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After the first protons and neutrons formed, after the first light elements formed, the universe…wasn’t really all that great.

Many industries are eyeing up hydrogen as a source of clean energy, but with supplies of green hydrogen limited, we should prioritise the areas where it could have the most positive impact on carbon emissions, say researchers

Hot Jupiters were once cosmic oddities, but unraveling how they moved so close to their stars has remained a stubborn mystery. Scientists have long debated whether these giants were violently flung inward or peacefully drifted through their birth disks. A new approach from researchers in Tokyo cracks open this puzzle by using the timescale of orbital circularization as a diagnostic.

Scientists have achieved an unprecedented view of the Sun by coordinating observations between two of the most powerful solar instruments ever built. For the first time, observations from the Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft have captured the same solar region simultaneously from different vantage points. This created a stereoscopic view that reveals intricate details of tiny "campfire" features scattered across the Sun's surface. These fleeting brightening, though individually small, occur in such vast numbers that they may collectively shape how the Sun's outer atmosphere is heated and how plasma erupts into space.

Researchers in Sweden have unveiled a way to create high-performance electronic electrodes using nothing more than visible light and specially designed water-soluble monomers. This gentle, chemical-free approach lets conductive plastics form directly on surfaces ranging from glass to textiles to living skin, enabling surprisingly versatile electronic and medical applications.

The FDA sent a letter to the supplement industry assuring that it would make it easier for them to hide disclaimers (which we like to call "quack Miranda warnings") about unproven health claims for supplements. What does this tell us about MAHA?

The post The FDA under MAHA control: Weakening the quack Miranda warning on supplements first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Astronomers have performed the deepest radio observations ever of Omega Centauri, searching for signs of an intermediate mass black hole thought to lurk at its center. Despite 170 hours of observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array achieving unprecedented sensitivity, they detected absolutely nothing where the black hole should be. If an intermediate mass black hole exists in this massive star cluster, as suggested by fast moving stars discovered earlier this year, it must be accreting material at an extraordinarily low rate, barely feeding at all compared to other known black holes.

Researchers have discovered that a close encounter with a rogue planet or brown dwarf during the Sun's early years could have triggered the reshuffling of our Solar System's giant planets. Running 3000 simulations of stellar flybys, the team found that substellar objects passing within 20 astronomical units of the young Sun could destabilise the planets' orbits just enough to match their current configuration without destroying the delicate Kuiper belt. This flyby scenario represents a new possible explanation for one of the Solar System's defining events, with roughly a 1-5 percent probability depending on how common free floating planets actually are in young star clusters.

Astronomers at the University of Tokyo have used gravitational lensing to measure how fast the universe is expanding, adding weight to one of cosmology's most intriguing mysteries. Their technique exploits the way massive galaxies bend light from distant quasars, creating multiple distorted images that arrive at different times. The measurement supports recent observations showing the universe expands faster than predictions based on the early universe suggest, strengthening evidence that the "Hubble tension" represents genuine new physics rather than experimental error.

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected the strongest evidence yet for an atmosphere on a rocky planet outside our solar system. Observations of the ultra-hot super-Earth TOI-561 b suggest that the exoplanet is surrounded by a thick blanket of gases above a global magma ocean.

Although, as the authors of this new Nature article note, there is some evidence of human fire use in Africa going back 1.6 million years, they don’t consider the evidence definitive because “the evidence for early fire use is limited and often ambiguous, typically consisting of associations between heated materials and stone tools.”   They also note that there is more direct evidence but it’s quite recent:

. . . . direct evidence of fire-making by pre-Homo sapiens hominins has, until recently, been limited to a few dozen handaxes from several French Neanderthal sites, dating to around 50 ka, that exhibit use-wear traces consistent with experimental tools that were struck with pyrite to create sparks.

In this paper the authors investigate a site in Sussex, dated about 400,000 years ago, that has several lines of evidence suggesting regular use of fire, and controlled use, since there were materials like pyrite that could be used to strike sparks.  Note that the paper considers this the earliest evidence for making fire, not simply using fire.  The authors consider their work to provide pretty definitive evidence of fire-making and fire use in H. sapiens. (Note that we are the only species to use fire.)

Click the headline below to read the article, or you can find the pdf here.

