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What can a sample return mission from Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io, teach scientists about planetary and satellite (moon) formation and evolution? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as an international team of more than two dozen scientists discussed the benefits and challenges of a mission to Io with the goal of sampling its volcanic plumes that eject from its surface on a regular basis.

It’s getting a little harder to be the first humans to achieve something but, if all goes to plan, a team of four private astronauts are expected to head off into a polar orbit around Earth aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule today (31 March) at 9:46pm ET and take the crew over the North and South Poles of Earth. Financed by Chun Wang, a Malta-based investor, they are planning a series of experiments, including attempting to grow oyster mushrooms in microgravity, which could eventually become a source of food for space missions.

After a container ship struck and destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, researchers began calculating the risks of similar catastrophic incidents for other US bridges – and they’re surprisingly high

Astronomers suspect that Europa has cryovolcanoes, regions where briny water could erupt through Europa's ice shell, throwing water—and hopefully organic molecules—into space. NASA's Europa Clipper and ESA's JUICE mission are on their way and will be able to scan the surface of the icy moon for signs of cryovolcanism. What should they be looking for? Pockets of brine just below the surface could be active for 60,000 years and should be warmer than their surroundings.

AI mental health apps may offer a cheap and accessible way to fill the gaps in the overstretched U.S. mental health care system, but ethics experts warn that we need to be thoughtful about how we use them, especially with children.

AI mental health apps may offer a cheap and accessible way to fill the gaps in the overstretched U.S. mental health care system, but ethics experts warn that we need to be thoughtful about how we use them, especially with children.

Researchers have developed an innovative solution to a pressing environmental challenge: removing and destroying per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly called 'forever chemicals.' A new study unveils a method that not only eliminates PFAS from water systems but also transforms waste into high-value graphene, offering a cost-effective and sustainable approach to environmental remediation.

Subsurface Habitats on the Moon and Mars Could Be Grown Using Mushrooms and Inflatable Robots

One of the first verified predictions of general relativity is the gravitational deflection of starlight. The effect was [first observed in 1919 during a total solar eclipse.](https://briankoberlein.com/post/einstein-and-eddington/) Since stars appear as points of light, the effect is seen as an apparent shift in the position of stars near the eclipse. But the effect happens more generally. If a distant galaxy is obscured by a closer one, some of the distant light is gravitationally lensed around the closer galaxy, giving us a warped and distorted view of the faraway stars. This effect can also magnify the distant galaxy, making its light appear brighter, and we have used this effect to observe some of the most distant stars in the Universe.

In-situ resource utilization will likely play a major role in any future long-term settlement of the Moon. However, designing such a system in advance with our current level of knowledge will prove difficult, mainly because there's so much uncertainty around both the availability of those resources and the efficacy of the processes used to extract them. Luckily, researchers have tools that can try to deal with both of those uncertainties - statistical modeling. A team from Imperial College London, the University of Munich, and the Luxembourg Institue of Science and Technology recently released a pre-print paper on arXiv that uses a well-known statistical modeling method known as Monte Carlo simulation to try to assess what type of ISRU plan would be best for use on the Moon.

Cave-dwelling orb spiders have adapted their webs so they act as tripwires for prey that crawl on the walls of the caves

Even though Jupiter's moon Io is considered the most volcanically active world in the Solar System, Venus actually has more volcanoes and volcanic features on its surface. For a long time, scientists thought that most of these features and volcanoes were ancient remnants of the planet's geological past. However, newer research shows that Venus is still volcanically active.

Someone sent me this tweet a few days ago, and I was unsure about whether this was any kind of violation of University policy.  As far as I gather, this was posted on the inside of a chemistry professor’s office, facing outwards.

University of Chicago – Outside a chemistry professor’s classroom, a sign filled with propaganda reads, “DEPORT ISRAELIS.”

This is blatant antisemitism and xenophobia which is completely unacceptable, @UChicago. An investigation is needed. pic.twitter.com/wGer8vjX9f

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) March 28, 2025

 

Here’s a photo from that tweet, but all I can make out in it is “Israel murdered 18,000 children” (Hamas’s figures, and probably grossly untrue) as well as “Israel must pay for the murders and destruction” and “DEPORT ISRAELIS.” If you can read more of it, please decipher in the comments. 

Anyway, I sent the tweet around to our local free speech group and asked if this was a violation of University rules.  This morning someone said that this kind of thing is indeed allowed, though you’re not allowed to display flags in your office (some wonky rule). A watermelon, though, does nicely as a substitute for the Palestinian flag. At any rate. I saw the tweet below this morning, indicating that the University of Chicago itself had apologized for the sign, which was “voluntarily” taken down, and said that it is being investigated as a possible violation of the “University’s non-discrimination policy.”

We sent a letter to the President of the University of Chicago. We’re working closely with students on the ground. This is the statement the University released today.

Let’s be clear: pressure works. Community matters. And transparency is everything.

We appreciate that the… pic.twitter.com/cGXW6iUqE4

— ChicagoJewishAlliance (@ChiJewishAllies) March 30, 2025

 

The statement:

If this is indeed allowed behavior, then putting a sign like this inside your office, facing out, is not a violation of free speech, which is part of the Chicago Principles. On the other hand, one could argue that such a sign creates a climate of harassment towards Jewish students, which is a Title VI violation. Now that Trump is threatening to withhold money from universities for condoning anti-semitic behavior, I can see where this kind of publicity could scare our university.

I don’t know if I’ll learn any more about this, but if I do I’ll impart it below.  All I can say is that IF displaying this kind of sign is permitted by University regulations, then it’s not kosher to investigate the person who posted it (that’s chilling of speech) or to make a public statement about it. All of this hangs on the “time, place, and manner” restrictions of speech at the University here, and people aren’t sure what the policy is.

Anyway, weigh in below with your opinion.

 

Bioelectronic devices, neural interfaces, biosensors and AI hardware are now easier to make thanks to a streamlined method for fabricating a key material.

Bioelectronic devices, neural interfaces, biosensors and AI hardware are now easier to make thanks to a streamlined method for fabricating a key material.

Researchers have developed new AI models that can vastly improve accuracy and discovery within protein science. Potentially, the models will assist the medical sciences in overcoming present challenges within, e.g. personalised medicine, drug discovery, and diagnostics.

Inhaling dust particles from the Red Planet over long periods of time could put humans at risk of developing respiratory issues, thyroid disease and other health problems.

By studying the brains of autistic girls, we now know the condition presents differently in them than in boys, suggesting that huge numbers of women have gone undiagnosed

UPDATE: Although I swore I wouldn’t read the comments on my piece, I couldn’t resist. In fact, I’m having a high old time reading them, and even answering some of them. Some are good, but there are tons of them that grossly misunderstand or mischaracterize religion. As of 11:30 a.m. today, there were 436 comments.

If you’ve read here in the last few months, you’ll know about my kerfuffle with the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which you can find described in various posts on this website. In short, Kat Grant, at the time a fellow at the FFRF, wrote an essay on the Freethought Now! website explaining their problems with defining sex (the author uses they/them pronouns). Grant finally came up with this unsatisfactory psychological definition: “A woman is whoever she says she is.”

I wanted to respond, and wrote FFRF co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor for permission to publish a short response (I was on the Honorary Board of Directors). She said “okay,” and after a few back-and-forths involving editing, it was published as a short piece called “Biology is not bigotry” (it’s now archived here and has been reprinted in other places).  The point of the title was, of course, that the biological definition of the sexes, based on the gamete type potentially produced (sperm or eggs), says almost nothing about how gender-nonconforming people should be treated or whether their rights should be curtailed (answer: almost never, though sports participation is one of the few exceptions).

The day after my piece went up, the FFRF took it down (Kat Grant’s piece is still online but is also archived here). Why? My best guess is that the young people at the FFRF raised a ruckus, but the FFRF also explained that my views were harmful and didn’t reflect the FFRF’s views (that was the point of the criticism, of course). Publishing my piece was, they said, “a mistake.”  No, it was censorship, pure and simple.

All this is explained in an op-ed I wrote that was published last night in the Wall Street Journal. If you click on the screenshot below, it should take you to a free version, or you can find it archived here.

I have to say that I didn’t choose the title (for I have not lost my atheism!), and the article was heavily edited. Yes, I do know that Gnosticism was not part of Catholicism, but I also know that Gnosticism also was a form of religion and superstition.

At any rate, I asked the WSJ to add the links to two assertions I made in the text, but they didn’t add those links. I’ve put them in the two paragraphs below taken from the WSJ piece, just so you can check up on how I quoted others:

The FFRF’s road to quasireligious views was a long one, paved by secular philosophers and the movements they spawned. It includes, for one thing, the Gnostic view that one’s true identity goes well beyond the physical body. As a Catholic website comparing Gnosticism with transgenderism notes, “The underlying concept is the same, that who we ‘really’ are is not our bodies, but rather some sort of interior ‘ego,’ or ‘I’ that constitutes our true self. It is incumbent that the body must conform to that true self.”

Some forms of feminism have made their contribution, with constructivists like Judith Butler arguing that sex is a social construct, not “a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but . . . a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies.” This is a denial of evolution.

That’s pretty much all I have to say except to once again exculpate myself from transphobia. The purpose of “Biology is not bigotry” was to show that adhering to the gametic definition of “biological sex” used by many biologists does not make you someone who hates or wishes to erase trans people.  I do think that there are a few instances in which their “rights” clash with the “rights” of other groups (women athletes or women prisoners, for instance), but that doesn’t mean you’re a hater—only someone trying to adjudicate for yourself an important difference of opinion.

The only remaining question is this: why is Honorary Board of FFRF still up on the Internet when Religion News Service Reporter Yonat Shimron told me (and published) that Annie Laurie Gaylor assured Shimron that that Board had been dissolved?

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist whose dogmatic science denialism led to mass famine when his ideas were applied to agriculture. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a lot like Lysenko in his science denial. Will his results be as disastrous?

The post “Make America Healthy Again”: The new Lysenkoism first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.