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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.

Blood vessels grown in the lab in just five days could quickly prevent the tissue damage that can occur after an accident

Biology isn’t really like physics: we don’t have “laws” that are always obeyed, but instead have generalizations, some of which hold across nearly organisms (but even the “law” that organisms have DNA as their genetic material is flouted). The only “law” I can think of is really a syllogism that Darwin used to show natural selection: a). if there is genetic variation among individuals for a trait, and b). if carriers of some of the variants leaves more copies of their genes for the trait than carriers of other variants, then c). those genes will be overrepresented in future generations, and the trait will change according to the effects of the overrepresented genes.

But even that is not a “law” but a syllogism. After all, natural selection doesn’t have to work.  There may be no genetic variation, as in organisms that are clonal, and different variants may not leave predictably different copies of themselves in future generations; such variants are called “neutral”.  So there is no “law” that natural selection has to change organisms.

In this paper (click on screenshot below, or find the pdf here), evolutionary geneticist Michael Lynch from Arizona State University goes after two papers (cited at bottom of this post) that, he says, are not only failed attempts to concoct “laws” of evolution, but are flat wrong because their proponents don’t know squat about evolutionary biology.  I’ll try to be very brief because the arguments are complex, and unless you know Lynch’s work on the neutral theory, much of the paper is a tough slog.  What is fun about the paper, though is that Lynch doesn’t pull any punches, saying outright that the authors don’t know what they’re doing.

Here’s the abstract followed by an early part of the paper, just to show you what Lynch is doing. Bolding is mine:

Abstract:  Recent papers by physicists, chemists, and geologists lay claim to the discovery of new principles of evolution that have somehow eluded over a century of work by evolutionary biologists, going so far as to elevate their ideas to the same stature as the fundamental laws of physics. These claims have been made in the apparent absence of any awareness of the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology that has existed for decades. The numerical indices being promoted suffer from numerous conceptual and quantitative problems, to the point of being devoid of meaning, with the authors even failing to recognize the distinction between mutation and selection. Moreover, the promulgators of these new laws base their arguments on the idea that natural selection is in relentless pursuit of increasing organismal complexity, despite the absence of any evidence in support of this and plenty pointing in the opposite direction. Evolutionary biology embraces interdisciplinary thinking, but there is no fundamental reason why the field of evolution should be subject to levels of unsubstantiated speculation that would be unacceptable in any other area of science.

. . . we are now living in a new kind of world. Successful politicians and flamboyant preachers routinely focus on the development of false narratives, also known as alternative facts, repeating them enough times to convince the naive that the new message is the absolute truth. This strategy is remarkably similar to earnest attempts by outsiders to redefine the field of evolutionary theory, typically proclaiming the latter to be in a state of woeful ignorance, while exhibiting little interest in learning what the field is actually about. Intelligent designers insist that molecular biology is too complex to have evolved by earthly evolutionary processes. A small but vocal group of proselytizers clamoring for an “extended evolutionary synthesis” continues to argue that a revolution will come once a critical mass of disciples is recruited (7–9), even though virtually every point identified as ignored has been thoroughly evaluated in prior research; see table 1.1 in ref. 6. More than one physicist has claimed that all of biology is simply physics. But 2023 marked a new level of advocacy by a small group of physicists, chemists, and geologists to rescue the field of evolutionary science from obfuscation, and to do so by introducing new theories and laws said to have grand unifying potential.

Note Lynch’s criticism of the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis”, a program (and associated group of investigators) who claim revolutionary ways of looking at evolution, which, as Lynch notes, have already been discussed under conventional neo-Darwinian theory.

There are two theories Lynch criticizes in this paper

1.) Assembly theory. This is the complicated bit from the paper of Sharma et al. (see references below). It involves an equation that supposedly gives a threshold beyond which the assembly of components indicates life that evolved via natural selection (I won’t define the components, either, which aren’t important for the general reader’s purpose:

According to Walsh, this equation is totally bogus because it neglects all the forces that can impinge on gene forms during evolution. An excerpt:

However, this is not the biggest problem with assembly theory and its proposed utility in revealing the mechanistic origins of molecular mixtures. A second, more fundamental issue is that the authors repeatedly misuse the term selection, failing to realize that, even in its simplest form, evolution is a joint function of mutation bias, natural selection, and the power of random drift. There is a fundamental distinction between the mutational processes that give rise to an object and the ability of selection (natural or otherwise) to subsequently promote (or eradicate) it. In the field of evolution, drift refers to the collective influences of stochastic factors governed by universal factors such as finite population size, variation in family sizes, and background interference induced by the simultaneous presence of multiple mutations; via the generation of noise, the magnitude of drift modulates the efficiency of selection. For the past century, these processes have been the central components of evolutionary theory (reviewed in refs. 5 and 6).

Because this theory neglects forces like mutation and genetic drift that can change frequencies of gene forms beyond natural selection, Lynch deems it “a meaningless measure of the origins of complexity.”

2.) The notion that organismal complexity is an inevitable result of natural selection. This goes after the paper of Wong et al., and you should already know that this can’t be true: evolution is not, in any lineage, a march towards more and more complex species. The immediate refutation is the existence of parasites like fleas and tapeworms, which have lost many of their features to pursue a parasitic lifestyle.  If you make your living by parasitizing other organisms, natural selection can actually favor the loss of complexity. Tapeworms, for example, have lost many of their sensory systems, their digestive system, and features of their reproductive system.  By any measure of complexity, they are much simpler than their flatworm ancestors.

Lynch points this out, and adds that there are lineages of microbes (very simple one-celled organisms like bacteria) that have not become more complex over the billions of years they existed. There may have been a burst of complexity when the lineages arose, but clearly bacteria haven’t been on a one-way march to primates. They are doing a fine job as they are:

Despite their substantially more complex ribosomes and mechanisms for assembling them, eukaryotes do not have elevated rates or improved accuracies of translation, and if anything, catalytic rates and degrees of enzyme accuracy are reduced relative to those in prokaryotes (with simpler homomeric enzymes). Eukaryotes have diminished bioenergetic capacities (i.e., growth rates) relative to prokaryotes (21, 22), and this reduction is particularly pronounced in multicellular species (23). Finally, it is worth noting that numerous organisms (parasites in particular, which constitute a large fraction of organisms) typically evolve simplified genomes, and many biosynthetic pathways for amino acids and cofactors have been lost in the metazoan lineage.

Another bit of evidence against Wong et al. is that their adducing “subfunctionalization”, whereby genes duplicate and the duplicate copies assume new functions, shows some “law” of increasing complexity. (The divergence of hemoglobins occurred in this way.) But Lynch suggests that genes don’t duplicate to make an organism more complex, and, moreover, the differential functions of duplicate genes can arise from selection being relaxed:

Subfunctionalization does not arise because natural selection is striving for such an endpoint, which is an energetic and a mutational burden, but because of the relaxed efficiency of selection in lineages of organisms with reduced effective population sizes. How then does one relate gene number to functional information?

Lynch winds up excoriating these new “theories” again:

For authors confident enough to postulate a new law of evolution, surely some methodology and supportive data could have been provided. Science is littered with historical fads that became transiently fashionable, only to fade into the background, with a nugget of potential importance sometimes remaining (e.g., concepts derived from chaos theory, concerted evolution, evolvability, fractals, network science, and robustness). But usually when the latter happens, there is a clear starting point. This is not the case with the “law of increasing functional information,” which fails to even provide useful definitions of function and information.

. . . . To sum up, all evidence suggests that expansions in genomic and molecular complexity, largely restricted to just a small number of lineages (one including us humans), are not responses to adaptive processes. Instead, the embellishments of cellular complexity that arise in certain lineages are unavoidable consequences of a reduction in the efficiency of selection in organisms experiencing high levels of random genetic drift.

I would take issue only with Lynch’s claim that only a “small number of lineages” have become more complex than their ancestors.  Most multicellular organisms are this way.  In the end, though, Lynch’s lesson is that people should learn more about evolutionary theory, which has grown quite complex, before they start proposing “revolutionary laws of evolution.”

The two papers at issue (I’ve provided links.)

10. A. Sharma et al., Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution. Nature 622, 321–328 (2023).

11. M. L. Wong et al., On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120, e2310223120 (2023). 

Tech CEOs are promising increasingly outlandish visions of the 2030s, powered by "superintelligence", but the reality is that even the most advanced AI models can still struggle with simple puzzles

Today origami master and physicist Robert Lang, who’s rebuilding his house and studio destroyed by fire, sends part 1 of a two-part series on California wildflowers. Roberts’s captions and ID’s are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Reader’s Wildlife Photos: Southern California Wildflowers, Part 1

Although my usual Altadena hiking routes are off-limits due to closures resulting from the Eaton Fire in January 2025, there are still some pretty nice hikes not far away, and the end of May is a superb time to see wildflowers. This installment (which is a two-parter) includes wildflowers of Southern California from a route up Mount Lukens, the highest point in the city of Los Angeles, at 5075 feet elevation. Although the route is pretty much chaparral all the way, the changes in elevation and slope direction encompass a variety of climatic conditions within a single jaunt, providing a variety of blooms to see along the way. These are in no particular order: I shot some of them going up, some coming down. IDs are courtesy of iNaturalist.

Annual cryptanthus (Cryptantha sp.) has a common name of “popcorn flower,” and indeed, its tiny clusters of white blossoms do look a bit like popcorn kernels (and they’re about that size).

Blue elder (Sambucus cerulea) is technically a shrub, rather than a tree, but they get pretty big along the Lukens trail.

There are a lot of paintbrush (Castilleja) species in Southern California; iNat thinks this is Camp Martin paintbrush (Castilleja martini):

This time of year, caterpillar scorpionweed (Phacelia cicutaria) has tiny lavender flowers. In the fall, their seed heads look amazingly like caterpillars (especially after they fall off the plants):

Chaparral whitethorn (Ceanothus leucodermis) has beautiful plumes of lavender flowers and in places, carpets the mountainside with their blooms for a few weeks. Their thorns are vicious, though, and it forms impenetrable thickets at higher elevations in the San Gabriels:

Palmer ceanothus (Ceanothus palmeri) looks a lot like the more common chaparral whitethorn but has pure white blossoms. This one was getting the once-over from what looks like a European honeybee (Apis mellifera):

Dudley’s clarkia (Clarkia dudleyana) continues the theme of purple. It’s in the primrose family.

Golden yarrow (Eriophyllum confertiflorum) has clusters of yellow flowers that, from a distance, look like they might be dandelion flowers, but they’re clusters of small flowers, just roughly the same size and color as the former.

Hoary rock-rose (Cistus creticus) is a non-native member of the rose family. It’s not particularly aggressive, and its crepe-paper-like petals are delicate and lovely, so I like it:

There are several varieties of Lupine (Lupinus sp.) in Southern California; neither iNat (nor I) could pin down this one. It’s a member of the pea family. Behind this are the San Gabriel mountain peaks to the north of Mount Lukens:

All photos were taken with an iPhone, as my “nice” camera is currently a lump of slag that I haven’t yet replaced. More flowers coming in part 2.

When astronauts finally reach Mars, they'll face a unique challenge: walking and working in gravity that's only 37% as strong as Earth's. After spending months in the weightlessness of space, their weakened muscles and bones will struggle to cope with even this reduced gravity. Now, researchers at the University of Bristol have developed a promising solution; a soft, wearable exosuit powered by inflatable "bubble muscles."

