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Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a violent cosmic collision in which one galaxy pierces another with intense radiation. Their results show that this radiation dampens the wounded galaxy's ability to form new stars.

Researchers developed a way to extend the shelf life of vegetables by injecting them with melatonin using biodegradable microneedles.

Researchers have demonstrated that by using a semiconductor with flexible bonds, the material can be moulded into various structures using nano containers, without altering its composition, the discovery could lead to the design of a variety of customised electronic devices using only a single element.

Researchers have demonstrated that by using a semiconductor with flexible bonds, the material can be moulded into various structures using nano containers, without altering its composition, the discovery could lead to the design of a variety of customised electronic devices using only a single element.

Large shifts in UV radiation at Lake Tahoe are associated with wet and dry climate extremes, finds a new study.

People with incomplete cervical spinal cord injuries showed improvements to their hand and arm movements after receiving a targeted form of vagus nerve stimulation

Teeth are good for chewing and biting, but they are also sensitive – and that may have been their original function hundreds of millions of years ago

After two decades of debate, research confirms that an odd binary star system has an equally odd planetary companion

The globe is criss-crossed by unused fibre-optic cables. Now, researchers are using them to defend against earthquakes and produce an unprecedented map of the underground world

Mars' oceans, lakes, and rivers are long gone. They've left behind evidence of their time here in river channels, deltas, paleolakes, and other features. The water's existence isn't a mystery, but its whereabouts is. Did it disappear into space, or did it retreat into underground aquifers?

In my first post of this series of two I maintained that First-Amendment-style freedom of speech, or something close to it, is necessary for the functioning of a democracy. But free speech is also touted not just as a prerequisite for having democracy, but a necessity for producing the “clash of ideas” that will give rise to the truth.  My contention in the first post is that while free speech is politically vital, it cannot by itself lead to finding the truth. For that you need what I call “expanded academic freedom”:  the right of individuals (usually academics or scholars) to think, write, and speak whatever they want. For this second endeavor is, unlike free speech, the one that allows people to look at the universe and see what is empirically true. (As I said earlier, the “truth” in my view, and that of the OED, is “something that conforms to fact or reality”, and knowledge, defined as “justified true belief”, is simply widely accepted truth.)

These are the two linchpins for finding and disseminating truth. Academic freedom guarantees the right to investigate reality and find out what is (provisionally) true, while freedom of speech guarantees the right to promulgate what you’ve found out. They work together to find the truth and (also important) make it publicly visible and publicly acknowledged: that is, they work together to produce knowledge.

I have construed academic freedom broadly and not limited it to academics. However, even on campus, academic freedom, just like freedom of speech, has its limits.  It is not true that I can teach creationism in an evolution class, or rail about Trump in a class about British history.  Academic freedom allows you to stay within the parameters of accepted knowledge and discourse within a field and, if you’re broaching new and heterodox ideas, they must be relevant to the class topic. If you violate this repeatedly, you’re likely to lose your academic job, and can have tenure revoked.

Similarly, academics are free to research anything they want, but that is no guarantee that their research will meet the standards of their field. If I was hired as a geneticist but spend my time studying the behavior of crickets, and not doing a good job of it, then yes, I could be disciplined or let go. You are free to do what you want within the parameters of your job, but that doesn’t guarantee career success.

(I won’t go into the the issue here of whether there is free speech in the classroom, though there clearly isn’t: again, professors can say what they want in class, but will be deep-sixed if it’s not relevant to the subject being taught. And classes also have is compelled speech: students are compelled to answer questions verbally or on exams, and are not free to give any answer they want.)

The separation of free speech and academic freedom is not a clean one. For example, a professor might say something in a didactic capacity that some students might consider harassment, like the professor at Hamline College who got into trouble for showing a picture of Muahmmad as a person, which offended some students. (The prof, who left, was ultimately vindicated.) However, there is a difference between freedom of speech adjudicated by the government, and freedom of thought, research, and teaching that is regulated by a professor’s field of work or department.

While freedom of speech assures professors at public universities of the right to promulgate their ideas, it is academic freedom, not freedom of speech, that allows them the latitude to study what they want and teach not only the gist of a subject, but promote a students’ ability to think.  It is academic freedom—the freedom of inquiry—that has:

• Made the American university system a huge draw for students and researchers throughout the world (the US has 80% of the world’s top 50 universities).
•  Led to 71% of all Nobel Prizes awarded having gone to Americans (29% of immigrants to America).  55% of the total are in science.
• Prompted many revolutionary discoveries, including polio and other vaccines, gene editing technology, MRI, lasers, and GPS. (note that academic freedom obtains in many other countries, where it’s also promoted discoveries, including the structure of DNA and, in part CRISPR editing).
• Led to the preeminence of American industry in creating scientific innovations, including microchip technology, vaccines for mumps, rubella, chickenpox, pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis B, and hepatitis A, and various drugs.

