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Researchers found for the first time evidence that even microquasars containing a low-mass star are efficient particle accelerators, which leads to a significant impact on the interpretation of the abundance of gamma rays in the universe.

Phosphorus is a critical raw material that should be recycled more efficiently. There is also a need for more environmentally friendly production methods for organic phosphorus compounds. A recently published review article examines the potential of green chemistry to contribute to these goals in the production and use of multifunctional phosphorus compounds, phosphonates.

By applying techniques from explainable artificial intelligence, engineers can improve users' confidence in forecasts generated by artificial intelligence models. This approach was recently tested on wind power generation.

Researchers present a solution to the challenging problem of recycling poly-cotton textile waste. The process starts with fully removing all cotton from the fabric using superconcentrated hydrochloric acid at room temperature. The cotton is converted into glucose, which can be used as a feedstock for biobased products such as renewable plastics. The remaining polyester fibers can be reprocessed using available polyester recycling methods.

The universe is getting more disordered, entropy is growing -- this is the second law of thermodynamics. But according to quantum theory, entropy should actually stay the same. Scientists took a closer look and resolved this apparent contradiction.

The universe is getting more disordered, entropy is growing -- this is the second law of thermodynamics. But according to quantum theory, entropy should actually stay the same. Scientists took a closer look and resolved this apparent contradiction.

The universe is getting more disordered, entropy is growing -- this is the second law of thermodynamics. But according to quantum theory, entropy should actually stay the same. Scientists took a closer look and resolved this apparent contradiction.

The narrow, deep holes required for one type of flash memory are made twice as fast with the right recipe, which includes a plasma made from hydrogen fluoride.

The narrow, deep holes required for one type of flash memory are made twice as fast with the right recipe, which includes a plasma made from hydrogen fluoride.

Scientists detected all five nucleobases -- building blocks of DNA and RNA -- in samples returned from asteroid Bennu by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission.

Scientists found that asteroid Bennu contained a set of salty mineral deposits that formed in an exact sequence when a brine evaporated, leaving clues about the type of water that flowed billions of years ago.

In today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “others,” we see a familiar theme: Mo being guilty of exactly what he’s accusing others of. In fact, I think the theme of the whole strip can be condensed to one word: hyprocrisy.

A patch made from lab-grown muscle cells boosted heart function in monkeys with cardiovascular disease and is now being tested in humans

The West Antarctic ice sheet could cause metres of sea level rise if it collapses – but more than 120,000 years ago, it may have survived an even warmer period than it is experiencing now

Much of Chapter 5 of my book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (the chapter’s called “Why does it matter?”) deals with religiously-motivated child abuse, mostly in the form of religious parents denying medical care to children.  Some of the stories are horrific, especially the first one I tell involving a girl with bone cancer. While Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are major culprits, with their faith often mandating that God rather than doctors will cure children, there are other groups like them.  And when the children die, as they often do (Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibit blood transfusion, and the kids, indoctrinated with that dogma, may die if they don’t get blood), the parents used to get off with light prison sentences or even parole. After all, it’s religion, Jake, so it’s okay to let your your kids die in its name!  For some reason, all the cases I described in my book involve Christian parents.

Well, it’s still happening The Guardian reports today about on eight-year-old diabetic (type 1) girl whose father, converted to an evangelical sect, decided to deny his daughter the insulin she needed to live. (I am SO familiar with this kind of behavior. It’s not ubiquitous, but it’s not vanishingly rare, either.) The daughter died, of course (this was in 2022), and the death was likely a painful one.

The difference between this case, described below (click on screenshot to read), and similar cases in the U.S., is that the parents—and 10 other people—were convicted of manslaughter yesterday, a much more serious charge than often levied against such parents in the U.S. I suppose manslaughter is an appropriate charge, but one shouldn’t rule out murder charges, either since sane persons know what will happen if they withhold insulin from a diabetic child. (I know of no murder charges ever filed against these odious parents.) Anyway, I get quite exercised when helpless kids die because God is supposed to save them, and often this happens with the child’s assent, because they get propagandized. Religion often comes with the need to propagandize, especially to your kids.

