News Feeds

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.

What kind of spacecraft can be used to explore and study the subsurface lunar environment? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as an international team of researchers discussed the benefits of a mission concept called LunarLeaper, which will be designed to traverse and analyze the various aspects of the lunar subsurface environment, including moon pits and lava tubes.

Since the invention of the telescope, astronomers have been hunting for objects in our Solar System in particular and more recently, for the theorised 9th planet. Observations of Kuiper Belt objects suggest a large object might be lurking in the depths of the Solar System but to date, it hasn’t been directly observed. A team of researchers have analysed infrared sky surveys and found 13 objects that matched the estimated flux and motion of Planet Nine! Further analysis ruled out 12 leaving a single object. Is this Planet Nine?

A few years ago, astronomers discovered an exoplanet orbiting the white dwarf 1856+534 b. Now they've used the mighty JWST to do follow-up observations and made some exciting discoveries. It's definitely a planet and not a brown dwarf, with a temperature of 186 K (-87°C/-125°F) and about 6 times the mass of Jupiter. This makes it the coldest exoplanet ever detected, and it's orbiting in the "forbidden zone," which should have been engulfed during the red giant phase.

Magnetars are among the rarest - and weirdest - denizens of the galactic zoo. They have powerful magnetic fields and may be the source of fast radio bursts (FRBs). A team of astronomers led by European Space Agency researcher Ashley Chrimes recently used the Hubble Space Telescope to track one of these monsters called SGR 0501+4516 (SGR0501, for short, and SGR stands for Soft Gamma Repeater). It's whipping through the Milky Way at a rate that could be as high as 65 kilometers per second. The big challenge was to find its birthplace and figure out its origin.

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

Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1992 astronomers have now found over 5,000 alien worlds around other stars. With the discoveries of exoplanets came an entirely new classification of worlds known as the super-Earth; terrestrial planets more massive than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Sadly we don’t have any such planets in our Solar System but a new report suggests planets like this are surprisingly common with at least as many as there are Neptune sized planets.

In a recent paper, a team of engineers from Purdue University describes how sandbox video games that offer players a high degree of freedom and creativity, like the popular Kerbal Space Program (KSP), could be used by space agencies to assist the early-mission development process.

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.

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

An interdisciplinary research team has unveiled the world's first artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to classify both the cancer stage and risk category of thyroid cancer, achieving impressive accuracy exceeding 90%. This innovative AI model promises to significantly cut frontline clinicians' pre-consultation preparation time by approximately 50%, aligning with the HKSAR Government's initiative to harness AI technology in healthcare.