News Feeds

Quantum Backrooms is a horror game in which the player explores eerie rooms. The twist is that the rooms have been generated by a quantum computer

When it comes to understanding Earth and our changing environment, space is the place. Not only does it give us an overall holistic view of the planet below, but satellite-based imagery can transcend national boundaries and give us an understanding of key changes that often go unseen at ground level. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen two new missions to address key questions in Earth environmental science: Hibidis and SOVA-S.

We're increasingly prioritising our own needs over those of the wider community, which may be causing us to love our partners less intensely

Bacteria created using mirror images of natural biomolecules would pose a grave threat to life on Earth, some researchers warn, but a new study suggests they would struggle to survive in the wild

We live in a golden age of astronomical imaging. Telescopes are capturing billions of galaxy images, painting the universe in breathtaking detail. But there's a problem, and it's a big one. A photograph tells you what something looks like but it doesn't tell you what it's made of, how fast it's moving, or how far away it really is. For that, you need spectroscopy. And right now, astronomy has a catastrophic imbalance, billions of images and nowhere near enough spectra to match them. A new telescope currently under construction in the mountains of western China is about to change that quite dramatically.

Every byte of data a spacecraft collects, every image, every reading, every scientific measurement has to survive one of the most hostile environments imaginable. Space is awash with radiation, and that radiation is the silent enemy of conventional data storage. Now, a team of researchers have built a new kind of memory chip that doesn't just tolerate radiation, it laughs in its face. Using a quirk of physics called ferroelectricity, this technology can withstand radiation levels equivalent to 100 million X-rays, and it could transform how we store data on missions heading deeper into the Solar System than we've ever ventured before.

Researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville have found a new way to measure the mass of neighbouring galaxies using pulsars. Using the universe's most precise natural clocks it’s possible to detect tiny gravitational disturbances rippling through the Milky Way. By analysing 54 millisecond pulsars, the team directly measured the gravitational pull of both the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, including their dark matter. The same technique could eventually map dark matter across the entire Galaxy bringing us closer to understanding what it actually is.

A cancer-killing virus has stopped pancreatic tumours from growing and spreading in three people in an initial safety trial, raising hopes that it may help to beat the deadly condition

Even if you’ve never bought any cryptocurrency, like columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, your money may be affected by bitcoin’s fate – which is uncertain, as quantum computing advances are threatening to make the encryption protecting it useless

Dive into the opening of The Selfish Gene's first chapter 'Why are people?', the New Scientist Book Club’s read for June to mark 50 years since the popular science classic was first published

The COVID Amnesia Project has seamlessly morphed into the MAHA Amnesia Project, and it’s up to us not to forget the sheltered sycophants and enablers whose enthusiastic support of the pandemic’s worst disinformation superspreaders led to this sad moment.

The post MAHA Fluffers Claimed MAHA Doctors Would “Restore Lost Trust.” I Disagreed. Who Turned Out to be Right? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Scientists have uncovered a surprising new way to control superconductivity — the mysterious phenomenon where electricity flows with zero energy loss. By pairing twisted layers of graphene with a synthetic diamond material, researchers were able to effectively switch superconductivity on and off by tweaking how electrons interact with their surroundings. Even more intriguing, the material behaved in ways that defied the rules of conventional superconductors, hinting at an entirely new kind of physics.

Scientists say moons around rogue planets wandering through the galaxy could remain warm enough for life thanks to tidal heating and hydrogen-rich atmospheres. These dark, starless worlds may have had stable oceans for billions of years — long enough for complex life to potentially emerge.

Until recently, the Pamir mountains in central Asia have bucked the global melting trend, but in 2025, the region’s glaciers experienced a massive loss of ice due to extreme heat

There's a planet out there called LHS 3844 b, orbiting a star about 48 light-years away. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) found it in 2018 when the planet transited across the face of its star. The James Webb Space Telescope zxeroed in on the planet and found it to be a barren, rocky place with no atmosphere.

We know that stars can engulf planets because stars that swell up to become red giants overwhelm any close-in planets. The Sun will do this to Venus, Mercury, and possibly Earth in a few billion years. But research shows that it can happen when low-mass stars first enter the main sequence. Lithium gives it away.

