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A sweeping nationwide study has found that U.S. counties located closer to operating nuclear power plants have higher cancer death rates than those farther away. Researchers analyzed data from every nuclear facility and all U.S. counties between 2000 and 2018, adjusting for income, education, smoking, obesity, environmental conditions, and access to health care. Even after accounting for those factors, cancer mortality was higher in communities nearer to nuclear plants, particularly among older adults.

Our solar system is home to a wide diversity of planetary bodies, boasting eight planets, five officially recognized dwarf planets, and almost 1,000 confirmed moons. The eight planets consist of the four rocky (terrestrial) planets of the inner solar system and the four gas giant planets of the outer solar system. The largest planet in our solar system is Jupiter, measuring a radius and mass of 11 and 318 times of Earth, respectively. However, the discovery of exoplanets quickly altered our understanding of planetary sizes, as several have been discovered to have masses and radii several times that of Jupiter. So, how big can planet get, and are there limits to their sizes?

Grounded until at least April, NASA's giant moon rocket is headed back to the hangar this week for more repairs before astronauts climb aboard.

Researchers at University of Victoria's Astronomy Research Centre (ARC) and the University of Minnesota study the changes in the chemical composition at the surface of red giant stars.

Mysterious signs engraved on objects reveal that a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a full writing system

A review of This Book May Cause Side Effects: Why Our Minds Are Making Us Sick by Helen Pilcher.

In the early years of Viagra, “the little blue pill” that generated such excitement about its sexual effects on men, I read an account by a woman who decided to try it herself, because isn’t what’s good for the gander good for the goose? (Answer: Not always.) She took that little blue pill and described the exhilarating night of lovemaking that ensued. The best sex she’d ever had! Rapture divine! When she awoke in the morning, she saw that the blue pill she had swallowed was an Aleve (naproxen). At least she didn’t get a headache.

Most people know about the placebo, the inert “sugar pill” given to a control group in a clinical trial when the experimental group gets the active medication. This method allows researchers to rule out the effects of expectations on a new drug’s medical benefits, if any. (Placebo-controlled tests of Viagra for women found that women did slightly better on the placebo, which ended Pfizer’s efforts to double their market.) Expectations can be powerful: the bigger the biologically inactive placebo—a larger pill, a bigger injection—or the more complex the intervention, even a sham surgery, the greater its benefits. Placebos have been used in many settings, most dramatically on the battlefield, where suffering, dying soldiers plead for morphine that has long run out of supply. Given a saline solution but told it is that powerful pain-killer, their pain vanishes.

This Book May Cause Side Effects: Why Our Minds Are Making Us Sick by Helen Pilcher. (Abrams Press, 2026)

Where the placebo goes, can the nocebo be far behind? In This Book May Cause Side Effects, Helen Pilcher, a science writer and TV presenter with a PhD in cell biology, delves into the placebo’s “evil twin”—the myriad ways that our negative expectations affect us. If you had chills, fatigue, or headaches after getting a COVID shot, she writes, they were likely due to your being told those are frequent “side effects.” If you read the list of symptoms that your newly prescribed drug “might” produce, chances are you will experience one or more of them—and possibly decide not to take that drug after all. “If just the thought of eating a certain food makes you feel sick,” she writes, “it’s highly likely that placebo’s evil twin has struck again. Indeed, many of those who believe they have intolerances to certain ingredients, such as lactose or gluten, may well owe their misery to psychological rather than physical processes.” When self-reported “gluten intolerant” people are given gluten-free bread but told that the bread contains gluten, very often they develop gastrointestinal symptoms. “And when some gluten-intolerant people are covertly fed regular bread but told that it’s gluten-free, they don’t get symptoms,” Pilcher writes. “It’s the idea of gluten that they are intolerant to, rather than theprotein itself.”

The combination of “sometimes” with dramatic anecdotes weakens her case that the nocebo affects all illness.

