Science

A new book from Rebecca Solnit, promising to bring us hope in these “difficult times”, is among our pick of popular science titles out this month – along with a guide on how to talk to AI, and a look at modern warfare

Models show that as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation gets weaker, the Gulf Stream will drift northwards. There are signs that this is already happening, and a more abrupt shift could warn of more severe climate impacts

I told you that Matthew’s new biography of Francis Crick was good! Now Crick: A Mind in Motion has been given the imprimatur of quality by winning a big book prize in England.  Matthew sent me his Bluehair post below, and when I asked him what prize he won, he replied:

Hatchard’s First Biography Prize. Hatchards is a posh bookshop on Piccadilly where the King buys his books. I will get a proper cheque. £2.5k! 

It is a big check—in both senses:

I won! I have a big cheque!

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-03-05T19:23:03.888Z

Below is the site for the prize (click to go there). Note, too that Matthew’s book beat out the John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, a book about Lennon and McCartney and Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealisme, a kiss-and-tell memoirSarah Wynn-Williams, who used to work for Facebook and who has been clobbered with lawsuits by that company and other people. 

And the site’s announcement:

Hatchards has teamed up with The Biographers’ Club to support the Best First Biography Prize.

The prize awards £2,500 to the best biography or memoir published that year, and has been won in recent years by Daniel Finkelstein, Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada, Lea Ypi, Heather Clark, Jonathan Phillips, Bart van Es, Edmund Gordon and Hisham Matar.

This year’s winner is Crick by Matthew Cobb.

Go buy it, or take it out from the library to read it. (This advice is for people who are interested in science, but if you’re not, you shouldn’t be reading here.)

Congratulations to Matthew! I told him to use the £2500 prize to treat himself to something nice, like a vacation.

It’s tough sometimes, living with a tempestuous star. Modern human civilization and technology lives at the whim of the Sun, as it sends solar storms and punishing coronal mass ejections our way. And while we understand the overall pitch of the 11 year solar cycle, it's hard to predict exactly what the Sun is going to do next. Now, a recent study has reached back and examined over a century of solar observations, in an effort to make more accurate near-term predictions of solar activity.

Reader Todd Martin sent some photos from the Yucatán (don’t miss the Ocellated Turkey!).  Todd’s captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

WEIT Yucatán

Here are some photos from a trip in November to the Yucatán in Mexico. The original purpose of the trip was to see Mayan ruins, but the natural beauty of the area turned out to be equally remarkable.

The first few pictures were taken during a boat tour of the mangroves in the Ría Lagartos Biosphere Reserve along the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. The tour began at dawn and we were greeted by the rising sun and a welcoming committee of Monohelea maya, a species of predaceous midge discovered with some fanfare by scientists in 2000 (and with somewhat less fanfare on this very morning by myself):

The reserve is home to many species of birds, the most famous of which is the American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber), which can be observed trawling for brine-shrimp in the brackish water:

This is a Magnificent Frigatebird (Fregata magnificens). The male is easily recognized by the bright red throat pouch which looks like a life vest when inflated but actually serves to attract females. The females can be recognized by their frequent calls of ‘Well, if you’re so magnificent why can’t you take out the trash’:

The largest avian species we saw was this haughtily regal Brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis):

This is a Neotropic Cormorant (Nannopterum brasilianum) a diving bird sometimes used by the indigenous people of Bolivia and Peru to catch fish:

Hopefully this Wood Stork (Mycteria americana) has a good personality because it is (as my grandmother might have quipped) ‘not conventionally attractive’. It is, however, the only native stork in North America:

The Osprey (Pandion Haliaetus) is sometimes known as a fish hawk because fish make up the majority of its diet (not unlike Kevin Bacon or the singer Meatloaf):

Some birds are naturally elegant like this Great Egret (Ardea alba).In case you want to know how to avoid confusing it with a Snowy Egret … a Great Egret has a yellow bill and black feet, while the smaller Snowy Egret has a black bill and yellow feet:

Green Heron (Butorides virescens). Here’s a fun fact I cribbed from Wiki: “Green herons are one of the few species of bird known to use tools. In particular, they commonly use bread crusts, insects, or other items as bait. The bait is dropped onto the surface of a body of water to lure fish. When a fish takes the bait, the green heron then grabs and eats the fish”:

This American White Ibis (Eudocimus albus) was quite accustomed to people, which allowed me to get a pretty good close-up:

Morelet’s crocodile (Crocodylus moreletii). They look somewhat fearsome, but our one-armed tour boat operator said this one was ‘practically domesticated’”

Yucatan Jay (Cyanocorax yucatanicus) Jays are the noisy, argumentative neighbors of the animal kingdom. They are often described as ‘gregarious’ which I take to mean that they’ll take food from your plate without asking:

Those who frequented Glamour Shots in the 1980’s might confuse this photo with others of the genre, but it’s an Ocellated Turkey (Meleagris ocellata). The bird was the original inspiration for the marketing tag-line ‘taste the rainbow’. Unfortunately the bird is considered ‘Near Threatened’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with numbers that are sadly on the decline:

Whoever named the Black Spiny-tailed Iguana (Ctenosaura similis) wasn’t particularly creative, but I’m inclined to give them a pass because … that spiny tail!:

Finally – we stopped by Florida before returning home and my wife couldn’t resist adopting one of those hairless sphynx cats from the local shelter (Alligator mississippiensis). We love him very much, though he does have the unusual habit of sleeping in his water dish:

Asteroids are critical to unlock our understanding of the early solar system. These chunks of rock and dust were around at the very beginning, and they haven’t been as modified by planetary formation processes as, say, Earth has been. So scientists were really excited to get ahold of samples from Ryugu when they were returned by Hayabusa-2 a few years ago. However, when they started analyzing the magnetic properties of those samples, different research groups came up with different answers. Theorizing those conflicting results came from small sample sizes, a new paper recently published in JGR Planets from Masahiko Sato and their colleagues at the University of Tokyo used many more samples to finally dig into the magnetic history of these first ever returned asteroid samples.

Since 2014, the planet has been warming by about 0.36°C per decade, according to an analysis of five temperature datasets, raising fears that climate tipping points could be crossed earlier than expected

What do a 20th-century physicist, an 18th-century statistician and an ancient Greek philosopher have in common? They all knew how to extrapolate with incredible accuracy. Columnist Jacob Aron explains how to combine their methods to improve your ability to guess

Everyone knows Yuri Gagarin as the first person to go to space. But was he? Literary historian Vladimir Brljak tells the tale of the intrepid balloonists who first flew beyond the blue terrestrial sky, challenging the definition of where our world begins to end

For decades, astronomers wondered why most nearby galaxies are speeding away from the Milky Way instead of being pulled in by its gravity. New simulations reveal the answer: our galaxy sits in a gigantic, flat sheet of matter surrounded by huge empty voids. This hidden structure—dominated by dark matter—balances gravitational forces and lets neighboring galaxies drift outward. The discovery finally explains the puzzling motions of galaxies just beyond our Local Group.

Electrons in solar materials can be launched across molecules almost as fast as nature allows, thanks to tiny atomic vibrations acting like a “molecular catapult.” In experiments lasting just 18 femtoseconds, researchers at the University of Cambridge observed electrons blasting across a boundary in a single burst, far faster than long-standing theories predicted. Instead of slow, random movement, the electron rides the natural vibrations of the molecule itself, challenging decades of design rules for solar materials.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a powerful imaging technique that reveals atomic scale defects inside computer chips for the first time. Using an advanced electron microscopy method, the team mapped the exact positions of atoms inside tiny transistor structures and uncovered small imperfections nicknamed “mouse bites.” These defects form during the complex manufacturing process and can disrupt how electrons flow through a chip’s channels, which are only about 15 to 18 atoms wide.

Craters, craters, and yet more craters: this snapshot from ESA’s Mars Express is packed full of them, each as fascinating as the last.

A sweeping new ALMA image has peeled back the veil on the Milky Way’s core, exposing a dense network of cold gas filaments near the central black hole. Stretching across 650 light-years, the survey maps the hidden fuel for star formation in remarkable detail and reveals a surprisingly complex chemical brew. This extreme region hosts some of the galaxy’s most massive, short-lived stars. The findings could help explain how stars — and even entire galaxies — formed under the universe’s most chaotic conditions.

Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected. It is located in a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away, opening a new radio astronomy frontier.

Here’s one less thing to worry about — or to look forward to: NASA has ruled out any chance that an asteroid called 2024 YR4 will hit the moon in 2032.

A ring of 13 carbon atoms and two chlorine atoms has a remarkable molecular structure that means you would have to go around the loop four times to return to your starting position

Reader Jon Gallant recently finished the essay collection compiled and edited by Lawrence Krauss, The War on Science:  Thirty-Nine Renowed Scientists and Scholars speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.” (Luana and I have a paper in it taken from our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology).

Jon decided to leave a review of the book on its Amazon page (his review is shown below in the Amazon rejection). Yep, his submitted review was rejected. He sent the rejection to me and I reproduce it and his emailed speculations (with permission).  I’ve put a red box around the submitted review:

At first I was puzzled, as I don’t follow Amazon reviews and know nothing about the ideology of the site or company.  Can you guess why the review was returned with requests for changes?  I suspect you’ve guessed correctly, though we can’t be sure.  I asked Jon what he thought, and here’s some of his response:

Use of the term “woke” in a less than reverential tone is no doubt classified by Amazon’s editors as “hate speech”.  After all, it makes wokies feel unsafe.  My hunch is that the dopier Communications majors from the 2010s work as review editors at Amazon.  The better-connected ones get into the editorial offices of some Nature publications we have encountered.

In truth, I can see no other explanation.  The review was not worshipful enough of wokeness, and in fact made fun of it, even expressing a hope that it would disappear.  If you have another explanation, by all means put it in the comments. I had no patience to read Amazon’s “community guidelines” to see if there were other infractions.

I don’t know if Jon will resubmit his review, but I thought that this was both sad and amusing. The other reviews (126 of them) are bimodal (70% five star, 18% one star), and it’s also amusing to look at the negative ones, most of them finding the book guilty of association with the wrong people, or not hard enough on Trump and right-wing assaults on science (not its purpose)

Taking psilocybin – the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms – eased symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder among people who did not respond to conventional treatments, and the effects lasted at least several months

Send in your good wildlife photos, as I’m out save for singletons and doubletons.

Today’s photos come from reader Jan Malik from New Jersey and are geese and DUCKS. The captions and ID’s are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are some Barnegat Inlet ducks (and other visitors) from the last day of this February.

Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) and Brant (Branta bernicla) in flight.  Same genus, similar body form, and a fairly recent common ancestor—only about 1–2 MYA in Pleistocene North America. Anne Elk’s (Mrs.) theory about brontosauruses could be adapted to geese: they are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the far end. My new theory is that these two species split when the Laurentide Ice Sheet separated the American coast from the inland regions. The Brant specialized in coastal habitats and feeding on seaweeds, while the Canada Goose evolved inland, feeding mostly on herbs and grasses. Perhaps this theory is not new. Or not mine.

Arguably the biggest stars of the winter Barnegat Inlet are the Harlequin Ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus). The drakes’ plumage is so dramatic—and their calls so comical (resembling a bath rubber ducky)—that many people come to Barnegat Light just to see them. The hens’ coloration is more subdued but still lovely.

JAC: You can hear their calls on the Cornell page for this species. Just below is a hen:

Every year I see them bobbing along the jetty, sometimes tossed around by heavy seas but always masterfully avoiding the rocks. They seem attracted to heavy surf and avoid the open sea. They stay mostly in a loose flock, which in recent years appears to have declined from 20–30 ducks in 2010 to just 10–15 in the last couple of years.

Drake:

They can preen while in the water, but they do catch a breather by climbing onto slippery rocks. Their feet are set a bit farther back, like in other diving ducks, but they can walk on land—although a bit awkwardly. By late February most of them are gone, heading back north to their nesting grounds on Labrador’s whitewater rivers and streams:

Like other diving ducks, they dip their heads before diving for fish. My other theory—Theory Number Two—is that by doing so they defeat the air–water interface diffraction and better locate prey:

They are exceptionally buoyant, which makes sense given their rocky surf habitat, but it also means they must put extra effort into diving. They have to jump slightly into the air before the dive to gain momentum, then use their wings as paddles to become submerged:

I once heard that the difference between geese and ducks is that ducks can launch themselves directly into the air from a resting position, while geese need to run for a while, either on water or land. This is probably true for dabbling ducks (like Mallards), but a Harlequin—with its feet set back a bit—must run some distance to become airborne:

Another common winter visitor: the Red-breasted Merganser (Mergus serrator), drake. Their bill serration is more pronounced than in other diving ducks, helping them catch fish:

Merganser hen. These are the most sea-loving mergansers. The other two I’m familiar with—Common and Hooded Mergansers—rarely appear in coastal waters. They are said to be very active underwater predators pursuing fish, but I’ve never seen that myself:

Common Eider (Somateria mollissima), probably an immature drake in transitional plumage. They are quite large and plump, which—together with the proverbial “eider down”—makes them well adapted to nesting in the Arctic. Reportedly, hens with ducklings may form crèches on their nesting grounds (a defense against polar foxes and skuas perhaps?) One day I must see that: