News Feeds

A colossal ancient impact may have reshaped the Moon far more deeply than scientists once realized. By analyzing rare lunar rocks brought back by China’s Chang’e-6 mission from the Moon’s largest crater, researchers found unusual chemical fingerprints pointing to extreme heat and material loss caused by a giant impact. The collision likely stripped away volatile elements, reshaped volcanic activity, and left a lasting chemical signature deep below the surface.

Physicists at Heidelberg University have developed a new theory that finally unites two long-standing and seemingly incompatible views of how exotic particles behave inside quantum matter. In some cases, an impurity moves through a sea of particles and forms a quasiparticle known as a Fermi polaron; in others, an extremely heavy impurity freezes in place and disrupts the entire system, destroying quasiparticles altogether. The new framework shows these are not opposing realities after all, revealing how even very heavy particles can make tiny movements that allow quasiparticles to emerge.

Once again, everything old is new again. The circle of disinformation is complete.

The post MAHA Leaders Are Recycling COVID Myths to Minimize Measles first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission is preparing to launch for a long-duration science mission aboard the International Space Station. During the mission, select crew members will participate in human health studies focused on understanding how astronauts’ bodies adapt to the low-gravity environment of space, including a new study examining subtle changes in blood flow.

I always say that one of the things that separates real science from pseudoscience is that while in both you’re allowed to say whatever crazy idea pops into your mind, in real science you’re obligated to take that idea seriously.

Here’s a video of NYT columnist Bret Stephens speaking at the famous 92nd Street YMCA in New York. (It’s 34 minutes long, and well worth watching.) I like Stephens’s columns quite a bit despite his identification as a “conservative”. He’s the paper’s best columnist on Israel and the Gaza War, and he’s also Jewish, and he’s a centrist conservative, not at all a MAGA conservative.

In the video Stephens gives a heterodox take on the “state of World Jewry.” His message is fourfold (I’m expanding on his own words here):

1.) The fight against antisemitism is a well-meaning but mostly wasted effort. We should spend and focus our energy elsewhere.

2.) Antisemitism is the world’s most unwitting compliment, for it is based largely on envy and resentment based on Jewish success.

3.) Proper defense against Jew-hatred is not to prove haters wrong by acting well, but to lean into our Jewishness irrespective of what anybody else thinks of it. As he says, “It goes without saying that there’s nothing  Jews can do to cure the Jew-haters of their hate. . . .And there is nothing we should want to do, either. . . If it’s impossible to cure an antisemite, it’s almost impossible to cure Jews of the delusion that we can cure antisemites.”

4.)  Jews don’t need a seat at the table of victimized groups. We should build our own table.

To me, the best part is his analysis of the psychology of antisemitism, which he think is not properly understood.  Here is one misconception: “We think that antisemitism stems from missing or inaccurate information.” (e.g., the lies of the Gaza war). The result is that people hope to erase antisemitism by correcting widespread misconceptions (“Israel is an apartheid state”, “Israel is committing genocide,” and so on.)

But he argues that Jew hatred is “not the result of a defect of education,” It is, instead, “the product of a psychological reflex. . . .  It’s not just a prejudice and belief, but a neurosis.” Antisemitism preceded the founding of the state of Israel, and therefore can’t just rest on the presence of a Jewish state. He further argues that Jew hatred doesn’t come largely because “we killed Christ,” which is just one excuse people use to justify their bigotry. Instead, says Stephens, people hate Jews because of the virtues of our religion (e.g., the love of life rather than death), and, most of all, because Jews have been successful. A quote: “They do not hate us because of our faults and failures; they hate us because of our virtues and successes. The more virtuous and successful we are, the more we’ll be hated by those whose animating emotions are resentment and envy.”

To Stephens, the obvious conclusion is that it’s a fool’s errand for Jews to try to earn the world’s love.

As for building our own table, it seems to involve “Jewish thriving”: “a community in which Jewish learning, Jewish culture, Jewish ritual, Jewish concerns, Jewish aspiration and Jewish identification. . . . are central to every member’s sense of him or herself.”  He thinks that this can be done both culturally and religiously. (I don’t know how pious Stephens is, or what he believes about God and the Old Testament, but he seems to be more religious than I thought.) Building our own table further involves expanding Jewish education, building more Jewish cultural institutions and creating more venues for Jewish philanthropy, de-wokeifying liberal Jewish congregations, and “reinventing publishing” so it is not as antisemitic as it is now.

