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Physicists have developed a lens with 'magic' properties. Ultra-thin, it can transform infrared light into visible light by halving the wavelength of incident light.

Tracing the origin of an ultra-hot exoplanet: The chemical composition of WASP-121b suggests that it formed in a cool zone of its natal disc, comparable to the region of gas and ice giants in our Solar System. Methane indicates unexpected atmospheric dynamics: Despite extreme heat, methane was detected on the nightside -- a finding that can be explained by strong vertical atmospheric circulation. First detection of silicon monoxide in a planetary atmosphere: Measurements of this refractory gas allow quantifying the rocky material the planet had accumulated.

Human-AI interactions are well understood in terms of trust and companionship. However, the role of attachment and experiences in such relationships is not entirely clear. In a new breakthrough, researchers from Waseda University have devised a novel self-report scale and highlighted the concepts of attachment anxiety and avoidance toward AI. Their work is expected to serve as a guideline to further explore human-AI relationships and incorporate ethical considerations in AI design.

Despite advances in machine vision, processing visual data requires substantial computing resources and energy, limiting deployment in edge devices. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a self-powered artificial synapse that distinguishes colors with high resolution across the visible spectrum, approaching human eye capabilities. The device, which integrates dye-sensitized solar cells, generates its electricity and can perform complex logic operations without additional circuitry, paving the way for capable computer vision systems integrated in everyday devices.

Despite advances in machine vision, processing visual data requires substantial computing resources and energy, limiting deployment in edge devices. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a self-powered artificial synapse that distinguishes colors with high resolution across the visible spectrum, approaching human eye capabilities. The device, which integrates dye-sensitized solar cells, generates its electricity and can perform complex logic operations without additional circuitry, paving the way for capable computer vision systems integrated in everyday devices.

Researchers have synthesized a new compound called infuzide that shows activity against resistant strains of pathogens.

Researchers have recreated the world's oldest synthetic pigment, called Egyptian blue, which was used in ancient Egypt about 5,000 years ago.

Researchers have discovered that the mixing of small particles between two solid electrolytes can generate an effect called a 'space charge layer,' an accumulation of electric charge at the interface between the two materials. The finding could aid the development of batteries with solid electrolytes, called solid-state batteries, for applications including mobile devices and electric vehicles.

Researchers have engineered a laser device smaller than a penny that they say could power everything from the LiDAR systems used in self-driving vehicles to gravitational wave detection, one of the most delicate experiments in existence to observe and understand our universe.

Researchers have engineered a laser device smaller than a penny that they say could power everything from the LiDAR systems used in self-driving vehicles to gravitational wave detection, one of the most delicate experiments in existence to observe and understand our universe.

Scientists have reported use of antibacterial coatings made from resilin-mimetic proteins to fully block bacteria from attaching to a surface. A protein that gives fleas their bounce has been used to boot out bacteria cells, with lab results demonstrating the material's potential for preventing medical implant infection.

New research shows that the presence of solar panels in Colorado's grasslands may reduce water stress, improve soil moisture levels and -- particularly during dry years -- increase plant growth by about 20% or more compared to open fields.

The challenge in the search for habitable worlds is clear. We need to be able to identify habitable worlds and distinguish between biotic and abiotic processes. Ideally, scientists would do this on entire populations of exoplanets rather than on a case-by-case basis. Exoplanets' natural thermostats might provide a way of doing this.

Microwaves can control a single quantum bit more precisely than ever before, creating a device similar to a quantum transistor – and potentially making quantum computers more reliable

Here’s an amazing video sent to me by reader Bryan Lepore. I didn’t quite understand what it showed, and he explained:

I think it is simply this:

1. Create a soap bubble from a soap solution that is sitting in a speaker/woofer.

2. Shine a light on the bubble. Here, you can see a ring of dots—that is simply a strip of LEDs in a ring. I have a light strip like this, and it produces unexpected results compared to an incandescent light.

3. Activate the speaker with different frequencies. This vibrates the bubble and the reflected image of the LED light strip.

… does that make sense?

Yep, sure does.

Did you spot the two kleptoparasitic flies from the picture by Gregory I put up this morning?  Here’s the original below it, and then the reveal:

If you found the wasp, you’ll know they were nearby.  Did anybody get both of them?

The argument continues about whether the virus causing covid originated in a wet market in Wuhan or as an accidental release from The Wuhan institute of Virology.  While several U.S. government agencies have agreed that the evidence is tilted towards a lab-leak origin, in my view the evidence is not dispositive on either side.

