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At the heart of our galaxy lies a cosmic puzzle: although the Galactic Center is packed with star-making material, massive stars form there surprisingly slowly. Using NASA's retired SOFIA observatory, scientists captured rare high-resolution infrared views that revealed dozens of new stars being born, but not in the numbers or sizes one might expect.

Solar sails are space's ultimate free ride, they get their propulsion from the Sun, so they don't need to carry propellant, but they come with their own challenges. A sail has a large surface area but a low mass, which creates a huge moment of inertia and makes it difficult to control, especially with reaction wheels. A team of engineers have cracked it though with "smart mirrors" that can instantly switch their reflectivity on command, transforming sunlight from an unruly force into a precision steering tool.

The early universe was shrouded in darkness. Just hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, a thick fog of hydrogen gas choked the cosmos, blocking light from traveling far. At some point, this gas became ionized, stripped of its electrons. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have identified the culprit: low-mass starburst galaxies emitting huge amounts of ultraviolet light. In just one patch of sky. They discovered 83 of these galactic powerhouses in one part of the sky at a time when the Universe was only 800 million years old.

An international team of astronomers using the [*Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor*](https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/class/) (CLASS) [reported the first-ever measurement](https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/06/11/telescopes-look-at-cosmic-dawn/) announced the first-ever detection of radiation from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) interacting with the first stars in the Universe.

Here’s the comedy/news bit from yesterday’s “Real Time”:  another New Rules bit called “The MUSKeteers,” so you know what the subject is.  Maher takes up Musk’s suggestion that we create a new political party comprising the 80% of Americans “in the middle.” Maher admires Musk’s engineering ability, but not his ability to manage the government; nor does Maher like Musk’s handling of Twitter, which apparently isn’t the free-speech zone Musk had promised. Still Maher runs through a list of Musk’s engineering accomplishments (Starlink, electric cars, SpaceX, etc.), and that alone will rile up those Manichaean progressives who cannot allow themselves to admit that Musk ever did anything good.

In the end, Maher asserts that Musk simply doesn’t belong in government, as it’s a completely different skillset (if you can call it “skill”; Maher calls it “the opposite of exceptional”).

Note that Maher uses one of my famous phrases: “It’s Chinatown, Jake.”

There’s also a four minute discussion between Maher and Senator John Fetterman. There’s not a lot of substance to it, but I do like Fetterman, and not just because he’s sympathetic to Israel. He’s a down-home guy and doesn’t put up with bullshit, a quality we need more of in Congress.

UC San Diego engineers have created a passive evaporative cooling membrane that could dramatically slash energy use in data centers. As demand for AI and cloud computing soars, traditional cooling systems struggle to keep up efficiently. This innovative fiber membrane uses capillary action to evaporate liquid and draw heat away without fans or pumps. It performs with record-breaking heat flux and is stable under high-stress operation.

The ancestry-testing company 23andMe has had a hard go lately. First, in 2023 a data leak at the company exposed millions of customers’ personal information—inhcluding genetic information—to hackers. As Wikipedia reports:

The cyberattack gathered profile and ethnicity information from millions of users. The affected customers were reported as primarily Ashkenazi Jews but also including hundreds of thousands of ethnically Chinese users. The hacker(s) stole information customers had chosen to share with their DNA matches, which could include name, profile photo, birth year, location, family surnames, grandparents’ birthplaces, ethnicity estimates, mitochondrial DNA haplogroup, Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup, link to external family tree, and any text content a customer had optionally included in their “About” section. On October 6, 2023, the company confirmed that the hacker(s) had illicitly accessed data on approximately 6.9 million users.

And now the company is going to sell off its genetic data to a new company, TTAM Research Institute. We were informed by 23andMe (I was a customer), that we could have our genetic data deleted before the sale, and I naturally did this; I believe I urged customers somewhere on this site to delete their data, too (you can always use a different company in the future).  But 23andMe is now subject to a lawsuit involving this sale:

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have sued the genetic-testing company 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent.

The suit, filed on Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, argues that 23andMe needs to have permission from each and every customer before their data is potentially sold. The company had entered an agreement to sell itself and its assets in bankruptcy court.

The information for sale “comprises an unprecedented compilation of highly sensitive and immutable personal data of consumers,” according to the lawsuit.

The CEO of the company was promptly dragged before a Senate committee to explain what 23andMe were going to do with the data, and his performance, as you’ll see in the eight-minute video below, was abysmal; he wriggled like a caught eel.

This wiggling and evasion from CEO Joseph Selsavage is even more waffle-y than was the testimony of the MIT, Harvard, and Penn Presidents before Congress (actually, the Presidents answered accurately, but it wasn’t good enough for Representative Elise Stefanik). A reader sent me the link to the new

video with this comment:

I thought you might be interested in this.  You recommended that readers who used 23&Me to conduct genetic analysis might want to delete their data after the company claimed bankruptcy and intend to sell this data to Regeneron for $300M [JAC: see above, TTAM won the bidding over Regeneron.]  I followed your sound advice.

Very disconcerting is this hearing where Senator Josh Hawley absolutely hammers the CEO of 23&Me about whether they are actually deleting our data or not even after instructed by customers to do so.  It’s not clear if they are actually permanently expunging our data records or not given the waffling but how outrageous if they are not:

Here’s the caption for the YouTube video, which was posted on June 12:

At today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) questioned interim 23andMe CEO Joseph Selsavage.

Oy vey! Look at Selsavage equivocate and squirm! It’s a pathetic and reprehensible performance. And only Ceiling Cat knows what TTAM will do with our data. (Since I asked for mine to be deleted, Regeneron presumably doesn’t have it, but Selsavage isn’t at all clear about that.)   Hawley is civil but also persistent, and manages to show up Selsavage as somewhat of a liar.

A reader sent me this 5½-minute video, and although I’d heard the song before (I once had a girlfriend, a classical soprano, who performed it with a colleague), I’m not sure I’ve featured it on this site. Here’s the YouTube caption:

During a tour in Asia in 1996, Régis Mengus and Hyacinthe de Moulins, members of the Little Singers of the Paris, performed the “Duetto buffo di due gatti”, accompanied on the piano by Rodolphe Pierrepont.

And about the song, well, its origins aren’t clear, at least according to Wikipedia:

The “Duetto buffo di due gatti” (humorous duet for two cats) is a performance piece for two sopranos and piano. Often performed as a comical concert encore, it consists entirely of the repeated word miau (“meow”) sung by the singers. It is sometimes performed by a soprano and a tenor, or a soprano and a bass.

While the piece is typically attributed to Gioachino Rossini, it was not actually written by him, but is instead a compilation written in 1825 that draws principally on his 1816 opera Otello. Hubert Hunt claims that the compiler was Robert Lucas de Pearsall, who for this purpose adopted the pseudonym “G. Berthold”.[

Don’t miss the complex, fast-paced ending after the applause. Who wouldn’t like this song as part of a classical music concert? Play it for your cat, too!

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The BBC informs us in two article (click to read) that a famous cat named Hendrix has been memorialized, and explains why.

Some information (“Saltburn” is “Saltburn-by-the-Sea,” on the northeast coast of England:

A cat that became a “local celebrity” has had a statue unveiled in its honour.

More than £4,000 was raised to place a bronze statue on Saltburn’s pier in Redcar and Cleveland, where Hendrix was a familiar face – often letting himself into cafes and the local arcades.

The cat, who previously lived in Whitley Bay and was known to ride Metro trains on his own accord, was much-loved by locals and tourists alike.

Owner Nathan Bye thanked the people of Saltburn, Hendrix’s international social media fanbase and Redcar Council who had supported the campaign to memorialise him.

The article has a video about Hendrix, made by Adam Clarkson, which includes this frame of the statue’s unveiling. It’s worth the minute’s watching. People loved Hendrix, and raised £4000 to hve this statue made:

Another article from the Beeb tells us why Hendrix got so much love (click headline to read):

An excerpt from the 2024 piece:

“He always wanted to be outside,” Hannah Chiarella recalls, adding: “Sometimes he was outside for two or three weeks.”

But she did not need to worry too much when her cat Hendrix went on another adventure – his many fans would keep an eye out for him.

First on Tyneside, where he was often seen riding the Metro or hitching lifts on buses, and later on the beach at Saltburn in Redcar and Cleveland, he became something of a local legend.

So much so, people now want to put up a statue in Saltburn in memory of Hendrix, who died aged 12 in September.

“I thought it was quite a nice idea because he did used to bring a lot of joy to people at the beach,” Ms Chiarella says.

“I thought a nice memorial would continue bringing joy,” she adds.

. . .When the family moved closed to Whitley Bay Metro station and later to Saltburn, Hendrix, who was named after Jimi Hendrix, again went about winning over the locals and visitors.

People would send Ms Chiarella photos informing her of Hendrix’s whereabouts and she set up a Facebook page to keep everyone updated.

“We weren’t as worried about him because we knew that everyone was looking out for him,” she says.

Once in Saltburn, Hendrix made the beach his new hangout spot.

“He knew there were a lot of people there and he was going to get a lot of attention,” Ms Chiarella says

He used to go to Saltburn Pier Amusements every day and owner Chelsie Oughton says he used the place as a base, with people travelling just to see him.

“He was charming and just really funny,” Ms Oughton says, adding: “He was here every single day and people couldn’t help but notice him.

“He was a beautiful cat, like a little legend.”

But Hendrix was more than just a cute visitor – Ms Chiarella says he would also cheer people up.

“We used to get messages from people saying how they were sat at the beach, maybe feeling down, and Hendrix would just pop up,” she says.

“It would be a nice part of his life, he helped people as well,” she adds.

RIP, Hendrix. Here’s a short BBC video on Facebook. Click to watch it and be sure to put the sound on.

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Finally, we have a short article about carousel animals that were cats. The article below (click on either headline) gives the following information, along with a bunch of carousel-cat photos.

