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Astronomers using data from the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) have discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago.

Engineers love a good practical challenge, especially when it comes to spaceflight. But there’s one particular challenge facing the crewed missions of the near future that scares mission planners above almost all others - fire. For decades, we’ve relied on a NASA test known as NASA-STD-6001B to screen material flammability for flight. But space is much more complicated than an Earth-bound test provides for. A new paper from researchers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center and Johnson Space Center and Case Western Reserve University details a planned mission to test the flammability of materials on the Moon’s surface - where they expect flame to act much differently than it does here on Earth.

Facilitated communication, or “FC,” is the supposed ability of people who can’t speak and are severely handicapped to “communicate” by having a “helper” guide them in pointing out letters or words.  Wikipedia describes it this way:

Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique which claims to allow non-verbal people, such as those with autism, to communicate. The technique involves a facilitator guiding the disabled person’s arm or hand in an attempt to help them type on a keyboard or other such device that they are unable to properly use if unfacilitated.

There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person. The facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board and dowsing rods.  Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object).  In addition, in numerous cases disabled persons have been assumed by facilitators to be typing a coherent message while the patient’s eyes were closed or while they were looking away from or showing no particular interest in the letter board.

James Todd called facilitated communication “the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities.”

And indeed, I thought FC had been discredited a long time ago. (I posted about it here in 2017 when the idea was used as an excuse for sexual assault.) But no, it’s reemerged with the publication of new bestselling novel, Upward Bound, touted by, among others, the New York Times, which lately has a real penchant for woo. The novel (#305 on the Amazon overall list today) has drawn huge attention because the author, 28 year old Woody Brown, is severely autistic and cannot speak. Yet he got a degree in English from UCLA followed by an MFA degree at Columbia, doing all assignments through a facilitator—his mother Mary.  She herself worked as a “story analyst for Hollywood studios.”

I’ve put a video below showing Brown “writing” by pointing at a letter board held by his mother, who then interprets the pointing. It’s not convincing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The novel is below (screenshot goes to publisher).

And yes, the NYT appears to have bought the whole thing, assuming that Woody actually wrote the novel. Read their article by clicking below, or finding the piece archived here).

A couple of excerpts from the NYT:

Woody Brown knew he wanted to be a writer when he was 8 years old. Around that age, he made up stories about his alter ego, Cop Woody, a hero who went around saving people.

The tales stunned his mother, Mary Brown. She’d been reading to him since he was a baby, but never imagined that he could create his own elaborate plots.

As a toddler, Woody was diagnosed with severe autism. Doctors concluded he couldn’t process language, and said it was pointless to explain things to him or talk to him in complex sentences. Whenever Woody spoke, it sounded like shrieks and gibberish.

But Mary came to realize that her son understood more than he appeared to. He would become hysterical if they deviated from their daily routine, but if she explained why they had to stop at Target before getting lunch at McDonalds, he would calmly follow her into the store. At 5, Woody learned to communicate by pointing at letters to spell out words, using a laminated card. He began responding to Mary’s questions, first with single-word answers, and later with short sentences. When he started spelling out his Cop Woody stories, Mary recognized some of the plots, which were lifted from the headlines. Woody had been following the news on the TV and radio.

“That’s how Mom figured out that I was listening to everything,” Woody told me when we met on a recent morning at his parents’ home in Monrovia, Calif., where he lives. To express this, Woody tapped letters on a board with his right index finger, while Mary, who was seated next to him on the couch, followed his finger taps and repeated the words aloud.

When he learned to communicate by spelling, it felt like an escape hatch had opened, Woody explained.

“Miraculous discovery,” he spelled. “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open — left ajar, not flung wide, because the majority of people still doubted me.”

. . .While not strictly autobiographical, the stories in “Upward Bound” are shaped by Woody’s experience. He describes the agony of being unable to share his thoughts or control his verbal and physical tics, and the frustration of being underestimated by people who look at him and see an uncomprehending, mentally disabled person.

“I wanted to reach neurotypical readers, the well intentioned people who don’t realize that we are the same inside,” Woody explained. “I have all the thoughts, dreams, longings and intelligence as any neurotypical person. I just present a little differently.”

