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A new “installation” appeared in the Quad yesterday next to the tent that appeared the other day; both were designed by the Students for Justice in Palestine and were erected with permission of the University.  That makes a total of three “hatey” installations on the quad, and it makes the area look like a mess. Prospective students and parents are now visiting the campus, and I wonder what they think of it, especially if they’re Jewish.

This one below may have had a tent nearby, as it looks as if something collapsed, or there is some canvas at the bottom. At any rate, this shows four of our Trustees, all accused of “financing genocide.”   I disagree:it is Hamas that is committing genocide, not Israel.

The tent is nearby, showing our President, Paul Alivisatos (with a dollar sign for the “s”), looking satanic and bearing the blood-dripping label, “genocide normalizer”.  At the top we read “Israel Bombs” along with an Israeli and American flag.  At the bottom we see the useless cry to “divest,” for the University has already said it won’t.  SJP is fighting a battle they’ve already lost, but they can’t help acting out. This is the equivalent of a tantrum by a petulant child.

The tent. You can enter it to “find out more,” but a herd of elephants couldn’t push me inside that den of admiration for terrorism and antisemitism:

The official University permission, required for any such installation:

Somebody seems to have complained, because at the bottom of the “permission” sign, highlighted in yellow, is a note that the OEOP is investigating this installation for whether it violates university policy. Until that determination is made, the installation will stay up, though it has to come down this Saturday. That’s in two days, so the “investigation” is more or less a sham.  But if the Trump administration sees this, what with its use of antisemitism as an excuse to control universities and remove federal funding, who knows what will happen? I wonder if the University thinks of that.  Still, giving permission for these “art installations” is making a statement in favor of free speech, and for that I admire them.

Below is the old sign before the updated replacement above. At the bottom it reads:

Installation Description

A 15 X 15 foot tent with a presentation inside about on going [sic]genocide in Palestine and the University’s ties to Israel. Art will be displayed.

They don’t say what’s on the outside, which I showed the other day: hateful caricatures of administrators and trustees embellished with symbols of red hands, a widely-understood symbol of killing Jews. Some art!

I wonder if there’s any number of installations that reaches a threshold of constituting harassment of Jews. For the meantime, I construe this as free speech, but, as I said, even our free-speech advocates are debating whether the Quad should be free of banners and signs and used as a place for discussion and speech, since some construe a plethora of signage as actually chilling speech. For the time being, I am on the pro-sign side, but there should be a limit on the number and size of signs allowed on the central part of our campus.

And the hatred evinced by these signs makes me detest the ideology behind them, for the ideologues have already lost–both on campus and in Gaza.  And remember, after the extremists take care of the Jews, their next aim is to destroy Western civilization and its Enlightenment values.

People in the US are reading for pleasure less and less, despite it being linked to better sleep, improved mental health and even a longer life

Occasionally, the Universe seems to literally smile upon us. If skies are clear Friday morning on April 25th, early rising sky watchers may witness a rare scene, as brilliant Venus and fainter Saturn form the ‘eyes’ and a thin crescent Moon nearby completes the ‘grin’ low to the east at dawn.

Reader Mark Joseph recently sent in some bird photos from his friend Cliff’s April 2024 trip to Belize; part one was posted here, and this is part two.  I am not sure who wrote the captions, but they’re indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Hooded oriole (Icterus cucullatus) – male:

Hooded warbler (Setophaga citrina) – male:

Least sandpiper (Calidris minutilla):

OK, this one is a bit of a story. Cliff called it a house wren, which is what I would have called it too, but when I went to look up the binomial to use in this post, I found out that the “house wren” has recently been split into *8* different species! So, this is now a Northern House Wren (Troglodytes aedon). Besides this common North American bird, the “Northern” group now has five area-specific Caribbean island species. There is also now a “Southern” group, the Southern House Wren and one erstwhile subspecies, Cobb’s Wren:

Limpkin (Aramus guarauna):

Prothonotary warbler (Protonotaria citrea):

Roadside hawk (Rupornis magnirostris):

Rose-throated becard (Pachyramphus aglaiae) – female, if I’m not mistaken:

Russet-naped wood rail (Aramides albiventris):

Rufous-tailed hummingbird (Amazilia tzacatl):

Vermilion flycatcher (Pyrocephalus obscurus) – male:

White-faced ibis (Plegadis chihi) – non-breeding plumage:

 

While looking through Cliff’s pictures of his trip to Belize, I see that he also did a nice series of six pictures of the Northern Jacana – Jacana spinosa (aka the Jesus bird, as it can walk on water); the comments with these pictures are Cliff’s:

Northern Jacana are very attractive birds that live pretty much on floating vegetation in freshwater marshes, ponds, etc:

They are very colorful in flight, squawking the entire time aloft.

These birds are interesting in that the female mates with several males, then the male raises the young (newborn Jacana can walk, swim, and feed themselves from birth):

 

Even the young birds have the famed Jacana ridiculously long toes for walking on floating vegetation:

 

This is one of my favorite images from the entire trip (so far)…

I’ve been a runner—on and off—for over 25 years. For years, my goal was qualifying for the Boston Marathon. But I was never quite fast enough for my age group. At one point, I figured if I could just hold my best marathon time for another 20 years, I’d eventually “age into” a qualifying time. Unfortunately, my musculoskeletal system has other plans. […]

The post Making Waves or Just Noise? A Look at Shockwave Therapy first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Regulations are a classic example of a proverbial double-edged sword. They are essential to create and maintain a free and fair market, to prevent exploitation, and to promote safety and the public interest. Just look at 19th century America for countless examples of what happens without proper regulations (child labor, cities ablaze, patent medicines, and food was a crap shoot). But, regulations can have a powerful effect and this includes unintended consequences, regulatory overreach, ideological capture, and stifling bureaucracy. This is why optimal regulations should be minimalist, targeted, evidence-based, consensus-driven, and open to revision. This makes regulations also a classic example of Aristotle’s rule of the “golden mean”. Go too far to either extreme (too little or to onerous) and regulations can be a net negative.

The regulations of GMOs are an example, in my opinion, of ideological capture in regulations. The US, actually, has pretty good regulations, requiring study and approval for each new GMO product on the market, but no outright banning. You could argue that they are a bit too onerous to be optimal, ensuring that only large companies can afford to usher a new GMO product to the market, and therefore stifling competition from smaller companies. That’s one of those unintended consequences. Some states, like Hawaii and Vermont, have instituted their own more restrictive regulations, based purely on ideology and not science or evidence. Europe is another story, with highly restrictive regulations on GMOs.

But in recent years scientific advances in genetics have cracked the door open for genetic modification in highly regulated environments. This is similar to what happened with stem cell research in the US. Use of embryonic stem cells were ideologically controversial, and ultimately the development of any new cells lines was banned by Bush in 2001. Scientists then discovered how to convert adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, mostly side-stepping these regulations.

In the GMO space a similar thing has happened. With the advent of CRISPR and other technologies, it’s possible to alter the genome of a plant without introducing a foreign gene. Increasingly these sorts of changes are being distinguished, from a regulatory perspective, from genetic modification that involves inserting a gene. Altering the genome without gene insertion is referred to a genetic engineering, rather than genetic modification, and the regulations for the use of genetic engineering (which includes product labeling) are less onerous. This provides an incentive to the industry to accomplish what they want through genetic engineering, without triggering the rules for genetic modification.

This brings us to a couple of recent studies showcasing this approach. For some additional background, however, I need to mention that one currently used technique is to use CRISPR or a similar method to modify the genome of a plant, but then back cross the resulting engineered plants with unmodified plants in order to get rid of any foreign DNA left behind by the CRISPR process. This is a bit laborious, and often requires multiple generations, to result in a plant with the desired mutations but no foreign DNA.

However, this technique does not work for every kind of plant. There are two categories in particular that are a problem – trees (or any slow-growing plant that would take years to reproduce), and sterile plants (like bananas). For these types of plants we need a new method that does not leave behind any foreign DNA and therefore does not require subsequent cross-breeding to get rid of it.

So – in January scientists published a study detailing “Transgene-free genome editing in poplar.” They report:

“Here, we describe an efficient method for generating gene-edited Populus tremula × P. alba (poplar) trees without incorporating foreign DNA into its genome. Using Agrobacterium tumefaciens, we expressed a base-editing construct targeting CCoAOMT1 along with the ALS genes for positive selection on a chlorsulfuron-containing medium.
About 50% of the regenerated shoots were derived from transient transformation and were free of T-DNA. Overall, 7% of the chlorsulfuron-resistant shoots were T-DNA free, edited in the CCoAOMT1 gene and nonchimeric.”

This means that they were able to use transiently expressed DNA in the cells, that essentially made the genetic change and then went away. They used the bacterium A tumefaciens as vector. This worked in about half of cells. They also did genome-wide sequencing to weed out any shoots with any foreign DNA. They also had to eliminate shoots where only some of the cells were altered (and therefore chimeric). So in 7% of the shoots the desired change was made, in all of the cells, without leaving behind any foreign DNA. No further breeding is required, and therefore this is a much quicker, cheaper, and more efficient method of making desirable changes (in this case they used a herbicide resistant mutation, which was easy to test for).

Next up, published this month, was the same method in the cavendish banana – “An Agrobacterium-mediated base editing approach generates transgene-free edited banana.” From what I can tell they used essentially the same method as with the poplar trees, although there are no authors in common between the two papers so this appears to be an independent group. The authors of both papers are Flemish and cite each-other’s work, so I assume this is part of a collaborative project. I also see another paper doing a similar thing in bamboo, with Chinese authors.

The authors explicitly say that the benefit of this technique is to create cultivars that have less of a regulatory hurdle, so the point is primarily to avoid harsher regulations. While this is a great workaround, it’s unfortunate that scientists need to develop a workaround, just to please the anti-GMO crowd. Anti-GMO sentiments are not based on science, they are ideologically and largely driven by the organic industry for what seems transparently self-serving reasons. The benefits of genetic engineering in agriculture, though, are clear and necessary, given the challenges we are facing. So the industry is somewhat quietly just bypassing regulations, while some governments are quietly softening regulations, in order to reap the benefits without inflaming anti-GMO activists. Hopefully we can get to a largely post-anti-GMO world and get down to the business of feeding people and saving our crops from looming diseases and climate change.

The post Transgene-Free Gene Editing in Plants first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Scientists have found scour marks on the seabed made by giant icebergs about 18,000 years ago, and they could offer clues to the fate of Antarctica’s ice

Most supplements that claim to help your brain have never been thoroughly tested, but one has convinced even the most discerning scientists of its worth, finds columnist Helen Thomson

My life changed in February of 1993. It began with an early morning phone call from a fellow student at our private Evangelical Christian college. I was informed that our mutual friend Tim had fallen asleep while driving home from a ski trip. He’d been critically injured in a terrible accident and was now lying unconscious in an Ohio hospital. Though it was over 100 miles away and we had class that morning, we left immediately.

Arriving, we were advised to prepare ourselves before seeing him. We tried, but how can one do so? We walked in and recoiled at what was left of our friend. Others came. We took turns praying over our dying friend after being assured by our spiritual leader that, if we prayed hard enough and believed, Tim would be healed.

Hovering over his body, we began our prayer. We held hands as we closed our eyes, me taking Tim’s left hand as we pleaded for a miracle. Tim lifted my hand in the air about six inches as we did so! I opened my eyes in wonderment, and considered interrupting the prayer, but chose to wait and show them. As soon as our leader said “Amen,” and everyone opened their eyes, Tim’s strength left and my hand fell with his.

If he was brain dead, how could he lift my hand?

Unsure what had happened, I told the others about Tim lifting my hand. It was unanimously agreed that God was communicating with me through Tim. It was such a fantastic coincidence that it could only be attributed to divine intervention. We asked ourselves, “If he was brain dead, how could he lift my hand?” And why, if not to send a message from God, did he do so at the precise moments our prayer began and ended?

A doctor examined Tim and told his parents their son’s pupils were not responding to light, he was brain dead, and his body was shutting down. He respectfully advised them that they needed to prepare themselves for his death. The most devout among us corrected the good doctor, assuring him (and me, specifically) that Tim would rise again. The doctor kindly responded, “No. He has one foot in the grave.” Our leader countermanded him, reminding us “Jesus had two feet in the grave.” I believed our leader.

Tim passed away three days later, as the doctor predicted he would. Our leader rationalized Tim’s death (and the false assurances that he would be healed) as having been God’s will. We convinced ourselves that Tim, as a fellow believer, was now rejoicing in heaven, where we would meet him when our time came. I adopted Tim’s hand raising my own into my testimony as I turned my life around.

My dying friend’s disinhibited spinal cord told him to raise his hand.

Over the years I’ve come to accept that my life-changing miracle of a hand-raising while brain dead was, in actuality, explainable. The kind doctor who tried to prepare Tim’s parents probably knew exactly why Tim lifted my hand, and he knew it wasn’t from divine intervention. My dying friend’s disinhibited spinal cord told him to raise his hand. My hand was lifted by a “reflex arc”—a residual signal passing through a neural pathway in Tim’s spinal column and not, crucially, through his (no longer registering) brain.1, 2 Neither Tim nor the Holy Spirit was responsible.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor / Unsplash

Raising one’s limbs, in reality, is common for those experiencing brain death.3 First reported in 1974, “brain death-associated reflexes and automatisms” are frequent enough to have gained a moniker, “the Lazarus Sign.”4 People experiencing brain death have been recorded doing much more than raising another’s hand too, including hugging motions for up to 30 seconds, rapidly jerking all four limbs for up to eight inches, and symmetric movement of both arms.5

Raising one’s limbs, in reality, is common for those experiencing brain death.

There is another seemingly inexplicable facet to the story, though: If raising my hand can be explained naturally, what then of the incredible coincidence that my hand was raised and lowered at the same moment when the group prayer began and ended?

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung might describe my experience as an example of “synchronicity,” i.e., an acausal connecting principle.6 According to Jung and his adherents, science cannot offer a reasonable causal connection to explain why a brain-dead man lifted my hand at the exact moment a prayer began and dropped it at the exact moment the prayer ended.7 Jung adherents claim the odds are so improbable that the connection must be cosmic.8

Interpreting Tim’s act of lifting my hand as a ‘miracle’ was the result of my creative license, probability, and desire to find meaning.

But science can explain the coincidence. My profound coincidence was causal. Interpreting Tim’s act of lifting my hand at a certain moment as a “miracle” was the result of my creative license, probability, and desire to find a pattern and meaning through trauma. In fact, research through the years has revealed much about the phenomena of coincidence. This can be illustrated through a skeptical examination of seemingly much more widely known coincidences: A list of eerie comparisons between the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. The first of these lists appeared in the year following Kennedy’s assassination in a GOP newsletter and typically include the following:9

• “Lincoln” and “Kennedy” each have seven letters.
• Both presidents were elected to Congress in ’46 and later to the presidency in ’60.
• Both assassins, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, were born in ’39 and were known by their three names, which were composed of fifteen letters.
• Both presidents were succeeded by southerners named Johnson. • Booth ran from a theater and was caught in a warehouse; Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.
• Oswald and Booth were killed before they could be put on trial.

And so on…10

How Coincidences Work1. Creative License and the Role of Context

First, the likelihood of noticing one becomes more flexible when defining what counts as a coincidence.11 Given enough creative license and disregarding context,12 one can find coincidences in any two events. Let us look, for example, at the two other assassinations, those of James A. Garfield and William McKinley. Both “Garfield” and “McKinley” have eight letters, both were Ohioans, both served as officers in the Civil War on the same side, both were shot twice in the torso, and both of their successors were from New York state.

Creative license is also used to justify such coincidences: Booth ran from a theater and was caught in a warehouse; Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater. Booth did run from Ford’s Theater, and Oswald was indeed apprehended in a movie house called “The Texas Theater.”13 John Wilkes Booth did not, however, get caught in a warehouse. A federal soldier named Boston Corbett shot him from outside a burning tobacco barn in Bowling Green, VA, on April 26, 1865. Booth was dragged out still alive and died later that day.14

Our brains are wired to create order from chaos.

Creative license is also used in, Both presidents were elected to Congress in ’46 and later to the presidency in ’60. The apostrophe preceding each numbered year omits the glaring inconsistency that Lincoln and Kennedy were elected to these offices 100 years apart from each other. In context, the “coincidence” doesn’t seem so incredible.

2. Probability

Coincidences are counterintuitive. Consider the probability found in three of the Lincoln and Kennedy coincidences:

Both presidents were elected to Congress in ’46 and later to the presidency in ’60. We only elect our representatives to Congress every two years, and a president every four years. This omits all odd-numbered years.

Both presidents were succeeded by southerners named Johnson. “Johnson” is second only to “Smith” as the most common surname in the U.S.15 Both northern presidents (Lincoln was from Illinois, Kennedy from Massachusetts) needed a southerner to balance the ticket. In the years following the American Civil War, it wasn’t until 1992 that a ticket with two southerners (Clinton and Gore) won the presidency.16

Oswald and Booth were killed before they could be put on trial.17 Booth and Oswald were the subjects of nationwide manhunts and unprecedented vitriol. It is little wonder they were murdered before their trials.

Being elected in years that end in the same two digits, having a successor with a popular surname, and an assassin who was killed before being brought to trial are not at all impossible; indeed, they are relatively probable.

3. Looking for Meaning

Science has shown us that people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual (that is, those seeking meaning and those searching for signs) are more likely to experience coincidences.18 Our brains are wired to create order from chaos,19 and the days following each presidential assassination were overwhelmingly chaotic. The country was shocked when Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy were assassinated, and it seemed just too simple that such inspiring leaders could be shot down by two relative nobodies who would otherwise be forgotten by history.

Photo by Alexei Scutari / UnsplashWas my experience with my dying friend a divine sign? Was it acausal? Probably not.

But both tragic events were really that simple. John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln while the president was watching Our American Cousin in Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC.20 Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.21

Applying Creative License, Probability, and Looking for Meaning to My Profound Coincidence

Let us now return to my profound coincidence. I used creative license in accepting Tim raising my hand as miraculous. I was desperately looking for any sign that he could communicate with me and took it as such. The probability of my friend dying young in a car accident doesn’t defy probability at all. The National Safety Council reports that 6,400 Americans die annually from falling asleep while driving.22 Tim raising one of our hands is probable, too. Movement of the body from residual spinal activity has been found in up to a third of those suffering from brain death.23 During my time with Tim at the hospital, I was surrounded by Evangelicals who assured me of my friend’s resurrection. Being confronted with the unexpected loss of a loved one heightened my emotions. I was more susceptible to believing in miracles than in my normal, rational state.

Was my experience with my dying friend a divine sign? Was it acausal? Probably not. Science has shown me the spiritual “meaning” I once attributed to Tim raising my hand was, in reality, meaningless. As years have gone by, I still stay in touch with a few of my friends who surrounded Tim. We are middle-aged now, with children of our own. Sometimes we remember Tim together. And that’s enough.

Exposing children with peanut allergy to proteins from the legume is an approved treatment to reduce the risk of allergic reactions, and now we have evidence it also works in adults

In a recent paper, a team of commercial space engineers proposed a Human-Crewed Interplanetary Transport Architecture (HUCITAR) to explore Mars and Ceres in a single journey. Their ambitious plan envisions six astronauts spending 4 years and seven months exploring these bodies, which could be ready to launch by 2035.

If you happen to be enjoying a sunny day, thank the bright surface of the Sun, known as the photosphere. At a piping hot temperature of about 5,800 K, the photosphere provides nearly all the sunlight Earth receives. But for all its glorious radiance, the photosphere isn't the hottest part of the Sun. That award goes to the diffuse outer atmosphere of the Sun known as the corona, which has a temperature of more than a million Kelvin. Parts of the corona can be as hot as 20 million Kelvin, which is hotter than the Sun's core. Of course, the big mystery is why the corona is so hot.

Inspired by the movements of a tiny parasitic worm, engineers have created a 5-inch soft robot that can jump as high as a basketball hoop. Their device, a silicone rod with a carbon-fiber spine, can leap 10 feet high even though it doesn't have legs. The researchers made it after watching high-speed video of nematodes pinching themselves into odd shapes to fling themselves forward and backward.

Inspired by the movements of a tiny parasitic worm, engineers have created a 5-inch soft robot that can jump as high as a basketball hoop. Their device, a silicone rod with a carbon-fiber spine, can leap 10 feet high even though it doesn't have legs. The researchers made it after watching high-speed video of nematodes pinching themselves into odd shapes to fling themselves forward and backward.

Using their novel FRESH 3D bioprinting technique, which allows for printing of soft living cells and tissues, a lab has built a tissue model entirely out of collagen.

The iCares bandage uses innovative microfluidic components, sensors, and machine learning to sample and analyze wounds and provide data to help patients and caregivers make treatment decisions.

The iCares bandage uses innovative microfluidic components, sensors, and machine learning to sample and analyze wounds and provide data to help patients and caregivers make treatment decisions.

This week brings the Hubble Space Telescope's 35th birthday — but instead of getting presents, the Hubble team is giving out presents in the form of four views of the cosmos, ranging from a glimpse of Mars to a glittering picture of a far-out galaxy.

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is coming in hot and heavy at this point, with various data streams from multiple instruments being reported in various papers. One exciting one will be released shortly in the Astrophysical Journal from researchers at the University of Kansas (KU), where researchers collected mid-infrared images of a part of the sky that holds galaxies from the time of the "cosmic noon" about 10 billion years ago. Their paper describes this survey and invites citizen scientists to help catalogue and classify some of their findings.

How can we turn the sun into a telescope?