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A group of undergraduate students pulled off something remarkable: they built their own dark matter detector and used it to probe one of physics’ biggest mysteries. Working with limited resources but plenty of creativity, they designed a stripped-down experiment to hunt for axions — hypothetical particles that could make up dark matter.

A group of undergraduate students pulled off something remarkable: they built their own dark matter detector and used it to probe one of physics’ biggest mysteries. Working with limited resources but plenty of creativity, they designed a stripped-down experiment to hunt for axions — hypothetical particles that could make up dark matter.

In a breakthrough experiment, scientists directly imaged how particles pair up in a system that mimics superconductors. Instead of behaving independently, the pairs moved in a synchronized, dance-like pattern—something never predicted before. This suggests a major gap in the classic theory of superconductivity.

In a breakthrough experiment, scientists directly imaged how particles pair up in a system that mimics superconductors. Instead of behaving independently, the pairs moved in a synchronized, dance-like pattern—something never predicted before. This suggests a major gap in the classic theory of superconductivity.

It’s an iconic image – a giant cephalopod with its tentacles wrapped around a sailing ship, tearing it apart as the crew panic. Eventually it drags the splintered remains down into the deep. Meanwhile, the largest living octopus is the Giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini), averaging about 16 feet long, however an exceptionally large specimen about 30 feet long weighing 600 pounds was found. The largest squid is the Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), reaching roughly 1,500 pounds (490–500 kg) and lengths up to 46 feet (14 m). That’s huge – but it’s no Kraken.

What about in the past? Everything was bigger in the past, right? That’s obviously a trope, but there is some truth to it, in that there have been ages of gigantism in the evolutionary past. In some periods and locations there are rich resources allowing for the evolution of larger body size, which comes with a number of survival advantages. This can set off an arms race of size, with prey becoming larger to avoid predation, and predators becoming larger to hunt bigger prey. The age of the dinosaurs is the most iconic example of this. But that, of course, does not mean that all lineages were necessarily larger in the past. Whales are a good example – the largest whales (and animals) to have ever lived are extant. So what about cephalopods? Are the largest ones living now, like with whales, or were there even larger ones in the past?

A new study examines the fossil remains of 12 giant octopuses that lived 100-72 million years ago. These were discovered and examined through grinding digital mining techniques at Hokkaido University in Japan. This method grinds very thin (25-50 micrometers) layers from a rock specimen, then takes a high resolution full color image of each layer. This method completely destroys the specimen, but results in a high resolution 3D image of any fossils within the rock. It uses AI models to reconstruct the fossils. The technique is used in cases where the fossils are too soft to X-ray (they are invisible to X-rays), cannot be chemically separated from the surrounding rock, and are too fragile for ordinary extraction. All of these are true for the soft beaks of octopuses.

Cephalopods are soft-bodied invertebrates, and so they rarely fossilize well. However, they do have chitinous jaws or beaks they use for eating. These are like the exoskeletons of insects or shell fish, but with some structural differences. Crustacean exoskeletons are mineralized to make them hard, so they serve well as armor. The octopus jaws are not mineralized but rather are reinforced with specialized proteins. The edges are hard to form a cutting edge, and become less hard but stronger as you move away from the edge. This way the jaws don’t crack under strain. These are evolved to be predatory crushing instruments. But they are also too soft for traditional fossil extraction methods, which is why the new technique was needed.

What did the paleontologists learn from examining these new specimens? They were able to infer the size of the creatures, which they estimate were up to 19 meters long – that is enormous. OK, it’s not quite Kraken size, but we are getting close. The wear patterns on the jaws also indicates that they were used to crush bones. What this could mean is that these cephalopods (Vampyronassa rhodanica) were definitely predators, and given their size they may have even been top predators. That is an incredible claim, given that they shared the Cretaceous oceans with plesiosaurs and mosasaurs. Mosasaurs were giant reptilian (but not dinosaurs) sea-dwelling predators up to 18 meters long. Could one of these invertebrate giants have taken on a mosasaur? Probably not, unless they were a baby.

As a point of clarification – the mosasaur was an apex predator, which means they they had no natural predators. The researchers are arguing that Vampyronassa rhodanica was a top predator, which means it occupied the top tier of the food chain, but could also have been prey itself. In a cage match between a mosasaur and a Vampyronassa rhodanica, my money is on the mosasaur.

But still, this means that there were cephalopods around 100 million years ago that were among the top predators of the ocean, competing with giant sharks and aquatic reptiles. This is the first invertebrate to join this group of top predators.

The researchers point out one more detail from the fossils – they had an asymmetric wear pattern, meaning that one side was significantly more worn than the other. This may not sound like much, but it suggests they had a preference for one side over the other. This likely reflects what is known as lateralization – that there were functional differences between the left and right side of their central nervous systems. This phenomenon tends to be seen only in species that have fairly complex central nervous systems, and the authors put this forward as evidence for this in this species. We know that modern cephalopods are highly intelligent, and this evidence suggests that these early cephalopods may have already evolved CNS sophistication. But this is, overall, a rather weak line of inference. Lateralization is not an iron-clad sign of intelligence, and is context dependent, but in this case it is a reasonable inference given that we know cephalopods eventually do evolve in this direction.

Overall this is a pretty interesting study, using a new technique to get a window into ancient cephalopods that was not previously possible. As a result we have gained new insight into this branch of the tree of life. I do have mixed feelings about the new technique, grinding digital mining, because it is completely destructive. It does seem like these fossils would otherwise not be usable, however. But – we do not know if we will eventually develop a non-destructive technique to examine such fossils, maybe even ones that can yield more or better information. The researchers and the field are aware of these tradeoffs. Destructive techniques are therefore used sparingly and only when the scientific information gained outweighs the loss of physical evidence, which they thought was justified in this case. Still, I hope this technique becomes obsolete quickly.

 

The post Release the Kraken first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Coincident with the rise of the dinosaurs, a large landmass filled most of the Arctic circle, potentially contributing to global cooling that advantaged the famous reptiles

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has been searching for exoplanets since its launch in 2018, and it turns out it may have found plenty more of them than we had thought

Smartwatches commonly use heart rate variability to monitor stress. Columnist Helen Thomson explores what this metric actually tells us, and whether it could also predict and diagnose depression – and help improve your mental health more generally

It's been a long time since I've written about the deceptive narratives around placebos promoted by supporters of alternative medicine. Unfortunately, a new article claiming placebos can work as well as "real medicine" is making the rounds on social media. Here we go again.

The post The myth of the magically powerful placebo returns first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Physicists have long assumed that the universe is uniform at very large scales, but evidence is emerging this is wrong and suggests a way to resolve some of the biggest cosmological mysteries

The planet Uranus is a weird place. Not only does it roll around the Sun on its side once every 84.3 Earth years, it also sports a spindly set of rings corralled in some places by strange little moons. Two of those rings, the μ (mu) and ν (nu) rings are incredibly faint, which makes them challenging to study.

Einstein told us that massive objects bend light and he was of course, right. Across the universe, giant galaxies are acting as natural telescopes, warping and distorting the light of objects behind them into spectacular arcs and rings. Now the Euclid space telescope wants your help to find them and the scale of the hunt is unlike anything attempted before.

If humans are ever going to live permanently on Mars, someone is going to have to work out where all the raw materials, the food, they oxygen or the material for the structures to name just a few. A new study has tackled that unglamorous but absolutely critical question and the answer involves robots, asteroids, and one of the most complex supply chains ever designed.

NASA's planet hunting telescope has been busy. A new study has just sifted through the light of over 83 million stars and emerged with more than 11,000 potential worlds, including a confirmed giant planet orbiting a distant star. The results don't just add to our catalogue of planets. They fundamentally change where we look for them.

On April 17th, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent commands to shut down an instrument aboard Voyager 1 called the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP. The nuclear-powered spacecraft is running low on power, and turning off the LECP is considered the best way to keep humanity's first interstellar explorer going.

It’s well known that most American academics lean towards the Left (I’m one), and that this trend is increasing over time. Here’s a plot of the political leaning of academics made by Sam Abrams (a politics and government prof at Sarah Lawrence) shown on the website of the Heterodox Academy. The trend is clear, and it’s the same among many surveys of American academics.

If I was asked ten years ago to explain this difference and also the trend over time, I wouldn’t have been able to give an answer, though now various places have suggested self-selection: academia by its very nature of free expression and (supposed) favoritism of argument and open ideas, favors liberals over conservatives. Here’s from The Independent Review:

The very nature of political inquiry is implicated here as well. Some argue that because academia focuses on expanding ideas, it is inherently opposed to conservatism, which seeks, in a nod to Buckley, to yell “Stop!” In some respects, a liberal-leaning academia should be expected to some degree. The confounding reality now, though, is that many liberal academics agree it is vital to limit ideas they deem harmful.

This paper in Theory and Society gives multiple explanations, including self-selection:

Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas.

But lately I’ve been hearing another explanation, a self-aggrandizing one offered by liberal thinkers themselves. It was originally stated by Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Now what does that mean?  I suppose you can interpret it as another way of saying what’s above: universities, whose job is to find out the truth (“reality”) tend to attract liberals.  But I don’t think that’s what the phrase is supposed to mean. I think that Colbert meant, and others mean, that reality itself has a tendency to buttress Left-wing views.  That’s what Grok says when asked to explain how the Left uses the phrase:

Often deployed earnestly (or semi-earnestly) to argue that empirical evidence on topics like climate change, inequality, public health data, or social issues tends to support center-left policy conclusions more than conservative ones. The implication: “Stop calling facts ‘liberal bias’—reality just doesn’t align with your priors.”