As an atheist but also a cultural Jew, I’m a bit put off by the overly religious nature of Stephen’s suggested cure. After all, Jewish schools are founded on the truth of Judaism, which is, like that of all religions, pure superstition. But yes, Jews need to de-wokeify (the ones who voted for Mamdani, for example, seem to me deluded) and not act like victims.

And I agree with Stephens that it’s time to stop trying to prove to the rest of the world that we’re okay. That is truly a fool’s errand, and what has happened since October 7 proves it. The more Israel tried to help Gazans dispossessed by the war, the more Israel (and Jews) was hated. It seems to me that antisemitism is now worse than ever; there are daily pro-Palestinian and anti-Jewish demnonstrations (e.g. “From the river to the sea. . “) all over Europe, Jews are killed en masse in Australia, and universities cater to pro-Palestinians and “encampers,” failing to enforce their rules when they are violated by antisemites.

In the end, Stephens avers that the precipice of Judaism is but a step away from its zenith, and we’ve failed to recognize the imminence of our downfall.  But he’s still hopeful, finishing this way:

“All this was understood once, and will be understood again. Until then, we will, again, endure the honor of being hated as we continue to work for a thriving Jewish future.”

Besides the overemphasis on religious Judaism, my only criticism is that Stephens, like all academics in the humanities, reads a pre-written paper out loud, rarely looking at the audience. But I’ll excuse that, for his talk provides a lot of food for thought—and for argument.  And I think his main argument, encapsulated in the four points above, is correct.

I’ve run on too long: listen to the talk (if you’re a religious or a cultural Jew, you must listen to the talk):

Voyager 2’s flyby of Uranus in 1986 recorded radiation levels so extreme they baffled scientists for nearly 40 years. New research suggests the spacecraft caught Uranus during a rare solar wind event that flooded the planet’s radiation belts with extra energy. Similar storms have been seen near Earth, where they dramatically boost radiation levels. The discovery reshapes how scientists think about Uranus—and why it deserves another visit.

Astronomers propose that an ultra-dense clump of exotic dark matter could be masquerading as the powerful object thought to anchor our galaxy, explaining both the blistering speeds of stars near the center and the slower, graceful rotation of material far beyond. This dark matter structure would have a compact core that pulls on nearby stars like a black hole, surrounded by a broad halo shaping the galaxy’s outer motion.

Astronomers propose that an ultra-dense clump of exotic dark matter could be masquerading as the powerful object thought to anchor our galaxy, explaining both the blistering speeds of stars near the center and the slower, graceful rotation of material far beyond. This dark matter structure would have a compact core that pulls on nearby stars like a black hole, surrounded by a broad halo shaping the galaxy’s outer motion.

We’re back with the Caturday felids: three items and several more for lagniappe.

First, an 18-minute video from Meowtopia about how cats see humans. It’s designed to prove that cats aren’t just using us, but that we are “their secure base.”  It’s a mixture of true facts mixed with some dry humor, somewhat like a toned-down ZeFrank video. The them is cat psychology: “What are cats thinking?”

It turns out that we are actually “Super Providers” whose purpose is to provide food; in other words, we are vending machines made of meat.  But we also mean one thing to them: “Safety.”

The video invokes a lot of scientific research on cats, is full of interesting results, and is well worth watching.

*********************

Click below to see an article from the Washington Post showing that “pet-friendly” hotels are actually biased against cats.  (The article is archived here.) What gives?

 

An excerpt; the article begins with cat staff checking into a “pet friendl” hotel in Amsterdam.

“Hotels will say they’re pet-friendly, but they really mean dogs,” said Erin Geldermans, who adopted “Liebs” in Colorado. “So we’ll show up with our cat, and they’re like, ‘Oh, sorry, cats aren’t allowed.’”

Cast into the night without a room, Geldermans and [their tabby cat Liebchen] landed on their feet, finding more inclusive accommodations at the Jan Luyken Amsterdam next door. The hotel didn’t even charge them a pet fee. However, the experience was a stark reminder that, for jet-setting cats, it’s a dog’s world.

Travelers who vacation with their feline companions say they have encountered an anti-cat bias around the world. They come across it in airports and on planes, at hotels and vacation rentals. The owners say they must often overcome hurdles to earn the same trust and acceptance granted to dogs.

“This is discrimination,” said Anna Karsten, a France-based travel blogger who has faced a double standard when traveling with her Ragdoll, Poofy. “It’s a higher risk, apparently, which, if you think about it, is outrageous. The cat is literally going to sleep, but the dog might destroy the entire room if it’s stressed.”