The evidence came from an unused clay pit in the Breckland area of Suffolk, with deposits of clay and silt as well as human artifacts like hand axes. The evidence for persistent fire use at this site (the authors suggest at least two groups of humans, and comes from five observations and experiments. I’ve put them below under the letters.

a.) Red clayey silt (RCS) in the layers, silt that seems to have required prolonged heating to form. Here’s what it looks like.  The unexcavated section is in the top photo, and the bottom is the partly excavated area which is an enlargement of the box in (a). I’ve put a red arrow in (a) at the RCS layer thought to reflect heating of the sediments by the presence of “hearths”: areas where cooking or other uses of fire regularly took place. The layer is more obvious in the bottom photo:

The authors say that the red layer reflecs heating or sediments containing iron:

The reddening is attributable to the formation of haematite—a mineral produced through heating of iron-rich sediments. Its distribution is homogeneous and not associated with particular microfacies or voids, indicating that it was preserved in situ.

b.) Experimental heating of the non-red sediments. The authors showed that the magnetic properties of material in the RCS differ markedly from unheated “control” samples of material taken from the lower layer (“YBCS” in second photo above). But by heating the YCBS layer extensively, it assumed some of the magnetic properties of the RCS, suggesting that the RCS involved heating of clays by fire. As they say (bolding is mine):

Three samples were taken from the RCS and two from the adjacent YBCS, which served as unheated control samples. The magnetic properties of the RCS (Supplementary Information, section 5) differ markedly from those of the unheated control samples, exhibiting elevated levels of secondary fine-grained ferrimagnetic and superparamagnetic minerals of pyrogenic origin, unlike the control samples. To assess whether these characteristics could result from heating, a series of experiments of single and multiple heating events of varying durations, was conducted. The aim was to determine whether the reddening could have arisen from one or multiple heating events, as repeated, localized burning is more typical of human than natural fire events (S.H. et al. manuscript in preparation).

The closest experimental analogue in terms of the minerology and grain size distribution, was observed after 12 or more heating events, each lasting 4 h at temperatures of 400 °C or 600 °C. Although the archaeological samples exhibit substantially lower magnetic susceptibility values, this may result from post-depositional mixing with unheated illuviated clay. Overall, the experiments indicate that the magnetic properties of the RCS result from an indeterminate number of short-duration heating events, consistent with repeated human use (Fig. 3).

Note that prolonged heating—nearly 50 hours of heating at 400-600 degrees C, was required to approximate the magnetic properties of the presumed fire-use layer.  This suggests also that the heating did not reflect wildfires, but repeated, localized, and intentional burning.

c.) Infrared spectroscopy of heated control samples changed in infrared absorbtion spectra of the “control” samples, making it closer to that of the presumed hearth layer of RCS.

d.)  The area contained four handaxes that showed marks of heat-shattering.  Here is a picture of a handaxe with “closeup of fractured surface caused by fire.”:

Presumably this is based on experiments using recently made handaxes, with some treated by fire and then compared to unheated controls.

e.) Fragments of pyrite were found in the heated area, and pyrite  is used with flint to produce fire (before that, people presumably had to get fire from lightning burns and somehow preserve it). Moreover, pyrite was not found in this locality; the nearest accessible mineral was about 15 km away, suggesting that people picked it up and brought it to the site to strike against flint (flint was also found in the area). As the authors note:

The occurrence of pyrite at Barnham warrants further consideration. Pyrite is a naturally occurring iron sulfide mineral that can be struck against flint to produce sparks to ignite tinder. Its use for this purpose is well documented in ethnographic accounts worldwide. Pyrite has been recovered from European archaeological sites dating from the late Middle Palaeolithic to the historic periods, occasionally bearing wear traces consistent with use for fire-making and, in some cases, found in association with flint striking tools.

Here are some fragments of pyrite; caption is from paper:

(from paper): b, Fragment of pyrite found on the surface of palaeosol in Area IV(6). c, Fragment of pyrite from palaeosol in Area VI, found in association with concentrations of heated flint.

e.) The heated sites were located in areas amenable to prolonged fire use. This is weak evidence, but I present it nevertheless. From the authors:

Notably, all three sites occupy marginal locations, away from the main river valleys and associated with small ponds or springs. In the absence of caves, these locations probably provided safer, more sheltered environments for domestic activities. Taken together, these findings present a strong case for controlled fire use across the Breckland region during MIS 11.

The upshot:  We often forget that any meat eaten by people before the advent of cooking would have to be raw, and raw meat is tough and, at least to us, somewhat unpalatable. (I do like a very rare steak, as well as steak tartare, though.) But our ancestors didn’t grind up meat, though they may have pounded it to make a kind of raw Pleistocene schnitzel. By making meat more palatable, cooking would promote eating more of it, and that itself could change the selective pressures on humans, giving them the extra nutrients they’d need if they were to evolve big brains (brains use a lot of energy!).  This is one (disputed) theory for a rapid increase of human brain size that lasted between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, though brain size was also getting bigger, albeit at a slower pace, before then. Cooking has also been suggested to have changed human social behavior (and perhaps social evolution), with pair bonding and mutual aid increasing as a way to gather, store, and protect food that needed to be cooked. And more complex social behavior could itself have promoted the evolution of larger brains to figure out how to regulate and get along in your small social group.

These theories, while suggestive, really should be downgraded to “hypotheses,” since there isn’t much evidence to support them—only correlation and speculation. However, they are interesting to contemplate, even if we never can get strong evidence for them.  At the end of the paper, the authors do seem to sign onto some of these, but not strongly.

The kernel of this paper is the several lines of evidence that do, to my mind, support the idea that humans were making and using fire at least 400,000 year ago.  Here’s what the authors say about the advantages, evolutionary and otherwise, of controlling fire:

The advantage of fire-making lies in its predictability, which facilitated better planning of seasonal routines, the establishment of domestic sites in preferred locations and increased structuring of the landscape through enculturation. Year-round access to fire would have provided an enhanced communal focus, potentially as a catalyst for social evolution. It would have enabled routine cooking, could have expanded the consumption of roots, tubers and meat, reduced energy required for digestion and increased protein intake. These dietary improvements may have contributed to increase in brain size, enhanced cognition and the development of more complex social relationships, as articulated in the Social Brain Hypothesis. Moreover, controlled fire use was instrumental in advancing other technologies, such as the production of glues for hafting. The widespread appearance of Levallois points from Africa to Eurasia by MIS 7 (243–191 ka), often interpreted as spear-tips, provides strong evidence of effective hafting. This interpretation is supported by use-wear evidence and the identification of heat-synthesized birch bark tar as a stone tool adhesive.

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior has returned with his patented text-and-photo piece on (you guess it) pollination. Athayde’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Delicate trade agreements

In one of the regular letters to his close friend, explorer and botanist Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin vented his frustration at a puzzle he hadn’t been able to crack: …I will return the 3 Melastomateds; I do not want them & indeed have cuttings; I am very low about them, & have wasted enormous labour over them & cannot yet get a glimpse of the meaning of the parts. (Darwin, 1862). The ‘Melastomateds’ cuttings belonged to the family Melastomataceae, a huge group (some 5,000 known species) of mostly tropical shrubs, trees, herbs and lianas. The ‘parts’ whose meaning eluded Darwin were the stamens and anthers.

A complete, hermaphroditic flower. The pistil comprises the ovary, the style (a pillar-like stalk through which pollen germinates to reach the ovary) and the stigma (a sticky tip at the top of the style that receives pollen). The stamen has a filament that supports the anther, where pollen is produced © Anjubaba, Wikimedia Commons:

For a range of Melastomataceae species and at least 15 other flowering plant families, there are two (sometimes three) types of morphologically distinct stamens and anthers in each flower, a condition known as heteranthery. Typically, one set comprises short, colourful stamens located at the centre of the flower. The other set has longer, less colourful stamens that are deflected to the flower’s side and curved inwards. Darwin wrote a whole book about flower morphologies and their bearings in natural selection (Darwin, 1877), but the relevance – if any – of heteranthery puzzled him. He suspected the condition was related to reproduction, but he couldn’t figure out how.

An Asian melastoma (Melastoma candidum) flower with shorter stamens/yellow anthers, and longer stamens/reddish anthers © Hachiman et al., 2024:

Darwin got his answer from his correspondent and enthusiastic evolutionist Fritz Müller (1822- 1897) working in faraway southern Brazil. Müller, a Prussian immigrant, was a brilliant naturalist who wrote about biology, morphology, systematics and evolution of plants, marine invertebrates, butterflies, ants, termites and other insects. Müller discovered the nutritious bodies (today called Müllerian bodies), which are plant glands that secrete ant food, and demonstrated that pairs of poisonous, unpalatable species benefit from evolving a similar appearance to reduce their chances of being attacked, a form of protection we know as Müllerian mimicry.

Fritz Müller kitted out to go exploring a Brazilian tropical forest © O Município;

From his observations of Melastomataceae, Fritz Müller and his botanist brother Hermann – who stayed in Prussia – proposed that the two types of stamen played different roles. One type was specialised in transferring pollen to flower visitors; the other was responsible for feeding them. But why would a plant come to such an elaborate ruse?

Most Melastomataceae and many heterantherous species are pollinated by bees, but their flowers don’t produce any nectar: pollen is their sole food reward. This creates a dilemma. Plants must hand out pollen, otherwise bees wouldn’t pay a visit. But the giveaway must be sparing, otherwise reproduction could be curtailed or prevented altogether. Heterantherous plants sorted this problem by dividing up pollen allocation. The showy, central stamens attract bees, who store the collected pollen in their pollen baskets (scopa): this pollen is no longer available for fertilisation. The longer stamens that curve away from the centre are in a convenient position to sneak on a foraging bee and deposit pollen on parts of her body from where they are not easily scooped up by grooming. With luck, these pollen grains will be transported to another plant’s stigma.

Xylocopa flavifrons (A) and Amegilla urens (B) collecting pollen from Melastoma malabathricum‘s feeding stamens (yellow) and being exposed to pollinating stamens (red). Arrows indicate the pollen-receiving stigmas © Hachiman et al., 2024:

The Müller brothers’ ‘division of labour hypothesis’, as it is known today, was a revelation to Darwin: I have had a letter from Fritz Müller suggesting a novel and very curious explanation of certain plants producing two sets of anthers of different colour. This has set me on fire to renew the laborious experiments which I made on this subject, now 20 years ago (Darwin, 1887).

Division of labour is beautifully exemplified by the pollination of Rhynchanthera grandiflora, a shrub native to the Neotropical region. This plant has flowers with four short stamens and one long stamen, all of them with upwards-facing anthers. A bee lands on a flower, grabs the short stamens and starts flexing her thoracic muscles at high frequency, generating vibrations that are transmitted to the anthers. These moves, known as ‘buzz pollination’, release pollen that lands on the bee. This tricky form of pollen extraction is restricted to some specialised bees such as bumble bees (Bombus spp.) and carpenter bees (Xylocopa spp.). Pollen released from anthers in the short stamens is scooped up by the bee. Pollen from the anther on the long stamen shoots up and sticks to the bee’s dorsal side (Konzmann et al., 2020).

L: A R. grandiflora flower. R: A bumble bee buzz-pollinating depresses the long stamen with its abdomen. The dotted line and cone show the mean direction and scattering angle, respectively, of the released pollen © Konzmann et al., 2020:

The division of labour hypothesis has been confirmed for a few other heterantherous, bee-pollinated species. But, as is invariably the case in biology, things are a bit more complicated.

The hypothesis requires that both types of stamens produce pollen at the same time. But that’s not the case for speckled clarkia (Clarkia cylindrica) and elegant clarkia (C. unguiculata), both natives to western North America. These plants have two types of stamens that mature gradually and at different times. Moreover, pollen from both types of stamens is collected for food and transferred between flowers in equal proportions, so there’s no indication of labour division. For Kay et al. (2020), heteranthery in Clarkia spp. and possibly other heterantherous plants is a mechanism to dispense pollen gradually, during several visits by bees. This strategy would enhance pollination because a bee with only a few pollen grains attached to her body is likely to move to another flower without wasting time grooming herself to remove pollen from her body. Why then bother with two types of stamens? Different morphologies and development times represent additional insurance against excessive pollen harvesting.

A speckled clarkia is a miserly pollen-giver © U.S. National Park Service, Wikimedia Commons:

We don’t have enough studies to assess the relative significance of the division-of-labour hypothesis or the pollen-dosing strategy. Either way, dividing up the pollen stock or releasing it slowly are tactics to give away as little as possible a metabolically expensive product without discouraging flower visitors, who aim to gather as much of it and as fast as possible. The morphological adaptations exhibited by heterantherous plants are examples of the true nature of plant-pollinator interactions: an equilibrium between two parties with conflicting interests fine-tuned by natural selection.

References

Darwin, C.R. 1862. Letter no. 3762, Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/.
Darwin, C.R. 1877. The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species. John Murray.
Darwin, F. (ed). 1887. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter. John Murray.
Hachiman, S. et al. 2024. Division of labour between dimorphic stamens in Melastoma candidum (Melastomataceae): Role of stamen strength in the biomechanics of pollination. Journal of Pollination Ecology 37: 284–302.
Kay, K.M. et al. 2020. Darwin’s vexing contrivance: a new hypothesis for why some flowers have two kinds of anther. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 287: 20202593.
Konzmann, S. et al. 2020. Morphological specialization of heterantherous Rhynchanthera grandiflora (Melastomataceae) accommodates pollinator diversity. Plant Biology 22: 583-590.

Researchers used a deep learning AI model to uncover the first imaging-based biomarker of chronic stress by measuring adrenal gland volume on routine CT scans. This new metric, the Adrenal Volume Index, correlates strongly with cortisol levels, allostatic load, perceived stress, and even long-term cardiovascular outcomes, including heart failure risk.

Carl Sagan famously said that “We’re all made of star-stuff”. But he didn’t elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been created in massive supernovae explosions - hence the saying. Scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled - the isotopes created in the supernovae flew here on tiny dust grains (stardust) that eventually accreted into Earth, and later into biological systems. However, a new paper from Martin Bizzarro and his co-authors at the University of Copenhagen upends that theory by showing that much of the material created in supernovae is captured in ice as it travels the interstellar medium. It also suggests that the Earth itself formed through the Pebble Accretion model rather than massive protoplanets slamming together.

But this is a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukah theme, as we now have three Jewish cats.  The instructions are here and we have only about ten photos. (Note: the cat below is AI generated; we don’t want those!)

Remember, one photo per submission, please!

Astronomers tracked a decade of dramatic changes in P13, a neutron star undergoing supercritical accretion. Its X-ray luminosity rose and fell by factors of hundreds while its rotation rate accelerated. These synchronized shifts suggest the accretion structure itself evolved over time. The findings offer fresh clues to how ultraluminous X-ray sources reach such extreme power.

Astronomers tracked a decade of dramatic changes in P13, a neutron star undergoing supercritical accretion. Its X-ray luminosity rose and fell by factors of hundreds while its rotation rate accelerated. These synchronized shifts suggest the accretion structure itself evolved over time. The findings offer fresh clues to how ultraluminous X-ray sources reach such extreme power.

Webb’s latest observations reveal a hellish world cloaked in an unexpected atmosphere: TOI-561 b, an ultra-hot rocky planet racing around its star in under 11 hours. Despite being blasted by intense radiation that should strip it bare, the planet appears to host a thick layer of gases above a global magma ocean, making it far less dense than expected.

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, December 14, 2025, and National Bouillabaisse Day.  It is very cold today: 2°F, which is -17°C.  Your hands start freezing within 15 seconds of exposure (I forgot my gloves!).

Hanukkah starts tonight at sundown and ends on Monday, December 22.  Here’s Gal Gadot and Noa Tishby, two of my heartthrobs, discussing the holiday:

Here’s a bowl of that fish soup from Wikipedia, with the caption, “A version by three-star Lyon chef Paul Bocuse from his restaurant ‘Le Sud’.” You can bet this will cost you some. . .

Arnaud 25, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Screwdriver Day (the drink), Monkey Day, Roast Chestnuts Day (where can I find them?), and National Biscuits and Gravy Day, a great indigenous American food.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Two shootings occurred yesterday: one at Brown University killed two people and injured nine, and at last ten people were killed by snipers on Bondi Beach, Australia, during a Jewish celebration; it appears to be a targeted attack. More in tomorrow’s Nooz.  Things are horrible everywhere.

*The government closed because Congress could not agree on whether to extend Obamacare subsidies. Now that Congress is back in session, it’s clear that this doesn’t mean a compromise is in the works. The Senate has rejected both Democratic and Republican plans, guaranteeing that premiums will go up at the end of the month, and presages yet another government closure in 2026.

The Senate rejected dueling health care bills Thursday, all but guaranteeing that Obamacare subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans will lapse at the end of the year.

Senators voted 51-48 on advancing a GOP health care plan that would have expanded health savings accounts as an alternative to the expiring tax credits. Democrats’ plan to extend the Covid-era enhanced subsidies for three years also received a 51-48 vote. Both proposals fell well short of the 60 votes needed to vault a key procedural hurdle.

The votes both went largely, but not entirely, along party lines. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican to oppose the GOP plan. Meanwhile, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Dan Sullivan of Alaska voted to advance the Democrats’ health care plan. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who would have voted for the GOP plan, missed the votes.

. . . Thursday’s Senate votes were part of a deal Senate Majority Leader John Thune made with Democrats to end the government shutdown that ended last month. Senators have widely acknowledged for weeks that the votes were aimed more at messaging than forcing through passable bipartisan compromise.

Still, a deal in the Senate was likely Congress’ best shot at preventing the subsidies from lapsing and raising premiums for many Americans who buy their insurance directly through Affordable Care Act exchanges. While the lapse will not completely eliminate the tax credits, they will revert back to pre-pandemic levels and many families could still see their premiums rise by $1,000 a year or more.

If you look at how much people’s healthcare premiums will go up if a bill doesn’t pass, a fair estimate would be a doubling of the monthly rate, but for some people it will be much more—perhaps fourfold.  It’s not right to play hob with people’s health for political gain, but it looks as if a compromise is not in the works.

*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan celebrates “Ten years of marriage equality“: the right of gays to marry which, a great moral advance, Sullivan largely helped to forge.  He assesses what the movement gained and what it lost.

And then, of course, we’ve had ten years of nationwide marriage equality since 2015’s Obergefell decision — a cause I imagined, helped kick-start in 1989, and spent a quarter century arguing everywhere I could. It included my own civil marriage and, in true American fashion, my sad but amicable divorce more than a decade later.

“If you live long enough” is a cliché for a reason. And, against the odds, thanks to protease inhibitors, I did live long enough to see these two evolutions in media and society unfold. “Did they do more good than harm?” is a question I’ve found myself pondering in my third trimester of life. The media revolution? A truly mixed bag, I’d say, especially in the iPhone and now AI era. A story for another time.

But gay marriage? Personally, I feel I failed in my own journey, but nonetheless tried hard, and treasure the enduring love and deep friendship I still have with my ex-husband. My marriage helped me mature, grounded me more firmly, taught me what sacrifice and generosity can be. Maybe it will happen again.

