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A close flyby past the Red Planet this week will send NASA’s Psyche mission on its way towards its final destination. The mission’s closest approach to Mars occurs on Friday, May 15th, when the spacecraft passes only 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) from the surface of the Red Planet. That’s just 1.3 Mars radii distant, inside the orbits of Phobos and Deimos.

For nearly 100 years, reinforced rubber has powered everything from car tires to airplanes, yet scientists never fully understood why adding tiny particles of carbon black made rubber so incredibly strong. Now, researchers at the University of South Florida have finally cracked the mystery using massive computer simulations that took the equivalent of 15 years of computing time. They discovered that carbon black forces rubber to “fight against itself” when stretched, dramatically boosting its strength and durability.

The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called lead, says in one email that it’s new and in another that it’s old.  Well, I haven’t seen it, and the accompanying note says this:

A comparison that has been made before and is hard to ignore.

And consider subscribing or buying a book:

Why not become a patron of Jesus & Mo?:

Books are still available – The latest J&M collection of J&M strips, which has a foreword by Jerry Coyne, is available here:

And the strip, in which Mo is pretty close to having an epiphany:

A medieval monk may have beaten Edmond Halley to one of astronomy’s greatest discoveries by nearly 700 years. Researchers say Eilmer of Malmesbury recognized that the blazing comet seen in 1066 was the same one he had witnessed in 989. At the time, comets were viewed as terrifying omens tied to war and royal deaths, adding even more drama to the famous celestial event shown in the Bayeux Tapestry. The discovery is sparking debate over whether Halley’s Comet deserves a different name.

Government departments and other public bodies in the UK must consider requests to release information about AI-produced content, regulators have confirmed. The move follows a successful request by New Scientist for the release of a minister's ChatGPT logs

This makes the third time in just two weeks that a major mainstream or scientific outlet published credible nonsense about acupuncture, but I had to cover it after dozens of people e-mailed me about this recent article in the New York Times Magazine. It is ostensibly about the interstitium, but pivots to using this recent discovery to retcon an alleged explanation for how […]

The post NYT Epic Fail on Acupuncture first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Step outside on a clear night almost anywhere in Britain and look up. Chances are you won't see much. An orange coloured washed out glow hangs over every town and city, drowning the stars in a tide of misdirected light. Now the Royal Astronomical Society is demanding that tide be turned back, not just for the sake of astronomy, but because the evidence of what artificial light at night is doing to our health, our wildlife, and our ecosystems has become impossible to ignore. The night, it turns out, isn't just a backdrop. It's a habitat that’s more entwined with our very wellbeing and health than you can possibly imagine. And we're destroying it.

Turn on your kitchen tap and watch the water hit the sink. That split second where fast, shallow water suddenly slows and spreads is known as a hydraulic jump. Now imagine the same thing happening in the atmosphere of Venus, but stretched across 6,000 kilometres of sulphuric acid cloud. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have just revealed that this extraordinary phenomenon, the largest hydraulic jump ever identified in the Solar System, is responsible for a mysterious wave that has been sweeping around our neighbouring planet for years.

Scientists in Japan have developed a new way to instantly detect elusive quantum “W states,” a major milestone for quantum technology. The breakthrough could help unlock faster quantum communication, teleportation, and powerful new computing systems.

Scientists in Japan have developed a new way to instantly detect elusive quantum “W states,” a major milestone for quantum technology. The breakthrough could help unlock faster quantum communication, teleportation, and powerful new computing systems.

When NASA's Artemis II spacecraft carried four astronauts around the Moon earlier this year, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope was quietly watching from a quiet valley in West Virginia. The Green Bank Telescope tracked the Orion capsule across 213,000 miles of empty space with a precision that would embarrass most speedometers and what it produced isn't just an engineering triumph. It's a glimpse of how the world's most sensitive ears are becoming indispensable to the future of human spaceflight.

A new quantum-inspired algorithm has cracked a problem so massive that conventional supercomputers struggle to even approach it. Researchers used the method to simulate extraordinarily complex quantum materials known as quasicrystals, opening the door to powerful new quantum devices and ultra-efficient electronics. The work could help scientists design advanced topological qubits and materials for future quantum computers.

A new quantum-inspired algorithm has cracked a problem so massive that conventional supercomputers struggle to even approach it. Researchers used the method to simulate extraordinarily complex quantum materials known as quasicrystals, opening the door to powerful new quantum devices and ultra-efficient electronics. The work could help scientists design advanced topological qubits and materials for future quantum computers.

The little pauses, “ums,” and moments when you struggle to find the right word may reveal far more about your brain than anyone realized. Researchers discovered that everyday speech patterns are closely tied to executive function — the mental system that powers memory, planning, focus, and flexible thinking. By using AI to analyze natural conversations, the team found they could predict cognitive performance with surprising accuracy, potentially opening the door to simple speech-based tools that could detect early signs of dementia long before traditional testing does.

You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. You’re chilling for several hours and eventually notice the water hasn’t touched you. You remember over-hearing some otherworldly fellows who briefly landed and discussed the landscape didn’t look well formed, so they left.

In 2025, a retreating glacier in Alaska caused a landslide into a fjord named Tracy Arm. The landslide triggered a tsunami that swept down the fjord into the ocean. The tsunami reached a height of more than 480 meters, the second highest tsunami ever recorded.

Jupiter, the gravitational behemoth that makes up a lion’s share of our solar system’s planetary content, is much more complicated than ever previously thought. Or so say leaders from NASA’s highly successful Juno mission.

The cosmological constant has been a problem in physics since Einstein, but new research may show why it takes the value that it does despite quantum fluctuations that should make its value practically infinite.

We’ve long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. But do they work?

A bit more than a week ago, I posted Rick Beato’s video critique of the NYTs list of the 30 Greatest Living Songwriters that you can find here (archived here).  Many of their choices, like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, were no-brainers, but Beato deemed others, like Bad Bunny, as bizarre. I agree.

Here he’s gotten his hands on some podcast footage of NYT staffers—three critics and the project’s editor—who helped compile the list, and for once he discards his geniality to make fun of these people in a nine-minute video. Beato even mocks the way they talk.  They do indeed come off as pompous and largely ignorant: Beato harps on their lack of formal musical education, though he says it’s not essential to evaluate music. (The participants went to Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Princeton; none has a degree in music.)

John Carmanica, the NYT’s pop music editor, is particularly annoying with his definition of a “songwriter” and his dismissal of Billy Joel as “not a hitmaker.”

As a whole, Beato says the NYT group is “Four Ivy League educated people—you’ve got two from Yale, one from Princeton, and Mr. Harvard there—that are the most pretentious, cork-sniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music: exactly what you’d expect from a New York Times music critic.” He adds, “These people’s takes are absurd. All you need to watch them talk about music. It drove me nuts watching it.”

As for Carmanica’s claim that Billy Joel wasn’t a hitmaker but a person who wrote “one or 1.5 kinds of songs,” have a gander at this list:

Piano Man
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
She’s Always a Woman
Movin’ Out
My Life
Uptown Girls
Just the Way You Are
The Longest Time
Only the Good Die Young (This is my favorite of his; it’s extremely inventive and a good critique of Catholic repression of sexuality. The lyrics are a work of genius.)
New York State of Mind

And others. These run the gamut from hard rock to love ballads to biography, and how can you say his range is limited to one to 1.5 types of song? Cork-sniffing pedants!

And it’s great watching Beato blow off steam.

My favorite: