Science

Our search for technosignatures - clear signs of advanced civilizations beyond Earth - takes many forms. Many are driven by the famous Drake equation, which attempts to estimate how many technological civilizations there are in the Milky Way. However, there’s a big fat question mark at the end of that equation in the form of a variable intended to account for the “longevity” of a civilization. And to be clear, that doesn’t mean how long the civilization itself survives. It simply means how long it actively creates a signature that is detectable by our current technology. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Oxford astrophysicist Brian C. Lacki, argues that, since the chances of us overlapping in time with any such civilization are miniscule, we’re much more likely to find the ruins of a “dead” civilization - and, surprisingly, the best place to do so might be in our own solar system.

If the Sun's fusion shut off right now, you would not notice for a very long time. The first stop is understanding the Sun itself: a vast pile of gravitating matter where fusion is so absurdly inefficient that, pound for pound, a compost heap beats it.

One of the hardest things to calculate for an asteroid is its mass - but it is such a critical feature. It determines how much of an impact it would have if it hits something, or how many resources are potentially available on it. But to accurately measure it we typically use optical sensing and a guesstimate of its density based on its spectral profile. A new paper suggests a completely novel way to use the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) flagship mission to potentially provide highly accurate mass calculations for nearby asteroids without any change in hardware.

Scientists have found that staple-shaped particles can tangle together to create a material that is both strong and flexible. Unlike conventional materials, these particles can be locked into a sturdy structure or rapidly unraveled using vibrations. The unusual behavior could open the door to recyclable buildings, reconfigurable structures, and even futuristic robotic technologies.

We have spent centuries being knocked off our pedestal. Earth isn't the centre of the Solar System, the Sun isn't the centre of the Galaxy, and we are not the point around which everything else turns. Now two philosophers want to take the demotion one step further and apply it to the thing we hold most precious of all, our own conscious minds. If they're right, awareness may be far more widespread, and far stranger, than we ever dared imagine.

For three years they've been one of the strangest puzzles in astronomy. Tiny, mysterious red dots scattered across the early universe, so abundant and so bright that some researchers wondered if they had "broken" cosmology itself. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has captured the most detailed look yet at one of them, and the answer it reveals is as exotic as the name suggests: a star sized object that is, in fact, a black hole wearing a disguise.

We are used to thinking of gravitational waves as messengers from catastrophes in space, the ringing of spacetime after black holes collide for example. But our own Galaxy hums with a fainter, steadier signal, a chorus of millions of unseen binary stars. A new study has found that this hum carries a hidden fingerprint of the Milky Way's spin, and that if a future space mission ignores it, our picture of the Galaxy itself could come out subtly wrong.

Somewhere in the plane of the Milky Way, a dead star is spinning 220 times a second, and it's circling its companion in almost the most perfect orbit astronomers have ever measured. China's giant FAST radio telescope has just found it, and the shape of that orbit is a near flawless record of a billion year relationship between two stars.

Oxford physicists have created an entirely new type of Schrödinger’s cat-like quantum state using components that are themselves highly quantum in nature. The advance could open new possibilities for more resilient quantum computers and deeper insights into the strange rules that govern the quantum universe.

Oxford physicists have created an entirely new type of Schrödinger’s cat-like quantum state using components that are themselves highly quantum in nature. The advance could open new possibilities for more resilient quantum computers and deeper insights into the strange rules that govern the quantum universe.

Here in Michigan, antivaxxers have scored a couple of political victories that are less than is being claimed. What do they mean for public health in the state?

The post Antivaxxers vs. the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

In a recent NASA-supported study, researchers assessed Titan's resource base and how it could be leveraged for ISRU. Compared with other locations under study (the Moon, Mars, etc.), they concluded that there is unrivaled potential for human exploration and settlement.

Svetlana (Lana) Jitomirskaya is a mathematics professor at Berkeley (Wikipedia, which puts her at two other schools, is out of date), and is one of 29 authors (I’m in there, too) on a paper in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, “In Defense of Merit in Science“. Lana is also a winner of the American Academy of Science and Letters’s Barry Prize for distinguished intellectual achievement.

I mention this because she is distressed at the very low math performance of entering students in Berkeley (and other schools in the University of California [UC] system), but did some calculations to show, as Governor Gavin Newsom intended with his 2024 California Education Compact, that the chances of a student getting admitted to a University of California branch are higher the worse the student’s high school is! Newsom and some “progressive” educators are against using standardized tests like the SAT for students applying for college, because they believe standardized tests discriminate against minority students.  Grade-point averages (GPAs) are one predictor of college and post-college success, but grade inflation is eliminating the inter-student variation that made GPAs useful, and data show that standardized tests add substantial predictive value to success (especially for highly selective schools like Berkeley), so it’s better that schools have both kinds of information for applicants.  Nevertheless, in an attempt to achieve “equity,” UC schools have completely barred the use of standardized tests, and that was against the recommendations of both a UC faculty task force and members of the Board of Regents.

At my own University, standardized tests are optional, but, weirdly, are used only when they can help a student get admitted, which seems to defeat the purpose of using a standardized benchmark. Here’s what Grok says about the University of Chicago’s standardized testing policy for admissions:

UChicago has maintained a test-optional policy since implementing it in 2018 as part of its UChicago Empower Initiative (initially focused on expanding access for first-generation and low-income students). This policy applies to all applicants, including domestic, international, and transfer students.

No Harm Testing Policy. In addition to being test-optional, UChicago uses a distinctive “No Harm” policy:

• Submitting SAT or ACT scores is entirely your choice.
• If you submit scores, they are only considered if they would positively affect your chance of admission.
• Scores that could negatively impact your application are not used in the review process.
• You can self-report scores on your application (via Common App or Coalition); official scores are only needed if you’re admitted and enroll.

This approach gives applicants flexibility—strong scores can help, but weaker ones (or not submitting) won’t hurt you.

Lana maintains that the omission of test requirements, (and I’d add the use of  “no harm testing policies”) hurts everyone: reducing the chances of really good students getting into even moderately good schools, while harming students from poorer schools by eliminating the pressure for them to study the “right” way: not memorizing but actually learning the material and learning to think, which you need to get good SAT scores. (It also eliminates the pressure for teachers to teach that way.) If you’re poorly qualified for a college you attend, the chances of you either dropping out or going into a “gut” major are higher.

The argument and the crucial graph is included in Lana’s new article in the Free Press, “Bring Back the SAT”.  You can read it if you’re a subscriber by clicking below, but I’ll reproduce some of her arguments plus the graph:

Lana gives several extended anecdotes about great students, once destined for Berkeley or UC San Diego, not getting in and having to go to community colleges, as well as students who got high grades by memorizing but did poorly in schools because they didn’t really learn to think. Many of those students, due to the negative correlation, get into places like UC Berkeley and UC San Diego.  I’ll mostly summarize the assertions about educational policy. (Quotes from Lana’s article are indented.)

What does an A grade in AP Calculus mean when it is paired with a score of 1 on the national exam? Exactly what a recent UC San Diego report revealed: In too many public schools, grades have become completely decoupled from learning.

None of this was Diego’s fault [his name is changed]. But now, he would face the reality of a world-class university. He would be required to retake calculus at Berkeley before moving on to the grueling upper-division requirements of mechanical engineering. With his immense drive and determination, common sense says he would catch up. Right?

“Getting into calculus in 11th grade is impressive,” I told him during the interview. “How and when did you realize you were good at math?”

“Math was always very difficult for me,” Diego replied. “But I worked hard and memorized all the formulas.”

This is the last thing a math professor wants to hear. Mathematics is not about rote memorization—it’s about conceptual understanding and logical reasoning, and Diego was never taught the difference. Like countless students at schools where teachers don’t understand mathematics themselves, he was instead taught what my colleague Hung-Hsi Wu calls anti-mathematics: a confusing, disconnected collection of unexplained procedures to be memorized for a test—and then immediately forgotten.

On the UC system’s abolition of SATs in 2020 and what it means for students like Diego:

To succeed now, Diego will need to unlearn these habits and rebuild his mathematical foundation from scratch, with much of what he has already learned not helping but standing in the way.

I desperately hope he manages to do so. But statistically, the chances are dangerously low. With the foundational deficiencies Diego demonstrated in his interview, the probability that he will survive his first Berkeley calculus course, even with a barely passing grade, is 50-50. He will spend his entire college career in a frantic, exhausting game of catch-up, and it is far more likely that he will be forced to change his major—leaving a hardworking young man’s confidence badly shaken, his engineering dreams derailed, and significant public resources wasted.

None of this would be as likely if the UC system still used a standardized test benchmark. The SAT was completely abolished for UC admissions by a Board of Regents decision in 2020, driven by concerns that standardized tests disadvantage minority and low-income students. This decision went against the unanimous, data-driven recommendation of the UC faculty task force—and against many of the Board of Regents’ own stated convictions. The SAT, imperfect as it is, measures knowledge of the absolute basics and the ability to reason clearly under a time constraint. An SAT score would have told us—and Diego himself—the truth about his preparation before it was too late.

Even more importantly, preparing for the test is itself a powerful intervention. If Diego knew that the SAT stood between him and a Berkeley engineering degree, his drive would have led him to use free, high-quality resources away from rote memorization and toward real mathematical reasoning. The preparation itself would have rewired his foundation. We failed Diego once by not providing him a decent math education. We should not fail students like him again by removing the incentive to build one themselves.

This is why my UC colleagues and I wrote an open letter to the Regents demanding a return to standardized testing. Within days, it garnered over 1,400 signatures, including those of 60 department chairs across the UC system. This unprecedented consensus is significant because STEM faculty aren’t political activists—they are the ones shaping California’s next generation of mathematicians and engineers.

That is indeed a powerful consensus!

According to Lana, the disconnect between grades and merit involves schools infusing courses with ideology:

Many of my colleagues teaching introductory gateway courses are not so lucky. They report a feeling of the bottom falling out of the classroom. “In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6,” one professor said. “The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”

The root cause of this bifurcation is California’s broken K-12 education. Teachers are trapped in systems that prioritize ideology over subject mastery, pressured by administrators to inflate grades, lower standards, and pass unprepared students along. The state has spent tens of billions of dollars on a high-speed rail line that has yielded zero benefit. It has spent far more, and done far worse, inflicting immense generational damage on California’s youth by failing to provide them a quality K-12 math education.

This is the fundamental reason why we cannot honestly satisfy the Newsom Compact’s goals. The onus for a decent math education has fallen entirely on parents. Those who can afford to move to a good school district or send their kids to after-school programs do so. Children of those who cannot are usually left trapped with subpar math instruction. Meanwhile, the schools that provide rigorous education become increasingly competitive. This is the engine behind the bifurcation we are seeing.

And here’s the critical and completely counterintuitive graph, the result of “progressive” thinking. Lana introduces it this way (bolding is mine)

An analysis of official California Department of Education data reveals that this is a systemic pattern. Over the last decade, the UC system has transitioned from a positive correlation between a high school’s math and English proficiency and its admissions success to a statistically significant negative correlation. Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates’ chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.

This is the kind of graph that only a mathematician could produce, as it summarizes a ton of data but to a layperson its point is not immediately grasp-able. (Thanks to Jay Tanzman, who put me onto the article and is a statistician, for explaining it to me.)  It is a plot over time in which the Y-axis values represent correlations: the correlation in one year between the assessed quality of a high school itself (not of a student), and the probability of students from that school being accepted to two UC schools: Berkeley and San Diego.  The points not only fall with time, but have gone below zero into negative territory, showing that the worse the school, the higher the chances of a its students getting into Berkeley and, especially, UC San Diego, where there’s a whopping -0.5 correlation between high school quality and probability of its students getting into UCSD. (If you’re statistically minded, you could say “how BAD a high school you went to is 25% of the reason you got admitted to UC San Diego.”) 

This result is in fact what Newsom and other higher-ups had in mind, for high schools rated of lower quality also have a higher proportion of minority students. This negative correlation largely, says Lana, resulted from an ongoing attempt to achieve equity by upgrading the admission chances of students from poorer schools.  I believe Lana’s point is not that this situation is the result of dropping SATs—for the correlation was already falling before 2020 when SATs were abolished—but that we now need the SATs to be able to assess how good students really are. 

I’m told that nearly all high-school students in California get straight As now, so GPAs are a terrible predictor of success, even though I’m also told that “conventional wisdom” says that GPAs and standardized tests are roughly equally important in predicting success in college. That may be wrong, at least for California, but I’ll depend on diligent readers to look it up.

Whatever the case, it’s certainly true that if you go to a worse school, your chances of getting into the two best UC branches improve! Lana winds up for calling for the reinstatement of SATs, and I’m with her:

It is too late to reintroduce the SAT for the 2026 cycle, but we can still help thousands of students like Diego who will apply to the UC system in 2027. That is why a growing coalition of faculty members is rushing to force an emergency course correction. If a car full of your children is hurtling toward a cliff, it is not the time to create yet another subcommittee. You’ve got to slam on the brakes. The University of California must recognize this academic emergency for what it is and act to immediately restore objective standards to the admissions process.

Now if you’re a “progressive”, you’ll object to her characterizing SATs as “objective”, but that’s an argument for another day.

h/t: Jay Tanzman

I wondered what Bill Maher thought about the sketchy Graham Platner and his run as a Democrat for the Senate seat from Maine. Well, see the video below. Maher realizes that Platner is a “broken person,” but we’re “always electing our reflection in the mirror.”  And he thinks that Dems should still vote for Platner because they need the Senate and we should just get used to America being “a country full of a lot of “broken, horribly educated, phone-addicted sort of nutty people,” and Platner is simply one of those. Maher points out some of our representatives or candidates who are already plenty weird (e.g., Tom Kean Jr., who’s been missing for over 100 days, Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist who wants to put Zionists in concentration camps, and.Victor Marx, who does exorcisms over the phone).

Maher goes off further on Americans: “Everything people ‘know’ now is from social media and shitposting and whatever some other idiot send them  or whatever the Chinese are feeding them on Tik Tok.” This leads to a new breed of voter “who is intensely political but somehow know[s] almost nothing about politics.” True, and also true for “encampers.”

Maher includes Trump as a primo example of brokenness, faulting him for not editing his stream of consciousness (the clips of the Prez are rich), though Maher misses a chance to mention Joyce’s Ulysses (the audience might not know what he meant, though).

This is a pretty good bit, but it’s also somewhat depressing because Maher, though appearing elitist here, does show us how nuts American politics has become.

The guests on Friday’s episode of Real Time were author David Sedaris, political scientist Ian Bremmer, and former National Security Council director Hagar Chemali.  The last two appear in this segment. 

I’ll put up some videos of the World Cup games or highlights that interest me. Here are 20 minutes of highlights between Brazil and Morocco, which was tied 1-1 at the end.

Summary from the BBC:

Vinicius Jr spared Brazil the embarrassment of defeat in an opening World Cup match for the first since 1934 as his spectacular solo goal earned a draw for the five-time winners against Morocco at the New York New Jersey Stadium.

Brazil fell behind in the 21st minute when Ismael Saibari lifted the ball over the onrushing Alisson Becker from outside the area following a lapse in communication between the Liverpool goalkeeper and his defenders, Gabriel and Marquinhos.

It was the first time the African champions had scored against South American opposition at the World Cup, having failed to do so against Peru in 1970 and Brazil in 1998.

Morocco continued to dominate and, by the 30th minute, had registered 12 shots – the most Brazil have faced in a World Cup match since their encounter with Mexico in 2018.

But as Mohamed Ouahbi’s side failed to capitalise on their advantage, Brazil drew level 13 minutes before the break through Vinicius.

Making his 50th appearance for the Selecao, he collected a ball from Bruno Guimaraes inside the area, cut inside, and unleashed a fierce strike past Yassine Bounou.

Former West Ham midfielder Lucas Paqueta almost put Brazil ahead in first-half stoppage time, but his acrobatic effort was tipped behind for a corner.

With several members of Brazil’s triumphant 2002 squad watching on in New Jersey – including Ronaldo, Kaka and Roberto Carlos – Carlo Ancelotti’s side began to move through the gears after the break.

And although chances were at a premium for both sides, Raphinha came closest to finding an elusive second when he narrowly failed to connect with Guimaraes’ low-driven cross across the face of goal.

The draw means Morocco’s wait to win their opening game at a World Cup goes on, while Brazil’s remarkable 92‑year unbeaten first-match record remains intact.

Brazil’s tying goal begins at 6:41.

Venus’ extraordinarily slow retrograde rotation was likely caused by a chance encounter with a moon-sized impactor. One that some 4.5 billion years ago likely slammed into our sister planet at a high angle and high velocity.

A new catalyst design could significantly improve the conversion of CO2 into methanol, an important fuel and chemical feedstock. Researchers separated key reaction steps across different catalyst sites, avoiding a long-standing trade-off between speed and efficiency. The result was about three times more methanol production than standard commercial catalysts.

What if some black holes aren’t black holes at all? A new theoretical study suggests that when a massive star collapses, it might not form a singularity hidden behind an event horizon. Instead, the collapse could trigger the birth of a tiny new universe inside the dying star. Driven by dark energy, this miniature cosmos would expand and push back against gravity, preventing complete collapse and creating an exotic object known as a gravastar.

What if some black holes aren’t black holes at all? A new theoretical study suggests that when a massive star collapses, it might not form a singularity hidden behind an event horizon. Instead, the collapse could trigger the birth of a tiny new universe inside the dying star. Driven by dark energy, this miniature cosmos would expand and push back against gravity, preventing complete collapse and creating an exotic object known as a gravastar.

To paraphrase the famous movie line, if the EBM you followed brought you to this, of what use was the EBM?

The post The Men of Data and Science Who Enabled the Quackery of MAHA and the Scientific Sabotage of MAGA first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.