Matt Ridley, however, has been a hard-core advocate of the lab-leak theory, and even co-wrote a book with Alina Chan that, at the time, presented both sides and, as Ridley says below, he “remained unsure what happened at that stage.”

No longer. Since 2021, Ridley has promoted the lab-leak theory, which he does in a Torygraph article shown below (click on headline below to get the archived version). Apparently Ridley teamed up with another collaborator, P. Anton van der Merwe, and wrote a scientific paper laying out his evidence for a lab-leak origin of covid. I’ve put the paper’s title below, but you can read it at the same Torygraph site. The scientific argument was published in the newspaper rather than in a scientific journal because the journal rejected it. (No explanation is given.)

In the intro before he shows the paper (surely a first for the Torygraph), Ridley explains how this came about:

In 2024 I was approached by a single member of the editorial board of a respected biological journal with a request that I team up with a British biologist with relevant expertise and compose an academic paper setting out the case for the lab leak hypothesis: he hoped the journal would consider it. With the help of Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, and advice from Alina Chan, I drafted such a paper. The paper was rejected; I suspect that it was another case of not wanting to rock the scientific boat. Now I am posting this paper online for all to read. It was composed several months ago so one or two small new items may be missing, but nothing in it has proved wrong. It is written not in my normal style but in dry, scientific prose, with each statement backed up by a source, in the shape of nearly 100 end-note references, so that readers can check for themselves that we have represented the sources faithfully. It deserves to be available to people to read. So the paper was commissioned, but the reviewers’ comments that led to rejection aren’t shown. Here’s the paper itself:

Here is some of the evidence Ridley and van der Merwe adduce:

• Attempts to find evidence for a wet-market leak have been unsuccessful. The cases found around the wet market could simply reflect sampling bias, as the Chinese concentrated on looking for infected people in that area.
• The Chinese have not been forthcoming with their data, and in fact locked one site with a catalogue of the sequenced but unpublished viruses they were working on
• If a person got infected with a bat virus from Yunnan (one theory), that person would have infected others on his/her journey to Wuhan, but there is no such trail of infection
• The Wuhan institute was doing “gain of function” experiments to increase the infectivity of SARS viruses (not the progenitor of the covid virus), but these did involve making viruses more transmissible.
• There were plans to put “furin cleavage sites” into SARS viruses, sites that make it easier for the viruses spike protein to get into cells. The virus causing covid has such a site—12 nucleotides long— which Ridley and van der Merwe insist was inserted into the virus progenitor by humans. As Ridley notes:

When the pandemic began in January 2020, Shi Zhengli of the WIV published two articles, one co-authored with Shibo Jiang, yet in both of them failed to mention the furin cleavage site, by far the most remarkable feature of the new virus’s genome. This may have been an oversight, but by contrast, it was the furin cleavage site that immediately alarmed several western virologists on first seeing the genome of the virus and led to the drafting of the Proximal Origin paper. Messages released during a congressional investigation reveal that the authors of the paper were not themselves convinced that a laboratory origin could be ruled out, either during or after the writing of the paper

• The containment of viruses at Wuhan for the SARS experiments was Level 2, which American scientists think was far too lax for such potentially dangerous experiments (this itself, of course, is not great evidence for a lab leak).

Here’s Ridley and van der Merwe’s conclusion:

In only one city in the world were sarbecoviruses subject to gain-of-function experiments on a large scale involving human airway cells and humanised mice at inappropriate safety levels: Wuhan. At only one time in history was research to create novel sarbecoviruses with enhanced infectivity through furin cleavage under consideration: 2018 onwards. The surprising failure to find better evidence for a natural spillover, and the lack of transparency from the Chinese scientists, is therefore best explained by positing a laboratory accident involving a live virus experiment as the cause of the Covid pandemic and attempts to cover it up.

This is a Bayesian conclusion, arguing that the total weight of the evidence supports a lab-leak prior. And it sure sounds conclusive, but I’m wondering why the paper was rejected (they don’t say what journal they submitted it to).

Further, a number of virologists I respect either adhere to the alternative wet-market theory or remain agnostic.  When I asked a colleague some questions about this, he/she said this:

All the **data** (including new stuff) points to a natural origin. It might have been a leak, but all the evidence that has been obtained points in the direction of a spillover in the wet market. Not everyone who disagrees with the prevailing view of something is Galileo.

