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Researchers have combined theory and experiments to show that nuclear polarization does not limit studies of muonic atoms, clearing the way for new nuclear physics experiments.

Advances in the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 over the past 15 years have yielded important new insights into the roles that specific genes play in many diseases. But to date this technology -- which allows scientists to use a 'guide' RNA to modify DNA sequences and evaluate the effects -- is able to target, delete, replace, or modify only single gene sequences with a single guide RNA and has limited ability to assess multiple genetic changes simultaneously. Now, however, scientists have developed a series of sophisticated mouse models using CRISPR ('clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats') technology that allows them to simultaneously assess genetic interactions on a host of immunological responses to multiple diseases, including cancer.

Advances in the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 over the past 15 years have yielded important new insights into the roles that specific genes play in many diseases. But to date this technology -- which allows scientists to use a 'guide' RNA to modify DNA sequences and evaluate the effects -- is able to target, delete, replace, or modify only single gene sequences with a single guide RNA and has limited ability to assess multiple genetic changes simultaneously. Now, however, scientists have developed a series of sophisticated mouse models using CRISPR ('clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats') technology that allows them to simultaneously assess genetic interactions on a host of immunological responses to multiple diseases, including cancer.

Memristors consume extremely little power and behave similarly to brain cells. Researchers have now introduced novel memristive that offer significant advantages: they are more robust, function across a wider voltage range, and can operate in both analog and digital modes. Their unique properties could help address the problem of 'catastrophic forgetting,' where artificial neural networks abruptly forget previously learned information.

Scientists recently unveiled a first-of-its-kind authentication protocol for wireless, battery-free, ultraminiaturized implants that ensures these devices remain protected while still allowing emergency access.

Scientists recently unveiled a first-of-its-kind authentication protocol for wireless, battery-free, ultraminiaturized implants that ensures these devices remain protected while still allowing emergency access.

Astronomers have detected oxygen in the most distant known galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0. This record-breaking detection is making astronomers rethink how quickly galaxies formed in the early Universe.

Engineers have developed an approach for recycling cement waste into a sustainable, low-carbon alternative that is comparable in performance to the industry standard.

Lithium-6 is essential for producing nuclear fusion fuel, but isolating it from the much more common isotope, lithium-7, usually requires liquid mercury, which is extremely toxic. Now, researchers have developed a mercury-free method to isolate lithium-6 that is as effective as the conventional method.

Lithium-6 is essential for producing nuclear fusion fuel, but isolating it from the much more common isotope, lithium-7, usually requires liquid mercury, which is extremely toxic. Now, researchers have developed a mercury-free method to isolate lithium-6 that is as effective as the conventional method.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in northern Chile, will give us a better view of the Milky Way than any ground-based telescope before it. It's difficult to overstate how transformative it will be. The ELT's primary mirror array will have an effective diameter of 39 meters. It will gather more light than previous telescopes by an order of magnitude, and it will give us images 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. It's scheduled to come online in 2028, and the results could start flooding in literally overnight, as a recent study shows.

One of the Holy Grails in cosmology is a look back at the earliest epochs of cosmic history. Unfortunately, the Universe's first few hundred thousand years are shrouded in an impenetrable fog. So far, nobody's been able to see past it to the Big Bang. As it turns out, astronomers are chipping away at that cosmic fog by using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile.

Young female black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys often want to hold other females’ infants, but mothers are much more permissive of experienced caregivers

This new 232-page government-commissioned study, called “the Sullivan Report” after its leader, opens this way (click on the screenshot below to see the whole thing).

This independent review was commissioned in February 2024 by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology.

The aims of the review are as follows:

i. Identifying obstacles to accurate data collection and research on sex and on gender identity in public bodies and in the research system

ii. Setting out good practice guidance for how to collect data on sex and gender identity

All public bodies, as defined by the Cabinet Office, are in scope of the review. The review also considers research institutions and organisations from outside the public sector, where relevant to the aims of the review.

The review is UK wide, respecting the devolved nature of areas of responsibility within the research and development landscape and the collection of relevant areas of data and statistics. This report concerns data and statistics. A further report will examine barriers to research.

The review is led by Professor Alice Sullivan, University College London, assisted by policy analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, and Dr Kathryn Webb, University of Oxford.

I’ll confess that I’ve only skimmed it, and am relying on the summary given by the Times of London. (If you subscribe click the headline below, or find the piece archived here.) It does, however, appear to draw on many studies: over 500 of them.