During check-in at a rental in the Dutch city of Leiden, Karsten had to provide references that Poofy was a model guest. Stung by a previous incident involving cat pee, the apartment’s owner said the family would have to keep Poofy in a “cage.”

After several minutes of negotiations, the two sides agreed to sequester the cat in the bathroom whenever the family was out. Karsten abided by the rule the first day but eventually left the door ajar. By the end of the week-long stay, the host had experienced a change of heart.

“She loved the cat,” Karsten said triumphantly.

REFERENCES??  The lesson is that if you travel with your cat, be sure that any “pet friendly” accommodations your reserve consider cats as adequate “pets.”  Actually, cats are not pets but owners, and we are their staff.

*********************

We all know of Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office .  He was rescued from the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, and has lived at 10 Downing Street for 15 years. Larry is now 19: technically an old cat, but still quite spry, running about outside the Prime Minister’s home and the object of many photographs. He’s gone through five Prime Ministers!

Here’s a 15-minute BBC News video showing seven times that Larry caused mischief.  He’s not a very good mouser; he’s said to have caught only 3 in his 15-year tenure.  Don’t miss Obama’s meeting Larry at 5:40.  There are many comments about Larry from Prime Ministers, journalists, and so on.

This too is an excellent video.  If you want more Larry, his Twitter feed is here.  Don’t miss the BBC journalist Helen Catt (that’s right!), who comments throughout.

Lagniappe: Larry turned 19 a few weeks ago.  Here is what he wants to tell us on his birthday, including how old he’d be in human years.

Extra lagniappe: Japanese road signs. Slow down for cats!

Still more lagniappe from the Facebook group Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit: A new and excellent Swedish law.  If we have any Swedish readers, please confirm this.

New simulations reveal that both H1N1 and COVID-19 spread across U.S. cities in a matter of weeks, often before officials realized what was happening. Major travel hubs helped drive rapid nationwide transmission, with air travel playing a bigger role than daily commuting. Unpredictable transmission patterns made real-time forecasting especially difficult. The study highlights why early detection systems are critical for slowing future pandemics.

Today we have urban wildlife, from Marcel van Oijen in Edinburgh.  His notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Urban wildlife in Scotland: Vertebrates

Marcel van Oijen

 

We live in Edinburgh South and our back garden borders a small woodland. The following pictures were all taken in the garden over a number of years, but I sorted them by month, from January to November.

Foxes (Vulpes vulpes) are among the first visitors to our garden each year. They have become very common in British cities. There are about 400,000 foxes in the U.K., and roughly one third are city-dwellers.

Magpies (Pica pica) come in droves to our garden. They are fascinating to watch but tend to frighten off the songbirds and steal their food:

Occasionally we see sparrowhawks (Accipiter nisus) plucking pigeons apart until what is left is small enough to fly away with. The magpies resent the sparrowhawks invading their territory, and gang up against them:

Carrion crows (Corvus corone) usually come in pairs; this one was an exception. The way it walked, paused, looked around, nodded its head, inspecting everything – it all suggested confidence and cleverness:

We do not often see Great Spotted Woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major), but regularly hear them pecking away when walking in the woodland behind the garden:

The mammals we see the most are our American friends, the Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis). They tend to chase ach other away, but these two were friendly, maybe young siblings:

We are always surprised to see amphibians because there is not much open water in our neighbourhood. This summer visitor is a Common Frog (Rana temporaria):

Wood mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) are almost as acrobatic as the squirrels, and we see them climbing up the stems of plants and jumping onto the birdfeeders:

We don’t see hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) often enough – we would like them to eat more of the slugs that invade our house from the garden:

This is the more common behaviour of the Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis): entering supposedly squirrel-proof birdfeeders and being nasty to each other:

We often see pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) around the golf course one kilometer away, but last November was the first time one came to see us:

Strange as it may seem, the prospects of finding advanced high-tech aliens somewhere in the cosmos will likely depend on finding exoplanets that like our own earth harbor large amounts of accessible energy-dense coal.

An international team of researchers have published two papers that reveal a new model for how the magnetic field of the Milky Way evolved.

Recently published data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) of the galaxy Messier 87 facilitate new insights into the direct environment of the central supermassive black hole. Measured differences in the radio light on different spatial scales can be explained by the presence of an as of yet undetected jet at frequencies of 230 Gigahertz at spatial scales comparable to the size of the black hole. The most likely location of the jet base is determined through detailed modeling.

