Science

President Trump's DOGE team, headed by Elon Musk, claims to have saved $1 million by ditching 70-year-old tape data storage. But experts say the move will likely end up costing more in the long term and could put data at risk

An underwater drone with long, spinning arms like the flagella of bacteria could survey the seas without endangering marine life, its creators claim

From dampening inflammation to boosting mental health, the many types of dietary fibre have a surprisingly large impact throughout the body. Here's how to get your fill

As the Aral Sea has been drained by irrigation and dried up, the mass loss on the surface has caused Earth’s upper mantle to rise up, lifting the emptied sea bed an average of 7 millimetres per year

Dozens of trials testing GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide, the medicine in Ozempic and Wegovy, against a placebo suggest that they really could protect against dementia

A scientist gives an answer to a long-standing question in theoretical glass physics: what does it mean to be an order parameter for an inherently out-of-equilibrium system? Starting from first principles, the scientist reexamines what it means to be in equilibrium and arrives at the conclusion that order parameters of glass are merely time-averaged positions of atoms.

As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly integrates into health care, a new study reveals that all generative AI models may recommend different treatments for the same medical condition based solely on a patient's socioeconomic and demographic background.

What if we spend decades building advanced telescopes to search for life on other planets and come up emptyhanded? A recent study exploring what we can learn about life in the universe -- even if we don't detect signs of life or habitability. Using advanced statistical modeling, the research team sought to explore how many exoplanets scientists should observe and understand before declaring that life beyond Earth is either common or rare.

A framework inspired by evolution may demonstrate why two observers see the same non-quantum world emerge from the many fuzzy probabilities of the quantum realm

I've long said that the antivax movement is borderline eugenicist (or at least social Darwinist) in nature. Now that a second child has died of measles, it's time for me to take a look at the "soft eugenics" of the antivax movement.

The post Measles, MAHA, and “soft eugenics” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

In 1986, the Voyager 2 spacecraft made a flyby of Uranus. It gave us the first detailed images of the distant world. What was once only seen as a featureless pale blue orb was revealed to be...well, a mostly featureless pale blue orb. The flyby gave astronomers plenty of data, but the images Voyager 2 returned were uninspiring. That's because Voyager only viewed Uranus for a moment in time. Things change slowly on the ice giant world, and to study them you need to take a longer view.

Yesterday I spent quite a few hours at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, part of a free field trip sponsored by the Biological Sciences Divison (or so I think). It’s the third largest Holocaust Museum in the world, probably after Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which I visited, and (perhaps) the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which I haven’t. This one is very large, and is full of interesting photos, articles, relics, and other memorabilia.

I guess it has so much stuff because Skokie, where the Museum resides, was mostly a Jewish suburb, and there were many Holocaust survivors who contributed items, as well as many Jews who donated money for this very large building.

We had a guided tour, though I had a tendency to wander off by myself to look at stuff.  If you’re in Skokie and have an interest in these things, I recommend it highly. First, a few photos (I didn’t remember to take photos until later in the tour), which aren’t great because they were taken with my camera.

The two Nuremberg “Race Laws”, passed in 1935, not only defined as who counted as a Jew or an Aryan, but also forbade “intermingling” of Jews and non-Jews. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” stipulated this:

The second Nuremberg Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, banned marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. It also criminalized sexual relations between them. These relationships were labeled as “race defilement” (Rassenschande).

The law also forbade Jews to employ female German maids under the age of 45, assuming that Jewish men would force such maids into committing race defilement. Thousands of people were convicted or simply disappeared into concentration camps for race defilement.

Here’s a photo of two people who violated that law, and it struck me as particularly noxious.  The woman is holding a sign that reads (my translation; note that it rhymes in German) “I am the biggest pig in this place and only associate with Jews.”  The guy’s sign reads, “As a Jewish boy, I always take only German girls with me to my room.”  The guy’s sign rhymes as well.  I have no idea what happened to these people, but the Jewish man was almost certainly taken to the camps, and that almost certainly led to death.

Nazi armbands (real ones).  Many of the inhabitants of Skokie were (and some still are) survivors of the Holocaust, and donated things like this to the Museum. The pin in the middle is, as you can see from the placard, a Hitler Youth Membership pin.

Below is a (genuine) postcard celebrating the “Anschluß“, when Germany annexed Austria on March 11-13 of 1938, claiming that the country was ethnically German.  Later in the year, the UK, France, and Italy agreed that it was okay as well for Hitler to annex the part of Czechoslovakia also containing “ethnic” Germans, an area called the Sudetenland. This “Munich Agreement,” did not involve any Czechoslovakian participation. Hitler promised to leave the rest of the country alone and that he had no more territorial ambitions (he was lying, of course). Britain’s PM, Neville Chamberlain, returned to England with great approbation, declaring that he’d achieved “Peace for our time.”  He was dead wrong, of course, and his loss of face when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 led to Chamberlain’s ouster in 1940 (he died the same year).

I digress: this card is about the Anschluß, and reads: “13 March, 1938.  One people, one country, one leader.”

Below is a very fancy hand-done document, labeled “Declaration of the State of Israel created by Arthur Szyk, 1948.  On loan from Cipora Fox Katz.” It’s lovely, and Szyk, a Polish-American artist, has his own Wikipedia page, which says this:

Arthur Szyk was granted American citizenship on May 22, 1948, but he reportedly experienced the happiest day in his life eight days earlier: on May 14, the day of the announcement of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Arthur Szyk commemorated that event by creating the richly decorated illumination of the Hebrew text of the declaration.

And, sure enough, here it is. Click photo to enlarge it and see its beauty:

I stopped by the gift shop on my way out, and among the many interesting thing was this “Bag of Plagues”: toys for kids commemorating the plagues visited on Egypt because Pharaoh wouldn’t let the Jews go:

Finally, one of the best parts of the Museum is a hologram of a Holocaust survivor, one of several created by the Shoah Foundation. When the survivors were alive, they spoke for about a week to the interviewers, and their answers were recorded. Their accounts were combined with modern technology and AI to enable the audience to ask questions of the hologram, and there is so much data recorded for each person that the holograms can answer almost any question (see the video at bottom for more details). Here’s a short recording I did of one survivor named Eva.  Eva lived in Amsterdam as a child, where she was friends with Anne Frank. After the war, when Eva had lost her father and brother and Anne Frank her own sister and mother, Eva’s mother married Anne Frank’s father, Otto.

Here’s she’s answering an audience question about what her typical day at Auschwitz was like:

Here’s Leslie Stahl interviewing holograms of  Holocaust survivors who had died before the interview. Yes, they are interviews with people who weren’t alive! This is an absolutely fantastic way to keep not just the accounts alive, but also the survivors themselves.

 

Today is Sunday, which means that we have a batch of butterfly photos from John Avise.  John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 17 

This week continues my many-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  We’re getting near the end of the alphabet, so this is the penultimate post of my photographic tour of our continent’s Lepidopterans.

Tiny Checkerspot (Dymasia dymas):

Tropical Checkered Skipper (Burnsius oileus), male upperwing:

Tropical Checkered Skipper, female upperwing:

Umber Skipper (Poanes melane), upperwing:

Umber Skipper, underwing:

Viceroy (Basilarchis archippus):

Viceroy, underwing:

Wandering Skipper (Panoquina errans), upperwing:

Wandering Skipper, underwing:

West Coast Lady (Vanessa annabella):

West Coast Lady, underwing:

West Coast Lady, larva;

Mars exploration technology has seen a lot of recent successes. MOXIE successfully made oxygen from the atmosphere, while Ingenuity soared above the red planet 72 times. However, to date, no one has ever achieved one thing that will be absolutely critical to any long-term presence on Mars - making drinkable water. There have been plenty of ideas on how to do that. Still, NASA recently started funding a Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) graduate student named Lydia Ellen Tonani-Penha to look into the problem under their Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) funding program. Her Project Tethys will examine ways to purify the frozen or liquid brine that Mars is infused with.

NASA's Perseverance was scanning the rim of Jezero Crater when it spotted a Martian dust devil overtake and consume another smaller one. The rover was about a kilometer away from the larger dust devil, which was about 65 meters wide. The smaller one was about 5 meters wide. This isn't Perseverance's first encounter with dust devils. It's seen clusters dancing around it and even captured audio of a dust devil on Mars for the first time.

Did you spot the orange cat amongst the oranges from this morning’s post?  I’ve circled it in red below. I thought this was fairly easy but not dead easy.

You may have already read about this new cat coat color, undoubtedly found as a single mutation in a single individual. Popular Mechanics describes the color, called “salmiak”, or “salty licorice” in the article below. “Salmiak licorice” is flavored with ammonium chloride (!), and, according to Wikipedia, is “a common confection found in the Nordic countries, Benelux, and northern Germany ” I tried it once in Sweden, but wasn’t a fan.

Presumably this coat was named because it resembles a variety of this confection that is coated with salt, like these:

Marcin Floryan, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

To read about the color and see photos, click the headline below to go to an article in Popular Mechanics, which is also archived here, and also go to the article at My Cat DNA. Photos are below, too.

From Popular Mechanics:

You’ve probably heard of spooky black cats, chaotic orange cats, and distinguished-looking tuxedo cats. If you’re really into cats, you might have even lesser-known color variants like seal point and ticked tabby. But there’s officially a new cat color in town— salmiak, or ‘salty liquorice.’ You can see one here.

The pretty black, white, and grey shade—named for a popular snack food in Finland, where this coat color has been making itself known—is thanks to a fur strand that starts off black near the root, but grows whiter and whiter out towards the tip. The coat was first spotted in 2007, and in 2019, it was brought to the attention of a group of cat experts lead by feline geneticist Heidi Anderson. Since then, the group has been trying to figure out exactly what causes this shade to express itself, and recently, they finally figured it out. A paper on the discovery has been published in the journal Animal Genetics.

Here’s a two-minute video of this fur pattern:

And from My Cat DNA, which runs down the genetics (this is a single genetic mutation, a “knockout” mutation that inactivates a gene because there’s a big deletion of the DNA outside that gene).

The salmiak colour pattern was found to be recessively inherited, meaning it requires one copy of the salmiak variant from both parents in order for the trait to be visible. Although white spotting patterns can lead to hearing impairment in cats as well as dogs, researchers did not note any signs of deafness. However, they recommended BAER (brainstem auditory evoked response) testing in the future to rule out this possibility. The allele appears to be quite rare, with only 5 cats found to be positive for the pattern, and another 3 carriers for it, out of 183 Finnish domestic cats screened. The variant has not yet been found in other domestic cat populations.

Two additional domestic cats were also genotyped, one domestic cat from Romania and one from the UK, which manifested a similar type of white patterning referred to as “karpati,” of yet-unknown molecular cause. This pattern has been used as the basis of the creation of a new breed, called the “Transylvanian.” The term karpati is related to “Carpathian,” the region where local cats were noted to have this pattern. Researchers confirmed that the salmiak allele was absent in both of the karpati-coloured cats. Both karpati and salmiak may be described as being similar to roan colouring in other domestic species.

Here’s the paper in Animal Genetics. Click to read (note that they use the word “flavor” in the title, which is not an accident):

. . . and a picture from the paper (caption also from paper);  Some of these do resemble salted licorice, especially (a) and (f):

FIGURE 1.  Salmiak coloring in cats. Prominent features of the coloring are: “tuxedo” (a.k.a. bicolor) white spotting in the absence of white spotting alleles (Ws, g), and additional gradation of the pigment within hairs of primary color toward no pigmentation at the tips in the body, legs and tail. Additionally, there is primary colored spotting in the white areas of the front legs and chest, more intense coloring in the scapular region, and a very pale tip of the tail. (a) Salmiak solid black cat (aa/wsalwsal), (b) salmiak solid blue cat (diluted black, aa/dd/wsalwsal), (c) salmiak brown mackerel tabby (wsalwsal) (right) and his normal-colored brother heterozygous for salmiak (wsalw), (d) salmiak phenotype on a long-haired solid black cat (not genotyped), (e) salmiak solid black cat (aa/wsalwsal) and (f) salmiak phenotype on a tortoiseshell cat (not genotyped). Cat a was sequenced, and cats b, c and e were genotyped for salmiak. Photo credits: (a) Ari Kankainen and (b–e) courtesy of the cat owners.

The authors sequenced entire cat genomes, and found that the salmiak pattern is associated with a huge deletion (95 kb, or 95,000 bases) outside the KIT gene, a gene responsible for the distribution of white patterning in cats.  This region of the DNA is presumably not translated into a protein, but somehow controls the expression of KIT, knocking it out. And that’s what produces the color.   “Regulatory” regions of genes are often very distant from protein-coding genes themselves, making it hard to find out how a gene’s expression is controlled.

The top line is a map of the cat chromosome containing the KIT gene (chromosome B1), the second line is a normal “wild type” cat with an intact KIT and control region, and the third line is the genotype of a cat with the salmiak allele, showing the bit deletion that moves the KIT gene closer to the KDR gene.

