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Today’s photos come from reader Jan Malik, who took pictures of wildflowers in the Catskills. Jan’s photos and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge them by clicking on them.

During my recent hike in the Catskills, near Woodstock, NY, I found some spring flowers, ephemerals as they call them. They are hardy plants that use the narrow window between snow disappearance and tree leaves developing to get nearly all of their photosynthesis done for the year. They seem delicate but they need to withstand temperatures well below freezing – it was snowing on the second day of my hike and these plants weathered it just fine. To use this quick growth strategy, these plants have to be perennials, with underground roots, tubers or bulbs preserving the nutrients. All of these are native to the Northeast – there is no shortage of “undocumented” plants in the Catskills but I haven’t included them here.

Bluets (Houstonia caerulea), not so common in the Catskills. They are more widespread in acidic regions like the White Mountains of New Hampshire or generally in acidic soil:

Red trillium (Trillium erectum), with their flowers pointing down (I had to get low to take this picture) despite the second part of their binomial; that part of the name refers to an upright stalk. Their close cousin, the white-petaled Painted trillium is rare in the Catskills, preferring more acidic soils of the Adirondacks:

Spring beauties (Claytonia virginica), were everywhere, their flowers opening as soon as the temperature was high enough for the small insects to fly. They have a variable amount of pink in the petals, some plants produce them very pale and some very pink:

Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) have flower shape quite similar to the Bleeding hearts, and they are indeed in the same family Papaveraceae:

Downy yellow violet (Viola pubescens). I think the black stripes have the same function as landing strips on an airfield, guiding pollinators to nectar:

There were many blue violets, this one is probably a Selkirk’s Violet (Viola selkirkii):

Canada violet (Viola canadensis) has flowers growing from a tall stalk, unlike other violets. There were other violets too in that wood, each species with unique preference for moisture, sun exposure, acidity etc.:

A lovely plant, Catskills’ specialty – ramps (Allium tricoccum), or wild leeks as some call them. They don’t bloom until late May or June, when leaves will have withered. In early spring the leaves are juicy, fragrant and tender, can be stewed, fried or just eaten raw with a sandwich. I collect them by picking one leaf from a plant (there are two to three leaves per plant), which should not kill it. The underground bulb is also delicious, reportedly, but I could never bring myself to kill it. Ramps developed their chemical defences (thiosulfinates) against animal browsing, and while deer eat it only in an emergency, for great apes it is perversely a culinary attraction. Waking up to a chill morning and leaning out of the tent to collect a few leaves for breakfast is what makes early spring hiking in the Catskills so special:

Hobble-bush (Viburnum lantanoides) flowers grow from a woody shrub. The plant can spread vegetatively, by sending its twigs low on the ground and forming roots. Hobblebush thicket can be a real obstacle for an off-trail hiker, but the plant redeems itself by developing tasty berries (ripe when black) in fall. These berries are in short supply though as thrushes get to them first:

Wild oats (Uvularia sessilifolia), not much to do with cereals, just droopy leaves resembling ears of real oats:

Dwarf ginseng (Panax trifolius) has edible underground tubers. These plants are too rare in the Catskills to dig one up and try cooking it, though:

Crinkle root (Cardamine diphylla). It is a member of the mustard family and its leaves are edible (as a salad or stewed) when young:

Blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) in its purple-petal variant. Later in summer, the plant will produce round dark-blue berries, somewhat similar to individual grapes. They look quite attractive but are said to be poisonous. Always eager to engage in culinary biology, I once tried to bite on a berry and can assure you there is no risk of being poisoned – the taste is so awful that swallowing it is out of the question:

Trout lily (Erythronium americanum) gets its name from spots on its leaves, which are not unlike those on the fish. There were plenty of those plants in the open Catskill forest, but only a small portion of them are in bloom. They need to grow for a couple years, collecting nutrients in their tubers before becoming mature:

Mars has lots of glaciers located along its mid-latitudes. We’ve known this for years thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO’s) SHARAD sounder. But, despite all of the excellent data it’s managed to gather, SHARAD doesn’t have high enough resolution to accurately measure the boundary between the glacier itself and the rocky material that has been deposited on top of it over the course of billions of years. A new study, published in the journal JGR Planets, details a potential method of finding that boundary—by using a drone.

