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Many of us obsess over how much sleep we get each night, and the dangers to our health of not getting enough, but really, there is another way

Feedback is excited to learn that University of Maryland researchers are measuring farts in a bid to build a Human Flatus Atlas, a project that seems destined for an Ig Nobel

Post-apocalyptic bunker sci-fi is huge this year as TV front-runners Fallout, Paradise and Silo return. Bethan Ackerley asks whether this is a signal we’ve given up on our real world, or if there is hidden hope

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

NASA crew members practise emergency rescue drills in a 40-foot-deep pool simulating the lunar surface, as part of tests on a new generation of spacesuit, the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit

From ice ages to asteroid strikes, an epic book shows how important it has been for humans to look outwards. Alex Wilkins surveys a climate historian's cosmic sweep

This week’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “bells,” came with a comment: “Does she think they were born yesterday?”

Wikipedia tells us that another word for “conceptual conservatism” is “belief perseverance,” and characterizes it this way:

Belief perseverance (also known as conceptual conservatism) is maintenance of a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it.[2]

Since rationality involves conceptual flexibility, belief perseverance is consistent with the view that human beings act at times in an irrational manner. Philosopher F.C.S. Schiller holds that belief perseverance “deserves to rank among the fundamental ‘laws’ of nature”.

The data adduced by the barmaid are under the heading “evidence from experimental psychology,” and she’s right, though it doesn’t cite “hundreds of studies”.

Not long ago I was asked by Jason Flores-Williams to contribute to his online/free paper newsletter Alma Asfalto, a Mexican publication (translation: “asphalt soul”) that has English translation. Flores-Williams wanted me to answer a few questions about evolution, and I agreed for two reasons. First, I wanted to help promote the understanding and acceptance of evolution among our southern neighbors. Second, if you click on the first link (to Wikipedia), you’ll see that Flores-Williams is a guy worth helping:

 Jason Flores-Williams (born 1969, Los Angeles, CA) is an author, political activist, and civil rights attorney. He is best known for his legal work on behalf of death row clients, political protesters, the homeless population of Denver, and his suit to have the Colorado River recognized as a legal person. Flores-Williams is an acknowledged expert in conspiracy law and First Amendment cases whose views are frequently sought by media organizations, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. He was also a lead organizer of the protests against the 2004 Republican National Convention. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

How could I refuse a guy who did that? And so I agreed, answering his five questions. These answers appear on pp. 6-7 of the 16-page March edition of the paper, along with interviews and short essays by other scientists and humanities folks (these include author and filmmaker Sasha Sagan, the daughter of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan). I’ll give here the five questions I was asked, but to see my answers you must to the paper by clicking on the screenshot below. (You can also download the whole paper. Warning: the site loads slowly.)  

Here are the questions I was asked. Again, see the answers at the site.

• In the simplest terms, what is evolution—and what do people most often get wrong about it?
• Why does evolution still make some people uncomfortable, even though it’s one of the most well-supported ideas in all of science?
• Does accepting evolution make human life feel less meaningful—or, in your view, more remarkable?
• People sometimes say that evolution promotes selfishness or brutality. What does evolution actually tell us about cooperation, empathy, and morality?
• If you could change one thing about how evolution is taught or talked about in public life, what would it be—and why does it matter right now?

Here are the contents:

Mexico City
March 2026 

Reality is being branded.
Truth manipulated.
Disengagement marketed.
But something real is gathering.

Across science, philosophy, art, and film, the real is now contested ground.

https://almaasfalto.com/marzo/

REALITY

Sasha Sagan
— The Integrity of Uncertainty

Zona Maco
— Art Week, Mexico City

Jerry Coyne
— Evolution and Meaning

Vlatko Vedral
— The Universe Owes You No Certainty

Asya Geisberg
— Necessary Friction

Franco “Bifo” Berardi
— Desertion from the Future

Kevin Anderson
— Against the Illusion

Mariana Rondón
— It Is Still Night in Caracas

Sarah Martinez
— Alchemist of Nothingness (FR/ES)

Printed in Mexico City.
Alma Asfalto circulates in Roma, in the Historic Center, and underground, on Metro platforms.

