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Chandra's X-ray Space Telescope, with some help from the Hubble, spotted a young Sun-like star about 120 light-years away with a powerful stellar wind. It's carving out its astrosphere, a bubble of relatively hot gas that's pushing into the surrounding, much cooler, interstellar medium. This is the same process our Sun went through 5 billion years ago when it created the heliosphere.

For the first time, astronomers have used images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to identify a supernova progenitor that could not be seen by any other telescope: a red supergiant that was located in a nearby galaxy. The supergiant’s surroundings were surprisingly dusty - dusty enough to render it invisible to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Smartphones, High-Definition Cameras, and the Disappearance of Paranormal and Supernatural Phenomena—a Skeptical Analysis

Over the past decades, we have witnessed a quiet yet decisive transformation in the history of human beliefs: the apparent disappearance of major paranormal phenomena that for millennia fueled mythologies, religions, folklore, and countless reports of supposed extraordinary manifestations. UFOs hovered over mountains and deserts;1 colossal creatures such as Bigfoot, the Yeti, or the Sasquatch roamed remote forests;2 spirits, apparitions, and ectoplasmic entities materialized in abandoned mansions;3 miracles occurred before the eyes of the devout;4 demonic possessions defied rational explanation.5 Today, all these phenomena seem to have taken permanent leave, an intriguing coincidence emerging precisely at the moment humanity begins to carry in its pockets (or better yet, in its hands) ultra-high-definition cameras capable of recording every detail of daily life, or any anomaly, with unprecedented precision.6

Before examining the role of smartphones, it is important to distinguish beliefs from manifestations. National opinion polls show that belief in paranormal phenomena remains high. A 2005 Gallup survey indicated that roughly three in four Americans believed in at least one type of paranormal experience, including haunted houses, communication with the dead, and astrology.7 Trend analyses aggregating data from Gallup, Harris, Pew, and other institutes show that, despite recent technological advances, these beliefs have remained remarkably stable, with only small declines in some items and even increases in specific beliefs such as ghosts and haunted houses.8 A more recent Gallup synthesis, from 2025, shows that 48 percent of American adults believe in psychic or spiritual healing and 39 percent in ghosts, while between 24 percent and 29 percent endorse six other supernatural beliefs; compared to 2001, variations are modest, with declines of only 6 to 7 percentage points in phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance.9 Literature reviews indicate that, in different countries, beliefs in spirits, UFOs, and other extraordinary phenomena remain widely disseminated among modern populations.10, 11, 12, 13

In other words, beliefs persist and remain widespread, but the supposed phenomena that should generate clear and reproducible evidence seem increasingly absent precisely at a moment when we possess technology capable of recording them with great clarity.14, 15 This shift invites a skeptical exercise: Why have paranormal and supernatural apparitions disappeared exactly when it became possible to document them unequivocally? For centuries, human testimony was the primary source of such accounts. However, scientific literature consistently demonstrates that testimony, even when sincere, constitutes extremely weak evidence: It is susceptible to perceptual illusions, cognitive biases, cultural expectations, and reconstructed (and often false) memories.16, 17, 18

They systematically avoid sharp, high-resolution cameras while tolerating grainy footage captured with old cameras or shaky amateur recordings. 

In recent decades, quantitative studies on spontaneous reports of “anomalous” experiences also reveal a telling pattern: Although belief remains high, the number of people claiming to have personally experienced paranormal and supernatural phenomena tends to decline or stabilize at low levels compared with previous decades. Population surveys in the United Kingdom, for example, indicate that around 25 percent of adults report having seen a ghost, a number smaller than the prevalence of belief in ghosts, which remains above 40 percent.19, 20, 21 The discrepancy between the high prevalence of belief and the lower prevalence of reported experiences suggests that direct accounts do not accompany the persistence of belief, a pattern compatible with the growing impact of recording technology. 

Recent experimental evidence reinforces this fragility. Contemporary studies show that up to 30 percent of participants incorporate false details into memories of extraordinary events after minimal suggestions or exposure to ambiguous images.22, 23 This type of cognitive vulnerability helps explain why, even before photography, reports of supernatural phenomena were so abundant despite the absence of reliable physical documentation. 