A biopsy of a woman's cancer seems to have triggered an immune response against the tumour, putting her into remission

One of the best-performing models in cosmology is also one with the least physical rationale behind it. Columnist Leah Crane says this leaves us with a puzzle that could make or break physics as we know it

The more years go by, the more Americans believe that ordinary airliners are secretly spraying chemicals for some hidden nefarious purpose.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A Closer Look at a Viral Claim

The post Can Ivermectin and Mebendazole Treat Cancer? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Doug Whitney has a genetic mutation that means he should have developed Alzheimer’s disease decades ago, but his long-term work in hot engine rooms may have protected him in a similar way to sauna therapy

Doug Whitney has a genetic mutation that means he should have developed Alzheimer’s disease decades ago, but his long-term work in hot engine rooms may have protected him in a similar way to sauna therapy

Two quantum computers and two supercomputers teamed up to break the record for the biggest molecule yet to be simulated using quantum hardware

A new quantum physics study reveals that simply changing a magnetic field over time can unlock entirely new forms of matter that don’t exist under normal conditions. By carefully “driving” materials with timed magnetic shifts, researchers created exotic quantum states that could be far more stable and resistant to errors—one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing. This breakthrough suggests that the future of quantum technology may depend not just on what materials are made of, but how they’re manipulated in time.

A new quantum physics study reveals that simply changing a magnetic field over time can unlock entirely new forms of matter that don’t exist under normal conditions. By carefully “driving” materials with timed magnetic shifts, researchers created exotic quantum states that could be far more stable and resistant to errors—one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing. This breakthrough suggests that the future of quantum technology may depend not just on what materials are made of, but how they’re manipulated in time.

Our Moon is still guarding its secrets decades after the last of the Apollo missions lifted off the lunar surface. Lunar scientists still puzzle over just when and how a giant Earth impactor formed our Moon, completely altering our early Earth in the process.

Bill Maher is tired of heaing about stuff like the Overton window, MKUltra, the “shadow docket” of the Supreme Court, looksmaxxing, “heuristic,” “cognitive offloading” and other examples of what he calls “pedantic bullshit.” (But he really hates the Overton Window. His curmudgeonly diatribe segues into a Dr. Seuss-like poem. He winds up arguing that his brain having been filled with useless knowledge—like the names of all the Kardashians and the characters in “Friends”—is “violence.” Indeed!

The guests you see are Financial Times editor Gillian Tett and NYT op-ed columnist Bret Stephens.

Io is a world of extremes. It is by far the most volcanically active world in our solar system. Being continually squeezed in the never-ending tug-of-war between Jupiter and its larger satellites will do that to a moon. As a result, Io has over 400 “paterae” - volcanic depressions that spew lava up onto its surface. And, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and utilizing data from Juno’s Jupiter InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) tool, we have been massively underestimating the power output of those paterae for decades.

It is appealing to think something as simple as honey could cure a cold or prevent hay fever, but is there evidence to back up honey’s health benefits? Columnist Alice Klein finds that it has legitimate medicinal uses, depending on the type of honey you’ve got

A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first represented their speech with written words

A 500-kilometre-wide object in a similar orbit to Pluto challenges our assumptions about small bodies in the outer solar system

Scientists are using sunlight to turn plastic waste into clean fuels like hydrogen, offering a breakthrough solution to both pollution and energy challenges. While still in development, the approach could transform trash into a valuable resource for a low-carbon future.