 

The alvarezsaurs were thought to have evolved a smaller stature because of their diet of ants and termites, but a new fossil found in Argentina casts doubt on that theory

The discovery of bright yet stable pigments is vanishingly rare, making them hugely valuable. Now chemist Mas Subramanian is unpicking the atomic code of colour and homing in on our most-wanted hue

Thinking about food systems in deep space likely brings to mind something like the Martian where an astronaut is scratching barely enough food to survive out of potatoes grown in Martian regolith. Or perhaps a fancy hydroponic system on an interplanetary transport ship, with artificial lighting and all the associated technological wizardry. But a new paper published in Acta Astronautica by Tor Blomqvist and Ralph Fritsche points out that growing food is only one small part of the whole cycle of providing sustenance for astronauts in space. To really get a sense of how difficult it will be, we have to look at the whole picture.

For two reasons I think that Jesse Singal‘s long op-ed (really a “guest essay”) in today’s NYT will mark a turning point in public and professional attitudes towards “affirmative care.”  First, the NYT saw fit to publish a piece showing that many American medical associations have promoted “affirmative care” of gender-dysphoric adolescents, despite those associations knowing that there was little or no evidence for the efficacy of such care.  Indeed, it seems that some of those associations lied or dissimulated about it, all in the interest of pushing a “progressive” ideology. As we know, left-wing “progressives” have been in favor of immediately accepting a child’s self-identification as belonging to its non-natal gender, so that teachers, parents, therapists, and doctors have united to start such children on puberty blockers and, later, surgery and hormones.

The NYT, while it has published pieces questioning the evidence for affirmative care, has been reluctant to come out as strongly as Singal does in the essay. That America’s Paper of Record deems this worthy of publication is news in itself.

For a number of reasons, most concerned with recent evidence (e.g., the Cass Review), the rah-rah affirmative therapy treadmill is grinding to a halt.  As Singal relates, recently two American medical associations—the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) and now the powerful American Medical Association (AMA)—have admitted that we don’t know whether a gender-dyphoric child will “resolve” as gay or non-trans without medical intervention, and also that there should be no surgical intervention aimed at altering the gender of minors.

Singal has long called attention to these problems, and for his troubles he’s been branded a “transphobe,” shunned and blocked on social media.  There was even a petition to ban him from the site Bluesky, though, thank Ceiling Cat, it didn’t work.  Now, at long last, his views are getting a respectful airing, and society is coming to realize that the American zeal for “affirmative care”—not shared so much in Europe—is not only misguided but harmful.

The second reason is that the author ID says this about Singal:

Jesse Singal is writing a book about the debate over youth gender medicine in the United States and writes the newsletter Singal-Minded.

Although he’s already written one book. The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, this is his first book on gender medicine, and if it expands on the theme of this article, it will be a landmark work with the potential to create big changes in gender medicine and how we view it.  Yes, it’s true that gender ideologues will oppose the article and upcoming book, but they have long put ideology over science, a strategy that is a loser, as we know from the failures of creationism and intelligent design.

Click on the headlines to read the article at the NYT, or find it archived for free at this site.

A few excerpts:

It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and that they were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis. Advocates and health care organizations just dug in. As a billboard truck used by the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group GLAAD proclaimed in 2023, “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.” Elsewhere, these and other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, referred to these treatme

. . .The science doesn’t seem so settled after all, and it’s important to understand what happened here. The approach of left-of-center Americans and our institutions — to assume that when a scientific organization releases a policy statement on a hot-button issue, that the policy statement must be accurate — is a deeply naïve understanding of science, human nature and politics, and how they intersect.

At a time when more and more Americans are turning away from expert authority in favor of YouTube quacks and their ilk — and when our own government is pushing scientifically baseless policies on childhood vaccination and climate change — it’s vital that the organizations that represent mainstream science be open, honest and transparent about politically charged issues. If they aren’t, there’s simply no good reason to trust them.

And then Singal documents how organizations representing mainstream science and medicine haven’t been so trustworthy. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has been particularly  vocal—and clueless—in relentlessly pushing affirmative care:

A 2018 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics provides a useful example of how these documents can go wrong. At one point, it argues that children who say they are trans “know their gender as clearly and as consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers,” an extreme exaggeration of what we know about this population. (A single study is cited.) The document also criticizes the “outdated approach in which a child’s gender-diverse assertions are held as ‘possibly true’ until an arbitrary age” — the A.A.P. was instructing clinicians to take 4- and 5-year-olds’ claims about their gender identities as certainly true. It’s understandable why the Cass reviewers scored this policy statement so abysmally, giving it 12 out of 100 possible points on “rigor of development” and six out of 100 on “applicability.”