While industry doesn’t have “academic freedom” in the sense that universities do, remember that most of the researchers in industry who create these innovations were trained in universities and absorbed their research ethos. But of course companies don’t have freedom of speech in the way that universities do; for example, they have the right to keep the technique behind their discoveries confidential for a time without publishing all the details.

You’ll notice that I have stayed away from humanities fields like literature, art, music, philosophy and law.  Why? Because, in my view, while these fields may produce interpretations or analyses of things like novels and paintings, they do not yield empirical truths. Literature, music, and painting, for example, are not “ways of knowing” but “ways of feeling or thinking”. (I discuss this in Chapter 4 of Faith Versus Fact).

This of course does not mean that such fields are without worth or merit; every reader here knows of my admiration for much of the humanities, particularly literature, art, and philosophy. It is simply that it’s not clear what we mean in such fields by the “pursuit of truth”.  What, for example is the “truth” in a Jackson Pollack painting or in Joyce’s Ulysses?  What is the (empirical) truth in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice? The latter gives us a provocative way to look at and construct morality, but of course there are a gazillion other suggestions about how to do that. Which one is the “true” path to morality?

Granted, fields like sociology and economics do traffic in truth, but truth that can be ascertained only by using the scientific method construed broadly, which I see as confluent with academic freedom.  It is the toolkit of science, which developed under academic freedom, that allows us to reach real truths, and that toolkit includes implements like falsifiability, quantitative methods, pervasive doubt and criticality (a feature of academic freedom itself), replication and quality control, parsimony, collectivity, double-blind testing, and peer review. These are laid out in Chapter 2 of Faith Versus Fact.  And in that book I also define “science construed broadly” as any endeavor that uses some of these tools to ascertain what’s true. So, for example, plumbers, car mechanics, and others who solve empirical problems using a version of the scientific method can be considered practicing “science construed broadly”. Steve Gould realized this in his essay Genesis vs. Geology, recounting his testimony in the creationism trial of McLean v. Arkansas:

As I prepared to leave Little Rock last December, I went to my hotel room to gather my belongings and found a man sitting backward on my commode, pulling it apart with a plumber’s wrench. He explained to me that a leak in the room below had caused part of the ceiling to collapse and he was seeking the source of the water. My commode, located just above, was the obvious candidate, but his hypothesis had failed, for my equipment was working perfectly. The plumber then proceeded to give me a fascinating disquisition on how a professional traces the pathways of water through hotel pipes and walls. The account was perfectly logical and mechanistic: it can come only from here, here, or there, flow this way or that way, and end up there, there, or here. I then asked him what he thought of the trial across the street, and he confessed his staunch creationism, including his firm belief in the miracle of Noah’s flood.As a professional, this man never doubted that water has a physical source and a mechanically constrained path of motion — and that he could use the principles of his trade to identify causes. It would be a poor (and unemployed) plumber indeed who suspected that the laws of engineering had been suspended whenever a puddle and cracked plaster bewildered him. Why should we approach the physical history of our earth any differently?

I see I’ve digressed a bit, so let me summarize. What is this sweating professor trying to say? (And remember, this is simply a first draft of some nascent ideas.) My claim is that freedom of speech does not by itself lead to truth via the much-vaunted “clash of ideas”.  That clash is necessary to find the truth, but not sufficient. Atop it one must place academic freedom: the freedom of scholars to teach, think, and research what they want.

I also claim that much of the humanities, whatever they claims, is not capable of finding truth, since it doesn’t turn on empirical facts but on critical analyses, competing theories, and competing interpretations. That doesn’t make humanities lesser than science—unless scholars in fields like art, music, and literature claim that they are practicing “another way of knowing.” Some disciplines, notably philosophy are good at of pointing out errors of thinking and guiding rational thinking, but again (in my view) do not and cannot find truths about the universe in which we dwell.

Finally, academic freedom is separate but still intertwined with freedom of speech, but they differ in important ways. The practice of academic freedom does not assume that all ideas are equal or all people are equal in merit: academia is hierarchical and meritocratic, while the First Amendment assumes that all views when expressed are equal and nobody gets an extra say because of their merit. Freedom of speech promotes the emergence of competing truths, while academic freedom emphasizes the ascertainment of the “truest” of these competitors.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “conduit,” came with the caption, “To be fair, he did make that clear.” And once again we see two of the prime features of Mo’s character: hypocrisy and cluelessness.

