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Over the past 90 years, astronomers have successfully matched several Chinese historical records of "guest stars" with known supernovae. However, identifying historical novae (smaller stellar explosions) has proven to be far more challenging, with many proposed candidates later turning out to be comets or meteors instead. One particularly debated case involves a guest star recorded in 1408 CE by Chinese astronomers. A team of astronomers now think they may have finally been able to identify the event, a rare nova that could potentially solve this centuries old astronomical mystery.

On May 10th, while striking a selfie to mark its 1,500th day on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance Rover got an unexpected guest star—a towering dust devil swirling in the distance photobombed the shot. The rover was on Witch Hazel Hill, an area on the rim of Jezero Crater that it has been exploring for the last 5 months. The dust devil on the other hand was sneaking into the background from a distance of 5 km away. The selfie image was made up of 59 separate photos taken by the rover using its WATSON camera.

How one special moment redefined how a science teacher does her job.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A not so expert "expert"

The post A Checkered History in Vaccine Court: Mark Geier at the VICP 1988-2003 first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

For our final video of the day, we have a two-minute clip of a very gutsy man rescuing a big male kangaroo who was caught in a metal cable. All’s well that ends well.

Kangaroos are reputed to be dangerous, for they can kick you hard. But I found only two reported human deaths due to kangaroos. The animal most likely to kill you in Australia, according to Wikipedia’s “animal attacks in Australia” article, is snakes, with between 3 and 10 deaths per year.

Of the roughly 6,000 exoplanets we've discovered, a significant number are in the apparent habitable zones of their stars. Most are giant planets; either gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, or ice giants like Uranus and Neptune. Could some of those have habitable exomoons?

More video today!  This one, of course, was suggested to me by YouTube, since I watch a lot of food videos as well as history videos. And it’s exactly the kind of video that I would have to click on, as it lists the favorite foods of every American President.

Here are the Presidents who, in my view, had the best taste (you’ll have to watch to see their favorites):

Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Tyler
James K. Polk
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses S. Grant
Teddy Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Lyndon Johnson***
Jimmy Carter

LBJ gets the kudos for liking the best dish, and, looking over the list, I see that it’s weighted with Presidents who liked Southern food. No surprise, as it’s America’s best regional cuisine.  They do mention a McDonald’s Filet O’ Fish as Trump’s favorite, but I thought he liked Big Macs better. Either way, he doesn’t make the list.

Banking a baby’s umbilical cord blood was once seen as a reasonable way to protect their future health, but much of that potential has turned out to be mere hype

A friend who is laid up with covid, and watching New Atheist videos (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, etc.) for the first time, sent me a new (six-day-old) [rp=atheist video made by someone I didn’t know. That would be Darante’ LaMar Martin, a former pastor who deconverted. In this 17.3-minute video, he makes two assertions: that there is no tangible evidence supporting the miracles of the Bible and thus the foundational claims of Christianity; and the spread of Christianity was based on “imperial enforcement” by king rather than on its truth. (Later adherents would have no way on checking the truth, anyway, and we know that the sole evidence underlying the world’s most popular religion, with 2.6 billion adherents, is solely the Bible. There is no extra-Biblical evidence for a person, much less his acts, on whom the New Testament is based.

You probably have heard some of the arguments against Jesus’s miracles before (e.g., the lack of contemporaneous evidence for a Jesus Man, as well as the absence of evidence that, upon the Crucifixion, the sky darkened and dead saints emerged from their graves. But the stuff about the subsequent spread of the faith, like the story of Constantine’s conversion (or rather, cooption), was new to me. (I can’t vouch for this other stuff; perhaps readers can judge it.)

It’s not clear whether Darante‘ believes that there was a Jesus figure on whom the faith was based. He implies that there was a “spiritual figure”  named Christus, a man who didn’t have a lot of followers but was executed by the Romans because he posed a “fringe threat.”  As he says, “The Romans didn’t kill a king; they killed a failed prophet.”

About the spread of Christianity he adds this: “The story of Christianity’s rise is not a story of truth triumphing over doubt. It’s a story of power rewriting the rules of belief. Christianity didn’t spread because Jesus walked out of a tomb. It spread because Christianity coopted its rivals, aligned with empire, absorbed its enemies, and forged its own legitimacy with law, violence, and theological branding.”

You know of prominent Christians who expound their beliefs in the mainstream media.  Some, like Andrew Sullivan, irk me because while I admire their political views, I see their religious belief as a form of irrationality or even hypocrisy: they accept things without the evidence they’d demand for political assertions.  Others include Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I’m not too hard on because she found religion to be the only palliative for her severe, suicidal depression.

The most irksome is Ross Douthat, whose new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Douthat is flogging it everywhere (the NYT gives him a big platform), and making no bones about believing in not only Jesus and the Crucifixion, but also the afterlife, Satan, assorted demons, purgatory, and angels.  While Sullivan and more liberal believers are clearly reluctant to describe the contents of their beliefs, Douthat has purchased the whole hog and proffers slices of ham to everyone.

Martin’s YouTube page, with more atheist videos, is here. (try “The ten top lies I told as a pastor.“) He has a charismatic style of speaking, and I can imagine that he was a good preacher before he saw the light.

 

Captured carbon dioxide could be injected deep in the Earth to dissolve rocks, freeing up nickel and other key metals vital for batteries

We have 2-3 more groups of photos, so please send in any good ones you have.

Today’s photos are of plants, and were taken by Aussie Julia Monaghan. Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Australian Native Plants (mostly)

These photos were taken in my and my neighbour’s garden, in the Lake Macquarie area of New South Wales, one of Australia’s largest coastal salt water lakes. As Australia often has a very hot, dry climate (thought we do have flooding at the moment), plants have many different adaptations to cope with the generally harsh climate, often growing in poor soils with full sun and low water supply. I took my photos using my Samsung phone.

Hairpin Banksia flower (Banksia spinulosa). A species of small woody shrub in the Proteaceae family, native to eastern Australia. The spikes are gold or sometimes yellowish. Specimens of Banksia were first collected by naturalists Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, on the Endeavour during Lieutenant James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific Ocean:

Hairpin Banksia bush (Banksia spinulosa). Banksia are adapted to fire, which plays an important role in seed release and germination. The plant’s reproductive structures, the woody follicles, store its seeds and only release them when exposed to the heat of a bushfire:

Hairpin Banksia (Banksia spinulosa) post pollination. As the flowers die they will develop into woody, fruiting cones:

Grevillea Mason’s Hybrid (Grevillea banksii × Grevillea bipinnatifidajubata) are a small spreading shrub that attract and feed native birds throughout sping and summer. A cultivar from a genus of over 350 flowering plants in the family Proteaceae, they are also known as  spider flowers.  This Grevillea is also named the Ned Kelly after one of Australia’s most notorious bushrangers:

Grevillea ‘Peaches and Cream’ (Grevillea bankssi × Grevillea bipinnatifida). Another Grevillea cultivar, their nectar is a reliable food source from winter to spring that feeds honeyeaters such as lorikeets and parrots. Grevilleas are generally very heat and drought tolerant:

Stiff Bottlebrush (Calistemon rigidus) attracts a variety of birds, from nectar-feeding species such as honeyeaters, to seed-eating birds such as cockatoos. Its dense foliage acts as a habitat for many different birds, as it provides thick cover and many nesting opportunities:

Purple Morning Glory (Ipomoea indica) is a climbing vine that grows quickly and smothers other plants. Considered a reportable weed, it was introduced from  Mexico or Central America as a garden plant but has become established in different ecosystems:

Coastal or Cairo Morning Glory (Ipomoea cairica) is another climbing vine introduced from Africa or Asia, that grows rapidly, smothering other plants. It has also been classified as an environmental weed:

Kangaroo Paw Bush – Pink (Anigozanthus) are a smaller cultivar of the Kangaroo Paw. They are very tolerant of drought and coastal conditions once they are established. They come in a variety of vibrant colours, including brilliant red, bright pink and bright yellows:

Kangaroo Paw Flower – Pink ( Anigozanthus). Their tufted flowers covered with velvety hairs resemble the paw of a kangaroo, hence their name:

Kangaroo Paw Flower – Yellow (Anigozanthus):

Grasstree (Xanthorrhoea australis). These are ancient trees consisting of a thick trunk made up of a dense layer of old leaves forming a protective layer around a softer core, with a tuft of newer leaves forming a crown at the top of the tree. These trees are extremely slow growing and may take many years to flower. While bushfires may burn the leaves and blacken the trunk, the plant’s living core is protected as it sits underground. In this species, fire stimulates flowering:

Results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggest that dark energy, a mysterious force in the universe, is changing over time. This would completely re-write our understanding of the cosmos - but now other physicists are challenging this view

The idea of a multiverse of universes is derived from a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, but now a new twist on a classic experiment says it is time to put the idea to bed

President Donald Trump and HHS Secretary's MAHA report has landed. It's a mix of the good (a little), but mostly the bad and the ugly (a lot).

The post The MAHA Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (mostly the bad and ugly) first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

It’s time for another duck report, though I’ve been very tardy. The ducklings have grown a lot since the photos I show here, but the penultimate photo tells you what they looked like yesterday.

First, here’s lazy Mordecai, who is loath to fly. When he encounters stairs (this is before the ducklings hatched), he hops up them rather than flies:

The brood in the pond. They were still small when these pictures were taken, at about a week old (they’re now 19 days old).

