News Feeds

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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