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The White House Releases its 2026 Budget Request for NASA. Cuts to SLS, Gateway and Orion

Regions from Ukraine to Mongolia are seeing a spike in paired heatwave-drought events as climate change alters weather patterns across the planet

As the number of electric vehicles increases, their increased demand could strain the grid – but small financial incentives convinced drivers to ease that demand by charging during off-peak hours

It looks like Natural History magazine has given an implicit endorsement—or at least a platform—to Princeton anthropology professor Agustín Fuentes.  We’ve met him before, and not under pleasant circumstances, as the man is wont to distort science and mislead his readers in the cause of progressive ideology. To see all the pieces I’ve written about him, go here (and especially these pieces here, here, and here.  And for critiques of Fuentes’s misguided accusations that Darwin was a racist who justified and promoted genocide, go here and here, and also see here for one I published in Science with a bunch of evolutionists. Some of these articles show Fuentes deliberately purveying misleading statements to buttress an ideological position. For that seems to be his modus operandi.

Now Fuentes has put his view that sex is not a binary into a new book, an excerpt of which was published in the latest Natural History, a magazine I always liked. This single bad article won’t change my mind about it (as the multiple bad articles in Scientific American did about that rag), but it makes me question the editors’ judgment. Do they know ANY biology? The reason I ask is that the excerpt is so tedious, dreadful, tendentious, misleading, and convoluted that it wouldn’t pass muster in a real scientific journal, and even a scientifically ignorant editor could see the problem with the arguments (and also correct the bad writing).

You can’t go to the article by clicking on the headline; and I don’t have a link, either. I was sent a pdf by a disaffected reader, and that’s what I’ll quote from. Perhaps you can find a copy if you dig around.

The overweening problem with this article is that it doesn’t show that the binary view is wrong, or that biological sex is really a spectrum. What Fuentes does (and he doesn’t really define biological sex) is to show that within the two constructs he takes to represent sex, there is a lot of variation in various traits.  Men don’t all behave in a way that differs from the way all women behave, development of sex is complicated, people of different sex have different “lived experiences” (yes, he says that), the structure of families vary among cultures, and so on.

But of course all of this variation, and the multidimensional definition of sex, neglects the big problem: is biological sex binary?  Yes it is: males have reproductive systems that evolved to produce small mobile gametes (sperm) and females have systems evolved to produce larger immobile gametes (eggs). There are only two types of gametes—no more. Biologists have arrived at this definition for two reasons: it’s universal in all animals and plants, and also because of its utility: the different investment in gametes usually leads to differential investment in offspring,  which explains not only sex differences in behavior, but sexual selection itself, which produces sexual dimorphism in appearance and sexual behavior. The exceptions to a strict binary defined (really “recognized”) this way range from about 1/5600 individuals to 1/20,000, and that’s as close to a binary you can get in biology.

What Fuentes does is throw a lot of sand in the reader’s eyes, showing variation within sexes and across cultures, hoping that at the end the reader will say, “Hey, maybe sex isn’t a binary after all.” But that variation does not touch the thesis he’s trying to depose. The man doesn’t know how to debate, so, like a true ideologue, he changes the ground of argumentation.

First (probably in the nonquoted parts of his book), he defines the sexes in an introductory note as “3Gfemales” and “3Gmales”, referring to “typical biological patterns of association between genetics-gonads-genitals in human bodies.” I presume he means that members of each have has the typical chromosomal constitutions of its type (e.g. XX in females) as well as gonads (that presumably means testes vs. ovaries) and genital morphology. Fuentes adds that “while useful as general categories, not all people fit into the 3G classifications.” So that is his definition, and of course since it involves more than gametes, will naturally be less binary than the biological definition. A male with a tiny penis, for example, perhaps because of a disorder of sex determination, would be called a biological male if he has testes, but is something else according to Fuentes. But Fuentes doesn’t say what such an individual is. How many sexes are there? An infinite number? And is that true of raccoons, Drosophila, and robins?

Okay, here comes the sand, so cover your eyes. I’ll have to use screenshots since I can’t copy and paste from this pdf:

Variation in sexual behavior:

But it is not “human sexuality” that is the binary, but the definition of sex.  Surely Fuentes recognizes that he is deviating from the main issue his book (and this article) is about: the binary nature of defined sex, as seen in every species of animal and plant. That doesn’t mean that sexuality and its expression is binary.  I’m not sure whether there’s a name for this kind of argumentation, but what he’s doing is clear.

He drags in variation in family structure, too:

Again, all this does is refute a binary of families, not of sexes. Why is it in there? What is the sweating professor trying to say?

Fuentes dwells at length on how sex is basically irrelevant in medicine because sexes show variation in their responses to drugs and get diseases at different rates, implying that the binary is all but useless for doctors. I read to my doctor several paragraphs of Fuentes’s screed, and I won’t give his reaction save to say that it was “not positive.” For example, can you even understand this?:

Stable? “Perceived instability”? What is he banging on about? He doesn’t say.

And females are too complicated to deal with in biology, medicine, and health? What is he talking about?  When a patient goes to see a doctor, it’s essential for the doctor to know the patient’s biological sex. Not only are some diseases specific to sexes (prostate cancer, ovarian or uterine cancer) as are some conditions (menopause), but a good doctor will realize that heart disease (and other diseases) can present differently in the sexes, and will investigate further based on that. Females with heart disease, for example, present more often with indigestion-like symptoms than do males. Now of course there are factors other than sex involved in treating a patient (do they drink, smoke, or eat too much?), but saying that sex is pretty much useless when treating patients is simply dumb. It can even be harmful (though he doesn’t say how):

Again, does any doctor pay attention only to sex? I don’t know of one. To be sure, Fuentes grudgingly admits that there are “two sets of reproductive physiologies” that are relevant to medicine, but minimizes the importance of sex. And to be sure, some diseases are recognized and treated identically in males and females, but to ignore biological sex as a doctor is sheer incompetence.

In another example, Fuentes notes that Ambien doesn’t work the way you’d predict in women if you just reduces the male dosage based on a smaller weight of females.  Why doesn’t this work? Because the drug clears from women “3G females” (did the doctors check all the “G”s?) more slowly than from “3G males.”   He uses this difference to attack the sex binary, by saying that we don’t understand why this average difference occurs, saying “asking about the actual physiological response, rather than assuming 3G males and 3G females are different kinds of humans, is a better approach.”

But again, this is irrelevant to the sex binary; it is about the mechanism of a difference between (Fuentes’s) biological sexes.  And, interestingly, one of the mechanisms he suggests is “attention should be focused on the varying levels of acting testosterone in attenuating the effectiveness of [Ambien].”

Testosterone! Well at least that has some connection with biological sex, no? Fuentes then tries to efface the difference in hormone levels by saying this:  “Testosterone is not characterizable as a male or female hormone, but rather by variation in circulating levels among humans, with 3G males usually having much higher levels than 3G males.”

In reality, we’ve long known that both testes and ovaries produce testosterone, but the distribution of salivary testosterone in the sexes is indeed variable in each sex, and there is hardly any overlap between the sexes: Since testosterone prompts the development of secondary sex traits, including behavior, it’s the binary nature of sex that produce an almost nonoverlapping distribution of hormones. But one should not imply, as Fuentes does, that variation of hormone levels in each sex means that the sexes themselves are non-binary.

(From paper): Figure 1. Shown is a depiction of the bimodal distribution of raw, baseline salivary testosterone values (in pg/mL) when including both men (N = 360) and women (N = 407). All saliva samples were collected and assayed by the present author using radioimmunoassay (Schultheiss and Stanton, 2009). The displayed testosterone data were aggregated from several past studies by the author, and for graphical purposes only, exclude eight male participants with testosterone levels between 150 and 230 pg/mL.

I don’t want to go on much longer, but I’ll add that Fuentes conflates sex and gender several times, and uses familiar tropes to dispel the binary, like the existence of hermaphroditic earthworms, which of course produce only two types of gametes, but in one body. He even shows a photo of a bluehead wrasse, which, like the clownfish (but in the other direction), changes sex in social groups (the head of a group of females is male, but if he dies a female changes sex and becomes the alpha-fish).  And like the clownfish, this doesn’t dispel the sex binary because again, there are only two forms, one producing sperm and one producing eggs. Nobody ever claimed that a biological female can gametically transform into a biological male or vice versa. As always, there are only two reproductive systems, classified by their type of gamete. Neither of these animals produces a third type of gamete.

At the end, Fuentes reprises his error of saying that variation within sexes dispels any notion of a sex binary, and even lapses into philosophisizing:

I love the “why and how humans are in the world.” It’s totally meaningless!  But wait! There’s more:

Of course there is intra- and inter-sex diversity in levels of hormones, behavior, sexual behavior, family structure, and so on.  But there is no diversity within a sex about the type of gamete it is set up to produce, either sperm or eggs (or both in the case of hermaphrodites, which Fuentes calls “intersex”).  And that IS a universal truth about being male or female, a truth that was recognized a long time before social justice ideology arose, and a reognition that had nothing to do with that ideology. Now it does, for even a dolt can see that Fuentes’s real aim to to dispel the binary definition of sex in any way he can, for he considers that definition to be harmful to people who don’t identify as either male or female. It isn’t. If the facts get in the way of ideology for people like Fuentes, they either ignore or misrepresent the facts. Here the entire article is a form of misrepresentation. ****************** At my own ending I’ll quote, with permission, part of the email that the reader who sent me this pdf wrote, just because I liked the email:

 

. . . last night, I was flabbergasted to read in the table of contents of the latest issue of Natural History, ‘Sex is a Spectrum: Why the binary view is problematic.”

That rumbling you just heard was SJG [Stephen Jay Gould] and his biologist forebears from this magazine spinning in their graves. Or so I infer.

OK, I am not a biologist and wouldn’t even try to play one on TV, and so wouldn’t claim the credentials or background to properly critique this. But I do have to wonder at the author’s writing in pretzel knots to avoid, for example, using the term “women” (preferred: “Humans with uteri” [p. 23]), or writing things I find hard to swallow (“the number of mating types (often called “sexes”) per kind of species…[is] two and sometimes three in most animals…”). I’d really like to know the animals that have three sexes (and what the third kind is called, and who it mates with).

h/t: Alex, Robert

Scientists have created an antivenom that has shown promise against some of the world's deadliest snakes after collecting antibodies from a hyperimmune man who exposed himself to their toxins

As climate change pushes summer temperatures to new highs, energy infrastructure such as cabling and transformers will struggle to cope

Has your dinner time conversations been dragging a bit of late? Feel like raising its knowledge level to a bit higher than the usual synopsis of the most recent reality TV show? Then take the challenge presented by Sean Carroll in his book "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe – Space, Time and Motion". Using this, your conversation might soon be sparkling with grand thoughts about modern physics, time travel, going faster than light and the curvature of the universe.

A watched pot never boils, goes the old saying, but many of us have at least kept an eye on the pot, waiting for the bubbling to start. It's satisfying to finally see the rolling boil, behind which complex physical mechanisms are at play. When this happens, the bubbles that form continuously change in shape and size. These dynamic movements influence the surrounding fluid flow, thereby affecting the efficiency of heat transfer from the heat source to the water. Manipulating small amounts of liquid at high speeds and frequencies is essential for processing large numbers of samples in medical and chemical fields, such as in cell sorting. Microbubble vibrations can create flows and sound waves, aiding in liquid manipulation. However, the collective behavior and interactions of multiple bubbles is poorly understood, so their applications have been limited.

While dolphins are known to transmit information in their whistles, until now it hasn't been clear whether the marine mammals used the same sounds to indicate a shared understanding of a concept

Well, dear readers, this is the last of the photos I have to show you, and there are but two. If you have good photos, send them in–STAT!  Thanks.

From reader Christopher Moss, bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). His captions are indented, and if you want to enlarge the photos, click on them.

Not terribly good, as they are cropped to the centre of the original, despite using a 750mm lens. I had noticed something black on the frozen pond, and when the eagle landed to investigate I realised something had died there. The crows were squawking a lot and I wondered if it was one of their number.

Oh! I just found 24 more photo from Richard Pieniakowski, so we have a couple of days’ worth (his captions).  I will just add the first two because they’re the same species as above.