Here’s Esther and her brood when they were two days old. Note that there are seven ducklings. We lost one to unknown causes :-(, but the rest are alive and healthy.

Mom and brood sunning on a stone:

Nap time!

One week old:

The babies love to climb on stones, and fortunately the pond is furnished with lots of them. They do this to dry off and also to warm up. Esther, always attentive, is right beside them. She’s turned out to be a great mother despite her hamhanded building of a nest on the ground.

Mordecai, whom I haven’t seen in 3.5 days, would stand guard while Esther was with the brood. They were small enough at a week old that she could sit on them all, but now they’re too big (see below):

A goose-stepping one-week-old duckling:

They like to swim in the discarded plastic pots previously (and unsuccessfully) used to grow plants. The pots have been left in the pond.

The Lab School teachers (a K-12 University of Chicago-affiliated school) know that the ducklings are here, and I’ve been asked to show them the ducks and answer their questions twice. I did it first with the kindergarten students, and below I’m talking to the 3rd through 5th graders while feeding the ducks. It’s a great joy to do this and field diverse questions of the students. (A frequent one: “Do the ducklings have names?”  Answer: “No, because we can’t tell them apart.”)

Another adorable week-old duckling:

. . . and here’s a photo I took yesterday. Look how they’ve grown! These are 19-day-old ducklings, so this represents about two weeks of growth from the photos above. Don’t worry; I have more photos and videos documenting their growth. These have full crops as they’ve just been fed.

And Mordecai, ever watchful (and plump). He seems to have disappeared, and I hope he returns. But his job as father is largely done. He did try to drive away invading drakes, but now Esther will have to do that herself. (I was told that last night she drove away three drakes!)

I’ve posted her often about the follies of “de-extincting” animals like the dire wolf, dodo, and woolly mammoth, culminating in a Boston Globe op-ed on May 1.  I’ve been quite critical of de-extinction claims, particularly those of Colossal Biosciences, which claims to have de-extincted the dire wolf, is on track to de-extinct woolly mammoths by 2028, and says it’s working on bringing back the dodo and the thylacine. My Globe op-ed explains four major problems with Colossal’s program. The first was this:

First, and most important, “de-extinction” is not de-extinction. The company says its claim to have de-extincted the dire wolf is legitimate because its edited pups meet some of the criteria for species “proxies” established in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But that claim is bogus. What Colossal has made is simply a gray wolf with a handful of genetic tweaks changing its size and color.

In the case of the mammoth, what we (may eventually) have is an Asian elephant with a handful of mammoth traits. And a handful of mammoth traits does not a mammoth make. I can paint my Ford Taurus bright red and even attach the Ferrari insignia to its hood, but it’s still a Ford Taurus, albeit with a handful of Ferrari traits. The Ferrari-ness of a Ferrari permeates every feature of a Ferrari’s engineering, just as the mammoth-ness of a mammoth permeates every feature of its biology. We know from ancient DNA studies that mammoths differ from Asian elephants at 1.4 million sites along its DNA, yet Colossal plans to mammoth-ize only a tiny fraction of these. Victoria Herridge, a mammoth expert, has described Colossal’s “mammoth” as nothing more than “an elephant in a fur coat.”

I am of course not the first scientist to point this out. Several, including Tori Herridge and Adam Rutherford, have written severely critical takes on Colossal’s claims.  But the mainstream media, by and large, ate up those claims.  Science journals and popular-science magazines like Science and New Scientist, however, did publish trenchant criticisms.

I believe Colossal was stung by these criticisms, which I’m sure they didn’t anticipate—though they should have. The company pushed back, but eventually, in an article in New Scientist (see below and my post), quoted Colossal’s chief scientific officer, evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro, as finally admitting that they really didn’t produce dire wolves, but grey wolves with a handful of edited genes that supposedly made the tweaked canids look more like ancient dire wolves.

Click below to see  Colossal’s partial retraction, which is also archived here:

Here’s how Beth Shapiro walked back the dire wolf de-extinction claim:

Well, yes, they had said they were dire wolves.  As the NYT reported on May 11:

The resulting animals [the gene-edited solves] were larger and fluffier and lighter in color than other gray wolves. The company’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, says this is enough to make them dire wolves, if you subscribe to the “morphological species concept,” which defines a species by its appearance. “Species concepts are human classification systems,” she told New Scientist, “and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right.”

Here’s Shapiro saying the same thing in a Bluesky post:

A statement from our Chief Science Officer, Dr. Beth Shapiro, on the dire wolf project pic.twitter.com/upl3WPSeUw

— Colossal Biosciences® (@colossal) April 10, 2025

Oy!  Everybody can disagree and everyone can be right!  All must have prizes!  She says that Colossal chose to call them dire wolves because they look like dire wolves. That’s a highly watered-down version of the morphological species concept, one of the alternative species concepts that Allen Orr and I criticized in our book Speciation (see chapter 1 and Appendix). But the most trenchant and humorous criticism of using this concept to rescue Colossal’s claim also came from the NYT piece:

A lot of people disagreed. Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.”

LOL.

In fact, we have no idea whether the three animals produced by Colossal even look a lot like the extinct dire wolf. For one thing, Colossal used mutations known in wolves and dogs (not taken from the dire wolf genome) to make the three living individuals white.  We don’t know if dire wolves were white, and some think they were reddish-brown, which seems more appropriate given that they didn’t live in the Arctic. (They lived in woodlands in the tropics and temperate zone.) And, as I’ve emphasized at great length, they can’t give the de-extincted animals the brains of the original species, for we don’t know which genes control the brain differences, much less what the brain differences were. Absent that ability, no de-extincted animal can behave like its model—something crucial if you want, as Colossal claims, to restore these animals to their “original” habitat.

But where we were as of yesterday was that Colossal, via Beth Shapiro, had finally admitted that they had not produced dire wolves but genetically tweaked gray wolves (of the 20 tweaks, five came from mutations in dogs and gray wolves, not from the dire wolf genome).

Now, however, they’ve walked it back again!  The tweet below shows a statement sent to New Scientist by a spokesperson at Colossal. Jacob Aron is the magazine’s news editor and he, like all of us, is now deeply confused. Colossal says that yes, they DID make dire wolves:

Colossal has sent us a statement, which we've added to the story. I don't feel the situation is any clearer…

— Jacob Aron (@jjaron.bsky.social) 2025-05-24T11:14:21.057Z

The New Scientist article now has this “correction:

Yep, let me put that in big letters: “WITH THOSE EDITS, WE HAVE BROUGHT BACK THE DIRE WOLF”.  And even using the concept of “functional de-extinction” is bogus, for they know nothing about the function (behavior, etc.) of the dire wolf.  All we know is that we have three white-colored gray wolves that may have bigger heads than did gray wolves when the trio grows up.  But 20 genetic tweaks is a teeny, tiny fraction of the thousands of differences between the extinct and the de-extincted creature, including the missing differences in brain structure.

The impression I get is that Colossal is now in PR chaos, stung by criticisms made by scientists and quoted in the press. They are desperate to say that they really have de-exincted animals despite the fact that all they have are three white canids, each with 15 DNA letters changed from gray wolf code to code taken from the dire wolf. Really, by any stretch of the imagination these are not members of a resurrected species. And the more Colossal opens its yap, now contradicting itself twice, the less respect I have for it.

After Shapiro admitted that Colossal hadn’t resurrected dire wolves, one of my colleagues posted this on Facebook:

I’m OK with this…I like it when scientists admit that they were wrong, or over-stated something. Although the initial press release was misleading at best, I’m glad that they clarify that these were not really Dire Wolves.

Sadly, they now say that they really are dire wolves. I’ve informed said colleague about the update, and we’ll see what he/she says.

h/t: Matthew

Hey, folks, this is the penultimate batch of photos I have. Please send me more!

As it’s Sunday, we have photos from John Avise, continuing his series on dragonflies and damselflies of North America. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Dragonflies in North America, Part 6

This week I continue my series of posts on Dragonflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’ve gone down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name, and also show the state where I took each photo.  Next week, PCC(E) willing,  we’ll probably start a short series on Dragonflies’ close cousins, the Damselflies (also in the taxonomic Order Odonata).

Wandering Glider, Pantala flavescens, male (California):

White-faced Meadowhawk, Sympetrum obtrusum. male (Wisconsin):

White-faced Meadowhawk, another male (Michigan):

White-faced Meadowhawk, female (Wisconsin):

Widow Skimmer, Libellula luctuosa, male (Wisconsin):

Widow Skimmer, female (Wisconsin):

Yellow-legged Meadowhawk, Sympetrum vicinum, male  (Michigan):

Yellow-legged Meadowhawk, female (Michigan):

Yellow-legged Meadowhawk, mating pair, (Michigan):

Astronomers with the Event Horizon Telescope have developed a new way to observe the radio sky at multiple frequencies, and it means we will soon be able to capture color images of supermassive black holes.

Live from NotACon with Guest Rogue Adam Russell; News Items: New Cambrian Fossil, Best Archaeopteryx Specimen, Chimps Using First Aid, Treatment for Baldness, New Color - Olo, The Next Theranos, Bespoke Genetic Therapy; Science or Fiction

Researchers have discovered a new 2D material, confirming decade-old prediction.