The upshot is that biological sex (male or female, with a very, very tiny proportion of true intersexes) is not consistently identified in government documents, even though some of them mandate “gender identification”.  While having both is usually okay by me, the absence of biological sex has, so the report (and the Times article) argue, caused the loss of useful data as well as harm to people.  On pp. 5-6 the report makes ten recommendations, and here are just three:

2. Data on sex should be collected by default in all research and data collection commissioned by government and quasi-governmental organisations. By default, both sexes should be included in all research, including clinical trials, and sex should be considered as a factor in analysis and reporting. As a general rule (with some obvious exceptions), a 50/50 sex ratio is desirable in studies

3. The default target of any sex question should be sex (in other words, biological sex, natal sex, sex at birth). Questions which combine sex with gender identity, including gender identity as recognised by a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) have a mixed target. Sex as a biological category is constant across time and across jurisdictions, whereas the concept of ’legal sex’ subject to a GRC may be subject to change in the future and varies across jurisdictions. Using natal sex future-proofs data collection against any such change, ensuring consistency.

6. The word ‘gender’ should be avoided in question wording, as it has multiple distinct meanings, including: a synonym for sex; social structures and stereotypes associated with sex; and gender identity. If a question targeting gender identity is worded as a question on gender, this is likely to mislead many respondents. Questions on sex have also often been labelled as ‘gender’. Change in the use of the term ‘gender’ means that it is important that questions on sex are labelled explicitly as such.

Plus given that there are over a hundred genders on lists I’ve seen, what does it add to a survey to add “gender identity”? I don’t really object to it, but really, what does gender add for official forms if biological sex is already specified?

Here are some ways the data are erratic (I’m not sure that any study asked for “natal sex” or “biological sex” sex rather than just “sex,” which these days is ambiguous.  (That information might be in the long report.) Quotes from the Times:

The study, led by Professor Alice Sullivan from University College London, investigated all public bodies and found “the meaning of sex is no longer stable in administrative or major survey data”.

Sullivan’s review found inconsistencies in the way sex and gender were recorded and conflated. Some official surveys were found to remove sex altogether and only collected information on gender identity.

This included a Royal Navy sexual harassment survey, which asked how respondents identified rather than asking for their sex “despite its obvious relevance to the subject matter”.

In another case, a children’s camping programme raised safeguarding concerns through collecting data on gender identity, with male, female and “other” response options.

. . .The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also previously caused confusion by proposing respondents to the 2021 England and Wales census could answer the sex question in terms of their subjective gender identity, rather than their sex. It was later forced to change this through judicial review.

This ambiguity also occurs in the National Health Service (NHS):

The review found that across the NHS “gender identity is consistently prioritised over or replaces sex”. She said that records that traditionally represented biological sex were “unreliable and can be altered on request by the patient” and that there had been a “gradual shift away from recording and analysing sex in NHS datasets”.

And the report describes some of the palpable harms deriving from this inconsistency. Bold headings are mine:

Medical Harm:

This meant there were “clear clinical risks”, such as patients not being called up for cervical smear tests or prostate exams, or the misinterpretation of lab results. Sullivan said: “This has potentially fatal consequences for trans people.”

In one case a paediatrician said that a child had been brought up in the preferred gender of the mother, which was different to their birth-assigned gender. “She [the mother] had gone to the GP and requested a change of gender/NHS number when the baby was a few weeks old and the GP had complied. Children’s social care did not perceive this as a child protection issue,” the doctor reported.

It’s even worse because in the UK (and many states in the U.S.) people can change their official records to a non-natal sex, which can also be harmful:

Sullivan’s review said the patient’s ability to change their records “puts transgender individuals at a particular disadvantage and as such is potentially discriminatory”. She said that in some cases samples such as blood tests could be rejected by laboratories or sex-specific cancer referrals could be missed.

Legal Harm:

In the justice system Sullivan found that definitions of sex and gender were “highly inconsistent”.

Sex can be recorded differently across the prison service, while many police forces record sex as the gender given in a gender recognition certificate.

The review said it meant that data across police forces was not reliable, particularly in patterns of female offending and “the classification of a small number of males within the female category may result in artificial significant increase in female offending rates”.

She said: “Many police forces record crimes by male suspects as though they were committed by women at the request of the perpetrator or based on how a person ‘presents’.”

