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From smartphones to net zero, there has been no shortage of innovative ideas in the past 25 years, which is why we have taken a look back to choose the best

Time it right each month, and you can spot two fleeting tricks of light on the lunar surface. Abigail Beall is planning ahead

Feedback has seen all the fuss about the finale of Stranger Things, but would like to point out that if we're going to dissect the plot, we have bigger things to worry about

Peter F. Hamilton’s new book A Hole in the Sky is set on a troubled ark ship hundreds of years into its voyage, with fantastic plot twists and turns. I'm a big Hamilton fan, but one aspect of the novel proved alienating for me, says Emily H. Wilson

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Imposing order on the world is seductive, but it flattens out the diversity and rich messiness of human life. Oddly, playing by the rules may help us fight back, argues C. Thi Nguyen in The Score

Almost 80 years ago, sociologists identified a new personality type that is particularly sensitive to loneliness. It's even more relevant today, says Annalee Newitz

We thought we could address big social problems by steering individual behaviour. But "nudging" people doesn't work, say behavioural scientists Nick Chater and George Loewenstein

In the last week I’ve finished watching an excellent movie and reading a mediocre book, both of which were recommended by readers or friends. I rely a lot on such recommendations because, after all, life is short and critics can help guide us through the arts.

The good news is that the movie, “Hamnet,” turned out to be great. I had read the eponymous book by Maggie O’Farrell in 2022 (see my short take here), and was enthralled, saying this:

I loved the book and recommend it highly, just a notch in quality behind All the Light We Cannot See, but I still give it an A. I’m surprised that it hasn’t been made into a movie, for it would lend itself well to drama. I see now that in fact a feature-length movie is in the works, and I hope they get good actors and a great screenwriter.

They did. Now the movie is out, and it’s nearly as good as the book. Since the book is superb, the movie is close to superb. That is, it’s excellent but perhaps not an all-time classic, though it will always be worth watching. Author O’Farrell co-wrote the screenplay with director  Chloé Zhao, guaranteeing that the movie wouldn’t stray too far from the book. As you may remember, the book centers on Agnes, another name for Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, a woman who is somewhat of a seer (the book has a bit of magical realism). And the story covers the period from the meeting of Shakespeare and Agnes until Shakespeare writes and performs “Hamlet,” a play that O’Farrell sees as based on the death from plague of their only son Hamnet (another name for Hamlet; apparently names were variable in England).  I won’t give away the plot of the book or movie, which are the same, save to say that the movie differs in having a bit less magic and a little more of Shakespeare’s presence. (He hardly shows up in the book.)

The movie suffers a bit from overemotionality; in fact, there’s basically no time in the movie when someone is not suffering or in a state of high anxiety.  But that is a quibble. The performances, with Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare, are terrific. Buckley’s is, in fact, Oscar-worthy, and I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t win a Best Actress Oscar this year.  The last ten minutes of the movie focuses on her face as she watches the first performance of “Hamlet” in London’s Globe theater, and the gamut of emotions she expresses just from a close shot of her face is a story in itself.  Go see this movie (bring some Kleenex for the end), but also read the book.  Here’s the trailer:

On to the book. Well, it was tedious and boring, though as I recall Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Indian author Arundhati Roy, was highly praised. Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize and I loved it; her second, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was not as good.  I read Mother Mary simply because I liked her first book and try to read all highly-touted fiction from India, as I’ve been there many times, I love to read about the country, and Indian novelists are often very good.

Sadly, Mother Mary was disappointing. There’s no doubt that Roy had a tumultuous and diverse live, and the autobiography centers around her  relationship with her mother (Mary, of course), a teacher in the Indian state of Kerala. The two have a tumultuous connection that, no matter how many times Roy flees from Kerala, is always on her mind.  It persists during Roy’s tenure in architectural school, her marriage to a rich man (they had no children), and her later discovery of writing as well as her entry into Indian politics, including a time spent with Marxist guerrillas and campaigning for peaceful treatment of Kashmiris.