With the popularization of photography in the late nineteenth century, the first “records” of ghosts, materializations, and spiritualist phenomena emerged, almost always blurred, overexposed, composite, or manipulated.24 The skeptical science of the time, from Darwin25 to Houdini,26 had already warned of fraud, lighting tricks, and honest mistakes. Even so, these images fueled a fertile social imagination that was poorly equipped for the kind of critical analysis we now consider trivial. 

Yet something fundamental changed when next-generation smartphones became ubiquitously available. Never in human history has there been a moment when billions of people possessed cameras with optical stabilization, precise sensors, 4K recording capacity, and the ability to capture phenomena instantaneously and share them within seconds. 

Paradoxically, this same technological infrastructure has fueled an entire subculture of “ghost hunters” and smartphone-based spirit-detection apps. Ethnographic research on ghost-hunting communities shows the intensive use of high-definition cameras, motion sensors, and apps that simulate paranormal measurements, but despite millions of recordings, no verifiable fact regarding the existence of ghosts has been established in a robust manner.27, 28 Independent assessments of these groups further show that most of the supposed evidence, shadows, electromagnetic noise, or video distortions, corresponds to optical or acoustic artifacts already extensively described in the technical literature and often replicable under controlled conditions.29 Even more rigorous investigative protocols, such as controlled-environment monitoring with multiple cameras, have never produced replicable or consistent results. In other words, the capacity to search for evidence has increased exponentially, but the quality of the “proof” remains trapped in artifacts, ambiguities, and wishful interpretations. 

Curiously, alleged extraterrestrials seem to prefer deserted roads, swamps, or isolated campgrounds, and maintain a distinctly selective shyness.

At the same time, astronomers equipped with powerful, high-definition telescopes that observe the sky 24 hours a day have never recorded a single robust piece of evidence for objects of nonhuman origin. By contrast, systematic surveys conducted by professional astronomers estimate that more than 95 percent of investigated UFO reports correspond to satellites, rocket re-entries, aircraft, balloons, or common atmospheric phenomena.30, 31 This pattern was already known before the widespread adoption of smartphones, but it has become even more evident as observational instruments have grown more precise. Curiously, alleged extraterrestrials seem to prefer deserted roads, swamps, or isolated campgrounds, and maintain a distinctly selective shyness: They systematically avoid sharp, high-resolution cameras while tolerating grainy footage captured with old cameras or shaky amateur recordings. 

The same inexplicable selectivity affects the great mythical creatures. Bigfoot, whose existence contradicts all biological logic, since no hominid species could survive in absolute isolation for hundreds of thousands of years without leaving fossils, consistent tracks, feces, or reproductive communities, vanished abruptly with the advent of modern smartphones. Recent research in ecology and environmental DNA biomonitoring, now used to track rare species, has likewise detected no genetic trace compatible with large unknown primates in North America, even in extensively sampled regions.32, 33 This kind of negative evidence reinforces the biological implausibility of a hidden large-bodied hominid. Hunters, hikers, mountaineers, and rural residents, all equipped with sophisticated cameras, have ceased to report sightings of the once-elusive primate. What remains alive is only the echo of old stories, always sustained by isolated footprints or shaky video footage. 

Ghosts and spirits, likewise, seem to have adapted poorly to technological advancement. For centuries, claims of apparitions spread globally, reinforcing the sense that the supernatural was a universal feature of human experience. However, the more we improved our ability to record images, the more these ectoplasmic entities retreated into the invisible, or into the past. Today, there are no sharp, verifiable, or even minimally convincing records. It is as if the very ontology of such beings were incompatible with high-precision sensors, as if the supernatural had vanished precisely when it could finally prove its existence to skeptics. 