Guidance notes for officers on the Police National Computer (PNC) state that it is “quite possible” that an arrested person who has acquired a gender recognition certificate and not informed the police “could be released or otherwise dealt with before any link to their previous offending history is known (through confirmation by fingerprints)”. The review found that this was also likely to be true of those who self-declared a different sex and name.

Distortion of educational data:

In schools and universities, the review found that children and young adults were more likely to report being transgender but that without biological sex being recorded data that showed the different life outcomes, including earnings, could not be relied upon.

The review said: “Significant sex-based effects could either be missed, because they are wrongly assumed to be due to changing practices in self-identification, or conversely wrongly inferred, as the data has become impossible to read reliably for sex-based effects.”

Pay differentials:

The lack of reliable data was also found to have an impact on pay gap reporting.

UK public authorities and private sector employers with headcounts of 250 or more have been required by law to report annually on their gender pay gap — which records how much less women earn than men.

However, those who identify as non-binary are excluded from the data and gender identity is recorded rather than sex.

Sullivan’s recommendations.  These are given in extenso following p. 6 in the report, but Sullivan is opposed to reporting gender identity (and I think this means non-natal sex for transsexuals):

It has been argued that recording biological sex alongside gender identity could interfere with a person’s human rights.

However, Sullivan found — and presented legal advice to back it up — that recording sex as gender identity was in itself likely to breach UK data laws and potentially human rights laws.

She said: “There are things that statistics cannot do. Statistics are not a means of personal self-expression. They can neither validate nor invalidate individual identities, and they cannot see into people’s souls.”

Remember that this is a report commissioned by the UK government, so take it up with them if you don’t like what it says. However, I do agree that on birth certificates and official documents, like driver’s licenses, what should appear is not gender identity but biological sex. If you want to add “gender self-assignment” to things like medical records, I don’t have a huge objection to that so long as biological sex is the primary thing identified, because I see no medical advantage, and palpable disadvantage, to recording only gender identity.

I’m still waiting to see how advocates of the “multidimensional, multivariate” concept of sex tell us how to DEFINE AND DETERMINE people’s sex. For the Sullivan Report, at least, trans women are not women, nor are trans men men—not in the official sense.

h/t: Richard

Lithium-6 is a crucial material for nuclear fusion reactors, but isolating it is challenging – now researchers have found a way to do this without using toxic mercury

A dinosaur fossil discovered in Mongolia boasts the largest ever complete claw, but the herbivorous species only used it to grasp vegetation

While earlier weather-forecasting AIs have replaced some tasks done by traditional models, new research uses machine learning to replace the entire process, making it much faster

The hormonal upheaval in the run-up to menopause can cause cognitive difficulties. But researchers are also finding that this can be a critical window for protecting long-term brain health

At the largest gathering of physicists in the world, the American Physical Society says it won’t back down in the face of executive orders to limit diversity programmes

Once again we have a conflict between science and the unevidenced claims of superstition. This time it’s from Australia.

Some of the “Willandra lakes fossils” from New South Wales, which include the famous “Lake Mungo remains” (three sets of hominin fossils that are the oldest ones known from Australia), have been or are scheduled to be reburied without further study. You can guess why: the indigenous people claim that these are their ancestors, giving them, so they say, moral rights to do what they want with all ancient bones that are found. I first learned about it from the two tweets below, but had a lot of trouble finding any news. I suspect that the news has been suppressed by the media because any intimation that these fossils derived from ancestors in other places is abhorrent, violating their superstitions. As the Australian National Museum notes:

From an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander view of creation, people have always been in Australia since the land was created.

On mainland Australia, the Dreaming is a system of belief held by many first Australians to account for their origins. In the Dreaming all-powerful beings roamed the landscape and laid the moral and physical groundwork for human society.

Prior to the Dreaming there was a ‘land before time’ when the earth was flat. Ancestral beings moulded the landscape through their actions and gave life to the first people and their culture. No one can say exactly how old the Dreaming is. From an Indigenous perspective the Dreaming has existed from the beginning of time.

And that led to the situation that I saw in these two tweets:

The Willandra Lakes fossils made the region a World Heritage Site

But now our evolutionary heritage is being reburied by the government, against the protests of UNESCO, archaeologists and some Aboriginal groups

Please sign the petition to stop this destruction (link below) https://t.co/6D3DNEqL2k pic.twitter.com/TgOEqoj0Zp

— Mungo Manic (@MungoManic) March 2, 2025

I link to the petition below.