Isn’t the FLRW metric way generic? It lays out the basic assumptions and tells us how the universe should behave, but it doesn’t say WHAT the universe is made of.

The flow of ice at Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica has sped up dramatically due to the disintegration of the ice shelf in front of it, and this could lead to faster sea level rise

The old Groundhog Day trope is this, “As the tradition goes, if the groundhog sees his shadow, we will have six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t, an early spring is coming.”  The holiday is celebrated on February 2, and over the years the tradition has come to center on Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog who lives in the eponymous Pennsylvania town.

Every year on February 2, a group of top-hatted men called the “Inner Circle” haul the hapless rodent out of his hibernation, slap him down on a lectern like a pancake, tap him with a cane, and then wait a bit. Then they lift the groundhog into the air and proclaim, via a poem, whether or not he saw his shadow. Here’s this year’s prediction: Phil did see his shadow (so they surmised) so we’re in for a long winter:

Of course the exercise is ludicrous, and Phil’s record of predictions is abysmal: about a 35%-40% accuracy.  But I can prove from first principles that this exercise is futile from the get-go.

Here:

To determine if the groundhog sees his shadow there must be

1.)  The possibility of a shadow (i.e., the sun must be shining), and

2.) If there is a shadow, the groundhog must have the ability to see it, and we have to know if he did or did not.

But if there is no shadow, as when the weather is overcast like this year, then the groundhog has nothing to see or not see, so he clearly cannot see his shadow whether or not he looks.  Thus, if the weather is overcast (as it was this year), you don’t need a damn groundhog: there will be an early spring. (As you see above, he is said to have seen his shadow! Oy!)

If there IS a shadow, then you have to determine whether the groundhog saw it.  I doubt that we’re able to do this, as Punxsutawney Phil is not trained to indicate whether or not he saw his own shadow. Thus if it’s sunny, the prediction becomes indeterminate.

Therefore there is only one possible predictive outcome, and that depends solely on whether the weather is sunny or not. The sole prediction is this (here it comes): no shadows possible, therefore an early Spring. That is, of course, bogus as well.

You could diagram this with a decision tree, but I think my logic here is impeccable given our inability to detect qualia in groundhogs. And this indicates why Phil’s bogus “predictions”, based on what the top-hatted men say, have been so inaccurate.

Science funding cuts in the UK are expected to be a "devastasting blow" for physics research, affecting international projects such as particle detection experiments at CERN

Humans have the ability to do “secondary representations”: that is, to pretend that one object or action is actually different from a real one. This can also be called “pretense”. Examples are children’s “tea parties” in which they use empty pots and toy cups, pretending to drink from the empty cups while knowing they are empty. Then they can pour pretend tea into one of two cups, and when asked to drink will drink from the “pretend full” cup. Or they can have sword fights with sticks, pretending that the sticks are real weapons while knowing they are not.

Secondary representations of states that are only imagined start early (some experiments suggest at 15 months), and the ability to imagine things that haven’t happened, or aren’t real, surely underlie much of human behavior involving planning for the future or imagining what someone might be thinking.  The authors of a new paper in Science (see below) argue that no such abilities to “pretend” or have secondary representations are known from any species save humans. (I am not sure about this. As I recall some birds caching food are known to unhide it and re-cache it elsewhere if they see other birds looking on: something that seems like an ability represent another bird’s state of mind.)

And there is anecdotal evidence that chimps can do this.  For example, female chimps have been seen to hold and carry sticks as if they were their babies; this involves imagining that the stick is a real baby (that only females do this suggests sexually differentiated behavior).  Or if chimps have played with blocks, sometimes they’ve been observed to drag around imaginary strings of blocks.  This and other data suggest that some primates can have imaginative representations, but the existing data, say Bastos et al., don’t rule out other explanations.

They thus did three experiments on a single, human-acclimated male bonobo at a facility in Iowa. The bonobo, named Kanzi, was 43 years old and died the year after the experiment (no, he didn’t pretend to be dead!). Kanzi has his own Wikipedia page, which notes his abilities:

Kanzi is well known for his noteworthy cognitive abilities. He had a very well-documented linguistic understanding of the human language. He is believed to be the first non-human great ape to understand and comprehend spoken English. In addition, he was also heavily documented for his understanding and usage of symbols to communicate, usually through lexigrams and partial ASL. The vast amount of information that researchers gathered from Kanzi created a significant impact for the fields of linguistics and cognitive science. Kanzi’s behavior and abilities have been the topic of research published in scientific journals, as well as reports in popular media. He died in 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Click below to go to the paper (pdf here), or you can read a summary of the study in the NYT, written by Alexa Robles-Gil, here (archived here)

Three experiments were involved, but the second was really a control for the first.

