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A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging

By the 1960s, two major contributions were made to the field of SETI, both of which considered how more advanced civilizations could be found based on the types of structures they might build and the levels of energy they could harness.

The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always questioned their origins. Now, he has a bold new proposal

Here’s a live Falcon Cam in New Jersey showing a breeding pair of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus).  The FB post about it says that one egg has already started to hatch.  The YouTube notes say this:

Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ is happy to partner with Union County to live stream the view of this peregrine falcon nest, which is located on the roof of the County Courthouse in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This view is from within the nestbox and captures more intimate moments between the breeding pair of falcons.

Tune in from time to time to see the babies.

Reader Jeremy “Jez” Grove went to Saturday’s Rally Against Antisemitism in London (he’s not Jewish, but a friend of the Jews), and sent me a nice report, along with photographs. Although all of us know that England is full of antisemitism these days, what with Jews getting stabbed and having their ambulances and schools set on fire or vandalized, I myself know little about the complex world of British politics, encompassing multiple parties. I was thus able to learn some things about the major parties and their attitude towards Jews.

I’ve indented Jez’s commentary, and the photos are his.

I’m on my way home from the rally against anti-Semitism, which was held outside the gates of Downing Street. Unsurprisingly, our prime minister didn’t manage to make the short walk to address the crowd and stand up against the rampant Jew hatred in the UK. (Instead, the Labour Party was represented by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Pat McFadden, whose empty platitudes were barely audible over the shouts of “Where’s Keir?” and general booing.)

By contrast, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative  Party, was met with rapturous applause and gave a barnstorming speech. I’d never vote Conservative, but Kemi has been outstanding on this issue and the fight for women’s rights.

Here’s part of Badenoch’s speech (you can see the full seven-minute version here):

I stand against antisemitism.

I stand against those people who want Jews to be afraid to go about their lives, and will never allow them to win.

I stand with the Jews of Britain. pic.twitter.com/rKBIs6Q1TX

— Kemi Badenoch (@KemiBadenoch) May 10, 2026

The Liberal Democrats also sent their party leader, Ed Davey. He made the right sounds, but the response from the crowd was pretty lukewarm. That’s probably a reflection of his irrelevancy in British politics and his party’s invisibility on the issue. He’s best known for his ridiculous attention-grabbing stunts – the only surprise was that he didn’t arrive on the stage on a skateboard! (I’m barely joking, btw.)

The Reform UK party (generally seen as right of the Conservatives, but who just won big victories in Labour Party heartlands in our elections on Thursday) sent their deputy leader.

To no-one’s surprise, there was no representative from the (hugely anti-Semitic) Green Party, despite the boasts from their party leader, Zack Polanski, that he’s the only Jewish leader of a British political party.

It’s worth mentioning that there was a decent number of Iranian and Kurdish supporters of Israel present, who got the hearty applause that they deserved.

When I told Jez that it was ironic that the best speech of the day came from a Tory, he answered, “I guess the Tories aren’t much further to the right than your Dems. Maybe they’re even to the left of them – most Tories wouldn’t dare openly saying that they want to dismantle our (socialised) NHS. .”

More:

I’ve attached a photo of the October Declaration flag. It was good to be amongst so many like-minded people standing up against anti-Semitism. Hopefully, the full event will be available to watch at some point soon.

Here’s the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s report on today’s rally. It contains a list of the speakers and some extracts from their speeches

Here are some of my (not very good) photos:

The airport-style security arches (I don’t believe that these have been required for pro-Palestine marches – because there has been no security threat posed to them): Note that the Jewish Community Security Trust (CST) felt it necessary to be present behind the London Metropolitan Police’s own barrier:

The  view looking from Trafalgar Square towards the stage outside Downing Street. One of the speakers claimed that the crowd was 20,000 strong. That seemed high to me, but given the security arrangements may have been a more accurate figure than is usual for protests of this type:

The view looking from Downing Street towards Trafalgar Square . This photo was taken before everyone had arrived:

Support from the Iranians. The group were applauded as they left at the end of the event chanting “Long live Iran! Long live Israel”. They were also thanked for their presence from the stage as were those flying Kurdish flags:

Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition (leader of the Conservative Party). Her speech is here:  [JAC: it’s above along with a link to her full speech]:

The pale blue flags are held by non-Jews who signed the October Declaration in support of Jews following the 7th October atrocities:

A guy holding a “This Mensch is with You” sign:

More:

I can’t remember who today’s speaker was who said he’d recently met the prime minister. And the PM audibly gasped when he was told that one synogogue alone was spending £20,000 a month on security. And the PM assured him that the “full weight of the law” would be used against those who had tried to burn down another synagogue. The speaker told him, “The 17-year-old suspect has just been released on bail and the only condition is that he doesn’t enter any synogogue”. The prime minister gasped again. But he didn’t have the guts to show up today. And nor did the deputy prime minister, or the chancellor, or any of the big names from the government’s cabinet. Instead, the Labour Party sent Pat McFadden (Secretary of State for the department of Work and Pensions). Only a political geek (guilty as charged) would know who he is. (My politically engaged wife recognised his name but couldn’t name his post.)

Shame on Labour – but even more shame on the anti-Semitic Green Party of England and Wales, who had two electoral candidates arrested for horrendous social media posts. [From the Guardian link below, the posts came from Saiqa Ali, a Lambeth Green candidate for Streatham St Leonard’s ward, and Sabine Mairey, who was standing in Lambeth’s Clapham Town.]

And according to the BBC, arrests were made of people trying to get knives into the rally.

When I asked Jez what those odious Green Party social media posts said, he responded:

The Guardian (!) reported (I can’t seem to do indented quotes, but what follows is all from The Guardian article archived here.

‘Ali’s Instagram account is set to private but screenshots indicated she had posted an image of an armed man wearing a headband of the banned Islamist group Hamas along with the slogan: “Resistance is freedom”.

Another screenshot indicated that Mairey had shared a post which included the text: “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge.” ‘

Mark Sturtevant is back with some arthropod photos for us. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Today we have another set of pictures of arthropods from my area in eastern Michigan. Some of these were taken in the field and others were in a staged setting on the faithful dining room table.

During recent summers, I have been using cheap black lights on the front and back porch to attract more insects, and many new species have arrived as a result. One was this floofy moth that is clearly in the tiger moth (Arctiidae) family, but it was new to me. I believe this to be Spilosoma latipennis. If so, it should have hot pink legs, as shown in the link, but I did not know at the time to check for that:

Another arrival was this species of chafer beetle. This is an Oriental Beetle (Anomala orientalis). It is an invasive species from Asia that is becoming a minor pest here on turf grasses and other plants:

Moving on to spiders, here is a new species of spider called the Western Lynx Spider (Oxyopes scalaris). Lynx spiders can be easily recognized by their form, and especially by those prominent leg spines. They are sit-and-wait predators on plants. This male was missing one of its pedipalps, so I used editing tricks to replace it:

Next up is a lovely Orchard Orbweaver (Leucauge venusta), which had built its web across a seldom-used path in the woods. I had to stand on tippy-toes to get several partial focus stacks, and this final picture was grafted together by hand, piece by piece from those pictures. I really like their iridescent abdomens that look like antique porcelain, and those beautiful green legs. She was eating an unidentified Syrphid fly:

The next two pictures show a flashy jumping spider that I have only seen a few times. This is the Thin-spined Jumping Spider (Tutelina elegans), but to me it will always be called ‘the purple jumper’. The pictures were both taken in a staged setting, where the first is a focus stack, again needing much assembly, and the second was a “lucky shot” single frame. Lucky because she never once stood still, and she was always waving her front legs. I wonder if these spiders are trying to be ant mimics:

Back to insects. Folks here will have seen this one many times now, but it is still special. This is the Wasp Mantidfly (Climaciella brunnea). I won’t repeat again the improbable life cycle it has as a parasitoid on spider egg sacs. You can clearly see that it shows convergent evolution on praying mantids, and at the same time it is a wasp mimic. More specifically, it mimics various species and regional color variations of paper wasps (Polistes sp.). A detail about that which I think is really neat are its two-toned pigmented wings, which is an ersatz way to get its wings to resemble the wings of its models.

I show our local model wasp (P. fuscatus) in the next picture for comparison. Paper wasps have an extra crease that folds their wings length-wise, so the wings are dark and narrow. The mantidfly does not have the crease, so it fakes it with pigment:

Speaking of mantids, I finish with an amusing story about the next picture. This is a Chinese Praying Mantis (Tenodera sinensis), in hand, and the picture was taken with the Opteka 15mm wide angle macro lens. This fully manual lens is the most difficult lens that I own since to get the depth of focus that is much of the point for this kind of photography, one has to stop down the aperture to about f/32. As a result you are taking pictures with a pinhole camera, and focusing is done by guesstimation. Meanwhile, the working distances are extremely short so an insect subject is practically touching the lens. Anyway, she wasn’t having any of it, and quite honestly I was having a hard time keeping this big girl under control. So I made a short movie about the struggle, and attached an appropriate sound track to it. For those who have handled one of these insects, you know they will do what they want to do, and what they want to do is climb:

Sound up for the movie!

Scientists have pulled off a mind-bending quantum experiment that sounds almost impossible: they showed that tiny metal particles made of thousands of atoms can exist in multiple places at once. Using advanced laser techniques, researchers at the University of Vienna observed quantum interference in sodium nanoparticles far larger than the kinds of particles usually seen behaving this way. The finding pushes quantum mechanics into a new realm, suggesting that even surprisingly “large” objects still obey the bizarre rules of the quantum world.

Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry

The search for Earth 2.0 has begun in earnest. But there’s a huge variety of exoplanets out there, so narrowing down the search to focus valuable telescope time on only the best candidates is critical. One variable of a planet that will have a huge impact on its habitability is its size. A new paper, now available in pre-print on arXiv, by researchers at the University of California Riverside, looks into the impact of a planet’s size on one of its more critical features for habitability - whether it holds onto an atmosphere - and determines that slightly smaller than Earth is likely the smallest a planet can be and still be viable for life to develop.

If I were a UFO enthusiast, someone who believes that some UFOs (now UAPs) are aliens visiting the Earth and that the US government knows this and is covering it up, I would be really disappointed. I might engage in some serious motivated reasoning to convince myself that the recent release of documents by the Pentagon was somehow dramatic, but down deep how could you escape crushing devastation. Lucy once again put the football out there for Charlie Brown and then yanked it.

Trump wrote that his administration will, “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” The Pentagon announced they will make their files available to the public. The NASA director applauded this transparency. The media is now hyping up these
“never before seen” documents.

And the result – an absolute nothingburger. We get more indistinct blobs, dots of light, blurry nothings, camera artifacts, and stories of people seeing dots of light. The Pentagon acknowledges – there is no evidence that any of these things are alien phenomena, but also that some of the blobs and lights have not been fully explained. So we are exactly where we have always been – there is no compelling or unambiguous evidence of aliens. Believers can weave whatever anomaly-hunting stories they want from the terrible evidence. Skeptics will continue to point out that the evidence does not tell us anything. Conspiracy theorists will continue to argue that the government is covering up the “real” evidence, and this data dump must be a false flag.

What was not in the data dump from the Pentagon? There were no alien bodies. The US government is not in the possession of an alien spacecraft or any part of an alien spacecraft. There were no unambiguous alien artifacts. There were no videos or pictures of clear alien spacecraft or aliens. There was no evidence that would have ended the debate. The government did not acknowledge that it was ever covering anything up about aliens.

There were also no obvious fakes – no “alien autopsy” videos, no shaky flying saucers, no CG videos. These were all, at least, legitimate pictures and videos. That’s why their quality was so consistently terrible. As I have said numerous times – the low quality of the evidence is the phenomenon. UAPs are low quality evidence by definition, because high quality evidence is not unidentified. It is not the strangeness of the phenomena that makes it hard to identify definitively, it is the low quality of the evidence. When objects come into focus, they are birds, planes, balloons, and other aircraft.

The simplest explanation for this situation is – aliens are not visiting the Earth, or if they are they have the technology to remain completely hidden from us. So we are just getting the residue of low quality evidence that the Pentagon was unable to explain, a residue that will always exist given enough data and is not predictive that something strange is going on. It would be remarkable if the Pentagon were able to positively identify 100% of every blurry photo or blob of light one of their people ever recorded.

UFO skeptics like Mick West will spend some time carefully examining videos to show that the claims of enthusiasts are not accurate and nothing preternatural is going on. Some of the videos look like birds to me – when you are flying above a bird which is flying over the water it creates the illusion that the bird is moving much faster than it is. Some are clearly camera artifact, like the star distortion patterns or afterglow. These careful analyses are convincing to skeptics and dismissed by believers.

How is the mainstream media dealing with these Pentagon releases? Total failure, in my opinion. They talk about it with a smile and a glint in their eye – “Ooh, we get to talk about UFO’s with a veneer of legitimacy because it’s coming from the Pentagon.” But they give no context, no useful analysis, and often not a hint of skepticism. At most you get a dry qualifier, “The Pentagon says there is no evidence of aliens,” but that’s like the fine print that wizzes by in a commercial. Some of the more gullible journalists think there is actually something going on here, likely because of profound ignorance of the UFO phenomenon over the last 80 years. They often don’t even feel the need for token skepticism.

If you are holding out for the really juicy evidence to be released in a later batch – don’t hold your breath. It seems unreasonable to assume that the Pentagon is holding onto smoking gun evidence at this point, and starting off with a bunch of crap. To think the government is holding on to solid evidence at this point you need to believe that Trump is impotent on this issue, or that he is lying and is now part of the cover up. Neither of these hypotheses seem likely. As is typical, you have to deepen the conspiracy in order to explain away the lack of credible evidence.

I know I have said all of the above before – because there is nothing new or interesting in the Pentagon release. As I said – this is all more of the same, and everything remains status quo. UAPs are all blurry nothings and fish stories. There is no compelling evidence of aliens. The government is not covering up their knowledge of aliens. The press are loving the clickbait. I can only hope more people will see this as the giant nothing it is.

The post Pentagon Releases More Boring UFO Videos first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is about to pull off a dramatic close flyby of Mars, skimming just 2,800 miles above the planet to get a powerful gravitational boost on its journey to the mysterious metal-rich asteroid Psyche. The maneuver will save propellant while giving mission scientists a rare chance to test and calibrate the spacecraft’s instruments using Mars as a target. As Psyche approaches from the planet’s dark side, it’s expected to capture striking crescent views of Mars, search for faint dust rings around the planet, and even gather magnetic and cosmic ray data during the encounter.

PNAS recently published credulous nonsense about acupuncture so bad that I thought it couldn't be topped. "Hold my beer!" cried National Geographic, as it proceeded to top PNAS.

The post More credulous nonsense about acupuncture, this time from National Geographic first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

NASA’s Curiosity rover had an unexpectedly stubborn Mars souvenir after drilling into a rock nicknamed “Atacama” — the entire chunk ripped loose from the ground and stayed stuck to the rover’s drill. Engineers watched as Curiosity shook, vibrated, tilted, and spun the drill over several days in an effort to free the rock, while cameras captured the strange scene on the Red Planet.

Dante’s Inferno may have been far more than a religious epic. New research argues that the 14th-century poet essentially imagined a catastrophic asteroid impact centuries before modern science understood meteors. In this interpretation, Satan crashes into Earth like a giant cosmic object, blasting through the Southern Hemisphere and reshaping the planet itself — carving out the circles of Hell while forcing up Mount Purgatory on the opposite side of the globe.

A new study suggests AI chatbots may do more than spread misinformation — they can actively strengthen a user’s false beliefs. Because conversational AI often validates and builds on what users say, it can make distorted memories, conspiracy theories, or delusions feel more believable and emotionally real. Researchers warn that AI companions may be especially risky for isolated or vulnerable people seeking reassurance and connection.

Scientists in Germany have pulled off a staggering computing feat by fully simulating a 50-qubit quantum computer for the first time ever using Europe’s new exascale supercomputer, JUPITER. The breakthrough shatters the previous 48-qubit record and highlights just how powerful next-generation supercomputers have become.

Here we go again.

President Donald Trump and the Department of War have released the long-awaited UFO Files, and they’re about as revelatory as the JFK assassination files were, namely not at all.

In my preliminary review of the files (it will take days or weeks more to read through them all), and following the UFO/UAP community online with endless believers that we are being visited by alien beings (or “non-human intelligence” or “biologics” in the current jargon) digging through the files in search of their long-promised “disclosure” of contact, absolutely nothing stands out beyond the usual blurry photographs, grainy videos, artist reconstructions, and countless stories about weird things in the sky and in space.

As always, I will acknowledge that extraterrestrial intelligences are probably out there somewhere in the cosmos—with a trillion galaxies, each of which having hundreds of billions of stars, each of which having planets it is as close to 100% that some of them somewhere will evolve life and even intelligent life—but very few members of the public are interested in the search for signatures of bacterial-grade life in the atmospheres of exo-planets (as NASA continues to search for life elsewhere).

What nearly everyone cares about is the second question: have they come here?

The answer remains the same: not that we know of. That is, there remains no definitive evidence of alien visitation on Earth, and the UFO Files release has done nothing to change that, which even most of the UFO/UAP proponents acknowledge, promising “just you wait” and “disclosure is still coming” and “the ‘holy crap’ material will be released soon”. So…we shall see. I remain skeptical unless and until my priors are updated with new evidence, which is not in these files.

What is in the files? Here is a brief overview of what I came across as I worked my way through them:

Figure 1. Artist’s “composite sketch” of this object, which an eyewitness described as having been seen in this field, unhelpfully identified by the Department of War as taken somewhere in the United States.

Here is the full caption:

Actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously.

How anyone standing in a field could assess the length of an object without some means of measurement by which to compare it is beyond me, or how anyone could possibly know it was made of bronze (obviously meaning “it looked like bronze-colored metal,” or some such).

Figure 1

Figure 2. Document dated October 28-29, 2001, in which the Georgian Foreign Ministry reports a Russian aircraft violated Georgian airspace and bombed areas of the Kodori Gorge. Russia denied it, saying it was a UFO. Georgian response: UFO is a Russian “bold lie”. Recall that this is a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union and shortly after Vladamir Putin came to power and launched a military action in Georgia.

Figure 2

Figure 3. In this document, dated September 12, 2023, the Mexican Congress heard testimony on UAP from experts that includes these long debunked fake alien corpses that even all UAP proponents acknowledge as fake. If this is any indication of the quality of the "UFO files" purported to reveal we’ve been visited by aliens, God help us (and I’m an atheist).

Figure 3AFigure 3B

Figure 4. This document, dated October, 2023, is emblematic of so many of the UFO Files documents, so heavily redacted as to be difficult to read, much less given proper context. Here is the disclaimer provided by the Department of War attached to all of these documents: “Redactions have been made to protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP.”

Figure 4

Figure 5. These are two of many photographic stills taken from videos shot, again unhelpfully, somewhere in the “Southwestern United States.” The UAP is the little dot that could be almost anything (a balloon, a drone, an aircraft), subsequently being tracked by a helicopter. Given the terrain I immediately thought of one of the many military bases throughout this part of the country where planes and drones and, yes, even balloons, may be found.

Also unhelpful are all the blacked out rectangles, which very likely represent all the information we would need to identify the speed, distance, size, etc. of the object based on where, exactly, this was filmed, and when, etc.

This is another reason why I support Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project at Harvard University because they are building multiple observatories in various locations in order to triangulate whatever objects are detected. Without triangulation, it is extremely difficult to assess size and speed of the various objects identified in these files (and elsewhere) of UAPs.

Figure 5AFigure 5B

Figure 6. This UAP is almost surely a drone or small plane, probably moving away from the camera. The caption reads: “U.S. Indo-Pacific Command reported UAP that resembles a football-shaped body near Japan” and appears to be taken in 2024.

Figure 6A

Figure 6B is an image of an “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle” (UAV) I found online labeled “The Jetank unmanned aerial vehicle successfully completed its first flight in China, Shaanxi province.” I’m not claiming this accounts for the UAP sighting near Japan, but with a range of 7,000 kilometers, and with all the political concerns about Chinese aerial technology, it’s not completely crazy to think it could be something along these lines.

Figure 6B

Figure 7. These light anomalies photographed from the surface of the moon by Apollo 17 astronauts are curious indeed. At first I suspected they were lens flares, as I’ve seen many such images in photographs taken at haunted houses, graveyards, and the like purportedly representing ghosts floating around the facilities, but it is not clear that lens flares explains these images.

I await the government’s own additional investigation, as explained in the file:

While this photo has been previously released and discussed by keen observers, there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly. New preliminary US government analysis suggests the image feature is potentially the result of a physical object in the scene. Additionally, as part of this investigation, the government has obtained the original film from the Apollo 17 mission and the results of the full NASA and DOW analysis will be released when completed.

Similar such images were photographed by Apollo 12 astronauts with no explanation provided.

Figure 7AFigure 7BFigure 7C

Figure 8. This video short from the files was posted by UAP investigator Steven Greenstreet on 𝕏 (@MiddleOfMayhem) noting “This ‘alien UFO’ appears to be a parachute and a flare, which is leaving behind a smoke trail”:

0:00 /0:13 1×

Figure 8

Figure 9. This screen shot from a UAP video appears to be a balloon trailing its string or tail.

Figure 9AFigure 9B

The following is a comment from the pilot and astronaut Scott Kelly, from a NASA press conference at which he spoke, explaining how difficult it is for pilots to determine what it is they think they saw:

In my experience of flying over 15,000 hours in 30 something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions, so I get why these pilots would look at that Go Fast video and think it was going really really fast. I remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach Military operating area and my RIO [Radar Intercept Officer], who sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. I didn’t see it, so we turned around to go look at it. It turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon.

My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a U.S. Senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was the commander of STS 124; they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the Space Shuttle and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt—they couldn’t quite figure it out—and they were potentially going to have to go and do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that my brother grabbed the camera and they took a picture of it, and when they blew up the picture they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay; it was actually the International Space Station that was 80 miles away.

There are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought that was their wingman. It’s just a very very challenging environment to work, especially at night.

That’s enough for now. Much more to come as I go through the files, but in general, remember the “residue of anomalies” problem that exists in all science: No hypothesis or theory in any field accounts for 100 percent of the phenomena under investigation.

This residue problem means that no matter how comprehensive a theory is there will always be a residue of anomalies for which it cannot account. The residue problem in UFOlogy was poignantly illustrated in Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, in which the UFOlogist admitted that “roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained” as:

weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on!

So the entire extraterrestrial hypothesis for explaining UFOs and UAPs is based on a residue of data left over after the above list has been exhausted.

What’s left? Not much.

But, as always, I remain open to examining new evidence if it is forthcoming. Let’s see what’s in the next tranche.

Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange "little red dots" (LRDs) in its infrared images. There are hundreds of these compact blobs at very high redshifts at distances of about 12 billion light-years. Astronomers think they began forming some 600 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them players in the infancy of the cosmos. They appear red in optical light and blue in the ultraviolet. So, what are these strange objects?

A spiral galaxy seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disc fills the view from corner to corner. Its disc is yellow near to the centre and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars, respectively. Thin brown clouds of dust, glowing pink spots of star formation, and sparkling blue patches filled with star clusters swirl through the galaxy. Behind it, small orange dots are very distant galaxies.

This week Bill Maher’s comedy-and-news bit is about the “Assassination Generation,” referring to all the young men who kill or commit arson for ideological reasons. As we know, a big proportion of young people (about 40%) think that political violence is sometimes warranted.  As you might expect, Maher deplores this behavior and the ideas behind it. Given that this is the social-media generation, Maher suspects that the deeds are done in part to get popular if your life sucks.  As he says,  referring to Cole Allen, “This is about being 31 and still living with your mom in Torrance. Life was supposed to come out better.” But he avers that these kids have it a lot better than they think (Cole Allen stayed at the Hilton before his failed assassination attempt at the correspondents’ dinner).

Maher does imply that sometimes political violence may be warranted—he mentions Stalin and Hitler—but, he says, “that’s not where we are now.”

The mantra for Young Assassins at the end: “What this is really about for today’s young assassins is, ‘When life lets you down, and doesn’t properly reward you for being the awesome person you’re sure you are, there’s one big save left: convince yourself you were meant for a cause bigger than yourself. And for Cole Thomas Allen, it was I’m Fighting Hitler‘.”

The guests you see are Represemtatove Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), and Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile. 

I rate this better than the average bit, and it’s time someone said that it’s insane to make a hero out of Luigi Mangione.