Bald eagle perched in snowfall:

Bald eagle flying through snow:

‘Shocking’ results from a major astronomical study have raised doubts about the standard model of cosmology, forcing scientists to consider new ways of understanding dark energy and gravity

Our Medical Establishment stood up for the right of anti-vaxxers to die in droves. They reject your bodily autonomy and medical freedom.

The post How Our Medical Establishment Went From”Don’t Make Anyone Get a Vaccine” to “Don’t Let Anyone Get a Vaccine” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The Juno spacecraft circling in Jovian space is the planetary science gift that just keeps on giving. Although it's spending a lot of time in the strong (and damaging) Jovian radiation belts, the spacecraft's instruments are hanging in there quite well. In the process, they're peering into Jupiter's cloud tops and looking beneath the surface of the volcanic moon Io.

We have known for years that the gut microbiome can alter brain function, but now research in mice is suggesting that the opposite is also true – that the brain modifies gut bacteria

While investigating Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) for the UK Ministry of Defence, I was exposed to conspiracy theories that allege that the government is covering up proof of an alien presence. I’ve since become an occasional media commentator on conspiracy theories and have even been the subject of one myself, with some people claiming that I’m still secretly working for the government on the UAP issue. Most conspiracy theories are binary: we either did or didn’t go to the moon; Lee Harvey Oswald either did or didn’t act alone; 9/11 either was or wasn’t an inside job—and if it was an inside job, the choice is binary again: The Government Made It Happen or The Government Let It Happen.

The Covid pandemic generated multiple conspiracy theories, but the fact that most have been proven to be false shouldn’t lead people to conclude that what might be termed “the official narrative” about Covid is necessarily true in all aspects. It wasn’t.

A flawed “everyone’s at risk” narrative was promoted.

Covid wasn’t a “plandemic” orchestrated by nefarious Deep State players. Neither did the vaccines contain nanobots activated by 5G phone signals. But not everything we were told about Covid was correct: lockdowns and cloth masks didn’t have anywhere near the impact on slowing community spread or lowering mortality rates that was originally hoped for and subsequently claimed. Some studies now suggest the benefits were statistically insignificant. The vaccines didn’t stop transmission. And in one staggering admission—written by a New York Times journalist, no less!—a child was statistically more likely to die in a car accident on the way to school, than of Covid caught at school: “Severe versions of Covid, including long Covid, are extremely rare in children. For them, the virus resembles a typical flu. Children face more risk from car rides than Covid.”

A flawed “everyone’s at risk” narrative was promoted, in a situation where elderly people and others with comorbidities were vastly more likely to have serious health outcomes. The benefits of natural immunity were downplayed, and obesity as a risk factor was hardly discussed, perhaps because of politically correct sensitivities about fat-shaming. Partly, all this was because Covid was new, with key pieces of the puzzle unknown—especially in the early days of the pandemic. Later, it reflected the difficulty of interpreting statistics and analyzing data, especially where there were different ways of doing so, in different countries, or at different times. The debate over whether someone died of Covid (i.e., the virus killed them) or died with Covid (they died of some other cause and happened to be infected with the virus) is one example of this.

Obesity as a risk factor was hardly discussed, perhaps because of politically correct sensitivities about fat-shaming.

Nothing exemplifies the more nuanced nature of Covid conspiracy theories than the lab leak debate. Was Covid a case of zoonotic emergence, centered on a wet market in Wuhan, or an accident involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology? According to previous assessments by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, some parts of the U.S. Intelligence community favored one theory, some favored the other, while some were undecided. Then, on April 18, 2025,  www.covid.gov and www.covidtests.gov were both redirected to a new White House website titled “Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19.”

Screenshot of the White House webpage: “Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19.”

Particularly in the early days of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was portrayed as a crazy conspiracy theory and was seen by many as being a rightwing dog whistle, along with any mention of Sweden’s more laissez-faire policies, the Danish Mask Study, and much more besides. This was part of the wider politicization of the virus, or rather, the official response to the virus. Broadly speaking, in the first weeks of the pandemic the American Left downplayed it, while the Right rang alarm bells, a trend that soon reversed entirely—ultimately the Left believed the pandemic was more serious than did the Right, and the Left supported the various mandates to a greater extent than the Right.

