Science

Reader J Monaghan from Australia sends us some urban birds from his area. It must be nice to live in Oz and see these around your house! Monaghan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. 

Urban Birds

These photos were taken in my garden and neighbouring streets in the Lake Macquarie area of New South Wales, one of Australia’s largest coastal salt water lakes. As we live in a “bird corridor” with many native and introduced different birds, we have had to learn to co-exist.

Australian magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen). During their August to October breeding season they become  protective of their nests and young, swooping on and sometimes injuring unwary passers by. Cyclists resort to sticking plastic ties and pipe cleaners in their helmets to protect from direct injury:

Female Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) are an introduced bird. Several families live near a creek at the bottom of my street and we all slow down and drive slowly past them as they take their time waddling off:

Mallards are not particularly shy and are happy to visit. If we walk and talk slowly, they will hang around for quite a while:

Australian Wood Duck (Chenonetta jubata) are common in our area, particularly around creeks and parks, as have adapted well to the urban environment:

Eastern Rosella (Platycercus eximius). The only two photos I have of these birds, as not only do they rarely come out into the open but they are skittish and fly away at the sight of my creeping cats:

Eastern Rosella. My second photo, just before it took flight:

Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae, also known as the laughing kookaburra). A frequent visitor to my friend’s pottery workshop, where it checks out her latest creations. Their raucous call can be sleep shattering at 6am:

Little Corellas (Cacatua sanguinea). Increasingly common in urban areas and often seen feeding on lawns, shrubs and playing fields. They are very social and can be boisterous and playful with each other. These two stayed still long enough for me to photograph them:

Masked Lapwing (Vanellus miles novaehollandiae). May swoop during breeding season but rare actual contact (unlike the magpie!). They nest in small depressions in the ground, and sometimes beside roads or in the roofs of buildings. We have to take care not to disturb their nests, which may require mowing around them or relocating them if they are in a particularly unsafe place:

Masked Lapwing couple on guard duty:

Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita). These birds are highly intelligent and comical, using loud, raucous calls and screeches to call out to each other. They drown out converstion when a flock flies over, so best to just wait until they fly off again:

The Sulphur-crested Cockatoo on the right spotted me trying to photograph it, raising its crest in reaction to my threat:

 Australian white ibis (Threskiornis molucca). Though they have many names (Tip turkey, Dumpster chook, Rubbish raptor), they are most commonly known as Bin Chickens, due to their ability to survive in cities by scavenging our leftovers, as their wetlands have been increasingly lost.

Australian White Ibis. Wary enough of humans that I couldn’t get close enough to take a better photo of them but brave enough to take over the local dog park:

Astronomers are on the hunt for those in-between black holes, not the small stellar ones or the supermassive ones, but something right in the middle. Recently, a group of scientists spotted a star travelling at high velocity out of the globular cluster M15. This speedy star got kicked out about 20 million years ago and is now zooming along at an incredible 550 km/s, fast enough that it's actually escaping our entire Galaxy! The researchers think this stellar ejection might have happened because of some cosmic game of pool - basically a three-body interaction involving one of those middle-sized black holes they've been trying to find!

The search for life in our Solar System, however primitive, past or present has typically focussed upon Mars and a select few moons of the outer Solar System. Saturn’s moon Titan for example has all the raw materials for life scattered across its surface, rivers and lakes of methane along with rock and sand containing water ice. There’s even a sprinkling of organic compounds too but according to a new study, Titan can probably only support a few kilograms of biomass overall, that’s just one cell per litre of water across Titan’s ocean.

The core mission of SBM comes down to a few things – examining the complex relationship between scientific evidence and healthcare, exploring issues of how optimally to regulate health care and health products, and fighting misinformation. Over the years I think we have made some solid strides on the first category. The medical infrastructure has been trending increasing towards higher standards of […]

The post The Misinformation Wars first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

What kind of mission would be best suited to sample the plumes of Saturn’s ocean world, Enceladus, to determine if this intriguing world has the ingredients to harbor life? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the pros and cons of an orbiter or flyby mission to sample Enceladus’ plumes. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners design and develop the most scientifically effective mission to Enceladus with the goal of determining its potential habitability.

When it comes to upgrading electrical and broadband infrastructure, new research shows that a 'dig once' approach is nearly 40% more cost effective than replacing them separately. The study also found that the greatest benefit comes from proactively undergrounding lines that are currently above ground, even if lines haven't reached the end of their usefulness.

When it comes to upgrading electrical and broadband infrastructure, new research shows that a 'dig once' approach is nearly 40% more cost effective than replacing them separately. The study also found that the greatest benefit comes from proactively undergrounding lines that are currently above ground, even if lines haven't reached the end of their usefulness.

In the great tug-of-war between the Sun and its planets, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus are much more susceptible to solar activities than scientists thought. Jupiter itself has an interesting reaction as it gets pummeled several times a month by solar wind bursts. They compress its magnetosphere and create a huge "hot spot" with temperatures over 500C.

Researchers report their discovery of fluorescent pigments in the feathers of Long-eared Owls, that can only be seen by humans with the help of ultraviolet light.

Up until recently, astronomy was reliant entirely on electromagnetic waves. While that changed with the confirmation of gravitational waves in 2016, astronomers had developed fundamental frameworks in the electromagnetic spectrum by that point. One critical framework broke the spectrum into three categories based on their wavelength - infrared, optical, and ultraviolet. To astronomers, each of these categories was created by a different physical phenomenon, and monitoring each gave its insight into what that phenomenon was doing, no matter what the other spectra said. This was especially prevalent when researching galaxies, as infrared and optical wavelengths were used to analyze different aspects of galaxy formation and behavior. However, Christian Kragh Jespersen of Princeton's Department of Astrophysics and his colleagues think they have found a secret that breaks the entire electromagnetic framework - the optical and infrared are connected.

It’s easy to measure the rotation rate of terrestrial planet by tracking surface features but the gas and ice giants pose more of a problem. Instead, previous studies have relied upon indirect measures like measuring the rotation of their magnetic fields. Now a team of astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to refine the rotation rate of Uranus with an incredible level of accuracy. This time though, instead of studying the rotation of the magnetic field, they tracked aurora to measure one rotation!

We all know that black holes can devour stars. Rip them apart and consume their remnants. But that only happens if a star passes too close to a black hole. What if a star gets close enough to a star to experience strong tidal effects, but not close enough to be immediately devoured? This scenario is considered in a recent paper on the arXiv.

An investigation of the changing behaviour of a single quantum bit through time has uncovered a tantalising similarity to the geometry of three-dimensional space

Researchers completed one of the most comprehensive studies to date on the risks of using AI models to develop software. In a paper, they demonstrate how a specific type of error could pose a serious threat to programmers that use AI to help write code.

It’s incredibly tricky to pin down the origin of the language that led to the words spoken everywhere between Spain and India – and it’ll be even harder to be sure we’ve got it right

Unusual rocks on an Icelandic beach were dropped there by icebergs, adding to evidence that an unusually cool period preceded the collapse of the Roman Empire

In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a report detailing recently-declassified information on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Since then, the Department of Defense has released annual reports on UAP through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Nevertheless, there is still a lack of publicly available scientific data on the subject. To address this, a new study led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Galileo Project proposes an All-Sky Infrared Camera to search for potential indications of extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Readers and correspondents are asking me what i think about the just-revealed “de-extinction” of the dire wolf by Colossal Biosciences, and the firm’s attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth, too.  I don’t want to write much about this now because I’ve put up a few posts about the mammoth before, and Matthew has expressed similar sentiments in his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age.  Further, I am writing my take for another venue, so I will just say this about the genetics of the de-extinction efforts so far:

My general sentiments are these: attempts to bring back extinct species as outlined so far are not only scientifically misguided, but are journalistically mis-reported by the press.  That is, the press is, by and large, distorting what has been done scientifically, pretending that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is actually identical to an extinct species. Further, Colossal seems happy enough to let this misconception be widely reported (to be fair, there are some decent articles about the science of de-extinction, and I’ll link to a few below).

The main problem, as I said, is the pretense that changing a living species by editing just a handful of genes (20 max so far) to get something that looks like the extinct “dire wolf” is not the same thing as re-creating a dire wolf.  That species undoubtedly had hundreds or thousands of genetic differences from the gray wolf, including genes affecting metabolism and behavior—genes that we do not know.  Further, control regions of genes, which are outside protein-coding regions, undoubtedly are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives. But we don’t know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

All of this means that, in my view, de-extincting species is a cosmetic rather than a serious genetic project, designed to produce gee-whiz animals to entertain rich people and to wow children.  Such animals, especially the highly touted de-extincted mammoth, which mammoth expert Tori Herridge calls “an elephant in a fur coat”, would certainly not survive in their original habitat.  Further, proponents’ claims that de-extinction would be a fantastic conservation effort , and could even mitigate global warming. are totally unsupported speculations.

There are two such efforts that have received all the press: the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth and of the dire wolf; the latter effort has produced some pups, but they are not dire wolves. We will never see woolly mammoths, though Colossal promises that they’ll be stomping about in three years!

Mammoth (see my website posts above) There are many reasons why this project is a non-starter.  The evidence that it is feasible rests solely on the production of “woolly mice,” which are mice that have had 8 edits in only 7 genes (remember, mice are easier to work with than elephants!).  Only two of the genes that were changed were edited in a way to conform to known mammoth genes. The rest are simply using mouse mutants known to affect hair texture, color, and waviness in lab mice.  Thus we have a woolly mouse—not anything close to a woolly elephant. Yes, it’s cool to make multiple changes in multiple genes at once, but this is not a new technology. The novelty will be to edit an elephant egg cell in a way that the edited cell can be implanted in an Asian elephant and develop into a woolly mammoth. If you really want something popping out of an Asian elephant that is close to a woolly mammoth, you will never get it. In fact, the whole project seems impossible to me. And the conservation results touted by Colossal–that the re-exincted mammoths, released on the tundra, will keep carbon in the permafrost and not in the atmosphere–are purely speculative.

Dire wolf:  Scientists edited a gray wolf stem cell, changing 20 genes. Fifteen of the edited genes were designed from from the sequenced dire-wolf genome (again, sequencing an extinct organism is a feat, but not one developed by Colossal), while five others were taken from known genes that change dogs or wolves (the articles aren’t clear on which genes were used, as Colossal is keeping that secret).  The edited cell, as an egg, was placed into a “large dog” to be the surrogate mom, and then extracted via caesarian section (did the dogs survive this procedure?) They get a whitish wolf with some dog or gray-wolf genes, not dire wolf genes. All of the changes are said to affect things like fur color, body size, and tooth and jaw configuration–traits that differentiated the dire wolf from the gray wolf.  As I noted, we wind up with a gray wolf (and remember, domestic dogs are descended from gray wolves, and can even be considered gray wolves, as they mate with each other and can produce fertile hybrids); we get a gray wolf with a couple of changed traits to make it look like what we think the dire wolf looked like. (We are not sure, for example, that the dire wolf had white fur.)

Neither the mammoth nor the dire wolf results are published in a peer-reviewed journals, though the woolly mouse experiment has been languishing on bioRΧiv for a while but hasn’t been published.

Here are some links, most but not all of them pointing out problems with de-extinction projects:

Colossal’s explanation of  the mammoth project. (Note that they also want to de-extinct the dodo and the thylacine, or marsupial wolf.)

Colossal’s account on the dire wolf result.

Nature paper by Ewen Calloway on why the woolly mouse isn’t a credible step towards a woolly mammoth.

Nature paper by Tori Herridge explaining why she turned down a position as advisor to Colossal on the mammoth

Article in Ars Technica by Nitin Sekar, WWF authority on conserving the Asian elephant, explaining why “Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation.”

Guardian paper by Adam Rutherford explaining why trying to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth is not only unethical, but impossible.

NYT article by Carl Zimmer on the dire wolf, a good summary and not nearly as critical as his Bluesky post below.

New Yorker article by D. T. Max on the dire wolf, somewhat windy and credulous (archived here).

Article in the MIT Technology Review by Antonio Regalado: “Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?”

Tweets and posts:

Tori Herridge’s posts on both Twitter and Bluesky are an informative and hilarious critique of the woolly mouse/mammoth projects. Get started with this one if you’d like (it’s a thread):

[though as an aside, honestly Colossal missed a trick not going for the Fgfr1/2 double mutant — I mean, have you seen a more mammothy-mouse?!]*MAMMOUSE KLAXON*www.nature.com/articles/s41…

— Tori Herridge (@toriherridge.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T00:20:55.808Z

Journalist Asher Elbein and a commenter on the misleading Dire Wolf.

Here Carl Zimmer points out that Colossal’s dire wolf is not a dire wolf. This is a bit more frank than his NYT article!

It's not a dire wolf. It's a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits. And here's my story! Gift link: http://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s…

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) 2025-04-07T16:38:15.772Z

Adam Rutherford (read his Guardian article on mammoths above) is particularly critical of the Dire Wolf project. I love the first tweet asserting that journalists who don’t do due diligence are making people stupider. That’s true, and it also makes people misunderstand (and possibly eventually mistrust) science:

Public service announcement. They are not Dire Wolves. They have 20 single letter changes in their entire genomes. I’ve done shits with more mutations. Every time journalists write up a Colossus press release, They are making people stupider. Client journalism by a ridiculous company.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T20:02:25.283Z

GODDAMIT. IT’S NOT A RESURRECTED DIRE WOLF. 20 edits in 19,000 genes. IT’S NOT GOING TO AID CONSERVATION. EVERY WRITE UP THAT SWALLOWS AND REGURGITATES THIS GUFFERY WOLFSHIT IS DOING PR FOR A FUNDING ROUND.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T12:05:49.778Z

Caveat emptor!

Oh, and for fun, here’s the Secretary of the Interior tweeting about how we shouldn’t worry so much about endangered species and pay more attention to “de-extincting” species.  But of course “de-extincting” isn’t going to do squat to keep existing species from waning. Burgum is off the rails here, entranced by the dire gray wolf.

Scientists have pioneered an influenza virus vector-based nasal spray vaccine platform and developed a nasal spray H5N1 avian influenza vaccine. During the early COVID-19 pandemic, this platform enabled the rapid development of a nasal spray vaccine in collaboration with mainland China's Wantai BioPharm. After completing Phase 1-3 clinical trials, it was approved in 2022 as the world's first nasal spray COVID-19 vaccine.

While the daily ebb and flow of people across a city might seem chaotic, new research reveals underlying universal patterns. A study unveils fundamental spatiotemporal scaling laws that govern these population dynamics.