I haven’t looked at Natasha Hausdorff‘s videos in a while, but you’ll remember her as a British lawyer, an expert in international law, and a “pro bono legal director of the advocacy group, UK Lawyers for Israel.” Here is her reaction to the latest anti-Jewish violence and anti-Israel protests in England, both of which have become regular events.  Here she goes up against Owen Jones,  left-wing “British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist, author and political activist,” whose Wikipedia entry shows a photo of him wearing a Palestinian flag shirt. The channel is LBC, or Leading British Conversation.

The question is whether the pro-Palestinian marches in the UK should be banned because because they fall outside the boundaries of free speech.  Hausdorff says they are violations because they constitute “hate speech” that incites violence against Jews, while Jones says that they’re not only legal, but a necessary outlet for opinions that Israel is committing genocide against Gaza. (He claims that Israel has killed 100,000 Gazans, which is surely untrue.) Jones is a big proponent of the “genocide canard”, and while I am not sure whether the marches violate British speech law, I agree with her that Israel has not committed genocide against Gazans. Anybody who knows what genocide is and how the IDF operates knows that’s a lie.  But of course Jones has nothing bad to say against Hamas.

In response to Jones, Hausdorff can’t come up with anything that the Israeli government has done to justify the accusations of genocide (she doesn’t mention the West Bank, but may have done so somewhere in her talks or writing). But she correctly notes that the accusations of genocide aren’t being raised against the noncombatant deaths produced by the U.S. in WWII—and in that case, as in virtually all other wars, the ratio of noncombatant deaths to combatant deaths is much higher than seen in Gaza.

Jones cites several academics and “genocide scholars” who back the “g-word” as what Israel is doing in Gaza He adds that one can find identifiable Jews participating in the marches on the Palestinian side.  He places the blame for hunger and destruction on Gaza squarely on the doorstep of Israel, while Hausdorff says that in contrast, it’s the fault of Hamas, which has embedded itself among civilians. Hausdorff argues that accusations of things like “starvation” are untrue, and also claims that the protests are a product of the “Hamas propaganda machine, ” which I think is an unwise accusation even though it is to some degree true: some of the figures and accusations bandied about by the protestors and by Jones and his experts come from Hamas.

Jones seems to argue largely from authority, citing none other than the Lancet and The Economist for the casualty figures, which must have come from Hamas.  Hausdorff says that she’d be willing to debate the cited pro-Palestinian “genocide scholars” any time, but so far they’ve refused to do so.

Here are the notes added to the YouTube site by the UK Lawyers for Israel. I’m not whether if Hausdorff was interrupted in an unwarranted matter: you be the judge.

This recording includes comments on whether restrictions should now be placed on anti-Israel marches in London and other British cities, as well as strongly disputed allegations regarding casualty figures in Gaza, war crimes and genocide.

Unfortunately, Natasha Hausdorff was repeatedly interrupted by the interviewer when she tried to set out the inaccuracy of these allegations. It seems that many interviewers cannot stand to hear the expression of any view that supports Israel – as soon as a person interviewed starts to deploy facts contradicting the false propaganda the interviewer interrupts to prevent the truth being told.

For details of Gaza casualties according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry down to 10 November 2025, see this thread by Gabriel Epstein: https://x.com/GabrielEpsteinX/status/…. This shows that even according to this information (which may itself be distorted by Hamas propaganda):

1. A much higher % of males of fighting age died than of females of the same ages, indicating that Israeli military action targeted combatants and was not indiscriminate.

2. A much higher % of male teenagers died than of female teenagers, indicating that a significant number teenagers, who are classified as children, were killed because they were combatants.

3. The claim initiated by Hamas and disgracefully maintained by the BBC, that 70% of those killed were women and children, is false.

The claim stated by Owen Jones, that the IDF has admitted that 83% of those killed were civilians, is completely bogus, as Chief Magistrate Goldspring found in paragraph 81a of this recent ruling: https://www.uklfi.com/wp-content/uplo…

The details provided by the Gaza Health Ministry do not identify how they died. They probably include around 10,000 who died of natural causes: see Salo Aizenberg https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/2021…. Thousands more may well have been killed by Palestinian fire – rockets falling short, explosive devices, and crossfire. They certainly include 471 allegedly killed in the explosion outside Al Ahli hospital caused by a Palestinian rocket that fell short: see https://www.uklfi.com/false-al-ahli-c…. Well over a thousand other Palestinian rockets also fell short; each of them may have killed dozens of people.

Finally, here’s a related email I got yesterday from the editors of a small publication in the Pacific Northwest that has clearly fallen for some of the Big Lies. I am accused of being a histrionic Zionist, a proponent of settler colonialism—and pro-genocide (they call it “modern Holocaust denial”) as well. Their arguments are largely the same as those of Jones, even citing casualty figures taken from medical journals.  They also try to tell me how to write this website. Finally, they seem unaware of my criticisms of religious Judaism, made on this site as well as in Faith Versus Fact, so they haven’t done their homework. But they don’t really care if I’ve also criticized Jewish superstition: their point is that I am pro-Israel, which they see as immoral.

At any rate, they can take a hike. Their email will not change how I “write my blog”.  The email is indented:

Reading your blog, we were appreciative of the fact that you seemed to promote science and counter narratives from the religious establishments. However, your inability to separate your own Zionist histrionics from what should have been strictly an antitheistic, science-focused platform ruins the experience for anyone who isn’t A) a genocide apologist, B) deeply insecure about their ethnic identity to the point that they associate it with a 20th century settler-colonialist project, or C), both. Does your criticism of religion only extend to Christianity and Islam, or do you take on the Jewish religious establishment too? The most tangible and powerful form of that, of course, being the state of Israel, which reputed medical journals estimate has killed close to 100,000 civilians just since 10/23. Atheism today needs smart, conscientious voices to lead, not modern Holocaust deniers. We won’t change your views with this email, but maybe we can change the way you write your blog to not repel people (a hopefully increasing majority) who are appalled by the Zionist crimes of ethnic cleansing and mass displacement.

I came across a few news items that I could possibly write about today and couldn’t decide which to cover, so I will write about all of them, since they all relate to renewable energy. The first is a new study comparing direct air capture (DAC) to installing new wind and solar. This is a direct comparison between these two options, to see which provides the most bang for the buck.

DAC involves taking CO2 directly out of the atmosphere in order to mitigate carbon release through burning fossil fuels. If this technology were sufficiently efficient it could be hugely useful in reducing future climate change. This is the only approach that can potentially have a negative carbon footprint, actually reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Other technologies simply reduce the amount released. This negative carbon factor is highly attractive since it could theoretically zero out our carbon release and even take us back in time to an atmosphere with less CO2. Right now, it should be noted, we are not only continuing to release massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, the amount continues to increase. In 2025 the world emitted 38.1 billion tonnes, of carbon, a 1.1% increase over 2024.

But there are problems with DAC – it is currently not very efficient and is not scalable enough to have enough of an impact. Also, the efficiency of DAC depends heavily on how you power it – if you connect it to the grid and there is some fossil fuel energy on that grid, you may actually increase CO2 rather than decreasing it. Ideally DAC would be powered entirely by low carbon energy sources. This is why critics of DAC argue that it simply makes no sense to deploy this technology before we have decarbonized the energy sector, which we should do first.

In the current study they ask a critical question – if we directly compare DAC to deploying wind and solar, which provides the greater reduction in energy pollution per dollar spent. They also considered both the environmental and health impacts. They further considered three scenarios – current DAC technology, significant advances in DAC technology, and a massive breakthrough in technology. They also did their analysis for the entire US and for different regions. What they found was that deploying renewable energy was more cost effective for every region of the country under the current technology and significant advances scenarios. In the massive breakthrough scenario the results were mixed by regions, with a slight net advantage country-wide to DAC.