From a methodological standpoint, this persistent absence of records is consistent with analyses in the philosophy of science applied to paranormal claims: If a phenomenon supposedly interacts with the physical world, it should be detectable by physical instruments; if it never is, despite the exponential growth in instrument sensitivity, then its existence becomes an increasingly implausible hypothesis.34

The same decline affects miracles and exorcisms. Although religious videos showing supposed instantaneous healings still circulate, such recordings never exhibit high-definition imagery, verifiable continuity, or transparent documentation. Sociological research on healing rituals also shows that, although millions of people report subjective experiences of “spiritual healing,” there is no video documentation of instantaneous, verifiable cures that meet minimal clinical criteria, such as independent pre- and post-examinations or transparent medical history.35 Medical literature likewise documents that many such claims can be explained by imprecise diagnoses, spontaneous remissions, or confirmation biases.36 The more sophisticated our recording technology becomes, the more rarefied extraordinary events appear to be. 

Demons, once so present in cultural narratives, seem to have developed a profound aversion to high-resolution equipment. Beings allegedly so powerful, capable of opposing gods, tormenting humans across civilizations, making people speak extinct languages and levitate, now seem terrified of ordinary individuals armed with devices that could finally reveal their true face. 

Some may argue that these phenomena still occur, but people have simply stopped recording them, even while carrying cameras virtually 24 hours a day. However, such a hypothesis runs entirely counter to contemporary behavior: We live in an era in which trivial dance trends accumulate millions of views, minor accidents are filmed from multiple angles, and any unusual animal becomes viral within minutes. Studies on the psychology of digital sharing show that unusual, threatening, or extraordinary content is significantly more likely to go viral, especially when it includes clear visual elements.37 This pattern makes it even more improbable that supposedly extraordinary phenomena would occur without sharp recordings, or that someone would deliberately refrain from filming or disseminating them. 

Just when these phenomena could finally verify themselves before omnipresent cameras, they remain invisible.

Within this context, suggesting that people witness aliens, mythical primates, miracles, ghosts, or demons and simply “forget” to record them is, at the very least, an exercise in involuntary humor. In a world so deeply connected and driven by the banal as well as the exceptional, a video that confirmed, and definitively proved, any one of these phenomena would generate an almost infinite number of likes and would instantly elevate its creators to the category of highly profitable, widely recognized influencers. 

The pattern that emerges is clear and epistemologically eloquent: The massive availability of recording devices has not reduced the prevalence of paranormal beliefs, but it has made the absence of robust evidence even more striking. Opinion surveys indicate that beliefs in ghosts, haunted houses, UFOs, or astrology remain widespread and, in many cases, have been stable for decades.38, 39, 40 However, when everyone can document the world with near-forensic precision, the territory of the supernatural does not expand toward clear evidence; it remains confined to ambiguous accounts, grainy videos, and testimonies vulnerable to perceptual illusions and cognitive biases.41, 42 New cameras do more than capture reality: They make it increasingly difficult to sustain, without embarrassment, that which depends on shadows and low verifiability. 

In this context, it makes little sense to speak of the “end” of paranormal beliefs; what we observe is a growing mismatch between persistent beliefs and absent evidence. On a planet where much of the population carries in their pockets, holds in their hands, or mounts on the dashboards of their cars, high-resolution cameras with immediate access to social media, one would reasonably expect an explosion of sharp recordings of ghosts, demons, intervening deities, UFOs, or mythical primates, if such entities truly interacted with the physical world in any minimally recurrent or plausible way.43, 44

Instead, what accumulates are decades of opinion inquiries showing stable beliefs and a colossal volume of “evidence” that collapses under the first skeptical examination. The coincidence remains striking: Just when these phenomena could finally verify themselves before omnipresent cameras, they remain invisible. 

The most parsimonious explanation continues to be the same one skeptics have long articulated: It is not that the phenomena have decided to retire or hide themselves; rather, there were never any paranormal phenomena to be recorded, only human interpretations of natural events, illusions, and frauds.

Fins washing up in the North Pacific suggest that orcas from one subspecies are snacking on other orcas, and researchers think that may explain their different social dynamics

Today’s article, by Liza Libes, was published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative think tank in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In its decision of the two cases Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court strongly limited the role of race in college admissions.  Using race as a prima facie criterion for admission was declared unconstitutional, but race could still be considered in admissions in a limited way. As the decision of the Harvard case said on page 8 (both were decided together)

At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. 