The book failed to engage me for two reasons. First, Mother Mary was a horrible person, capable of being lovable to her schoolchildren at one second and a horrible, nasty witch at the next.  She was never nice to her daughter, and the book failed to explain (to me, at least) why the daughter loved such a hateful mother. There’s plenty of introspection, but nothing convincing. Since the central message of the novel seems to be this abiding mother/daughter relationship, I was left cold.

Further, there’s a lot of moralizing and proselytizing, which is simply tedious. Although Roy avows herself as self-effacting, she comes off as a hidebound and rather pompous moralist, something that takes the sheen off a fascinating life.  Granted, there are good bits, but overall the writing is bland.  I would not recommend this book.

Two thumbs down for this one:

Of course I write these small reviews to encourage readers to tell us what books and/or movies they’ve encountered lately, and whether or not they liked them. I get a lot of good recommendations from these posts; in fact, it was from a reader that I found out about Hamnet.

The resolution of the Event Horizon Telescope is limited by the diameter of Earth, and our observations of the black hole in M87 and in our own galaxy are at the edge of that limit. To observe other, more distant black holes we will need radio telescopes on the Moon.

I’ve posted many times about the “God-shaped hole” (GSH) that all of us are supposed to have. In case you’ve been in, say, Alma-Ata, you will know what it is: it’s the longing for religious faith that nearly all of us are supposed to harbor, a lacuna that, unless filled by belief in God, leaves us miserable and unsatisfied with life.

Of course the GSH is bogus: many of us are atheists and don’t feel any longing for religion. Further, if you’re a nonbeliever, it’s very hard if not impossible to force yourself to believe the pablum shoved down our throats by the faithful—or those who, nonbelievers themselves, like the NYT’s Lauren Jackson, see belief as the spackle we need to fill America’s GSH.  As I’ve written several times, the GSH is touted these days as the force behind America’s so-called “return to religion”, which is not an increase in faith but a temporary pause in a long-term drop in faith.

In his essay “What if false beliefs make you happy?“, my philosopher friend Maarten Boudry (also an atheist) criticizes the view that we should believe things even if they’re dubious, so long as they comfort us. An excerpt:

But such a project of self-deception cannot tolerate too much in the way of self-reflection. You don’t just have to bring yourself to believe in God; you must also – and simultaneously – forget that this is in fact what you’re doing. As long as you remain aware that you’re engaging in a project of self-deception, I doubt that Pascal’s advice will achieve the desired effect. At the very least, there will always be some nagging doubt at the back of your mind about why you embarked on this whole church-going and hymn-singing project in the first place. And remember that you can only reap the benefits of your beneficial misbelief if you truly and sincerely believe it.

After being astounded that some of his friends would indeed take a pill that, overnight, would make you truly believe in an afterlife (and forget you took that pill), Boudry says this:

Is such a life of voluntary delusion really what you should want? Even if you don’t have any objections against untruthfulness per se, how can you foresee all of the consequences and ramifications of your false belief in an afterlife, or in any other comforting fiction? If you were absolutely convinced that your personal death (or that of other people) doesn’t really matter, because there’s another life after this one, you might end up doing some crazy and reckless things. [JAC: like flying airplanes into the World Trade Center.] And if you genuinely believe that you are wonderfully talented, that your health is perfectly fine or that your spouse is not cheating on you (despite extensive evidence to the contrary), you may still be “mugged by reality” later on. Reality, as the writer Philip K. Dick argued, is that which, after you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

In an essay on his Substack column (click the screenshot below to read for free), psychologist Paul Bloom denies that we even have a GSH:

A couple of excerpts: He starts by explaining what the GSH is and then says why he doesn’t think it’s ubiquitous:

There was always reason to be skeptical. For one thing, the idea of inborn spiritual yearning never made much evolutionary sense. There are plausible enough accounts of how we could evolve other appetites, including basic ones like hunger and thirst, and fancier ones such as a desire for respect and a curiosity about the world around us. But why would evolution lead us to be wired up for spiritual yearning? How would that lead to increased survival and reproduction? Perhaps it’s a by-product of other evolved appetites, but I’ve never seen an account of this that’s even close to convincing.

