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Early humans had almost no hope of surviving severe burns, so evolution may have prioritised the selection of genes that heal mild ones, which could be affecting modern medicine

Men who were embodying female avatars via virtual reality felt anger and disgust when catcalled, which could change the behaviour of some perpetrators

The UK government's Redbox AI chatbot is being used by thousands of civil servants, but a lack of transparency about exactly how they are using it has experts concerned

RFK Jr.’s recent speech about autism has sparked a lot of deserved anger. But like many things in life, it’s even more complicated than you think it is, and this is a good opportunity to explore some of the issues surrounding this diagnosis.

While the definition has shifted over the years (like most medical diagnoses) autism is currently considered a fairly broad spectrum sharing some underlying neurological features. At the most “severe” end of the spectrum (and to show you how fraught this issue is, even the use of the term “severe” is controversial) people with autism (or autism spectrum disorder, ASD) can be non-verbal or minimally verbal, have an IQ <50, and require full support to meet their basic daily needs. At the other end of the spectrum are extremely high-functioning individuals who are simply considered to be not “neurotypical” because they have a different set of strengths and challenges than more neurotypical people. One of the primary challenges is to talk about the full spectrum of ASD under one label. The one thing it is safe to say is that RFK Jr. completely failed this challenge.

What our Health and Human Services Secretary said was that normal children:

“regressed … into autism when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

This is classic RFK Jr. – he uses scientific data like the proverbial drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination. Others have correctly pointed out that he begins with his narrative and works backward (like a lawyer, because that is what he is).  That narrative is solidly in the sweet-spot of the anti-vaccine narrative on autism, which David Gorski spells out in great detail here. RFK said:

“So I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether you call it an epidemic, a tsunami, or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors. “

In RFK’s world, autism is a horrible disease that destroys children and families and is surging in such a way that there must be an “environmental” cause (wink, wink – we know he means vaccines). But of course RFK gets the facts predictable wrong, or at least exaggerated and distorted precisely to suit his narrative. It’s a great example of how to support a desired narrative by cherry picking and then misrepresenting facts. To use another metaphor, it’s like making one of those mosaic pictures out of other pictures. He may be choosing published facts but he arranges them into a false and illusory picture. RFK cited a recent study that showed that about 25% of children with autism were in the “profound” category. (That is another term recently suggested to refer to autistic children who are minimally verbal or have an IQ < 50. This is similar to “level 3” autism or “severe” autism, but with slightly different operational cutoffs.)

First, there are a range of estimates as to what percentage of autistic people would fit into the profound category, and he is choosing the high end. Also most of the people in that category don’t have the limitations that RFK listed. A 2024 study, for example, which relied upon surveys of parents of children with autism found that only 10% fell into the “severe” category. Even within this category, only 67% had difficulty with dressing and bathing, or about 7% of children with autism. I am not trying to minimize the impact of the challenges and limitations of those at the severe end of the spectrum, just putting the data into context. What RFK was doing, which is what antivaxxers have been doing for decades, is trying to scare parents with a very specific narrative – perfect young children will get vaccinated and then regress into horrible autism that will destroy their lives and your families.

What is regression? It is a loss of previous milestones or abilities. The exact rate in severe autism is unclear, ranging from 20-40%, but the 20% figure is considered more reliable. In any case, RFK misrepresents this as well. Regression does not mean that a 2 year old child without autism develops severe autism – it means that a child with autism loses some function. Much of the time regression refers to social skills, with autistic children finding it more difficult to engage socially as they age (which can simply be adaptive and not require neurological regression). Language regression occurs but is less common.  Again we see that he uses a piece of the picture, exaggerates it, and then uses it to imply a reality that does not exist.

He then does it again with the “surge” of autism. Yes, autism diagnoses have been increasing for decades. At first (during the 1990s) you could make a correlation between increasing vaccines in the childhood schedule and increasing autism diagnostic rates. This was always just a spurious correlation (my favorite example is that organic food sales track better with autism diagnoses than does vaccination). But after about 2000, when thimerosal was removed from the childhood vaccine schedule in the US, autism rates continued to increase. The correlation completely broke down. Antivaxxers desperately tried to explain away this breakdown in the correlation, with increasingly ridiculous special pleading, and now it seems they just ignore this fact.

RFK is just ignoring this fact, and just making the more general observation that autism rates are increasing, which they are. But this increase does not fit his scary narrative for at least two reasons. First, as I and others have pointed out, there is copious evidence in the literature that much of this apparent increase is due to changing diagnostic patterns. At the severe end of the spectrum there is some diagnostic substitution – in past decades children who are now diagnosed with autism would have been diagnosed with mental retardation or something else less specific or just different. At the high functioning end of the spectrum children with autism likely would not have been diagnosed with anything at all. I have explored this issue at length before – the more carefully you look (applying the same diagnostic criteria across different age cohorts), the less autism is increasing. It is also true that autism is dominantly a genetic disorder, and that there are very early signs of autism, even in  six month olds, and perhaps even at the fetal stage.

But also the dramatic increase in autism diagnoses is mostly at the mild end of the spectrum. There is only a small increase of profound autism. So again, RFK’s narrative breaks down when you look at the actual scientific facts. He says normal children regress into profound autism and this is surging. But that is wrong. He is exploiting the fact that we use the same term, autism, to refer to profound autism and what was previously called “aspergers syndrome” but is now just considered part of ASD.

All of this is sufficient evidence to conclude that RFK is incompetent to serve as HHS secretary, he does not understand medical science and rather makes a lawyer’s case for extreme conspiracy theories designed to scare the public into making bad medical choices.

But there is another side to this story (that has nothing to do with RFK). In our effort not to pathologize people who are simply atypical, are we overlooking people who actually have a severe disability, or at least making them and their parents feel that way? I’ll explore this side of the question in my next post.

The post How Should We Talk About Autism first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A study published last week suggests that, if vaccine uptake continues to decline, measles will soon be endemic again in the US. It's just part of how RFK Jr. is making America sicker again.

The post Hello measles, my old friend: The return of previously vanquished vaccine-preventable diseases first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Yep, it’s time for this feature again. (I have been lax in accumulating words and phrases). Note that I am not trying to change the English language here—only saying what irritates me, and why. Here are four examples, some of which I may have kvetched about before:

Advancement.  NO! NO! NO!  “Advances” has always been sufficient before, so why this gussying-up of a good word? I think the “-ment” suffix is intended to make the speaker sound more erudite, though perhaps people aren’t aware that “advances” is a perfectly good word.

Dudebro.  This word simply means “males I don’t like”, either referring to all males or a specified group. Either way, it is offensive and wouldn’t be tolerated if there was a similar word for women (there probably are, but I’m not going to suggest any.)

“It is what it is.”  This seems to me, on the surface, a redundancy. Things are what they are. Yes, of course! I suppose it could be construed as meaning, “These things can’t be changed,” but why not use that phrase instead of one that’s either ambiguous or redundant.  It also implies that what is cannot be changed, which stifles progress.

“That is so niche.”  This clearly means “this is too specific” in some sense. But “niche” is a noun, not an adjective.  I’m sure it’s too late to stop this one, just as it’s impossible to stop “genius” being used as an adjective instead of a noun, as in “here are ten genius hacks for your closet”.

Ever since the City of Chicago dropped the charges against 26 pro-Palestinian students and two faculty arrested on our campus for trespassing, I’ve wondered whether mayor Brandon Johnson, elected in 2023, has some sympathies for Palestine contrasted with some opprobrium for Israel.  (The city also refused to send Chicago cops to take down our encampment, so it had to be done by University police, who in the end did a great job.)

The Instagram post below was put up by CAIR Chicago (the Council for American-Islamic Relations), showing the mayor donning a keffiyeh to celebrate Arab Heritage Month (this month of April),  Now keffiyehs of various types been used by Arabs for centuries, mostly as headdresses but sometimes as shawls. However, this particular black-and-white garment is Palestinian, and, as CAIR surely knows —and Brandon Johnson should have known—is associated with Palestinian resistance, beginning with Yasser Arafat’s frequent wearing of it, including while appearing in front of the United Nations (see the history of the garment and its symbolism at this Guardian article).  As Wikipedia says:

The black and white keffiyeh’s prominence increased during the 1960s with the beginning of the Palestinian resistance movement and its adoption by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CAIR-Chicago (@cairchicago)

Johnson, who is not a popular mayor (see below) has been accused before of “disrespecting” Chicago’s Jewish community, though I didn’t know about that. But the actions of the City of Chicago with respect to illegal activities of Palestinian protestors, and the city’s refusal to act, combined with the photo above, makes me wonder about Johnson’s feelings about Israel. (One instance: when pro-Pals blocked Lake Shore Drive, our main artery along the Lake, the city did nothing.)

