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YouTube hasn’t yielded Bill Maher’s comedy segment from his  latest “Real Time” show, but I found something nearly as good: his conversation this week with the ladies of “The View”. There are two parts, which I put in reverse order, but both show that Maher’s appeal isn’t just from his (or his assistants’) comedy scripts, but also a general eloquence and thoughtfulness. There’s no script here; he just argues and discusses wokeness, the Presidential candidates, and the war in Gaza with five outspoken women.

I found the second part of Maher’s appearance (10 minutes) more interesting, and so put it first part (9.5 minutes). Watch in reverse order if you want to see the whole thing. All of it’s good.

 

What happened to Jon Stewart?

I don’t often read The Critic—a British cultural and political site that’s been going for five years—mainly because it’s UK-centric and I can’t fathom the intricacies of British politics. But it’s my loss, as I’ve missed some good articles. Fortunately, Alan Sokal told me that he’s recently put up two pieces at the site, both about the incursion of ideology in science and both relevant to a paper that I coauthored. I’ve put Sokal’s headlines below, which you can click to read for free.

Sokal, of course, became publicly famous for his 1996 hoax paper published in Social Text, but he’s also written numerous papers and books analyzing and criticizing philosophical and scientific problems with postmodern academia.  He writes well, deals with topics I like, and is always worth reading.

The first piece below has a purpose similar to that of the paper I wrote with Luana for Skeptical Inquirer: exposing the incursion of ideology (mostly from the Left) into science, but it deals with all science rather than just evolutionary biology, the ambit of our paper. It also has lots of examples we didn’t use. Click to read

This shorter piece is a complement to the first, and deals more with the injurious effects of wokeness in STEM:

I could give lots of quotes, but I’ll try to limit myself.  As in the Coyne/Maroja paper, Sokal concentrates mostly on Left-wing intrusions into science, but he doesn’t fail to call out Right-wing intrusions as well, including objections to evidence on climate change and conservative attacks on environmentalism. Since you should read both pieces, I’ll mix quotes from the two papers, lumping them under a few themes.

The sexes.  As Luana and I realized, nowhere is the misguided intrusion of ideology into science more evident than in the pervasive claim that humans have more than two sexes. The only people who reject that palpable truth are ideologues, especially academic ones.  Sokal makes sex a big part of his papers, and I’ll give a few quotes (all indented).

Now the entire American medical establishment, from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics to the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, insists that sex — as in male or female — is, in the AAP’s words, “an assignment that is made at birth”. What could this mean?

Sokal then goes into the facts: all animals and vascular plants have only two sexes, male and female, defined by gamete size. He’s peeved at the “sex-assigned-at-birth” mishigass.

A baby’s name is assigned at birth; no one doubts that.  But a baby’s sex is not “assigned”; it is determined at conception and is then observed at birth, first by examination of the external genital organs, and then, in cases of doubt, by chromosomal analysis[1]. Of course, any observation can be erroneous, and in rare cases the sex reported on the birth certificate is inaccurate and needs to be subsequently corrected. But the fallibility of observation does not change the fact that what is being observed — a person’s sex — is an objective biological reality, just like their blood group or fingerprint pattern, not something that is “assigned”. The medical associations’ pronouncements are social constructivism gone amok — this time about a subject that has been more-or-less accurately understood by humans (albeit without all the scientific details) ever since the beginning of our species. Sex, unlike quarks, is not subtle[2].

What could have impelled sober-minded scientists to advocate such an easily refutable view? The cause is evidently political. The medical establishment’s new-found reluctance to speak honestly about biological reality — and its insouciance in speaking dishonestly about it — presumably stems from a laudable desire to defend the human rights of transgender people.  But while the goal is praiseworthy, the chosen method is misguided.  Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned”.

The bottom line is this: It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just.  If the cause is truly just, then it can be defended in full acceptance of the facts about the real world; if that cannot be done, then the cause is not just.

That’s good writing.  And he adds this in the footnotes, a further attack on the “assigned at birth” hypothesis that I haven’t seen:

[1] Alice Sullivan has kindly drawn my attention to data showing the sex ratio at birth, in various countries, from 1950 to 2021. In several countries, mostly in Asia and Central Asia, there has been, since the mid-1980s, a huge preponderance of boys over girls, reaching a peak ratio 118:100 in China in 2005 (it has now decreased to 112:100). The obvious cause of this disparity is the cultural preference for boys, combined with the availability of sex-selective abortion. And the latter is possible precisely because sex is determined at conception and is observable in utero, well before it can be “assigned” at birth. (Indeed, aborted fetuses, which are never born, also have a sex: in some countries preferentially female.)

Decolonization and Indigenous “Ways of Knowing”

There is also some pressure on the physical sciences and mathematics from the “woke left”, but at present it is mainly concerned, not with the content of research, but with vague calls for the “decolonisation” of curricula and for “decentering whiteness and cisheteropatriarchy” in pedagogy.

It’s tolerably clear what “decolonisation” can mean in history and literature, but it’s less clear what it might entail in the natural sciences and mathematics, which purport to produce — and in my view do often produce — universally valid knowledge. Some advocates of “decolonisation” take the radical position that scientific and mathematical knowledge is not in fact universally valid. For instance:

[U]nique forms of racism and cisheteronormativity are insidiously reinforced through ideological constructions of STEM as neutral. Such neutrality is a function of objectivity and depoliticization as epistemological values in science … (numerous similar citations can be found in this article).

In New Zealand this postmodernist idea has now become official policy. The National Curriculum explicitly mandates “equal status for mātauranga Māori [Maori knowledge]”, asserting that it has “equal value with other bodies of knowledge”, presumably including modern science. Indeed, the chemistry curriculum was revised to include the concept of mauri — the “life principle, life force, vital essence” and “the binding force between the physical and the spiritual” — that students are taught “is present in all matter”. As one chemist perceptively commented:

Who discovered this binding force between the physical and the spiritual? And what evidence was involved in its discovery? If this binding force is real, then everyone needs to know about it. It needs to be in the chemistry syllabus of every country, not just in New Zealand.

(It now appears that the inclusion of mauri in the chemistry curriculum was quietly rolled back after protests from scientists.)

Confirmation Bias

Science — and that includes both the natural and the social sciences — is, or at least is supposed to be, a truth-seeking enterprise. The phenomena that one decides to study may be chosen for their conceptual significance, for their social or economic importance, or simply out of personal curiosity. But whatever topic a scientist decides to investigate, she is intellectually and morally obliged to follow the evidence wherever it leads: even (or especially) if that evidence conflicts with her preconceptions or her desires.

Science doesn’t always work this way, of course — scientists are, after all, human — but that is anyway the ideal towards which we strive. And if there is freedom of debate within the scientific community — freedom to hold each others’ ideas to stringent conceptual and empirical scrutiny — then the scientific community collectively is more likely to reach objectively true conclusions than any of its members could do alone.

A scientist’s political and social values may, of course, influence her selection of topics to study — that is perfectly legitimate. But those values should be carefully put to the side when evaluating the evidence. The goal of the scientific endeavour is to find out how things really are, not to confirm how we wish they were.

And that reminded me of my favorite Richard Feynman quote, which epitomizes what science is all about:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.  So you have to be very careful about that.

The Harm of an Ideologically-Based Science

And when an organization that proclaims itself scientific distorts the scientific facts in the service of a social cause, it undermines not only its own credibility but that of science generally. How can the public be expected to trust the medical establishment’s declarations on other controversial issues, such as vaccines — issues on which the medical consensus is indeed right — when it has so visibly and blatantly misstated the facts about something so simple as sex?

. . .But as [Carole] Hooven and [Colin] Wright are at pains to emphasize, the harm arising from this politicisation of scientific inquiry is not just — or even primarily — the manifest injustice done to researchers like themselves. Rather, the principal harm is done to the scientific endeavor itself: by inducing researchers to self-censor as a matter of personal and professional preservation, “cancel culture” undermines the freedom of debate that is the cornerstone of the scientific community’s claims to knowledge. As John Stuart Mill pointed out a century-and-a-half ago, giving the example of Newtonian mechanics:

The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of … This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.

When that freedom of debate is curtailed, even true ideas stop being rationally justified.

An incident

 Sokal recounts an incident connected with a dreadful published paper. I wrote about that paper (Sokal’s too charitable to name the authors), but didn’t know the aftermath:

What about decentering whiteness and cisheteropatriarchy in teaching? One article on “dismantling whiteness” in physics teaching was published recently in the journal Physical Review Physics Education Research: this is the section of the prestigious Physical Review devoted to “experimental and theoretical research relating to the teaching and learning of physics and astronomy”. I won’t enter into the details of the article; see here for a thoughtful and balanced critique. More interesting is what happened when four physicists took up the editors’ invitation to contribute “constructive and respectful criticism of published articles” — referring specifically to this one — “in the form of Comments”. The four authors’ duly submitted Comment — which you can read here — was rejected by the PRPER editor on the grounds that it was “framed from the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued”. As the authors dryly but accurately pointed out:

This is akin to stating that an astronomer must first accept astrology as true before critiquing it. Such notions should be, at a minimum, dispiriting for anyone who sees educational practices as worthy of empirical investigation.

Nature‘s misstep

But the best part of both papers is Sokal’s analysis of a misstep made by the journal Nature.

Two years ago, the prestigious journal Nature issued a new “ethics guidance” concerning proposed submissions. But the guidance does not pertain simply to the protection of human research subjects; that issue has been strictly regulated for decades. Nor is it about restricting the publication of information that poses serious material dangers, such as facilitating the production of nuclear or biological weapons. Rather, the guidance purports to address other forms of “harm” that could be caused by a scientific publication. And on these grounds, the editors arrogate to themselves an astoundingly broad power:

Regardless of content type (research, review or opinion) and, for research, regardless of whether a research project was reviewed and approved by an appropriate institutional ethics committee, editors reserve the right to request modifications to (or correct or otherwise amend post-publication), and in severe cases refuse publication of (or retract post-publication):

. . . Content that undermines — or could reasonably be perceived to undermine — the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings.

That vague and subjective language is an open door to ideological censorship of valid scientific contributions — a censorship that the editors do not even attempt to disguise. It is therefore imperative to evaluate the justifications that the editors of Nature have offered in support of this brave new policy.

Sokal’s evaluation that follows this in the second paper above is wonderful. But you can read that for yourself.

A set of Australian fossils offers a rare glimpse of the ancient relatives of platypuses and echidnas that lived alongside the dinosaurs 100 million years ago

A petition is circulating among the University of Chicago community about our weeklong Encampment, which violated numerous University “time, place, and manner” (TPM) restrictions on free expression.

Our own encampment began on April 29 on the University Quad.  After the President and Dean of Students warned the protestors that they faced university sanctions for violating TPM restrictions, there were some negotiations between the protestors and the administration, but they came to naught. By May 3, the patience of the administration was at an end. On that day the President issued a statement that ended this way:

At 5 a.m. on May 7, after about a week’s existence, the encampment was taken down by the University of Chicago Police. (Apparently the Chicago City police, on orders from our bumbling mayor, wouldn’t do anything, though Mayor Brandon Johnson did allow the city cops to remove an encampment at the Art Institute.)

Before that time I had beefed that the University didn’t seem interested in identifying any protestors violating TPM restrictions despite the threat of sanctions; indeed, when the encampment was taken down and the Encamped fled like fleas off a drowning rat, the campus cops didn’t take names or look at IDs, but simply drove the protestors onto a nearby street. How would they know who the Encamped were?

Without sanctions and punishment (it needn’t be severe for first-time violators), there is no deterrent to actions that violate our freedom of expression. (Yes, it’s okay to put “time place, and manner” regulations on speech in colleges, as those regulations support an atmosphere of free expression.  No deplatforming or shouting down speakers, and you can’t block buildings or use megaphones outside of prescribed hours.)

And, in my view, the University had been lax in punishing violators. In the end, that only impedes free expression and creates chaos on campus. (I am, of course, fully in favor of free speech that doesn’t violate the regulations we have in place.) But, mirabile dictu, now there’s a petition going around reporting that there have indeed been sanctions imposed on some Encampers. Four of them, all seniors, won’t be receiving their degrees, presumably until their actions are examined and judged by the relevant committees.

That, of course, angers up the coterie of Palestine supporters, many of whom seem to believe that any expression of their ideology constitutes free speech, even if it violates university regulations. It’s OKAY, they think, to block campus access, deplatform opposing speakers, fence off an area of campus for Tentment, and cancel or disturb regular classes by chanting through megaphones. These folks really do need a lesson in what free speech means here.

But let’s look at the pushback to the punishment (probably temporary) for those four seniors.  Below is the text of a Google document for a petition addressed to the University community. In the petition is the report of sanctions.

The bolding in the first and last two sentences is part of the petition, while that in the middle is mine.

NO WITHHOLDING DEGREES FOR SUPPORTING PALESTINE: UCHICAGO, LET THE SENIORS GRADUATE

On May 24th, the University of Chicago told 4 seniors that their degrees are being withheld without justification just 8 days before graduation set for June 1st. UChicago administrators engage in their latest form of repression and intimidation against Pro-Palestine student activists. We demand UChicago let them graduate!

The administration claims these students “may have been involved with complaints” regarding the UChicago Popular University For Gaza Palestine solidarity encampment. Friday Morning, a University adminstrator from the Center for Student Integrity sent the student activists a “Disruptive Conduct Process Notice” informing them the conferral of their degrees will be delayed, therefore, preventing them from graduating with their diplomas despite the students completing their degrees. The Center for Student Integrity went on break for 4 days after notifying the students, preventing students from asking what the complaints were or questioning  how they were selected to be a part of this process.

The University of Chicago administration continues to target these 4 students for their support of Palestine on campus. Administration has intimidated, repressed, threatened, and harassed students who show support for Palestine all year. This new intimidation tactic follows the university arresting 26 students and 2 faculty at a sit-in in November, subjecting those same students to disciplinary proceedings that stretched on over 6 months, and repeatedly destroying pro-Palestine art memorials throughout this year. Most recently, the administration used sleep deprivation against people in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment by threatening overnight police violence multiple nights in a row before ordering a brutal police raid on the encampment at 5am, attacking in riot gear while the exhausted people in the encampment were asleep in their tents.

The University of Chicago forsakes its role as a university and eschews its responsibility to its students, workers, and community. As Israel continues its genocide of the Palestinian people, UChicago continues to invest in weapons manufacturers and Israeli companies collaborate with Israel through programs like the Israel Institute and study abroad at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. UChicago cares only about appeasing donors, not about people’s lives.

In the last few weeks, Israel has launched another assault on Rafah where it told people to flee, blocked all aid to Gaza, and attacked northern Jabalia where Palestinians are trapped in a hospital under siege. Yet, UChicago is more concerned with targeting and harassing its students than with addressing its complicity in genocide. After 8 months of genocide, after days of meetings with students from the Popular University for Gaza encampment, UChicago admin refuses to even name Palestine. UChicago’s President, Paul Alivisatos, refuses to acknowledge the undeniable fact that every Gazan university has been destroyed. Over the past 8 months, UChicago has evaded, stalled, and ignored even the most basic demands of its students–hiding behind its bureaucratic structures. But in one email, a single administrator can make the baseless decision to prevent 4 students from graduating.

We, students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community members demand the University of Chicago let our seniors graduate.

See the full petition and list of signatories here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VEpMFO_Roxbb00AVR80rz_p3-bsgJht-meU2o2yqvVg/edit?usp=sharing

As far as I can see, the bit in the middle is both erroneous and funny. Pro-Palestinian students have indeed been allowed to engage in repeated demonstrations, even illegal ones, without either no or perfunctory punishment. I kept an eye on the art memorials, like a huge installation of Palestinian flags, and I saw no destruction of legally permitted installations. (Illegal stickers and posters were removed by the University, and graffiti painted on buildings was cleaned off.)

But the weirdest part of the petition is the claim that the University was using “sleep deprivation” to torture the Encampers.  If they intended that, they’d play music all night. The “sleep deprivation” was experience by Encampers who heard rumors on two nights that the University Police were going to take down the encampment in the early morning. And indeed, on the second night, they did. This is in fact a measure designed to ensure the safety of everyone, preventing clashes between police and protestors because the protestors were simply woken up and told to leave campus. And it worked: nobody was injured—no Encampers, no cops.  Beefing about this as a form of torture is just another way to claim victimhood, a leitmotif of these protests and not in keeping with pose of resolute civil disobedience.

I’m not going into the bogus claims of genocide or our supposed “complicity” in it. This post is just about the petition. I don’t know how many people have signed it, but they have to realize that if there are no sanctions for disrupting the campus in this way, the campus will continue to be disrupted.  These people fail to realize that the purpose of the University is teaching, learning, and promoting thought—not promoting a preferred ideology that comports with “social justice”.

Students are of course free to enact civil disobedience, but part of that is accepting the consequences of the disobedience.  Students who beg not to be punished, as well as people who signed the petition above, undercut the very moral suasion essential to civil disobedience, so they damage not only the university’s mission, but the concept of civil disobedience itself.

Sometimes, astronomers get lucky and catch an event they can watch to see how the properties of some of the most massive objects in the universe evolve. That happened in February 2020, when a team of international astronomers led by Dheeraj (DJ) Pasham at MIT found one particular kind of exciting event that helped them track the speed at which a supermassive black hole was spinning for the first time.

Dr. Pasham found AT2020ocn, a bright flash captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory. He thought it might signify a tidal disruption event (TDE). In these extreme events, a black hole rips apart a star. Part of the star’s remnants are flung from the black hole, but part falls into the accretion disk. And how they fall could hold the key to understanding how a black hole is spinning.

How that disk accretes is attributable to a cosmological theory called Lense-Thirring precession, which shows how space-time is warped by powerful gravitational fields—like those around black holes. Lense-Thirring theory predicts that an accretion disk formed after a TDE would “wobble” soon after the event before settling down into a more standard pattern of matter orbiting a black hole. The key would be to catch a TDE event very early after it happened and then watch the resulting “wobbling” over as long of a time span as possible.

Fraser discusses measuring the spin of a black hole.

So catching AT2020ocn was just the first step—then the authors had to monitor it—preferably for months. To do so, they recruited the Neutron Star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER), an X-ray telescope attached to the ISS. NICER watched the galaxy containing AT2020ocn for 200 days immediately following the bright flash caught by Zwicky. 

They began to notice a pattern. Every 15 days, the amount of X-rays emitted around the black hole peaked sharply, indicating the potential “wobble” they were looking for. Plugging that frequency into equations for the Lense-Thirring theory, along with estimates of the star’s mass and the black hole’s mass, they determined the black hole was spinning at 25% of the speed of light—which is actually relatively slow for a black hole.

A black hole’s rotational speed can increase or decrease depending on its local environment. As it absorbs more material, typically in the form of matter from its accretion disk falling into it, its rotational speed increases. On the other hand, if it collides with another black hole, the overall rotational speed could decrease, as the two black holes’ spins could be opposite. That appears to be what has happened with the black hole that caused the AT2020ocn TDE, given its relatively slow speed compared to other black holes.

Black holes typically spin exceptionally fast, as Fraser discusses in this video.

The findings of this work were recently published in a paper in Nature. They also potentially lay the groundwork for calculating the spin of other supermassive black holes in the galaxy. Dr Pasham believes astronomers could calculate the spins of hundreds of black holes, opening up insights into their formation and life cycle.

But to do that, they will still need a lot of luck. TDEs are relatively rare events, and even when they do happen, there are obvious resource constraints on telescope time. The Vera Rubin Observatory might help, as it will monitor large chunks of the sky, but it’s not scheduled to come online until mid-next year. Until then, those interested in tracking black hole spins might have to rely on serendipity to find a rare event and have the telescope time to monitor it.

Learn More:
MIT – Using wobbling stellar material, astronomers measure the spin of a supermassive black hole for the first time
Pasham et al. – Lense–Thirring precession after a supermassive black hole disrupts a star
UT – Black Holes are Firing Beams of Particles, Changing Targets Over Time
UT – The Milky Way’s Black Hole is Spinning as Fast as it Can

Lead Image:
Artist’s depiction of how the accretion disk around a black hole could wobble in frequency with its spin, and how that wobble might be captured by a sensor near Earth.
Credits: Michal Zajacek & Dheeraj Pasham

The post A New Way to Measure the Rotation of Black Holes appeared first on Universe Today.

Today John Avise has returned with another Sunday batch of bird photos: the second part of his trip to Spain and Portugal (part 1 is here). As always, his IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Portugal and Spain Birds, Part 2 

This week’s post is Part 2 of a three-part mini-series on birds I photographed in 2010 while on a multi-stop business trip to Portugal and southern Spain.

Great Crested Grebe (Podiceps cristatus):

Greater Flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus):

European Greenfinch (Chloris chloris):

Grey Heron (Ardea cinerea) flying:

Eurasian Griffon Vulture (Gyps fulvus) flying:

Eurasian Hoopoe (Upupa epops):

Eastern Imperial Eagle (Aquila heliaca):

Imperial Eagle chicks:

Lesser Kestrel (Falco naumanni) flying with mouse in beak:

Little Bustard (Tetrax tetrax):

Little Bustard flying:

Long-legged Buzzard (Buteo rufinus):

Common Nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos):

Purple Heron (Ardea purpurea):

NASA is actively working to return surface samples from Mars in the next few years, which they hope will help us better understand whether ancient life once existed on the Red Planet’s surface billions of years ago. But what about atmospheric samples? Could these provide scientists with better information pertaining to the history of Mars? This is what a recent study presented at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated the significance of returning atmospheric samples from Mars and how these could teach us about the formation and evolution of the Red Planet.

Here, Universe Today discusses this research with the study’s lead author, Dr. Edward Young, who is a professor in the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences at UCLA, and study co-author, Dr. Timothy Swindle, who is a Professor Emeritus in the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, regarding the motivation behind the study, how atmospheric samples would be obtained, current or proposed missions, follow-up studies, and whether they think life ever existed on the Red Planet. Therefore, what was the motivation for the study?

Dr. Young tells Universe Today, “We learn a lot about the origin of a planet from its atmosphere as well as its rocks. In particular, isotope ratios of certain elements can constrain the processes leading to the formation of the planet.”

Credit: European Space Agency

Dr. Swindle follows this with, “There are two basic types of motivation. One is that we’re planning on bringing all these rock samples, and we’re going to be interested in knowing how they’ve interacted with the atmosphere, but we can’t figure that out without knowing the composition of the atmosphere in detail. So, we need an atmospheric sample to know what the rocks might have been exchanging elements and isotopes with. But we’d also like to have a sample of the Martian atmosphere to answer some basic questions about processes that have occurred, or are occurring, on Mars. For example, Martian meteorites contain trapped atmospheric noble gases, like krypton and xenon. But it appears that there are at least two different “atmospheric” components in those meteorites.”

For the study, the researchers proposed several benefits of returning a Mars atmospheric sample to Earth, including atmospheric samples being among the NASA Perseverance (Percy) rover sample tubes, gaining insight into potential solar gar within the Martian interior, evolutionary trends in atmospheric compositions, nitrogen cycling, and sources of methane on Mars. For the Percy atmospheric sample, also known as Sample No.1 “Roubion”, the study notes how this sample was obtained after Percy tried to collect a rock core sample but ended up collecting atmospheric gases instead. Additionally, the study proposes the lack of leakage the sample tube will experience while awaiting its return to Earth and the gases present within the sample are ideal for analysis once returned to Earth, as well. But aside from the Percy rover sample, how else could a Martian atmosphere sample be obtained?

“At least two other ideas for collecting a sample of Martian atmosphere have been suggested,” Dr. Swindle tells Universe Today. “One is to fly a spacecraft through the Martian atmosphere, collect a sample as it goes through, then return it to Earth. The other is to have a sample return “cannister” (it doesn’t have to be any bigger than a Perseverance tube) that has valves and a (Martian) air compressor. You could land it on the surface of Mars, open the valve to the atmosphere, turn on the compressor, and get a sample that has hundreds or thousands of times as much Martian atmosphere as a volume that is just sealed without compression, as Perseverance has done, and hopefully will do again.”

Dr. Swindle and Dr. Young both mention the Sample Collection for Investigation of Mars (SCIM) mission, which was proposed in 2002 by a team of NASA and academic researchers with the goal of collecting atmospheric samples at an altitude of 40 kilometers (25 miles) above the Martian surface and return them to Earth for further analysis. While SCIM was selected as a semi-finalist for the 2007 Mars Scout Program, it was unfortunately not selected for further development, and both Dr. Young and Dr. Swindle tell Universe Today there are currently no atmospheric sample missions being planned aside from the Percy rover sample. Therefore, what follow-up studies from this research are currently underway or being planned?

Dr. Swindle and Dr. Young both mention how efforts are being made to collect small quantities of atmospheric gas due to the small size of the sample tubes, with Dr. Swindle telling Universe Today, “A big set of questions right now is how good a sealed Perseverance tube would be at containing an atmospheric sample. How good is the seal? Might the tube spring a leak on a hard landing? Would some molecules in the Martian atmosphere stick to the coatings of the tubes? There’s been some activity on all of these questions, and so far, the answers have all been good – it looks like those Perseverance tubes may do well, even though they weren’t really designed with atmospheric sampling in mind.”

As noted, the purpose of obtaining and returning an atmospheric sample from Mars could help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of the Red Planet. While present-day Mars is a very cold and dry world with an atmosphere that is a fraction of the Earth’s atmosphere, with liquid water being unable to exist on the surface, along with no active volcanism, as well. However, significant evidence obtained from landers, rovers, and orbiters over the last several decades point to a much different Mars billions of years ago after it first formed. This included an active interior that produced a magnetic field that shielded the surface from harmful solar and cosmic radiation, a much thicker atmosphere being replenished from active volcanism, and flowing liquid water, all of which potentially led to the existence of some forms of life on the surface.

However, given Mars’ small size (half of Earth), this means its internal heat cooled off much faster (possibly over millions of years), resulting in volcanism becoming inactive and the dissipation of the magnetic field the interior activity was driving, the latter of which led to harmful solar and cosmic radiation stripping the atmosphere, with the surface liquid water evaporating to space along with it. Therefore, do Dr. Young and Dr. Swindle believe life ever existed on Mars, and will we ever find it?

Dr. Young tells Universe Today, “I really don’t know.  I think microbial life sometime in the past, or even now, is a reasonable hypothesis but we don’t have enough information.”

Dr. Swindle also echoes his uncertainty whether life ever existed on Mars, but elaborates by telling Universe Today, “If there hasn’t, why did life start so early on Earth, but didn’t start on Mars, which had a similar climate at the time. If there has been, how similar is it to life on Earth? Since Earth and Mars are always exchanging rocks because of impacts, is life on Earth related to life on Mars? If it has existed, it will be tough to find. But an atmospheric sample could help. For instance, there seems to be methane in the Martian atmosphere. Most, but not all, of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is biological, and analyzing the relative ratios of the isotopes of carbon or hydrogen is one of the best ways to figure that out.”

When will we obtain an atmospheric sample of Mars and what will it teach us about the formation and evolution of the Red Planet in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The post Could Martian atmospheric samples teach us more about the Red Planet than surface samples? appeared first on Universe Today.

The dismantling of DEI in America continues. It happened last week in the entire University of North Carolina system, and now occurred the University of Wyoming. This short post just documents what is clearly a trend—one I thought wouldn’t happen until I was six feet under. Click on the headline below to read the article from USA Today:

The piece:

The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees voted unanimously last week to eliminate the school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) department and move its staff and some of its programming to other departments on campus.

The decision was made to balance input from the university community and the will of the Wyoming legislature, according to a written statement by University President Dr. Ed Seidel.

“We received a strong message from the state’s elected officials to change our approach to DEI issues. At the same time, we have heard from our community that many of the services that might have incorrectly been categorized under DEI are important for the success of our students, faculty and staff,” Seidel says. “These initial steps are a good-faith effort on the part of the university to respond to legislative action while maintaining essential services.”

Additionally, the University will no longer require job applicants to “submit statements regarding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and no longer evaluating employees’ commitment to DEI in annual performance evaluations.”

State lawmakers voted in March to cut $1.73 million from the University of Wyoming’s block grant and forbid state funding for the school’s diversity program. At a packed Board of Trustees meeting in March, students, educators, and community members rallied in support of DEI initiatives, and the Board of Trustees pledged to vote on a path forward at their May meeting.

The decision from the Board of Trustees comes amidst a heated national debate on DEI. Donald Trump recently spoke against the “DEI revolution” and pledged to crush “anti-white” racism. Defenders of DEI argue that its programming is necessary in acknowledging the present-day effects of past violence.

The last sentence is the one that’s worth discussing. Are there inimical effects on today’s society of past “violence”? (I’d use “racism” rather than “violence”.) The answer is indubitably “yes.” Given that, how do we rectify them? How can we make people at least share a minimum level of equality and well being?  One remedy is the “color blind” approachy: giving everyone equal treatment and opportunity. But as is often pointed out, many minorities already begin with two strikes against them, having inherited a culture which isn’t conducive to conventional social success. Until recently that was also the case for women, but that’s being rectified very quickly.

The remedy I’ve tentatively hit on, one that seems fair and still maintains the virtues of meritocracy, is also a remedy that seems impossible: assure all Americans that they have equal opportunity from birth.  That’s impossible not only because of inherited status and wealth, but because at least increasing opportunities by a decent modicum, ensuring good schools for all, cultures conducive to well being and success, decent medical care and other bits of the social safety net—seem to require both resources and a will that is lacking in America.  In that respect we need to be more like Iceland or Denmark but we’re demographically and socially quite different. Topping it all off, we don’t know which interventions will work, especially for fixing education. Throwing money at schools doesn’t seem to improve education much, and so we have to go through a slow empirical process of testing different interventions.

But I’ve digressed. One thing I can say is that the way DEI is used today in America is not creating more social justice. In contrast, it’s creating more division and resentment, more guilt and victimhood, and promoting a denigration of merit that can’t be good in the long run.

I’ve also pointed out that some aspects of DEI are worthy, like having a place to adjudicate harassment and bias, but this kind of monitoring hasn’t been done well. (For example, I object to anonymous “bias reporting” that chills speech and creates a climate of fear. By all means have a place to report bias, but it can’t be anonymous.)  And schools can reach out to truly diverse communities, not just involving ethnicity, but also socioeconomic status and different viewpoints.  Oh, and bring back mandatory standardized testing, which seems to be good for everyone.

But now I’ve digressed too much and am off for a fat, juicy burger (no steak this week), so I’ll just convey the news above and pass on.

h/t: Ginger K.

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The Washington Post recounts how a man was living in a car with 50–yes that’s right, 50–cats, and they were rescued from the car when it was left closed and overheated. One of the cats, named “Hercules”, was at death’s door, but they brought him back to become a model for Target’s store-brand kitty litter.

Click below to read, or go here to find the story archived for free.

The scene was heartbreaking: Nearly 50 cats were crammed into a hot car at a rest stop near Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

The cats were piled from floor to ceiling inside an SUV, and police soon learned that their owner had been living inside the car with them.

The owner agreed to surrender the cats to area animal shelters, but during the rescue, one of the cats escaped. Hercules, a gray and white feline, scampered off that sweltering day in June 2022, said Nicole Perreault, a veterinarian who runs Tuff Start Rescue, a Minnesota foster and adoption nonprofit.

Be sure to look at the photos of the cats in the car. It’s is indeed heartbreaking. But wait! There’s more:

Animal rescue volunteers searched for the cat for a month, she said, until Hercules was finally spotted sitting on someone’s doorstepin the area. His jaw was fractured, he was covered with maggots and his tongue was severely damaged, Perreault said.

The person who found Hercules outside brought the cat to the veterinary clinic.

Perreault said she suspected the cat was Hercules and contacted his previous owner, who confirmed it.

“This gentleman said he had fallen on hard times and had been evicted so he was staying in his car with all of his cats,” she said. “He was very polite, and it seemed he loved them very much. He was happy to know that Hercules had been found and was getting a lot of love.”

“We suspected he might have been hit by a car,” Perreault said of Hercules. “He was so near death that I wondered if it would be more humane to euthanize him.”

But then Hercules lifted his head and looked right at Perreault.

“I got the impression that he really wanted to fight,” she said.

Perreault and her team fed Hercules and cleaned him up, then gave him fluids through an IV and put him on pain medication. When the 6-year-old feline was strong enough, Perreault took him to an animal oral surgeon to have his jaw repaired.

Here are pictures of Hercules on Perreault’s FB page taken right when he showed up. He looks really awful! (You can donate there to help him, though he’s pretty good now):

Perreault said she posted a few photos of Hercules on her Facebook page to let people know the cat had been found and was gradually healing.

“He ripped my heart out when I saw him,” she wrote. “… I decided we owed it to him to give him every chance to recover from this horrible ordeal, so that hopefully he can experience the love and TLC that awaits.”

Jill LeBrun, a pediatric nurse from St. Paul who has fostered dogs and cats for Perreault’s rescue over the years, was immediately interested.

Last fall, LeBrun said, she was scrolling on social media when she came across a post from the Animal Connection, a pet talent agency in search of cats with unusual faces. It was scouting pet models for Target, which is based in Minneapolis.

LeBrun said the agency loved the photo she sent of Hercules with his tongue hanging out. She was asked to bring her cat to a studio for a photo shoot so his personality and star appeal could be assessed.

“Hercules did great — he’s a friendly cat and everybody loved him,” LeBrun said, noting that she was paid $100 to participate. “They told me his picture would appear on something for Target in early 2024.”

. . .In mid-March, when LeBrun still hadn’t heard back, she made a trip to her local Target and walked down the pet aisle.

When she came to a display of store-brand cat litter, she was stunned and delighted to see her cat’s image — with his dangling pink tongue — on every bucket of Up & Up Fragrance Free Clumping Cat Litter on the shelf.

And here’s a video about Hercules showing starring on the cat litter:

And there’s still more:

LeBrun said Hercules was recently called in for a second Target photo shoot, which means he’ll probably be appearing on other merchandise in a few months. The TV station Kare 11 recently reported on the cat’s sudden fame as a model.

Do watch the update on Hercules at KARE.

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Bored Panda has a collection of 50 pets at the vet’s, and I’ll show just a few cat pictures with the credits:

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Here’s a still-active bill in Pennsylvania, sponsored by Carolyn Comitta (a good-hearted Democrat, of course) that bans the cruel declawing of cats. You can click to read the bill, or read a more recent update from the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF):

I join the ALDF in supporting the bill. Their summary:

The Animal Legal Defense Fund supports this bill.

Sponsor: House Bill lead sponsor Rep Liz Hanbidge (D-61) and Senate Bill lead sponsor Sen Carolyn Comitta (D-19)
Introduction Dates:
House Bill: March 17, 2023
Senate Bill: April 22, 2024

This bill, H.B. 508/ S.B. 1178, would prohibit the declawing of cats unless the procedure is medically necessary for a therapeutic purpose and performed by a licensed veterinarian. Under this measure, declawing for cosmetic or aesthetic reasons, as well as for reasons of human convenience, would be strictly prohibited.

Declawing is an invasive surgical procedure in which the last bone of each toe is amputated, similar to severing a human finger at the last knuckle. The procedure is commonly performed for human convenience — often to protect furniture — rather than for the cat’s well-being. Declawing causes significant post-surgical pain and leads to a cat’s inability to scratch, eliminating a critical natural behavior. This can cause lifelong physical problems and lead to behavioral issues, such as biting and aggression, which the cat may resort to because they have been stripped of their primary defense mechanism.

Similar legislation has been enacted in three U.S. states — New York, Maryland, and Virginia — as well as numerous large cities that have jurisdictional bans such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Madison, West Hollywood, Austin, Denver, Beverly Hills, and Berkeley. In Pennsylvania, communities such as Allentown, Easton, Etna, and Pittsburgh have successfully passed local laws to prohibit declaw procedures.

There’s no down side to this bill that I can see.  Saving a sofa (if no other scratching posts work) is less important than saving your cat’s feet and their ability to defend themselves.

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Lagniappe:  I can’t remember where I got this–probably on Facebook.

h/t: Divy, Barry, Ginger K.

Black holes seem to provide endless fascination to astronomers. This is at least partly due to the extreme physics that takes place in and around them, but sometimes, it might harken back to cultural touchpoints that made them interested in astronomy in the first place. That seems to be the case for the authors of a new paper on the movement of jets coming out of black holes. Dubbing them “Death Star” black holes, researchers used data from the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to look at where these black holes fired jets of superheated particles. And over time the found they did something the fiction Death Star could also do – move.

The black holes at the center of the study were supermassive ones at the centers of galaxies. Importantly, they were all surrounded by hot gases that were visible to Chandra’s X-ray sensors. The jets themselves were clearly visible in the data, but there was other important information hiding in it—namely, pockets free from gas, which had been pushed away by the jets.

Each black hole has particle jets in two opposing directions. As those jets push away gas and dust, they open up a pocket in space surrounding the black hole. These are visible in the X-ray data due to a lack of signal from those regions. The researchers hypothesized that the jets should align with the pockets of free space they create.

Black holes have been known to spin for a while – as Fraser discusses.

However, they found that, in at least 6 of the 16 black holes they were studying, the beams had completely changed direction such that the pockets of missing gas no longer aligned with the jets currently emitted from the black hole. In some cases, these changes added up to a 90-degree shift in the direction the jets were facing. What’s even more impressive, they seemed to move on a relatively small time scale, with estimates ranging from 1 to 10 million years. That is a blink of an eye for a black hole over 10 billion years old.

So why is this important? Cosmologists theorize that these disruptive jets put an upper limit on the number of stars that form in the host galaxy of the black holes. They don’t let the gas and dust surrounding them cool down enough to start to form stars and rocky planets. So, while it isn’t clear if the jets of particles themselves are roasting any formed planets like the actual Death Star, it is clear that moving the jets around would cause an even more massive disruption in the star-forming process. In theory, this would mean that galaxies containing these moving jets would have fewer stars, but that is a study for another paper.

Understanding exactly why this is happening might also need to be researched in another paper, but the authors have a few theories. Matter orbiting around the black hole and falling into it could cause the black hole to rotate, causing the jets it emits to move with it. 

How a black hole forms could hold the key to understanding why its jets move over time. Fraser discusses how that happens.

Another explanation is that the gas is moving around the galaxy without being impacted by the beams. In essence, the “cavities” of no gas in a galaxy are remnants of other cosmological forces and have nothing to do with the black hole beams. However, the authors don’t think this is likely because the galaxy mergers that could be one source of causing the “sloshing” happened in the galaxies that had the moving beams and those that didn’t. One would expect the cavities to be present in both types if they were caused by galaxies merging rather than moving jets of particles.

As always, there is more science to do. Thanks to the wonderful world of video streaming, a whole generation of new scientists inspired by the same Death Star could do it.

Learn More:
Chandra – Spotted: ‘Death Star’ Black Holes in Action
Ubertosi et al. – Jet reorientation in central galaxies of clusters and groups: insights from VLBA and Chandra data
UT – It’s Confirmed. M87’s Black Hole is Actually Spinning
UT – The Milky Way’s Black Hole is Spinning as Fast as it Can

Lead Image:
Image from Chandra’s X-Ray and VLBA’s radio data set of a black hole’s jets with “cavities” surrounding it.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Bologna/F. Ubertosi; Inset Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLBA; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

The post Black Holes are Firing Beams of Particles, Changing Targets Over Time appeared first on Universe Today.

We’re running out of photos again, so I plead with and importune you to send in your good wildlife photos.

We have just a few photos today, and the first batch, from reader Steve Pollard, is salacious: LOCKED FOXES. As always, the contributor’s captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I attach three photos taken a couple of months ago of a pair of locked American Red Foxes (Vulpes vulpes fulva) in our garden. They were taken with a phone camera at extreme range, so they are not the greatest, but it’s not something I’ve seen before. From the magazine Wildlife Online:”Copulation lasts only a few seconds and, following ejaculation, the pair are locked together—a copulatory lock—for up to 90 minutes, owing to contraction of the vixen’s vagina and the swelling of the bulbus glandis tissue at the tip of the dog fox’s baculum”. As the photos indicate, the lock can result in some awkward positions! In this case, the vixen tried several times to get free, twisting and even biting at the dog. The lock lasted for over 20 minutes. The cub from a previous engagement took quite an interest in proceedings.

From Floridan Maderspacher, a marsh fritillary (Euphydryas aurinia), which, he says, “goes by the much nicer German name of Skabiosen-Scheckenfalter“.

From Lee Jussim.

Northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris)  in California:

American robin‘s eggs (Turdus migratorius), New Jersey

Hatched eggs:

Swans and babies (Cygnus sp., also New Jersey):

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss434_Tricia_Rose_2024_05_25.mp3 Download MP3

In recent years, condemnations of racism in America have echoed from the streets to corporate boardrooms. At the same time, politicians and commentators fiercely debate racism’s very existence. And so, our conversations about racial inequalities remain muddled. In Metaracism, Brown University Professor of Africana Studies Tricia Rose cuts through the noise with a bracing and invaluable new account of what systemic racism actually is, how it works, and how we can fight back. She reveals how—from housing to education to criminal justice—an array of policies and practices connect and interact to produce an even more devastating “metaracism” far worse than the sum of its parts. While these systemic connections can be difficult to see—and are often portrayed as “color-blind”—again and again they function to disproportionately contain, exploit, and punish Black people. By helping us to comprehend systemic racism’s inner workings and destructive impact, Rose shows how to create a more just America for us all.

Tricia Rose is Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. She has received fellowships from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and her research has been funded by the Mellon and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations. She co-hosts with Cornel West the podcast The Tight Rope. She is the author of Longing to Tell: Black Women’s Stories of Sexuality and Intimacy, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When we Talk About Hip Hop—and Why it Matters, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, and her new book Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives—and How We Break Free.

Shermer and Rose discuss:

• how she broke free from her own working-class background growing up in Harlem in the 1960s
• racism, structural racism, systemic racism, metaracism
• specific problems to be solved vs. deep-root cause-ism
• What policies, practices, laws, and beliefs are racist in 2024 America and what can be done about them?
• what it means to be “caught up in the system”
• individual vs. group differences
• White advantages and Black disadvantages
• Rawls’ original position/veil of ignorance and why it has not been realized in America
• race differences that are real and current, and not just historical
• Trayvon Martin
• Kelley Williams-Bolar
• Michael Brown
• Rose’s response to Black conservative authors like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell
• why Coleman Hughes is wrong about color-blindness
• Obama, George Floyd and race relations today
• reparations.

Introduction to the Show

In my 1997 book Why People Believe Weird Things, in a chapter on race and racism, I summarized the scientific research to date on the subject. My deeper motive in this exercise was my belief that in my lifetime we could achieve—or at least approach in an asymptotic curve—a post-race society in which such superficial characteristics as skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits would be considered the least important thing to know about a person.

Nearly twenty years later, in my book The Moral Arc, I suggested that we had made so much moral progress toward this end that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” was at last coming true and so, I concluded, “we are living in the most moral period in our species’ history.”

How naïve I was. Conversations about and coverage of race and race-related incidents have since become omnipresent in our culture, from social media to mainstream media. Government, corporate, and academic collection of data on all matters race has become ubiquitous, driven further along by racial (and gender) sensitivity training programs, of which I have partaken.

Thus, in 2022 I edited a special edition of Skeptic on “Race Matters,” that included: “Systemic Racism—Explained” by Mahzarin R. Banaji, Susan T. Fiske & Douglas S. Massey. Excerpt:

In the early 1960s, more than 60 percent of White Americans agreed that Whites have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods. By the 1980s, however, the percentage had dropped to 13 percent. The fact that discrimination is illegal, and White support for segregation has plummeted, begs the question of why segregation persists.

Rental and sales agents today are less likely to respond to emails from people with stereotypically Black names or to reply to phone messages left by speakers who “sound Black”. A recent meta-analysis of 16 experimental housing audit studies and 19 lending analyses conducted since 1970 revealed that sharp racial differentials in the number of units recommended by realtors and inspected by clients have persisted and that racial gaps in loan denial rates and borrowing cost have barely changed in 40 years.

Audit studies, conducted across the social and behavioral sciences, include a subset of resume studies in which researchers send the same resume out to apply for jobs, but change just one item: the candidate’s name is Lisa Smith or Lakisha Smith. Then, they wait to see who gets the callback. The bias is clear: employers avoid “Black-sounding” names. In fact, in both Milwaukee’s and New York City’s low-wage job market, Black applicants with no criminal background were called back with the same frequency or less as White applicants just released from prison.

As a result, Critical Race Theory (CRT) literature on systemic racism is both riding and fueling this cultural pattern, loaded as it is with discussions about racial group differences on everything from income and family wealth to the percentage of Black professors in STEM fields. What percentage of STEM professors have brown eyes, blue eyes, hazel eyes, and green eyes (pace Jane Elliott’s famous experiment)? How many brunettes, blonds, and redheaded professors are there in STEM?

Who knows? Who cares? Why are these superficial characteristics considered meaningless, whereas equally frivolous features like skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits are proxies for everything from intelligence and personality to moral worth and social value?

The answer is obvious. Race and racism as manifested in slavery, segregation, lynchings, Jim Crow, redlining, profiling, and police brutality is America’s original sin, whereas we have no history of prejudice and bigotry based on eye or hair color. How did we get to this point and how can we get past it?

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Imagine if your dead laptop or phone could charge in a minute or if an electric car could be fully powered in 10 minutes. New research could lead to such advances.

Nuclear physicists have long been working to reveal how the proton gets its spin. Now, a new method that combines experimental data with state-of-the-art calculations has revealed a more detailed picture of spin contributions from the very glue that holds protons together.

Undergoing surgery is seldom a pleasant experience, and it can sometimes be highly invasive. Surgical procedures have evolved steadily over the centuries, growing with the knowledge of anatomy and biology. Innovative methods have also been bolstered with new tools, and a growth in the use of robotics since the 1980s has moved health care forward significantly.