Science

An assessment of nearly 900 dogs has identified 12 breeds prone to brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome, which can affect dogs' ability to sleep and exercise

Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments

Just a few hundred light-years from Earth, the famous variable star Mira A is huffing and puffing its outer layers to space. Its most recent mass-loss event ejected more material at higher velocity than in past events. A team of astronomers led by Theo Khouri, Chalmers University in Sweden discovered two large clouds of material expanding away from Mira A in observations done by the Very Large Telescope and ALMA telescopes in South America in 2015 and 2023. Those clouds form two lobes of a cosmic "heart" shape surrounding the star. That structure is basically a cloud of dust at the edges, filled by gas from the star.

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Fungi have become Hollywood’s go-to bad guys. But as yet another story focuses on Cordyceps, Nick Crumpton says we are missing a chance to broaden our fictional horizons

Feedback enjoys the debunking of a study that suggested a 2022 solar eclipse had been "anticipated" by a bunch of trees

Mathematician Hannah Fry travels to the front lines of AI in her new BBC documentary AI Confidential with Hannah Fry. She talks to Bethan Ackerley about what the technology is doing to us – for better and for worse

There are many courses in universities that seem not to be exercises in objective teaching and learning, but rather courses designed to foist certain political ideologies or points of view on students. One of them at this university was called to my attention by several in our community; it seems to be a course on how it’s justifiable to use violence to resist oppression. It was and is still taught by Alireza Doostdar, director of our Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion. I’ll just cover what must be one of Doostdar’s biggest areas of interest: the settler-colonialist, genocidal, and apartheid state of Israel.  Does that justify the violence of Hamas? You’d have to take the course to see, but from the syllabus it looks like terrorism against Israel is not demonized in the course.

Doostdar is one of the handful of professors here who have taken an active and visible role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and was, I believe, one of the 28 faculty and students arrested for trespassing at the admissions office in 2023 (disruption #3 described here; the city later dropped charges).  His brother, Ahmadreza Mohammadi Doostdar, was arrested in 2018 for spying for Iran, and was sentenced to 38 months in prison, 36 months of supervised release, and given a fine of $14,153.

Over the past couple of years Alireza Doostdar has issued a number of tweets showing his animus towards Israel, but then took them down, which is either an act of cowardice, contrition (which I doubt) or ambition (getting rid of stuff that makes you look bad). Here are three of them.  First, plaudits for Iranian missiles:

Two more Doostdar tweets I posted that have now vanished:

The thought that Iranians will rise up against their government doesn’t seem so insane now, does it?

It is clear that the man has no love for Israel, promoting as he does the false narratives of Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide.” There is, of course, no opprobrium for Hamas or other terrorist organizations.

Here’s the first page of the syllabus for one of Doostdar’s courses, which is still listed as a “Human Rights” course in the college catalogue:

Look at that image of the buff Palestinian man wielding a sling à la David and waving the Palestinian flag!  Here’s a description of the course (bolding is mine):

From 18th century slave rebellions in the Americas to 20th and 21st century anticolonial revolutions, oppressed peoples’ struggles for liberation have often incorporated violent tactics, even against noncombatants. This course examines anticolonial violence in light of the work of the Martiniquan revolutionary Frantz Fanon and some of his interlocutors. We study specific freedom movements: the Haitian and Algerian revolutions against French colonialism, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Russian and American anarchism, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers’ mobilization against white supremacy and police violence, and the ongoing Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Throughout, we will pay attention to how revolutionaries evaluated the place of violence in their own movements, including criteria for justifiable and unjustifiable use of force.

Here are the readings for the section on Palestine. I haven’t looked all of them up, but looked at about a dozen, and all the ones I saw damned the apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonialist state of Israel.

None of the sources I examined condemned Hamas (the course, after all, is about justifiable violence), and all I saw were resolutely anti-Israel.

What is my conclusion? Well, first, Doostdar surely has a right to teach this course; to prohibit it because it may peddle hatred and lies (“apartheid”, “genocide,” etc.) would violate academic freedom.  All I can do is say, that as a fellow faculty member, I think the course is biased and promotes misunderstanding and hatred. Is this an academic or a polemic course?

I would add that if any Jews want to take the course (and some of course should—to see what other side is arguing), they will not emerge having learned that there’s anything good about Israel, or that the IDFs war in Gaza was justifiable. It’s ironic since Israel’s response to the attack on October 7 could also be seen as “liberatory violence” in response to yearslong Palestinian attacks on Israel, though either missiles or acts of terror.

My inspection of the syllabus and perusal of the reading suggest that this is an example of the “one-sided” syllabi that I discussed in a post last year. The authors of the study I described looked at 27 million syllabi. I summarized their results thus:

The upshot is what you might expect: “anti-progressive” (or “conservative”) works were assigned with progressive ones far less often than were works that buttressed the progressive point of view. Conclusion: liberal academia is not exposing students to credible alternative points of view (and yes, the authors took care to examine cite only works that academically credible).

Classic “progressive” works used in their analysis include the following; you won’t know the critical views so much but you can see them in the paper. I’d recommend reading the big unpublished paper if you have time as it has a lot more data.

1.  The classic progressive views of racism in the criminal-justice system:  Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me
2.  The classic progressive view of the Israel/Palestine conflict (and oppression of Arabs in general): Edward Said’s book Orientalism
3.  The classic progressive “pro-choice” paper: Judith Jarvis Thomson’s paper “A Defense of Abortion“

In short, “progressive” courses did not assign views counter to the course’s own ideology nearly as often as they assigned papers buttressing that ideology. This seems to be the case in Doostdar’s course. Make of it what you will, but it looks like an example of “myside bias.“

There’s been plenty in the news about 3I/ATLAS over the course of the past 8 months. Our third confirmed interstellar visitor went behind the Sun during its closest approach, but reemerged in December with plenty of eyes watching it. Papers describing what it looks like following its closest brush with the power of a star in probably billions of years are starting to come out, including a new one available in pre-print on arXiv from Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University and his co-authors, which shows how much the comet - and it is definitely a comet - has changed in the matter of only a few months.

We know that supermassive black holes can inhibit star formation in their galaxies. But new research and JWST observations show that the most luminous quasars can actually suppress star formation in neighbouring galaxies. SMBH may have played a more pronounced role in shaping the early Universe than previously thought.

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Microsoft researchers have developed a technology that writes data into glass with lasers, raising the prospect of robotic libraries full of glass tablets packed with data

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Babies in the West commonly lack a gut microbe that is found in infants in other parts of the world, which may be due to differences in their mothers' diets

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finally published an obituary of J. D. Watson, who died in November of last year. (Nathanial Comfort has written a biography of Watson that will be a good complement to Matthew’s biography of Crick; Comfort’s book will be out at the end of this year or the beginning of 2027.)  You can access the PNAS obituary for free by clicking on the screenshot below, which is a good summary of Watson’s accomplishments (and missteps) if you don’t want a book-length treatment.

Most laypeople, if they know Watson’s name, probably know just two things. First, he and Crick co-discovered the structure of DNA, one of the great findings of biology. Second, Watson was demonized, and fired as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, for making racist comments.  Both are true. Yes, Watson was a racist, as I discovered from talking to him for an hour and a half (see below), but he was also a brilliant scientist who did far more than just the DNA-structure stuff. The article describes some of his other accomplishments and I quote:

DNA was not the only structure that Watson solved at Cambridge. Using X-ray crystallography, Watson determined that the coat protein subunits of Tobacco Mosaic virus (TMV) were arranged helically around the viral RNA, although he could not detect the RNA (5). Two years later, Rosalind Franklin, now at Birkbeck College with J. D. Bernal, published the definitive study on the structure of TMV (6).

Watson left Cambridge in 1953 to take up a fellowship with Delbrück at the California Institute of Technology. He joined forces with Alex Rich in Pauling’s laboratory to work on the structure of RNA, but RNA gave fuzzy X-ray diffraction patterns and provided no clues as to what an RNA molecule might look like. Watson was not happy in Pasadena and, with the help of Paul Doty, was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at Harvard. However, he first spent a year in Cambridge, United Kingdom, before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Watson and Crick teamed up again to study the structure of small viruses and proposed that as a general principle, the outer protein coat of these viruses was built up of identical subunits. Franklin was also studying small viruses, and she and Watson exchanged letters, and she asked Watson and Crick to review drafts of her manuscripts.

At Harvard, Watson, his colleagues, and students made many important findings on ribosomes and protein synthesis, including demonstrating, concurrently with the team of Sydney Brenner, Francois Jacob, and Matt Meselson, the existence of messenger RNA. Watson’s contributions are not reflected in many of the publications from his Harvard laboratory. He did not add his name to papers unless he had made substantial contributions to them, thus ensuring that the credit went to those who had done the work. These papers included the discovery of the bacterial transcription protein, sigma factor, by Watson’s then graduate student Richard Burgess, along with Harvard Junior Fellow Richard Losick. At Harvard, Watson also promoted the careers of women, notably providing support for Nancy Hopkins, Joan Steitz, and Susan Gerbi. He also contributed to the split in the Department of Zoology due to his contempt for those working in the Department who were antireductionists.

 

In his last scientific paper (7), published in 1972, Watson returned to DNA. In considering the replication of linear DNA of T7 phage, he pointed out that the very ends of a linear DNA molecule cannot be replicated, the “end replication problem” which is solved in eukaryotes by telomeres. (Watson’s work was predated by Alexey Olovnikov who had published the same observation in 1971 in a Russian journal.)

Note the contributions Watson made, along with collaborators, at Harvard, and note as well that he did not put his name on publications unless he made “substantial contributions to them.”  I did that, too, and I inherited that practice from my Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin, who inherited it from his Ph.D. advisor Theodosius Dobzhansky, who inherited it from his research supervisor at Columbia and Cal Tech, the Nobel Laureate T. H. Morgan.  This is a good practice, and I never suffered from keeping my name off papers, for the granting agencies care only about which and how many papers come from an investigator’s funded lab, not how many his or her name is on.  I’ll digress here to say that this practice has almost died out, as people now slap their name on paper for paltry reasons, like they contributed organisms or other material.  The reason is the fierce competition for funding and credit.

Watson went on to write influential textbooks, trade books (notably The Double Helix) and headed up the Human Genome Project, from which he ultimately resigned. Finally, he ran the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he did very well until the racism scandal broke, rendering him ineffective.

Witkowski and Stillman don’t neglect the dark side of Watson:

In the late 1990s, Watson gave seminars, notably at the University of California Berkeley, where he expanded on research on the hormone POMC and related peptides and made inappropriate and incorrect observations about women. In October 2007, he made racist remarks about the intelligence of people of African descent, and, damagingly for his fellow employees at CSHL, stated that while he hoped that everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” The CSHL Board of Trustees dissociated the institute from Watson’s comments, and he was forced to step down from his administrative position as Chancellor. The matter resurfaced in January 2019 when Watson was asked if his views on race and intelligence had changed. His answer was unequivocal: “No, not at all.” The Laboratory’s response was immediate, relieving him of all his emeritus titles. Watson and his family, however, continued to live on the CSHL campus.

They conclude this way:

Jim’s remarkable contributions to science and society will long endure—for the scientists using the human genome sequence, for students using Molecular Biology of the Gene and for readers of The Double Helix, and for reviving Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He was a most amazing man.

Here’s a photo of Watson and me when he visited Chicago in 2013 to introduce the Watson Lectures that he endowed for our department. Do read the cool story about how those lectures came about in my post “Encounters with J. D. Watson“.