An excerpt from the article:

It took Jason Struhs 36 hours to call the ambulance after the death of his daughter Elizabeth.

When the police followed shortly afterwards, they heard singing. The Saints, a religious sect in Queensland, that has been likened to a cult, were praying for the eight-year-old to be resurrected.

“I’m not jumping up and down in joy, but I’m at peace …” Jason told a police officer that day. “I gave my little girl what she wanted. And I expect God to look after her.”

Justice Martin Burns on Wednesday found Jason Struhs, and religious leader Brendan Stevens, along with Elizabeth’s mother, Kerrie, brother Zachary, and 10 other members of the group, guilty of her manslaughter.

Elizabeth Struhs died at her family home in Rangeville, Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, on 6 or 7 January 2022, of diabetic ketoacidosis.

Jason told police: “There were no feelings of oh well, that didn’t work.”

“I have to be patient. I have to keep praying. I didn’t sit there and think that I had killed my daughter, I was thinking that she was in a better place now,” he said.

The delay before calling the ambulance after a child’s death is quite common, though I don’t know why. The kid is dead and it has to be reported. At any rate, there was a trial at the end of 2024.

Throughout the nine-week trial last year, the court heard hours of interviews with the Saints filmed by police, at the scene and in the days afterwards.

Recently released to the media, they give an insight into their beliefs.

Elizabeth’s mother, Kerrie Struhs, believed so strongly in the Saints’ faith she had been previously jailed for not providing her daughter the necessaries of life in 2019, when Elizabeth became sick for the first time.

Jason took her to the hospital in a coma over Kerrie’s objections. She told the police she wasn’t grateful to the medical staff for saving her life.

“What do you think might have happened if she wasn’t taken to hospital the first time?” she was asked by police, days after Elizabeth’s death.

“I believe she would have got better and didn’t need any medical assistance at all,” she replied.

When Elizabeth was returned to the family with no lasting medical problems, she took it as proof of a miracle. She never attended hospital to see her daughter’s treatment.

A month after Kerrie was released from jail, Elizabeth was taken off her insulin after two-and-a-half healthy years and became sick again – but her mother told police she never had any doubts.

She told them she was surprised God was taking the situation “to the extreme … as in, to death”, but saw it as part of his plan for the “last days”.

If Elizabeth had died and was brought back in front of paramedics, more people would see the miracle, she said.

“These are end days. I see this as simply God is needing to show people, give people a chance to see that God is still here. And we are the ones that will declare it faithfully,” she told police.

Jason was originally not religious; it was only when he “found God” that he turned into someone who could kill his daughter:

For 17 years, his wife and many of his children attended the small home-based church service multiple times a week, but Jason Struhs didn’t believe in God at all.

For years he helped her administer insulin four times a day, take her to doctors, prepare specific meals and check her sugar levels.

. . . . After a verbal fight with his son Zachary and counselling by the other Saints, Jason converted in August 2021.

“The next four months after turning to God had been the best four months of my life, because I had peace. I now had family who loved me,” he said in his police statement.

The sentence below, which I’ve put in bold, is what really angers me. These people are so absolutely sure of the fictions they embrace that they are willing to let their offspring die because “they’ll be in a better place,” There is no evidence for such a place! Jason feels no remorse for what he did.

The Saints prayed and sang as a group. Finally, on 8 January, Jason called the paramedics.

“I said to everyone that even though God will raise Elizabeth, we couldn’t leave a corpse in the house, we couldn’t leave her body sitting there forever,” Jason said.

On 8 January, Jason told police his faith was stronger than ever.

“I am fully at peace at heart. I don’t feel sorry, I feel happy because now she’s at peace and so am I … she’s not dependent on me for her life now. I’m not trapped by diabetes as well.”