And that may indeed be true, but it reverses the causes of what’s meant: “the views of liberals are more often supported by the facts than are the views of conservatives or moderates.”

Well, one can argue about even that (e.g., climate change on one hand and Israel on the other), but what bothers me is that the quote implies that reality itself leads to liberalism.  But reality has no ideology: it’s simply what’s true about the Universe. Evolutionary biology itself gives just the facts, though those facts can be accepted by liberals or rejected by conservatives like religious creationists. How one deals with the facts depends on one’s upbringing and predisposition.

Actually, anyone studying reality—trying to find the truth—had best abandon any ideological slant beforehand, as ideology impedes the search for truth. The methodology of science itself—hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, double-blind testing, the use of math and statistics, publication and communication, and empirical observation—is not ideological, and does not lead one to either the Left or Right.

This paper from BioScience, written by a philosopher and an evolutionary molecular biologist, shows that studying reality itself is best done in an atmosphere of ethnical neutrality. Click screenshot to read.

The authors argue first that ideological neutrality is important in finding the truth:

Arguably, a more feasible solution to the new demarcation problem is an old solution: when engaging in the core activities of scientific research, scientists should strive to eliminate the influence of all non-epistemic (e.g., ethical and political) values from the work they are conducting and (importantly) reviewing—at least to the extent that this is humanly possible. Like the ideal of a perfect democracy, the ideal of perfect ethical or political neutrality is probably never attainable in practice. Nonetheless, it is an ideal that motivates scientists to identify and hold each other accountable for any non-epistemic biases that might infiltrate and potentially distort scientific reasoning.

They then say that science is best conducted employing four Mertonian norms (Robert Merton was an American sociologists who wrote a lot about the sociology of science):

Merton’s first norm, perhaps inappropriately called “communism,” “prescribes the open communication of findings to other scientists and correlatively proscribing secrecy” (Zuckerman and Merton 1971).

. . . Merton’s second norm—universalism—states that personal attributes of a scientist, such as race, gender, nationality, religion, class, or political affiliation, are irrelevant when evaluating their scientific work. This norm functions epistemically as a corrective against all possible forms of discrimination other than merit.

. . . Merton’s third value, organized skepticism, encourages scientists to remain open to future falsification. This involves considering “all new evidence, hypotheses, theories, and innovations, even those that challenge or contradict their own work” (Anderson et al. 2010).

. . . Merton’s fourth norm called “disinterestedness” is perhaps the most controversial. Taken literally, this norm seems to require of scientists that they set aside personal goals in the pure pursuit of truth. Even the most careful scientist is vulnerable to confirmation bias (Wiens 1997). The expectation that scientists should behave as if they had no stake in the outcomes of their research is meant to counteract the effects of wishful thinking.

Now the authors discuss the opposition to these norms, and problems that arise when using them, but I think it’s useful to recognize that setting aside ideology is the best and fastest way to understand reality.

I suppose this post is a long-winded way of exporessing what I see as a self-aggrandizing phrase, and one that distorts the way that finding truth really works, but I’ve heard the phrase often enough to dissect it a bit.

The upshot: neither morality or ideology can be derived from reality, but those of a certain ideological or moral bent may rely on reality more than those of other stripes.

ASTEP, the Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets, a small visible telescope operating at Concordia station, continues making a real impact in characterizing odd new exoplanetary systems.

I think this was news commentary, but I didn’t hear the whole show: just a snippet on my car radio. At any rate, one commenter said this:

 “Joe Biden is probably the last Democratic President for generations who will be in favor of Israel.”

One could say that the Democrats are taking a position of neutrality, favoring neither Israel or its opponents (e.g., Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, or Hamas), but I doubt that is the case. The Democratic Party is being taken over by so-called “progressives,” and they are opposed to Israel in general—not just “Zionism” (which means Israel’s existence as a state), and not just Netanyahu.  This, according to a poll of Palestinians  taken in the West Bank and Gaza two years ago, is who the Democrats are and will be favoring:

According to the poll, only seven percent of Gazans blamed Hamas for their suffering. Seventy-one percent of all Palestinians supported Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on October 7 — up 14 points among Gazans and down 11 points among West Bank Palestinians compared to three months ago. Fifty-nine percent of all Palestinians thought Hamas should rule Gaza, and 70 percent were satisfied with the role Hamas has played during the war.

Before October 7, Fatah would have defeated Hamas in a head-to-head vote of all Palestinians 26 to 22 percent. If elections were held today, Fatah would lose to Hamas 17 to 34 percent. Eighty-one percent of respondents were dissatisfied with Abbas, up from 76 percent before the war. Sixty-two percent did not view the recent resignation of former PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh as a sign of reform. And 65 percent of Palestinians think the PA is a burden on the Palestinian people. Among likely voters, 56 percent supported Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life sentences for his role in the murder of Jews during the Second Intifada. Thirty-two percent supported Qatar-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and 11 percent supported Abbas.

