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Researchers have identified hexagonal perovskite-related oxides as materials with exceptionally high proton conductivity and thermal stability. Their unique crystal structure and large number of oxygen vacancies enable full hydration and high proton diffusion, making these materials ideal candidates as electrolytes for next-generation protonic ceramic fuel cells that can operate at intermediate temperatures without degradation.

Immobilizing small synthetic molecules inside protein crystals proves to be a promising avenue for studying intermediate compounds formed during chemical reactions, scientists report. By integrating this method with time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography, they successfully visualized reaction dynamics and rapid structural changes occurring within reaction centers immobilized inside protein crystals. This innovative strategy holds significant potential for the intelligent design of drugs, catalysts, and functional materials.

Today’s photos come from UC Davis math professor Abigail Thompson, a recognized “Hero of Intellectual Freedom” (see here). Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

I included a couple pictures of the pools themselves this time, with lots of anemones, Anthopleura xanthogrammica (giant green anemone) and Anthopleura elegantissima (aggregating anemone) and ochre sea star (Pisaster ochraceus), ostrich plume hydroids and sponges (the bright orange/red stuff):

Family Sabellidae (Feather duster worm). Marine worms are fantastic creatures, but narrowing it down even to the genus can be tricky.  The body of the worm is in the cylindrical tube that ends in sand grains.  The feathery orange tentacles bring food into the worm’s mouth.  The pink is a bit of anemone in the foreground:

Triopha catalinae (clown dorid). One of the most spectacular nudibranchs in California:

Triopha maculata (spotted dorid):

Halosydna johnsoni (maybe….) (scale worm):

Granulina margaritula (pear marginella).  This tiny snail (about the size of a sesame seed) brings its flamboyant mantle (the beautiful speckly brown stuff around the edge) up over its shell:

Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone).  This type of anemone has very variable coloring- the next picture is the same species:

Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone) #2:

Aeolidia loui (warty shag-rug nudibranch).  A good argument for using scientific rather than common names; this nudibranch is quite lovely:

Camera info: Olympus TG-7, mostly in microscope mode, with pictures being taken from above the water.

After a tiring spring that followed the publication of the book, I’ve taken a little break. But starting tomorrow, I’ll be posting on the blog again, focusing again on the important differences between the conventional notion of “particle” and the concept of “wavicle”. I prefer the latter to the former when referring to electrons, quarks and other elementary objects.

Today, though, some book-related news.

First, a book review of sorts — or at least, a brief but strong informal endorsement — appeared in the New York Times, courtesy of the linguist, author and columnist John McWhorter. Since McWhorter is not a scientist himself, I’m especially delighted that he liked the book and found it largely comprehensible! The review was in a paragraph-long addendum to a longer column about language; here’s an excerpt:

I have come across another book that teaches us new ways of looking at things. It taught me that matter consists of the accumulation not of bits of stuff but of standing vibrations. . .  Matt Strassler’s marvelous new “Waves in an Impossible Sea.” . . . makes it possible to understand such things without expertise in physics or math.

Another positive review recently appeared in Nautilus magazine, written by Ash Jogalekar, a scientist himself — but a chemist rather than a physicist. The full review is available here.

Lastly, the audiobook is in preparation, though I still don’t know the time frame yet.

Anytime astronomers talk of mapping the Milky Way I am always reminded how tricky the study of the Universe can be. After all, we live inside the Milky Way and working out what it looks like or mapping it from the inside is not the easiest of missions. It’s one thing to map the visible matter but mapping the dark matter is even harder. Challenges aside, a team of astronomers think they have managed to map the dark matter halo surrounding our Galaxy using Cepheid Variable stars and data from Gaia. 

If we study the nearby universe, we find that almost one-third of all disk galaxies seem to have a warp shape to their disk. Instead of resembling a perfect disk, they somewhat resemble a potato chip or crisp depending on your geographical location. Not surprisingly it is known as a disk warp and even our own Galaxy has one too. Galaxies rotate just like a spinning top and the galactic disk experiences precession or a wobble due to the torque forces from the surrounding dark matter halo. Measuring this has been a challenge for many years.

Credit and Copyright: Stefan Payne-Wardenaar; Magellanic Clouds: Robert Gendler/ESO

Dark matter is a mysterious and invisible type of matter that is thought to make up about 27% of the universe’s mass-energy content. Unlike ordinary matter, dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it detectable only through its gravitational effects. Its presence is inferred from the rotation speeds of galaxies, gravitational lensing, and the cosmic microwave background. Despite lots of research, the exact nature of dark matter is still unknown, and it is one of the most significant unsolved problems in physics and cosmology. It is thought that this invisible matter surrounds most galaxies. 

The international scientific journal Nature Astronomy recently published the paper “A slightly oblate dark matter halo revealed by a retrograde precessing Galactic disk warp.” This research, jointly led by the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, introduced an innovative “motion picture” method to measure the precession rate of the Milky Way’s disk warp. 

On either side of the white line in the picture are two models of how dark matter is distributed in a galaxy similar to the Milky Way. At left, non-interacting cold dark matter creates satellite galaxies. At right, dark matter interacting with other particles makes the number of observed satellite galaxies smaller. Credit: Durham University

Central to the study was a type of star known as a cepheid variable. They are a type of pulsating star whose brightness varies in a regular cycle due to periodic expansions and contractions in their outer layers. They are useful because their pulsation period is directly related to their actual or intrinsic brightness so can be used for measuring distances in space. By comparing the apparent brightness of a Cepheid with its known luminosity, we can determine its distance from Earth. 

The team were able to analyse a sample of 2,600 Cepheid variable stars of different ages to observe the precession direction and rate of the Milky Way’s warp. These measurements showed that the current dark matter halo of the Milky Way is slightly oblate – like a sphere that has been squashed at the poles and is rotating backward at 0.12 degrees every million years!

Source : “Motion Picture” Method Reveals the Shape of the Milky Way’s Dark Matter Halo

The post Mapping the Milky Way’s Dark Matter Halo appeared first on Universe Today.

If either of the two presumptive nominees for the major political parties in the US are elected in November they will be the oldest person ever to be inaugerated as president. What implications does this have? As a neurologist who sees patients every workday of various ages, evaluates them, and explicitly investigates the effects of aging on their function, I have some thoughts.

The first thing to realize is that aging affects different people differently. Especially once people get north of 40 you start to see significant and growing divergence in how well people age, in terms of their health and various aspects of functioning. I have seen many patients in their 90s who are completely sharp and fully functional or have just specific issues to deal with, but are overall healthy. I have also seen patients in their 50s who are wrecked and suffering from various aspects of declining health.

This divergence is partly due to the luck of genetics, and partly due to lifestyle. Some people have a chronic illness that dramatically affects their aging. Others may have suffered an injury with long term effects that get more challenging with age. While others have engaged in one or more poor lifestyle choices and have paid a heavy toll. Chronic alcohol use disorder, for example, can be devastating, adding years or decades to one’s apparent age. Smoking also takes its toll.

For these reasons, what we can say about a person based upon just a number is actually quite limited. We can make statistical comments, but that’s all. Even there, we can only describe what is typical, but there are exceptions. There are, for example, so-called “super agers” who do not develop the typical brain changes that most people do with age.

What is average and typical is that as people age they tend to slow down, cognitively and physically. Colloquially the cognitive effects of aging are often referred to as
“senior moments”. What are they, exactly? As we age it is typical for memory access to become more slow. It takes longer to think of a word or a name. However, in healthy aging people will still get there eventually, it just takes longer. On the plus side, as we age we tend to get more thoughtful and complex in our deliberations, so there is actually a trade-off. I heard one researcher describe this as – we develop increasingly more complex algorithms of thought. These take more time, but produce more nuanced and sophisticated outcomes.  We also tend to become more emotionally regulated, less anxious, and have greater life satisfaction.

Also, quite clearly, even the best super-agers, become less resilient.  This is happening on every level, from a cellular level to tissue, organs, and the entire organism. We are less able to deal with stress, and bounce back more slowly. We “pay the price” much more heavily, for a lost night of sleep, any bit of excess, strenuous activity, or even minor ailments like a cold.  We have less biological reserve and our repair mechanisms operate more slowly. This is why one of the most common reasons for ER visits among older women is a urinary tract infection (UTI). When younger a UTI presents likely as some burning urination. When older it can present as delirium. Any physician can also tell you that you have to be more gentle with medications as people get older. They feel the side effects much more extremely.

There is also the frequent challenge of distinguishing healthy aging from pathology. This is an extremely common presentation, for both physical and cognitive complaints. This can be an athlete in their 50s who are losing some ground on performance, or now get significant muscle cramping or some other symptom with extreme activity. It can also be someone in their 60s or 70s who have the typical list of cognitive complaints and are worried it is the beginning of something. That’s my job – to figure out if the presentation is just healthy aging, a functional problem (like getting poor sleep, a medication side effect, or perhaps the effects of anxiety or depression), or if it is symptoms of brain disease. It’s usually not difficult to determine, as by the time someone is sitting in front of me, if they do have organic brain disease, it is detectable.

But still, there are lots of very early or subtle cases, and in any case the patient’s symptoms and concerns have to be addressed. So we typically do a standard workup, especially looking for things that can be treated (like low B12 levels). We then treat whatever we find, go over lifestyle advice, and in some cases treat symptomatically. For those who have signs of organic disease, they go down a different clinical pathway depending on the diagnosis.

How do we apply all of this to the two main presidential candidates? That’s tricky, and it is not my intention to do that here. I will refrain from making armchair diagnoses based upon publicly available video (and so should you). I will say that both candidates have displayed reasons for concern, at least enough to warrant a professional evaluation. That is what I would recommend, and would love to see – a transparent independent full medical, neurological, and cognitive assessment of both (or all) candidates.

I would argue that the American public deserves this information, for all candidates (otherwise it is arguably discriminating based on age).  But I also acknowledge that, especially if not done properly, this can be highly problematic. The results can easily be “weaponized” and taken out of context. There is also a tendency for people to overly rely on numbers, and we wouldn’t want the presidential race to devolve into an IQ pissing contest. A narrative summary by a panel of acknowledged independent experts who were given access to an agreed- upon minimum assessment plus whatever they thought was necessary, and let the chips fall where they may. I doubt this will happen, unless voters insist upon this and get it passed into law. Similarly, I would like to see regulations forcing candidates to fully disclose their financial information.

In any case, this can be a healthy conversation for our society to have in general. We have an aging population. We are dealing with issues of aging in many contexts. It is possible for people to remain functional and productive into extreme old age. We also need to be thoughtful in how we deal with those who are perhaps no longer able to function well enough – when do we take the car keys away? It’s always a difficult conversation. None of us likes to confront the realities of aging. But we have to.

The post Some Thoughts on Aging first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Tests on lab-grown “mini-brains” show a one-off gene therapy treatment can prevent the formation of the tau tangles associated with several neurodegenerative conditions

I must confess, I think asteroids and I think of movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon! Scientists think that an asteroid like the ones that appeared in the Hollywood blockbusters struck Mexico 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. It now seems they may not have been the only ones that were wiped from our planet. Ammonites are marine mollusks that flourished for 350 million years but they were wiped out too. Some research suggests they were struggling in North America but thriving in other parts of the world. 

Ammonites lived during the Mesozoic era and are related to modern day squids and octopuses. They had coiled spiral shells that were divided into chambers which were used to regulate buoyancy and their movement through the sea. Their fossil remains have been found across the planet on beaches up and down coast lines. The shells somewhat resemble the Fibonacci sequence (where consecutive numbers are added to produce the next; 0 and 1 becomes 1, then 2, 3, 5, 8 and so on) and it is this in part that has fascinated palaeontologists about the creature. 

Along with the dinosaurs, the ammonites were wiped from Earth 66 million years ago when a massive asteroid struck the Earth near what we now call the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico creating the stunning feature; the Chicxulub crater. It’s not just the dinosaurs and ammonites that are thought to have been taken to extinction but a total of 75% of all species are thought to have vanished from Earth in the cataclysmic event. It is thought the asteroid that struck Earth was 10 kilometres in diameter and released energy equivalent to billions of atomic bombs. 

Chicxulub crater in Mexico. Credit: Wikipedia/NASA

Palaeontologists have argued that the ammonites were already declining and that their extinction was unavoidable around the end of the Cretaceous period but new research published in Nature Communications shows that they may not have been so close to extinction after all. The paper by lead author Dr Joseph Flannery-Sutherland and team from Bristol University reveal that the evolution of the ammonites ahead of the asteroid impact was really quite complex. 

Using fossils alone to unravel the way a species like ammonites changed over time is difficult. According to Dr Flannery-Sutherland ‘The fossil record tells us some of the story, but it is often an unreliable narrator. Patterns of diversity can just reflect patterns of sampling, essentially where and when we have found new fossil species, rather than actual biological history.’ He goes on to explain that by analysing just the late cretaceous ammonite fossil record as though it was the full story is why the wrong conclusion has previously been drawn. It is more complex. 

The team created a new database of all fossils collected to date, using museum collections, university samples and any specimens available rather than just rely on previously published papers. This helped the team to build a more complete picture from source data. 

The database allowed the team to understand how ammonite extinction rates and speciation rates (how quickly a species gives rise to new species) varied across the world. If extinction was underway during the late cretaceous period then extinction rates would be greater than their speciation rates everywhere. Instead, across a wide range of geographies, the extinction and speciation rates varied considerably. Possible causes for the variation may have been merely environmental factors like ocean temperatures and sea level to predators and competition among ammonites themselves.

Source : Ammonites’ fate sealed by meteor strike that wiped out dinosaurs

The post Ammonites Were Doing Fine Until the Asteroid Hit appeared first on Universe Today.

Moving large amounts of regolith is a requirement for any long-term mission to the Moon or Mars. But so far, humanity has only sent systems capable of moving small amounts of soil at a time – primarily for sample collection. Sending a large, dedicated excavator to perform such work might be cost-prohibitive due to its weight, so why not send a bulldozer attachment to a mobility unit already planned for use on the surface? That was the thought process of an interdisciplinary team of engineers from NASA and the Colorado School of Mines. They came up with the Lunar Attachment Node for Construction and Excavation – or LANCE.

LANCE is an attachment to NASA’s Chariot rover prototype, which was originally designed to be the primary mobility system for astronauts returning to the Moon. However, it was designed in 2007, when the original NASA Lunar Architecture plan was to establish a permanent lunar base in 2019. 

That still has yet to happen, and the Chariot system has recently been replaced by two separate rovers for use in the Artemis missions – one pressurized for longer exploratory trips and one unpressurized for short jaunts around the Artemis base site. However, the concept of LANCE should be adaptable to whatever method NASA finally uses to transport humans on the lunar surface. 

Fraser discusses the architecture plans for Artemis.

While LANCE looks like a simple bulldozer blade, its design is made specifically for use on the lunar surface. Its frame is aluminum rather than steel, a nod to the weight restrictions on space missions. Its curved front end, called a moldboard in excavation terms, is made of a combination of carbon fiber composites and epoxy, which were even more rarely used back in 2009 when the system was initially proposed.

Engineers even produced a prototype after extensive Finite Element Analysis modeling of the expected forces on the blade during several types of actions, such as building roads, landing pads, and berms that could block debris scatter from affecting surrounding equipment during rocket landings and ascents. The prototype was tested at a natural test site in Moses Lake, Washington.

Moses Lake proved an ideal training ground for lunar excavation equipment because of a highly cohesive silt deposited by the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980. The silt proved similar to lunar regolith, but without the requirement to move thousands of tons of simulated regolith to a NASA lab somewhere. So, NASA has been using the site as a test bed for large-scale lunar excavations for years.

Fraser shows plans for the landing and ascent vehicles on the lunar surface.

LANCE performed admirably well during its test phase. It leveled a 25m x 25m area, then moved on to some berm construction. As part of the testing, it quickly became apparent that operator efficiency made a massive difference in how quickly these operations were performed, so whoever ends up using the implement on the lunar surface would benefit from sufficient training beforehand.

But if it ever does end up operational on the Lunar surface, LANCE will have to contend with a very different environment than it did at Moses Lake. Lunar regolith is much more electrostatically charged than volcanic silt, and the lower gravity could make the forces of moving it much more difficult, despite the best modeling efforts of LANCE’s design team. 

It is unclear if LANCE will indeed be part of the Artemis missions, though large-scale excavation equipment will be needed as part of the mission architecture. What will remain to be seen is whether LANCE’s development and testing show that it should be possible to utilize a lightweight, flexible attachment to a rover to help build the infrastructure necessary to support a long-term base on the lunar surface.

Learn More:
Mueller et al. – Lightweight bulldozer attachment for construction and excavation on the lunar surface
UT – NASA Wants to Build Landing Pads on the Moon
UT – What’s the Best Way to Build Landing Pads on the Moon?
UT – Want to Build Structures on the Moon? Just Blast the Regolith With Microwaves

Lead Image:
Chariot rover with LANCE attachment undergoing testing at the Moses Lake test site.
Credit – Mueller et al.

The post A Handy Attachment Could Make Lunar Construction a Breeze appeared first on Universe Today.

Europe is set to regain its capacity to launch satellites into space when the Ariane 6 rocket finally flies after years of delays

Cars carrying sensors and scanners have been touring UK cities collecting data to help property owners plan carbon-cutting retrofit projects

Access Consciousness claims to show how to improve your mental and physical health by touching 32 Access Bars on your scalp. It's basically phrenology reborn and fused with "energy medicine."

The post Access Consciousness: Phrenology fused with energy medicine first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

I guess I have to give the usual disclaimers here: yes, John Sailer is a conservative, and yes, it’s an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, whose op-eds are reliably on the Right. But of course where else will you learn things that the MSM won’t tell you? In this case, we learn that the National Institutes of Health, the largest government dispenser of research funds in America, is apparently funding hiring initiatives involving racial preferences. But how can they do that given that such hiring is illegal under Title VII? (And accepting students on the basis of race was recently deep-sixed by the Supreme Court.)

The way around this, according to Sailer’s article, is simply to fund “cluster hires,” which gives an institution a pot of money to hire several faculty at once, in hopes that doing so will bring in underrepresented minorities. Well, that’s fine (it casts a wider net), so long as people aren’t hired on the basis of their ethnicity itself.  But in the case of the National Institutes of Health, cluster-hire funding also requires that candidates proffer diversity statements, which of course allow universities to pick and choose using race, which is easily determined from diversity statements. (The University of Chicago prohibits this explicitly based on the Shils Report: our hires and promotions are to be based solely on research, teaching, contribution to the intellectual community, and university or department service).

Further, beyond the NIH’s end-run around race-based hiring, universities are making their own goals much more explicit, as Sailer found out by using the Freedom of Information Act to see what universities are doing vis-à-vis hiring.

If Sailer is wrong in his quotes and claims, he could be sued, and because he bases them on public records, I seriously doubt that his article is misguided.

Click the headline to read, or find the WSJ piece archived here. 

Here are some excerpts, showing how universities manage to hire based on ethnicity. One of them, to my horror, was Vanderbilt, which, headed by Chicago’s former Provost, has been a model of rationality, honesty, free speech, and adherence to academic and legal standards.

Sailer:

 . . . . there is evidence that many universities have engaged in outright racial preferences under the aegis of DEI. Hundreds of documents that I acquired through public-records requests provide a rare paper trail of universities closely scrutinizing the race of faculty job applicants. The practice not only appears widespread; it is encouraged and funded by the federal government.

At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”

Both initiatives are supported by the National Institutes of Health through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First. The program gives grants for DEI-focused “cluster hiring” at universities and medical schools, promising eventually to spend about a quarter-billion dollars.

A key requirement is that recipient institutions heavily value diversity statements while selecting faculty. The creators of the program reasoned that by heavily weighing commitment to DEI, they could prompt schools to hire more minorities but without direct racial preferences. That’s the rationale behind DEI-focused “cluster hiring,” an increasingly common practice in academia. The documents—which include emails, grant proposals, progress reports and hiring records—suggest that many NIH First grant recipients restrict hiring on the basis of race or “underrepresented” status, violating NIH’s stated policies and possibly civil-rights law.

In grant proposals, several recipients openly state their intention to restrict whom they hire by demographic category. Vanderbilt’s NIH First grant proposal states that it will “focus on the cluster hiring of faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, specifically Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander scientists.” The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas jointly proposed hiring 10 scholars “from underrepresented groups,” noting that the NIH First program specifically identifies racial minorities and women as underrepresented.

But if you can’t use race as a criterion for hiring, why are DEI statements required? This still confuses me, for it’s not even a moderately disguised way to engage in the practice. If you go to the NIH First Awards page, you see a list of seven schools given FIRST awards for cluster hiring, and then this statement:

These awardee institutions will build self-reinforcing communities of scientists, through recruitment of cohorts of early-career faculty who are competitive for assistant professor positions and have a demonstrated commitment to inclusive excellence. The institutions are also building efforts to positively impact faculty development, retention, progression, and eventual promotion, as well as develop inclusive environments that are sustainable. Overall, the FIRST cohort awardees, together with the CEC  will work to determine if a systematic approach that integrates multiple evidence-based strategies including the hiring of faculty cohorts with demonstrated commitments to inclusion and diversity will accelerate inclusive excellence, as measured by clearly defined metrics of institutional culture change, diversity, and inclusion.

Unless you fell off the turnip truck, you’ll know that “inclusive” and “diversity” are simply code words for “racial diversity.”  But the code isn’t hard to break. This means that the government is, without explicitly admitting it, in the business of producing equity, which of course is against government regulations. In fact, the NIH affirms this ban (bolding is mine):

At its inception, NIH First was widely understood not to involve racial preferences. In 2020, shortly after the program was announced, Science magazine published an explanation: “Not all of the 120 new hires would need to belong to groups now underrepresented in academic medicine, which include women, black people, Hispanics, Native Americans, and those with disabilities, says Hannah Valantine, NIH’s chief diversity officer. In fact, she told the Council of Councils at its 24 January meeting, any such restriction would be illegal and also run counter to the program’s goal of attracting world-class talent.”

ILLEGAL is the relevant word here. Sailer goes on (again, bolding is mine):

Yet multiple programs have stated their intention to limit hires to those with “underrepresented” status. One job advertisement, for a First role at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, notes: “Successful candidates will be early stage investigators who are Black, Latinx, or from a disadvantaged background (as defined by NIH).”

And some universities make explicit the fact that they’re hiring based on race. Drexel, one of the seven schools that got a FIRST Award, makes it mandatory to be an underrespresented minority to be hired:

Some grantees even admit such preferences in documents sent to and reviewed by the NIH. A joint proposal from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the university’s Baltimore County campus states that all scientists hired through the program will meet the NIH’s definition of “underrepresented populations in science.” Drexel University’s program, which focuses on nursing and public health, provides its evaluation rubric in a progress report. Among its four criteria: “Candidate is a member of a group that is underrepresented in health research.”

This raises questions about compliance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination in employment. The First program’s website highlights regulations requiring that federal agencies ensure grant recipients comply with nondiscrimination law. The most basic implication is that universities can’t refuse to hire someone, or prefer one candidate over another, because of race or sex. But emails show that this has been happening.

This also occurs at the University of New Mexico (UNM), which appears to have been slapped on the tuches. Bolding is mine:

At the University of New Mexico, the First leadership team heavily scrutinized the race and sex of applicants. “Just to be sure: what was the ethnicity of Speech and Hearing’s first-choice candidate?” a UNM team member asked in an email.

“She identified as URM in her application, right? I am confused, maybe I am misremembering,” a team member wrote of a different candidate. Another responded, “It looks like she said she was a ‘native New Mexican.’ We checked, and she said she’s white.”

. . . UNM appears to have violated NIH First policy, which states that programs “may not discriminate against any group in the hiring process.” The UNM spokeswoman said in a statement that “the email correspondence among members of the UNM FIRST Leadership Team do [sic] not represent the University of New Mexico’s values nor does it comport with the expectations we have of our faculty” and that “as a result of this unfortunate circumstance,” the university is instituting a required “faculty search training/workshop for all . . . faculty search committee members.”

Hiring of underrepresented minorities is, of course, a form of discrimination—against people considered “white” or “white adjacent” (e.g., Asians).

And this goes on even for non-NIH-funded hires. One place is, as I said, Vanderbilt University, run by our former Provost, Daniel Diermeier. Does he know about this?

At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”

For sure!

I’m pretty sure that Vanderbilt does know about this, because they refused to comment when asked. They do have a FIRST grant proposal in for a cluster hire, and it’s explicitly aimed at hiring those of “minoritized” groups, not including, of course, Asians or Jews (bolding is mine):

In grant proposals, several recipients openly state their intention to restrict whom they hire by demographic category. Vanderbilt’s NIH First grant proposal states that it will “focus on the cluster hiring of faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, specifically Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander scientists.”

. . . Taken as a whole, these documents shed new light on the practice of cluster hiring. They explain why some in academia seem to treat the practice as a form of legal racial quotas. In addition to the responses already noted, representatives of the University of Maryland, UT Dallas and UT Southwestern said that their institutions comply with civil-rights laws and don’t discriminate on the basis of race. Drexel, Northwestern, Mount Sinai and Vanderbilt didn’t reply to inquiries.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m in favor of increasing all kinds of diversity—socioeconomic, ethnic, and viewpoint diversity. The more varied people you have, assuming that they meet quality standards, the more chance you can get an oddball idea that will move science forward. But in science, and particularly in the NIH—whose money goes entirely for health-related research—an increase in diversity is important only insofar as it is associated with an increase in the quality of research produced. You can get both only by widening the net, trying to attract more applicants. And in the end you must, according to law, hire people irregardless of their race, and, as the Shils Report specifies for Chicago, using only criteria associated with merit.

 

A giant salamander—and by “giant” I mean about 2.5-4 meters long—equipped with teeth and wicked fangs was found in Namibia, dated at about 270 million years ago, and just reported in Nature.  Its significance is that it is early, but is considered a “stem” tetrapod, meaning that it has some of the characteristics of modern amphibians, which are tetrapods (four-legged animals that could move around on land).  The authors, according to this CBS News story, suremise that it “was considerably longer than a person, and it probably hung out near the bottom of swamps and lakes”.  It was also an apex predator, meaning that it ate other animals, but there was nothing around that could eat it.

Its was found in an area that, 270 million years ago, was at high latitude, ergo cold and partly glaciated. This beast is the first suggestion that there was a tetrapod fauna in cold-ish climates at that time.

Click below to see the article, or download the pdf here:

The researchers recovered a skull that was about 60 cm (2 feet long), as well as the front part of the postcranial skeleton. The authors don’t give a size estimate, but with a two-foot head it was probably large, and could have been 12 feet long: the longest salamander known yet. (The largest living salamander, the Japanese giant salamander (Andrias japonicus), can attain a length of about 5 feet.  This puppy could have been twice as long.

Two skull fragments were known of this animal before, but it hadn’t been named and there were no remains of the skeleton. The authors named this one Gaiasia jennyae, after the Gai-As formation in which it was found, and also after Jenny Clack (1947-2020), who studied early tetrapods. (This, of course, will anger the pecksniffs who think that animals shouldn’t be named after people, but they can jump in the lake.) It is the only species in the genus Gaiasia.

The sample in the field (from the Supplementary information):

(From paper): B. Reassembling the ex situ type specimen of Gaiasia jennyae (F 1528)– a dorsal up skull with lower jaw and most of the articulated axial skeleton. C. In situ dorsal-up Gaiasia jennyae skull (F 1522) at locality shown in A. panorama. D. Type specimen of Gaiasia jennyae (F 1528) shown in B. after preparation. Note the differential compression of the skull roof. There is no evidence of pre-burial breakage or subaerial weathering. Scale bar =10cm.

Here’s the skull in dorsal (a,b) and ventral (c,d) views, and reconstructions.

From the paper: a,b, Skull in dorsal view. a, Photograph. b, Interpretative drawing. c,d, Skull in ventral view. c, Photograph. d, Interpretative drawing. e, Reconstruction of the articulated specimen in lateral view showing preserved elements of the skeleton. adsym, adsymphysial bone; an, angular; anf, angular fenestra; c1, anterior coronoid; c2, middle coronoid; caf, carotid artery foramen; chf, chordatympanic foramen; d, dentary; ept, ectopterygoid; exo, exoccipital; f, frontal; it, intertemporal; j, jugal; l, lacrimal; mx, maxilla; n, nasal; p, parietal; par, prearticular; pfr, prefrontal; pl, palatine; po, postorbital; pof, postfrontal; pp, postparietal; pospl, postsplenial; psph, parasphenoid; pt, pterygoid; qj, quadratojugal; sa, surangular; spl, splenial; sq, squamosal; st, supratemporal; t, tabular; v, vomer. Scale bars, 50 mm (a,c).

And a reconstruction of the skull and postcranial skeleton they found. Because we don’t have the posterior skeleton, length estimates are guesses.

Here are photos and a reconstruction of the lower jaw. The white circles show the fangs, which are indicated in the upper drawing. There were three on each side, and interlocking fangs on the top mandible as well. It ate by both suction and biting:

(From the paper): e, f. Photographs of the right hemimandible. e, Ventral view of the posterior half. f, Dorsal view of the symphyseal area. adsym, adsymphysial plate; an, angular; anf, angular fenestra; c1, anterior coronoid; c2, middle coronoid; chf, chordatympanic foramen; d, dentary; par, prearticular; pospl, postsplenial; sa, surangular; spl, splenial. Dotted white circles show the position of the symphysial fangs. Scale bar, 50 mm.

. . . and a reconstruction of the front of the animal from the paper. Remember, that fearsome head was about two feet long!

Now this is unlikely to be any kind of ancestor of reptiles, but it’s likely that this is one of several species occurring when tetrapods had already evolved from fish and one of its relatives probably gave rise to modern amphibians, while another gave rise to all modern reptiles (and after followed the evolution of birds and mammals). Its importance is not only the “gee whiz” factor, but also the indication that there was a thriving ecosystem at high latitudes about 270 myr ago. After all, this is an apex predator, and it had to eat something aquatic (fish or, perhaps, other early amphibians).  So if these creatures existed, there must also have been many other animals living at high latitudes at that time.

Today is Sunday, and so we get a batch of bird photos from John Avise.  John’s comments and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Falkland Island Birds 

On my vacation voyage to Antarctica aboard a Quark ship in 2018, our first stop was in the Falkland Islands, before heading on to South Georgia Island and then the Antarctic Peninsula proper.  This week’s post shows several of the birds that I photographed in the Falkland Islands.  In retrospect, it turns out that this first stop on our journey was one of the great highlights of that entire voyage.

Cobb’s Wren (Troglodytes cobbi); endemic to the Falklands:

(I sent this photo to Matthew Cobb, who replied, “My wren, which is mine, is very thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.”)

Correndera Pipit (Anthus correndera):

Dark-faced Ground Tyrant (Muscisaxicola maclovianus):

Gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua):

Grass Wren (Cistothorus platensis):

Magellanic Oystercatcher (Haematopus leucopodus):

Magellanic Penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus):

Magellanic Snipe (Gallinago paraguaiae):

Rockhopper Penguin, Eudyptes chrysocome:

Ruddy-headed Goose (Chloephaga rubidiceps) pair:

Striated Caracara (Phalcobaenus australis):

Upland Goose (Chloephaga picta) pair; the white one is the male:

Black-browed Albatross (Diomedia melanophris):

And at my insistence, John put this one up:

Falkland flightless steamer duck (Tachyeres brachypterus):

It looks like a distant ring with three sparkly jewels, but the Webb telescope’s (JWST) most recent image is really the view of a distant quasar lensed by a nearby elliptical galaxy. The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) looked at the faint apparition during a study of dark matter and its distribution in the Universe.

We get to see this ghostly vision thanks to the gravitational lensing of the quasar. Such lensing creates one of the great natural telescopes in nature. It uses the gravitational effect of matter to warp space. All matter does this, but bigger conglomerations of it do it more. So, for example, a galaxy cluster and its aggregate stars, planets, gas clouds, black holes—and dark matter—warps space quite a bit. So does an individual galaxy.

When that happens, the path of light from more distant objects around (or through) the lens also gets warped. The lens magnifies the view of those distant objects between us and the lensing mass. So, thanks to gravitational lensing, astronomers often get intriguing views of objects otherwise too dim or far away for detailed study.

A Lensed View of a Distant Quasar

The distant quasar RX J1131-1231 that JWST imaged for this view lies about six billion light-years away from Earth. Astronomers know there’s a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s heart. It emits high-energy X-rays, which Chandra X-ray Observatory and the XMM-Newton orbiting telescope detected. Hubble Space Telescope has also viewed this eerie-looking object.

This image shows the quasar RX J1131-1231 imaged by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. JWST’s image is in the infrared. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Michigan/R.C.Reis et al; Optical: NASA/STScI

Those X-rays tell astronomers that something very energetic is happening in the galaxy—that’s why it’s also often called a quasar. The X-ray emissions get produced by a superheated accretion disk and eventually bounce off the inner edge of the disk. Astronomers can take a spectrum of that reflected X-ray emission—but they have to account for the fact that it’s affected by the strong gravitational pull of the black hole. The larger the change in the spectrum, the closer the disk’s inner edge lies to the black hole. In this case, the emissions come from a region that lies only three times the event horizon’s radius. That suggests the black hole is spinning very, very fast—at half the speed of light.

JWST’s mid-infrared observation of the lensed quasar allows astronomers to probe the region around the its heart. They should be able to tease out details of matter distribution in the region, which should help them understand the distribution of dark matter there.

Mapping the Black Hole’s History

The central supermassive black hole at the heart of quasar RX J1131-1231 has its own tale to tell. Those X-ray emissions from its accretion disk provide clues to how fast that black hole grew over time and how it formed. There are a couple of main theories about the growth of black holes. We know that stellar-mass ones come from the deaths of supermassive stars. They explode as supernovae. What’s left collapses and that creates the black hole.

However, the supermassive ones at the hearts of galaxies probably form in one of two ways. They could come from the accumulation of material over a long time during collisions and mergers between galaxies. If that happens, a growing black hole gathers material in a stable disk. If it has a steady diet of new material from the disk, that should lead to a rapidly spinning black hole. On the other hand, if the black hole grows due to many small accretion episodes, its diet would come from random directions and its spin rate would be slower.

So, what’s the story of the bright, supermassive monster at the heart of RX J1131-1231? All the observations to date show a rapidly spinning black hole. That means it likely grew via mergers and collisions. Further observations of its high-energy activity should help astronomers as they probe deeper into the Universe and see objects at earlier and earlier epochs of cosmic time. JWST’s contribution helps them use gravitational lenses to spot these things. At the same time, they get to map the distribution of dark matter that helps the Universe create those natural magnifying glasses.

For More Information

Webb Admires Bejeweled Ring
Distant Quasar RX J1131
RX J1131-1231: Chandra & XMM-Newton Provide Direct Measurement of Distant Black Hole Spin

The post Webb Looks at One of the Best Gravitationally Lensed Quasars Ever Discovered appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA has big plans for the Moon. Through the Artemis Program, NASA plans to create a program of “sustained exploration and lunar development.” This will include the creation of the Lunar Gateway, an orbital habitat that will facilitate missions to and from the surface, and the Artemis Base Camp that will allow for extended stays. Through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, NASA has contracted with commercial partners like SpaceX and Blue Origin to deliver scientific experiments and crew to the lunar surface.

However, these efforts are expected to culminate in the creation of a permanent outpost and human presence on the Moon. This will require far more in the way of crew and payload services to ensure crews can be sustained in the long run. In a recent white paper, “Lunar Surface Cargo,” NASA researchers identified a significant gap between current cargo delivery capabilities and future demand. The paper indicates that this growing cargo demand can only be met by creating a “mixed cargo lander fleet.”

Key Findings

As the authors indicate in the paper, NASA’s Moon to Mars Architecture Definition Document (ADD) (Revision A) cites the need for a wide variety of landing systems. In section 3 (subsection 1.4.8.4), the ADD addresses the CLPS program and the need for cargo landers as part of the larger subject of transportation systems:

“Lunar surface exploration will require the delivery of assets, equipment, and supplies to the lunar surface. While some supplies and equipment may be delivered with crew on HLS, cargo landers provide additional flexibility and capability for robust exploration. In the HLR segment of the exploration campaign, additional cargo delivery can be provided through NASA’s CLPS Provider Landers.”

To date, NASA has selected fourteen companies to deliver payloads during the Human Lunar Return (HLR) exploration segment. This includes SpaceX, Blue Origin, Ceres Robotics, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, selected in November 2019 to deliver crew and cargo. It also the nine additional companies that were contracted to deliver science experiments in 2018 and 2022, such as Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Lockheed Martin Space, Moon Express, and Astrobotic – the first commercial vendor to launch a mission to the Moon (Peregrine-1), which unfortunately did not land on the lunar surface.

However, as the Artemis Program transitions from the HLR to other segments, the need for cargo deliveries will expand dramatically. As stated in the ADD, this will include the Foundational Exploration (FE) segment, which will coincide with Artemis IV and Artemis V (currently planned for 2026 and 2028, respectively) and will consist of NASA expanding its “lunar capabilities, systems, and operations supporting complex orbital and surface missions.” After Artemis VI takes place in 2031, NASA anticipates sending a crewed mission a year to the Moon.

Artist’s concept of the Blue Moon lander. Credit: Blue Origin

At this point, the Sustained Lunar Evolution (SLE) segment will begin, consisting of “enabling capabilities, systems, and operations to support regional and global utilization (science, etc.), economic opportunity, and a steady cadence of human presence on and around the Moon.”

Growing Demand

To assess the growing need for lunar landers and transportation systems, NASA analyzed a representative sample of planned cargo for the Artemis Program and potential needs. Once again, these needs are broken down by segment, with each sample item represented by a potential mass range (see table below). They also include one-time payloads for habitation, mobility systems, power and communications, freezers, various science and technology payloads, and recurring logistics delivery missions that will include food, water, air, spare parts, and other necessities.

The authors note that the initial crewed missions using the Starship HLS (Artemis III and IV) will be short-duration, so the landers will be able to carry the necessary supplies. However, future missions will need additional surface elements to accommodate longer-duration missions, the range of exploration, and the size of the crew. For instance, as the Human Landing Return segment transitions to Foundational Exploration, the planned and potential payloads in the sample reflect these growing needs.

Examples include the delivery of the Lunar Mobility Vehicle (LMV), Vertical Solar Array Technologies, a mobile Lunar Surface Relay, an IP Mobility System, the Endurance Rover, a Sample Return Freezer, and a Fission Surface Power (FSP) reactor (an expansion of NASA’s Kilopower project). These payloads will allow for extravehicular activities (EVAs), the provision of power and communications for a future habitat, and the ability to conduct sample return missions from the South Pole-Aitken Basin.

Planned and potential cargo to the lunar surface. Credit: NASA

Beyond this, NASA anticipates the delivery of the elements that make up the Artemis Base Camp. This includes a Pressurized Rover – aka. the Habitable Mobility Platform (HMP) – and the Initial Surface Habitation – the Lunar Foundation Surface Habitat (LFSH) – which will culminate in the creation of regular Surface Habitats. They also consider the logistical needs for crews of two operating with the HMP and crews of four operating within the LFSH. During the Sustained Lunar Evolution segment, there are the deliveries associated with creating an ISRU Pilot Plant and the ongoing logistical needs.

In sum, NASA predicts that future demands for cargo will range from 2,500 to 10,000 kg (~5,510 to 22,045 lbs) a year for annual recurring logistics. They also predict that occasional large cargo deliveries (rovers or habitation modules) of up to 15,000 kg (33,070 lbs) could occur during the Foundational Exploration campaign segment. The “Lunar Mobility Drivers and Needs” white paper, part of the 2024 Moon to Mars Architecture series, provides a detailed breakdown of the logistical requirements.

Capabilities

Regarding the current payload capabilities, the authors acknowledge NASA’s cooperation with private industry and international partners. This includes the CLPS, HLS, and the Human-class Delivery Landers (HDL) programs responsible for developing crew and cargo landers. Meanwhile, international partners like the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are collaborating on potential cargo delivery services. As they demonstrate, small payloads of 500 kg (1100 lbs) that will support logistics in the SLE segment are within the capabilities of the CLPS program.

The heavier payloads, which include the elements of the Artemis Base Camp, range from 12,000 to 15,000 kg (26,455 to 33,070 lbs), which is within the capabilities of the HDL program. This leaves a gap between the 500 kg and 12,000 kg, which accounts for the vast majority of necessary payloads in the FE segment. These payloads are foundational to NASA’s long-term plans for a program of “sustained lunar exploration and development.” As a result, demand for these elements and the related support services is high.

Artist’s impression of an Orion spacecraft rendezvousing with the Lunar Gateway. Credit: NASA Additional Considerations

In addition to landers providing cargo deliveries, they must provide access to diverse locations across the South Pole-Aitken Basin that satisfy mission objectives. Specific locations that are named include the Hawthorn Crater, the peak near Shackleton Crater, the rim of the Faustini Crater, the De Gerlache Crater, Malapert Mastiff, and connecting ridges covering a region measuring about 500 km2 (310 mi2). These sites are key locations for solar arrays, ice collecting, and transportation networks.

NASA also identified gaps for lunar cargo and sample return, where the capacity of existing vehicles greatly exceeds the return capability. To this end, the white paper recommends a range of cargo providers that will allow for diversity and flexibility. This approach addresses “some key lessons learned from the International Space Station, including the need for dissimilar redundancy to avoid a situation in which any system becomes a single point of failure.”

In conclusion, NASA has identified a “substantial architectural gap in lander capability” that will grow as the Foundational Exploration segment continues and gives way to the Sustained Lunar Evolution phase. But as they note, this presents major opportunities for NASA and industry partners to create a mixed cargo lander fleet that “meets cargo delivery demands, enables longer missions, sends more crew members to the surface, and empowers a larger exploration footprint.” This, they add, is essential to achieve the objectives of NASA’s Moon to Mars mission architecture.

Additional details regarding payload services and transportation are provided in another white paper, “Lunar Mobility Drivers and Needs,” released concurrently with the paper mentioned above. These and other considerations will be addressed in greater detail in the 2024 Architecture Concept Review (2024 ARC), which is due to be released later this year. This review will include white papers on NASA’s lunar surface strategy and cargo return needs.

Further Reading: NASA

The post NASA's Skyrocketing Need for Cargo Deliveries to the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

Did you spot the two fawns this morning in Charles Schwing’s photo? Here’s the reveal, with the babies circled. You can see the legs of the one on the left and the spots on the fawn to the right, but click the photo (twice if you must) to enlarge it:

Here’s the full 22-minute uncut interview of Joe Biden by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. It took place yesterday evening, and concentrated, of course, on Biden’s performance in his debate for Trump.  Please weigh in below.

My short take: Stephanopoulos asked good, hard questions—no softballs. And Biden’s unscripted performance here was better than in the debate, but I’m still worried.

When asked whether he watched the debate on tape, Biden says he couldn’t remember. He says he was ill and “just had a bad night.” He also claims that Trump’s shouting, even with his mike shut off, threw Biden off. But then remember that Biden gave a barnburner teleprompted speech the very next day, and how could that be if he was ill? As for reports that he has a “bad day” often in private life as well, he replies by touting his accomplishments in a boilerplate recitation, and denies that his efforts in the past 3.5 years has cost him anything vis-à-vis his health.

Biden claims that his doctors say he’s fine, and that “he has a full neurological test every day”, which sounds dubious. Stephanopoulos asks, however, if Biden had taken a full cognitive test. Biden evades that question, saying that he “has a full cognitive test every day,” referring to his behavior in public. But that’s not an answer, and it’s curious if he really hasn’t HAD such a test, which could put many minds at ease  Nevertheless, the President says he doesn’t want to have a full medical evaluation because “he’s already done it.”  That’s clearly not the case: he’s referring to his “normal” behavior in public. But many of his answers are basically a campaign speech: assertions that he “put NATO together,” “shut Putin down,” “checkmated China” (???), “put together a South Pacific initiative,” and so on.

Biden vehemently asserts that he will defeat Trump in November. despite the polls that show otherwise. He adds that he got this same poll-based pushback in 2020, when he won.  Ergo, he implies that the polls aren’t really a good prediction of what will happen, and it’s merely a “toss-up”. That may be the case, and no candidate ever admits that they’re really behind. He claims that a “pathological liar” like Trump simply can’t win, and that he knows of nobody “more qualified to be President and win this race than me.”

When Stephanopoulos notes that a group of Congresspeople are getting together to convince Biden to drop out of the race, Biden poo-poos that, claiming that all the people in Congress he knows have told him to stay in.  (Biden looks disturbed at this point.) He reasserts that his dropping out “is not gonna happen,” and denies that his approval rating really is 36%.

In the end, yes, I think Biden did a good job in his first term. He was good on Ukraine vs. Russia, okay on Israel, not so good on immigration, decent on most other things, but lame on gender/sex issues (Title IX).  I don’t hold him responsible for the downturn in our economy; but I think he certainly did better than Trump would have.  Trump will be mired in trials and legal issues for the next few years, and I also think he’s mentally ill. So, as a “never Trumper” liberal, I’ll vote for whatever candidates the Democrats choose. But I’m still dubious about Biden, even after watching this interview. He was simply not sharp enough, and what’s the story with his voice? I do think he has a neurological problem that might impede his effectiveness as President. He needs to take a cognitive test and make the results public.

Despite that, and despite his defensiveness and clear reluctance to even consider dropping out of the election, I guess he’ll be the Democrat whose name is by the party box.

After the end of the debate, 23 minutes in, four ABC correspondents give their take during the last 8 minutes. None of them think that Biden did a good enough job to rehabilitate his reputation, and several say that he hasn’t taken the doubt among House Democrats seriously enough. None of the four are enthusiastic.

Biden’s self-confidence may hurt not just the party, but, come November, the country.

Here are two takes (excerpted). First, from the New York Times (archived here):

Mr. Biden’s performance in the 22-minute session with George Stephanopoulos was not viewed as disastrously as his debate against Mr. Trump eight days earlier. But while his most loyal supporters presumably found enough reassurance to stick with him, those who have turned against him or were on the verge of doing so did not seem comforted, and time is running out if the party is to change nominees, as some would like.

While Mr. Biden had a ruddier color to his face this time and looked calm and composed with his hands in his lap and legs crossed, he once again sounded hoarse and at times tentative, sometimes struggling to finish a sentence. He was dismissive about concerns about his health, denied that he was more frail and ducked questions about medical tests.

He took responsibility for his debate performance repeatedly — “nobody’s fault but mine” — but then blamed it on exhaustion and sickness and Mr. Trump “shouting” and distracting him. Even so, he indicated that he did not know whether he had actually watched a recording of the debate afterward. He said that he has a cognitive test every day because he is “running the world” and that he would only step aside as a candidate “if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race.’”

Probably the one line that generated the most irritation among fellow Democrats was his response when Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Mr. Biden how he would feel in January if he loses to Mr. Trump and has to turn the White House back over to the former president. “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” Mr. Biden replied.

Multiple Democrats expressed exasperation at that afterward, declaring that the election was not about earning a participation trophy but about stopping a convicted felon who tried to overturn an election he had lost, urged “termination” of the Constitution to return himself to power and vowed to devote his next term to exacting “retribution” on his adversaries. One House Democrat, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussion, said that he hoped the Lord Almighty would be coming to talk with Mr. Biden soon.

And from this morning’s Free Press article by Eli Lake:

President Joe Biden, in his interview Friday night with ABC News, said many things. The polls had him in a dead heat with Donald Trump. Democratic Party leaders have urged him to stay in the race. America, under his leadership, has “checkmated” China.

He delivered these assessments with a gravel-voiced clarity missing from his disastrous debate performance on June 27. He was engaged and followed his train of thought to a conclusion. The problem was the substance of his answers were lacking. In fact, many of the things he said strained credulity.

Call it Biden’s alternative facts.

Let’s start with the polling. Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up” between him and Donald Trump. It’s possible Biden has indeed spoken to pollsters who tell him the presidential race, after the debate, is 50-50. But the highest quality polls after the debate show Trump in a firm lead.

The New York Times/Siena College poll, for example, has Biden down six points among likely voters. A Wall Street Journal post-debate poll found 60 percent of likely voters either strongly or somewhat disapprove of Biden’s performance as president. CNN’s latest poll among American adults has Biden at 43 percent versus Trump at 49 percent.

Former senior adviser to President Barack Obama David Axelrod posted on X a more realistic assessment of Biden’s chances in the race on Friday evening: “The president is rightfully proud of his record. But he is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his capacities moving forward and his standing in this race. Four years ago at this time, he was 10 points ahead of Trump. Today, he is six points behind.”

The other extraordinary answer Biden gave to Stephanopoulos was that Democratic Party leaders were urging him to stay in the race. In response to a question about whether he would consider abandoning his run for a second term if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged him to withdraw, Biden said, “Every one of ’em. . . they all said I should stay in the race.” He said this was also true of James Clyburn, the former House majority whip from South Carolina who saved Biden’s campaign in 2020 in his home state.

In public remarks, however, two of these Democratic leaders have signaled a very different message for Biden. This week Clyburn said he would support a “mini-primary” before the Democratic convention at the end of August if Biden stepped aside. And Pelosi this week encouraged Biden to give an interview to serious journalists to prove he is capable of running for a second term. Then she added this knife-twist in an interview with MSNBC: “I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’ ”

Scanning the liberal press, I really couldn’t find a single op-ed saying that Biden did a good job and should forget about dropping out.  Surely that tells you something about the mindset of liberals.  Joe needs to go.

From the AP News, we hear about a shrine on the Japanese island of Tashirojima, population 50 humans and 100 cats. (Click the screenshot to read). Here’s a map of its location from Wikipedia:

Click on the AP headline to read about this place:

An excerpt:

On a small island off Japan’s northeastern coast, visitors make offerings at a shrine for unlikely local guardians: cats.

The “Neko Jinja,” or Cat Shrine, mythologizes cats as guardian angels of Tashirojima, where cats outnumber humans.

Legend says the island used to be famous for sericulture and farmers would keep cats because they would chase away rats, protecting the silkworm cocoons from the rodents.

Fishermen on the island have also traditionally believed that cats bring good luck, including large hauls of fish.

Another legend says fishermen used to watch the cats’ behavior for tips on the coming weather before heading to sea.

The islanders have long coexisted with the cats. One day, however, a fisherman accidentally injured a cat while working. Feeling sorry for the injury, the islanders built the shrine for cats.

Here’s that shrine, but first a note from Wikipedia:

There is a small cat shrine, known as neko-jinja (猫神社), in the middle of the island, roughly situated between the two villages. In the past, the islanders raised silkworms for silk, and cats were kept in order to keep the mouse population down (because mice are a natural predator of silkworms). Fixed-net fishing was commonly practiced on the island after the Edo period, and fishers from other areas would come and stay on the island overnight. The cats would go to the inns where the fishers were staying and beg for scraps. Over time, the fishers developed a fondness for the cats and would observe the cats closely, interpreting their actions as predictions of the weather and fish patterns. One day, when the fishers were collecting rocks to use with the fixed-nets, a stray rock fell and killed one of the cats. The fishers, feeling sorry for the loss of the cat, buried it and enshrined it at this location on the island.

There are at least ten cat shrines in Miyagi Prefecture. There are also 51 stone monuments in the shape of cats, which is an unusually high number compared to the other prefectures. In particular, these shrines and monuments are concentrated in the southern area of the island, overlapping with the regions where silkworms were raised.

The shrine:

ja:user:ダダ, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Tashirojima is part of the city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture in the Tohoku region, which became well known after a tsunami devastated the area following a massive magnitude 9 earthquake on March 11, 2011.

Over 100 cats inhabit Tashirojima, along with about 50 humans, according to the city’s website.

Wikipedia adds that there are no dogs, and gives this info:

Along a paved road running about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) between the island’s two ports, cats groom themselves and mingle with other cats.

There are a few cafes and inns, but no car rental shops, gas stations or public transportation. Tourists are expected to walk up and down the island’s hills while visiting.

Most of the cats are used to tourists, who can be seen petting the friendly animals throughout the island.

A photo from the AP of direction signs—and a cat, of course (credit: HK Photo; Hiro Komae)

From Wikipedia:

By 2015, the human population numbered around 80, while the total cat population exceeded that by several hundred, with at least 150 cats permanently residing in one of the villages. A vet traveled to the island every two months to examine the village-dwelling cats. While the cat population is mostly made up of crossbreeds and mixed-breed cats, one distinct breed commonly seen on the island is the Japanese Bobtail.

In Japanese culture, cats are considered to bring good luck, said to bring money and good fortune to all who cross their path. Some even claim that it was the cats who kept the majority of the island from being destroyed during the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

Another photo from the AP article: cats being fed at a cat cafe (credit HK photo, Hiro Komae):

From Wikipedia:

Since 83% of the population is classified as elderly, the island’s villages have been designated as a “terminal village” (限界集落, genkai-shūraku) which means that with 50% or more of the population being over 65 years of age, the survival of the village is threatened.  The majority of the people who live on the island are involved either in fishing or hospitality.

The island is also known as Manga Island, as mangaka Shotaro Ishinomori planned to move to the island shortly before his death. There are manga-themed lodges on the island, resembling cats.

Here’s one of the lodges from the Manga Island site, which gives useful information about how to visit:

. . . and more cats on Tashirojima (photo: Hiro Komae):

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

Here’s a NYT article about an annual parade in Belgium for cats; the article is also archived here.  Click to read:

An excerpt:

A 7-year-old girl hawks cat-themed souvenirs in Flemish outside her parents’ shop. Two women in matching cat print dresses wander down a crowded street looking for a place to buy stuffed plush kitties. In every store and restaurant window, a cat figurine or statue signals allegiance to the feline persuasion.

This is Kattenstoet, Belgium’s cat-themed parade and festival.

JAC: I believe “Kattenstoet” means “Cat festival”.  And Ieper used to be known as “Ypres,” site of an infamous battle in WWI.

Tucked among rolling farmland in the West Flanders region near the border with France, Ieper, Belgium, has not always had such an adoring relationship with cats. In the Middle Ages, when the city’s main industry was cloth making, they used cats to keep wool warehouses free of mice and other vermin. But when the felines began reproducing too quickly, town officials developed a ghastly solution: During the second week of Lent, on “Cat Wednesday,” cats were tossed to their deaths out of the belfry tower onto the town square below. At the time, the animals were seen as a symbol of witchcraft and evil, so their deaths were celebrated.

The last live cat was thrown in 1817, but Ieper (also called Ypres in French) developed Kattenstoet in 1937, a tradition to both acknowledge the city’s gruesome history and celebrate cats. The parade, which was held on Sunday, May 12, is filled with elaborate floats, costumes and performances. Afterward, a person dressed as a jester tosses stuffed animal cats from the belfry, down to the onlookers below.

UGH. Do they have to toss the stuffed cats?

One woman, wearing cat ears while sitting on the curb eating a Belgian waffle, said she had traveled from Tokyo to catch the parade. Another, who identified herself as Beth from Northamptonshire, England, said she’d grown up coming to Ieper with her family to visit the British war memorials, but this was her first time attending Kattenstoet. Though she only owns one cat, a Maine Coon named Kimber, she has him and six of her former feline friends tattooed on her left arm.

There’s a lot more, and photographs (which I dare not show because the copyright Pecksniffs will get me), but look at the archived version.  Here’s a photo from Wikipedia:

User cirdub at flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

. . . and a video of the 2018 parade; watch for the people dressed as cats:

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From Bored Panda we have a panoply of religiously-themed cat photos. I’ll show a few; click the headline below to see them all.

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Lagniappe: From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a 9-year-old girl sets up a lemonade stand, with proceeds going to rescue cats. Click to read, and I’ll give an excerpt:

When Steve the cat passed away last month at the age of 16, 9-year-old Ivy Larson wanted to do something to honor him.

She set up a lemonade stand in front of her father’s house on Mount Washington and donated the proceeds to Nose 2 Tail, a cat rescue based near her mother’s home in McDonald.

good cat

“I wanted to help the cats there,” Ivy said. “I love cats … and Nose 2 Tail is right near my house.”

So the dogs didn’t feel left out, she also had homemade dog treats for the dogs that walked by her lemonade stand.

Joe Larson, Ivy’s father, said that the neighbors and community have been wonderfully supportive and gave generously in Steve’s honor.

They raised $150 and plan to have another lemonade stand on the Fourth of July on Hallock Street, Mount Washington, from noon-3 p.m. You can also contribute online in Steve’s honor at nose2tailcatrescue.org.

 

h/t: Laurie Ann, Ginger K.