Golden Age carousel cats (of the domestic sort) came from mostly from The Dentzel Co. and Herschell-Spillman in the US. There were some very rare early PTC cats, but it’s hard to tell if they are domestic or more like Bobcats. Bayol carved a nice domestic carousel cat in France. The other european cats, like the early PTC, appear to be anything from Lynx or Bobcats to small Leopards or Puma. Often the domestic cats would be with their catch in mouth. Usually a fish or bird or occasional rodent, but not always. One Dentzel cat has a crustacean catch. There were quite a few cats carved, but not a lot by any one maker, so they remain among the more coveted carousel figures.

CAROUSEL CATS (ca. 1895-1928) – Historic carousel menagerie figures – Carousel Cats. Dentzel, Herschell-Spillman, Bayol and others carved carousel cats. Often the cats would be with their catch in mouth. Quite a few, but not a lot of cats were carved by any one maker, so they remain among the move coveted carousel figures.

I gather from this that old carousel animals are now collector’s items, which is no surprise.

Historic Carousel Cats

And a few photos (uncredited) from the article. Note that almost every ride-a-cat has a fish or bird in its mouth:

Prey-less cat. I rode on many carousel animals when I was a kid, but I don’t remember riding on a domestic cat.

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Lagniappe: a “life hack” from Linkiest:

 

h/t: Erike, Malcolm, Gregory

Dumbest Thing of the Week: Premium Water; News Items: NASA Budget, RFK Jr Sacks Vaccine Panel, Digital Life After Death, Light Out of Nothing, Possible New Treatment for HIV; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Replicating Eratosthenes; Science or Fiction

Astronomers using ALMA have uncovered how gas and dust in planet-forming disks evolve separately an insight that reshapes our understanding of how different types of planets form. While dust lingers, gas dissipates quickly, narrowing the window for the formation of gas giants like Jupiter.

Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have created a groundbreaking quantum device that can measure 3D acceleration using ultracold atoms, something once thought nearly impossible. By chilling rubidium atoms to near absolute zero and splitting them into quantum superpositions, the team has built a compact atom interferometer guided by AI to decode acceleration patterns. While the sensor still lags behind traditional GPS and accelerometers, it's poised to revolutionize navigation for vehicles like submarines or spacecraft potentially offering a timeless, atomic-based alternative to aging electronics.

Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have created a groundbreaking quantum device that can measure 3D acceleration using ultracold atoms, something once thought nearly impossible. By chilling rubidium atoms to near absolute zero and splitting them into quantum superpositions, the team has built a compact atom interferometer guided by AI to decode acceleration patterns. While the sensor still lags behind traditional GPS and accelerometers, it's poised to revolutionize navigation for vehicles like submarines or spacecraft potentially offering a timeless, atomic-based alternative to aging electronics.

Scientists at the University of Michigan have unlocked a long-standing mystery about quasicrystals exotic materials that straddle the line between the orderly structure of crystals and the chaos of glass. These rare solids, which once seemed to break the rules of physics, are now shown to be fundamentally stable through cutting-edge quantum simulations. The findings not only validate their existence but also open the door to designing next-generation materials using powerful new computational techniques.

Amidst an ongoing outbreak of a deadly bird flu virus in livestock, the US Department of Agriculture is doing more to prevent the spread than public health agencies are

We don't know what dark matter is, but that doesn't stop astronomers from using it to their advantage. Dark matter is part of what makes gravitational lensing so effective. Astronomers expect the Roman Space Telescope to find 160,000 gravitational lenses, and dark matter makes a crucial contribution to these lenses.

A ‘ghost plume’ identified deep in the mantle beneath Oman suggests there may be more heat flowing out of Earth’s core than previously thought

Putting unusually large atoms in a box with cold copper sides helped researchers control them for an unprecedented 50 minutes at room-temperature, an improvement necessary for building more powerful quantum computers and simulators

There appears to be a volcano near Jezero crater on Mars and the Perseverance rover might already have samples from it that we could use to precisely date the activity of another planet's volcano for the first time

Almost a decade ago, researchers calculated that microwaves can seemingly spend an imaginary amount of time within a material – now an experiment reveals how the phenomenon is perfectly real

You wanted zoomies? Well, you got ’em!  Here’s the brood on June 11 doing a bit of postprandial zooming.  It’s not absolutely predictable, though the probability of this behavior is highest after mealtime in the afternoon.  It usually begins with one duck going underwater and swimming, and soon the rest follow, seeming to race each other across the pond. I keep my camera close by, ready to take video if I see imminent signs of the zoomies.

While this looks like “play”, it’s probably practice for flying and flapping their wings: eventually they’ll take off if they do this.  As for whether the ducks are really having fun—getting pleasure out of this behavior, well—all I can respond is to utter the sentence that Jake tells Brett at the end of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

The babies are nearly five weeks old in this video. It’s hard to imagine when they were helpless little fluffballs!

We’ll have a longer post with videos and duck pictures on Sunday.