Science

We know that stars can engulf planets because stars that swell up to become red giants overwhelm any close-in planets. The Sun will do this to Venus, Mercury, and possibly Earth in a few billion years. But research shows that it can happen when low-mass stars first enter the main sequence. Lithium gives it away.

This ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week captures all the glory of the star-forming region N159. It's in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and is dwarfed by its much larger neighbour, the Tarantula Nebula. But N159 is gorgeous, too, so captivating that it's been featured as a Picture of the Week several times.

Our planet's liquid iron outer core is slowly giving up its secrets to a trio of satellites launched by ESA in 2013. Called Swarm, the three probes have been studying Earth's magnetic field at the source. In the process, they've revealed startling changes in a molten layer region 2,200 kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean. In 2010, material in that area of Earth's outer core changed direction. Insteading of moving slowly westward, it's now headed east and picking up speed. Scientists are working to figure out why by using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm data and additional information from ESA's CryoSat mission and ground-based instruments.

Open star clusters are prevalent stellar structures in the Milky Way. Astronomers think their could be 100,000 of them. But they're not all the same: some are binary clusters, and within those, there's a hierarchy based on how they form. Recent research explores the different types and how many of each type is in the Milky Way.

After an AI from OpenAI found a trick to solve an 80-year-old conjecture from Paul Erdős, mathematicians have borrowed the same technique to solve another important problem

Correction: Colin told me this: “One minor correction: Theory and Society isn’t a new journal. What’s new is the newly approved ‘Peer Review’ paper category they offer. We had been working with the Springer Nature people for close to 6 months back and forth, and finally they approved it and implemented it on the journal website’s backend so it appears in the drop-down menu when people submit articles.

Luana sent me this tweet, which I’d missed, announcing the founding of a new section of a scientific journal that exists to critique articles in other journals (with the original author given the right of reply). Click on the screenshot if you want to go to the original tweet:

 

To see the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Kevin McCaffree and Colin explaining the journal, click on the screenshot below—or you can find the article archived here.

Some excerpts:

We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.” But science isn’t like a thermostat regulating your home’s temperature. It’s a human institution run by fallible human beings. Scientists and scholars are susceptible to career incentives, moral fads, groupthink and fear. When those pressures capture journals or entire fields, peer review can become less a filter for error than a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.

. . . Decades of studies on publication bias, replication failures and political bias in the social sciences have shown that peer-reviewed papers are often less reliable than the public assumes. John Ioannidis’s famous 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” remains disturbing because its basic insight about the fallibility of medical research remains true. In fields that rely heavily on narrative or qualitative methods, or that touch on politicized topics (as much social science does), ideology influences which questions are asked and which conclusions are professionally acceptable.

The authors then mention the Sokal hoax as well as the “Grievance Studies affair” involving submission of bogus papers to social-science and humanities journals by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghassian. (There were no submissions to STEM journals in either “affair” unless you consider gender studies journals as being in STEM.

A bit more:

This problem is growing more serious. Across swaths of the humanities, social sciences, medicine and biology, some narratives have become taboo. Papers presenting contrary evidence or dissenting viewpoints are rejected without comment. Letters to the editor, which are supposed to provide a quick way to respond to flawed work, are ignored or unavailable. The result is an ideologically biased literature that’s presented as an expert consensus and cited by journalists, courts, school boards, medical associations, government agencies and lawmakers to justify policies that affect millions of people.

The most obvious answer is better peer review. But ideologically captured fields have little incentive to correct themselves. As a result, objections to progressive orthodoxy are relegated to social-media threads, blog posts and newspaper opinion sections.

This is where the myth of “self-correcting” science becomes a problem. People assume the system will fix itself, but first someone has to notice the problem and create a mechanism for correction.

That is what we have done. As an editor-in-chief and a member of the editorial advisory board of Theory and Society, an interdisciplinary journal published by Springer Nature, we are proud to announce a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.” The purpose is to avoid procedural traps that can prevent legitimate criticism from being published and to recover what peer review was supposed to be: serious, good-faith analysis by experts seeking clarity and truth.

As in postpublication peer review, a Peer Review article may address a paper from any scholarly journal so long as it raises concerns about methods, evidence, logic, definitions or theory. The focus must be on claims, arguments and scholarly standards, not the author’s character or motives.