In a non sequitur leap so sweeping it is almost beyond comprehension, Pastor Joel Webbon, urging an end to women’s suffrage, asserts, “It’s because we love women—and we know that when women can vote, they vote for being raped.”1

This bizarre assertion is part of a conversation between three Christian Nationalist clergymen, Pastor Dale Partridge, head pastor at King’s way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona, Father Calvin Robinson, a British expat cleric, and Pastor Joel Webbon, leader of Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown Texas. In this conversation, the three assert women are guided by emotion rather than intellect. Hence, they argue, women are easily manipulated. Thus, the vote must be taken away from them for their own good:

Partridge, a Reformed pastor who leads King’s Way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona, argued that women are “easily manipulated by evil men.” “You want to get to my wife, you have to go through me,” Partridge said. “You’re not going to get her emotions manipulated. You are going to have to manipulate my emotions, and I’m less likely to be manipulated.” He continued, “That’s the threat, is that they can’t control men the way they can control women—which is the reason why they want the women’s vote.”2

Perhaps these men would consider certain women who don’t seem to conform to their view as helpless souls governed by their emotions as anomalies. These would include the late Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, 1969–1974, the late Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1979–1990, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, 2005–2021, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State of the United States, 2009–2013, and Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, 2021–2025; not to mention Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Amy Coney Barrett; as well as the 26 female senators and 129 female members of the House of Representatives in the present federal legislature.

So, are these women anomalies, exceptions to the rule, and are most women ruled by their emotions and “easily manipulated by evil men,” as Partridge asserts? Not according to a study by the University of Michigan. One assertion about the emotionality of women is that their emotional stability is often negatively impacted by hormonal changes during their menstrual cycles. The study examined men, women naturally cycling, and women who were not cycling while taking oral contraceptives:

“Thus, there is little indication that ovarian hormones influence affective variability in women to a greater extent than the biopsychosocial factors that influence daily emotion in men,” the researchers wrote, adding that men and women’s daily emotions fluctuate “to similar extents.” According to the researchers, this shows that men and women actually have “similar levels of affective variability,” or as U-M put it, they “ride the same emotional rollercoaster.” The mechanisms behind them between the sexes, however, may “systematically” differ. “Our study uniquely provides psychological data to show that the justifications for excluding women in the first place (because of fluctuating ovarian hormones, and consequently emotions, confounded experiments) were misguided,” Beltz said.3

Another study, reported in Forbes, found that, overall, women exercised greater emotional control in management situations than men:

The only category in which women didn’t receive the better scores was “emotional self-control,” where no gender differences were found. In numerous other categories important for management success, however, women did score higher. A few key examples:
Inspirational Leadership: Women scored in 54th percentile, men in 47th percentile.
Coaching and Mentoring: Women scored in 57th percentile, men in 46th percentile.
Organizational Awareness: Women scored in 56th percentile, men in 46th percentile.
Adaptability: Women scored in 54th percentile, men in 48th percentile.4

That study notwithstanding, a 2015 article in Psychology Today asserted there is little difference in the emotionality of men and women:

Are women more emotional than men? Maybe. Men could be described as more emotional than women, too. It depends on the type of emotion, how it is measured, where it is expressed, and lots of other factors. It is also important when answering that type of question not to dichotomize sex differences as necessarily being either “entirely absent” (i.e., gender blank slate-ism) or so large that men and women “can’t relate to one another” (i.e., the old Mars versus Venus claptrap). Most psychological sex differences fall somewhere in the middle.5

Even studies using the Big Five personality scale—OCEAN, or Openness to Experience, Consciousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism—that find women express more emotional variability than men, there is no way to extrapolate from this fact that women cannot run companies or countries, which history shows they clearly can. No such profession can be reduced to a simple set of emotional regulatory factors easily cleaved between men and women.6

It appears, then, that the characterization of women by these three clerics is based less on science than on traditionally stereotypical views of women, along with their own religious biases.

One must also consider what primarily makes an individual either male or female, i.e., X and Y chromosomes. Females have two X chromosomes, while males have an X and a Y chromosome. So, is the Y chromosome special in some way that makes men intellectually superior to women? Does it carry special and unique genes women simply don’t have? While Y chromosomes do have some special genes that produce testes, they are, overall, stunted, lacking matching genes to pair with those on the X chromosomes. Hence, with paired genes of a given type, a defective gene carried on one X chromosome can be effectively neutralized by a functional gene of the same pair on the other X chromosome. Because the Y chromosome often lacks the gene to pair with the defective gene, there are genetic diseases carried by women that are almost exclusively expressed in men. One of these is hemophilia. Somehow this trio of clerics missed learning this.