This week, one of the most important fossils ever found in Australia (and perhaps the world) was taken to an undisclosed location, put in a hole and covered with dirt

WLH-50, the Garnpung Giant pic.twitter.com/ikot0CMzLd

— Mungo Manic (@MungoManic) March 18, 2025

You can read about the Garnpung Giant, WLH-50, here, on a site by Peter Brown. (The fossil is called “Giant” because its head is unusually large). It hasn’t been studied much, but has already been reburied to satisfy the wishes of indigenous people. I truly wonder why many of the aboriginals (not all of them) prefer these fossils to be buried rather than studied, but, as I said, scientific study might show these fossils to themselves have been from “settler colonialists”!

Willandra Lakes Hominid 50 was recovered from a deflating land surface in the Garnpung/Leaghur Lake region of south-western New South Wales, with the first published report in Flood (1983). This skeleton has not been reliably dated, has not been formally described, and is probably pathological. These circumstances result in some unease over the extreme claims made about the relevance of WLH 50 to interpretations of the Australasian evolutionary sequence (Stringer 1992; Brown 1992; Stringer and Bräuer 1994). In particular WLH 50 regularly appears as a corner stone in arguments for evolutionary continuity between the Indonesian and Australian regions published over the last two decades (Thorne 1984; Wolpoff 1992, 1995; Thorne and Wolpoff 1992; Frayer et al. 1993; Frayer et al. 1994; Hawks et al. 2000) which is an unusual circumstance for an undescribed and poorly provenanced fossil.

Attempts to date WLH 50 have obtained controversial results. Initial attempts to obtain a radiocarbon date achieved a result much younger than expected. It is possible that the specimen was contaminated and material other than collagen was dated. It is also possible that the fossil is a lot younger than some people would like.

WLH 50 consists of a fragmentary cranial vault, with damage to the basal and temporal segments, some facial fragments, parts of an elbow joint and some smaller postcranial pieces. The most striking feature of the cranial vault, malar fragments and elbow is of great size. Although glabella is not preserved, maximum cranial length can be estimated (±3 mm) to 212 mm, with a maximum cranial breadth of 151 mm and maximum supraorbital breadth greater than 131 mm. These dimensions exceed the recorded Aboriginal range of variation (Brown 1989). Even with the pathologically thickened vault, discussed below, endocranial volume was approximately 1540 ml compared with the Holocene Aboriginal male mean of 1271 ml Brown (1992b) . The extremely large size of WLH 50 should be of some concern to those who argue that this skeleton is in some manner representative of ‘Late Pleistocene’ Australians (Thorne 1984; Wolpoff 1992, 1995; Thorne and Wolpoff 1992; Frayer et al. 1993; Frayer et al. 1994).

There’s more at the site linked above, but the large cranial vault made it especially imperative to study this specimen. Sadly, it’s now deteriorating below ground, thanks to the demands of the indigenous people.

As Wikipedia notes, this region has harbored humans for the last 40,000 years, some of the oldest H. sapiens fossils known. (Remember, the humans who populated the world left Africa roughly 70,000 years ago, and colonized Australia only 5,000 years after that). That makes these fossils especially important for scientific study.  But when they’re reburied, as all three of the major Lake Mungo fossils have been, no further study is possible, and the bones will be destroyed. And look at this:

In 1989, the skeleton of a child believed to be contemporary with Mungo man was discovered. Investigation of the remains was blocked by the 3TTG with the remains subsequently protected but remaining in-situ. An adult skeleton was exposed by erosion in 2005 but by late 2006 had been completely destroyed by wind and rain. This loss resulted in the Indigenous custodians’ receiving a government grant of $735,000 to survey and improve the conservation of skeletons, hearths and middens that were eroding from the dunes. Conservation is in-situ and no research is permitted.

At any rate, two readers managed to find two article on this from the ABC. The first one is from 2022, but the second is from this week, showing that the dispute is ongoing.

From 2022 (click to read):

An excerpt:

First Nations people with direct links to Australia’s oldest human remains say they should have the ultimate voting rights to re-inter the skeleton, not the federal Environment Minister.

The Willandra Lake Region, near Ivanhoe in the far Central West, is home to Mungo Man’s 42,000-year-old remains, the oldest in Australia and first recorded evidence of a ceremonial burying.