Submissions, limited to 2,500 words, will undergo a simple merit review rather than endless rounds of gatekeeping. An editor or subject-matter expert will ask a straightforward question: Is this critique coherent, serious and reasonable enough to deserve scholarly attention? If so, it will be accepted.

This is a good idea, and I can easily see myself writing a short response to some pieces that I find deficient. (Some of my website critiques of “sex-is-a-spectrum” posts might have been appropriate.

The only problem is what to do with papers (not just critiques) that try to air subjects that are forbidden or inflammatory.  Those might be suitable for The Journal of Controversial Ideas, but I’ve never seen a straight science/data paper there. (Granted, I haven’t looked at every issue.)

Anyway, pass this news along to those who might be interested.

Are people suffering from a persistent, debilitating, and apparently incurable psychiatric condition, such as incapacitating suicidal depression, entitled to physician and/or government assistance in dying? (This procedure is also called “physician-assisted suicide”, or “medical assistance in dying”: MAID).  Of course anybody can kill themselves without the help of doctors or the government, but I’m talking about formal programs, often involving ingestion or injection of pentobarbital or secobarbital. This is available for those suffering from apparently incurable and suicidal mental illness in five countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Spain (see details below the fold). All of these countries require, as is proper, a rigorous vetting program by mental-health professionals and doctors to see if all recourses have been tried and if the patient truly want to die and sees no point in living.

One alternative, legal everywhere and mentioned in the piece below, is voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSF), which, depending on what you do, will cause death within a week or two.  Some countries, like the Netherlands, will give hospice care to mentally ill people who are not approved for MAID but choose VSF, helping those patients ease out of life when their bodies start to shut down.

While physician-assisted suicide is legal in many places, including 11 states in the U.S., as well as Washington D.C.—laws permitting it have recently passed in Illinois and New York, and will take effect this summer—these are all for people suffering from terminal medical conditions.  The U.S. and all countries other than the five listed above do not allow physician-assisted suicide for other coniditons, whether or not the government assists or helps pay for it.

For a number of reasons I list below, MAID for psychiatric conditions has become quite controversial,  While I tend to side with those who allow it, I also agree that stringent medical and psychological vetting is necessary before a doctor is allowed to help someone die who has such conditions.  In the Free Press article below, author Rupa Subramanya first describes the death of Iris Dekker in the Netherlands, and then discusses the many issues around the procedure.

Click to read, though you’ll have to be a subscriber.

One gets the feeling from the posted article above, which is generally objective, that Subramanya really does oppose MAID for psychiatric conditions, and partly for religious reasons.  In a new hourlong conversation with Coleman Hughes, however, Subramanya pulls no punches; she clearly doesn’t think MAID is ready for primetime.  Coleman is a bit more in favor of it, but also has reservations.

First, a bit about Iris Dekker, who sought MAID in the Netherlands after over a decade of deep depression and suicidality.  She in fact tried to kill herself twice, once by hanging and once by cutting, but her parents found her in both cases and aborted the attempt. She also had a physical condition that may have been related to her mental illness:

Depression was not new to the Dekkers. Omar [Iris’s father] has a history of it, as do other members of his family. But Iris’s was different. Her symptoms were psychological and physical—a condition called functional neurological disorder, associated with severe psychological distress and depression. It often presents with symptoms like paralysis, seizures, and chronic pain, and was once referred to in medical psychology as hysteria. Iris had spent more than two years in a wheelchair after a seizure left her unable to walk.

In the end, after she had tried everything, including electroconvulsive therapy and ketamine treatment, Iris asked for MAID. But she became worse while waiting for approval and so practiced VSF until she died, with her pain palliated by physicians, at age 19.  Her parents didn’t want her to die, but in the end realized that there was no likelihood of a cure, and supported her. The end:

Watching her fade away, Omar felt the full weight of what was happening. He recalled the final night with his daughter as he held her in his arms and listened to her breathing. “In my heart, as a father—and also as a nurse—I was thinking, I have to do something,” he said. “And at the same time, I knew: No. This is what she wants.”

In her final moments, Iris could no longer speak or respond. When she took her last breath, Omar saw a smile on his daughter’s face.

“She looked so happy,” he said. “I couldn’t give her more love than letting her go.” Iris died on March 1, five days before her 20th birthday.

Letting go of those we love is very hard. We take it for granted that it’s humane when we’re dealing with pets who have terminal medical issues, but we cannot know when animals are undergoing unbearable mental suffering. But humans can tell us.

*********

It seems obvious, as I said, that Subramanya doesn’t like the idea of MAID, nor does she say how it could be implemented properly.  Statements like these are what makes me feel that way:

The Dekkers agreed to talk to me in detail about their daughter’s decisions—and theirs. They also showed me medical records for Iris. I tried to understand how loving parents could be persuaded that the best decision for their daughter was an early death. What I found was a system that turns young people’s ambiguous wishes into a diagnosis of incurable depression. The process raises questions about the treatment not only of a few teens like Iris who choose to die by euthanasia, but countless others who are confronted with the idea that their psychological suffering is beyond help.

. . .With each failure, Iris and her parents heard the same conclusion from specialists: Her condition was “treatment resistant,” and doctors had exhausted their options. In fact, the conclusion that depression such as Iris’s can be incurable is itself controversial among psychiatrists. As one recent paper in Psychological Medicine noted, clinicians “cannot accurately predict long-term chances of recovery in a particular patient with treatment-resistant depression.”

In the podcast with Coleman, Rupa makes it clear that while she’s not opposed to assisted dying, she is pretty much opposed to the process when it’s applied to psychiatric illnesses or even, as is legal in Canada, to people who have incurable suffering from a medical condition, like going blind or having diabetes.  I won’t counter her arguments, though I disagree with many of her claims. I just want to list below some of the reasons people oppose MAID for purely psychiatric conditions.  All of these save the first are mentioned in either the article or in the podcast. I have made the list and give my reactions to it.

1.) Religious reason #1: only God can take a life or determine when someone should die, suicide is against religious dictates, etc. I will not deal with this because I don’t believe there are gods and thus don’t think these reasons are worth considering seriously. But they are of course worth countering and discussing. I simply won’t entertain the proposition that “God knows best.”

2.) You can never tell when depression might be alleviated; many people who tried to kill themselves because of depression have later recovered and think their suicidal ideation was mistaken. True, but for someone like Iris Dekker, who had tried everything, saying “you might get better” is letting someone suffer forever despite having made a gazillion attempts to find a reason to live. Note that Subramanya reports that psychiatric MAID is rare even where legal:

Even in countries that have been at the forefront of assisted dying, psychiatric euthanasia is still rare. The Netherlands had 174 cases of psychiatric euthanasia in 2025—about 1.7 percent of its euthanasia deaths and 0.1 percent of deaths overall. Of the 338 euthanasia applications received at the Euthanasia Expertise Center in 2025 from patients younger than 30 that involved psychiatric suffering, only 11 were approved. None were minors.

This worry can be alleviated by a process of rigorous vetting, which, given the statistics above, seems already in place. While it of course cannot guarantee that someone allowed MAID could some day recover from psychiatric illness, if they’ve tried many ways to get better and yet still remain suicidal after years, it seems cruel for someone else to say that we should let them live because we don’t know what would happen. It is in effect trying to control someone else’s existence.

3.) The slippery slope argument: MAID for mental illness will lead not only to expansion of the process to those who don’t really qualify, but also, as Rupa says, “people who were socially isolated, people who were homeless, people who were on disability and people who just felt a great sense of despair.”

Again, this can be alleviated by rigorous vetting, and by involving doctors and therapists who aren’t in the business of willy-nilly approving candidates for MAID, just as there should be procedures preventing doctors from prescribing opioids for no good reason. Of course no system is perfect, but when you see someone like Iris Dekker, who has suffered greatly for years and wants to die–and has tried to die by her own hand–slippery-slope arguments need to be contested.  There’s no need to go all the way to the bottom of the slope once you step off the summit.

4.) Laws like Canada’s that allow MAID if you’re suffering not from terminal illnesses, but from other medical conditions, are not supportable because you can’t judge what is “intolerable suffering.” 

Again, rigorous vetting is the best way to deal with this.  Who better than (objective) mental-health professionals and doctors can judge whether suffering is “intolerable”. especially when multiple drug and/or psychiatric regimens ahve been tried?

5.) The social argument (from Rupa): suffering should be solved and endured collectively rather than by personal choice. 

Here’s what Rupa says;

We’re fully rational actors making these decisions entirely on our own. But in reality, our choices are shaped by our relationships with people. It’s shaped by the environment that we’re in, and it’s shaped by economic conditions, whether we feel loved, supported, or abandoned. So his argument is that autonomy is never fully independent because we make decisions within this context. I think with Canada, and then you have a political class in a place like Canada that is more than happy to enable all of these things. And so I feel like all of these things have come together in Canada, in the Netherlands as well.

I don’t really understand this argument, but it figures in the example of Rupa’s father (see below). If someone is suffering and can’t be cured, why should this be a problem that can’t be solved by the individual?  And of course the state does get involved when MAID is considered.

6.) Different doctors have different standards for “intolerable suffering.” Further, at least in Canada, some doctors, says Rupa, tend to get on oversight committees who are on board with MAID, so the procedure becomes easier to get. Rupa says this:

I think that some of the doctors I’ve spoken to think that they’re basically God. they feel powerful in making these decisions one doctor I spoke to she’s a prolific maid provider in British Columbia in Vancouver and she loves the limelight she loves talking about the patients she’s euthanized over the years and she started off I think she was a she went from delivering babies to now euthanizing people and she told me look and she said this elsewhere as well that I like to push the boundaries as much as I can when it comes to medical assistance anddying and that was pretty extraordinary to me. [JAC: remember, this is a transcript taken from the podcast, so there are infelicities of speech as well as outright errors in transcription.]

Again, choose well known and objective physicians; that is the best you can do. And of course usual more than just two or three doctors. Remember that MAID for mental illness is not yet legal in Canada.

7.) Hastening death is “the path of least resistance”, and in many cases may be less expensive and time-consuming than treatment for years and years. Here’s another quote from Rupa:

You do have cases where people can change their minds, but eventually the system decides that it should be the option. There was another case of a man with cancer who became delirious and very unresponsive in hospital. And according to this report, the doctors aroused him, shook his head and interpreted his blinks and the responses he was mouthing as consent and then proceeded to kill him that very same day. So basically, what all of this tells me is that. . .  there’s a medical culture now which is hastening death. And, you know, as one ethicist put it to me, he said this is the path of least resistance now.

If the law is made with the input of ethicists, this should be prevented. Again, the solution seems to be rigorous vetting and oversight rather than letting people suffer forever. And of course you can give control over your medical treatment to others via “do no resuscitate” orders and the like (I have these).

8.) MAID “normalizes” euthanasia and suicide.  Another quote from Rupa:

Hughes: Are you saying because of MADE, we’re entering this culture of normalization of suicide? And because of that, Some young people, they form that expectation that like, yeah, I have a right to die because of this culture. And then if they get rejected, they seek other means where like maybe in the past, without that culture of normalizing euthanasia and suicide, maybe they wouldn’t have even gone down the road. Is that sort of what you’re implying?

Subramanya: Yeah.

“Normalizing euthanasia” does not necessarily mean making it the go-to option.  And we are talking about euthanasia, not “regular” suicide.

9.) Religious reason #2: One role of religion should be to keep people off the slippery slope. Here’s an exchange from the podcast:

Hughes: But if you don’t have a religious view that life is sacred and that suicide is a sin, then it’s possible to talk yourself into it and kind of reason your way into ending your life if you really are at a low point and you are suffering, right? Is that what this is?

Subramanya: Yes, I think religion is certainly one institution when you look at the fact that as I mentioned earlier We’ve become a very individualistic society where suffering is no longer done communally, it’s not experienced communally, but on your own, where previously, you know, you’d go to the church or to the temple or to the mosque or whatever religion you belong to. But now, you know, a lot of us live in isolation, especially young people, you know, who are, I think, we’re still seeing some of the effects of the pandemic rapidly. right now where young people have been struggling with loneliness and alienation and mental health issues and then where suicide is not treated as something that you prevent but increasingly something that you facilitate so religion for sure. If you’re talking about how institutions once played a very important role in making us feel connected, that’s changed quite a bit.

Subramanya seems to have forgotten that it is also religion that’s been the main obstacle to any form of MAID, even for terminal illness (Mother Teresa is one example of someone who thought Jesus will take people when he’s ready). Is Subramanya suggesting that we should try to foist religious solutions onto someone seeking MAID?  Too late: religion is disappearing now, and you don’t go proselytizing someone who is suffering.

When Subramanya tells this story about her father, who found a reason to live, she seems to use it as an example of why anyone, however ill, can find a reason to live.  But people differ in how they bear suffering:

. . . I learned that my father in India was diagnosed with primary central nervous system lymphoma. They found a cyst in his brain and he needed a very urgent brain biopsy. As I was writing about Keanu’s death, this 27-year-old young person with type 1 diabetes and blindness and that he had given up on life, I was watching my own father fight desperately to hold on to his. And five months later, my father can’t speak because the part of the brain on which they operated controls speech. He has undergone chemotherapy and radiation.

He’s doing really well. His cancer is in remission. But what strikes me most is Not just merely his resilience, it is his desire to live. I mean, despite the pain and exhaustion, the loss of speech, the humiliations that he’s experienced, that serious illness brings about in people. You mentioned your mother who had who died of cancer. He’s soldiering on. He still loves life. And he wants more time. He’s fighting for every single day. And he finds joy in ordinary moments.

So, you know, for me, you know, as someone who’s written quite extensively about death, I look at my father and I wonder like what Why is he so different from someone who is 73 years old here in Canada, perhaps given a similar diagnosis and chooses made? Or why does a 28-year-old give up on life? And I don’t think my father in India is an outlier in the sense that he wants to live as much as possible. I think in places like India, you still have strong cultural family ties. I think religion continues to be extremely important. And I think these are factors, these are things that are increasingly, they’re disappearing in the West.

Once again we see religion mentioned as a way to keep people off the slippery slope of MAID. But what if you are not religious and cannot force yourself to believe? Someone like me, for instance.

In the end, I see both the article and podcast (not Hughes) infected with religiously-tinged arguments. I’ve long viewed the Free Press, while ideologically appealing in several ways, as too soft on religion—too eager to see it as caulk for our “god-shaped” holes.  This article may be one example.

Click on “continue reading” below to see descriptions of the five countries medical assistance in dying is legal for those with psychiatric issues:

From Grok:

My question:  Which countries allow medical assistance in dying for psychiatric problems or other mental issues?

How Grok answered:

As of May 2026, a small number of countries explicitly permit medical assistance in dying (MAiD, which includes physician-administered euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide) where a psychiatric disorder or other mental health issue is the sole underlying medical condition (or the primary source of unbearable suffering). In these jurisdictions, the person must generally be an adult with decision-making capacity, make a voluntary and well-considered request, experience constant and unbearable suffering with no prospect of reasonable improvement, and have exhausted relevant treatment options. Psychiatric cases remain relatively rare (typically 1–2% of total MAiD cases where data are available).Here is the current list of countries where this is allowed:

• Netherlands: Euthanasia is legal for psychiatric disorders under the 2002 law if the patient has “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement.” This has been in practice for over two decades, with official reports documenting dozens of cases annually (e.g., 115 psychiatric cases in 2021).
• Belgium: Euthanasia is permitted for “constant and unbearable physical or mental suffering” from an incurable condition (including psychiatric disorders) since the 2002 law. Requests require multiple written statements, medical confirmation, and review. Psychiatric cases are reported (e.g., 26 in 2022).
• Luxembourg: The 2009 law allows euthanasia or assisted suicide for an incurable medical condition causing unbearable physical or mental suffering with no prospect of improvement. Psychiatric disorders qualify under the same criteria as in the other Benelux countries.

 

• Switzerland: Assisted suicide (not physician-administered euthanasia) is permitted. A 2006 Federal Supreme Court ruling explicitly extended this to individuals with “incurable, permanent, severe psychological disorders,” provided the person has decision-making capacity and the wish is autonomous (not a symptom of a treatable mental disorder). Right-to-die organizations facilitate this, often with psychiatric evaluation.
• Spain: The 2021 Organic Law on the Regulation of Euthanasia allows MAiD (euthanasia or assisted suicide) for a “serious and incurable illness” or “serious, chronic, and incapacitating condition” causing constant and unbearable suffering (physical or mental). While a 2023 Constitutional Court ruling sought to limit purely psychiatric cases to those with a somatic basis, practice and recent cases (including a high-profile 2026 euthanasia of a 25-year-old woman with mental illness after legal proceedings) confirm eligibility is possible under the law’s broad criteria.

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Physicists have thought for decades that microscopic black holes can theoretically emerge not from exploding stars but from delicate "critical states" in which space and time organise themselves into a crystal like structure. Now, for the first time, researchers from TU Wien and Goethe University Frankfurt have derived an exact mathematical formula describing this bizarre phenomenon using a surprising trick involving infinitely many dimensions!

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