However, it’s not just women exercising power that troubles these clergymen in the video. Rather, it is democracy itself. As Pastor Webbon states:

So long as we have democracy, coupled with universal suffrage, you’re constantly going to be going against the grain. You’re going to constantly have half the population voting for temperance, tolerance and suicidal empathy.7

Webbon’s solution to this problem is simple and forceful (with the emphasis on forceful):

I don’t think you’re going to get people to vote away Democracy … But my position is it has to be taken. It has to be that men—virtuous, ambitious, masculine men—have to climb the ladder of power and forcefully take away from the people that which is to their detriment.

Father Robinson disagrees, citing an historical example where people did indeed vote away democracy. The historical example he cites with equanimity is Weimar Germany giving up democracy to the Nazis. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he seems to see this as something positive. Early in 2025 he was defrocked by the Anglican Catholic Church after mimicking Elon Musk’s straight-arm gesture many have seen as a Nazi salute (but was, in fact, a common gesture waving to the crowd.8) Robinson stated emphatically on an Instagram post that he wasn’t a Nazi and that he made the gesture as a joke to mock liberals:

The joke at the end was a mockery of the hysterical “liberals” who called Elon Musk a Nazi for clearly showing the audience his heart was with them … My attempt at dry wit in the typically British way was not a joke at the expense of WWII nor an admission of my membership in the National Socialist Party. That would be an incredibly ignorant and bad faith assumption to make. The responses are very telling, though. The people who understand cheer—those who have eyes to see. Those who choose not to understand, reach for their pitchforks. They have a new channel for their hatred. They remain in my prayers. May the Lord soften their hearts.9

Father Robinson’s superiors at the Anglican Catholic Church would have to have been among those he characterized as “those who choose not to understand” and failed to see the humor in in his actions. Their response was:

While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinson’s heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition. Mr. Robinson had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in the service of the left or the right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist. Clearly, he did not, and as such his license in the church has been revoked. He is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC.10

The ACC church’s statement went on to condemn any trivializing of the Holocaust. Regardless of Robinson’s disassociating himself from the Nazis, he does seem to approve of the people of the Weimar Republic voluntarily giving up democracy.

It would be easy to dismiss these three clerics as members of a misogynous and racist fringe group. However, their vision of depriving women of the vote isn’t theirs alone.

Along with wanting to disenfranchise women, Pastor Webbon would like to purify our nation by ridding it of immigrants. Thus, he would like Americans to join ICE in what he sees as a noble cause. On an episode the Right Response Ministries podcast, Webbon explained how:

You can’t be vigilante, but you literally can join ICE and be God’s appointed avenger who seeks to carry out God’s vengeance on the evildoer. Immigration is evil, at least at the level that we have it today. Those who are flooding our country—it’s not theirs—they are flooding our country like a swarm of locusts and eating up the inheritance that your fathers, by their blood, sweat, and tears, laid up for you. It is a breach, a rebellion, against the Fifth Commandment to honor your father and mother. And so, to join the proper mechanism through ICE and to become, in that sense, God’s appointed deacon to carry out vengeance on the evildoer who is devouring the inheritance of the children, that is a righteous thing. You can join ICE today and make Jesus smile as you, with a gun, pack foreigners into the back of a van to be kicked out of the country. That is a godly, glorious endeavor.11

Since, unless one is a member of a Native American tribe, one must be the descendant of immigrants, many of whom—like my Irish ancestors—were also seen as bringing ruin on our nation, it is at first hard to understand Webbon’s antagonism toward immigrants. However, Dale Partridge makes it clear as to just which immigrants Christian Nationalists are referring:

Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge says non-European immigrants have “destroyed our nation, literally”: “If you’re not a Christian and you’re not fully assimilated—I’m talking language, culture, and values—get out of America.”12

Calvin Robinson, though of mixed-race descent, also sees an immigrant threat, though mainly from Muslims, whom he seems to see as being helped by Jews:

I get attacked on this from both sides because I mention the problem of Islam and people are like, “Yeah, but it’s the Jews who opened the door.” I’m like, “Yeah.” I mention the problem of Judaism, and they’re like, “Yeah, but the Muhammadans are raping your daughters.” These are both issues. They both need addressing. Islam has taken over, yes; it’s the broom of the Jews and they have opened the gates and it’s the reason we have barbarians everywhere. But the barbarians need dealing with and we’re not dealing with them. They are literally raping our daughters, so let’s get them out and let’s close the doors and let’s kick out the people who are opening the doors, too.13

Joel Webbon also takes the Jews to task, saying that, while they might be allowed to live in the United States, they should not have any say in its laws. On his Right Response podcast, Pastor Webbon stated:

You don’t get to drive the bus, if you’re someone who’s not a Christian, and even more than just not a Christian, but someone whose entire religion is founded on the rejection of Christ.14

In another episode of the Right Response podcast, after saying Jews might be able to live in the United States but should be denied the right to hold public office, Webbon added:

This nation is for us and our posterity. It’s not for Hindus. It’s not for Muslims. And it’s not for Jews. It belongs to Christians.15

So, in the ideal Christian Nationalist state, as envisioned by Webbon, Partridge, and Robinson, women would be denied the vote, immigration would cease and non-European immigrants would be deported, and Jews would be denied the right to hold public office.

It would be easy to dismiss these three clerics as members of a misogynous and racist fringe group. However, their vision of depriving women of the vote isn’t theirs alone. It is a key provision of the agenda of well-funded Christian Dominionists. One of its leaders is Douglas Wilson, the spiritual mentor of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Wilson has proposed replacing individual voting with a household voting system, in which each household—led by its masculine head—would have a single vote. In a 2025 survey involving 3,300 respondents, the Religion in Public blog found that 20.5 percent of Americans they questioned favored replacing our present system with one of household voting:

We also asked our respondents about women’s political rights, starting with the idea of a household vote. In our weighted sample, 20.5 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with this proposal. Predictably, there is a gender gap – 24.2 percent of men and 16.9 percent of women agreed.16

So, assuming this survey reflects a cross section of Americans, it appears nearly one fourth of American men and a sixth of American women would favor effectively depriving women of the vote.

Let us compare these statistics with some of those of the Weimar Republic in the 1930s. In the first election in Germany following the economic crisis of 1929—that of 1930—the Nazi party received 18.3 percent of the vote. By 1932, while still a minority party, they composed the largest faction in the Reichstag, the German Parliament. In the election of March, 1933, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party (NSDAP) won 17,277,180 votes, or 43.91 percent of the total.17 Thus, the present strength of those favoring a plan put forward by Christian Dominionists to severely shrink the American electorate is comparable to that of the Nazi party in Germany at the beginning of its rise to power, but well below that which brought Hitler to power.

Fortunately for the continued existence of American democracy and constitutional rights, financial conditions in America do not mirror those in the Weimar Republic in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929. However, should such a financial disaster occur, those posing as saviors of our system could easily ascend the “ladders of power,” as Webbon phrased it.

Regardless of whether there is or is not an economic crisis, Pastor Webbon has laid out a timeline for the accession of Christian Nationalism:

In the near future, possibly as soon as 2028 but likely 2032, this America First Christian Nationalist movement is going to take over the GOP and it’s going to win an election. It’s going to be everything MAGA said it would be—but MAGA betrayed us—and this is what we can look for on the horizon of the political landscape. And this is what you need to be committed to and what you must be working towards.18

This ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week captures all the glory of the star-forming region N159. It's in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and is dwarfed by its much larger neighbour, the Tarantula Nebula. But N159 is gorgeous, too, so captivating that it's been featured as a Picture of the Week several times.

Our planet's liquid iron outer core is slowly giving up its secrets to a trio of satellites launched by ESA in 2013. Called Swarm, the three probes have been studying Earth's magnetic field at the source. In the process, they've revealed startling changes in a molten layer region 2,200 kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean. In 2010, material in that area of Earth's outer core changed direction. Insteading of moving slowly westward, it's now headed east and picking up speed. Scientists are working to figure out why by using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm data and additional information from ESA's CryoSat mission and ground-based instruments.

Open star clusters are prevalent stellar structures in the Milky Way. Astronomers think their could be 100,000 of them. But they're not all the same: some are binary clusters, and within those, there's a hierarchy based on how they form. Recent research explores the different types and how many of each type is in the Milky Way.