This probably produces the salmiak color (we can’t be 100% sure). The authors of the paper say this:

Other structural variants downstream of the KIT gene have been previously associated with coat color phenotypes in cattle, goats and horses (Brooks et al., 2007; Henkel et al., 2019; Küttel et al., 2019). In two Pakistani goat breeds, of which one is completely white and another one is white with colored patches, there is a copy number variation starting ~63 kb downstream of KIT and spanning a ~100 kb region that has a disrupted variant in a genomic region most similar to the salmiak variant (Henkel et al., 2019). In summary, comparative data from other species and genotype segregation analysis support the newly discovered KIT region deletion as potentially being a cause of salmiak coat color in cats.

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This article from the Washington Post, by Sam Sanders, tells you how to play with your moggy. Click on the headline below or find the article archived here.

A summary (quotes are indented):

Pick the right toys.

For toys, Ellis says, “the texture and shape are what truly matter.”

Does the toy feel furry like a mouse? Does it have feathers like a bird? These are good signs that your cat will enjoy the toy. Cats slice with their teeth instead of chewing, so hard, durable toys used for dogs typically don’t work for cats. Cats also prefer toys that are smaller in size, similar to the size of the prey they hunt.

Move your cat’s toy in a pattern that mimics their prey. 

. . . To mimic a bird, glide a wand toy in large sweeping movements or figure eights mirroring natural flight patterns. Create “S-shaped” wiggles on the floor with a wand to mimic a worm or snake. Tuck a toy under your rug like a hiding mouse.

Let your cat win.

As you move their toy in prey-like motions, periodically let your cat “win” by capturing the toy, and don’t immediately rip it away. This allows them to finish the predator cycle. Let them celebrate their successful hunt with additional kicks, bats and bites before reengaging for additional playtime.

DO NOT USE LASER DOTS. I have always thought that this frustrates the cat and is more for the amusement of the staff than of the cat. Two more tips (there are additional ones in the piece):

Create multisensory experiences through sound.

Adding sound brings dimension to a cat play session. “Cats can hear in an ultrasonic range,” says Delgado. “Their close-up vision is very fuzzy, with a focal point of only a few meters away, so they use their hearing to know if prey is nearby.”

Create noises that mimic what cats would hear in the wild, like a high-frequency chirp or squeak. The rustling sound of paper, tissue paper or cardboard while playing with a toy can mimic the sound of rustling through leaves. Try hiding treats in the paper pile, creating an immersive food puzzle.

Try turning the lights down low. 

Cats need play throughout the day, but engaging in a play session during low-light conditions is another opportunity to provide a novel and enriching play session. “Cats are crepuscular, meaning they are most active at dawn and dusk,” says Delgado. As dawn and dusk change throughout the seasons, your cat’s play habits will change, too. Take this as an opportunity to give your cat a high-intensity play session as the sun is setting to help them (and you!) get a restful night of sleep.

Read the rest at the archive and then start playing with your cat PROPERLY!

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Finally, from the AP news (click on the headline), you can read about bodega cats: those cats in NYC that inhabit small, often Hispanic-owned stores. If you’ve been to NYC, you may know that many bodegas have resident cats. But I didn’t know it was illegal.

An excerpt:

New York City’s “bodega cats” are beloved fixtures in the Big Apple — but they’re on the wrong side of the law.

The convenience store cats that live at many of the city’s bodegas and delis look innocent enough, spending their days lounging in sun-soaked storefronts or slinking between shelves of snack foods as they collect friendly pets from customers.

Officially, though, state law bars most animals from stores that sell food, with bodega owners potentially facing fines if their tabby is caught curling up near the tins of tuna and toilet paper.

The pets’ precarious legal position recently came into the spotlight again when a petition circulated online that advocated for the city to shield bodega cat owners from fines, racking up more than 10,000 signatures.

But inspecting bodegas is a state responsibility. The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets said in a statement that its goal is to ensure compliance with food safety laws and regulations, though it noted that inspectors aim to offer “educational resources and corrective action timelines and options” before looking at fines.

Many fans argue that the cats actually help keep the stores clean by deterring other ubiquitous New York City creatures, like rodents and cockroaches.

Indeed.  Bodega-cat inspectors are EVIL! And bodega cats help in many ways:

However, some shopkeepers say the felines’ most important job is bringing in customers.

At one bodega in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a fluffy gray and white cat named Mimi has become even more of a star attraction after a customer posted a video of her to TikTok that was viewed over 9 million times

Sydney Miller, the customer who shared the video, said the experience has helped her build a lasting rapport with Mimi’s caretaker, Asam Mohammad, a Yemeni immigrant who has only been in the U.S. for a few years.

“Ultimately, the cats are a symbol of community building and the special, unique type of connection that happens in a city like New York,” said Miller, a poet and digital content producer.

Here’s Mimi!

@girl.brain

Replying to @Cleotrapa a little update on mimi the bodega cat #cat #bodega

♬ original sound – sydney

You can sign the petition here (it’s over 11,000 signatures now). I signed it!

And here’s a short video about bodega cats and the push to protect them from Cat Pecksniffs:

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Lagniappe: Two of them today. First, a rescued cougar. Listen to its noises!

. . . . and a cat becomes a sundial.

h/t: Barry, Debra

We’re running a bit low on photos, so if you have good ones, send them in.

Today’s batch comes from our most regular regular, Dr. Mark Sturtevant, but with an unusual theme. Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

And now for something completely different. Over the past few years, I have been exploring a type of photography called light painting. This term can refer to different kinds of artistic photography, but the one I practice involves taking multiple long exposures of a still-life scene illuminated only by a flashlight. The images are then imported into a photo editing program and blended together using digital paintbrushes. This technique can produce a single image with dramatic lighting effects that would be impossible to achieve in a single shot. While the process requires patience and basic familiarity with image editing software, I believe only minimal artistic skills are necessary. Anyone can do this!

In this small set of pictures, I showcase some of my light painting still-life projects. Since they incorporate natural and scientific objects, they may align with Readers’ Wildlife Photos in a broad sense.

The first images illustrate the initial steps of the light painting process. It begins by arranging a still-life scene in front of a camera on a tripod. I always take a few bright-field shots like this first picture. While a preliminary image like this may appear quite ordinary, and the surroundings can be cluttered, this step is useful in order to figure out the composition. The shells in this picture are part of my large collection of marine and freshwater specimens.

Next, the camera is set for a long exposure (typically 15-20 seconds). After turning off the room lights, I work in total darkness while “painting” over a portion of the scene with a small flashlight. After the shutter closes, I repeat the process with another long exposure, illuminating a different part of the scene. It’s essential to avoid moving the camera between exposures, and it is essential to keep the flashlight moving in order to create soft shadows. Here are two examples of such images, taken straight out of the camera.

This sequence is repeated several more times. In this case, I took approximately two dozen pictures, though I likely didn’t use all of them in the final picture.

The next step involves loading the images into a photo editing program and selectively blending them together. While many photographers use Photoshop for this, I prefer GIMP, which is a free alternative to Photoshop. I do nearly all of my photo editing in GIMP. The images are stacked as layers, one on top of the other, so that each picture is perfectly aligned. This alignment is why it’s crucial to keep everything stationary during the photography process.

A layer mask filter is applied to the top layer, and this allows me to use a digital paintbrush to selectively make parts of the top image transparent to reveal the corresponding areas of the image beneath it. This technique is non-destructive, meaning the pixels in the top image remain intact and can easily be restored if needed.

Once I’m satisfied with how the first two images are blended, I merge them into a single picture layer. I repeat this process for each subsequent layer until the final composition is complete.

And with that, here is the finished image of the seashells.

Next, I’d like to share a few more light painting projects. This is a human skull that I’ve had most of my life and it is called “Uncle Herbert.” Based on the shape of the eye sockets and other details, I consider Uncle Herbert was a male, though I could be mistaken. This was my very first light painting, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the process was!

In this final scene, Uncle Herbert is used again alongside objects related to “Human Biology,” which is what I call this picture. The old microscope belonged to my father, and the human vertebra in the foreground is a well-worn teaching specimen I purchased long ago.

For anyone interested in trying out this kind of photography, here is a tutorial about using a flashlight. (Click on “Watch on YouTube”).

And here is a tutorial on using layer masks in Gimp. Photoshop would be very much the same, and I expect there are other photo editing programs.

Finally, one can find a couple more of my light painting photos here, including a very complicated one that almost broke me.

 

Yes, Gary the orange cat is there with the oranges. Can you spot him?

Click picture to enlarge but DO NOT say in the comments where you found him. Let others have fun finding him.

There will be a reveal at noon Chicago time. (h/t Stacy on Facebook)

An innovative new computational model developed by an engineer could lead to fast-charging lithium-ion batteries that are safer and longer-lasting.