Should we err on the side of caution, especially in the beginning when we just don’t know, but do know the history of earlier pandemics?

Defining a conspiracy theory is tricky, and we shouldn’t conflate an elaborately constructed false narrative with a disputed fact. But when the line can be blurred, and when “conspiracy theorist” is itself sometimes used as a pejorative, the polarized debate over Covid can be tricky to navigate. “Covid vaccines didn't work” is false, but “Covid vaccines didn’t stop transmission, so mandating them, especially for those at little risk, was unnecessary” is true. Then again, if there’s any doubt at the time, why not err on the side of caution? Vaccination has proven to be among the most successful methods of modern medicine and much, much cheaper and less disruptive than shutdowns. “Masks didn’t work” is false, but “cloth masks generally had only a statistically insignificant health benefit” when deployed at scale is true. Then again, when in doubt, should we err on the side of caution, especially in the beginning when we just don’t know, but do know the history of earlier pandemics?

Why does any of this matter, especially as the pandemic fades into the rearview mirror? First, the truth is important, and we owe it to ourselves and to posterity to tell as full and accurate a story as possible, especially about such a major, impactful event. Secondly, we need to have a conversation about the failed response to Covid because not only were the various mandates on lockdowns, masks, vaccines and school closures much less effective than claimed, but also, many of those who questioned governmental and institutional narratives were demonized.

Authorities bet the farm on measures that were both divisive—mandates are almost always going to fall into this category—and ineffective.

On social media, dissenting voices were deplatformed or shadow-banned (a user’s content is made less visible or even hidden from others without the user being explicitly banned, or notified, or even aware that it has happened). So we never had an open and honest debate about possible alternative strategies, such as the Great Barrington Declaration authored by the Stanford physician-scientist and current NIH director Jay Bhattacharya. The authorities bet the farm on measures that were both divisive—mandates are almost always going to fall into this category—and ineffective. Dying on the hill of dragging traumatized 2-year old children off airplanes because they couldn’t keep a mask on was bizarre and even perverse, as was closing playgrounds, hiking trails, and beaches, and even the risibly ridiculous arresting of a lone paddleboarder off the coast of Malibu. Across the board, civil liberties were set back for years, while the consequences of school closures—both in terms of education and social development—have yet to be properly assessed (although preliminary studies indicate that students may be at least one year behind where they should be). And what about the level of preparedness of hospitals and medical equipment manufacturers? We need to talk about all this.

The next pandemic may have an attack rate and a case fatality ratio that would make Covid look like, well, the flu.

But most of all, this matters because of the next pandemic. It may be bird flu, the Nipah virus or mpox. Alternatively, it’ll be a Disease X that comes suddenly and unexpectedly from left field. But it’s inevitable, and the next pandemic may have an attack rate and a case fatality ratio that would make Covid look like, well, the flu. Such a pandemic would need a “we’re all in this together” response, just when half the country would regard such a soundbite as an Orwellian reminder of what many refer to as “Covid tyranny.” Trust in the public health system, and many other institutions, is at an all-time low. We need to depoliticize healthcare and ensure that never again do people misappropriate science by appealing to it but not following it (“masks and lockdowns, except for mass BLM protests”). We need a data-led approach and not a dogma-led one.

Having a full, robust and open national conversation about Covid—with accountability and apologies where necessary—is vital. That’s because identifying the mistakes and learning the lessons of the failed response to the last pandemic is essential in preparing to combat the next one.

Nick Pope’s new documentary film on which this essay is based is Apocalypse Covid. Watch the trailer here and the full film here.

A team has discovered how certain bacteria breathe by generating electricity, using a natural process that pushes electrons into their surroundings instead of breathing on oxygen. The findings could enable new developments in clean energy and industrial biotechnology.

As young stars form, they exert a powerful influence on their surroundings and create complex interactions between them and their environments. As they gobble up gas and dust, they generate a rotating disk of material. This protoplanetary disk is where planets form, and new research shows that stars can feed too quickly and end up regurgitating material back into the disk.

A different kind of human cell division could improve our understanding of cancer and help us grow specific tissues