Burns will sentence all 14 on 11 February.

Only prosecution and strong sentences will curb this kind of behavior, though some of it will go on in secret, for religion is powerful.

I won’t harp on this further; you can read my book to see similar cases.  The point, of course, is that this girl would still be alive if there were no religion, for only religion would make a parent stop giving medical care to their offspring. (Well, I suppose there are other forms of such lunacy as well, but these are doctrines of Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other fringe Christian sects like the Saints.)  And the courts, in the U.S. at least, used to go much easier on parents like this than, say, parents whose kids died from malnourishment or related abuse. Religion used to give you somewhat of a pass, though that now seems to be changing, thank Ceiling Cat.

Here’s a video about the death of Elizabeth and the trial.  Do watch it, because you’ll see how these people remain deluded even though they thought God would “bring her back” after she died.

Finally, I present for your appraisal the cover of the Jehovah’s Witness magazine Awake! from 1994.  Every child on the cover of this magazine died because they refused blood transfusions. But it’s okay, because they put God first.  I used this slide in the talks I used to give about faith versus fact.  In the case of Elizabeth, faith is The Saints; fact is insulin.

h/t: Paul

Remarkable archaeological finds are telling a new story of how prehistoric humans turned clothing from a necessity into a means of self-expression

We have a small set of photos today taken in Florida by Bill Dickens. And there’s a video (also by Dickens) at the bottom. Bill’s captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

An Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) has taken to dropping by weekly to my backyard on the Banana River in Cocoa Beach Florida.

Here’s some photos and a video of it eating a live Hardheaded Catfish (Ariopsis felis). It’s somewhat gruesome as it starts by eating the gills on one side, so it takes a while for the unfortunate fish to succumb.

The Osprey is still wet from having been in the water.

It takes around 20 minutes to consume most of the fish – they’re around 12-inches long. It messily leaves some of the carcass behind on the lawn. There’s a possum living in a brush pile in my yard that has learned to scout around under the tree at night to clean up the remains.

A video:

Comet G3 ATLAS wows southern hemisphere observers and Universe Today readers before it fades from view.

Comet G3 ATLAS, captured along with the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile on January 22nd. Image credit: Yuri Beletsky.

Comets are always a true celestial treat to track. In a clockwork cosmos, the appearance of a potentially bright new comet is always a celestial question mark: will it perform up to expectations, or fizzle from view? Such was the case with Comet C/2024 G3 ATLAS.

Comet G3 ATLAS imaged from Namibia on January 20th courtesy of Clyde Foster. “The comet is putting on quite a show…” says Clyde. “And can’t have photos like that, without our beloved Namibian Camelthorn trees!”

Discovered on the night of April 25th, 2024 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey, the comet showed potential near perihelion in 2025.

Comet G3 ATLAS as seen from Middlemarch Otago, New Zealand. Credit: Ian Griffin Demise of a Comet

Of course, such a close pass is always fraught with uncertainty: good cases in point are C/2012 S1 ISON which disintegrated on U.S. Thanksgiving Day 2013, and W3 Lovejoy which survived a blistering perihelion just 140,000 km (!) from the surface of the Sun, and went on to become another fine southern hemisphere comet in late 2011 and early 2012.

Comet C/2024 G3 ATLAS paired with Venus at dusk on January 24th over the Atacama Desert in Chile, courtesy of Daniele Gasparri. Daniele notes on Space Weather it was “…a scene of rare beauty: comet C/2024 G3 ATLAS was perfectly visible to the naked eye, its very long tail standing out against the colors of the sunset and extending all the way toward Venus. Between these two ‘giants’ of the sky, I could see Saturn, the zodiacal light, and a thin greenish band of airglow.”