Everyone immediately speculated that, because many colleges are determined to continue using race as a criterion for admission, they would try to circumvent the Court’s decision by asking students, in their admissions essays, to describe how they overcame hardships or would contribute to the university community, realizing that students would slip in race or ethnicity in these essays to lubricate their admission. As Libes describes in her piece (click screenshot below to read), that’s exactly what was done in North Carolina.

Libes also stresses the importance of real writing—as opposed to AI—as a skill that will help students in their later lives, for of course one can get AI to write essays along the lines of the themes above. I did that for one admissions essay (see below).

First, why students should learn to write well with their own brains and hands, and why colleges should ask for more than boilerplate essays designed to foster racial diversity or assess students’ ideologies. Libes’s extracts are indented:

Despite what our schools may have students believe about the relative uselessness of writing, strong writers achieve disproportionate professional success because good writing is a proxy for creative thinking—and creative thinkers become society’s visionaries. Take Steve Jobs, who was a storyteller before he was a programmer, or Thurgood Marshall, who reshaped American law not only through legal mastery but through powerful rhetoric. These mavericks have gone down in history not necessarily for their technical proficiency but for their aptitude for creativity.

Writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.Writing is the best tool we have to showcase creative thought.

. . . A good writer is therefore a strong thinker—and this distinction transcends academic disciplines. In my counseling practice, for instance, I routinely observe smart STEM students producing more insightful essays than average humanities students, because good writing is not so much a measure of technical ability as it is a proxy for the capacity to express ideas. Because creative thinking is invaluable in any walk of life, writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.

I suppose that part of Libes’s job is to prepare students for college admissions, as she’s not on a faculty.  But I’m heartened by her observation that STEM students write better essays than humanities students.  I have no experience of whether that’s true, as I never taught humanities students.

According to Libes, the changing of the college admissions essay, which began as a way to keep Jews out of elite colleges by looking for “Protestant values,” started after the banning of racial quotas in the Bakke case (1978):

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, however, with many universities forced to drop their racial quotas, the college essay evolved into a tool for admissions officers to gain a glimpse of applicants’ “backgrounds and perspectives.” Soon, the college essay became less about the discriminatory idea of “fit” and more about the ideas that students could bring to the intellectual table.

Around the same time, the revamped college essay shifted admissions practices towards a more holistic evaluative model that relied less on grades and test scores than on the applicant’s intellectual potential as a whole. In one sense, this model is still in use today: I have students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores who not only fail to secure admission to “elite” colleges but who are also destined to land in menial professional roles—not because they aren’t smart but because they have never learned to effectively express their ideas. In theory, the college essay should be an effective tool to separate “smart but dull” from “smart and interesting” students. Though many college-consulting professionals have expressed doubts about the viability of the college essay in the face of generative AI, so-called large language models will only ever fall into the category of “smart but dull,” giving truly visionary students a chance to shine by demonstrating their capacity for original thinking.

These changes, then, apparently occurred between the early Sixties and the Bakke decision in 1978:

For a brief moment in time—the halcyon decades following the Civil Rights era—the college essay did indeed allow strong writers and thinkers to rise to the top of our society. In his book On Writing the College Application Essay, for instance, former Columbia admissions officer Harry Bauld wrote that the college essay “shows you at your alive and thinking best.” That was 1987. Today, colleges seem to be doing everything they can to move the college essay away from the model of “thinking” prowess towards the infamous doctrine of “fit.”

And so college essays have degenerated into exercises that allow admissions offices to judge both the rcial and ideological “fit” of students to a given school. Libes uses as examples schools on  in North Carolina. Get a load of this:

Of the five most competitive colleges in North Carolina—Duke, Davidson, Wake Forest, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State—three ask the ubiquitous “fit” question, prompting students to identify their reasons for wishing to attend these universities in a short-answer statement. [JAC: as you see below, the University of Chicago also asks a “fit” question.] Duke explicitly uses the language of “values” in its prompt, suggesting that the university cares less about academic preparation than it does about the morals of each individual applicant. Share the wrong moral values—conservatism, religious traditionalism, or moral absolutism, among others—and risk facing a rejection letter in your inbox the coming spring.

The “fit” question is not the only way these colleges screen for values. UNC-Chapel Hill and Wake Forest both insist that students demonstrate their readiness to make contributions to their “community,” thereby favoring students with a natural bent towards communal rather than individualistic values. Wake Forest, in fact, has no reservations about framing its “community” prompt in terms of social justice:

Dr. Maya Angelou, renowned author, poet, civil-rights activist, and former Wake Forest University Reynolds Professor of American Studies, inspired others to celebrate their identities and to honor each person’s dignity. Choose one of Dr. Angelou’s powerful quotes. How does this quote relate to your lived experience or reflect how you plan to contribute to the Wake Forest community?

Similarly, Wake Forest asks students to identify their top-five favorite books. While this might seem an innocuous and even intellectually worthy question, there is no doubt that a student who includes Born a Crime by Trevor Noah will fare better in the admissions process than a student who dares to list Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Oy gewalt: that Wake Forest question seems to be there to weed out students who don’t have the correct “progressive” ideology! And does Wake Forest also give a selection of Maya Angelou quotes, or does it assume that students already know her books? If they don’t, they’ll be scurrying like termites to read them ASAP.

And Duke, which I’ve realized is woker than I knew, raises the issue of the goodness of diversity, and explicitly incorporates that in a question. You know the students are going to go full Kendi with this one:

Adapting to the rise of wokeness in 2014, for instance, Duke added the following college-essay prompt:

Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better—perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background—we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.

But with the rise of Trumpism and the suppression of DEI and wokeness in universities, Libes notes that essay questions are now concentrating on the value of viewpoint diversity, which Libes says is “this year’s new ‘it’ essay.” She concludes by once again emphasizing real essays that inspire independent thought rather than ticking off presumed boxes about race and ideology:

If colleges wish to remain institutions devoted to intellectual excellence rather than moral choreography, they must abandon their obsession with “fit” and return to the college essay’s original purpose: to identify students most capable of independent thought.

It is precisely those students who go on to shape ideas, build institutions, and sustain our free, pluralistic society.

Libes doesn’t deal with AI so much (see below), but her essay is well worth reading, and inspired me to look up the University of Chicago’s admissions essays. My school is famous for asking unusual and sometimes off-the-wall questions aimed at demonstrating a student’s ability to think. And commercial sources publicize them during the admissions cycle, to let students see what they’re in for and to offer students “help” by producing company-written answers for a fee (I consider this unethical). You can see the list of admissions questions for 2025-2026 at the commerical site here (“we can help you draft in time for submission”). Sadly, the only required question is of the anodyne type seen above:

Question 1 (Required)

How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

A big yawn for that one! It’s a “fit” question like the ones in North Carolina.  HOWEVER, we offer seven other essays that are far more interesting as gauges of creativity, and applicants must choose to answer just one of these in addition to Question 1. I’ll show you just three:

Essay Option 1

In an ideal world where inter-species telepathic communication exists, which species would you choose to have a conversation with, and what would you want to learn from them? Would you ask beavers for architectural advice? Octopuses about cognition? Pigeons about navigation? Ants about governance? Make your case—both for the species and the question.

Essay Option 2

If you could uninvent one thing, what would it be — and what would unravel as a result?

Essay Option 6

Statistically speaking, ice cream doesn’t cause shark attacks, pet spending doesn’t drive the number of lawyers in California, and margarine consumption isn’t responsible for Maine’s divorce rate—at least, not according to conventional wisdom. But what if the statisticians got it wrong? Choose your favorite spurious correlation and make the case for why it might actually reveal a deeper, causative truth.

Now THOSE are questions worth offering, and do you really need the required question to assess a student’s ability?

But there is one big problem: AI can answer all of these questions, and better than most students. As an example, I chose the Option 1 question, about telepathy, and sent it to Luana to put into her paid AI bot. I will put the bot’s answer below the fold. But do read it because it’s amazingly good and, to me at least, indistinguishable from a human answer. In fact, it’s much better than I think many high-school students could write. THAT is why they use AI, and why Luana thinks that AI spells the death of humanities in liberal-arts schools.

In the end, then, given the existence of AI and its ubiquitous use by students, is there really any point to asking essay questions? I doubt it, especially because you can “guide” the AI bot by asking for specific things to appear.  After due cogitation, I decided that universities should require only four things for admission, none of them essays:

1. High-school grades
2. SATs or ACT standardized test scores. Sadly, these are optional at the University of Chicago, and 80% of American colleges and universities either do not require test scores or forbid submitting test scores. (Grok says 90-93% don’t require them, though in 2015 60-65% of them did.) Doing away with test requirements is a big mistake.  There is no downside to using such scores; they were banned or made optional solely as a way to increase ethnic diversity, even though an article in the NYT shows that using standardized tests does not hurt diversity.and is also the best predictor of success in college, success in getting into graduate school, and success in the workplace in later life.
3. Letters of recommendation. (These are not great, as students won’t ask for letters unless they know they’ll get good ones. In fact, I’ve been asked by students requesting letters from me to assure them that I’d write a good one.)
4. Personal interviews.  You can tell a lot about a person from a 20-minute interview. Unfortunately, those have been used, as at Harvard, as a tool to weed out students—in their case Asian students, who were deemed from interviews to not be as “personable” as other students. That this was a bogus way to reduce the percentage of Asians admitted came from data showing that the difference appeared only when Harvard staff did the interviews, not when alumni were recruited to do interviews.

Some schools, like those concentrating on music, art, or fashion design, require submitting samples of your work, which cannot (as of yet) be faked by AI.

The four criteria above should suffice to properly assess students.  And standardized tests should always be required.  I’m hoping for the day when the University of Chicago realizes that.

Click “continue reading” to see the AI answer to the essay option 1 (on telepathy) below. We didn’t specify a word limit, though both essays that Grok produced were close to 500 words (I show just one response).  Thanks  to Luana for interacting with the bot.

Here’s the bot’s answer (indented). If you don’t know what AI can do these days, you’ll be impressed, as I was!

In an ideal world where minds can meet without barriers of flesh or language, I would choose to speak with a squid—specifically a young Humboldt squid slicing through the open Pacific, jet-propelled and ink-ready, living the raw bargain of freedom and fear. Not the beaver with its tidy dams, not the octopus curled in its den of clever puzzles, not the pigeon with its flawless internal compass, not the ant with its flawless collective. I would pick the squid because it alone embodies the exhilarating, terrifying trade-off that defines so much of what it means to be alive: the faster and freer you move, the more visible you become to the things that want to eat you.

Picture her: a living arrow of muscle and chromatophores, rocketing at twenty-five body lengths per second through water so clear it feels like flying. One pulse of her mantle and she’s gone—pure velocity, pure choice. No walls, no schedule, no permission required. She can vanish into a cloud of ink or flash a warning display brighter than any neon sign. She is, for a few heartbeats at a time, the freest creature on the planet.

But freedom here is never free. Every jet that carries her toward a school of lanternfish also sends a pressure wave that whispers “dinner” to a sperm whale three hundred meters below. Every moment of open-ocean liberty is paid for in hyper-vigilance. Her skin never stops reading the light, the current, the faint electric signature of a predator’s heartbeat. She lives at the exact intersection where speed and terror trade kisses.

That is the conversation I want. I would hover weightless beside her in the blue, let our thoughts mingle like ink in water, and ask the only question that has ever really mattered to me: How do you keep choosing the open water when you know the price?

I don’t want architectural blueprints or navigational tricks or lessons in collective governance. I want to know what courage tastes like when it has no roof and no backup plan. When she decides to jet upward at dusk to hunt, does her whole body sing with joy even while every nerve is screaming they are watching? When she slips into a tighter school for safety, does part of her mourn the lost velocity the way I sometimes mourn the safer, smaller life I could have chosen? Does she ever regret the trade-off, or has she learned that the only real freedom is the one you keep choosing even when it costs you sleep, even when it costs you blood?