Only 5 percent of Palestinians think Hamas’s massacre on October 7 constitutes a war crime.

The poll was taken by a Palestinian organization, “the Ramallah-based non-profit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.”  And we have this breakdown of Democratic support (almost nil) from The Arab Center:

 On April 15, 2026, the United States Senate considered two resolutions to block nearly $450 million of arms sales to Israel over concerns about human rights violations and the US-Israel war on Iran. With pro-Israel Republicans controlling the Senate, the defeat of these resolutions, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), was predictable. Indeed, the first resolution, to stop a $295 million sale of bulldozers that Israel has used in the past to destroy civilian homes, lost in a 59-40 vote; the second, to halt a $151 million sale of 12,000 1,000-pound bombs, failed 63-36. The surprise was that more than three-quarters of the 47-member Democratic caucus voted to halt at least one of the sales—an unprecedented number.

Jews were reliably Democratic before the war, and Democrats were reliable friends of Israel. Brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, those days are gone. Democrats are not only ignoring Hamas’s war crimes and avowed desire to destroy Israel, but also favoring an oppressive, misogynistic, and truly genocidal regime against the only democratic state in the Middle East.  And no, I don’t think it’s just animus against Netanyahu or “Zionism” that’s motivating this change.  I think that Democratic opposition to Israel would be nearly as strong if Israel had some other Prime Minister. And it’s not “Zionism” they oppose, either, for that’s just the new euphemism for “Judaism”, for Zionism is just the recognition of the validity of the state of Israel as a refuge for Jews. (Do these people oppose the many explicitly Muslim states as examples of “Islamism”? If so, I haven’t heard about it.)

Israel (and Jews) are now seen as oppressors in the “oppressor-victim” narrative that’s behind wokeness. And the “oppression” by Israel involves the Two Big Lies: Israel is “genocidal” and “an apartheid state.” (For a refutation of the “genocide” canard go here, and of the “apartheid” canard go here).  We are seeing the Democratic Party becoming more antisemitic and anti-Enlightenment. For Democrats like me, this is depressing.  I’m not a one-issue candidate but I’m still Jewish, and how am I to vote for someone who is anti-Israel?

I now have three batches plus some singletons, and so we’ll have semi-regular photos for a while, at least.  Today’s batch of tidal invertebrate photos, and one video, comes from math professor Abby Thompson at UC Davis. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. The video is also hers.

April tidepools, and a mystery den.

Starting with a video of a Ctenophore, Pleurobrachia bachei (Pacific sea gooseberry, a ‘comb jelly’). All appearances to the contrary, this is in a different phylum (Ctenophora) from the “jellyfish” of my earlier post, which are in the phylum Cnidaria.   The flashing lights are the cilia in the “combs” that run down the sides, used for locomotion.  This one wasn’t moving very much, but I was surprised it was moving at all.   I picked it up off the sand quite a way above the water line, and dumped it into a shallow pool to take a photo.    It seemed to be recovering pretty well from what I thought was death.   It’s about the size of a walnut.

Sea urchin “test”, or internal skeleton. Probably Strongylocentrotus purpuratus:

Ophiopholis aculeata (daisy brittle star):

Bispira pacifica (feather duster worm):

Close up of ‘feathers’ of pacifica:

Genus Eupentacta (sea cucumber):

Phoronis ijimai (tentative- the white things). This is a species of horseshoe worm, which lives in tubes.   I haven’t seen this species before, and it was in an awkward spot, so it was hard to get a good photo.   The photo below that is from a few years ago of a worm from the same family, so you can see their general shape better:

Phoronopsis harmeri (from July 2021) (same family):

Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone):

And a few nudibranchs:

Triopha maculata (nudibranch):

Tenellia laguna (nudibranch):

Acanthodoris rhodoceras (nudibranch):

Rostanga pulchra (nudibranch):

Lastly the mystery den. Our entire front yard seems to have been tunneled under, with at least three major entrances- this pair of holes is just one of them.  The holes are large, about 10 inches across.  We’re dreaming of badgers, would be very happy with foxes, and really hoping it’s not skunks (I love skunks, but not in the front yard).  A wildlife cam is the next purchase:

Camera: Olympus TG-7.   Thanks as usual to some experts on inaturalist.

The giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—have challenged our understanding of planetary formation and evolution. Specifically, their atmospheric formations and compositions have provided awe-inspiring images from spacecraft and given scientists key insights into the interior mechanisms of these massive worlds. But what about exoplanets? What can their atmospheres teach scientists about their formation, evolution, composition, and interior mechanisms? And how do longstanding exoplanet models stack up against the real thing?