In case you’ve forgotten your religious history, yes, the Qur’an was dictated to Muhammad, but through a primary conduit: an angel. As Wikipedia notes:

Muslims believe the Quran was orally revealed by God to the final Islamic prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel incrementally over a period of some 23 years, beginning on the Laylat al-Qadr, when Muhammad was 40, and concluding in 632, the year of his death. Muslims regard the Quran as Muhammad’s most important miracle, a proof of his prophethood, and the culmination of a series of divine messages starting with those revealed to the first Islamic prophet Adam, including the holy books of the Torah, Psalms, and Gospel in Islam.

And heeeere’s the Divine Duo:

As humanity heads back to the Moon, a silent danger lurks: exhaust plumes from multiple spacecraft will blast lunar dust into orbit, creating a potentially deadly obstacle course for future missions. The solution will be to build landing pads on the lunar surface out of the lunar regolith. Researchers simulated landing pads just like these and their tests showed they could handle the heat and force of the propellant exhaust from a landing spacecraft. The techniques they found will minimise erosion over multiple landings.

We’re running low on this feature, so please send in some good photos. I won’t beg again for a while.

Today we have photos from Africa by Loretta Michaels.  Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Brief Introduction: I used to do a lot of business in Africa and so I almost always tried to tack on a weekend safari of some sort while there.  Most of these times I had only my iphone to take pictures, unlike the bigger safari vacations my husband & I take with all our camera gear.

While in Dar es Salaam on business, I spent a weekend on Chumbe Island, just off the coast of Zanzibar.  One of the more bizarre sightings was a Coconut Crab (Birgus latro), the largest land crab in the world, which is able  to climb coconut palms and easily crack coconuts with its claws.  These crabs also eat fleshy fruit and even prey on smaller crabs. This species of crabs has evolved to live on land from the sea, returning to water only to lay their eggs. On land, they live in underground holes made with fibers from coconut husks, and are generally only spotted at night. An adult crab can reach one meter in length. It has a curled-under abdomen that makes it look like a lobster. Coconut crabs supposedly have very tasty meat, so, unfortunately, they are hunted:

Three nicely aligned bush elephants (Loxodonta africana) I saw during a trip to Zambia:

A nice female African lion (Panthera leo), spotted during a night drive in Zambia:

A Komodo Dragon (Varanus komodoensis) spotted during a drive:

Two white rhino (Ceratotherium simum) in Nairobi National Park, a 45 square mile wildlife sanctuary established in 1946 just outside Nairobi:

Lunchtime at the Lilayi Elephant Nursery just outside Lusaka, Zambia.  The baby elephants are just adorable to watch, especially as they come running in from the fields when they see it’s feeding time:

A Golden Monkey (Cercopithecus mitis kandti) spotted in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda:

A mother and baby mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei) in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, just outside Kigali. It is one of two subspecies of the Eastern Gorilla.  The other population lives in the Congo. The park is one of the 3 homes of the endangered mountain gorillas within the Virunga Mountains:

Dominant male gorilla in Volcanoes National Park:

Variable Sunbird (Cinnyris venustus) in Rwanda. The sunbirds are a group of small Old World passerine birds which feed largely on nectar, although they will also take insects, especially when feeding young. Flight is fast and direct on their short wings. Most species can take nectar by hovering like a hummingbird, but usually perch to feed most of the time:

“Fragments” of West Nile virus have been detected in UK mosquitoes, suggesting that the virus is circulating in the country, probably as a result of the warming climate

While the medical world is melting down from the absolute apocalypse that is RFK Jr., it’s good to celebrate that (at least for now) medical progress continues to march on. Recently published in the NEJM is a case report of a breakthrough that we may look back on as a milestone in medicine. Patient-Specific In Vivo Gene Editing to Treat a Rare […]

The post Personalized CRISPR Gene Editing Therapy first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

China's ambitious Tianwen-2 mission will soon be heading to two extremely different space rocks, and should provide vital data to help us understand the nature of asteroids and comets

A record 67,000 square kilometres of primary rainforest was lost from the tropics in 2024, with global warming and El Niño contributing to a massive jump in fire-driven damage

Jupiter and its powerful gravity have played a major role in sculpting the Solar System. A new study provides a glimpse into Jupiter's primordial state, which could have implications for our understanding of how the Solar System evolved.

A metamaterial is a composite material that exhibits unique properties due to its structure, and now researchers have used one featuring a small sawtooth pattern on its surface to move and position objects underwater without touching them directly. Adjacent speakers exert different forces on the material based on how the sound waves reflect off it, and by carefully targeting the floating or submerged metamaterial with precise sound waves, researchers can push and rotate the object attached to it.