And then I asked “What about the furin cleaveage site?” This was something that Nobel laureate David Baltimore considered almost conclusive evidence for the lab-leak theory, but walked it back a bit:

The virologist David Baltimore commented that “these features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” later clarifying that “you can’t distinguish between the two origins from just looking at the sequence” (Caltech Weekly 2021).

My colleague commented about the furin cleavage site: “It is common in closely related [corona]viruses.” also citing a paper saying, “This is a good summary of the issues.”

That article, in the Journal of Virology from 2023, concludes that the wet-market hypothesis is more likely, though is somewhat agnostic:

Scientific conclusions are based on likelihood given the scientific data, and conclusions can change as new data are obtained. Based on the scientific data collected in the last 3 years by virologists worldwide, hypotheses 1 and 2 are unlikely. Hypotheses 3 and 4 cannot be ruled out by existing evidence. Since hypotheses 1 and 2 support the lab leak theory and hypotheses 3 and 4 are consistent with a zoonotic origin, the lab leak- and zoonotic-origin explanations are not equally probable, and the available evidence favors the latter. Further insight into CoVs in animals at the animal-human interface requires additional surveillance of circulating virus sequences from animals. There is ample precedent for the seeding of pandemics and more geographically limited outbreaks from nonhuman species. Common-cold CoVs, SARS-CoV, Ebola virus, HIV, influenza A virus, mpox virus, and others all have zoonotic origins (31–33). SARS-CoV-2 is the ninth documented coronavirus to enter the human population. The best existing scientific evidence supports a direct zoonotic origin. As new evidence continues to emerge from scientific studies or other investigations, our understanding of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve. Nevertheless, it is possible that its origin may never be known with certainty.

I’ll add that Ridley is, as he says below, an adherent to a less stringent form of climate change than many scientists. He calls himself  a “climate-change” lukewarmer (see comment #2 below). Of course, he could be wrong about that yet right about covid. Nevertheless, I remain agnostic about how the virus got into our species. We may never know how this occurred, but investigating its origin is still worthwhile. In the article cited above, David Baltimore explains why:

Why is it important to know where the virus originated?

Well, I think we want to know the pathway of generating highly infectious new viruses that could cause pandemics because we want to protect ourselves against this happening again. If it happened by natural means, it means that we have to increase our surveillance of the natural environment. We have to try to find the hosts that provide an ability for the virus to change its sequence, to become more infectious. This would mean we need to keep surveillance on markets, on zoos, on places where viruses could jump from one species to another.

But if SARS-CoV-2 came about by an artificial means, it means we’ve got to put better defenses around laboratories. I’m not suggesting that it was deliberately released if it came from a laboratory, but we have to realize that whatever a laboratory does might get out of the laboratory and create havoc. It means that work of this sort should only go on in what are called biosafety level 4 laboratories.

UPDATE 1:  Author van der Merwe wants me to add another point, which I will, despite his rude last line:

I would add one more point, concerning why this issue matters.

Even the possibility that the COVID-19 was the result of a lab leaks mandates that close attention is paid to preventing another research related pandemic in future. At present scientists largely self-regulate when it comes to deciding what gain of function experiments to do, even if such experiment could generate a pandemic organism. Many of the scientists arguing most strongly for natural origins have a clear conflict of interest as they oppose tightening of restrictions on these sorts of experiment.

Refusing to tighten regulations until a lab leak is proven, is equivalent to refusing to reduce CO2 emissions until it is proven beyond doubt that these greenhouse gas emissions will result in catastrophic effects.

It is ‘pandemic-risk denialism’.
Are you siding with these people?

UPDATE 2.  Ridley also wrote me, as expected. and wants me to change my article. I have modified my comment on climate change to reflect his claim that he is a “lukewarmer.”  But his last point I already dealt with in my comment from Baltimore in the original post.

1. The (anonymous) virologist colleague that you consulted has misled you in a rather shocking way. He told you that furin cleavage sites are  “common in closely related [corona]viruses.” This is simply untrue: the only coronaviruses that count as “closely related” by a reasonable definition of that term are other sarbecoviruses. None of the over 800 sarbecoviruses yet found have a FCS. Not one. Other less closely related coronaviruses do have one, as we state in our article, where we say “MERS has one”. But to call other coronaviruses, such a as merbecoviruses “closely related” to SARS-CoV-2 is like calling birds or reptiles “closely related” to a mammal. You would not argue that finding the first mammal to grow feathers was unsurprising because “closely related tetrapods have feathers”. And if it was found near a lab that had engineered feather genes into other animals, I would be surprised if you did not find it suspicious. Note that an FCS is selected against in bats, where sarbecoviruses cause enteric infections, as we state.

2. Your colleague says “all” the data points towards the market. That’s just an empty slogan: what data? Not a single infected animal has been found, the very minimum expected in every other zoonotic outbreak. We set out the data on both sides of the argument in our paper and lots point to the lab. None of the data is proof but that does not make it “un-data”.

3. You wonder what the editor said to justify rejection. He said that there is no evidence of gain of function research at the WIV. That’s simply laughable. There’s tons of published evidence of exactly that, proudly published in journals by the WIV scientists.

4. You call me a climate denialist. This is false, lazy (easy to check) and defamatory. I have covered climate change in print for more than 40 years. I have repeatedly stated exactly why I think climate change is real and man-made. I just don’t yet see good arguments for it being net very dangerous. That’s not “denialism”. I am a lukewarmer.

5. Several commenters argue that it does not really matter how it started. This is gobsmacking. Knowing how this pandemic began is vital for preventing the next one: next to no effort is being made to enhance lab safety currently, or to prevent terrorists gaining access to virology expertise. In addition, a lab leak could explain why the virus was so highly infectious from the start of the outbreak. I have yet to hear anybody argue after an airliner crashes that it does not matter what caused it.

I suggest your readers read the whole paper.

h/t: Christopher for the Torygraph archive.

Reader Gregory sent us what may be the hardest “spot-the” photo ever.  There are two flies in this photo, but I’ll let Gregory describe the scene:

While kayak camping on the Kansas River this weekend, we were entertained by the energetic searching of a spider wasp (Hymenoptera: Pompilidae) seeking a spider to paralyze and oviposit on. However, following the spider were small flies, which turn out to be satellite flies, a subfamily of Sarcophagidae (flesh flies). The larvae of the flies are kleptoparasites and feed on prey captured by solitary wasps like the spider wasp. So the adult female flies were following the spider wasp to lay their eggs on the paralyzed spider and use it for their young. There are two flies in the photo.

Good luck. If you find them, just say so in the comments but don’t tell people where they are! As I said, this will take some searching, so I suggest you enlarge the photo.   The reveal will be at 11 a.m. Chicago time.

Math professor and Hero of Intellectual Freedom Abby Thompson of UC Davis has sent us some tidepool photos, along with a few birds. Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The first picture is of a pair of foolish birds from my back porch, followed by some Northern California tidepool pictures from late April and May.   The tides the last week of May were among the lowest of the year, occurring at a very unfortunate time of day (near dawn) for those who prefer a leisurely morning, like me.    As usual I got help from people on inaturalist for some of the IDs.

I don’t understand how mourning doves ever manage to reproduce. Here’s a pair pondering building a nest on the extremely wobbly fan hanging from the trellis over our porch. I’ve also seen them trying to nest on the peak of the roof and on a very narrow garden railing.  They give new meaning to the word birdbrain.    I strung up a nice, spacious, secure basket for them right near the fan, which they totally ignored.   They eventually gave up on the fan; they’ve probably found a nice spot smack in the middle of a parking lot somewhere.

On to the tidepools:

Thorlaksonius subcarinatus: This is a species of amphipod, which (I feel like I keep saying this) is tiny, just a bright orange speck. Amphipods are like isopods (the roly-polys in your garden) except they’re flattened vertically instead of horizontally.  The Thorlaksonius part is for sure, the species seems likely correct:

Liparis florae (tidepool snailfish).  About 2” long.  The second picture is a close-up of its weird eye:

Rostanga pulchra (nudibranch). This species eats a bright orange sponge, on which it becomes practically invisible:

(Family) Sabellidae (feather duster worm) It’s not possible even to determine genus from this photo:

Phidiana hiltoni (nudibranch):

I took a picture of the brown-and-white-striped worm (Tubulanus sexlineatus) and only noticed afterward that the photo includes both a nudibranch (Coryphella trilineata) to the right of the worm and a sea spider (Pycnogonum stearnsi) to the left. Tidepools are crowded places:

A little jellyfish, Polyorchis haplus (I think). This one was stranded on the sand, but when plopped into a small pool it started zipping around. The red spots are eyespots:

Acanthodoris nanaimoensis (nudibranch). I don’t see this species very often, and it’s a knock-out:

 

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

Mining craters on the moon could be more practical than extracting precious metals from asteroids, but it might also introduce new legal difficulties