Pilcher makes her case for the nocebo’s malevolent antics in 12 chapters, starting with deaths from hexes to “psychogenic” deaths that have no apparent physiological cause to the downsides of labelling mental and physical illnesses and thereby creating more cases of them. “The nocebo effect can conjure blindness and paralysis, seizures, vomiting and asthma attacks. With no brain injury in sight, it can trigger the symptoms of concussion … With no allergen present, it can induce features of an allergic reaction—watery eyes, runny nose and an itchy rash—that are indistinguishable from the more common, pollen-triggered alternative.” 

There is really no scientific reason to distinguish placebos from nocebos, since both terms describe the way that beliefs, expectations, and apprehensions affect our bodies. But the nocebo is hot; “the nocebo effect has been promoted from academic footnote to nerdy hot potato,” she notes, and Pilcher makes the most of that hotness. The nocebo “is far more pervasive and potent than most people had realized,” she writes. “All symptoms, all illness and all disease has [sic] the potential to be negatively impacted by the thoughts that swirl around inside our heads.” All disease? Yes: “Hiding in plain sight, the phenomenon is part of all illness and all disease, where it makes us more unwell than we need to be.” Does she literally mean “all” or do all diseases merely have the “potential” to be impacted?

That fuzziness undermines her reporting. To be sure, giving us details of every one of the many studies she describes could become stultifying; yet, by not providing actual numbers and percentages of people in an experiment who were affected by a nocebo, and by speaking vaguely of “most” people or “some” people who have the “potential” to succumb, we cannot assess the strength of the finding. For example, she writes that in one study, “people who were falsely ‘diagnosed’ with the ‘bad’ version [of a fictitious gene that allegedly influences their response to exercise] did much worse. They had less endurance and their lung capacity was reduced.” “People”? All of them? One tenth? How many people? 3? 30? Lung capacity “reduced” by how much? How long did that reduction last after they went home? Or, in noting that “some” people die from the stress of bereavement or surviving a plane crash, she adds “that’s certainly not to imply that intense stress is going to kill us all. These deaths are rare. You are far more likely to muddle your way through life’s major stressors than you are to die from them, but sometimes it happens.” The combination of “sometimes” with dramatic anecdotes (Johnny Cash died four months after his wife June) weakens her case that the nocebo affects all illness. Did he die of a broken heart? Or complications from diabetes, respiratory failure, autonomic neuropathy, and pneumonia? 

90 percent of the symptoms that people reported when on statins were also what they experienced when on the placebo.

More worrisome is Pilcher’s enthusiastic endorsement of experiments long discredited and unreplicated, such as Robert Rosenthal’s “Pygmalion” study, in which teachers allegedly raised the IQs of the randomly chosen students they had been told would intellectually bloom that year, simply by the power of their expectations. And because Pilcher so enjoyed meeting Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychology professor who became famous for her decades-old “chambermaid” and “counterclockwise” studies, she suspended scepticism, not even doing a quick google search that would have revealed what was wrong with those studies. In the former, hotel maids were said to have lost weight and lowered their blood pressure simply by being told their activities were “exercise” rather than “work.” But the experimenters relied on the women’s subjective self-reports, so they could not rule out whether the women actually—consciously or subconsciously—increased their activity level or changed their diet. And the 1979 “counterclockwise” study, which supposedly showed that having eight men in their 70s live in a simulated 1959 environment for a week would physically reverse their frailty and other signs of aging, was never published in a peer-reviewed journal or replicated. (It later became a made-for-TV stunt with celebrities.) Langer actually said to the participants, "we have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this, you will feel as you did in 1959." No bias there.

Although these lapses give one pause, Pilcher provides the details in other studies that rise to a “wow” level. In one, 60 patients who had stopped taking statins because they couldn’t stand the side effects were persuaded to try again. They were given 12 bottles of pills: four containing statins; four containing identical-looking placebo pills; and four empty bottles. The patients used one bottle per month, in a randomly prescribed order, over one year, recording their symptoms daily on their smartphones. The study was double blinded, so neither patients nor doctors knew which tablets the participants were taking (or none). The researchers found that 90 percent of the symptoms that people reported when on statins were also what they experienced when on the placebo. This means that most of the side effects of statins are caused by expectations, not the tablet’s content. 

You’ve nothing to lose and possibly a world of delicious bread to gain.

In her final chapter, Pilcher offers ways of countering, if not overcoming, the nocebo’s influence. Reframe the aftereffects of an injection not as painful “side effects” but as evidence the medication is working; if you need a medication, cautioning that 20 percent of the people taking it get headaches, focus on the 80 percent who don’t; and if you have been diagnosed with a serious disease, you can ask your doctor for “personalized informed consent:” telling you about possibly serious symptoms that would require medical attention, but none of the milder symptoms were more likely to be evoked by the nocebo. And if you are one of the thousands of people who think they are allergic to gluten—unlike those with celiac disease, who most definitely are—why not ask a friend or partner to subject you to a nice double-blind experiment? You’ve nothing to lose and possibly a world of delicious bread to gain.

One way of studying and understanding distant, hard-to-reach locations elsewhere in the Solar System is to find analogues of them here on Earth. For example, deserts and lava fields are often used to understand aspects of the Martian surface. In new research, scientists collected samples from natural geysers in the Utah desert to try to understand the Solar System's icy ocean moons.

Expert birdwatchers have changes in their brain structure compared with novices, which probably help them better identify birds and may even protect against age-related cognitive decline

I’m not sure who Frederick Alexander is, but he’s written an intriguing article at The Gadfly (click below to read for free)

Alexander lists five types of “progressives”, and although their characteristics are distinct, he avers that their natures interlock to reinforce “progressivism”, which he sees, as most of us do, as performative wokeness that serves as a form of virtue signaling.  And yes, two of the subspecies really believe the ideology. I’ll give the five types (indented), but it’s fun to try to think of examples of each one.  I have omitted some of the descriptions in the interest of space.

The True Believers are the rarest and most dangerous type. Usually found in university admin or HR, they genuinely think that questioning any aspect of progressive orthodoxy constitutes harm. The moment they make eye contact with reality, their pupils dilate, and they assume a glazed, faraway look like someone’s talking to them through an earpiece only they can hear.

It’s the Tavistock clinician who dismissed parents’ concerns about rushing children into transition as “transphobia”. It’s the university administrator who considers “women” a radioactive word and the niqab an expression of female empowerment. It’s the civil servant who enforces unisex toilets because questions of “dignity” matter more than safeguarding.

The Careerists know it’s all nonsense but have mortgages. They privately roll their eyes at the latest pronoun updates but champion them in the board meeting with the enthusiasm of a North Korean newsreader.

Examples include the BBC editor who knows “pregnant people” is absurd but issues the apology on behalf of the female presenter who corrected the autocue to “women”. It’s the museum curator who rewrites exhibition labels to acknowledge “problematic legacies” to satisfy the demands of the True Believer, who controls the money.

The Cowards are everywhere. They know exactly what’s happening, hate it, but will never say so out loud. They’re the sort who’ll text you “100% agree!” after you’ve been fired but somehow missed every opportunity to back you up before the True Believer called you in about your unconscious bias.

When Kathleen Stock was hounded out of Sussex University, the Coward thought it was outrageous right up to the moment they realised they could be next. Then they recalibrated the events in their mind and took a different view.

. . .The Opportunists don’t care either way but have spotted the angles. Young, ambitious, and morally vacant, they add a dozen causes to their personal website and say things like “centring marginalised voices” without meaning a word of it.

The Opportunist will launch a DEI consultancy today and charge an HR True Believer ten grand tomorrow to tell a roomful of Careerists they’re racists. Or they’ll be the author who went from wellness influencer to decolonisation expert in 18 months and set up a podcast in between. It’s the academic who discovered that adding “queer theory” to their research proposal tripled their funding chances.

. . .The Fanatics think they’re True Believers except they dial it up to eleven. Pronouns and watermelon emojis in the bio, sure. But they also believe in decolonising logic and think the world is going to end tomorrow if we don’t do what they tell us. Every cause connects to every other cause, and all causes connect back to the same enemy.

It’s the student activist who screams at a Jewish classmate for three hours about Zionism, then files a complaint claiming she felt unsafe. It’s the protester who glues himself to a motorway, causes an ambulance delay, then calls the criticism “ableist”. The Fanatic cannot maintain eye contact except when talking about Palestine, at which point his eyes fix unblinkingly on yours, daring you to push back on his claims of genocide.

I could name a specimen of each of these, but will refrain on the grounds that you wouldn’t know most of them. Fanatics, though, include Robin DiAngelo, and True Believers the many biologists who assert that sex is a spectrum. (Some of the latter could be “careerists” as well, knowing that they can sell books and write articles, advancing themselves, by supporting nonsense.

Then, in an analysis that I like a lot, Alexander explains why these types are self-reinforcing, advancing “progressivism” as a whole (I hate calling it that; how about “wokeness”?):

Identifying these types isn’t an exact science, and they overlap to various degrees. The crucial thing to understand is that they need each other.

True Believers provide the moral authority, write the policies, and enforce the rules with genuine conviction. They absorb the ideology and give it form. Without them, it would all feel like a game of pretend (which it is).

Careerists provide the manpower. They actually implement the nonsense without stopping to think much about what any of it means.

Cowards provide the silence and the illusion of consensus, allowing the system to expand unopposed.

The Opportunists provide the raw energy, finding new ways to monetise moral exhibitionism because they see progressive orthodoxy as a business opportunity. Celebrity activists – indeed the whole entertainment industry – fall into this category.

Fanatics provide the threat. They’re the enforcers who make the Careerists think twice about cracking a joke since every joke has a victim. The Coward looks at them and thinks at least I’m not that person in an effort to assuage the sense of disgust at their own lack of integrity.

The system rewards all of them. True Believers get authority. Careerists get promotions. Cowards keep their heads down and Opportunists get book deals. Fanatics get the attention they crave, which is why we’re forever seeing clips of them in our social feeds waving Palestinian flags or throwing soup at Van Gogh.

What they all get – every single one – is protection from consequences.

Why? Because progressive orthodoxy is sustained by particular incentives. It’s got nothing to do with the strength of the ideas, most of which are obviously terrible when examined under daylight. It’s about the incentives that come with compliance and the costs that come with dissent.

In the end, Alexander still thinks the ideology is doomed to disappear:

The good news is that every protection racket collapses eventually – and progressivism will be no exception. The lawsuits will become too expensive, the backlash too loud to ignore. Those politicians who told us that men can be women will explain with a frown that these were “challenging times” rather than a gruesome display of moral cowardice. Pronouns in bios will become so mortifyingly embarrassing that those who had them will pretend, even to themselves, that they never dreamt of anything so silly.

Well, I’m not so sure he’s right here, but one can hope. The Democratic Party has been influenced too long by “progressivism,” and that shows no signs of disappearing. Indeed, it’s growing, to the point where Nate Silver lists Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the two top Democratic candidates for President. (Remember, though, that it’s early days.) AOC is clearly a progressive, a combination of Fanatic and Careerist, while Gavin Newsom used to be progressive but, starting to realize he can’t win the Presidency that way, has been moving towards the center. He’s clearly a combination of Careerist and Opportunist.

In the meantime, have fun by listing below individuals falling into the five classes given above.

An examination of bones has revealed one of the largest prehistoric mass killings known in Europe, with women, adolescents and children making up most of the 77 victims

How we feel about a night’s sleep can have a bigger impact on mood and grogginess than actual hours of rest. Here’s how to change your mindset to feel more energised

Temnothorax kinomurai, a parasitic ant species found in Japan, reproduces asexually and all of its young develop into queens that try to take over other ants’ colonies

Horses use their larynx to make two sounds simultaneously, so they are effectively singing and whistling at the same time

Fascination with UFOs (unidentified flying objects) is endless. I get it – I was into the whole UFO narrative when I was a child, and didn’t shed it until I learned science and critical thinking and filtered the evidence through that lens. I credit Carl Sagan for initiating that change. In his excellent series, Cosmos (still worth a watch today), he summarized the skeptical position quite well. To paraphrase – after decades, there isn’t a single hard piece of evidence, not one unambiguous photo or video. He gave a couple of examples of evidence (widely cited at the time) that were completely useless. Now -four decades later – the situation is the same. The evidence, in a word, is crap. It is exactly what you would expect (if you were an experienced skeptic) from a psychocultural phenomenon, without any evidence that forces us to reject the null hypothesis.

So why does belief in UFOs (meaning that some of them are alien spacecraft) not only persist but are experiencing a resurgence? Ostensibly this was triggered by the release of the Pentagon videos. I have already dealt with them – they are just more low-grade evidence. In fact, as I have argued, the low-grade quality of the images is the phenomenon. UFOs, or UAPs as the Pentagon now calls them, are not an alien phenomenon, they are an “unidentified” phenomenon. Mick West has arguably done the most thorough analysis of these videos. He convincingly shows how they are just misidentified birds, balloons, and planes. If you look at the videos you will see that they are blobs and shadows and lights. They are not clear and unambiguous images of spacecraft. Believers must infer that they are spacecraft by their apparent properties – and that is where the technical analysis comes in. A sprinkle of motivated reasoning, or simply lack of expertise, is enough to convince yourself that these are fast moving large objects. But a better analysis (again, see Mick West above) shows this is not the case. They are small, moving with the wind, or flying at the speed of a bird.

But the US military is taking UAPs seriously. This is actually not a surprise – unidentified anomalous phenomena might be Chinese spy balloons, or Russian fighter planes. This has always been at the core of the government’s interest. it is now policy to scramble fighter jets for visual confirmation of anything not identifiable on radar. And now that they are doing that – 100% of UAPs so far have been identified as mundane objects, mostly balloons. In fact, the US military is happy to encourage public belief in “UFOs” because it is a convenient cover for their own top secret projects. It is not a coincidence that UFO sightings tend to cluster around military bases.

Another factor in the recent upsurge in interest is the media. The media, of course, loves stories that generate a lot of interest, and UFOs fit the bill. However, they also know that UFO stories are fringe and often based on rumor or testimony from dubious sources, so they are often relegated to “fluff” stories. They are like the ghost stories that circulate every Halloween – journalists know they are nonsense, but make great headlines. But now – the media feels they have permission from the US government to take UFO stories seriously, so they gleefully are. Here is an example from the New York Times. The author, a regular columnist, Roth Douthat, has four questions for the Trump administrations. Do they have more videos, why are there so many apparent whistle-blowers, why are some US senators calling for disclosure, and is the US government pursuing research into UFO experiencers and paranormal phenomenon (which they have in the past)?

These sound like serious questions, and so a serious journalist can write a column about them without looking silly. But the thing is – we already have the answers to these questions. The Pentagon has done a thorough analysis of all the evidence the US government has, and concluded – there is no evidence of aliens. As predicted, the whole thing is a giant nothing-burger. Except for the newer videos, most of the evidence is old and long-debunked nonsense by the same cast of characters that have been peddling this pseudoscience for decades. Why are people interested in this – because other people are interested in it. But whenever you dig down, there is simply nothing there. I have been following the UFO story for literally 50 years, and nothing has changed.

This brings me to another reason we are seeing a resurgence in interest in UFOs – because that is the natural cycle. Each generation, since the 1940s, has a fascination with UFOs. This lasts for a decade or so, then wanes for a decade or so, then comes back. This is because people get hyped up about some apparently new evidence or claim, or a movie, or now some social media video, and we get another round of people learning about UFOs for the first time. This interest lasts for a while, with many people feeling as if some big disclosure is right around the corner. They see the recent activity as a trend, rather than just as the cycle it is, and expect some big government announcement, or the proverbial aliens landing on the White House lawn.

But of course – nothing happens. Eventually, nothing becomes boring. There are always die-hards who keep the flames going, or turn their UFO interest into a job, but public interest fades and turns to something else. UFO enthusiasts then wait for another generation to forget how boring the whole thing is, or who never experienced it before, and then fan the flames back into fire, which will also eventually burn itself out.

Meanwhile, skeptics like me, who have been at this for awhile, see it coming a mile away. We can immediately respond because we have seen it all before – it’s the same tired arguments and the same lame evidence. But we still have to be careful not to seem dismissive. We are not – we’ve just been here before so we have a head start. Also we (collectively – there is a lot of dividing and conquering going on) do the detailed analysis, the hard work necessary to demonstrate convincingly that whatever new evidence is being put forward is what it is.

UFO believers reading this blog, at this point, are likely to leave in the comments – “well, what about this evidence?” Hit me. Give me your best evidence. I am happy to do a deep dive and see what we got. But you should first look for skeptical analysis of the claim – be your own most dedicated skeptic first. If you still think the evidence is worthwhile, send it my way. (And don’t tell me to read thousands of pages of low grade evidence – give me your best evidence.) Decades of making this challenge has not resulted in anything (for example), but I am willing to keep going. Also, keep in mind, if aliens were visiting the Earth, I would want to know, and if the evidence were compelling, I would have every motivation in the world to support and promote that conclusion. And I would have much to lose if I wrongfully denied a genuine phenomenon – arguably the most interesting and impactful phenomenon in human history. I would not want to be on the wrong side of that story. So yeah – convince me.

But you should be open to the possibility that you are wrong, that all the evidence is best explained as a psychocultural phenomenon without any need to invoke aliens. I strongly believe that is the case, and it would take compelling evidence to convince me otherwise. Such evidence does not exist, because if it did, we wouldn’t need to be debating this anymore. That is why believers have to invoke conspiracy theories or make the absurd claim that aliens are just teasing us with the possibility of their existence but withhold any solid evidence. Maybe that worked in the 1950s, but 75 years later it’s increasingly untenable.

 

The post Why UFOs Are Back first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

We often stop noticing things we’ve become too accustomed to, as a side effect of our brains protecting us from sensory overload. Columnist Helen Thomson shares the evidence-backed ways to learn how to notice again

Returning from my hiatus, I couldn't decide on a specific new topic, mainly because so much bad stuff happened in my absence. So, in this post I back up a bit to reflect on how RFK Jr.'s "make America healthy again" is nothing new. What is new is that the antiscience-cranks are in charge.

The post MAHA: Everything old is new again, except this time antiscience cranks (like Stanislaw Burzynski) are in charge first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Far beyond Neptune, in the frozen depths of the Kuiper Belt, many ancient objects oddly resemble giant snowmen made of ice and rock. For years, scientists wondered how these delicate two-lobed shapes could form without violent collisions tearing them apart. Now researchers at Michigan State University have recreated the process in a powerful new simulation, showing that simple gravitational collapse can naturally produce these cosmic “snowmen.”

A Martian volcano once thought to be the result of a single eruption turns out to have a much more complex past. Orbital imaging and mineral data show it developed through multiple eruptive phases, all powered by the same evolving magma system underground. Shifts in mineral composition reveal the magma changed over time, hinting at different depths and storage histories. Mars’ interior was far more active than previously believed.

Searching for life beyond Earth has rapidly advanced in recent years. However, directly imaging an exoplanet and all their incredible features remain elusive given the literal astronomical distances from Earth. Therefore, astronomers have settled by exploring exoplanet atmospheres for signatures of life, also called biosignatures. This is currently conducted by analyzing the starlight that passes through an exoplanet’s atmosphere, known as spectroscopy, as it passes in front of its star, also called a transit. But improvements continue to be made to better explore exoplanet atmospheres, specifically cleaning up messy data.

For decades, scientists have searched the skies for signs of extraterrestrial technology. A study from EPFL asks a sharp question: if alien signals have already reached Earth without us noticing, what should we realistically expect to detect today?