I know the theistic response here: So much the worse for biological evolution! Some theists would argue that the universal yearning for the transcendent is evidence for divine intervention during the evolutionary process. They would endorse Francis Collins’ proposal that God stepped in at some point after we separated from other primates and wired up the hominid brain to endow us with various transcendental features, such as an enlightened morality and a spiritual yearning for the Almighty.

I think there are a lot of problems with this view (see here for my critical response to Collins’ proposal), but the main one I want to focus on here is that it’s explaining a phenomenon that doesn’t exist. There is no good evidence that spiritual yearning is part of human nature. Children are certainly receptive to the religious ideas that their parents and the rest of society throw at them (they are very good at acquiring all forms of culture), but I’ve seen no support for the view that they spontaneously express a spiritual yearning that isn’t modeled for them. Children raised by secular parents tend to be thoroughly secular.

Bloom then criticizes the “milder” view that we might not be born with a drive to seek God, but experience of the world will eventually force the “reflective person” to seek the transcendent. The factors said to promote this drive are things we don’t like, especially “death, injustice, the seeming randomness of tragedy and good fortune, and so on.”  But I don’t see that, either.  In fact, the more reflective you are, the more likely you should be to believe things based on a mental Bayesian process: believing things more firmly when there’s more evidence supporting them. And only those with a bent for spirituality in the first place would think that injustice or death would raise the prior probability that there’s a God. As I’ve said, I always dowgrade my opinion of someone’s ability to reason when I find they’re believers in God. (I don’t do this so often with people in the distant past, when many phenomena were imputed to God that we now know have a scientific explanation.)

Bloom dismissed this milder form of the GSH hypothesis when he returned from a Templeton-run conference in which theologian Tony Jones was on a panel called “Yearning and Meaning,” and all the panelists were asked what finding of their work was most surprising. (As you see below, Jones has written about this at greater length.) The bolding is Bloom’s

 I used to think this was plausible enough, but I just came back from a conference where I heard Tony Jones talk about this work with Ryan Burge. Jones and Burge are the principal investigators of a Templeton-funded project studying Americans who claim to be not affiliated with any religion. There are a lot of these “Nones”—about 30% of Americans, with the proportion rising to 45% when you look at Gen Z.

Jones was on a panel called “Yearning and Meaning,” and the conference organizer went around to each panelist and asked what their most surprising finding was. Rather than try to quote Jones from memory, I’ll draw on his Substack post where he talked about this finding. (This post is also where I got the Pascal quotation I used above.)

His finding concerned a specific subgroup of “Nones”. As Jones and Burge find, not all the self-described “Nones” really reject the transcendent. Some of them are indistinguishable from religious people—they just don’t like to call themselves “religious”—others fall into the category of “spiritual-but-not-religious”. The interesting finding concerns those Nones who are totally secular.

Another large group — 33 million Americans — we classify as the Dones, or the Disengaged. Ninety-nine percent of them report praying “seldom or never.” Same for how often they attend a religious service. They’re not going to get married or buried in a church. They’re not going to let their kids go to Young Life camp.

And here’s the finding.

And they don’t have a God-shaped hole. They don’t long for religion, and they don’t miss it. You might say they’re filling that hole with other things (travelling soccer teams, mushrooms, Crossfit), but that doesn’t show up in the data. Their mental health and well-being indicators are a couple points lower than the Nones who look more religious, but it’s not a massive chasm. They aren’t religious or spiritual, and they’re just fine, thank you very much.

The title of his post is: Pascal Was Wrong: There (Probably) Is No God-Shaped Hole.

It shouldn’t come as no surprise that the theory of a universal GSH is wrong. Religion in America is waning, and it’s been nearly gone in Europe for several centuries. You don’t see the Swedes or Danes yearning and pining for the transcendent. Like many of us, they find enough meaning in life without going beyond life; they find meaning in their work, their families, their friends, and their avocations.