First, Kanzi was prepared for the pretense test by letting him learn about a real object: fruit juice that could be poured into glasses from a pitcher. In 18 trials, real juice was poured into one of two cups from a pitcher. Kanzi, who had been trained to point at what he wanted to have, was then asked, “Where’s  the juice?” He was successful in all trials.

Then the pretense experiment began. The same pouring was done, but from an empty pitcher into both of two empty cups.  Then one of the pretend-filled cups was poured back into the pitcher, so it would be pretend-empty while the other was pretend-full. Again, Kanzi was asked “Where’s the juice?”  In 50 trials, involving no reinforcement of any kind for making the correct choice, Kanzi chose the pretend-full cup 34 times and the pretend-empty cup 16 times, a highly significant deviation from an expectation of 50:50 under the null hypothesis. This showed that Kanzi could track where pretend juice was.

The second experiment used a cup of real juice next to an empty cup, and the empty cup was pretend-filled from an empty pitcher. Then Kanzi was asked, “Which one do you want?” Kanzi wanted the real juice in 14 out of 18 trials, again, a significant deviation from 50:50 under the null hypothesis. This showed that Kanzi didn’t simply believe that there was real juice in the empty cups in the first experiment, for he was able to distinguish real juice from pretend-poured juice.

The third experiment was like the second, except involving grapes. First, Kanzi was “trained to indicate the location of a real grape in one of two transparent jars after observing the experimenter sample a grape from a plastic container and place it into one of the jars and perform a control action on the other jar.” When asked to choose one jar to get the grape, he was successful in every one of 18 trials.

Then Kanzi was given pretend grapes to choose. From the paper;

In probe trials, the experimenter pretended to sample a grape from an empty container, then placed it inside one of the two jars, before repeating the same action on the other side. Then, one of the jars was pretend-emptied, and Kanzi was asked, “where’s the grape?” Kanzi succeeded at this conceptual replication even more quickly than in the first experiment. He correctly indicated the location of the remaining pretend grape above chance, in 31 out of 45 unreinforced probe trials

Again, Kanzi was highly successful at the juice and grape trials, able to recognize a pretend action of pouring and emptying juice, and determining which of two jars containing pretend-grapes had had the grape removed. In other words, he was playing tea party, and highly successfully.

This one chimp, then, was able to conceptualize pretend actions as real ones.

There are a number of possibilities not involving secondary representation that the authors say could be happening here. For example, apes like Kanzi who have been trained to recognize symbols to represent objects (as he was), might be better at communicating their wishes than are wild apes. Or symbol training could actually create the ability to do secondary representation. It’s hard to rule out these possibilities since to do such experiments an ape has to be “enculturated” by interaction with humans, and Kanzi was surely highly enculturated.

But if the authors are right that these experiments show that apes can have secondary representation, playing along with “pretense”, that opens up a world of possibilities of thinking about the cognitive abilities of apes (and other animals). The authors dwell on this at the end:

Secondary representations underlie many other complex cognitive capacities, such as imagining future possibilities (20) and mental state attribution (13). Our results may therefore help to interpret other bodies of data that have been hampered by an apparent logical problem (32). Finding that a bonobo can generate secondary representations in pretense contexts increases the likelihood that these representations are available for other cognitive functions. This finding reinforces growing evidence that apes track decoupled mental states, such as beliefs, rather than simply reading behavior (25, 28, 31). It also increases the likelihood that secondary representations could subserve future-oriented behavior (24, 35, 50–53), whose underlying representations have not yet been established.

In conclusion, our findings suggest that some nonhuman animals can generate secondary representations that are decoupled from reality, and that this capacity was likely within the cognitive potential of our last common ancestor with other apes, which lived 6 to 9 million years ago.

It is no surprise that our closest relative (along with chimps) could do this. As Darwin posited in 1871, our own behaviors and mental states evolved from those present in our common ancestors.

Kanzi died suddenly the year after the experiment, simply collapsing. He apparently suffered a heart attack, as he had a history of heart issues and had previously been obese. You can read about his other training in representing objects with keyboard symbols at the Wikipedia site.

From Wikipedia, here’s Kanzi in 2006 (he died in 2025):

William H. Calvin, PhD, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons