stars to form) but then were flung out because of gravitational interactions with other objects, such as a black hole. Two galaxies colliding can also spray their stars throughout the cluster. It is also very likely that such stars would retain their planets.

In fact, intergalactic stars would be a great place for life. They would not be at risk from nearby supernova or gamma ray bursts. There is also a much lower density of cosmic rays outside of galaxies (they are largely produced within galaxies and are trapped by magnetic fields within galaxies). So space travel would also be much easier within an extragalactic solar system. They are also likely to be extremely isolated from other systems, and their nighttime sky would be much darker. Some would have only some distant smudges of other galaxies. But many would have spectacular views of nearby galaxies dominating their sky.

At some point I also learned that within the Milky Way there are more rogue planets wandering between stars than there are planets gravitationally bound to stars. There are likely about a trillion planets orbiting stars, and 4-5 trillion rogue planets. These are less likely to host life as we know it, without the warmth of a nearby star. But it is possible for such planets to host chemosynthetic life within subsurface oceans. Moons of rogue gas giants may also be warmed by tidal forces. It’s even possible for some worlds to have thick hydrogen atmospheres which could keep the surface of the planet warm enough to have liquid water for billions of years.

A recent study, theoretically at least, may add another location where there are a surprising number of planets – around supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies (including the Milky Way). Quick caveat – this is an ArXiv preprint publication, so not yet peer-reviewed. It is based on modeling and simulations without any confirmation from observational data.

Some supermassive black holes are called active galactic nuclei (AGN) if they are actively “feeding” on a disc of matter swirling around them. These astronomers were interested in whether or not this disc of material could form into planets. It is generally considered that such swirling discs of material are too hot to allow matter to clump together and form planets, but they considered the conditions as you get further and further from the AGN. Their simulations found a sweet spot where the temperature and radiation are low enough to allow for planet formation while still having enough matter to clump into planets. Essentially you end up with a distance gradient of “doubling time” – the amount of time on average for any clump of rock and dust to double its mass. Some regions would have only slow growth and produce only pebbles. Others would have rapid growth, enough to exceed the mass necessary for stars to ignite. And in between – lots of planets.

They estimate there could be tens of millions of planets around a single AGN. They also hypothesize that there may be many exotic objects in these regions. For example, you could have a rapid enough doubling time and a sufficient supply of dust that an object could form entirely of dust (no significant hydrogen or other gas) and yet exceed the mass of star formation. What would happen to such an object? We have no known examples. Some actual stars may also form in this region.

Any planets forming around an AGN would likely be a terrible place for life, this being a generally hostile environment. This also is a tiny number of potential planets compared to the number of star-bound and rogue planets in the galaxy. If this turns out to hold up under peer review, and if observations confirm their predictions, then this would be an interesting small tweak to our models of where everything is in the universe. It would be most interesting for the potential for exotic objects to exist in these regions. Microlensing would be capable of detecting such objects around AGNs, so this is a testable hypothesis.

The post Planets Around Black Holes first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Rachel Carson’s look at the dire effects of industrial and agricultural pollution birthed the modern environmental movement when it was first published – and remains as crucial a read today, finds Rowan Hooper

New medicines are getting better. But so is our ability to get them where they need to go.

The post Revolutions in Drug Delivery first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A glacier could have carried the giant sandstone at the centre of Stonehenge southwards from north-east Scotland, but this scenario appears unlikely

Researchers have discovered how microscopic imperfections and atomic vibrations can be used to control a powerful quantum effect in an advanced material. The effect can turn alternating electrical signals from the environment directly into the kind of current electronic devices need, without traditional components. As temperature changes, the signal can even flip direction, giving scientists a new way to tune device performance.

Researchers have discovered how microscopic imperfections and atomic vibrations can be used to control a powerful quantum effect in an advanced material. The effect can turn alternating electrical signals from the environment directly into the kind of current electronic devices need, without traditional components. As temperature changes, the signal can even flip direction, giving scientists a new way to tune device performance.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered unusual chemistry in interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, including the first direct detection of methane on a visitor from another star system. The comet also contains exceptionally high levels of carbon dioxide, making it unlike most comets born in our solar system. Scientists believe the methane was hidden beneath the surface and only emerged after solar heating reached deeper icy layers.