Comet G3 ATLAS faced just such a perilous passage, reaching perihelion 14 million kilometers from the Sun on January 13th. SOHO’s venerable LASCO C3 imager caught the comet near the Sun, as it topped -3.8 magnitude, the brightest comet since P1 McNaught in 2007.

Comet G3 ATLAS crosses from SOHO’s LASCO C3 view, into STEREO Ahead’s Hi1 imager. Credit: NASA/STEREO/SOHO image compilation: Fred Deters. Amazing Comet Captures

Reader images soon poured in, as the comet took the plunge southward and unfurled a fine dust tail. The comet was a bashful one for folks up north, as it only popped up north of the ecliptic from January 8th until January 15th. It always seems that bright comets have a ‘thing’ for southern hemisphere skies.

Comet G3 ATLAS, as seen from the International Space Station. Credit: Don Pettit/NASA

Few observers saw the comet post-perihelion up north. A few skilled astrophotographers did manage to nab dusty streaks of the tail known as syndynes above the dusk horizon. One bizarre fact when it comes to comets: the tails are blown back by the solar wind, meaning the dust and ion tails of G3 ATLAS precede ahead of the comet outbound.

This capture of the comet by Filipp Romanov over the Sea of Japan shows just how difficult the comet was the see for observers up north.

Alas, perihelion seemed to have a delayed impact on the comet. Images taken around January 18th showed that the nucleus seemed to be in ill-health. G3 ATLAS soon became a ‘headless comet’ with a fading nucleus and a still-bright tail. The tail produced a remarkable striped look as a finale.

Lionel Majzik first discovered the breakup and demise of the nucleus of Comet G3 ATLAS, as seen in this amazing sequence spanning January 18th to the 23rd. The Future for Comet G3 ATLAS

Currently, comet G3 ATLAS shines at +5th magnitude and fading, in the constellation Piscis Austrinus.

The many tails of Comet G3 ATLAS, courtesy of Daniele Gasparri. “Comet G3 ATLAS seems unwilling to leave our sky,” Daniele notes.

The comet was on a 160,00 year orbit inbound. Estimates put in on an 600,000-year outbound orbit. That is, for whatever fragments may remain to revisit the inner solar system on a far off date.

…and be sure to catch astrophotographer Dylan O’Donnell’s story about the perils of comet hunting:

That does it. We’re moving to the southern hemisphere, to ‘comet country’. For now, though, we can all enjoy these spectacular views of Comet G3 ATLAS. Hopefully, this was the first good comet of 2025.

The post Requiem for a Comet: Amazing Reader Views of G3 ATLAS appeared first on Universe Today.

I lived and worked through the transition in medicine from completely paper-based documentation to completely digital-based – using an electronic medical record (EMR). There is no question, the EMR system is much better. Access to information, communication, ordering tests, tracking results, and documenting visits are all much easier with an EMR. But modern doctors and other health care providers are not exactly […]

The post Can AI Reduce Doctor Burnout? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Novel propulsion systems are one of the most important ways to push space exploration forward – literally. Traditional propulsion systems, like chemical rockets, are good at getting spacecraft out of gravity wells but not so great at traveling in free space. More modern systems, like electric propulsion, are better at providing long-term propulsion but are very slow. Others haven’t even made it to space, like nuclear thermal rockets. But there’s one type that could trump them all – fusion propulsion. It has the benefit of significant thrust and excellent fuel efficiency and could open up the whole solar system in ways other systems could only dream of. One company, Helicity Space, thinks they are on the path to developing a working version of just such a fusion propulsion system, and they just received a NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to continue its development.

The NIAC grant itself focuses on exploring the heliosphere—an area surrounding the Sun (including on top of it) that our star influences. It is huge in terms of the amount of space covered and not well understood because, typically, missions only stay in the plane of the ecliptic, and if they go far enough to reach the outer stretches of the heliosphere, it is only after decades of travel, like the Voyager space probes.