Now Bloom admits that some people have a God-shaped hole:  we know from what they aver that this is the case. But the GSH is far from universal, and, as we know, you can’t force yourself to believe what you don’t believe. Further, arguments that the GSH evolved are bogus: there’s no clear connection between reproductive output and spirituality, and at any rate, the waning of religion is much faster than we would expect if it represents a reversed form of biological evolution. Two more quotes:

Bloom:

As Robert Wright points out in The Evolution of God, the claim that religion is about morality, spirituality, or the answers to “deep questions” is only true of more recent religions. These are not features of religion more generally. In a review of Wright’s book, I described early deities as “doofus gods”.

Boudry:

What if some supernatural misbeliefs have been carefully ‘designed’ by natural selection for our benefit? Even if God doesn’t exist, it was necessary for evolution to invent him. The problem is that, even if you think such evolutionary accounts are plausible, natural selection (whether in the biological or cultural realm) does not really care about our happiness. According to scholars like Ara Norenzayan and Joe Henrich, belief in moralizing Big Gods has fostered pro-sociality and enabled large-scale human cooperation. That sounds beautiful and uplifting, but if you look a little closer, it turns out that it’s mostly the nasty, vengeful, punishing gods that bring pro-social benefits. The sticks works better than the carrot. Which raises the question: is belief in a wrathful god who will torture you in hell if you disobey him really good for you, even if we assume that it has helped to scale up human cooperation?

At the end, Bloom admits two more things about evolution beyond saying that yes, some people have a GSH. These are the two:

Second, I do think that religion is in some sense a natural outgrowth of the human mind. If you dropped children on a desert island and waited a few dozen generations to see the society that they came up with, my bet is that this society would include religion.

I disagree. The existence of “nones”, as well as the waning of religion, disprove the idea that faith is a “natural outgrowth of the human mind”.  Until the suggested experiment is done, I reject that claim.

Third, I agree that we are drawn towards meaning; this was a central theme of my book The Sweet Spot. But, along the same lines as what I just said about religion, the sort of meaning that we are drawn to isn’t inherently spiritual or transcendental. Meaningfulness encompasses such secular activities such as deep, satisfying relationships and difficult pursuits that make a difference in the world. Some people do find meaning in religion, but this is just one source among many.

I disagree again, but only mildly.  What we’re drawn to are things that give us pleasure and fulfillment. If you want to call that “meaning”, fine.  Yes, people are social and seek the company of others; and that’s likely a result of how we evolved. But does that suggest that we are drawn to other people to fill a meaning-shaped hole? No more than we’re drawn to eat because we have a “food-shaped hole.”

A while back I asked readers to tell us what they thought gave their life “meaning and purpose.” There were 373 answers, more than I’ve gotten for any other post on this site. And, almost without exception, they said that whatever meaning and purpose they found in life was simply the meaning and purpose they brought to it—without God.  I would go further and say that meaning and purpose (like our feeling of “agency”) are not usually there in advance and that we strive to fulfill them, but more often are post facto rationalizations of the things we discovered that bring us happiness and joy. (Yes, there are some people who decide to be priests or nuns in advance, but I claim most people, even secular ones, don’t set out to fill a “meaning-shaped hole” in their being.)  They discover what they like to do, and then do it. That becomes “purpose and meaning.”

In short, the God-shaped hole is a crock.

h/t: Robert

Extraordinary fossils of 518-million-year-old jawless fish, among the earliest known vertebrates, appear to show that these animals had two pairs of eyes

Newly discovered rock art sites in Sulawesi, Indonesia, that date to nearly 68,000 years ago are thought to be the oldest rock art in the world, pre-dating Neanderthal hand stencils in Spain by 1100 years

A fossil discovery in northern Ethiopia expands the known range of Paranthropus, a genus of strong-jawed hominins that lived around 2 million years ago, and suggests they lived in a range of habitats

The light-sensitive tissue of birds’ eyes is not supplied with oxygen by blood vessels – instead, it powers itself with a flood of sugar, and this may have evolutionary benefits

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “mustard,” came with a note:

I wouldn’t say writing these X-Factor strips is particularly easy, but it’s not rocket surgery.

I await the song with baited* breath!

*It’s “bated breath,” Jake!

Back in 2014, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) captured an image of a young protoplanetary disk around a young star named HL Tauri. The image showed gaps and rings in the disk, substructures indicating that young planets forming there. This meant that planet formation began around young stars a lot sooner than thought. ALMA is continuing its investigation of protoplanetary disks in its ARKS survey (ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures).

