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Researchers interrogated the 'sounds' of a cluster of stars within the Milky Way, uncovering a new technique for astrophysicists to probe the universe and learn more about its evolution.

When spring arrives and the heating season comes to an end, keeping warm becomes less of an issue. However, scientists remind us that it is not just a seasonal necessity -- heat is also a valuable energy resource that can be stored and used when needed most. Researchers have discovered an innovative solution beneath our feet: using soil as an efficient thermal energy storage system.

A collaboration between chemical engineers and animal scientists has created a system for recovering valuable industrial chemicals from animal waste, representing a major step towards circularity and environmental sustainability.

A more precise definition of the second is crucial to all sorts of physical measurements – but to get there, scientists have to pack up their extraordinarily fragile optical clocks and take them on tour

On March 17 Trump issued a new executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” And its goal is largely to prevent the dissemination of divisive or negative views of American history, instantiated, for Trump, in the Smithsonian Institution’s new exhibit on sculpture and identity. Here’s the “purpose” of the EO:

 Purpose and Policy.  Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.  This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.  Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.  Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.

The EO then concentrates on a new exhibit at the Smithsonian that deals with race and power:

Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.  This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.  For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power:  Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”  The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”

Other institutes also get this kind of treatment, including The National Museum of African American History and Culture and Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  The Order then decrees that the Department of the Interior must prevent such “divisive” exhibits. Part of Trump’s Diktat to the Department of the Interior telling it what it must do:

(i)    determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology;

(ii)   take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties, as appropriate and consistent with 43 U.S.C. 1451 et seq., 54 U.S.C. 100101 et seq.,and other applicable law; and

(iii)  take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.\

It’s clear that Trump is aiming for a somewhat sanitized version of American history, closer to that of the old sanitized history textbooks we had in junior high and far, far distant from the claims of the 1619 Project.  Of course the truth is somewhere in between: America and its founders had high and admirable ideals, but fell down when it came to the “all men are created equal” with the same “unalienable rights” part.  All people (not just “men,” which to them presumably meant “people”) were not treated as if they were created equal, and the institution of slavery led to the worst war in American history (the Civil War killed 1.5 times the number of Americans who died in WWII and more than ten times the number of American deaths in the Vietnam War).

And bigotry did not end after the Civil War, of course. Immigrants were largely denied opportunities, blacks still faced Jim Crow treatment, and we incarcerated American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII.  Our history, while progressing now towards equality of opportunity, has been checkered, and it’s wrong to hide that from people.

On the other hand, it’s misleading to pretend, as woke culture does courtesy of Ibram Kendi et al., that racism is still built heavily into American laws and that all white Americans are bigots determined to hold down minorities. Yes, identity politics is distorting America, but the remnants of the past nevertheless can be seen in the lower well-being and achievement of some minorities, and we need to remedy that as best we can.

In contrast, Trump seems to want to hide America’s past under a basket.  I haven’t seen the Smithsonian’s exhibit so I can’t pass judgement on it, but the NYT, highlighting Trump’s order, takes another tack: it addresses, and pretty much denies, the existence of human race. Read the article by clicking the headline below or find it archived here.

The tenor of this article, which is poorly researched but laden with quotes, is that human races do not exist and are merely a social construct.  A few excerpts to that end:

The president’s order noted, among other things, that the show “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”

In interviews, several scholars questioned why the executive order appeared to take issue with that view, which is now broadly held. Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written about scientific racism, said that “the executive order is troubling and out of step with the current consensus.” He added that pseudoscientific attempts to create a hierarchy of races with white people at the top were seen “in places like Nazi Germany or within the eugenics movement.”

and   

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.”

“It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,” the statement says. “Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences.”

This is the view throughout the article, and it’s both right and wrong, which means it’s misleading.  The “classical” view, which is that there are a finite number of distinct groups, distinguishable by morphology and with few or no intermediates between groups, is wrong.  Thousands of years ago, when human populations began differentiating in geographical isolation from one another, and were was on the road to formation of distinct biological “races” and then species, this definition may have be closer to accuracy. But human mobility and interbreeding had long since effaced the distinctness of populations. We have groups within groups within groups.

But populations that are genetically distinct continue to exist, and that is what the article neglects. You can call them “races” or “populations” (my preference) or “ethnic groups”, but there’s no doubt that the human species is geographically heterogeneous, with geographic barriers like the Sahara or the Himalayas demarcating the more distinct populations. Further, you can often identify people’s ancestry from their genes. Otherwise, companies like 23andMe wouldn’t work at all.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  Writing about “race” these days is a hot potato because even discussing it implies that you are ranking populations, which no rational person does any more.  But ignoring the genetic distinctness of populations, based on frequency differences in many genes among populations from different areas, affords a fascinating and informative look into the history of human migration, selection, and so on.

There are few sensible pieces written on the topic of race. Most of them argue that race is a social construct without any biological basis.  But I want to be a bit self-aggrandizing and recommend one section of the paper “The ideological subversion of biology” that Luana Maroja and I wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer. It’s free at the title link. The paper takes up six ways that evolutionary biology has been distorted by ideologues. The part you should read is section 5, which starts like this (it is not long but I urge it upon you):

5. “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.” This is the elephant in the room: the claim that there is no empirical value in studying differences between races, ethnic groups, or populations. Such work is the biggest taboo in biology, claimed to be inherently racist and harmful. But the assertion heading this paragraph, a direct quote from the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is wrong.

and a few excerpts from that section (there are references to all statements):

. . .old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

One more:

On a broader scale, genetic analysis of worldwide populations has allowed us to not only trace the history of human expansions out of Africa (there were several), but to assign dates to when H. sapiens colonized different areas of the world. This has been made easier with recent techniques for sequencing human “fossil DNA.” On top of that, we have fossil DNA from groups such as Denisovans and Neanderthals, which, in conjunction with modern data, tells us these now-extinct groups bred in the past with the ancestors of “modern” Homo sapiens, producing at least some fertile offspring (most of us have some Neanderthal DNA in our genomes). Although archaeology and carbon dating have helped reconstruct the history of our species, these have largely been supplanted by sequencing the DNA of living and ancient humans.

We go on to discuss the taboos of race (the most taboo-sh being studying differences in mentation and IQ among groups) as well as some of the advantages of knowing the genetic differences among human populations.

The point I want to make is that, when you’re talking about “race,” you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, the classical idea of “races” is largely wrong, but we should not pretend that all human populations are genetically identical, or that the existing genetic differences aren’t diagnostic or of interest.  The NYT article above, however, says nothing like that. Instead, it emphasizes the viewpoint expressed above:

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.”

“It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,”

You can see how this is misleading.  Populations are not absolutely distinct, but are distinguishable genetically if you use many genes. And populations do tend to statistically cluster by geography, because geographic isolation promotes genetic differentiation. (Again, this is how ancestry companies figure out where your genes came from.) And yes, of course, “race” was used to prop up colonialism, oppression, and discrimination”. That’s the bathwater we should throw out. But we should keep the baby, which is recognizing that human populations are not genetically identical, and that the genetic differences among them give useful information about several topics. Just read section 5!

A company in the Netherlands says it has perfected a way to create "graft chimeras" with the skin of one plant and the innards of another

From robot rights to ageing and climate change, this month’s science fiction squares up to the big topics, with new titles from authors including Nick Harkaway and Eve Smith

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “nature,” came with the caption, “Jesus lets her confuse him.”  And indeed she does.  Now Jesus and Mo have no reason to be homophobic!

Today we have a batch of photos from UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison. Susan’s comment are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Don’t miss the baby possum (last photo)!

Backyard Visitations

Recently I was fortunate to have a large mob of brightly colored birds visit my back yard.  A flock of over 100 Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum) had been zipping around the neighborhood in their tight flying formation, constantly conversing in their high-pitched whistles.   These wonderful birds are like parrots of the temperate zone in that they are colorful, social fruit-eaters, flocks of which will quickly denude a berry-covered bush before swooping off to another one.  They descended upon my backyard pond the for a boisterous communal drink, as I sat at my computer/cat-cuddling/birdwatching station.

The photo sequence below illustrates the Cedar Waxwing’s always-changing body shapes, lively social behaviors, and unusual coloration: “a silky, shiny collection of brown, gray, and lemon-yellow, accented with a subdued crest, rakish black mask, and brilliant-red wax droplets on the wing feathers” (per AllAboutBirds.org). [JAC: I always thought that if an Adidas sneaker could fly, it would look like a cedar waxwing.]

Amidst the more routine winter visitors like Yellow-Rumped Warblers (Setophaga coronata) and White-Crowned Sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys), other recent notables have included Purple Finch (Haemorhous purpureus) and, in our Oregon yard, a presumably amorous pair of Red-shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus).

Purple Finch:

Red-shouldered Hawks:

A friend in Davis has been so fortunate as to have Barn Owls (Tyto alba) take up residence in her yard.   Actually, it’s not a matter of fortune, but of putting up several well-placed owl nest boxes.

Barn Owl:

Owl nest boxes:

This same friend has just released, in her yard, nine baby Virginia Opossums (Didelphus virginiana) that became effectively orphaned when their mother was trapped and relocated.   May her possums not become dinner for her owls; there are plenty of rats around for the owls to eat!

Baby Opossum (with me for scale):

Modern medicine is facing many challenges. As the science of medicine advances, it gets harder and harder. We have, in a way, picked all the low hanging fruit. People are living longer, and their medical conditions are getting more challenging to understand and to treat. In order to continue making medical progress we need more advanced technology. This technology – like stem […]

The post Will AI Save Medicine first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Blackholes are a fascinating class of object to study. We have learned significant amounts over the years but one of the outstanding mysteries remains; how there were supermassive black holes with millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun present in the first billion years after the Big Bang. Our current models of stellar mass black hole evolution and mergers cannot explain their existence. A new paper suggests that ultralight dark matter particles, like axions may have done the trick and provides a mass range for expected particles.

Squeezing exercise into one or two days a week seems to have similar health benefits as doing the same amount of physical activity spread out throughout the week

As humans continue to make tentative progress out into the cosmos, the impact of space exploration on our fragile bodies is only beginning to be understood. We know that space travel decreases muscle and bone mass but a team of researchers have discovered which bones suffer the most! Using a group of mice that became astro-rodents for 37 days, they discovered that bone degeneration effective the femur most but not the vertebrae. They concluded that it’s our weight-bearing bones that suffer the most.

Travellers to Mars Need to Avoid the Dust

A termination letter obtained by New Scientist reveals that the Trump administration has gutted the office that runs the country’s only nationwide survey on drug use and mental health

Researchers have created a bilayer metasurface made of two stacked layers of titanium dioxide nanostructures, opening new possibilities for structuring light.

The concept of nothing once sparked a 1000-year-long war, today it might explain dark energy and nothingness even has the potential to destroy the universe, explains physicist Antonio Padilla

Many health problems are faced by astronauts who spend significant amounts of time in space. But perhaps one of the most insidious is the danger to their mental health. In particular, a prolonged sense of loneliness that could crop up as part of a long-term deep space mission could have dire consequences. A recent paper from Matthieu Guitton, the editor-in-chief of the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans and a researcher at the CERVO Brain Research Center in Quebec, proposes one potential solution to that risk - social robots.

Under pressure from Elon Musk’s DOGE task force, NASA is cancelling grants and contracts for everything from lunar dust research to educational programmes

One of the common misconceptions about black holes is that they devour not only matter, but also the history of that matter. So when a black hole forms, you can only guess how it came to be. That isn't entirely true. Informational history is only lost when matter crosses the event horizon, and perhaps not even then. The material surrounding a black hole still has a rich history. In a recent study, astronomers have used that history to uncover the origins of a black hole system.