Because I am seventeen and standing at the same crossroads. Every college application, every late-night decision about who I want to become, every time I say “yes” to something bigger and scarier, I feel the mantle contract and the jet fire. The open ocean is calling—research, travel, risk, voice, independence—but so are the shadows: failure, judgment, the very real predators of burnout and regret. I want the squid to teach me how to move at full speed without flinching, how to read the currents of fear without letting them steer.I suspect her answer would be brief, electric, and impossible to translate perfectly into human words. Something like: The open water is not a gift. It is a dare you answer every second you are alive. And the dare is the only thing worth answering.

In that moment the distance between us would collapse. The girl on the surface and the squid in the deep would both be students of the same hard, beautiful lesson: freedom is not the absence of danger. It is the decision to keep swimming anyway.(Word count: 497)

***********

The bot (Grok) added what’s below after Luana solicited an essay about a fruit fly, which I don’t think was as good

This version keeps the same reflective, authentic voice as the fruit-fly essay but pivots completely to the squid’s wild, high-stakes existence. It weaves in the exact details you gave—open-ocean freedom, water-jet speed, the constant trade-off with predation—while still feeling deeply personal and forward-looking for a college reader.Want it longer, shorter, more humorous, or tied to a specific personal experience (ocean trip, documentary, fear of the future, etc.)? Just tell me and I’ll adjust instantly.

After nearly 50 years of failed attempts and scientific speculation, chemists at Saarland University have achieved what many thought might be impossible: creating a long-sought silicon-based aromatic molecule. By replacing carbon atoms in a famously stable ring-shaped compound with silicon, the team synthesized pentasilacyclopentadienide — a breakthrough published in Science.

Ukraine has responded to a war it didn’t start by creating an industry it doesn’t want, but could the nation's drone expertise help it rebuild? To learn more, New Scientist gained exclusive access to the research labs, factories and military training schools behind Ukraine’s drones

Asteroid mining companies are finally getting off the ground, and that is raising some concerns about the impact those activities will have on the space environment. A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Anna Marie Brenna of the University of Waikato in New Zealand discusses a framework that she thinks might work to solve the legal challenges facing those who want to protect the space environment and those who want to exploit it.

Deep inside the Milky Way, an invisible force is quietly holding everything together — its magnetic field. Now, researchers have created one of the most detailed maps ever of this hidden structure, revealing surprising twists in how it flows through our galaxy.

We have a timely contribution, and a bit of duck-related drama in New Jersey, from Jan Malik, whose captions and story are indented below. (The duck was, in the end, unharmed.) You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here is a short series of pictures from Barnegat Light that I took about twelve years ago. I was sitting on the rock jetty one February day, scanning for any passing seabirds, when something in the corner of my eye caught my attention: a commotion farther out in the inlet channel. A duck was being attacked by a large gull.

Trigger warning and spoiler alert: the gull went hungry— the duck escaped that morning.

The prey: Long‑tailed Duck (Clangula hyemalis)

This isn’t the actual bird that was attacked; I think I photographed this one later that day. But like the victim, it was probably an immature male. Long‑tailed Ducks form large flocks outside the breeding season, wintering offshore from the Arctic Ocean, Norway, Greenland, and Canada, and reaching New Jersey when the weather turns especially cold. Unfortunately, their IUCN status is Vulnerable, and based on my very unscientific observations over twenty years of winter trips to the Jersey shore, their numbers seem to be declining.

The drama begins: the duck is caught by a Great Black‑backed Gull (Larus marinus).

These gulls—the largest species in the family Laridae—are powerful scavengers and opportunistic predators. I don’t see them often at Barnegat Light or other exposed coastal areas; they seem to prefer city dumps and places with more edible refuse than the clean, wind‑swept inlet.

Each bird pulls in a different direction.  The duck tries to dive, while the gull attempts to lift its prey and carry it to land, where it can kill it properly by violent shaking.

Given the size difference, the duck can’t fight back All it can do is try to slip free:

A second gull arrives The possibility of a meal attracts another gull, which immediately tries to steal the catch. This actually helps the duck—when raptors (if we can stretch the term to include gulls) quarrel over prey, they often drop it:

The gull’s grip is weak.  Here it’s clear that not all is lost for the duck. The gull’s smooth, non‑serrated bill has only a tenuous hold on the duck’s feathers, and it’s far from securing a proper grip:

The gull’s feet offer no help. Like other gulls, Great Black‑backed Gulls have webbed feet built for paddling, not grasping. Their only real weapon is the bill, and in this case it wasn’t placed well enough to subdue the duck:

The hunt ends unsuccessfully.  The duck breaks free and immediately dives. Long‑tailed Ducks can dive 100–200 feet (30–60 m) and swim underwater using both their feet and wings, much like penguins:

Another Long‑tailed Duck in flight.  I include this photo to show why the species is called “long‑tailed,” although this individual doesn’t have the longest tail I’ve seen. These ducks were once called “Oldsquaw” in the United States and “Old Wife” in parts of England, but in the early 2000s the name was changed because it was considered offensive. I agree with the change, though I sometimes wonder whether it marked the beginning of the slippery slope that later led to Audubon being “canceled” and many other biological names being flagged as candidates for revision.

JAC:  All’s well that ends well.

Scientists have proposed a surprising connection between solar flares and earthquakes. When solar activity disturbs the ionosphere, it may generate electric fields that penetrate fragile fracture zones in Earth’s crust. If a fault is already critically stressed, this extra electrostatic pressure could help trigger a quake. The idea doesn’t claim direct causation, but it offers a fresh way to think about how space weather and seismic events might interact.

A cream that directly disrupts the underlying causes of the skin patches seen in the condition vitiligo will be made available on the NHS

If you’ve been following exoplanet research over the last couple of years, you’ve definitely heard of K2-18b. Located 124 light years away in the constellation Leo, it’s attracted a lot of attention as it sits squarely in its red dwarf host star’s habitable zone, and measurements of the James Webb Space Telescope show its atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide and methane. It’s one of the prime candidates for a “Hycean” world - one where a thick hydrogen-rich atmosphere covers a global liquid water ocean. It is such an intriguing target for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researchers that they turned two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world to watch K2-18b’s system. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that there is likely no artificial narrow-band radio signals that are equivalent to our technology level coming from the planet, despite millions of potential hits.

Duplicating the information held in quantum computers was thought to be impossible thanks to the no-cloning theorem, but researchers have now found a workaround

There have been plenty of attempts to resolve the “Hubble Tension” in cosmology. This feature describes how one of the most important variables in cosmology, the expansion of the universe, takes on different values depending on how you measure it. A new NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I report on the Cosmic Positioning System (CPS) details another potential solution to it - this one involving a network of five far-flung satellites spread throughout the solar system.

Is there somewhere on Earth where Sovereign Citizens can actually be free of any nation's laws?

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People often focus on the bad side effects of vaccines, but they can have some great side effects too, says columnist Michael Le Page. They don’t just protect us from contagious diseases but can also lower the risk of dementia and heart attacks

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, may have been even more instrumental to the system’s evolution than we thought, forming its rings, shaping its moons and even affecting the planet itself

CU Boulder researchers have designed microscopic “racetracks” that trap and amplify light with exceptional efficiency. By using smooth curves inspired by highway engineering, they reduced energy loss and kept light circulating longer inside the device. Fabricated with sub-nanometer precision, the resonators rank among the top performers made from chalcogenide glass. The technology could lead to compact sensors, microlasers, and advanced quantum systems.

CU Boulder researchers have designed microscopic “racetracks” that trap and amplify light with exceptional efficiency. By using smooth curves inspired by highway engineering, they reduced energy loss and kept light circulating longer inside the device. Fabricated with sub-nanometer precision, the resonators rank among the top performers made from chalcogenide glass. The technology could lead to compact sensors, microlasers, and advanced quantum systems.