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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.

There’s a specific sequence in the anime Dragonball Z that for some reason has stuck in my head for over two decades. Goku, the main character of the show, travels to King Kai’s planet and can barely stand up when he arrives because the planet’s gravity is 10 times stronger than Earth’s. Over time, he trains in this gravity, and his body begins to adapt to it. Eventually, after leaving the planet, he’s stronger, faster, and more agile than he ever was before. But would that really happen if you were exposed to 10G over a long period of time? Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) decided to test that idea and report their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But instead of using anime characters, they used fruit flies as their test subjects.

A team at the University of Hong Kong has developed a new “super steel” that can survive the harsh conditions needed to make green hydrogen from seawater. The material uses an unexpected double-protection mechanism that resists corrosion far better than conventional stainless steel. Even more impressive, it could replace costly titanium parts used in today’s hydrogen systems.

Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system

Fifteen years after Western astronomers first discovered ‘buckyballs’ in space, they’re back with stunning images and rich data generated by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The results of their study have revealed the cosmic origin of these strange molecules.

Scientists have taken a major step toward ultra-secure quantum communication by demonstrating a remarkably stable quantum encryption system that worked across more than 120 kilometers of optical fiber. Using tiny semiconductor quantum dots that emit single particles of light on demand, the team achieved one of the highest secure key rates yet for this type of technology while maintaining continuous operation for over six hours without manual adjustments.

Scientists have taken a major step toward ultra-secure quantum communication by demonstrating a remarkably stable quantum encryption system that worked across more than 120 kilometers of optical fiber. Using tiny semiconductor quantum dots that emit single particles of light on demand, the team achieved one of the highest secure key rates yet for this type of technology while maintaining continuous operation for over six hours without manual adjustments.

A major obstacle may be standing in the way of the next generation of ultra-tiny computer chips. Researchers discovered that many promising 2D materials lose their advantages because an invisible atomic-scale gap forms when they are combined with insulating layers. That tiny gap weakens electronic performance and could prevent further miniaturization. The team says new “zipper materials” that lock together more tightly may offer a path forward.

A major obstacle may be standing in the way of the next generation of ultra-tiny computer chips. Researchers discovered that many promising 2D materials lose their advantages because an invisible atomic-scale gap forms when they are combined with insulating layers. That tiny gap weakens electronic performance and could prevent further miniaturization. The team says new “zipper materials” that lock together more tightly may offer a path forward.