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The floating ice shelf of world’s widest glacier – Thwaites glacier in Antarctica – is detaching, with worrying implications for global sea-level rise

Inside some very special black holes, there may be a boundary called a Cauchy horizon. Columnist Leah Crane explores the place beyond which physics breaks and anything is possible

I'm on vacation this week and decided to repost a 2018 article that I had written for my other blog (but never published on SBM) that's oddly relevant to the SBM post last week about that awful NYT acupuncture article. Meet the introduction of the "interstitium" in acupuncture, complete with a major Deepak Chopra connection!

The post A blast from the past: The “interstitium,” the inspiration for that recent awful NYT acupuncture article first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have achieved what was once considered impossible by electrically powering insulating nanoparticles to create a completely new kind of LED. Using tiny organic “molecular antennas,” the team found a way to funnel energy into materials that normally cannot conduct electricity, producing ultra pure near infrared light with remarkable efficiency.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have achieved what was once considered impossible by electrically powering insulating nanoparticles to create a completely new kind of LED. Using tiny organic “molecular antennas,” the team found a way to funnel energy into materials that normally cannot conduct electricity, producing ultra pure near infrared light with remarkable efficiency.

Researchers have developed a durable new catalyst that produces clean hydrogen without relying on expensive platinum metals. The breakthrough could make renewable hydrogen fuel cheaper, more efficient, and easier to scale for real-world energy use.

Electric vehicles are pushing scientists to tackle one of the biggest hidden energy drains inside electric motors: magnetic energy loss. Now, researchers in Japan have developed a powerful AI-driven physics model that can peer into the chaotic “maze-like” magnetic patterns inside motor materials and reveal how heat and microscopic magnetic structures trigger wasted energy.

Electric vehicles are pushing scientists to tackle one of the biggest hidden energy drains inside electric motors: magnetic energy loss. Now, researchers in Japan have developed a powerful AI-driven physics model that can peer into the chaotic “maze-like” magnetic patterns inside motor materials and reveal how heat and microscopic magnetic structures trigger wasted energy.

Scientists have achieved something that once sounded almost impossible: using ordinary sunlight to create quantum-linked photon pairs, a phenomenon normally dependent on precise laboratory lasers. By building a sun-tracking system that funnels sunlight through optical fiber into a special crystal, researchers generated strongly correlated photons capable of performing “ghost imaging,” where images are reconstructed indirectly through quantum correlations. Remarkably, the sunlight-powered setup produced image quality close to that of a traditional laser system, even recreating detailed images like a “ghost face.”

For more than 200 years, scientists have struggled to pin down the exact strength of gravity — and one physicist spent a decade chasing the answer while keeping his own results hidden from himself. Stephan Schlamminger and his team at NIST painstakingly recreated a landmark French experiment designed to measure “big G,” the universal gravitational constant that governs everything from falling apples to galaxies. When he finally opened a sealed envelope containing the secret number needed to decode the experiment, the results brought both relief and disappointment

For more than 200 years, scientists have struggled to pin down the exact strength of gravity — and one physicist spent a decade chasing the answer while keeping his own results hidden from himself. Stephan Schlamminger and his team at NIST painstakingly recreated a landmark French experiment designed to measure “big G,” the universal gravitational constant that governs everything from falling apples to galaxies. When he finally opened a sealed envelope containing the secret number needed to decode the experiment, the results brought both relief and disappointment

I did one of my favorite shopping expeditions today, stocking up on groceries in Chinatown. A giant supermarket opened there in the last couple of years, and it has everything one would want for Chinese food, including the hoisin sauce, sesame oil, soy sauce, and Botan Calrose short-grained rice that I favor.  But there are many, many aisles of things that aren’t even labeled in English, and tons of goodies like the first two shown below. I love wandering the aisles (usually I’m the only white guy there, and certainly the only Jew), so it takes me much longer to shop than I usually do.  They also have Chinese pastries, including various buns and cakes that are perfect for a weekend breakfast.  Also congee and crullers.

About the title above: no, this, it isn’t food for cats, but cat-shaped food for humans, plus a “veggie cat” nail salon downstairs.  The Chinese do love their cats, and it shows in the many products emblazoned with moggies.  The “good luck cat”  (maneki-neko in Japanese), raising its hand to wish you prosperity, is ubiquitous, and is on this first group of cat pastries:

I have a reclining maneki-neko in my office that is solar powered, so it waves its paw when the sun is out.  No good luck on overcast days!

I’d never seen this one before: cat-shaped butter-and-cheese cookies in a great package. Now I’m sorry I didn’t buy them:

And this was downstairs, but closed on Sunday. What on earth is a “veggie cat,” and what does it have to do with fingernails?

Bill Maher continues his defense of Israel on the country’s birthday by pointing out the pervasive Israel-dissing of the mainstream media, adding that there is one thing that the American Left and Right agree on: Israel is the “monster country of all time” (he includes the NYT in this category). He also calls out Democrats, professors, influencers and young people for hating on the Jewish state.  Some of the quotes Maher gives will curl the soles of your shoes.  As he says, “Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable, now; it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy; it’s the new Che Guevara tee shirt.”

The guests on view are Dan Jones, a historian and author of Castles: A Fortified History, and David French, New York Times columnist and co-host of the podcast Advisory Opinions. I wonder what French thought of Maher’s slap at the NYT at 1:44.

This is more serious and less funny than his usual bits, but it’s a good one.

British physicist and science popularizer Phil Halper emailed me about two new surveys he and others had conducted with 1675 physicists, asking their views about fundamental questions in the field.  This is not, of course, a guide to the truth, but simply a snapshot of where physicists stand on things like quantum gravity, black holes, and the Big Bang.  The links to the surveys are in the text below, sent by Phil. I’ll highlight a few of their stands on interesting (to me) issues. Phil’s words are indented:

My co-authors and I just released the largest survey of physicists ever done. In conjunction with the American Physical Society we got more than 1600 replies to our Big Mysteries Survey.

What’s relevant for debates between believers and non believers is that we only got a large consensus on one topic and that is the Big Bang should be understood only as a theory that says the universe evolved from a hot dense state that says nothing at all about a beginning of time . Interestingly, we got 68% in both this large survey of a broad cross section of physicists and for a smaller scale survey we did of leading physicists in Copenhagen with the Niels Bohr Institute. This seriously undermines William Lane Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument which is defended by claiming that physicists agree that the Big Bang has shown that the universe had a beginning, we now have strong empirical evidence that physicists think no such thing.

On the fine tuning argument the most popular answer  was that constants are brute facts that need no explanation. This was found in both of our survey and in the Phil papers survey of philosophers.

You can see the results here

And the Copenhagen Survey is here.

JAC: The Copenhagen Survey involved views of 151 physicists attending a conference on black holes in 2024.

And there is a video with Sean Caroll, Niayesh Afshordi, and Ghazal Geshnizjani discussing the results here. [JAC: I’ve put the video below.]

You might also enjoy the recent debate I did on science, cosmology and faith with Stephen Meyer here.

I haven’t yet watched the videos, but I did look at the big survey; you can access the pdf for free by clicking on the screenshot below:

First, a bit of methodology from the paper:

In the summer of 2024, a survey was conducted at the Black Hole Inside Out Conference in Copenhagen to assess physicists’ views on a range of ongoing controversies [1]. Eighty-five scientists responded. One year later, the authors collaborated with the American Physical Society’s Physics Magazine on a substantially larger follow-up survey, which polled 1,675 participants from the magazine’s readership and the members of the American Physical Society. The Physics Magazine survey therefore provides a broader view of attitudes within the physics community and allows comparisons with the more focused conference-based Copenhagen sample.

Taken together, the two surveys make it possible to compare views expressed in a specialist conference setting with those expressed by a much larger and more heterogeneous respondent pool. On some topics, the results are remarkably similar; on others, the differences are substantial. This paper presents the Big Mysteries Survey results, offers commentary on their interpretation, and highlights points of agreement and divergence relative to the Copenhagen survey

Here are a few bar charts from the paper. First, what the Big Bang implies (Sean Carroll explains this at the beginning of the video below).  A big majority of physicists think that the Big Bang says nothing about whether it marked the ‘beginning of time”:

Of course tyros like me have no idea why the Big Bang doesn’t imply the beginning of time, but so be it: all of this is above my pay grade but I’m happy to see where physicists stand on these issues now.

What about cosmic inflation? A bit more than half of physicists think that cosmic inflation (the expanding universe) explains “an unexpected uniformity” of the universe.

Dark matter: does it explain anomalies in the rate of rotation of galaxies? No consensus:

Also no consensus on whether dark energy explains the accelerating expansion of the Universe:

There’s no consensus on why the universe’s physical constants appear to be “fine-tuned” for the existence of worlds that can produce life. (This is a favorite theological argument for God.) The “brute facts” explanation brings a stop to searching for explanations, but only 26% of physicists hold it.  20%—and I think this includes Carroll—think it’s explained by a multiverse.

There are more graphs, but I’ll show just one more. What kind of picture of the Universe is provided by quantum mechanics? The Copenhagen explanatoin, which people like me can’t reconcile with physical reality, is the favored explanation. I believe it was Feynman who said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t. I’m still baffled by the issue of quantum entanglement, and don’t even understand the experiments buttressing it.

And here’s the video with Sean Caroll, Niayesh Afshordi, and Ghazal Geshnizjani.  Carroll, as usual, gives some very succinct and lucid explanations. The other physicists are good as well.

Have a look at the paper for more opinions, including about what black holes mean and what they do.

Hawking faced a question with no answer hiding behind it. The best boundary condition for the universe, he decided, was that there was no boundary at all. To make that statement into physics, he had to do something deeply strange to time.

Send in your wildlife photos! I am almost out. Thank you in advance.

Today we have miscellaneous photos from the Catskills taken by reader Jan Malik. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge them by clicking on them.

Here is another batch of pictures from my hikes in the Central Catskills this April and May. They are not too artistic, given the fast pace that a weekend backpacking hike demands, but they give a sample of what common animals a casual hiker can see in these “mountains” (the Catskills are an eroded plateau and, despite being steep in places, they are too low to have an alpine zone).

White‑tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), right in the parking lot at a cloudy sunrise. It was slurping water from a muddy puddle despite a clear stream flowing nearby, so it must have been leftover salt that attracted this ungulate. Woodstock residents like their roads well salted. One has to drive carefully at dusk around Woodstock, as there are many deer browsing on lawns and gardens.

In the woodland, I found the first of many red efts of the Eastern newt (Notophthalmus viridescens). This is an intermediate land stage of development between the aquatic larva and adult forms. Red efts have lungs, but air exchange through the skin is also important, supplying 30–40% of their oxygen demand. They travel through the forest litter when it is humid enough—after rain or in the early morning:

This is probably a blue‑headed vireo (Vireo solitarius), collecting nesting materials. If my identification is correct, then it is not possible to tell a male from a female, as they are sexually monomorphic and share rearing duties almost equally. Interestingly, however, a female may desert the nest just before fledging to mate with another available male:

Possibly an Eastern comma (Polygonia comma), found at higher elevation:

Black‑and‑white warbler (Mniotilta varia). I think this is a male. If so, he may be led by a female into the territory of another male to provoke a fight and allow her to judge his fitness. These birds occupy a similar niche to nuthatches and brown creepers; they climb and circle tree trunks to find arthropods:

Eastern towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus), male. These colorful sparrows hang around the edges of forest clearings:

Eastern American toad (Anaxyrus americanus americanus), hiding in a ramps patch. I wonder whether they would prey on red efts or if the efts’ foul taste would be a deterrent:

While passing through oak woods rich with acorns, I heard many alarm chirps from Eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus). Most made themselves scarce as I approached, but one remained on guard duty:

Not a good picture, but here is a dark‑eyed junco (Junco hyemalis). These are hardy birds, staying year‑round in the forest. In winter they form close‑knit flocks with a few dominant individuals and a strict pecking order:

Chipping sparrow (Spizella passerina) on the side of a quiet road. These migrate to more southern states in winter and in summer nest closer to human settlements:

Mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa). There were a couple of them in the area, continuously jousting in the air for control of the territory. I see them every spring in that exact spot, but this year they were too engaged in battling each other to stay still, so this is a picture taken a few years back:

Brown creeper (Certhia americana), shown here just a moment after eating a couple of mayflies. They are common enough, but I rarely see them due to their near‑perfect camouflage. Without directly comparing the bill length it is difficult to tell a female from a male:

The equations of general relativity give up at the singularity. Decades before Stephen Hawking dared to guess what came before, John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt built the strange mathematical machinery that would make the question askable in the first place.

Astronomers have revealed the sharpest image ever captured of a filament in the cosmic web — the enormous hidden structure connecting galaxies across the Universe. The glowing strand stretches 3 million light-years and links two galaxies from nearly 12 billion years ago. By observing this faint intergalactic gas directly for the first time in such detail, scientists gained new insight into how galaxies are fueled and formed.

In Ladakh, Himalayan wolves are increasingly breeding with feral dogs, giving rise to a new animal known as khipshang that could injure humans and outcompete other carnivores

A study led by UC Riverside physicist Hai-Bo Yu suggests that a new type of dark matter could explain three astrophysical puzzles across vastly different environments.