Policy statements like this one can reflect the complex and opaque internal politics of an organization, rather than dispassionate scientific analysis. The journalist Aaron Sibarium’s reporting strongly suggests that a small group of A.A.P. members, many of whom were themselves youth gender medicine providers, played a disproportionate role in developing these guidelines.

Dr. Julia Mason, a 30-year member of the organization, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, with the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir, that the A.A.P. deferred to activist-clinicians and stonewalled the critics’ demands for a more rigorous approach. Dr. Sarah Palmer, an Indiana-based pediatrician, told me she recently left the A.A.P. after nearly 30 years because of this issue. “I’ve tried to engage and be a member and pay that huge fee every year,” she said. “They just stopped answering any questions.” This is unfortunate given that, as critics have noted, in many cases the A.A.P. document’s footnotes don’t even support the claims being made in the text.

In the face of a lack of studies supporting their preferred ideology, organizations like the American Psychological Association (APA) have waffled, weaseled, and dissimulated, sometimes making contradictory statements.  Here’s one example (the AMA has also changed its stand but wouldn’t give Singal an interview). Bolding is mine:

The A.P.A. presents a particularly striking case of why transparency is important. In 2024 it published what it hailed as a “groundbreaking policy supporting transgender, gender diverse, nonbinary individuals” that was specifically geared at fighting “misinformation” on that subject. But when I reached out to the group this month, it pointed me to a different document, a letter written by the group’s chief advocacy officer, Katherine McGuire, in September in response to a Federal Trade Commission request for comment on youth gender medicine.

The documents, separated by about a year and a half (and, perhaps as significantly, one presidential election), straightforwardly contradict each other. The A.P.A. in 2024 argued that there is a “comprehensive body of psychological and medical research supporting the positive impact of gender-affirming treatments” for individuals “across the life span.” But in 2025, the group argued that “psychologists do not make broad claims about treatment effectiveness.”

In 2024 the A.P.A. criticized those “mischaracterizing gender dysphoria as a manifestation of traumatic stress or neurodivergence.” In 2025 it cautioned that gender dysphoria diagnoses could be the result of “trauma-related presentations” rather than a trans identity and that “co-occurring mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder) … may complicate or be mistaken for gender dysphoria.” It seems undeniable that the 2025 A.P.A. published what the 2024 A.P. A. considered to be “misinformation.” (“The 2024 policy statement and the 2025 F.T.C. letter are consistent,” said Ms. McGuire in an email, and “both documents reflect A.P.A.’s consistent commitment to evidence-based psychological care.”)

Behavior like this should anger anyone wedded to evidence-based medicine and science, especially because the APA simply lies when it says that its stand has been consistent all along. And the APA is not alone in its bad behavior.  Other organizations are digging in their heels, maintaining unsupportable positions in the face of counterevidence—all because of the ideology that people can change sex and we should believe them when they say they are really of a different sex than their natal one. This is wedded to the view that surgery and hormones designed to change gender have been proven to be safe.

I should add here that many adults who have transitioned are nevertheless happy with the outcomes of their treatments. But note that Singal’s forthcoming book is about youth gender medicine. This is the focus of the controversy, and few people (certainly not me) would deny adults the right to go ahead with surgery and hormones, though perhaps the public shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Singal’s conclusion, which I hope is the theme of his book, is short and sweet:

Should we trust the science? Sure, in theory — but only when the science in question has earned our trust through transparency and rigor.

  It looks like most medical organizations should not be trusted until they start speaking the truth.

It seems that the southern hemisphere gets all the good comets. A bashful binocular comet is about to finally leave its southern perch, and briefly come into view for folks up north. Said comet of the moment is C/2023 E1 Wierzchos. Although the comet just passed perihelion last week, it should put on a fine encore show as it heads north in March at dusk.

Plant lovers and botanists will be especially pleased by today’s selection of lovely photos from Thomas Webber. Thomas’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them (recommended).

The theme for today’s installment is Gone to Seed. Here are a few north-Florida flowers shown in their prime and afterward, when their glamor parts had been replaced by seed enclosures, bare seeds, or merely the dried remains of the flower bases. All of them grew within Gainesville’s city limits, at sites from semi-pruned to semi-wild. I think I’ve identified them all correctly to species this time, but I invite corrections.

Frostweed, Verbesina virginica. Individual flowers 1 cm. Native:

These bracts, called phyllaries, surround the bases of the flowers. In late February a few of their papery remnants are still aloft on their brittle four-foot stalks:

Low rattlebox, Crotalaria pumila. 2.5 cm across. Native. The map in the article linked here is incomplete and does not reflect the herbarium records for Alachua County, where I took this picture.

Showy rattlebox. C. spectabilis. 3.5 cm across. Native to southern and southeast Asia, now widely naturalized in southeastern North America:

C. spectabilis seed pods. 4 cm long. The pods of C. pumila look similar but are smaller. Crotalaria, and especially their seeds, are laden with toxic alkaloids. Larvae of the rattlebox moth, Utetheisa ornatrix, bore through the walls of the pods and feed on the seeds. Somehow the caterpillars manage to detoxify the alkaloids enough so they aren’t poisoned, while remaining poisonous enough to deter most animals that might try to eat them. The larvae retain the toxins into the flying-moth stage, and at both stages their distinctive vivid color pattern warns predators to leave them alone.

A rattlebox-moth caterpillar. About 3 cm. I doubt that I could have found any of these if I’d gone looking for them, but this one crawled right in front of me while I tried to get a picture of the low rattlebox. It held fairly steady for a few seconds, letting me capture enough detail to identify it. I didn’t have my choice of background:

Tropical sage, Salvia coccinea. 3 cm. Native. At this latitude these remain at their peak through late December:

All that’s left in late February are these cones called calyces, which are fused sepals:

Spanish needles, Bidens alba. 2.5 cm. Native. This is the king weed of these parts, growing everywhere and sometimes in great masses; one dense bunch covers an acre of a low damp lot in the middle of Gainesville:

Seeds of Spanish needles. 1 cm long. The name of the genus, meaning two-teeth, derives from the forks at the tips of the seeds. The barbs on these projections are part of an impressive example of convergent biological and cultural evolution, and have turned out to be just the thing for attaching the seeds to socks and shoelaces:

Dotted horsemint, Monarda punctata. Whole flower head 2.5 cm wide. Native. The most complicated flowers I find around here:

All of that elaborate presentation goes to produce seeds 1 mm in diameter, too small to show well with my basic macro gear. At this stage you can still shake a few of them from the calyces. Thanks to Mark Frank of the Florida Museum of Natural History herbarium for a remedial lesson in the difference between calyces and phyllaries:

Beggarweed, Desmodium incanum. 1 cm across. Native to Central- and South America, naturalized in the southeastern U.S. This year, by means unknown, a few of them showed up for the first time in what passes for my lawn:

Beggarweed pea-pods, 3 cm long:

Scarlet morning glory, Ipomoea hederifolia. 4 cm long. Native:

Morning-glory seed pods, 7 mm. The hard little capsules cleave along their sutures and split open to release black seeds the shape of orange sections, exposing the translucent porcelain-like septa that divided them:

Mars’ frozen ice caps may be time capsules for ancient life. Lab experiments show that key building blocks of proteins can survive tens of millions of years in pure ice, even under relentless cosmic radiation. Ice mixed with Martian-like soil, however, destroys organic material far more quickly. The findings point future missions toward drilling into clean, buried ice rather than studying rocks or dirt.

Glyphosate is the most used herbicide in the world, with farmer applying about 750 million kg per year. The US is the heaviest user, responsible for 19% of global use. The chemical is popular among industrial farmers because it is safe and effective, and yet it also remains highly controversial. It is also back in the news, and so an update on […]

The post Glyphosate Remains Controversial first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The commonly used RSA encryption algorithm can now be cracked by a quantum computer with only 100,000 qubits, but the technical challenges to building such a machine remain numerous

Quantum computers need special materials called topological superconductors—but they’ve been notoriously difficult to create. Researchers have now shown they can trigger this exotic state by subtly adjusting the mix of tellurium and selenium in ultra-thin films. That tiny chemical tweak changes how electrons interact, effectively turning a quantum phase “dial” until the ideal state appears. The result is a more practical path toward building stable, next-generation quantum devices.

Quantum computers need special materials called topological superconductors—but they’ve been notoriously difficult to create. Researchers have now shown they can trigger this exotic state by subtly adjusting the mix of tellurium and selenium in ultra-thin films. That tiny chemical tweak changes how electrons interact, effectively turning a quantum phase “dial” until the ideal state appears. The result is a more practical path toward building stable, next-generation quantum devices.

Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases