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Across the universe, some of the most dramatic events occur when a black hole meets a neutron star. A neutron star is the ultra-dense remains of a massive star that exploded—imagine all the mass of our Sun compressed into a sphere just a few tens of kilometres wide. When a black hole and neutron star spiral toward each other, the result is one of nature's most violent spectacles.

For years, scientists have been scratching their heads over the "Hubble Tension,” the mismatch between how fast the cosmos expanded in its youth versus how fast it's expanding today. But now, armed with the most precise data ever captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found the perceived gap is staring to narrow!I n fact, the expansion rate measured by Cepheid variables versus the cosmic background has overlapping error bars again. Will the tension mystery finally be resolved?

A 500-page proof that only a handful of people in the world claim to understand kicked off a saga unlike anything else in the history of mathematics – and now there’s a new twist to the story, says Jacob Aron

Despite reports of a recent surge in ADHD, a global analysis has found no reliable evidence of an increase in the number of children diagnosed with the condition since 2020

Thanks to AI and modern carbon dating techniques, we have a new understanding of when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written – which could revise the story of Judea

Exercise is one of the most effective ways to lower your blood pressure, but some workouts are more effective than others. Grace Wade investigates

A new documentary sheds light on the extraordinary story of the US's first woman astronaut, Sally Ride, who defied all expectations in both her career and personal life

Artist Clare Hewitt uses fallen oak leaves and sunlight to create her works of art before returning the leaves to the forest

Understanding the meaning of "equals" in mathematics tells us a lot about both the nuance and richness in the field, but also how ideas of equality are used or misused in life

In this latest instalment of Future Chronicles, an imagined history of future inventions, we journey to 2035, when undersea living became a reality. Rowan Hooper tells us how it happened

Feedback is amazed to see sperm racing touted as a new track sport, but it’s going to take a lot of CGI and other fakery to help it take off

Being accurate in the language we use to describe conditions like ADHD matters, and can lead to better outcomes for those affected. The words we choose to use are important, say Alex Conner and James Brown, hosts of podcast The ADHD Adults

A new book on quantum physics is pleasingly full of cutting-edge topics. Yet it isn't the accessible work it promised to be

Putting an end to a mass extinction sounds like an impossible task, but some researchers argue that doing so would be setting our ambitions too low

Astronomers have found another super-Earth. It's about 10 times more massive than Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star about 2475 light-years away. These massive Earth-like planets hold key information about how planets form and evolve.

Carbon stored in landscapes for thousands of years is leaching back into the atmosphere via rivers, and human activity may be to blame

I’ve been meaning to post this for some time; it’s a letter from a petulant Wall Street Journal reader who’s respondong to my op-ed about the KerFFRFle: my clash with the Freedom from Religion Foundation about whether, as one of its fellows wrote, “A woman is whoever she says she is.” The reader thinks that this self-identification is a perfectly good definition of “woman” as opposed to the gamete-based definition that most biologists hold.

The psychologically-based definition implies that the objective reality of who you are is exactly who you think you are.  I won’t go over that well-trodden ground except to say again that there are lots of people who claim to be things or people that are not objectively true, like all the religious people who claim to be prophets.  But just check the Oxford English definition for “woman,” and you won’t find anything based on self-conception. Instead, you find this:

I guess the OED hasn’t caught up to progressive wordsmithing!

At any rate, David Opderbeck, a professor of law at Seton Hall University, had a rather confused response in the WSJ, which I’ve put below. I’ll have a few words about it after you read it:

What is the sweating professor trying to say? First, Dr. Opoderbeck doesn’t seem to realize that the conflict is about the biological definition of “woman”, and so he claims that there can be many definitions of woman, presumably including men who say they are women.

Now this part I don’t understand at all:

. . . . . when they otherwise vigorously deny that there is any objective reality to traditional ontological categories. A “human,” for dogmatic materialists such as Mr. Coyne, after all, is nothing but a random configuration of matter, without substance, intentionality, teleology, mind or being beyond the entirely contingent fact that matter happens to have configured itself in a certain way in this moment of evolutionary time.

How do we chop through this thicket of verbal weeds? Of course I accept that there is an objective reality to an individual human, and of course a human can be defined as a member of a group, Homo sapiens, having certain biological traits (note the similarity to “woman”).  As for the claim that reality has to involve teleology about material objects that “happen to have configured themselves in a certain way at this moment of evolutionary time,” it’s opaque if not ludicrous.  There is no teleology in evolution, and matter does not “configure itself.” If that were true, I’d configure myself into the young Robert Redford. But all this confusing verbiage, I detect a whiff of religion, And that supposition is supported by the observation that Opderbeck got his master’s degree at Fuller Theological Seminary, and has written some books with a theological bent:

His first two books, Law and Theology: Classic Questions and Contemporary Perspectives (Fortress Press 2019) and The End of the Law? Law, Theology, and Neuroscience (Wipf & Stock / Cascade 2021) received broad acclaim. His third book, Faithful Exchange: The Economy as It’s Meant to Be, a theological assessment of economic paradigms informed by rule of law principles, will be released by Fortress Press in 2025. In addition to his appointment at the Law School, he is Affiliated Faculty in Seton Hall’s Department of Religion.

Theology is, as Dan Barker observed, a subject without an object, and “theological assessments of economic paradigms” seems a very weird thing to do.

But never mind. In his second paragraph, Opderbeck supports the FFRF self-conception definition, meaning that he also supports whatever brain chemistry that makes some individuals objectively fat because, although they have anorexia and are skeletal, nevertheless think that they’re fat.  Or whatever brain chemistry makes a person think that they are Jesus reincarnated. Yes, they must be Jesi.

Opderbeck’s ignorance is best revealed when he claims that the gamete-only doctrine is “arbitrary” and that I think it’s “best for society”.  It’s not at all arbitrary, but comes from biologists observing animals and plants over more than two centuries, and observing that, yes, all species have only two types of reproductive systems. One evolved to make small mobile gametes (males) and the other large immobile ones (females). That’s hardly arbitrary. As for that definition being best for society, that’s like saying that recognizing that Saturn goes around the Sun is arbitrary, but recognizing that is good for society.  These claims would be true only under the construal that recognizing the truth is good for society. But clearly that’s not what Opderbeck means.

In fact, I myself am not sure what Opderbeck means, except that he’s cooked up a hash of words that imply that reality is, objectively, what you think it is; that biology is driven by teleology; and that an objective recognition of gamete types that maps perfectly onto what biologists have recognized forever is nevertheless just “arbitrary.”

All I can say is, “Lawyer, stick to your courtroom.”

 

The glymphatic system flushes out waste products from the brain – now scientists have found a way to boost it in mice, which could open treatment possibilities for neurodegenerative diseases

Once thought to have originated in cows and spread through dust, the surprising evolutionary story of tuberculosis reveals why it's so hard to stamp out this ancient disease, writes Carl Zimmer

Computer simulations of high-energy particles are pushing the boundaries of what we can learn about the interactions that happen inside particle colliders