Helicity proposes using fusion rockets to send a constellation of spacecraft to all parts of the heliosphere with sensors to detect things such as plasma properties, the amount of energetic particles, and the amount of dust in a given region. This constellation could provide heliophysics with a much more complete picture of what the heliosphere looks like.

The idea of fusion rockets have been around for a long time, as Fraser discusses.

However, the real innovation the NIAC grant focuses on isn’t sensor instrumentation but the propulsion system. Fusion propulsion has been a dream of many space exploration enthusiasts for decades. Still, it has seemed to suffer from the same fate of technical development hell that its ground-based cousins, the large-scale power-positive fusion plants, have. The physics of plasma constraint and forced fusion are challenging, to say the least, so projects like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) cost billions of dollars and take decades to complete.

Helicity, on the other hand, is a scrappy start-up based in Pasadena, and they believe they can produce a functioning fusion engine well before ITER hits its full power in 2035. In an interview with Fraser, Setthivoine You, the company’s co-founder and chief technologist, explains that if you’re trying to make money from a fusion power plant, “you need to do net gains of 20, 30, 40, 50 [times] more fusion energy out than what you put in [and] you have to do it every single second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

On the other hand, Helicity’s engine doesn’t have to operate constantly and can produce net gains of only 10x, and only occasionally. In such an operational mode, the engineering challenge becomes much more tractable. The company has already built a prototype unit at its facility in Pasadena and has been presenting at several conferences and publishing academic papers detailing its progress all along.

Isaac Arthur covers the details of fusion propulsion systems.
Credit – Isaac Arthur YouTube Channel

The NIAC grant will allow them to start fleshing out the technical details of what the engine would require to complete the heliosphere mission, allowing them to tweak the engine to get to those performance metrics. But that’s not the only mission this system can be used for. Getting to Mars in about a month and a half, rather than the nine months using traditional propulsion, has been one of the space exploration community’s main selling points to such a system.

During the interview, Fraser mentioned even more outlandish missions, like one to the solar gravitational lens point, where we could use the Sun’s gravitational lensing effect to image exoplanets around other stars directly. Dr. You mentioned, “Our proposal could take us out there in less than 10 years”, dramatically shorter than any currently proposed propulsion system. Unlike alternatives like giant solar sails, it would also have the added benefit of slowing down and holding its position.

In addition to the advanced propulsion system, though, Helicity mentions developing additional technologies that could directly benefit people back on the ground as part of their proposal. Dr. You mentions “high-high solid-state switches, energy storage, systems, [and] magnetic coils” as potentially useful tools that would result from the development of the engine.

Where fusion rockets lie compared to other forms of propulsion in terms of power and efficiency.
Credit – Helicity Space

Much of the challenges facing the development team appear to focus on developing these “subsystems inside plasma sources,” which is one particular challenge Dr. You calls out, along with several other engineering challenges. Basically, proving the engine will work in space is the biggest technical hurdle at this point – and the Phase I NIAC grant is another step towards doing so.

It is not the first step, however—Helicity is backed by several VC firms and large aerospace companies, including Airbus and Lockheed Martin. The fact that they already have an experimental system up and running also lends credence to their ability to execute the mission of bringing fusion power to space. If they manage to do so, a long-held dream of space exploration enthusiasts will be realized, and the whole solar system will be opened up for human use.

Learn More:
NASA / Helicity Space – Fusion-Enabled Comprehensive Exploration of the Heliosphere
Helicity Space – Technology
UT – Magnetic Fusion Plasma Engines Could Carry us Across the Solar System and Into Interstellar Space
UT – Impatient? A Spacecraft Could Get to Titan in Only 2 Years Using a Direct Fusion Drive

Lead Image:
Image of the heliosphere and an artist’s concept of the fusion drive ship that could be sent to monitor it.
Credit – NASA / Helicity Space

The post Fusion-Enabled Comprehensive Exploration of the Heliosphere appeared first on Universe Today.