I did not expect this to happen so soon.  Last night Israel, with the knowledge of the U.S. (but not necessarily with its material help) attacked Iranian bases and officials, and apparently did considerable damage to facilities, as well as killing nuclear scientists and the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.  From the NYT:

Israel launched a stunning series of strikes on Friday morning against Iran’s nuclear program and killed three of the nation’s security chiefs, in a remarkable coup of intelligence and military force that immediately decapitated Tehran’s chain of command, prompted threats of severe retaliation and raised fears of a wider conflict.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel described the attacks as a last resort to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, which Israel views as an existential threat. In addition to targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, Israel’s strikes killed top Iranian officials and nuclear scientists and hit Tehran’s long-range missile facilities and aerial defenses.

Israel has exchanged previous volleys of strikes with Iran and fought its proxy forces across the Middle East, but this was the first time it successfully hit Tehran’s nuclear facilities after years of preparation and threats. Though the extent of the damage at the nuclear sites was not yet clear, the scale of the strikes stunned Iranians and Israelis alike.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Israel “should anticipate a harsh punishment.” Later on Friday morning, the Israeli military announced that Iranian forces had fired about 100 drones at Israel, as Mr. Netanyahu vowed the fighting would last “as many days as it takes.”

It was also not immediately clear whether the United States, Israel’s most important ally, had blessed the attack. For weeks, President Trump’s envoys have been holding talks with Iranian officials on a new agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program. As recently as Thursday evening, Mr. Trump suggested that Israel should not yet attack Iran because such an assault would “blow it” for the nuclear negotiations.

Three other bits of news and a NYT map of where the attacks occurred:

• • Iranians assassinated: The strikes dealt a heavy blow to Iran’s military leadership. Mohammad Bagheri, the commander in chief of the military and the second-highest commander after the supreme leader, was killed, according to the Israeli military and Iranian media, as well as other top security officials.

Here’s who was killed:

Iranian Military Generals

• • Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces and the second-highest commander after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

  • Gen. Hossein Salami, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s primary military force.

  • Gen. Gholamali Rashid, deputy commander in chief of the armed forces.

Nuclear Scientists

• • Fereydoun Abbasi, the former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.

  • Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, a theoretical physicist and president of the Islamic Azad University in Tehran.

• What was hit: Israel said Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz was among the targets. Rafael Grossi, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Iran had informed him that there was no increase in radiation levels at Natanz. Another nuclear site, at Isfahan, “has not been impacted,” Mr. Grossi said.

• How it happened: Israel attacked at least six military bases around the capital Tehran, residential homes at two highly secured complexes for military commanders and multiple residential buildings around Tehran, according to four senior Iranian officials.

The operation was stunning in planning and scope. Read this from the Times of Israel:

Israel spent years preparing for the operation against Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, a security official tells The Times of Israel, including building a drone base inside Iran and smuggling precision weapons systems and commandos into the country. [JAC: note how far Iran is from Israel. Those are some brave commandos.]

The effort hinged on tight joint planning between the IDF and the Mossad intelligence agency.

According to the official, Mossad agents set up a drone base on Iranian soil near Tehran. The drones were activated overnight, striking surface-to-surface missile launchers aimed at Israel.

In addition, vehicles carrying weapons systems were smuggled into Iran.

These systems took out Iran’s air defenses and gave Israeli planes air supremacy and freedom of action over Iran.

The third covert effort was Mossad commandos deploying precision missiles near anti-aircraft sites in central Iran.

The operations relied on “groundbreaking thinking, bold planning and surgical operation of advanced technologies, special forces and agents operating in the heart of Iran while totally evading the eyes of local intelligence,” says the official.

Iran launched 100 drones at Israel in response, but none of them made it (see below).

Two other pieces of good news for Israel:  First, the Jordanian air force helped take down the Iranian drones sent to Israel in response.

Jordan’s air force intercepted missiles and drones entering its airspace Friday, according to its state news agency.

The interceptions took place because the missiles and drones were likely to fall within Jordanian territory, posing a threat to civilians, it said. Israel has been intercepting some of the 100 drones launched by Iran outside Israeli airspace, the Israeli military said.

And Jordan has warned Hezbollah not to try to retaliate against Israel:

Lebanon’s government informed the Hezbollah terror group that it would not tolerate the Iranian proxy joining in Tehran’s response against Israel following the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Saudi news outlet al-Arabiya reports.

“The time when the organization bypassed the state in deciding to go to war is over,” the group was told, according to the report.

The report adds that Lebanese authorities also warned Hezbollah that it would bear responsibility for dragging the country into war.

Israel’s setting up a full drone base in Iran without the country detecting it (along with trucks bearing weapons, which would have to cross Iraq somehow] is an amazing feat, but that’s what Mossad specializes in (remember Beepergate?)  The pronouncement by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran was not adhering to its agreements probably prompted Israel’s attack, giving them a reason to take out nuclear facilities. And the semi-breakdown of the U.S. negotiations with Iran didn’t hurt, either.

It’s early days yet, and more retaliation from Iran can be expected, if not a full-scale war, but Israel saw Iranian nukes as an existential threat, which they were, and the bombs could be made within a few months (it would take longer to construct delivery missiles).  My fondest hope, which is probably a pipe dream, is that the Iranian people would rise up and throw out the theocracy that they despise and set up some kind of democracy, but the military still has the power.

Scientists have uncovered a previously unknown type of molecular motion inside DNA-based droplets: instead of spreading randomly, guest molecules advance in an organized wave. This surprising discovery opens the door to understanding how cells might organize internal processes without membranes. Using customizable DNA condensates as experimental models, the team showed how molecular waves emerge through precise DNA interactions. These insights could not only transform our grasp of cellular signaling but may even lay groundwork for treating neurodegenerative diseases by influencing how molecules behave inside aging cells.

When the Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, they discovered drifts of tiny brilliant orange glass beads glittering across the surface. Each one less than 1 mm across and formed about 3.6 billion years ago. These microscopic treasures, each smaller than a pinhead, had been hiding their secrets for billions of years. Now, cutting edge technology has finally cracked the mystery: they're perfect time capsules from the Moon's explosive volcanic past, frozen droplets of ancient lava that solidified instantly in the airless void recording the history of the Moon.

The Hubble Deep Field revolutionised astronomy by staring at a seemingly empty patch of sky for thousands of hours, unveiling a cosmos teeming with distant galaxies. But even Hubble can't peer back far enough to witness the universe's first moment of illumination; the Cosmic Dawn, when primordial darkness gave way to starlight. Now, the Square Kilometre Array promises to shatter that barrier. In a groundbreaking simulation, researchers have modelled 1000 hours of SKA observations, creating astronomy's next great deep field, one designed to capture the universe's very first sunrise.

The ecliptic is the apparent path that the Sun follows during a year. It's an imaginary line that the planets follow, with some small deviations, around the Sun. Spacecraft find it easier to follow the ecliptic because it's generally more energy efficient. However, the Solar Orbiter isn't on the ecliptic and it's giving us our first up-close looks at the Sun's poles.

For most of us, dust is just something we have to clean up. For astronomers, interstellar dust is a hindrance when they want to study distant objects. However, recent James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations of a distant galaxy are changing that. This infrared-sensitive observatory is letting them find a way to use dust to understand the evolution of early galaxies. In addition, it uncovered a special property of that galaxy's ice-covered dust, indicating it could be similar to the materials that formed our Solar System.

Most scientists agree that supernova explosions have affected Earth's climate, though the details are not all clear. They likely cooled the climate several times in the last several thousand years, just as humanity was becoming established around the world. The evidence is in telescopes and tree rings.

Astronomers have used JWST to study a fascinating planetary system that's only 16.7 million years old, with two bizarre giant exoplanets. Designated YSES-1, its closer planet, YSES-1b seems to be surrounded by a disk of material that could be the birthplace of moons, similar to what might have happened at Jupiter billions of years ago. The other, YSES-1c, has a layer of silicate particles in its upper atmosphere—clouds of sand.