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Do you really need to pay quite so much attention to which foods you eat, and which you avoid?

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Summertime. And the living is easy. Janice Joplin has to be the best singer. Ever. There may be those in the comments who disagree, but remember, within the context of the blog, what I write is canon. Which is not the same as being true. Canon. Any-who. I spend summer on the front porch and rarely venture inside. Outside has had the […]

The post Infection Control/Infection Prevention first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Shortly after astronomers detected asteroid 2024 YR4 on December 27th, 2024, they realized it posed no threat to Earth. But it still might impact the Moon in 2032. The impact debris could threaten satellites and trigger an extraordinarily stunning meteor shower.

Very massive stars (VMSs), which typically has masses about 100 times that of our own Sun, are critical components in our understanding of the formation of important astronomical structures like black holes and supernovae. However, there are some observed characteristics of VMSs that don’t fit the expected behavior based on the best models we have of them. In particular, they hover around a relatively limited band of temperatures, which are hard to replicate with typical stellar evolution models. A new paper from Kendall Shepherd and their co-authors at the Institute for Advanced Study (SISSA) in Italy describes a series of new models based on updated solar winds that better fit the observations of VMSs in their natural environment, and might aid in our understanding of the development of some of the most fascinating objects in the Universe.

LUNAA Journeys (St. LUcia National Astronomy Association) is looking to address an all too common problem in the global astronomical community. Too often, participation in astronomy is seen as cost prohibitive, the sole pursuit of large universities or organizations that can afford to build a large modern observatory, or launch the Hubble Space Telescope. This is unfortunate, as there’s never been an era of more readily accessible information, out there in terms of astronomy and skywatching.

During its commissioning phase, NASA's [*Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere*](https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/punch/) (PUNCH) mission captured high-resolution images of a [Coronal Mass Ejection](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/coronal-mass-ejections) (CME) in greater detail than was previously possible.

Researchers have created a revolutionary robotic skin that brings machines closer to human-like touch. Made from a flexible, low-cost gel material, this skin transforms the entire surface of a robotic hand into a sensitive, intelligent sensor. Unlike traditional robotic skins that rely on a patchwork of different sensors, this material can detect pressure, temperature, pain, and even distinguish multiple contact points all at once.

When Apollo astronauts stumbled across shimmering orange beads on the moon, they had no idea they were gazing at ancient relics of violent volcanic activity. These glass spheres, tiny yet mesmerizing, formed billions of years ago during fiery eruptions that launched molten droplets skyward, instantly freezing in space. Now, using advanced instruments that didn't exist in the 1970s, scientists have examined the beads in unprecedented detail. The result is a remarkable window into the moon s dynamic geological history, revealing how eruption styles evolved and how lunar conditions once mirrored explosive events we see on Earth today.

For the first time in history, we re seeing the Sun from an angle no one ever has: from above and below its poles. Thanks to the European Space Agency s Solar Orbiter and its tilted orbit, scientists have captured groundbreaking images and data that are unlocking mysteries about the Sun s magnetic field, its puzzling 11-year cycle, and the powerful solar wind. Instruments aboard the spacecraft are already revealing strange, chaotic magnetic behavior near the Sun s south pole and tracking solar particles like never before. As the Orbiter climbs to even steeper viewing angles over the next few years, the secrets of our star may finally be within reach.

...because the CDC schedule is about to start shedding vaccines the way antivaxxers on ACIP think that those vaccinated against COVID-19 shed spike protein. Ground zero for RFK Jr.'s extinction-level event with respect to public health is vaccines.

The post RFK Jr.’s ACIP bloodbath: I hope you’re all up-to-date on your vaccines… first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Oy, how the ducklings have grown! Remember, today has been only 40 days since they hatched on May 6.  In all respects save their inability to fly, they are slightly small adults, though they still hang together as the Brood of Six. Here are some photos and videos taken over the last two weeks.

The pictures and videos below are presented chronologically, and were taken on four days: June 1, 5, 7, and 11. You can see the change in the ducklings over a period of only ten days: they’ve lost most of their fuzz and are mostly feathered, and their wings are getting larger.

Mother Esther, June 1:

More “babies”, if they can be called that. Esther stands on a plant pot and watches her offspring:

On June 1 the ducklings were growing feathers, most notably on their wings.

A video of ducklings leaving the water on June 1 for a postprandial grooming session and then a nap. They are able to leave the water and jump on the pond edge very easily now.

More preening on the same day:

And, after preening, they often form a clump o’ ducklings, keeping warm and together. Esther, as you see, is always nearby.  They’re also nibbling at the grass:

A single duckling giving itself a thorough cleaning.

By June 6, the ducklings had developed more extensive feathering, especially on their breasts. They look to me like little dinosaurs, which of course they are:

And they look quite plump after feeding, often with their craws hanging over the edge of the pond. We call these “Dali ducks”. But they are not fat.

The babies dunking themselves on June 6:

Father Mordecai, who hasn’t been around for a few days:

After dining, swimming, diving, and preening, the ducklings plop themselves down for a nap. I love the plopping:

On June 7 we had a bout of postprandial zooming:

Esther the Queen:

Esther always does thorough ablutions, for as mom, she has to be in good condition. (Soon she’ll molt and gradually lose her feathers, replacing them with shiny new ones. This process is gradual so she is not of course bald!)

Meanwhile, Mordecai, when he was there, would drive other ducks out of the pond. Here he subtly but insistently forces Haman the Evil Duck out of the pond:

By June 11 the ducklings had gotten almost all of their feathers, but their wing feathers are small and they can’t yet fly. They’re also a bit smaller than Esther, but not by very much. Here’s one sunning on a rock:

Duckling ablutions:

Dabbling. They seem to get some food from the pond, and I’ve seen them slurping down algae.  Here they all seem to have homed in one one area:

Homing as Esther watches:

A big-time case of the zoomies:

A duckling. It’s now hard to tell them from mother, and at a distance you have to concentrate on color (Esther is lighter) rather than on size. There’s just a bit of fuzz near the tail, but otherwise they are fully feathered. I predict they’ll be flying in two weeks.

As a reminder, here are two of them the day they hit the water: May 7:

Here I am hand-feeding a stray hen, who we call “Hoover” because she comes right up to us when we’re sitting and cleans up all the duck food spilled on the ground at feeding time. I felt sorry for her and gave her a handful of food, which she quickly grabbed, one pellet at a time. I don’t really want to feed her, but when a duck looks straight at you  with their beautiful faces and liquid eyes, it’s hard to resist. I am not feeding these stray ducks much at all, and they are often gone (eating elsewhere, I hope). Photo by Elsie Holzwarth:

Like the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the once-venerable American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has by and large abandoned its primary values and mission. In the case of the AAUP, celebrating its 110th anniversary this year, that mission was the protection of academic freedom as well as “to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.”

How has this happened? First, in a post in 2025 (see other critiques of mine here), I summarized the ways the AAUP has gone to ground:

The three changes the AAUP has made to this end include these (there are a few other and more minor ones included in the piece):

a.) Abandoned its opposition to academic boycotts

b.) Approved of the use of diversity statements, finding them “compatible with academic freedom”

c.) Averring that institutional neutrality, as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report, need not impact academic freedom one way or the other, so one need not adhere to the Kalven principle that the university or parts of it cannot issue ideological, political, or moral statements unless those statements bear directly on the mission of the University.

In a new article, the Chronicle of Higher Education (click headlines below of find it archived here), Matthew Finkin, once head of the committee that criticized academic boycotts and DEI criteria for promotion (“Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure”), explains the 180º turn the AAUP took on these positions. Finkin finds, as the title below shows, that the newer reversed positions are incompatible with the organization’s original mission. As he says:

Recent actions have departed from these standards — and radically. The AAUP, acting through its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, has, first, abandoned its prior position that systematic participation in the boycott of Israeli universities could threaten academic freedom and, second, declared that adherence to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dictates as a condition of faculty retention can be consistent with academic freedom. These actions reveal a body now driven by considerations other than fidelity to principle. As a result, the deep well of communal respect has been drained dry; the AAUP’s credibility has been destroyed.

Let’s summarize the source of the reversals by topic.

Academic boycotts. 

As recently as 2005, when the British Association of University Teachers called for its members not to engage academically with two Israeli universities, the AAUP opposed this move strongly, issuing this statement:

Since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics and irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest-possible international movement of scholars and ideas.

A subsequent subcommittee report opposed organized academic boycotts by groups (including both departments and universities), though of course considerations of academic freedom allow individuals to cooperate or collaborate with whomever they want.

Then came October 7, 2023 and the subsequent demonization of Israel by many liberals—liberals who, by and large, make up most university faculties. The AAUP then did that 180 and, in 2024, decided that boycotts of universities (read: Israeli universities) was okay after all.  And it allowed this because, the AAUP proclaimed, banning boycotts actually compromised academic freedom. The striking thing was that the AAUP gave not a single example of how boycotts actually had compromised academic freedom:

There matters stood until the summer of 2024, when Committee A approved a statement that expressly “supersedes” the position adopted nearly two decades before. The new Statement on Academic Boycotts explained its raison d’être: The 2006 position was “controversial, contested, and used to compromise academic freedom. We therefore believe that this position deserves reconsideration and clarification.” Unfortunately, the reasons given for this reconsideration are threadbare, at best. The result is a tangle of inconsistencies and begged questions — without any reference to, let alone inquiry into, the role played by freedom of research and teaching on which the committee’s position rested a generation before.

The assertion that because the 2006 position has been “used to compromise academic freedom” it should be reconsidered could provide a valid reason for revision. But the report makes no mention of any instance, in press accounts or complaints brought to the staff, of any faculty member having been disciplined or threatened with discipline simply for advocating for a boycott. So “compromise” must mean something other than violation or abridgment, but the 2024 statement breathes no hint of what.

The AAUP. whose Committee A chair, Rana Jaleel, is apparently pro-Palestibnian, favoring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, decided that academic boycotts were fine because opposing them would chill the speech and actions of those who favor boycotts. Note, though, that the AAUP is not a university, and so is not subject to academic neutrality provisions of universities. Further, this argument, as Finkin notes, is nonsensical:

This argument is logically flawed and empirically unsupported. By its logic, were the state to accede to the demands of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and divest university investments in companies that do business in Israel, those faculty members who oppose the boycott and wish to say so would have had their own academic freedom “compromised.” The only way that would not be the case would be to maintain that advocacy for BDS is protected by academic freedom, but advocacy against it is not.

Nor is there any factual basis for the claim that such legislation has actually “been used to compromise” academic freedom in that chilling sense. Illinois law, for example, directs its public-university retirement system to decline to invest in companies that observe the anti-Israel boycott and to divest in those that do. Yet at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the BDS movement shows no sign of abatement.

According to the AAUP’s new argument,  organized academic boycotts or prohibition of them would both infringe on academic freedom. The only rational solution is to impugn organized boycotts (but not individual ones), because such organized movements impinge on scholarly interchange between institutions, which is essential for academic freeedom. The AAUP blew this one.

DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) statements

Here we’re talking about the use of DEI statements as prerequisites for hiring, promotion, and tenure, something prohibited by the University of Chicago. Although our university favors at least the DI parts of DEI, it also considers ideological statements of this sort to violate our 1970 Shils Report, which bases hiring and promotion on meritocracy. DEI statements are compelled speech, as those who are forced to write them must adhere to the going norms of DEI, norms that sneer at statements like “I have treated and will treat all students the same, regardless of their immutable characteristics like race or religion.” Modern DEI statements are expressly ideological, hewing to “progressive” Leftist politics.

Finkin notes the slipshod way that the AAUP went about giving its imprimatur to DEI statements:

Had Committee A taken up DEI in keeping with its customary process of policy consideration in such a weighty matter, it would have assembled the data on what these policies actually provided, how widespread they were, and how they were being administered; engaged with the arguments on the relationship of DEI to academic freedom in the literature and in the deliberations of faculties, including those that refused to use them; and provided a clear, dispassionate analysis of how DEI stacked up against the 1940 statement’s commitment to freedom of research, teaching, and political engagement. It did nothing of the kind. Instead, it launched an aggressive defense of DEI accompanied by a strident attack on its critics, in all of six paragraphs and three conclusory recommendations. Each bears brief synopsis before the substance of the statement is addressed.

I won’t go through these arguments except to say that they seem to boil down to this:  if DEI statements are approved by a faculty as essential for professional advancement, then opposing them is violating academic freedom. Apparently academic freedom, says the AAUP, is what a faculty consensus says it is.  Finkin points out the problems with this view:

It is worth noting that a number of faculty members subject to the anti-Communist loyalty oath supported it, and a larger number were indifferent. The AAUP did not consider the depth of faculty support for the loyalty oath to have any bearing on its consequences for academic freedom. The reason is that the abridgment of academic freedom is a matter of fact irrespective of the status or motive of those effecting or acquiescing in it. The way Committee A has cast it, a DEI policy identical in every word would or would not abridge academic freedom depending only on the ideological or political proclivities of a majority of a bare quorum of “an appropriate larger group.” Faculty liberties cannot be made to hang by so precarious a thread. It should be enough to say of the right to exercise academic freedom what the Supreme Court said of the right to exercise freedom of thought and speech: It depends on no majority; it hinges on the outcome of no vote.

And, in fact, as I’ve said, required DEI statements, by okaying compelled speech, violate the Constitution and are therefore illegal, at least at public universities that must adhere to the First Amendment. The only reason they’re still compulsory in some public universitie—I believe the University of California is one—is because nobody so far has had the moxie to challenge the statements in courts, for that would require having “standing”, which would endanger all your academic prospects. As Finkin explains:

It seems inevitable that sometime, somewhere, one or more instructors will not be reappointed for no reason other than the failure to satisfy a DEI requirement. It seems equally inevitable that at least one housed in a public university will contest the decision on constitutional grounds; and, in that event, that the AAUP will appear before the court as amicus curiae. In that case, it would be expected that the AAUP will address the court much along this line:

We appear before this court as the repository of a century’s thoughtful engagement with the meaning and significance of academic freedom, to bring our considered judgment, expressed in the Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation, to the court’s attention and to argue in support of it.

To which the only frank response a court could make is: “You are the successor in title, but no longer in principle, spirit, or scrupulous care.”

I’ll finish by noting that the real defender of academic freedom these days, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), is opposed to both academic boycotts and DEI statements.  The AAUP is now an opponent rather than a guarantor of academic freedom, and FIRE is its true successor.

h/t Wayne

Having finished off birds, damselflies, and dragonflies, John Avise has a new topic for us this Sunday: whales. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Whale-watching Trips, Part 1.  The World’s Largest Animal.

Coastal Southern California promotes itself as one of the whale-watching capitals of the world, and indeed many whale-watching boats operate out of this area, taking tourists on off-shore excursions to view cetaceans and other sea-life.  I‘ve been on quite a few of these several-hour trips, and they’ve nearly always provided wildlife treats that will be the subjects of this photographic series.  Today we begin with photos of a whale species that passes through this area during the winter months on its migratory travels.   An adult Blue Whale also happens to be the largest animal that has ever inhabited our planet.

Blue Whale, Baleanoptera musculus:

Blue Whale closer up:

Blue Whale fluke:

Blue Whale spout:

Blue Whale, blowhole close-up:

Blue Whale, dorsal fin:

Blue Whale, longitudinal view:

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.

A cosmic particle detector in Antarctica has emitted a series of bizarre signals that defy the current understanding of particle physics, according to an international research group that includes scientists from Penn State. The unusual radio pulses were detected by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a range of instruments flown on balloons high above Antarctica that are designed to detect radio waves from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.

AI has helped astronomers crack open some of the universe s best-kept secrets by analyzing massive datasets about black holes. Using over 12 million simulations powered by high-throughput computing, scientists discovered that the Milky Way's central black hole is spinning at nearly maximum speed. Not only did this redefine theories about black hole behavior, but it also showed that the emission is driven by hot electrons in the disk, not jets, challenging long-standing models.