New experiments reveal that protein precursors can form naturally in deep space under extreme cold and radiation. Scientists found that simple amino acids bond into peptides on interstellar dust, long before stars and planets exist. This challenges the idea that complex life chemistry only happens on planets. It also boosts the odds that life-friendly ingredients are widespread across the universe.

Well, this is the last batch of photos I have, so you know what to do.

Today’s contribution is from Ephraim Heller, this time with photos from America rather than Brazil. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

It has been a busy January on the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park.

After a warm early winter, a few weeks ago we finally had a hard freeze. A branch of the Snake River froze solid. However, there is a location where a warm spring feeds into the branch and this inlet stayed open. Hundreds of Utah sucker fish (Catostomus ardens) were trapped in this area of open water surrounded by ice, isolated from the main body of the Snake River. Naturally, this provided a smorgasbord for the local bald eagles and coyotes.

As I observed the Utah suckers at various times of day, I noticed that in the late afternoon they would all rise to the surface and expose their dorsal fins. Intrigued, I queried my AI which informed me that this is a matter of oxygen dynamics:

• The warm water holds less oxygen than cold water, and thermal springs typically have low dissolved oxygen content due to high temperatures.
• In confined areas with high fish density, oxygen is rapidly depleted.
• Fish respond to low oxygen levels by “piping” or “aquatic surface respiration” (ASR) when oxygen levels drop below critical thresholds. This behavior involves positioning at the water surface with mouths/dorsal fins exposed to access the oxygen-rich surface layer. This behavior indicates that the fish are stressed.

However, the AI also stated that “Aquatic plants produce oxygen through photosynthesis during daylight, with peak production in late afternoon. At night, plants consume oxygen through respiration. Dissolved oxygen levels are highest in late afternoon and lowest just before dawn.” This doesn’t seem consistent with the timing I observed.

I don’t know how much of this is true vs. AI hallucination, but it sounds plausible to me. I’d appreciate it if the ichthyologists and limnologists among the readers would confirm or refute this story.

Now for the photos:

Here are the Utah sucker fish at the surface of the open water pool in the evening, trapped by the surrounding ice:

Here is a close up of the fish at the surface:

Every so often the fish would go into a frenzy at the surface. I don’t know why. It was unrelated to anything I saw happening at the surface. Here is a bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) watching the frenzy and assessing his menu options:

Having made up his mind, the eagle helps himself to a serving of fresh fish:

The common ravens (Corvus corax) have found a lovely rotting fish. Instead of exerting the effort to catch a fresh fish, this eagle has decided that it is easier to steal the carrion:

Bald eagles are kleptoparasites, so when an eagle with energy and initiative catches a fish the other eagles won’t let him dine in peace:

Ravens are smart birds. This one is surely thinking “If those eagle ignoramuses can catch a fish then surely I can do it better.” Unfortunately for him, the fish got away:

In spite of their inability to fish, common ravens are handsome birds:

To my surprise, the North American river otters (Lontra canadensis) who live half a mile downstream have not been dining at the buffet. I think it is because this branch of the river is frozen solid and the otters don’t like traveling on the ice surface for long distances without the safety of accessible water. So I donned my cross country skis and visited them at another, unfrozen branch of the Snake River. They, too, were feasting on Utah suckers:

Also on the river are trumpeter swans (Cygnus buccinator) in the morning mist:

Trumpeters need a long runway to take off. These four are just starting to accelerate:

Once airborne they are graceful:

Finally, this old-time general store sits adjacent to the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park. In this star trail time lapse, the stars are, of course, circling Polaris, the north star. The Tetons are to the left of the store:

Recently the World Health Organization published their guidelines on traditional medicine, actually referring to the category of “traditional, complementary and integrative medicine (TCIM) practices.” As has long been the case, there are some good parts to their approach, but also some concerning aspects, and at times it feels self-contradictory. The problems begin with their definition. I dislike lumping traditional, complementary, and integrative […]

The post WHO On Traditional Medicine first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.