The author of the piece, Alexandra Alter, visited Woody and his mom, and describes the interview as if Woody himself were answering her questions by pointing at the letterboard. The only reference to the possibility that it’s Mary rather than Woody who is speaking is this:

Some of the communication methods Mukhopadhyay teaches have drawn criticism from language experts who argue that the person holding the board might be influencing or misinterpreting comments from a disabled person. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association doesn’t recommend the method, and put out a statement in 2019 warning that the resulting words might not reflect the disabled person’s intentions.

There are also skeptics who doubt someone as severely autistic as Woody can form and express sophisticated thoughts, much less write a novel.

Mary said she isn’t surprised some people question Woody’s abilities — it took her years to recognize what he was capable of. But she bristles at critics who say the way they communicate is harmful or manipulative.

“How on earth am I harming him?” she said.

Mary has also faced questions over whether she’s influencing or shaping Woody’s writing, which she insists she isn’t. When Woody is conversing, his finger flies across the board, but when he’s writing, Mary makes him spell out each word slowly. He can also type on a keyboard, but prefers to write with the letter board, because his poor fine motor skills make it hard to hit the right keys, and the time spent fixing typos makes him lose focus.

That’s the only reference in this long, glowing article to the possibility of facilitated communication, and there is no reference to the long, sad history of FC—a history that has made investigators almost universally say that it’s the facilitator and not the disabled person who is doing the “speaking.” (For a free Frontline documentary showing this, go here.)

Now it’s time for you to see Woody communicate. This video comes from NBC’s Today show, and Woody’s novel is breathlessly pronounced “deeply heartfelt and moving” and “authentic” by Jenna Bush Hager (W.’s daughter). Pay attention to the pointing by Woody and interpretation by Mary.  Seriously, I cannot see at all a string of meaningful words.

As one correspondent wrote, “[Woody] is frequently not looking at the board while pointing, AND, when they show what he’s pointing to, it doesn’t correspond at all to actual words. I’m actually blown away that they showed this so clearly.” Indeed!  Didn’t NBC get a bit dubious about this, much less the NYT, whose reporter saw the same thing?  All I can say is that if this is really facilitated communication from Woody, it would be the first real facilitated communication ever documented. But it wasn’t tested, as they did no test on Woody. (They could, example, test his abilities by having Mary interpret things that only Woody knows, or using another facilitator.)  Has Jenna even heard of facilitated communication?

Now I’m not ruling this out as authentic communication, but the demonstration above doesn’t increase my priors. Shame on the NBC for buying this without doubts.

Fortunately, at least two people wonder if Woody’s novel is his own composition or Mary’s. The first is Daniel Engber at the Atlantic, who wrote the critical article below (archived here if it’s paywalled).

Engber watched the NBC clip, and says this:

But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.

Katharine Beals, a linguist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania who has a son with autism, has studied Brown’s controversial method of communication since the early 2000s, and she has cataloged the ways in which it fails. She told me that she found the clip from NBC to be upsetting. Beals conceded that it can be hard in some cases to say whether such communication is real—but not in this one. “This isn’t subtle,” she said. “You can see that he’s not pointing to the letters.”

On YouTube, where the clip from NBC is posted, viewer comments are aggressive, ranging from ridicule to accusations of fraud. These are snap judgments based on a single, highly edited video; in the end, there is no way to prove or disprove from afar Brown’s capacity to write. But several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, have issued formal warnings against the use of Rapid Prompting, a training method for communication from which Brown’s approach is derived. “There is uncertainty regarding who does the spelling,” ASHA says. And given that the method may mislead, “children and their families can incur serious harm.”

Of course there is a strong desire by Mary, and all facilitated communicators, to believe that they’re merely translating someone else’s thoughts—all the more reason to do appropriate tests and controls.

More from Engber

I emailed Brown, directly and through his publisher, to request an interview and ask if he or his mother would explain the spelling process as it appeared on the Today show. I got an emailed statement back. “I can understand why people are curious—even skeptical—about my method of communication,” it said. The statement continues:

It is mysterious and confounding to see a severely autistic nonspeaker perform acts of scholarship and fiction writing if you don’t presume intelligence in a disabled person. I have been using the same green board since I was in middle school and I find the letters and colors very calming. A keyboard requires specific aim and is unforgiving of error. I have a distinct brain but imperfect aim. This may look chaotic but in this way I keep up a steady rhythm with my finger that helps me stay on track. I am no savant. I came to novel writing like most published authors. I have read many books, attended good colleges, and got my MFA in writing at one of the country’s best programs. The only difference is that I communicate in a different manner.

Clinicians quickly came to understand that the method was susceptible to a very powerful “Ouija-board effect”: A facilitator could unwittingly deliver subtle and subconscious prompts—gentle pressure on a person’s wrist, perhaps—that shaped the outcome of the process. When the typers were subjected to formal “message-passing tests,” in which they would be asked to name an object or a picture that they’d seen while their helper wasn’t in the room, they almost always failed. Even kids who had produced fluid written work seemed incapable, under those conditions, of saying anything at all.

By 1994, the method was broadly disavowed. Yet a core group of true believers continued to promote its use. The New Jersey professor was among them. So was Mary Brown. In 2011, Mary posted on an autism-community website that her son’s use of facilitated communication had “helped him keep up at grade level.” The post has since been taken down, and FC has given way in recent years to its purportedly more reliable offshoots: Rapid Prompting and a similar approach called Spelling to Communicate. Now, instead of holding the speller’s hand, most facilitators hold the letter board instead. At first glance, the risk of influence seems less acute.

But wait, another fan of pseudoscience likes it! Yep, it’s RFK, Jr.:

ASHA has described Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate as bearing “considerable similarity” to FC and thus as “pseudoscience.” But a formal disavowal by experts simply isn’t what it used to be. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared himself a fan of these methods: Doubters are delusional, he said in 2021; they remind him of doctors who still deny the harms of childhood vaccines. In January, Kennedy appointed two letter-board users and an expert trainer in Spelling to Communicate to the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, an audio series about nonspeaking autistic children who allegedly display their telepathic and clairvoyant powers via letter board has been listed among Apple’s most popular podcasts for more than a year.

Sales of Upward Bound are soaring too. Following the Today show segment, Brown’s book reached Amazon’s top-10 list for books of any kind. This was preceded by a platinum-level rollout that included starred advance reviews, awestruck and largely uncritical features in The New York Times and The Guardian, and testimonials from A-list novelists including Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Rivka Galchen, and Mona Simpson. This is the kind of marketing that any debut literary author would kill to have.

Critics of Rapid Prompting and related methods are aghast. “This really feels like a crescendo,” Beals said. “It’s really, really out of control.”

. . . The problem is, reasonable doubts about the book have been overlooked as well—by Penguin Random House and by the media outlets that have hyped it. (The dewy-eyed feature in the Times does provide, in passing, an attenuated paraphrase of ASHA’s statement about Rapid Prompting.) Then there is the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work. Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”

It’s always unwise to take something on faith, particularly something that has been previously discredited and whose present instantiation can be tested but wasn’t. Although Engber likes the book and recommends it, he’s dubious about authorship.  Likewise, I am not willing to accept Woody Brown as the author.

Neither is Freddie deBoer in the article he recently put up. Its title tells the tale (click to read):

deBoer is even more skeptical than Engber:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novel Upward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.

The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests…. This is the inconvenient, damning reality.

So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling,” which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.

The Times article never grapples with the evidence. Instead, it substitutes anecdote for science: the mother “realized” her son understood more than expected; the facilitator “saw tension evaporate.” But these are precisely the kinds of subjective impressions that controlled studies were designed to test and, where appropriate, falsify. The best we get from the review’s author, Alexandra Alter, as far as an acknowledgement of FC’s discredited reality lies in these paragraphs:

It goes on, but you get the points: Woody is likely not composing anything himself, the writing is probably due to his mother, the NYT and NBC are uber-credulous, and the buying public, eager to embrace woo and a feel-good story, is making the book a best seller. Oh, and this credulous acceptance of a method discredited for years is harmful to autistic people, to science, and to reason as a whole.’

deBoer spends a lot of space attacking the NYT, as he’s done in the past, but he does give some insight into why the paper is touting FC so hard:

As with so many recent bad publicshing decisions, rehabilitating FC reflects the paper’s increasing dependence on a subscriber-driven business model, where maintaining the sensibilities and emotional investments of its core readership – affluent brownstone liberals who would prefer the pleasant version of reality, thanks – often takes precedence over adversarial truth-telling. In an earlier era, when advertising and broad retail circulation were more central to its finances, the Times had greater latitude to challenge its most dedicated audience. Today, with digital subscribers a) the dominant revenue base and b) heavily drawn from demographics that are highly educated, high income, and progressive-leaning, there’s a clear incentive not to alienate a readership that is drawn to narratives of underdog triumphs and redemptive uplift. Facilitated communication fits neatly into that worldview, offering a reassuring story about disability that flatters the moral intuitions of well-meaning readers while sidestepping the far more difficult reality. The result is a kind of audience capture that encourages credulity precisely where skepticism is most needed. Who wants to read a downer story about genuinely non-verbal, deeply disabled people on their phone while they ride the 4 train uptown to take Kayleigh to her $20,000/year dance lessons?

This may well explain the Times‘s recent touting of religion, whose factual claims could also be seen as pseudoscientific (indeed, Ross Douthat’s evidence for God, presented in the NYT, is based on science).  It does no harm to criticize religion, for the NYT subscribers are likely soft on it. If they’re not believers, they’re “believers in belief”: people who aren’t themselves religious but see faith as an essential social glue essential for “the little people” who hold society together.But Ceiling Cat help you if you promote nonbelief!

h/t: Greg

Addendum by Greg Mayer

The Times just went deeper into the FC morass. The columnist Frank Bruni, who should know better– he’s a professor at Duke, fer chrissakes– just went all in on the dubious book: Let’s leave readers with a happier thought. I’m reading a novel, “Upward Bound,” written by a young man named Woody Brown who was diagnosed with severe autism as a child and thought to be incapable of sophisticated communication. He still struggles with speech, as our Times colleague Alexandra Alter explained in an excellent recent profile of him. But he’s an effective writer, complaining in “Upward Bound” about caretakers’ tendency to let their autistic charges idle “as if time means nothing to people who have nothing but time.” His book takes readers inside the thoughts of someone like him. And it’s a revelation that forces you to ask: How much do we overlook in people — how many gifts do we fail to nurture — by making overly hasty judgments? Woody’s mom believed in him. Then college and graduate-school professors did. Then editors. Tapping letters on a board to spell out his answers to Alexandra’s questions, he told her: “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open.” Now he’s free — and he’s flying. It’s in his weekly dialogue with Bret Stephens. While Stephens didn’t endorse FC, any sane journalist would have pushed back, so his silence on it in the column is a black mark on him, as well. If you want to see how FC works, watch the Frontline documentary “Prisoners of Silence” (available free here), which thoroughly debunked FC– in 1992! When I taught a course on “Science & Pseudoscience”, I used to show this to the class, because it shows how pseudosciences work, how they are evangelized, how their proponents reject criticism by employing well-known hedges and dodges, and the harm they can do.

To say NASA has been undergoing some massive administrative changes lately is a huge understatement. One of the more concerning ones, according to a new paper at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Ari Koeppel and Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, is the trend towards the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and break things” - which they argue doesn’t work very well when it comes to producing valuable science.

The recent rapid advance in the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) applications I think qualifies as a disruptive technology. The term “disruptive technology” was popularized in 1997 by Clayton M. Christensen. To summarize, a disruptive technology is “an innovation that fundamentally alters the way industries operate, businesses function, or consumers behave, often rendering existing technologies, products, or services obsolete.” AI is potentially so powerful, and changing so quickly, that it is challenging to optimally regulate it. We are caught in a classic dilemma – we do not want to hamper our own competitiveness in a critical new technology, but we also don’t want to unwittingly create new vulnerabilities or unintended negative consequences. For now we seem to be erring on the side of not hampering competitiveness, which basically places us at the tender mercies of tech bros.

Which is partly why I found the conflict between Anthropic and the Department of Defense (still the legal name) so fascinating. In short, Anthropic’s powerful AI application, Claude, has at least two significant internal “red lines” or guardrails – it cannot be used for massive domestic surveillance, and it cannot be used for final military targeting, without a human in the loop. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has not backed down on this – he says that the first restriction on domestic surveillance is simply a matter of ethics. The second restriction, however, is mainly a matter of quality control – their system is still vulnerable to hallucinations and is not reliable enough to count on for final targeting decisions. Hegseth has criticized his concerns as “woke” and a critical vulnerability for the US military. More charitably, he say essentially that the US military is using the application lawfully, and should not be restricted in any lawful use of the software. Others have also stated that in an emergency they have to know the software will do whatever they ask it.

This conflict has many deep implications, and is beyond what I intend for this blog post. What I want to focus on is the fact that an AI application is creating this ethical dilemma, and forcing us to ask – who should control such awesome power, the CEO of a tech company or the Federal government? It seems that we are facing or about to face many similar questions provoked by the disruptive nature of recent AI applications.

Anthropic, in fact, is at the center of another similar discussion, involving the security of the internet. They have a new application, Mythos, which is an AI coding app. Mythos is potentially disruptive in two ways. The first is more mundane, and certainly not unique to mythos – it allows for non-coders to do what is called “vibe coding”, giving an AI coder a natural language description of the application you want, and the AI coder making it. Why this is disruptive is because it takes coding out of the limited hands of a relatively few highly trained and skilled individuals and puts it in the hands of everybody. This can lead to the proliferation of code that has not gone through any rigorous safety testing for vulnerabilities.

But the feature of Mythos that has many experts (including those from Anthropic itself) very concerned is that the program turns out to be excellent at identifying security vulnerabilities in code. I mean – really good. It has found vulnerabilities that have been sitting there unnoticed for years, and can reliably exploit them. When Anthropic realized how good their software was at essentially cracking software security, they had an “Oh, shit” moment. We are at an “inflection point”. Anthropic estimates they are 12-18 months ahead of the competition, so very soon similarly powerful software will proliferate. If we do not lock down critical software infrastructure by then, the internet can be screwed. Much of the internet and many applications run on core software that is open source, maintained by volunteers with shoestring budgets. Mythos has already cracked open some of these core bits of code.

Turning the internet, and essentially the software infrastructure that increasingly runs our world, into a cybersecurity nightmare is, I would imagine, not good for business. So Anthropic has given a preview version of Mythos to a consortium of 40 software companies, including their competitors, to basically give them a head start in finding and fixing any vulnerabilities in their software (which they are calling Project Glasswing). They are also dedicating some money to fund the project, especially for open source software. This all sounds great, and maybe this will fix the problem. Hopefully we will eventually see this as a Y2K situation, the disaster that never happened because we prevented it.

What this affair highlights is how the disruptive nature of AI is creating the potential for significant problems, if we do not stay ahead of it with rational regulation and quality control. It seems that Anthropic is trying to be an ethical and responsible corporate citizen, and that it recognizes the power of its products. Thank goodness for that – imagine if the same tech were in the hands of a less scrupulous or responsible company? It’s pretty easy to imagine. This is happening at a time when the Federal government not only has no apparent interest in regulating AI, they are trying to prevent the states from doing so either. And they are throwing a temper tantrum when they cannot use their new toys without restrictions.

Going forward we should not rely on the noblesse oblige of tech CEOs. We need to make sure that security and ethical restrictions are baked into any new applications. I am all for vibe coding, for example, but such apps need to have rigorous quality control, so we don’t fill the world with the coding equivalent of AI slop, creating a vulnerabilities tsunami. Perhaps this consortium of tech companies will evolve into something bigger – an organization dedicated to safely and securely developing this technology. This means, of course, we need to get buy in from China, which means we need international standards to regulate this tech. I think of it like nuclear weapons. AI is a very different kind of threat, but it is also a powerful technology that would benefit from international agreements so that we don’t accidentally destroy our civilization.

The post AI May Disrupt The Internet first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Today’s photos are of lizards, come from Ephraim Heller, and were taken in Trinidad and Tobago. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Many people have said to me “the hummingbirds are nice, but what about the lizards of Trinidad and Tobago?” Perhaps not literally true, but grant me poetic license. Preparing this post gave me an opportunity to learn about lizards. Trinidad and Tobago is home to about 49 species of lizards in 11 families in 4 clades.

Clade #1: T&T is home to four iguanian families (Iguania): Dactyloidae (anoles), Iguanidae (iguanas), Polychrotidae (polychrotids), and Tropiduridae (treerunners). Iguania are characterized by visual communication (dewlaps, crests, color change), fleshy non-forked tongues, and sit-and-wait predatory behavior, along with various osteological arrangements.

Here’s a Caribbean treerunner (Plica caribeana):

The green Iguana (Iguana iguana) possesses a parietal eye, a small, pale scale on the top of the head that is a photosensory organ, connected to the pineal gland via its own nerve pathway. It cannot form images, but it detects changes in light intensity and shadow, giving the animal an early warning system against aerial predators approaching from above. It also contributes to circadian rhythm regulation and thermoregulation, which is particularly important for a reptile that ferments its food. Green iguanas eat leaves, relying on a hindgut microbial fermentation system to break down plant fiber.

Green iguanas have a social structure. Dominant males hold territories that contain smaller males, females, and juveniles, with larger males claiming better display perches and more access to females. During mating season males shift toward red or orange hues, becoming more conspicuous; a defeated male that loses his territory returns to a dull brown within hours and holds this color until he reclaims his position.

This one is angry with me:

Trinidad has only one native anole, the leaf anole (Anolis planiceps). Other species are introductions that arrived from other Caribbean islands, likely through human commerce. When a leaf anole detects a threat it can run bipedally, a behavior seen in a number of small lizards and interpreted as a burst-speed adaptation.

Here’s an unidentified anole. Perhaps a reader can identify it:

Clade #2: T&T is home to three gecko families (Gekkota): Gekkonidae (true geckos), Phyllodactylidae (leaf-toed geckos), and Sphaerodactylidae (sphaerodactyl geckos).

Gekkota are distinguished primarily by their feet and eyes. Most geckos have adhesive toe pads with microscopic hair-like structures (setae) that generate van der Waals forces, allowing them to cling to smooth surfaces. The eye is typically large with a vertical or elliptical pupil, and the eyelid is fused into a fixed transparent scale (the “spectacle”) rather than a moveable lid.

I photographed the northern turnip-tailed gecko (Thecadactylus rapicauda). The name comes from the tail, a fat-storage organ. It is also detachable: autotomy (self-amputation) serves as a predator-distraction mechanism. The regenerated tail is typically wider at the tip than at the base, allegedly looking like a turnip. One cool but useless fact: this gecko is able to lick the transparent scale covering each eye.

For completeness, here’s a bit of information about the two lizard clades that I did not photograph.

Clade #3: there are two species of Amphisbaenia in the family amphisbaenidae. These are legless worm lizards. Adapted for living underground, the key distinguishing features are: annular (ring-like) body scales arranged in complete rings around the body, which no true lizard possesses; a highly consolidated, rigid skull adapted for head-first burrowing, with the two sides of the skull fused to form a battering ram; vestigial or absent eyes covered by scales; no external ear openings; and reduced or absent limbs in most families. They move using a unique accordion-like rectilinear locomotion rather than lateral undulation. Sadly, I have no photos of worm lizards as they live underground.

Clade #4: finally, there are three scincoid families (Scincoidea): Scincidae (skinks), Teiidae (teiids), and Gymnophthalmidae (microteiids). Scincoidea is defined primarily by molecular phylogenetics, not by a single morphological characteristic. Bony plates underlaying the scales are present in skinks, giving them their characteristic armored, smooth texture.

Terminally ill people are commonly reunited with lost loved ones in their dreams and have visions of doors, stairways and light, which are said to help them accept the dying process

Researchers have discovered lithium hidden in pyrite within ancient shale rocks—an unexpected find that could reshape how we source this critical battery material. It raises the possibility of extracting lithium from existing waste, reducing the need for new mining.

The Lyrid meteor shower will soon hit its peak. Here's how to spot it, including by using the New Scientist stargazing companion

It's vital that your conference attendees know the speakers' past credibility to judge their current credibility. All you have to do is be honest.

The post An Open Letter to Professor Katy Milkman: Don’t Censor John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Emily Oster. Amplify Their Voices. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

In 1934, a Soviet physicist named Pavel Cherenkov shone gamma rays into a bottle of water and noticed a faint blue glow. So had others before him. They all shrugged and moved on. Cherenkov didn't. What he found — by refusing to dismiss something he didn't understand — turned into one of the most useful phenomena in modern physics.

It's obvious that Earth is a planet. It's obvious that the Sun is a star. But for substellar objects like brown dwarfs, it's not so clear. Researchers are using the JWST to find a stronger dividing line between star and planet that depends on how they formed.

A pair of dwarf galaxies in the giant Virgo Cluster show what can happen when these stellar cities interact. Scientists at the University of Michigan focused the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) onto the galaxies NGC 4486B and UCD736 and found each of them sporting "overmassive" black holes at or near their hearts. Those supermassive black holes comprise a large fraction of each galaxy's mass.

On the relationship between the pointless cosmos and purposeful living organisms.

I am a firm believer in miracles—a confession that will be immediately off-putting to readers of Skeptic. Below I will offer a definition of miracles and attempt to justify belief in them, but for the moment I will focus on a fundamental distinction between two modes of causality. I call these because-of causal mode and so-that causal mode. We can think of these as two ways of explaining an event.

Because-of causal mode example: a man walks into a bank and we ask for an explanation. One explanation tells us about the neurons firing in the motor cortex of the brain that excited a cascade of additional neuron firings, and then muscle flexing. And, of course, there was the mass of the body, the friction of shoes against the sidewalk, the heft and leverage of the doorway, and so on. This mechanical explanation makes the event intelligible; it tells us how the event took place. It took place because of all these enabling factors.

So-that causal mode example: There’s another way of making the event intelligible, and that is to explain the purpose of the man’s actions—he went into the bank so-that he could deposit some money. This is a teleological explanation.

The scientific because of explanation is concerned with immediate past events—facts about what things happened and theories about how they happened. Meanwhile, teleological explanations focus on future outcomes involving values. A teleological explanation tells us that an agent is acting for the sake of bringing about an intended state of affairs—causality guided by purpose. All living systems act with purpose; they seek beneficial outcomes; their behaviors are goal-directed, functional. They are about something.

Here we have two modes of causal explanation—both claiming to render events intelligible, but in different ways. There has been a long tradition of attempts to conciliate these two modes of causality, a tradition that I will now grossly oversimplify. Some people say that the so-that mode of causality is a mere illusion, or at best, a convenient pretense. They believe there is only one kind of causality, and that all genuine explanations can be reduced to the logic of because-of causality.

Others believe that teleological explanations are real, insisting that the universe has some sort of inherent or endowed purpose—it has a point, it is about something, for something. The entire universe behaves in the ways it does so-that an ultimate purpose in creation might be achieved. In one approach because-of causality is ultimately real and so-thatcausality is a fantasy. In the other approach so-that causality is ultimately real and the because-of causality of science is merely an instrument for working out an ultimate cosmic purpose.

The cosmic bus isn’t going anywhere that matters. It has no driver and no destination.

Here’s the big question prompted by our encounter with contemporary science: is the grand epic of cosmic evolution in some way driven or guided so-that some destiny might be achieved, or is the cosmos, despite its awesome splendors, ultimately void of genuine meaning or purpose? As Steven Weinberg famously said, “the more we know about the universe the more it appears to be pointless.” There are difficulties with each of these views. If you claim there is genuine meaning somehow inherent in the cosmos, then you must tell us what it is and why we should accept it. But if the claim is that teleological dynamics are not genuinely real, then you are left with the problem of convincing us that meanings (e.g., values, expectations, the force of will) fail to have genuinely real consequences.

I wish to offer a third option, one that avoids both problems. This view says that all the elements of so-that causality (goal-directed behavior) are genuinely real phenomena, but they are recent and unintended emergents of because-of dynamics.

We might frame this emergence view in terms of two different perspectives on the nature of matter: the grunge theory and the glitz theory of matter. The grunge theory says that matter isn’t much—it’s just some sort of vague or chaotic and uninteresting stuff that becomes interesting only when the laws of nature or the will of God whip it into shape. So the grunge theory appears to assign matter to one domain, while relegating both natural law and divine purpose to another. 

I want to reject the dualism of this view in favor of what I’m calling the glitz theory of matter, which holds that there are no independently real laws of nature. What we have are simply the properties of matter. A law of nature is just something we formulate as we observe regularities in the properties of matter. If we take this view then we can see that matter is not boring grunge, but wonderfully interesting and creative stuff. What makes it interesting: when certain properties of matter interact with other properties of matter, we find increasing probabilities that novel and unanticipated properties of matter will emerge spontaneously.

Here’s a simple illustration: Oxygen and hydrogen atoms have distinctive properties, and when they interact they can produce water molecules, which present new properties not found in either oxygen or hydrogen. And then the interaction of water properties with other properties of matter will increase the probability of even more novel properties. And, as proposed above, the emergence of new properties of matter may result in the formulation of completely new laws of nature. All of this follows the straight-forward logic of because-of causality. As interactions continue the probability of getting large molecules will increase, and when you have interactions between large molecules, then the probability of emergent living systems will increase dramatically. And as living creatures arrive on the scene, so too does the visionary logic of so-that causality. In a fundamental sense, the story of creation is a story about shifting probabilities and how these result in the various entities, events, properties and relations that make up the natural world.

I want to suggest that the goal-directed causal dynamics of teleology amounts to an emergent property of living systems. Before the appearance of living systems causality was limited to because-of dynamics, but with life comes purpose and value. Now agency enters the picture and things begin to matter. Living systems behave in certain ways so-that they will survive and reproduce. Molecules don’t do this. Molecules are created and constrained entirely by the care-less dynamics of because-of causality. But when molecules get really complex and interactive then it becomes more and more probable that they will gang up and behave according to a completely new mode of causality. This does not mean that because-ofcausality becomes overruled or deactivated. It means only that the because-of dynamics have called into play additional sets of anticipatory, goal-directed algorithms. 

A meaningless universe has inadvertently, accidentally and aimlessly created the conditions for meaningfulness.

Purposeful behavior and meaningfulness are real phenomena, not illusory; but they are also recent (~4 billion years ago) and localized (on Earth, at least). This suggests that the cosmos itself is essentially absurd—it has no meaning; it is not guided or coaxed by any agent or purpose. It is not about anything. However, without question, there are pockets of genuine meaning and purpose within the cosmos, as we are here to attest. The cosmic bus isn’t going anywhere that matters. It has no driver and no destination. But there are living beings on the bus, and they hustle here and there with all kinds of determination. My life, your life, all our lives, can be rich and full of meaning without having to claim they have cosmic significance. Life can be worth living even if we are not the point of some cosmic drama. The thing that impresses me most about the cosmic drama is that a meaningless universe has inadvertently, accidentally and aimlessly created the conditions for meaningfulness. This mysterious and wonderfully ironic accident—dare I say, “miracle”?—takes my breath away. 

By “miracle” I do not mean an impossible event occurring at the behest of an all-powerful supernatural agent. I mean only this: any event, the occurrence of which is considered to be so radically improbable as to be virtually impossible. (I am excluding logically impossible events from discussion because they have a probability of zero—even gods cannot square circles). A miracle is an event having a probability value so close to zero that you cannot imagine any conditions under which it might occur. Given these terms, it might be said with good reason that many miracles have occurred in our universe—it’s just that they never occur before their time.

A thought experiment might help to clarify this. Suppose we place ourselves backward in time to some point immediately after the primordial Big Bang, when the universe was nothing but a raging inferno (no quarks, no atoms, just pure radiation) and consider the prospect of a supernova. Nothing that might have been known of the natural world at the time could possibly predict or explain the formation of stars, not to mention their fusion and expulsion of atoms. The very idea of such events would be considered so improbable as to be preposterous, impossible, and contrary to nature.

 Life can be worth living even if we are not the point of some cosmic drama.

Or, let us go back a mere four billion years. Again, at that point we would be completely incredulous if faced with the notion that billions of tiny objects would soon be exploring about on our young planet and behaving in complex patterns that defy all that could possibly be known at the time about the natural order of things. And yet, lo and behold, living beings emerged, not because of some magic wand, and not because of necessity, but rather because a countless series of unpredictable probability-enhancing events brought forth the enabling conditions. 

We have the meaning-bearing lives we do because they were made incrementally less improbable by the epic events of cosmic evolution, whereby matter was distilled out of radiant energy, segregated into galaxies, collapsed into stars, fused into atoms, swirled into planets, spliced into molecules, captured into cells, mutated into species, compromised into ecosystems, provoked into thought, and cajoled into cultures. Surely, there is nothing intellectually shameful about embracing the staggering beauty and the humbling fortuity of these events as … miraculous.

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Feedback discovers that a conspiracy theory has formed that various celebrities have been replaced by clones, and sees just a few small problems with the idea