In 1974, Mungo Man’s body was removed from the ancient burial site, along with more than 100 other Aboriginal graves.

In 2017, the body was returned to the region but has remained in the Lake Mungo visitor centre.

JAC: It’s not there any more: Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were reburied about a week after the article above appeared. Researchers and elders tried to work out some compromise under which the bones would be “reburied” (presumably put in a facility below ground) while still accessible to scientists. But it failed. More:

According to the National Native Title Tribunal, the majority of Lake Mungo falls within the Paakantyi people’s land.

Paakantyi man Michael Young said Ms Ley having the final say was an example of settler colonialism.

“We have had that for 234 years and we are really over that side of it,” he said.

“We want our people re-established in those areas so they can determine what is best for their country and their people.”

I am not moved by the “settler-colonialism” argument. No living indigenous people know whether these remains are ancestral. The people represented by known Mungo fossils might not have reproduced, or might have left no living descendants if they did.  Their relationship to living First Nations people is unknown, and it’s a loss to science to cater to these unevidenced claims. Sure, there can be displays with casts and appreciation for the history of ancient humans that came to Australia, but what a loss to science to rebury some of the oldest H. sapiens remains known from out of Africa!

The article below (click to read) came out two days ago on the ABC:

Excerpt:

The discovery of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady, some of the most significant remains ever found in Australia, helped to re-write the history of this country and its First Peoples.

But how they, and the 106 other remains found with them, should be laid to rest has led to decades of division, secret burials and two federal court cases.

The reburial of the final skeletal remains into undisturbed and unmarked grave sites — overseen by a group of elders — is currently underway.

But some traditional owners hope a last-ditch federal court case will stop the reburials and allow a public “keeping place” to preserve the remains for further scientific study.

. . . Mungo Man is the oldest skeleton ever found in Australia at approximately 42 thousand years old — older than the pyramids in Egypt — and some of the earliest human remains discovered anywhere in the world.

This finding confirmed how long First Nations people have lived on this continent and revealed new details about how they lived at the time.

Over the 1960s and 1970s, 106 other Indigenous skeletons were removed from the same region and taken to Canberra.

The information gathered at the site led to the region being listed on the World Heritage Register in 1981, one of the first in Australia.

But the removal of the bones without their consent angered traditional owners of the three groups in the area, the Mutthi Mutthi, Paakantji (Barkindji) and Ngiyampaa people.

This sounds like a good compromise, and even some tribal elders agree with that suggestion:

Wamba Wamba and Mutthi Mutthi man Jason Kelly and other community members have long believed the remains should go to a ‘keeping place’ that would remain accessible to both scientists and descendants, as was requested by his elders.

But even the elders don’t have authority here!

But members of the Willandra Lakes Region Aboriginal Advisory Group (AAG), an advisory group of community-elected representatives of the three traditional owner groups, want the remains reburied in a secret location with a traditional ceremony so they could finally be at peace.

“A keeping place is no good for our ancestors,” Barkindji man and AAG member Ivan Johnson told ABC Mildura.

“Our ancestors were buried in the ground, and we should put them back in the ground and leave them there to rest.”

Rest? Being at peace at last? They aren’t resting, they are DEAD and only their bones remain, bones that can give us clues to human migration and evolution. What about the Garnpung Giant? Could it possibly be a specimen of Homo erectus (thought to have gone extinct about 110,000 years ago)? We won’t know.

And of course the scientists object, though there are some who have been cowed by the Authority of the Sacred Victims. Read the article to learn more. .

As the reburials proceed, so too does a federal court application brought by Jason Kelly seeking to force Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to bring them to a halt.

He also wants the locations of the burial sites to be recorded and have burial mounds erected so descendants and the public can pay their respects.

A decision is expected to be handed down within the next week.

You can sign a petition about it having the fossils accessible in a “keeping place” here (though it won’t do much good, I suspect). Not many people have signed the petition (just over a thousand); imagine if every subscriber here signed it!  I find it unconscionable that false legands and dubious claims about ancestry impede science in this way. A “keeping place” can both respect the wishes of the indigenous people and at the same time allow scientists to study the remains.

Here’s a video from The Australian in which the anthropologist who apparently discovered Mungo Man and Mungo Lady argues for a keeping place that will allow study of the fossils.  He notes that in 20 years there will surely be new methods for studying fossils like this, making their preservation especially important.

h/t: Cate, Al