And collectively? A much higher grade surely — with the caveat that we’ve only had a decade of evidence. My opponents feared it would destabilize marriage more generally. It didn’t. Marriage rates were 6.9 per 1,000 in 2015 and 6.1 today — a decline in line with the previous half-century. Not great, but there’s no sign that gay marriage had any serious impact. Divorce rates? They have actually improved since 2015: from 3.1 to 2.4 per 1,000 in 2023.One small contributing factor is that divorce rates among gay men are actually lower than that for straight couples. Who predicted that? Certainly not Bill Kristol.

How has marriage affected these gay men and lesbians? It’s been a boon. Married couples have higher household incomes, lower poverty rates, higher levels of employment, better health than unmarried ones, higher home-ownership rates — and report greater social acceptance. Gay men have been thriving in education. . . 

. . . . The queer activists, of course, loudly insisted that same-sex couples rejected the institution of marriage and would never join it. But the number of married gay men and lesbians more than doubled from 390,000 in 2015 to 823,000 now; and nearly 60 percent of same-sex cohabiting couples are now married, compared with 40 percent in domestic partnerships.How has this reform been greeted in the country at large? Gallup shows that support has grown from 58 to 69 percent. In 2024, the GOP removed opposition to gay marriage in its platform. A married gay man with two sons is now the Treasury Secretary in a hard-right Republican administration — a more senior position than any openly gay Dem has ever held.

As social reforms go, it’s hard to do better than this. It sure hasn’t been a panacea for marriage as a whole, but it has shored up the thing a bit and broadened its base. And then there are things for which there are no statistics. The young mercifully don’t know much of the immense psychic pain, deep spiritual anguish, emotional trauma, and intense self-hatred that the past contained for so many of us — a pain far worse for the countless generations before.

And the downside, involving the alphabet characterization:

The trouble, of course, is that success breeds its own set of problems. Successful civil rights movements — think of the mid-1960s — can radicalize and curdle. And as most normie gays got on with their lives, queer extremists duly took over the gay infrastructure and institutions, and the era of more general woke madness set in.

The goal was to re-marginalize us as “queer” again, to indoctrinate kids with leftist lies about human biology, and create an entirely fake history of gay and lesbian rights. Dissent was punished, old leaders ousted, and an ever-expanding alphabet of ever-more bizarre and niche identities — often approaching mental illness — replaced any idea of gay and lesbian identity.

They changed the flag and merged its colors with the BLM movement; they pioneered untested medical experiments on pre-pubescent children with gender dysphoria, including gay and lesbian kids; they sterilized them and rendered many incapable of orgasm for life; they perverted the English language — “chest-feeding” anyone? — and tried to abolish the whole idea of homosexuality as a distinct human experience, in favor of their generalized, post-modern, intersectional queerness. And they replaced the principles of live-and-let-live by forcing others to take the knee to their radicalism. No-enemies-to-the-left syndrome became a pandemic. Sore winners.

. . . I remain deeply proud of what we did. Nothing will ever take that away. The current madness is based on lies about human nature, and lies always fail in the end. We will emerge from it because it’s built on sand. Meanwhile, you carry on, hoping some kind of moderation will happen, but seeing no sign of it at all. I realize don’t belong in this intolerant “LGBTQIA+” community any more. And it doesn’t want me or any gay men like me. The price of success is always failure, I suppose. But the success was real.’

Well, I apologize for the long excerpt, but Sullivan is an eloquent exponent of the unpredicted attacks on gays by the whole “intolerant “LGBTQIA+” community.”  Still, he did well in life. No matter how much I disagree with Sullivan over things (increasingly it’s limited to religion as he moves towards the center), I could never hope to have improved the well-being of society as much as he did by promoting gay marriage. And that will not go away.

*After several years of calling Israel genocidal while keeping silent on Hamas, Amnesty International finally admitted that Hamas committed crimes against humanity (h/t Stephen). It’s a measure of the degree of anti-semitism that this happened only this week.  Amnesty International, like Doctors Without Borders (DwB) or even the UN itself, has a horrible record of persistently criticizing Israel and ignoring Hamas, though it did accuse Hamas once of committing “war crimes”, ignoring the humanitarian crimes.

Amnesty International on Thursday accused Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups of crimes against humanity, including extermination, during and after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war.

“Palestinian armed groups committed violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and crimes against humanity during their attacks in southern Israel that started on 7 October 2023,” the human rights watchdog said in a 173-page report.

The group has previously accused Hamas and others of committing war crimes.

War crimes are serious violations of international law against civilians and combatants during armed conflict. Crimes against humanity can occur in peacetime and include torture, rape and discrimination, be it racial, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender-based. They involve “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.”

Amnesty has also accused Israel of genocide, an accusation that Jerusalem vehemently denies. However, Amnesty said any Israeli wrongdoing, or Palestinian groups’ crimes against other Palestinians, were outside the scope of this report.

Amnesty said that the mass killing of civilians in Israel on October 7 amounted “to the crime against humanity of extermination.” Among the other crimes listed were murder, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearance, and sexual violence.

Hamas rejected the report, saying it contained “inaccuracies and contradictions.”

Israel also critiqued the report, noting that it came out more than two years after the attack, with the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Oren Marmorstein, saying it “falls fa

Crikey! They did not even condemn Hamas for the October 7, 2023 massacre of civilians as well as kidnapping.  What has happened to organizations like Amnesty International and DwB? How did they lose their moral compass?

*The NYT reports that the CIA enlisted a team of climbers in 1965 to put a plutonium-generated device on the top of the famous Himalayan peak Nanda Devi, designed to spy on China. There’s a lot of plutonium in it, but it was abandoned and never used. It’s still spewing radioactivity somewhere on the peak:

The mission demanded the utmost secrecy.

A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas.

Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice. One misplaced foot, one careless slip, and it was a 2,000-foot drop, straight down.

Just below the peak, the Americans and their Indian comrades got everything ready: the antenna, the cables and, most crucially, the SNAP-19C, a portable generator designed in a top-secret lab and powered by radioactive fuel, similar to the ones used for deep sea and outer space exploration.The plan was to spy on China, which had just detonated an atomic bomb. Stunned, the C.I.A. dispatched the climbers to set up all this gear — including the 50-pound, beach-ball-size nuclear device — on the roof of the world to eavesdrop on Chinese mission control.

But right as the climbers were about to push for the summit, the weather went haywire. The wind howled, the clouds descended, a blizzard swept in and the top of the forbidding mountain, called Nanda Devi, suddenly disappeared in a whiteout.

From his perch at advance base camp, Capt. M.S. Kohli, the highest-ranking Indian on the mission, watched in panic.

“Camp Four, this is Advance Base. Can you hear me?” he recalled shouting into a walkie-talkie.

No response.

“Camp Four, are you there?”

Finally, the radio crackled to life with a faint voice, a whisper through the wash of static.

“Yes … this … is … Camp … Four.”

“Come back quickly,” Captain Kohli remembered ordering them. “Don’t waste a single minute.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Then Captain Kohli made a fateful decision. He needed to, he said — to save the climbers’ lives.

“Secure the equipment. Don’t bring it down.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb.

It hasn’t been seen since.

And that was 1965.

Every mountain-lover knows of Nanda Devi, India’s second highest mountain at a height of 7817 m (25,646 ft). It was notoriously hard to climb, and infamous for being the mountain that killed 22-year-old Nanda Devi Unsoeld, the daughter of Willi Unsoeld, who conquered Everest via its West Ridge in 1963 and named his daughter after Nanda Devi.

From 1965 to 1968, attempts were made by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in co-operation with the Intelligence Bureau (IB), to place a nuclear-powered (SNAP-19C RTG) telemetry relay listening device on the summit of Nanda Devi.This device was designed to intercept telemetry signals from missile test launches conducted in the Xinjiang Province, at a time of relative infancy in China’s missile program. The expedition retreated due to dangerous weather conditions, leaving the device near the summit of Nanda Devi. They returned the next spring to search for the device, which ended without success. As a result of this activity by the CIA, the Sanctuary was closed to foreign expeditions throughout much of the 1960s. In 1974 the Sanctuary re-opened.

But now, because Nanda Devi has religious significance, nobody of any stripe is allowed to climb it. If the device ever turns up, it will be inside a glacier, and that is unlikely to be found given the new restrictions.

Sumod K Mohan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

*Amherst College has to get the prize for the most bizarre student orientation of 2025. Luana sent me this article (yes, from the Washington Free Beacon) of the stuff that transpires when first-year Amherst students are indoctrinated oriented.

Amherst College was founded over two centuries ago to prepare young Christian men for the ministry. Today, however, the prestigious college has become a hotbed of administratively sanctioned sex performances and “sexual skills” programs, with a focus on “queer” and transgender students and on free-sex practices such as polyamory. The graphic nature of school-sanctioned sex events has made many current Amherst students deeply uncomfortable, according to students who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

Amherst, in central Massachusetts, is one of the country’s most exclusive small liberal arts colleges. The acceptance rate for the class of 2029 was 7 percent and annual tuition plus room and board exceeds $93,000, making it the sixth-most expensive college in the country.

Every year, first-year students are instructed, as a part of orientation, to attend an event—dubbed “Voices of the Class”—in which they are familiarized with Amherst’s “code of conduct” through a theatrical performance scripted using out-of-context excerpts from their own admissions essays. An entire section of the performance is dedicated just to sex.

The event takes place in Johnson Chapel, which Amherst calls its “most important building,” and is used for worship services, convocations, senior assemblies, and other significant gatherings. Johnson Chapel displays 36 portraits of the college’s most notable figures and alumni—including all 19 former presidents of the college, influential trustees, clergymen, civil rights leaders, poet Emily Dickinson, and former U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, who all likely would have looked on in horror if they saw the event on August 31st, 2025.

On the chapel’s chancel, students performed mock sex acts including oral sex, masturbation, and group sex. A young woman bent over while another student pretended to penetrate her from behind. Others pretended to do drugs and shared their “high thoughts.”

Every first-year was urged to attend the performance by their orientation leader. The administration advertises the event as a “lighthearted tradition” to “celebrate the humor, creativity, and individuality of your class.” The school funds the performance, and Amherst administrators work closely with the student performers, offering feedback and approving the script.

. . . . Following the event, the Office of Student Affairs asserted in an email that “Voices of the Class” is “not graphic.”

Um. . . .

Niemi, who’s from Idaho, describes the skits as simulated sex, with students moaning and thrusting under a blanket, and says that the peer educators “showered handfuls of condoms on students like confetti.”

“I thought about leaving 10 minutes in. I’m not someone who breaks rules or skips mandatory events, but it was disgusting enough it almost forced me to leave,” Niemi recalled.

But Amanda Vann, Amherst’s “director of health and wellbeing education,” told the Free Beacon that the skits help students build up their skills when it comes to sex. “The skits are part of our broader commitment to promoting wellbeing and sexual respect on campus,” she said

Right.  The script is written by juniors and seniors taking excerpts from admissions essays written by first-year students (or maybe those who didn’t get in as well).  Here are two videos of the event:

I don’t consider myself a prude, but I just don’t get this.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are again discussing Andrzej:

Hili: He’s not paying any attention to us at all.
Szaron: All we can do is pretend we don’t care.

In Polish:

Hili: On w ogóle nie zwraca na nas uwagi.
Szaron: Możemy tylko udawać, że nas to nie obchodzi.

*******************

From The Dodo (click to enlarge). DO NOT FEED BEA A MUFFIN! (And read it if you can.)

From Give me a Sign; notice that all ursids are prohibited in the sixth bullet point for having bear feet:

From Stacy; a great wrestling match:

From Masih, another brave Iranian woman, singing without a hijab, breaking two rules. She did this in Iran, I think, and had been arrested for it, but released in the face of national outrage.

The translation:

The virtual concert by Parastoo Ahmadi, which impacted millions of Iranians inside and outside Iran and, despite the danger, prompted many Iranians to visualize and break out of the dictatorship’s bubble. This courageous move by Parastoo is a stand and a fight against the Islamic Republic. Everyone should take a step in their own way and challenge the Islamic Republic until the day all the pieces of the puzzle come together and the Islamic Republic is forever removed from Iran and Iranians. If male singers inside Iran stand alongside brave women like Parastoo, Zara, and the young rappers who are currently fighting for their natural rights these days, they will reduce the cost of the struggle for female singers. #بدون_زنان_هرگز

كنسرت مجازى پرستو احمدى كه ميليونها ايرانى را در داخل و خارج از ايران تحت تاثير قرار داد و با وجود خطر ، افكار بسيارى از ايرانيان را وادار به تصويرسازى و خروج از حباب ديكتاتورى كرد.
اين حركت شجاعانه پرستو، ايستادگی و مبارزه عليه جمهورى اسلامى‌ست. هركس به سهم خود قدمى بردارد و… pic.twitter.com/Vx7Vzhu7i1

— United Against Gender Apartheid (@UAGApartheid) December 13, 2025

Larry the Cat presents a poor, frustrated kitty:

Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/hRoijzSBWs

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 13, 2025

From Malcolm; I’m sure they don’t make these any more:

The Motocompo: Honda’s 1980s foldable scooter that fits in a city car.pic.twitter.com/o4HMajt8ES

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025

From Simon, who asks, “Who even lets them drive?”

GWAS pic.twitter.com/OuDcNbeTdy

— Oded Rechavi (@OdedRechavi) December 12, 2025

One from my feed. Crows are not dumb!

Taking the leaves off strawberriespic.twitter.com/HehaSJ1zMn

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 13, 2025

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was seven years old and would be 89 today had he lived. https://t.co/iRkNe4jCO5

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 14, 2025

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb.  First, a headline you don’t see every day:

We don’t do court reports, especially when it comes to violent crime, but there’s always an exception.

— Angry People in Local Newspapers (@apiln.bsky.social) 2025-12-09T14:30:20.280Z

Second, the late ecologist Sir Bob May takes issue with how this famous story is related:

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Looking into a paper about beetles reminds me of Bob May's firm riposte to his account in Nature about God's famous inordinate fondness for beetles.

— Roland Pease (@peaseroland.bsky.social) 2025-12-08T15:35:15.535Z

The early universe was a very different place than today. And by “early” I don’t mean a billion or even ten billion years ago. The universe is about 13.77 billion years old, and when it was only a handful of seconds old, it was completely unrecognizable.