In my opinion this just adds to the conclusion that we should first decarbonize the grid with a combination of low carbon energy sources, including maximizing wind and solar while maintaining or even expanding our nuclear infrastructure, and only then invest in significant DAC. We can continue to research DAC in the meantime, and then deploy only when it gets significantly more efficient, in order to offset industries that are difficult to decarbonize.

There are a couple of solar power updates worth discussing as well. The first is that we are getting very close to commercializing tandem silicon and perovskite solar cells. Silicon is the current standard, with most commercial panels at 22-23% efficiency, with high-end panels at about 26%. This is pushing up against the theoretical limit for silicon (32%), and many experts think we will not get much closer to this theoretical limit because of some unavoidable sources of energy loss. This is where perovskite comes in – this is widely considered to be the next material to replace silicon in high efficiency solar cells. But even better, silicon and perovskite absorb light at different frequencies, so when you combine them in tandem you get even higher efficiencies. The current record is produce by LONGi (a Chinese solar panel company), with a commercial tandem panel with verified 34.6% efficiency. They plan to make these panels available in 2027-2028. Also, the theoretical upper limit of efficiency of this tandem design is 43%.

However, perovskite still has a longevity problem. For these tandem panels the silicon component lasts 20-25 years with minimal efficiency loss. The perovskite, however, only lasts 10-12 years. This is insufficient for residential use, but still useful for grid-scale projects. With large projects it is cost effective to pay for the higher end panels, and replacing them with even better panels in 10 years is not a bad investment anyway. But home owners don’t want to do this. However, there is a great deal of research into extending the lifespan of perovskite panels (for example). Another Chinese company, GLC, has announced a tandem solar cell with a 25 year warranty, and with an efficiency of 26%. We are quickly heading for panels with both efficiencies in the mid 30s and a lifespan of 25 years.

The availability of relatively cheap and highly efficient solar panels has also given rise to a new industry – plug-in solar (also called balcony solar). These are stand-alone panels you simply plug into a regular outlet, which can both accept and deliver energy. That’s really it. You have to mount it somewhere, but most people do not put it on their roof but rather on a stand or attached to their balcony or similar structure. This is useful for renters, apartments, mobile homes, remote locations like cabins, or even to supplement existing rooftop installations. In general you will recoup the cost of the panel in reduced energy bills in seven years, while the panel itself should last for 30 years. These are already very popular in Germany where they have been used for a decade without any safety issues.

Utilities companies in the US have been trying to slow their adoption, arguing that they present safety issues. For example, if they are sending current to the grid they could endanger utility workers. However, this is likely a diversionary tactic to slow the adoption of a competing technology. Units are already designed not to send energy to the grid when there is a power outage. The safety record in Germany is pretty solid evidence that they can be used safely. For most users plug-in solar would not power their entire home, but would shave money off their energy bill and reduce their carbon footprint.

The great thing about plug-in solar is that there are no issues with grid stability since most users will be simply reducing their baseload demand, not producing excess energy that has to go to the grid. But because they can be widely distributed, these small reductions in grid energy demand can be significant. This could be a useful supplement to grid-scale and rooftop solar. And of course they can be especially useful when paired with home battery backup, or even just an EV.

With recent events in the Mideast, including national average gas prices at $4.45 per gallon and electricity costs up 7.4% over last year, it seems like a good time to push for energy technologies that are not reliant on a vulnerable infrastructure partly in unstable parts of the world. These events also highlight that we can never achieve true energy independence simply by producing more oil, as oil prices are set as a global commodity. Solar, however, can be true energy independence, harvested right where it is used. Of course, this raises an entirely different discussion about maintaining domestic renewable energy technology and raw material supply chains. This is why invested in the technology of tomorrow rather than doubling down on fossil fuels is so critical.

The post Some Renewable Energy Updates first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.