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Where do I begin with a piece so ridiculous, so imbued with superstition, and so dependent on seeing “truth” as “what makes you feel good”, that it would take hours to properly dissect it? I suppose I can say that this long op-ed by NYT columnist Ross Douthat, a religious Catholic and a conservative, seems to be of a piece with a new movement among liberals: softness towards religion.  All over the MSM, which includes the NYT and even The Free Press, we see articles telling us—despite the rise of “nones”—that we must have religion to keep society together; and (check the Free Press link), scholars, intellectuals, and public figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson are become more explicitly religious. They apparently have realized something that’s escaped the rest of us. Examine your belly, and perhaps you’ll see the “god-shaped hole” invariably mentioned in these articles.

In this piece (click below or find the piece archived her , Douthat tells us that, if we’re without faith, we have to fix that situation immediately. And then he tells us how to go about choosing a faith.  Speaking personally, I can’t find my god-shaped hole, nor do I feel I need a faith to improve my well being or give meaning to my life. Moreover, I don’t understand how, if I were to follow Douthat’s instructions and find a congenial faith (his is Catholicism, but he says others will do), I could force myself to believe something that I find unbelievable.  Perhaps some propagandizing, á la Orwell, could do it, but nobody wants that kind of treatment.

First, though, I give the data from a Pew Survey of America’s “nones”—people without a formal religious affiliation—from 2007 till now. You can see a more or less steady rise over time, with a stasis or even a drop occurring rarely, and then a 3% drop between 2022 and 2023.  I suppose that people like Douthat are pinning their “god-shaped hole” hypothesis on this one year of data, as if people in 2022 suddenly realized that their lives lacked meaning without God.  But seriously, we’d need more data than this to show that Americans are becoming less religious. My own guess is that “nones” will resume their increase, and then level off at an asymptote that is higher, representing a level of agnosticism or atheism that won’t be exceeded because there are some people that really do need religion or inherit it from their parents.

Remember, too, that some of these “nones” are spiritual, panthesists, or believers in something numinous or supernatural; they’re simply those people unaffiliated with a church. But even atheists and agnostics have grown; as Wikipedia notes in its article on “Irreligion in the United States“:

According to Pew, all three subgroups that together make up the religious “nones” have grown over time: in 2021, atheists were 4% (up from 2% in 2011), 5% agnostics (3% a decade before) and 20% “nothing in particular” (14% ten years before).  In 2023, atheists are still 4%.

Here are the nones:

Other countries are even more irreligious: here’s another Pew-file-derived map from 2010: 15 years ago, showing the percentage of “nones. Many countries then, like Australia, Canada most of Western Europe and Scandinavia, and of course China (formerly a godless Communist land) have more nones than America, and this trend is also increasing.

File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Here’s a figure from the WaPo showing the rise of atheism (not “nones”) in Iceland, and it’s striking: there are more nonbelievers than believers.

As for other countries in Scandinavia, I urge you to read Phil Zuckerman’s book Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment.  The book is based on interviews of Danes and Swedes, and the Amazon summary notes this:

What he found is that nearly all of his interviewees live their lives without much fear of the Grim Reaper or worries about the hereafter. This led him to wonder how and why it is that certain societies are non-religious in a world that seems to be marked by increasing religiosity. Drawing on prominent sociological theories and his own extensive research, Zuckerman ventures some interesting answers. This fascinating approach directly counters the claims of outspoken, conservative American Christians who argue that a society without God would be hell on earth. It is crucial, Zuckerman believes, for Americans to know that “society without God is not only possible, but it can be quite civil and pleasant.”

Indeed, and it’s not as if the Icelanders, Danes, and Swedes have frantically turned to crystals, reiki, or other forms of woo to fill that God-shaped hole. As Zuckerman tells us, Danes and Swedes have found meaning in their life by living a secular existence. I suspect that is the case for many readers here, too. 

 

All this is to show that, at least in the West, religion is on the decline, and people like Douthat ignore all the data showing that. Rather, they are promoting faith because the world is not a particularly great place right now (some of it has to do with Trump, some with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza), and also because they are “believers in belief”, those who either aren’t religious but like the “little people” argument for belief, or, alternatively those who want to justify their own belief by showing how it helped them and could help others. I do think that religion can help some people, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who suffered from depression, but that in general it is a societal impairment: a form of delusion that we really can do without (see Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress).

On to Douthat’s Big Push for Faith:

The first thing he does is to assert, without any proof or links, that religion is on the rise and “nones” on the wane (I urge you to check out the link below):

The long rise of the Nones, Americans with no religious affiliation, has seemingly reached its limit, and a fascination with the numinous shadows our culture once again. Within the intelligentsia there is a wave of notable conversions and a striking nostalgia for belief.

The link goes to a Free Press article full of anecdotes: notable people like Jordan Peterson and Hirsi Ali who have become religious. But of course this says nothing about the general trend.  He then dismisses atheism, which is a bad thing to do.  Why go looking for the “right” religion for you when there is no evidence for a God? Later Douthat says that we don’t need to find a religion whose epistemic claims are true, but, for crying out loud, it’s a “god-shaped hole” and you must fill it by finding a religion with a god.  My definition of religion has always been Dan Dennett’s take from his book Breaking the Spell:

“social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought”

Now this may not apply to some forms of faith, like Zen Buddhism, but it’s good enough for me as it covers all the Abrahamic faiths as well as faiths like Hinduism. And remember, Douthat is concerned with filling the god-shaped hole to give our lives meaning:

The ultimate goal of the sincere religious quest is a relationship or an experience of grace that can’t be obtained through reasoning alone. But for the open-minded person who hasn’t received divine direction, a religious quest can still be a rational undertaking — not a leap into pure mystery but a serious endeavor with a real hope of making progress toward the truth.

Here we see another problem: Douthat never defines what “truth” is.  He dismisses the need to choose religions based on the empirical truth of their tenets, so I suppose he means the slippery notion of a “true” religion is “one that feels right.” And that’s how he largely proceeds in this tedious article.

To dispose of the need for empirical truths when choosing a faith, Douthat simply says that they’re all true in a way, but some are more true than others—that is, some feel more right than others:

The starting place for this endeavor is the recognition that Dawkins is simply wrong about the requirement for believers to disbelieve in every other faith. The bookstore of all religions isn’t necessarily a library of total falsehoods with one lonely truth hidden somewhere on the shelves, and embracing one revelation doesn’t require believing that every other religion is made up.

A sincere believer in Hindu polytheism, for instance, doesn’t need to assume that the singular God of the monotheistic faiths is just a fiction: Jehovah might be one deity among many, whose powers were exaggerated by his adherents but whose deeds were entirely real. Or alternatively a Hindu might interpret his faith’s pantheon as localized expressions of a single ultimate divinity and regard the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as a way of personifying that divinity as well.

. . .So the religious seeker, looking out across a diverse religious landscape, should assume that there exist less-true and more-true schools of thought, not one truth and a million fictions. And this suggests, crucially, that even if you start in what turns out to be a wronger-than-average place, you can still draw closer to ultimate reality by conforming yourself to whatever that tradition still gets right.

What does he mean by “gets right”?  But wait! There’s more!

. . . .This principle does not presume that all religions are identical, that there is no scenario in which any soul is ever lost. (Certainly it was not a matter of indifference to Lewis whether people worshiped Aslan or Tash.) The idea, rather, is that if God ordered the universe for human beings, then even a flawed religion will probably contain intimations of that reality — such that a sincere desire to find and know the truth will find some kind of reward.

Yep, any religion can fill part of that hole, perhaps not as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle, but better than atheism could.

He concludes that the more popular religions are more likely to be “true”, but that could be tautological if you define “truth” as “satisfying psychological needs”.  I still define “truth” as “what exists in the universe and can reliably be confirmed by others,” or, as the OED says:

Something that conforms with fact or reality.

NOT “something that makes you psychologically satisified”. That definition isn’t in there! Saying the more popular religions are more true is meaningless.  Douthat:

This doesn’t imply, however, that a religious search should begin at random. Rather, you should start the way you would in any other arena, by looking for wisdom in crowded places, in collective insights rather than just individual ones, in traditions that have inspired civilizations, not temporary communities.

If this sounds like an argument that the more popular and enduring world religions are more likely than others to be true, that’s exactly what I’m arguing.

Yes, if a new revelation suddenly arrives, there will be a moment when the truest faith will be one of the smallest. But if a faith claims to be much truer than the competition, it’s reasonable to expect proof of those qualities to emerge on a reasonable timeline, to see world-historical and not just individual effects. So for the novice, it makes sense to start with religions in which those effects are already manifest and there’s no question that the faith has staying power.

Here he seems to see “truth” as the OED sees it: a “true” religion makes empirical claims (“conforming with fact or reality”) that are verifiable.  But in that case no religion is truer than others!  And we all know about the conflicting empirical claims of even the major Abrahamic faiths: who was the prophet, was Jesus resurrected, what miracles were done, and so on.

I don’t want to repeat the criteria Douthat gives for choosing the best faith for you. (For example, if you don’t want too much supernatural stuff, he suggests you choose a more humanistic religion.) But there always has to be a god in it, and absent any convincing evidence for such a being (again, Douthat doesn’t discuss this), I don’t know why you should go choosing a religion in the first place, since all of them (according to my definition) include that supernatural being.

He moves more towards Christianity, of course, because he’s a Catholic.

Or the big question might be: How has God acted in history? In that case, you don’t want to start at the end of things, comparing the systems that the followers of Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha constructed to explain the revelation. You want to start with the taproot — with the allegedly divine person, the allegedly sacred book, the historical credibility of the story and the immediate consequences for the world.

If you have no strong reaction to the core stories, you can step back and use other questions to chart your path. But if you find Jesus to be a remarkable figure and the Gospels shockingly credible, if God speaks to you through the Bhagavad Gita or the Quran or the Pentateuch, if Buddha’s teaching seems like the answer to the riddles of your life — well, you probably shouldn’t simply return to the more abstract questions.

No: If you feel yourself to have a completely open mind and suddenly a specific text or figure leaps out at you, then you should take the possibility that God is speaking to you seriously; at the very least, it’s a signal that this is where you’re supposed to start.

But again: what is the evidence that God exists, much less than he’s speaking to you personally? Finally, Douthat winds up with a story that sort of pulls the reader towards Jesus:

Consider the story of religious pilgrimage offered recently by the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. Raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, he found that spiritual interests grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.

He found that worship in actual paganism, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments and some stark mystical experiences as well.

But it would have been unimaginable to him at the start of the journey that the Christian faith imparted to him weakly in his childhood — that “ancient, tired religion” as he put it — could have possibly been his destination in the end. Only the act of questing delivered him back to the initial place, no longer old and tired but fresh and new.

Clearly, Kingsnorth found the truth!

In the end, I consider the whole piece worthless given the lack of definition of a “true” religion and the slippery alternation between truth seen as psychological comfort and truth seen in the empirical sense as what really exists. And, of course, shouldn’t you begin your quest with evidence for god in hand?

At the conclusion of the piece, we learn that this spate of advice is taken from an upcoming book by Douthat:

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.”

That is one book I’m not going to review. And really, could Douthat tell me why I should be religious? I don’t harbor a god-shaped hole nor do I feel that my life lacks meaning. Douthat just wants to know that he’s in good company, living in a fully religious world.

h/t: Barry

More than a decade of data about the particles zipping around our sun could be used to solve many mysteries, from the behaviour of individual particles to the history of our solar system – while raising new questions

Today we have the second installment (13 total) of Robert Lang‘s photos from his visit to Brazil’s Pantanal region. Robert’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The Pantanal, Part II: Mammals

Continuing our mid-2025 journey to the Pantanal in Brazil, we saw quite a few different species of mammal, ranging from tiny monkeys to the giant anteater. Most of these sightings came from safari jeep trips, which we typically took twice a day. But not all; on one of our first river outings, we saw a giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) chowing down on a fish. These guys get up to about six feet long—but they’re still adorable. (They’re one of the most endangered mammal species in the Neotropics, according to Wikipedia):

Even higher on the adorability scale was this crab-eating fox (Cerdocyon thous) mother and kits that we happened across. We watched the kits chew on their mother and each other and tumble around as the sun went down, and eventually they all wandered off into the grass. As regular readers know, true foxes are Honorary Cats, according to our host; these foxes are not closely related to true foxes, so their honorary feline status is, as yet, undetermined [JAC: I pronounce these Honorary Cats as well]:

Another contender for the cute-ness crown is the capuchin monkey (family Cebinae; I don’t know the species here). We usually saw these in groups, but they usually headed for the trees before we got close enough for good photos. I got this one, though:

Another small mammal that we saw quite a few of is the agouti (Dasyprocta sp.) It’s one of the larger rodents of South America:

But the largest species of rodent is the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), of which we saw many. In fact, they wandered around our cabins at one of the places we stayed. They seem like they’re always somewhere between chill and bored, and get up to 60–70 kilos in mass. The babies, though, rival the animals I’ve already shown for cuteness. (Baby animals will do that.)  [JAC: This is the world’s largest living rodent]:

On the larger side of things, there were a few types of deer. Here’s a pampas deer (Ozotoceros bezoarticus) buck:

And a gray brocket (Mazama gouazoubira):

A few non-natives, introduced by the ranchers who own most of the Pantanal. There are feral pigs (Sus domesticus), but we saw them only once or twice:

But we regularly saw cattle, which are the primary agricultural output of the Pantanal. Most of them are light-colored Zebuines (Bos indicus), a humped breed that can survive through the long dry season, but there are a smattering of other breeds around:

The local jaguars can and do take cattle on occasion, so some of the ranchers have added a water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), larger and more aggressive, to their herd, to discourage any jaguars lurking about:

But the largest—at least, by length, though not weight—of the mammal sightings was the relatively rare giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla). We had two sightings of those, one of which we were able to approach on foot from downwide (their eyesight is terrible, but their sense of smell is acute); that was a lucky treat:

Coming soon: reptiles, invertebrates, and birds, birds, birds.

Dylan Curious is an bright and enthusiastic fellow, and he has a great YouTube channel focused on what is happening in AI around the world. But Dylan’s curiosity doesn’t stop there. Having read and enjoyed Waves in an Impossible Sea (twice!), he wanted to learn more… so he and I had a great conversation about humans and the universe for about 90 minutes. Don’t let the slightly odd title deter you; we covered a broad set of interesting topics of relevance to 21st century life, including

• In what sense is all motion relative?
• Why haven’t we already encountered intelligent life from other stars?
• Might we live in a simulation?
• Could the universe have glitches akin to what happens in computer games?
• Should the language of science be reconsidered?
• Are the particles we’re made of really waves?

Dylan is fun to talk to and I’m sure you’ll enjoy our discussion. And follow him, as I do, as a way of keeping up with the fast-changing AI landscape!

When you look at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" movement, there is a notable echo of an idea once promoted by Oprah Winfrey, namely The Secret, combined with antivax and alt-med tropes.

The post MAHA: Echoes of The Secret first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Here’s a livestream video you may want to check in on from time to time. As Space.com describes, it’s from the ISS:

Cameras are officially rolling! Or, in this case, streaming.

SpaceTV-1, a set of Ultra High Definition 4k cameras from space streaming company Sen, was delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) last year, and is now broadcasting live views of Earth and space for all the world to see.

The London-based company is pursuing a mission to provide anyone and everyone with easy access to an experience usually reserved for astronauts — the overview effect. A phenomenon coined for the awe of seeing our planet from space and the effect it has on a person’s perception of humanity, Apollo 14‘s lunar module pilot NASA astronaut Ed Mitchell described the overview effect as, “an instant global consciousness,” accompanied with “an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it,” and Sen wants that for everybody.

. . . The SpaceTV-1 camera suite was delivered to the ISS in March, 2024, aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on the CRS-30 cargo mission last year. SpaceTV-1 was attached to the Bartolomeo platform on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Columbus module. The package includes three cameras, providing three unique views of space around the ISS and Earth below.

A wide angle lens captures the long curve of Earth’s horizon, with the occasional piece of the space station moving in and out of frame. A tighter view focuses directly on Earth, showing a stretch about 150 miles x 110 miles (240 kilometers x 180 kilometers). The third camera looks at the space station’s forward docking port, connected the the Harmony module.

It’s very easy to get mesmerized by the video, but you can always keep it in the background of your computer screen (there are some replays as there is signal loss when the ISS is on the other side of Earth from the receiver, but there are also helpful descriptions at the bottom of the screen. It is a YouTube video.

Sunrise is very soon!

h/t: Ginger K.

 

When dining with friends last night and talking about Trump’s controversial executive orders, I realized that there was some serendipity in these orders, which covered a variety of topics.  And the serendipity was that suddenly it has become okay to discuss things that were previously either taboo or fraught topics—things like the binary nature of human sex, whether DEI is a good thing, and how immigration needs to be reformed. That can only be to the good, for a taboo topic is one that doesn’t go away, but just goes underground where it simmers slowly until it boils over. Now we can talk about them, even if arguing why some of Trump’s orders are malign.

One of the topics newly airing, a topic with which I’ve had some acquaintance, is sex and  gender issues.  How many human sexes are there? To what extent must we respect people’s claims of being nonbinary or transsexual? Should the rights of transsexual people ever be curtailed to further the rights of others?  Should trans-identified men compete with women in sports, or be put in women’s prisons?  Previously, even asking these questions got one labeled a transphobe, and I well know that accusation (I reject it).  But it’s time to air these questions civilly and using data, though that is hard to do given the rancor of gender extremists.

Perhaps the first person demonized by gender fever was Abigail Shrier, whose views I’ve defended extensively.  She has maintained that there is such a thing as rapid onset gender dysphoria, that its rapidity comes from social contagion (people urging others to transition), and that therapists who engage in “affirmative therapy” are engaged in malpractice, for they promote medical treatment (hormones and surgery) to kids who are too young to understand what they’re getting..

Shrier’s first book broaching these topics, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), was praised by some (including me) but demonized by many, especially those with “gender fever”. You may remember that the ACLU’s LGBTQ+ law expert, trans-identified woman Chase Strangio, called for banning Shrier’s book in a tweet that he later deleted:

It’s shameful that an ACLU bigwig called for censorship of a book he didn’t like. Clearly, for Strangio, ideological purity takes precedence over free speech. That attitude will spell the death of the ACLU–at least as we knew it.

Shrier’s second book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids aren’t Growing Up, deals not just with affirmative therapy but the “therapization” of all of life for young people in America, imbuing many with the idea that they suffer from some mental disorder that needs professional assistance.  I read that book, too, and gave it a glowing review on this site. Both books are well worth reading.

But my point here is twofold. First, it’s now okay to talk about the topics of her books without being demonized. Second, Shrier was pretty much right about all of her theses: there is social contagion causing gender dysphoria, accounting for its sudden rise, and, especially, that giving surgery, puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormones to children or adolescents is a bad idea.

In her new piece at the Free Press (click below or find a free version at this archived link), Shrier takes a victory lap: it’s now okay to seriously consider and discuss her ideas (except, of course, among extreme gender activists, who will never discuss any idea that contradict their ideology), and, importantly, she was right about social contagion and especially about the dangers of willy-nilly dispensing affirmative therapy, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones to children and adolescents.

I’ll give a few quotes. Shrier, who previously wrote op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, is a clear and engaging writer, a pleasure to read, and she starts her new piece with a real hook:

When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.

Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberties Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.

I could go on. But as of January 28, 2025, I don’t have to.

On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

Did you know that a lot of the damaging gender policy came from Obama?

If it seems odd that the spell of pediatric gender medicine should have been ended by politicians and not physicians, consider that in America, politics is how it began. Specifically, it began with Obamacare.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

“Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class,” healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told me. And that opened a huge new source of funding for these treatments. “Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine,” Abbruzzese said.

If an insurer covers testosterone to treat a man who was deficient, then, according to gender ideology’s cracked logic, the insurer would also need to cover testosterone for a woman identifying as a man. If a procedure to remove a man’s unwanted breast tissue was covered, then a similar procedure for a woman identifying as a man must also be covered. Denying those claims could subject insurers to federal enforcement action.

To mandate coverage for gender treatments, activists “snuck in gender identity without Congress ever voting for it,” Abbruzzese told me. Transgender rights groups filed lawsuits, to test whether judges agreed: Suddenly, a “woman” was anyone who claimed to be one, as far as provision of healthcare was concerned. Luxury cosmetic treatments became available even to minors covered by their parents’ insurance—at fire-sale prices.

Shrier discusses the odious and harmful organization The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which never saw an intervention towards transition it didn’t like, and even collaborated with the U.S. govenment (the Biden administration) to hide data suggesting that affirmative care and puberty blockers did not help young people with gender dysphoria. This hiding of data that the author Johanna Olson-Kennedy (and the Biden administration) didn’t like is one of the most disgusting incidents I know of involving withholding data:

[WPATH] suppressed publication of systematic reviews of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries undertaken by Johns Hopkins University. That research would almost certainly have revealed, as so many systematic reviews have now done, that while the risk of sterility, cardiac event, osteoporosis, and bone fracture were high, any alleged mental health benefits of the WPATH-approved puberty blockers-to-cross sex hormones protocol remained unproven.

But the Biden administration pressed onward, suing any state that enacted bans on medical transition for minors. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender adult, successfully pressured WPATH to drop minimum age requirements for gender medical treatments and surgeries in its September 2022 standards of care. Again and again, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris used the bully pulpit to assure “transgender Americans . . . especially the young people” that “your president has your back,” as Biden declared in an April 2021 address to Congress.

In 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services published a fact sheet claiming that gender affirming treatments for youth were “crucial to overall health and well-being.” Any physician or therapist who might otherwise have been tempted to discourage trans-identified youth from immediate and irreversible medical transition sat up and took note.

The Obama and Biden administrations worked in tandem with activist organizations. Federal funds poured into tainted research. Gender physician Johanna Olson-Kennedy received nearly $10 million from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on gender-confused adolescents ages 11 and up. (She later lowered the age to 8.) Olson-Kennedy and a team of colleagues recruited hundreds of transgender-identified minors. They gave one cohort of the children cross-sex hormones and another puberty blockers—to determine if either treatment produced improvements in mental health. (There was no control group.) After only one year on cross-sex hormones, two of her 315 subjects had committed suicide.

As for her nine-year study on puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy didn’t like the results so, by her own admission, she shelved them. “She said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to the bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states,” according to The New York Times. She told the Times she intends to publish the data, but that getting her work to a place where it wouldn’t be “weaponized” required it to be “clear and concise. And that takes time.”

The public that had funded her research has never had the opportunity to review its results.

Surely the fact that Rachel Levine is a trans-identified man affected her harmful behavior as Assistant Secretary of Health, which underscores the dangers of appointing wolves to guard the henhouse, or at least reporting on the state of the hens.  Likewise, Chase Strangio, as the ACLU’s director of LGBTQ litigation, is another harmful wolf. He has corrupted the ACLU’s mission away from providing civil rights for all to prioritizing the rights of LGBTQ individuals.

As Shrier reports, Trump’s new Executive orders ameliorate the situations she’s warned about (yes, it is okay to admit that some of Trump’s orders are salubrious):

Trump’s executive order directs federally funded institutions to stop reliance on WPATH, calling its recommendations “junk science.” Cut off from what Abbruzzese calls WPATH’s “evidence laundering,” insurers will be forced to evaluate the gender medical evidence and issue policies on their own. Systematic reviews and investigations already undertaken in England, Finland, and Sweden indicate it’s not likely they will find the evidence for medically transitioning children to be terribly impressive. Activist researchers into gender medicine might soon see their federal grants dry up.

Every healthcare entity accepting federal dollars (nearly all of them, in Obamacare’s world) risks losing contracts with Medicare and Medicaid if they continue to provide pediatric gender transitions.

This executive order does not abolish pediatric gender medicine. Boutique practices that do not rely on federal funding can still offer “top surgery” to minors, for instance. There will surely be litigation to challenge the reach of Trump’s order.

But that order does break the spell—and the spell was always our biggest problem. Parents who allowed their children to transition are often caricatured as Hollywood eccentrics, the sort who bequeath their estates to teacup Chihuahuas. The parents I spoke to—even those who allowed their children to transition—are nothing like that.

Many are conscientious and loving and afraid, if a little naive. They believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. They had wandered into a Truman Show, an all-consuming simulacrum, designed to convince them to abandon their protective instincts. If the parents still weren’t convinced, therapists coerced them into allowing their daughters to undergo gender transition with this thinly veiled threat: “Would you rather a live son or a dead daughter?”

In the end, Shrier pats herself and her “allies” on the back for raising the alarm, but it’s a well-deserved pat, and if I ever meet her, I’ll add one of my own:

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.

But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.

When Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) was all the rage, and Boston University (BU) gave him his own Antiracist Research Center, I decided I’d better read his famous book, How To Be an Antiracist.  I found the book’s popularity puzzling, as it was a not-too-coherent mélange of autobiography and questionable but authoritative Diktats about racism, which was that it was ubiquitous, a feature of all white people, and that any law or rule that wasn’t explicitly antiracist was racist.  Further, if you are not actively involved in antiracist work, you are a racist.  As the NYT wrote, quoting a sentence from the first edition of Kendi’s book:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right.

Well, that was arguable, but in general I found that the book didn’t cohere, though of course its message resonated at the time, what with Black Lives Matter and all, and sold a gazillion copies. Kendi became the doyen of antiracism (his female counterpart was Robin DiAngelo), and Boston University set up a center run by Kendi, funded by $10 million from a donor, and, over the next three years, it got a further $43 million in grants and donations.

Given all this, I wasn’t too surprised to learn that, given the incoherence of his book—and I’ll admit that I haven’t read Stamped from the Beginning, which some of my friends like, and which won a National Book Award—BU’s Antiracist Research Center was not a success.  It was dogged by accusations of mismanagement, and really never did anything. Nineteen employees of the Center (nearly half of its staff) were laid off and BU launched an investigation, which, although it found no issues of misuse of money, decided to hire a management consultant firm, whose recommendations led to a revamping of the center about a year ago. On this site I reported on a discussion of Kendi’s efficacy by John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, and said this (Loury was responding to McWhorter’s statement that he didn’t understand the joy that Kendi’s downfall was provoking):

Loury responds that yes, Schadenfreude is not a great emotion, but he feels that Kendi is an “empty suit”—a “little man behind the curtain”—who “doesn’t know anything.”  Loury asserts it’s not really about Kendi, but the failure of the extreme antiracist extremists, like Black Lives Matter or the 1619 Project to make any progress.

I agree with Loury about the problems of an unequipped Kendi being made the symbol of a movement, and if you read his book How to be an Antiracist, you’ll see the intellectual vacuity of his ideas. McWhorter agrees that Kendi was chosen to be the symbol of that movement, and wasn’t equipped to lead it, but that’s no reason to be angry at him.  In response, Loury asserts that the man is a fraud, and so he does show a bit of Schadenfreude, for Loury adds that Kendi is an “embarrassment and an absurdity.”  Isn’t that Schadenfreude?

In response, McWhorter says that Kendi was thrust into a position for which he was not equipped, and it was not his fault that his Institute fell apart. (McWhorter says that what Boston University did in founding Kendi’s antiracist center  “was an insult to black achievement.”)  In other words, Loury blames Kendi for taking money and doing what he was unequipped to do, while McWhorter blames society and Boston University for thrusting Kendi into a job that was irresistible in order to do performative antiracism.

Now I learn from this tweet, followed by reporting (see below) that Kendi has left BU for Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, D.C.

BU will just close Kendi’s center, which means he didn’t build anything lasting that could be handed on to others.

He says this move has been in the works for a while, but he only went to BU five years ago. It’s pretty clear he needed an exit after the scandal.

BU supposedly… https://t.co/IiADCHBr0a

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) January 30, 2025

You can read about Kendi’s move in many places, including BU Today, the Boston Globe, Axios, The National Review, and The Washington Post (I haven’t found a mention in the New York Times).  The Center will close on June 30 when its charter expires, and Howard University has also given Kendi his own institute:

Kendi will start at Howard this summer as a history professor and director of the tentatively named Howard University Institute for Advanced Research, according to the university. He will also bring with him the Emancipator, a digital magazine focused on racial inequity that was founded with the Boston Globe but has since gone independent.

The new institute will research the African diaspora through the lens of racism, technology, climate change and a host of other subjects, said Howard Provost Anthony K. Wutoh, and bring on fellows for each academic year with projects they propose. The effort will be funded largely through donors, though Wutoh said the specifics are not yet finalized.

As to why Kendi is leaving BU, the only guesses are from the National Review, which indicts a lack of productivity of the Center and speculates that Trump’s new DEI initiative may have been responsible:

Despite the generous funds, only two new research papers [from the BU institute] had been produced by the time of the employee layoffs. The exact count of total research papers is unclear.

“Despite all the headwinds we faced as a new organization founded during the pandemic and the intense backlash over critical race theory, I am very proud of all we envisioned, all we created, all we learned, all we achieved—the community we built, the people we helped and inspired,” Kendi said in a statement Thursday.

“To all the faculty, staff, administrators, students, supporters, and Boston community members, I feel honored to have been able to do this work with you over the last five years,” he added. “I am departing for an opportunity I could not pass up, but what connected us at CAR remains, especially during this precarious time. Our commitment to building an equitable and just society.”

The center’s closure and Kendi’s departure come as President Donald Trump roots out diversity, equity, and inclusion practices within the federal government and threatens to do the same in the private sector if corporations and universities fail to abandon the leftist ideology.

Taking the hint from the Republican administration, universities are halting research projects and shuttering offices related to DEI, according to the Wall Street Journal. Public higher-education institutions are reversing course because they could lose federal funding if they continue maintaining their diversity and inclusion efforts.

I’m not sure about the involvement of Trump’s DEI plans here, but I do have a few remarks. First, I don’t feel any joy that Kendi is leaving BU, even if he was sort of deep-sixed for non-productivity.  If McWhorter and Loury are correct, Kendi was simply unequipped to run a big institute. (As a side note, he also had stage 4 colon cancer, but appears to have survived it; and he did a lot of his work while waiting to see if he would be cured. That diagnosis is a huge burden to carry.) Kendi may, as they said, be good at helping with the “racial reckoning,” but appears to lack managerial skills (he’s only 42).

Second, I think that, in view of what happened at BU, Howard is making a mistake giving Kendi his own institute. As nearly everyone who’s studied the BU debacle admits, Kendi is unequipped to run a big institute. On the other hand, he’s published many books and shows no lack of scholarship, and his presence at Howard will undoubtedly be a magnet for students.  In my view, they should have just made him a professor, but one without an institute to run.  At any rate, we’ll see how the new Howard University Institute for Advanced Research will fare.

In the meantime, here’s Howard University’s welcome:

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D., as the director of the newly established Howard University Institute for Advanced Study.

The institute will be dedicated to interdisciplinary study advancing research of importance to the global African… pic.twitter.com/BlJIJ1j6Vj

— Howard University (@HowardU) January 30, 2025

Today’s photos are the continuation of John Avise‘s series of photographs of North Ameerican butterflies. The IDs and intro are captioned, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 8 

This week continues my 18-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  Now we’ve come to some of the G’s and H’s.

Greenish Blue (Icaricia saepiolus), male topwing:

Greenish Blue, male underwing:

Greenish Blue, female:

Gulf Fritillary (Dione vanillae), male:

Gulf Fritillary, female:

Gulf Fritillary, underwing:

Gulf Fritillary, larva:

Hackberry Emperor (Asterocampus celtis), topwing:

Hackberry Emperor, underwing:

Hedgerow Hairstreak (Satyrium saepium), male:

Hedgerow Hairstreak, female:

Hoary Comma (Polygonia gracilis), topwing:

Hoary Comma, underwing:

In the more than sixty years where scientists have engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), several potential examples of technological activity (“technosignatures”) have been considered. While most SETI surveys to date have focused on potential radio signals from distant sources, scientists have expanded the search to include other possible examples. This includes other forms of communication (directed energy, neutrinos, gravitational waves, etc.) and examples of megastructures (Dyson Spheres, Clarke Bands, Niven Rings, etc.)

Examples of modern searches include Project Hephaistos, the first Swedish Project dedicated to SETI. Named in honor of the Greek god of blacksmiths, this Project is focused on the search for technosignatures in general rather than looking for signals deliberately sent toward Earth. In a recent paper, a team led by the University of Manchester examined a Dyson Sphere candidate identified by Hephaistos. Their results confirmed that at least some of these radio sources are contaminated by a background Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN).

The team was led by Tongtian Ren, a Ph.D. student in astrophysics from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. He was joined by Prof. Michael Garrett, his supervisor at the University of Manchester, the Leiden Observatory, and the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy at the University of Malta; and Andrew Siemion, an Associate Research Astronomer at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, the SETI Institute, and the University of Oxford. The paper that describes their findings recently appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Dyson Spheres are a class of megastructures originally proposed by physicist Freemon Dyson, who proposed how advanced civilizations could create structures large enough to enclose their stars (thus harnessing all of their energy). Project Hephaestos, led by Prof. Erik Zackrisson, has published numerous papers exploring possible Dyson Sphere candidates using different methods and data sources. The fourth and most recent paper in the series focused on seven potential candidates (designated A to G) around M-type stars from a sample of 5 million detected by the ESA’s Gaia Observatory.

Previously, Ren and his team have investigated these candidates to identify possible natural explanations. As they explored in a previous paper, these include dust-rich debris disks that absorb light and re-emit it as infrared radiation. This will lead to an observed infrared excess, which Dyson proposed as a possible indication of his proposed megastructure. However, as they indicate in their most recent paper, the Project’s measurements do not appear to resemble typical debris disks. As Garrett explained to Universe Today via email:

“When I saw the original results from Project Hephaestos last year, I was skeptical – they had surveyed 5 million stars, and if you do that, there is a good chance your measurements might include emission from background sources. You don’t expect stars to show radio emission at this level, and it basically tells you that the radio emission is probably coming from background (radio) galaxies. But then you also need a special kind of galaxy that is faint in the optical but very bright in the infrared – the only galaxies I knew that had this characteristic are DOGs – Dust Obscured Galaxies.”

The team was also inspired by another paper by Jason T. Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, the director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center (PSETI), and a member of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds (CEHW). In this paper, Wright hypothesized that a true Dyson Sphere might use radio emissions to discharge waste heat. This led them to consider the possibility that these candidates were indeed Dyson Spheres.

Artist’s impression of a bright, very early active galactic nucleus. Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/B. Saxton

As Tongtian explained, they were also inspired by previous research by Garrett:

“Mike briefly argued in 2015 that even in a Kardashev Type I Civilization, where energy consumption is significantly higher than that of humans on Earth, their radio communication signals are too weak to detect. However, the Dyson Spheres could correspond to a Kardashev Type II Civilization—one that harnesses over a billion times more energy than a Type I Civilization. Therefore, regardless of whether the beings reside on planets or elsewhere near the Dyson Sphere, it might be possible to detect their use of similar electromagnetic technologies.”

To investigate these possibilities further, the team searched through data obtained by the enhanced Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (e-MERLIN) and the European VLBI Network (EVN) for data on the brightest radio source (candidate G). To their surprise, they found that three candidates from Project Hephaestos had radio counterparts in the astronomy databases. As Tongtian explained, the most logical explanation is that these signals (including candidate G) were due to contamination from bright radio sources – Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) – in the background:

“They shouldn’t belong to one civilization. Otherwise, many anomalous stars would be connected as a swarm in the sky, not isolated seven. At that moment, we realized that either different extraterrestrial civilizations located hundreds of light-years away all have mastered the same or similar advanced radio emission technologies, or these signals originate from some form of natural contamination. We preferred to assume that they were some natural objects beyond the Milky Way – and most likely to be hot DOGS.”

These results effectively confirmed their earlier hypothesis that at least some of the candidates identified by Project Hephaistos are contaminated by bright radio sources that are also very bright in the infrared wavelength. This causes them to mimic the characteristics that Freeman Dyson predicted and what astronomers expect from Dyson Spheres. However, this does not rule out the remaining six candidates and highlights the importance of thoroughly analyzing each candidate with high-resolution radio observations.

Artist’s impression of a Dyson Sphere, a megastructure associated with a Type II Civilization. Credit: SentientDevelopments.com

“We don’t know that all of the candidates are contaminated, but some, maybe all, probably are. I really hope some of them are indeed good Dyson Sphere candidates,” said Garrett. “This all shows that a multiwavelength approach is really required when looking for candidates in order to rule out background contamination.”

“The development of new astronomical instruments does not follow the rapid update cycles of consumer electronics—it takes decades,” added Tongtian. “Gaia (launched in 2013 and recently decommissioned) and WISE (launched in 2009 and expired in 2024) provided a crucial observational window. The next generation of similar probes may not be available for a long time, making it unlikely that a large-scale Dyson Sphere search program like Project Hephaistos will be conducted again in the near future. So the current seven Dyson Sphere candidates deserve to be carefully examined.”

Further Reading: arXiv, MNRAS

The post High-Resolution Imaging of Dyson Sphere Candidate Reveals no Radio Signals appeared first on Universe Today.

Maher’s comedy bits are called “New Rules,” and last night’s 9-minute episode was called “New Rules: Everything is broken.”

Maher highlights Trump’s new dance, the “Icky Shuffle,” often performed to The Village People’s song, “YMCA”, with the dance accompanied by salacious gestures. Instead of “YMCA,” Maher suggests that the new American Anthem is Dylan’s “Everything is Broken” (1989). Maher then explicates why America is broken, and not all of it has to do ith Trump (viz., gas prices, massive immigration, terrible health care, repeated emergency refunding of the government, increased mental illness, influencers [!]).  Even Whole Foods gets some well-deserved snark.

It’s not his best bit, but there’s always a few chuckles.

What's the Word: Geyser; News Items: Self Replicating AI, DeepSeek, PEPFAR Freeze, Chemical Looping, Giant Clams and Tiny Algae; Who's That Noisy; You Questions and E-mails: Telepathy Tapes; Science or Fiction

The Kiffness combines two songs into a great music video: “Hold Onto My Fur” and the famous “Oh Long Johnson”

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From Bored Panda, we have pictures of stuff on cats (one of them stars the famous Japanese chill cat, Kagonekoshiro (“white basket cat”).  Click below to see them all; I’ll show only five:

This is the renowed Japanese cat Kagonekoshiro, also called Shironeko, who died at 18:

Cover y9ur sleeping moggie with Cheez-Its (I prefer the white cheddar version):

This cat is not happy. . .

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Newsweek apparently has a pets reporter, and here’s one of her reports (click to read):

The scoop:

A cat’s response to her feline sibling coming home from a vet appointment left the owner, and viewers, gasping with concern and laughter.

A January 16 TikTok video by user @marissanicoleeeee showed the owner’s two cats sitting on the floor next to each other. The Siamese cat had recently returned from a vet appointment where he was sedated.

Veterinarians sometimes suggest sedating cats during a vet visit if they are fearful, anxious or aggressive. Sedating cats helps them feel less stressed. Plus, it ensures the veterinary team is safe while handling the feline. Following sedation, cats might be groggy, sleepy and quieter, a Pets Radar article reported. It can take a few hours to a day for the sedation to fully wear off.

Still feeling the effects when they returned home, the owner’s cat did not have the reflexes felines normally possess. Instead, he sat there blissfully unaware his black cat sibling, Peach, was plotting to take “full advantage” of him.

Peach realized her feline sibling wasn’t fully himself. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to fight back, she took her chance and pawed him on his face, sending him toppling over. The owner gasped at what just unfolded in front of her.

The video. What a bad cat!

@marissanicoleeeee

#funnycat #vetmed #tik_tok

♬ Just the Two of Us – Grover Washington, Jr.

More:

Knowing what she did was bad, Peach immediately ran off. She thought she could get away with it, considering the state he was in, but her owner captured it all on film.

Meanwhile, the sedated cat rolled to his side and stayed on the ground. He looked up, confused about what happened. The owner felt sorry for him, writing “my poor sensitive boy” on the video.

Newsweek reached out to @marissanicoleeeee via TikTok for additional information and comment.

Viewer Reactions:

Peach’s unexpected reaction to her feline sibling coming home garnered 446,200 views, 101,900 likes and 138 comments on TikTok as of Wednesday. People called it a “hit and run.”

“I can’t stop watching this. The fact the black kitty BARELY tapped him is sending me,” commented a viewer. The owner responded that she agreed it was a light tap.

A second person said: “Black kitty is like, ‘Yo bro snap the F*** out of it.'”

Yep, it’s those likes and views that people want. Eventually you MONETIZE IT!

 

h/t Nicole, Ginger K.

Sailing has been a mainstay of human history for millennia, so it’s no surprise that scientists would apply it to traveling in space. Solar sailing, the most common version, uses pressure from the Sun to push spacecraft with giant sails outward in the solar system. However, there is a more technologically advanced version that several groups think might offer us the best shot at getting to Alpha Centauri – light sailing. Instead of relying on light from the Sun, this technique uses a laser to push an extraordinarily light spacecraft up to speeds never before achieved by anything humans have built. One such project is supported by the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, initially founded by Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking. A new paper by researchers at Caltech, funded by the Initiative, explores how to test what force a laser would have on a light sail as it travels to another star.

The general concept of pushing something with light seems simple enough, but the devil is in the details in terms of how it will operate in space. The laser and spacecraft have to synchronize over millions of miles. If either so much as slightly move the angle they are set to, perhaps because a micrometeoroid hit them, then the mission fails either because the craft ends up in a different part of the galaxy or the laser doesn’t provide enough power to get it there in a reasonable amount of time.

Testing is the way to ensure such a disaster doesn’t happen, but even understanding how the physics of a light sail will work over such large distances is difficult. So, the researchers at Caltech, led by postdoc Lior Michaeli and PhD student Ramon Gao, built a setup to test those physics.

Lithographical image of the sample test bed, including springs connecting the corners of the sample.
Credit – Michaeli et al. / Caltech

Images provided as part of a press release to accompany their paper in Nature Photonics show a small square sample of light sail connected to a larger, hollowed-out square membrane by a set of four springs attached to each corner of the sample. What the images don’t do a good job of capturing is just how small the sample is —40 microns by 40 micros isn’t much compared to the 10 m2 for the final light sail design.

But it is a start, and the test rig introduced some interesting engineering challenges. The square is only 50 nm thick and made of silicon nitride. The springs are made of the same material, and the overall setup “looks like a microscopic trampoline,” according to the press release. 

When the sample was subjected to an argon laser, it vibrated. The researchers knew that this vibration was caused primarily by heat from the laser, and they needed to differentiate the vibration caused by heating from the force applied by the light itself. To do so, they turned to an instrument commonly used in space exploration—an interferometer.

Fraser discusses the difficulties of reaching another star.

In this case, it was a type known as a common-path interferometer. In this setup, the two laser beams of the interferometer travel essentially the same path and, therefore, encounter the same environmental conditions. When one laser hits a moving object, and one hits a stationary one, the difference in movement can be subtracted to tease out the signal the experimenter is looking for—in this case, the radiation pressure of the laser itself.

One further step was to integrate the interferometer with a microscope and a vacuum chamber, which eventually allowed measurements down to the level of a picometer in terms of the sample’s displacement. They also collected information about the mechanical properties of the silicon nitride springs used to hold the sample in place.

Once the test setup was confirmed, the next step was to move the angle, like they potentially would in a real-world scenario. In this case, they only angled the laser beam but still noticed a significant loss of pushing power. They theorized that light hitting the edge of the sail diffracted, causing a loss of that power that would otherwise be used to push the sail.

Fraser discusses Project Starshot in detail.

This test setup will allow researchers to test how to avoid such a fate for the long-term light sail mission. They already have some ideas about integrating nanomaterials and self-correcting forces that would allow the light sail to automatically move back into its optimal path. But any such advancements are a long way off. Despite the long journey ahead, developing this test bed is a step (or maybe a laser push) in the right direction.

Learn More:
Caltech – The Pressure to Explore: Caltech Researchers Take First Experimental Steps Toward Lightsails that Could Reach Distant Star Systems
UT – What Should Light Sails Be Made Out Of?
UT – What’s the Most Effective Way to Explore our Nearest Stars?
UT – Lightweight Picogram-Scale Probes Could be the Best way to Explore Other Star Systems

Lead Image:
Image of a free-floating lightsail (left) and depiction of the test-setup used at Caltech.
Credit – Michaeli et al. / Caltech

The post Measuring Lightsail Performance in the Lab appeared first on Universe Today.

Chemists have found a new way to determine 3D genome structures, using generative AI, that can predict thousands of genome structures in minutes, making it much speedier than existing methods for analyzing the structures.

Researchers compared the environmental impacts of lithium-ion battery recycling to mining for new materials and found that recycling significantly outperforms mining in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and energy use.

A new study of satellite imagery and high-resolution climate model data upends previous assumptions and provides insight about how the atmosphere and ocean weather patterns interact. The new research reveals the surprising ways atmospheric winds influence ocean eddies, shaping the ocean's weather patterns in more complex ways than previously believed.

The Hakuto-R 2 mission launched on January 15, 2025. It’s the successor to Hakuto-R, which launched in December 2022 but failed when it lost communications during its descent. Both missions carried rovers, and this image was captured by the rover Resilience as it travels toward the Moon.

The company behind Hakuto-R 1 and 2 is ispace. ispace develops robotics and other technologies that they intend to use to compete for commercial contracts. These missions are technology demonstration missions. Hakuto-R 1 carried the Emirates Lunar Mission, a rover named Rashid. Hakuto-R 2 carries ispace’s own micro-rover named Resilience.

ispace posted this image on social media with the text, “The RESILIENCE lander remains in excellent health as it continues to orbit Earth in its planned trajectory towards the Moon!”

“RESILIENCE knows what it means to be alone in the vastness of space. Looking back at Earth on Jan. 25, 2025, the lander was about 10,000km from our Blue Marble, poignantly capturing Point Nemo, the most remote place on our planet, about 2,688 kilometres from the nearest land.”

The most well-known picture of our Blue Marble came from astronauts on Apollo 17 in 1972. It appeared during a boom in environmental activism and helped people around the world understand the planet they live on and consider its future and our impact on it.

The Blue Marble image of Earth from Apollo 17. Image Credit: NASA

The second most well-known image of Earth is probably Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot image. Voyager 1 captured that image in 1990 on its way to the outer Solar System. The spacecraft captured the image from 6 billion km away when it passed Saturn. Carl Sagan proposed the idea not for scientific reasons but to drive home the idea that humanity’s home was just a tiny dot in the dark.

The “pale blue dot” of Earth captured by Voyager 1 in Feb. 1990 (NASA/JPL)

It seems de rigueur now for space missions to turn around and capture an image of Earth on their way to their destinations.

OSIRIS REx did it.

Black and white image of Earth taken by the OSIRIS-REx’s NavCam 1 instrument. Image Credit: NASA/OSIRIS-REx team and the University of Arizona

So did Artemis 1’s Orion spacecraft.

On Flight Day 9, NASA’s Orion spacecraft captured imagery looking back at the Earth from a camera mounted on one of its solar arrays. Image Credit: NASA

So have Lucy and many others. Now, they’re as common as pictures of their homes that young people take as they leave for college.

Yet, we don’t seem to ever tire of them. For some reason.

Maybe it’s because we’re accustomed to looking at maps with borders and labels on them, emphasizing how we see our planet through a political and historical lens. In those images, the context is human.

But images of Earth from space have none of that. They show the true context of our planet. It’s a brilliant blue sphere, rippling with life, delicate and precious. It’s at the mercy of greater events that go on elsewhere in the Solar System and beyond, events beyond our control.

The people at ispace might not have intended their image to trigger this type of thinking. But regardless, this image takes its place in a long lineage of images of Earth captured by our departing spacecraft.

Hopefully, that lineage will continue for a long time.

The post Japanese Lander Looks Back at Earth as it Heads to the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

A galactic merger is a chaotic event. When two massive structures like galaxies merge, their powerful gravitational forces wrench stars out of their usual orbits in a process called violent relaxation. In essence, the merging galaxies are evolving rapidly, and small perturbations can be amplified as the system moves toward a more stationary state.

Intuition suggests that this chaos should disrupt the galaxy, including its star formation, but new observations of the Arp 220 galaxy merger show that something else happens: the merger creates a massive magnetic field that traps gas and encourages more stars to form.

Arp 220 is one of the closest galaxy mergers to us. It’s also extremely bright in infrared and is considered to be the prototypical ULIRG—an Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxy. It’s the result of two spiral galaxies merging. The galaxies are gas-rich, which triggers starburst activity in Arp 220’s central regions. In new research, scientists from the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and other institutions probed these central regions with the Submillimeter Array on Maunakea in Hawaii to better understand the magnetic fields.

The research is “Polarized Dust Emission in Arp220: Magnetic Fields in the Core of an Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxy.” It will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the lead author is David Clements from the Department of Physics at Imperial College in the UK.

ULIRGs are characterized by intense star formation and extreme luminosity in the infrared. “Arp 220 is the merger of two gas-rich spiral galaxies and hosts a massive starburst forming stars at a rate of ~ 100 solar masses per year,” the authors explain. The star formation is concentrated in two distinct nuclei in Arp 220’s center.

Since Arp 220 is the prototypical ULIRG, it’s a natural laboratory and a case study for understanding these objects and their starburst nature. The researchers aimed the Submillimeter Array (SMA) at Arp 220’s central regions to detect polarized light coming from polarized dust there. Since dust grains align themselves with magnetic fields, the SMA can detect and characterize magnetic fields by measuring polarity.

“Despite the potential impact of magnetic fields on galaxy structure, sub-mm observations of polarization in extragalactic sources remain sparse,” the authors explain in their paper. The first large-scale effort to measure this polarization was in 2002 when researchers published the first galaxy-averaged detection of sub-mm polarization. SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) provided another limited sample of dust polarization observations, but SOFIA ended in 2022.

Other efforts were made to detect the magnetic fields in the starburst regions, but they lacked the resolution to see the two regions separately. If each region or nuclei had different polarizations, the low resolution would dilute the polarization, possibly even making the magnetic fields undetectable. The authors explain that their efforts have overcome this problem. “We here present the results of sub-mm polarization observations of Arp220 at subarcsecond resolution using the Submillimeter Array. These are capable of resolving the separate nuclei and thus avoiding this dilution problem,” the authors write.

The authors explain that they detected polarized dust with a 6 sigma significance associated with the brighter, western nucleus. Six Sigma is a very strong detection, indicating a significant level of polarization created by powerful magnetic fields.

For Arp 220 to be undergoing starburst activity, a lot of cold gas needs to be concentrated in the starburst regions. However, starburst activity means a lot of young stars are forming. Young stars generate a lot of heat that disperses gas, creating an obstacle for continued star formation.

“To stop this happening, you need to add something to hold it all together – a magnetic field in a galaxy, or the lid and weight of a pressure cooker,” said lead author Clement in a press release.

NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

“This is the first time we’ve found evidence of magnetic fields in the core of a merger,” Clements said, “but this discovery is just a starting point. We now need better models to see what’s happening in other galaxy mergers.”

Astronomers have long been puzzled by starburst galaxies, especially their unusually high star formation rate (SFR). When galaxies merge and become starburst galaxies, they appear to convert gas into stars more efficiently than standalone galaxies.

Astrophysicists have theorized about this property of starburst galaxies and what could cause it. Previous theoretical models have suggested that magnetic fields could help restrict the gas from dissipating, driving the starburst activity. However, this is the first time scientists have observed these fields.

This figure from the study shows the polarization angle on the left and the magnetic field angle on the right. “We detect polarized dust emission in Arp220 for the first time, with a peak polarized flux intensity
of 2.7 +/- 0.45 mJy close to the position of the western nucleus,” the authors write. The ellipses represent the rotating molecular disks, with the white crosses representing the positions of the nuclei. Image Credit: Clements et al. 2025.

According to study co-author Qizhou Zhang, also from the CfA, the magnetic fields do more than suppress the dispersal of star-forming gas. “Another effect of the magnetic field is that it slows down the rotation of gas in the disks of merging galaxies. This allows the force of gravity to take over, pulling the sluggish gas inward to fuel starbursts,” said Zhang. “The SMA has been one of the leading telescopes for high angular resolution observations of magnetic fields in molecular clouds in the Milky Way. It’s great to see that this study breaks new ground by measuring magnetic fields in merging galaxies.”

In contrast with observations of other nearby galaxies, the direction of the magnetic fields doesn’t seem to correspond with galactic outflow directions.

There are some other critical findings regarding the orientation of Arp 220’s magnetic fields. “Dust emission polarization is oriented roughly perpendicular to the molecular disk in the western nucleus,” the authors write. The polarization of dust emission is directly related to the orientation of the magnetic field, and this perpendicular orientation indicates that the magnetic field is oriented to the plane of the galactic disk. However, the magnetic field could be in the process of being reordered as the pair of nuclei interact. This points out how complex the merger environment is and how the magnetic fields are affected.

Finding these magnetic fields in Arp 220 strongly indicates that they’re behind the unexpected starburst activity. But it’s only one data point. A larger sample is needed to reaffirm these findings. The research team’s next step is to aim ALMA, the SMA’s big brother, at other galaxies like Arp 220 to see if they also have these magnetic fields.

“While the observations described here deal with just a single target, the nearest and brightest ULRG, Arp220, they suggest that magnetic fields may play a significant role in the processes underway in the innermost regions of major mergers,” the authors explain in their paper’s conclusion. “Observations in
search of dust polarization in the inner regions of other local ULIRGs and other DSFGs (Dusty Star-Forming Galaxy) are thus likely to bring new insights into these objects and how they evolve.”

Press Release: Astronomers Detect Missing Ingredient in Cooking Up Stars

New Research: Polarized Dust Emission in Arp220: Magnetic Fields in the Core of an
Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxy

The post Star Formation Might Depend on Galactic Magnetic Fields appeared first on Universe Today.

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