In our final installment in the series, we'll examine all the close calls, possible candidates, and instances in which extraterrestrial signals could not be ruled out

When Robert Trivers died this year, I lost a friend and the world lost one of the few people who genuinely understood why we lie to ourselves. Skeptic readers know his work even if the name sits just out of reach—his fingerprints are on half of modern evolutionary psychology. Bob once let me fly him out to lecture my state pharmacy association on the science of deceit: a room full of pharmacists learning, from the man who worked it out, that the mind is built to fool its own owner before it fools anyone else. He was generous like that, and funnier than his reputation. That idea—self-deception as design, not defect—is where any honest account of our species has to begin.

It’s also the first entry on a list I’ve spent years assembling in an attempt to gather the load-bearing findings about human nature—scattered across biology, psychology, economics, and anthropology, buried in thousands of pages no busy person will ever read—and compress them into something you can hand to a friend. What follows is the compression of the compression. Seven ideas. If they’re new to you, they will rearrange how you see nearly everything. If they’re not, consider this the map of where the bodies are buried. 

The line between clear sight and self-deception runs through every skull, and it does not stop running because you’ve read an article about it. 

A warning before we start: there is no flattering way to read this list. I am implicated in every item on it. So are you. 

1. You are the mark, not the con artist. 

Trivers’s central insight, laid out in The Folly of Fools, is that self-deception is not a malfunction. It’s an adaptation. The most convincing liar is the one who believes his own lie—he leaks no tells, because there’s nothing to leak. So natural selection built minds that hide their real motives from the conscious tenant upstairs. The unsettling part is the part most people skip: in this arrangement, the “you” that experiences your own reasoning isn’t running the con. You’re the one being conned. Your sense of why you do what you do is a press release, not the minutes of the meeting. 

2. The rider works for the elephant. 

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor, with the mechanism supplied by Daniel Kahneman’s two systems: conscious reasoning (the rider) imagines it’s steering, but the automatic, emotional, intuitive part (the elephant) decides first—in milliseconds—and the rider’s actual job is to invent justifications after the fact. When you form a political opinion, you do not reason your way to it. You feel your way to it, then reason your way to a defense. This is why facts so rarely change minds. You’re not arguing with someone’s logic. You’re arguing with their elephant, and the rider you’re talking to is just the press secretary. And here’s the twist that should keep an honest person up at night: the implication is notthat morality is arbitrary. There are almost certainly better and worse answers to how conscious creatures should treat one another—Sam Harris is right that the moral landscape has real peaks and valleys. The problem is that the machinery generating your moral certainty was never built to track those peaks. It was built to track your tribe. 

Our power has outrun our self-knowledge. That gap is no longer a curiosity. It’s the central problem of the species. 3. You are a monkey with a machine gun. 

For the overwhelming majority of our existence, we lived in bands of roughly 150, chased scarce calories, faced physical threats, and tracked reputation face-to-face. That world is gone. The brain is not. You are running twenty-first-century software—cable news, dating apps, global markets, eight billion strangers—on hardware and instincts shaped over deep evolutionary time, in a world that vanished in an eyeblink by comparison. Nearly every modern pathology is this mismatch wearing a different mask: obesity is the calorie-seeking system in a world of abundance, social-media misery is the status-tracking system run at a volume it was never built for, chronic stress is a threat-detection system designed for lions and now triggered by email. Our power has outrun our self-knowledge. That gap is no longer a curiosity. It’s the central problem of the species. 

4. Tribalism is a feature to be managed, not a bug to be solved. 

This is the sentence most people across the spectrum get wrong. Progressives tend to think tribalism is ignorance that education will cure. Conservatives think it’s a virtue when aimed at the right targets. Libertarians think clear thinking dissolves it. All three are wrong, because the impulse to sort the world into us and them is as deep in the architecture as language. You will not eliminate it. The groups that out-survived the others were the ones that cooperated inside and competed outside, and you are their descendant. The functional question is never how to abolish tribalism but how to channel it—through cross-cutting institutions, productive competition, and norms of engagement. Societies that manage it thrive. Societies that let it run loose produce Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Weimar. The historical record on this is not ambiguous. 

5. The Blank Slate is not just wrong—it’s dangerous. 

Steven Pinker’s target is the still-dominant assumption that humans arrive infinitely malleable, with no nature worth mentioning—that every difference between individuals, groups, and sexes is pure socialization. The science doesn’t support it. But the deeper problem is moral, not empirical. If people have no nature, then anyone who refuses to be molded to your program must be acting in bad faith—stupid, corrupt, or evil. That inference is the seed of every utopian catastrophe in history. The planners who believed they could manufacture a New Man had the power. They lacked the knowledge. The gap between the two filled with corpses. You cannot modulate what you refuse to acknowledge; a pilot who denies gravity does not fly well. 

6. Patternicity will fool you, and it feels exactly like insight. 

This one belongs to Skeptic’s own founder. Michael Shermer’s point is that the brain is a pattern-detection machine with the sensitivity dial turned all the way up—because mistaking a shadow for a predator a hundred times is cheaper than mistaking a predator for a shadow once. So we find faces in clouds, meaning in coincidence, conspiracies in noise. Layer motivated reasoning on top, and you don’t just find patterns everywhere; you preferentially find the ones that confirm what your tribe already believes. The feeling of having seen through to the truth is generated by the same machinery whether or not there’s anything there. Which means the conviction can’t be your evidence. It never could. 

The smartest reasoners are often the most expertly biased, because they’re better at building the defense. 7. Design for the animal, not the angel. 

Here’s the payoff, and it’s strangely hopeful. The systems that work are the ones built for the creature that actually exists. Markets succeed because they channel self-interest instead of pretending it away—the butcher feeds you out of his own interest, not his benevolence. The American founders built checks and balances not for angels but for the ambitious, self-interested primates who would actually hold power. “If men were angels,” Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” The institutions that fail are the ones designed for a species we wish we were. Understand the animal, and you can build a civilization worthy of it. Deny the animal, and the animal runs the show. 

♦ ♦ ♦

There’s an eighth idea, and it’s the one that makes the other seven dangerous to summarize: the bias blind spot. We can see every distortion clearly—in other people. Hand a sharp partisan a list like this one and watch him aim it across the aisle, never once at himself. The studies are brutal on this point: greater intelligence and scientific literacy don’t reduce motivated reasoning on identity-defining issues. They supercharge it. The smartest reasoners are often the most expertly biased, because they’re better at building the defense. 

So I’ll say what the science forces me to say. Nothing on this list exempts me from anything on this list. I am the mark in my own mirror as surely as Trivers was in his—and he knew it, and knowing it was the closest thing to an escape hatch our species has ever found. Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. The line between clear sight and self-deception runs through every skull, and it does not stop running because you’ve read an article about it. 

You are not the exception. Neither am I. But the effort to catch yourself—to ask, before the next certainty hardens: Is this my thinking or my tribe’s? Is this evidence or is it rationalization?—is the one thing the animal can do that the animal it evolved from could not. 

That effort is what my book The Why Behind Things is for. This was the cheat sheet.

Actor Ben McKenzie explores the world of crypto in an entertaining documentary that doesn't shy away from calling out those who have promoted the currency

Global warming will amplify the impacts of El Niño events, and could also make them much stronger and more far-reaching

A new retrospective of the artist beloved by mathematicians opens this week. Get up close to the art with our interactive story

A new retrospective of M.C. Escher’s work opens this week. Explore some of his most mind-bending, mathematically inspired works here

Despite AI's dizzying improvements in mathematical ability, its successes show just how integral human mathematicians are to the scientific process