To be fair, I did find this picture of Johnson accepting a yarmulka from Jews before he was elected, but of course the article says that he was “courting the Jewish vote”.  I don’t think he put it on, though!

I don’t think I need worry much longer about a possible anti-Semite being mayor, though, for, as I said, Johnson is not at all well liked by Chicagoans of all stripes. As Wikipedia notes:

Johnson is considered to be a political progressive. His term as mayor has been marked with low approval ratings, with only 6.6% of Chicago voters expressing favorable views of him in a February 2025 poll.

As for CAIR, well, it’s been accused of touting antisemitism many times before; I’ll give just three links: here, here, and here (h/t Malgorzata). A few quotes, one from each source (in order):

. . . . key CAIR leaders often traffic in openly antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric. Some of CAIR’s leaders, such as Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, were previously involved in a now-defunct organization that openly supported Hamas and, according to the U.S. government, functioned as its “propaganda apparatus.”

and

The White House strongly condemned recent comments from the leader of a top American-Islamic group who said he was “happy to see” Gazans invading Israel on October 7.

The comments came from Council on American-Islamic Relations Director Nihad Awad at a conference two weeks ago, when – according to a video posted on X, by DC-based Middle East Media Research Institute – he said, “I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”

“We condemn these shocking, Antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement shared with CNN.

Bates echoed President Joe Biden in calling the October 7 attacks “abhorrent” and “unadulterated evil,” noting that October 7 “was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.”

and

Two years in the making, this new book is the product of extensive meticulous research into the most dangerous Islamist political group in the U.S. today—CAIR. It is dangerous because it was created as a front group for Hamas in 1993—in a secret meeting of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas leaders, including CAIR’s current leader Nihad Awad, held in a downtown Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia in 1993, a meeting the FBI wiretapped.

Since its corporate inception in 1994, CAIR has been the number one promoter of incendiary vile antisemitic tropes and conspiracies in the U.S. by any “mainstream” Islamist group. I use the word mainstream in quotations because CAIR has successfully duped virtually the entire media establishment—many of whom have willingly collaborated—into portraying this Hamas front group as a “Muslim civil rights organization.” CAIR is soaked with antisemitism, yet we hear NOT a word about this reality from the gatekeepers.

Yes, the news is thin today, and I will let other people rail about Trump, as I’ve done my share in the last week or so. Instead, how about a happier topic: books?  I have just finished two books and, as I’ve said, I’m reading another.  I am glad to say I can recommend them all for your consdieration.

The first one was Walter Isaacson’s 2004 biography of Benjamin Franklin, which you can find on Amazon, with the long (586 pp.) paperback now only $6.66 (Satan’s number). Click cover to go to the site:

I don’t know how Isaacson manages to pump out these long biographies, which are packed with research and scholarship (though written very well), so quickly. But he does. I’ve read two of his before: his biographies of Steve Jobs (2011) and of Leonardo da Vinci (2018).  Both were good, but the biography of Leonardo I think is a world-class piece of writing. If you must read one of these, start with that. Isaacson clearly has a penchant for very smart men, preferably polymaths like Franklin and Leonardo. But I note that he’s also written a biography of Albert Einstein (2008); I haven’t read that one because I’ve read about three other biographies of the man.

You can get all four as a set of “The Genius Biographies” for $51, and that’s over 2000 pages of enjoyment and education.

Like Leonardo, Franklin was also a polymath: he “discovered” and worked out the properties of electricity, helped write both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, invented bifocals, set up the American postal system, and founded the University of Pennsylvania. As a superb diplomat, he helped bring an end to the Revolutionary War on favorable term for America, and also served as what then constituted the governorship of Pennsylvania. Moving back and forth between the U.S. and France, as well as throughout America, his travels equipped him well to contribute to founding documents that all our colonies were able to sign.

Further, Franklin was a humble man, dressed in ordinary garb, not foisting himself on others, largely free from arrogance, and trying to live by his famous 13 “necessary virtues” he compiled when  young.  He largely succeeded in living up to those standards, though he was a bit wobbly on “temperance”, winding up with gout as well as kidney stones. Yet despite his ill health in later life, he was the prime mover in the Treaty of Paris (1783), requiring delicate skills at negotiating simultaneously with France, the nascent U.S., and Britain. The only palpable flaw that I could detect in him was his gross neglect of his wife, whom he left for 14 of the last 17 years of his life, and was not there when she died. Franklin himself had a long life, expiring at 84.

I’d recommend this highly, especially if you know little of Franklin. You’ll be impressed at his scientific skills: though he wasn’t a theoretician, he was great at thinking up hypothesis and good at testing them. Its length makes it a good book to take on a trip, but if you haven’t read his biography of Leonardo, start with that one.

*********************

I’ve read quite a few books on the Holocaust, but this one, byJózsef Debreczeni, may be the best, outstripping even the famous books of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel (Night and If This Is a Man) . Up until recently, however, it was obscure, and, though written in 1950, it was available only in Hungarian, and wasn’t translated into other languages, including English, until 2023. I believe a reader suggested it in an earlier “books” post on this site. Click below to find it at Amazon:

What makes this book different from those of Wiesel and Levi is, curiously, its lack of analysis and of philosophizing.  Night is also semi-fictional, so you can’t tell which episodes were made up, though it’s largely true.  In contrast, Cold Crematorium merely describes what happened to Debreczeni in the Lager: what life was like as inmate in three different concentration camps, including Auschwitz.  He was in the camps for only about a year, but that was nearly enough to do him in. From Wikipedia:

The winter of 1944–1945 was harsh, with heavy snows and extreme temperatures. [Dobreczeni] contracted diarrhea, and by January 20 he weighed 35 kg (77 lb). Thanks to a friend who brought him extra food, he survived. He subsequently contracted typhus but survived with the help of a camp doctor. Soviet forces liberated the camp in May 1945, and he recovered at a Soviet hospital.

I cannot begin to describe how grim the life in the camps was, especially at Auschwitz, but he doesn’t spare the reader the gory details. One of them: everyone constantly had diarrhea because of the diet of soup made with polluted water and almost no contents, and because the “toilet man” with the bucket didn’t come around fast enough, everything was covered with shit, which eventually piled up on the floor above the ankles. The intricate way prisoners developed a black market in food and tobacco to survive is amazing.

I like this book because, more than the other books, it’s just a graphic and un-fictional presentation of day-to-day life in a concentration camp. This shows you how horrible the Holocaust really was, and how inhumane were the people who engineered and implemented it.  It doesn’t discuss whether all of us have the potential to become Nazis, and doesn’t go into depth about how the Holocaust affected the author after he was liberated. The book simply ends with the liberation.  One trigger warning: it is very graphic and disturbing, but also the only book I know that makes you see what it was like to be an inmate.

*********************

Finally, I am 110 pages into the book below, which I mentioned a few days ago (click cover to go to Amazon site).  I recommend it, at least what I’ve read of it so far. It’s an analysis of cancel culture by two employees of FIRE (Schlott is also a journalist). As I said the other day,

This extremism and demonization is in fact the subject of a good book I’m reading now: Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind , which takes up Great Untruth #3 of Haidt and Lukianoff’s earlier bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Let me remind you of all three of those Untruths whose embrace by the young is, Haidt and Lukianoff argued, responsible for a lot of turmoil, divisiveness, and rancor on and off campus:

1.) What doesn’t kill you make you weaker

2.) Always trust your feelings

3.) Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

It’s a lot like Lukianoff’s talk that I heard in Los Angeles a couple of months ago, recounting horrific tales of cancellation coming from both the Right and the Left. Right now I’m reading about those instances, and haven’t yet encountered the authors’ solutions, which come at the end of the book. We all recognize divisive nature of politics (and life!) in America, as well as the fact that for many, the validity of social/political arguments now seems to rest largely on whether the person who makes them is on your side (“good”) or not (“bad”).  I’ll give an overall assessment when I’m done.

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you’re reading or what you’ve read lately, preferably dwelling on books you’d recommend. I’ve found many good books by following readers’ suggestions, and so I hope to make this a regular feature. Put your readings in the comments!

It’s Sunday, which is John Avise photo day. John’s new series takes us through the dragonflies and damselflies of North America. His notes and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Dragonflies in North America, Part 2 

This week I continue a series of posts on Dragonflies and Damselflies (taxonomic Order Odonata) that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m going down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  Also shown is the state where I took each photo.

Brown Spiketail, Cordulegaster bilineata, female (Georgia):

Brown Spiketail, female sideview (Georgia):

Calico Pennant, Celithemis elisa, mature male (Michigan):

Calico Pennant, young male (Michigan):

Cardinal Meadowhawk, Sympetrum illotum, adult male (British Columbia, Canada):

Cardinal Meadowhawk, mating pair (British Columbia, Canada):

Carolina Saddlebags, Tramea carolina (Florida):

Common Green Darner, Anax junius, male (California):

Common Green Darner, flying (California):

Common Green Darner, pair mating (California):

Common Whitetail, Plathemis lydia, female (Georgia):

Dragonhunter, Hagenius brevistylus (Wisconsin):

I want to remind readers again to avoid over-commenting on threads for reasons I’ve discussed before.  The Roolz on this issue (see here) are often blatantly ignored. Now I don’t enforce them strictly, but I see some folkz commenting over and over again on the same thread, and often making the same point.

If you haven’t yet read the posting guidelines, please do so here or on the left sidebar.  (“Da Roolz”).  At issue:

Thank you.

A lot of people came down on Bill Maher for his report about dining with Trump at the White House and, although Maher took Trump to task several times during that visit for the administration’s policies, he had the temerity to confess being surprised that Trump actually was gracious to him in person and even laughed.  For saying that Maher was demonized widely. Larry David joined in the pile-on in a satire in the NYT called “My dinner with Adolf“, a satirical parallel about dining with Hitler and finding him gracious.

Well, I wasn’t so amused by that parallel, for although I think Trump is a narcissistic loon who is on track to wreck the country, he is not equivalent to Hitler, and I detest the “Hitler parallel” that is so widespread these days.  The trope, of course, is that if you dislike someone and his actions, then every single thing that person does must be bad and he’s pretty much like Hitler.

This extremism and demonization is in fact the subject of a good book I’m reading now: Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind , which takes up Great Untruth #3 of Haidt and Lukianoff’s earlier bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Let me remind you of all three of those Untruths whose embrace by the young is, Haidt and Lukianoff argued, responsible for a lot of turmoil, divisiveness, and rancor on and off campus:

1.  What doesn’t kill you make you weaker
2.  Always trust your feelings
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people

We see #3 on both sides in American politics, including in the criticism of Maher, and all I can say is that by and large I embrace the arguments of Democrats, but I try hard not to see Republicans as evil, much less as a pack of Hitlers. Yes, of course there are some bad Republicans, but they’re not all Hitler equivalents.

Indeed, some of the NYT readers pushed back on David in a new collection of responses.

I had no doubt that after the dinner Maher would go back to dissing Trump on his show. And sure enough, he did in his latest “Real Time” comedy/opinion bit, called “New Rule: Flirting with Fascism”. Watch the 7.5-minute video below. As you see, Maher more or less calls Trump a liar, a violator of the Constitution, a flirter with authoritarianism and dictatorship, and an instigator of the January 6 insurrection. Not to mention the title of the bit. . .

Maher tells Democrats that they have to evolve a new strategy to win back seats and perhaps the White House, but he still favors trying to talk to the other side. He even mentions the crap he took for dining with Trump. Here’s the last bit that starts at 6:11:

“I’ve taken some shit from the looney Left for just reporting honestly how the President reacted in private when I criticized him to his face.   What I should have said is that he eats with his hands and that he showed me his collection of human ears pressed between the pages of Mein Kampf. . . . But I didn’t do that. I was honest about it, and that gives me standing to say to conservatives, ‘Now okay: you appreciated my honesty and balls, now I want to see your balls. . . . It’s not how I meant it to come out. . . . What I mean is ‘It’s your turn. You know things aren’t going well and the first hundred days has been, yes, a shitshow. Show me that you can be honest about that. Show me that you’re not just a MAGA cultist’.”

I would say that’s a pretty hard-headed criticism of Trump, and you won’t find harder criticism even in the NYT.  So let’s not have any demonization of Maher or flippant comparisons with Hitler here. If you want to emit the Hitler tropes, I’d advise you to abstain and reserve them for other websites I can point you to. In fact, I may make that the latest one of the Roolz.

Quickie with Steve: Game Transfer Phenomenon; Geoengineering, Biosignature Candidate, Skull Rock on Mars; Commercial Perovskite Solar Panels; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Another Unified Theory; Science or Fiction

Images of Mars never cease to amaze. This latest image of NASA’s Curiosity Rover captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the rover as a dark speck and the end of a long trail of tracks. It was rattling along at a speed of 0.16 km/h across the Gediz Vallis Channel and was headed towards a region that could have been formed by water billions of years ago. The weather on Mars won’t allow the tracks to persist though so they are likely to last for only a few months.

The US National Science Foundation cancelled funding for research on misinformation, disinformation and AI-generated deepfakes, even as misleading information runs rampant on social media

Lately, there's been plenty of progress in 3D printing objects from the lunar regolith. We've reported on several projects that have attempted to do so, with varying degrees of success. However, most of them require some additive, such as a polymer or salt water, as a binding agent. Recently, a paper from Julien Garnier and their co-authors at the University of Toulouse attempted to make compression-hardened 3D-printed objects using nothing but the regolith itself.

There's no better word for this image of the Sun than Spectacular, which means something impressive, dramatic, or remarkable that creates a spectacle or visual impact. It comes from the Latin word spectaculum, which means a show, spectacle, or public exhibition. Ancient Romans would agree with the word choice if you could somehow show it to them.

An Ultra-Diffuse Galaxy Found With Almost No Dark Matter

This is one of the most amazing performances of someone under fire I’ve ever seen, and even though the video was long for me (45 minutes), I watched the whole thing, mesmerized as well as stunned by how well the “victim” answered questions coolly and eloquently.

In one corner: Natasha Hausdorff, British barrister (lawyer) with an expertise in international law. She’s also Jewish and the legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel. Her credentials are impeccable:

A graduate of Oxford University and Tel Aviv University, Hausdorff practised with the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and clerked for the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. She was a former fellow at Columbia Law School in the National Security Law Program. She is also the legal director of the NGO UKLFI Charitable Trust.

In all the other corners (it’s a hendecagon, with 11 corners) are the hostile opponents: the members of the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Dame Emily Thornberry.  This interview grilling was part of the Committee “conducting an inquiry into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, asking ‘how the UK and its allies can help to achieve a ceasefire and lasting end to the war in Gaza and Lebanon’.”

Remember that the UK government, though nominally supporting Israel, refused to sell arms to the Jewish state. But here, its members are basically asking Hausdorff to defend every action of Israel. And she basically does.  The hostility of the committee towards Israel seems ubiquitous (Hausdorff was one of several experts, including Palestinians, but I was unable to find any YouTube videos of Palestinians testifying at this hearing.)  What is amazing about Hausdorff is that she not only doesn’t lose her cool despite the clearly anti-Israel inquisitors, but always has the facts at her fingertips. And when she doesn’t know something, she says so.

I highly recommend that you watch this video, if for no other reason that to see a stupendous performance. But you will also hear how someone who’s pro-Israel deals with canards and misconceptions about the war. Or listen to just fifteen minutes.

After watching this, Malgorzata (who called it to my attention) said, “Natasha Hausdorff is a force of nature and a world class treasure.” I agree; Hausdorff is one of my rare heroes.

Text-generating AIs such as ChatGPT can be used to hide encrypted messages inside fake conversations, which could help people living under oppressive regimes communicate secretly

A recent study has unraveled some of the secrets concealed within the entangled web of quantum systems.