Science

The accelerating expansion of the universe is usually explained by an invisible force known as dark energy. But a new study suggests this mysterious ingredient may not be necessary after all. Using an extended version of Einstein’s gravity, researchers found that cosmic acceleration can arise naturally from a more general geometry of spacetime. The result hints at a radical new way to understand why the universe keeps speeding up.

Scientists have discovered an enormous stream of super-hot gas erupting from a nearby galaxy, driven by a powerful black hole at its center. The jets stretch farther than the galaxy itself and spiral outward in a rare, never-before-seen pattern. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope pierced through thick dust to reveal this violent outflow. The process is so intense it’s robbing the galaxy of star-forming gas at a staggering rate.

Scientists have unveiled a new way to capture ultra-sharp optical images without lenses or painstaking alignment. The approach uses multiple sensors to collect raw light patterns independently, then synchronizes them later using computation. This sidesteps long-standing physical limits that have held optical imaging back for decades. The result is wide-field, sub-micron resolution from distances that were previously impossible.

Like, it shouldn’t be this easy. Yeah I know physics is kind of hard, and it has taken us centuries to reach our present level of knowledge, and we know we’re still a long way from complete knowledge of time and space.

Scientists are a step closer to solving one of the universe's biggest mysteries as new research finds evidence that dark matter and neutrinos may be interacting, offering a rare window into the darkest recesses of the cosmos.

The meme below, from Cats Doing Cat Stuff: implies that Thaland has declared all cats as official national symbols. Well, as the articles below say, that’s not exactly true. Some cats have become national symbols, but only breeds from Thailand. Read on:

Here are two articles, the first from the Singapore-based cna news organization and the second from the Bangkok Post. Click on either to read, though the first is more informative:

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From cna:

Five cat breeds native to Thailand were approved as national pet symbols by the government on Nov 18, joining the Thai elephant, fighting fish and Naga among other nationally recognised emblems.

The pure Thai breeds – Suphalak, Korat, Siamese, Konja and Khao Manee – possess distinctive physical and behavioral traits that clearly differentiate them from other breeds, according to Thailand’s National Identity Committee, which had proposed their designations as national pets.

“Their uniqueness has gained international recognition, with some foreign breeders attempting to register purebred Thai cat lines and establish global breed standards,” the Thai government’s public relations department said in a report on Nov 20.

A drawing of the five lucky breeds from cna graphics:

More from cna:

Preecha Vadhana, a cat breeder who operates Bangrak Cat Farm in Bangkok, said that each of the five breeds has very distinct features, making them easily distinguishable from one another.

“But they also share similarities, particularly their structure and short coat.”

The Suphalak has a distinct copper coat and is considered a symbol of prestige and fortune. The Korat is a bluish-grey cat with large, vivid green eyes, while the Khao Manee – a rare, white species – often has eyes with two strikingly different colours such as gold and blue.

The Konja is known as a lucky black cat, unlike its foreign counterparts which are often infamous for the opposite.

Finally, the “king of cats”, the Siamese or Wichienmas, is marked by its distinct dark spots and treasured for its intelligence. It is typically the most expensive of the breeds and can cost 15,000-20,000 baht (US$465-US$620) from a local breeder, while others cost 7,000-15,000 baht.

. . . . The decision to elevate these species is not just symbolic: It is meant to help conserve rare native breeds, standardise them and protect Thailand’s ownership of them. The species will also be used more in creative-economy and tourism branding, according to the government.

Then there’s some grousing about how this recognition won’t help the hundreds of thousands of feral Thai street cats.  That’s probably true, but this is just symbolic. I think the USA needs a National Cat too, and give the genetic admixture that is America, it should be a regular moggy, like a tabby.

Here’s a 4½-minute video about the recognition of National Cats:

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This article from artnet (click to read) describes a new exhibition of medieval manuscripts with cat drawings at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. The title of the exhibit is cute: “Paws on Parchment”.  Click to read, and go to the site to see some of those medieval cat drawings, none of which look like real cats!

Note that if you live near Baltimore, the exhibit runs only through February 22, so get your tuches there soon. If I lived nearby, I’d sure go.

An excerpt:

In the 1470s, a Flemish scribe left some meticulously drafted pages of an illuminated manuscript out to dry, only to find out the next day that his cat had trod over them, leaving inky paw prints on the parchment. (Contemporary writers will know the similar pain of typos and elisions wrought by a feline friend’s frenzied scamper across a keyboard.)

Now, more than 500 years later, those pattered pages are the “cat”-alyst for an exhibition at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. Aptly titled “Paws on Parchment,” the show explores how medieval illustrators in Europe, Asia, and the Islamic world celebrated cats in the marginalia of their manuscripts and beyond. On view through February 22, 2026, it’s the first of three exhibitions over the next two years dedicated to the depiction of animals in art.

Here is that page with the cat print on it, a cat that lived over 550 years ago!

(from artnet): A 15th-century manuscript bearing the tell-tale marks of a frisky feline. Photo: courtesy of the Walters Art Museum.

Herbert researched the works from a lot of different angles to better understand how people felt about cats. This included primary sources like medieval poetry, moral and cautionary tales, recorded pet names, and discussions of cats in encyclopedic works like Isidore of Seville’s Etymology, from the 7th century, and in medieval bestiaries.

Pets with Purpose

She was surprised by what she found. “Many medieval people loved their cats just as much as we do,” she said. However, the reason people kept them in homes, churches, and libraries was less for company and more for the practical reason of rodent control. Their skills at hunting mice and rats were critical to protecting food stores, valuable books, and textiles—and of course, preserving their owners from the plague and other diseases carried by vermin. “Because this was their key purpose in people’s lives, they are most often shown hunting mice,” Herbert said. “While this is still something a house cat might do today, our lives and livelihoods generally don’t depend on their success.”

A manuscript cat that was on display. Does this look like a cat?  Go to the artnet page or the Walters Museum page to see other illustrations and photos.  This exhibit has been running since last August, and you have about six weeks to see it.

Here’s a FB video of cats that didn’t make the cut for the exhibit.

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We all know about Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, who roams around in and around 10 Downing Street, but did you know that there’s an equivalent cat in Belgium. He belongs to the Prime Minister, and has the lovely name of “Maximus”, short for his full name, “Maximus Textoris Pulcher”. Click below to read the Guardian article about him:

An excerpt:

For nearly 15 years, Britain’s Larry the Cat has charmed visitors to 10 Downing Street. Now another prime ministerial pet is proving a social media hit in Belgium.

Maximus Textoris Pulcher was announced in August as an official resident at the Belgian prime minister’s office, Rue de la Loi 16 in central Brussels.

The grey rescue cat is now thought to have the second most popular political account on Belgian social media, with more than 142,000 followers on Instagram – second only to his master, Bart De Wever, who became Belgium’s prime minister in February.

The cat’s full name is a mock-grandiose title rooted in the prime minister’s love of Latin and Roman history, conveying the meaning “De Wever’s beautiful Maximus” (textoris being “of the weaver”, or De Wever).

De Wever adopted the cat, an abandoned Scottish fold, from a refuge. “I have a cat in my office, it is grey and it does not catch … mice, but I love it anyway,” he told journalists during a recent press conference.

Maximus’s posts on Instagram have lit up the Belgian internet, whether he is stretching for a toy, lolling on a windowsill or being tickled on his chest to an electropopsoundtrack.

. . . Unlike Larry, officially an apolitical cat, Maximus offers subtle observations on his country’s political life. “Another strike,” reads one Maximus thought bubble on the day Belgium began a three-day national action in November against proposed spending cuts, hinting at the exasperation of his master. In another post when De Wever’s eclectic five-party coalition was locked in budget talks, a grumpy-looking Maximus lies on the floor with a thought bubble reading: “Even on Sunday, these nuisances [cabinet ministers] are here.”

A source close to De Wever – described as “a cat person all his life” – said the account was a low-effort part of his team’s work and offered the public a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Rue de la Loi 16.

My friend Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher, tells me that everybody in Belgium knows who Maximus is, and many people follow him.

Here are a couple of Instagram entries showing Maximus making pronouncements. I’ll put a translation for each:

“I’m lookng forward to 2026”:

View this post on Instagram

What do you think of my Christmas sweater, Maximus?
Maximus: Gorgeous!
Maximus (thinking): Ugly…

View this post on Instagram

BDW: What a lovely present, Maximus!
Maximus: Happy birthday… you old sock!

 

(Note that the socks bear pictures of Maximus)

View this post on Instagram

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Lagniappe. This cat seems to be real, or at least the same photo is everywhere. One specimen:

View this post on Instagram

 

h/t: Peter N.,, Ginger K.

 

Reader Ruth Berger sent some butterfly photos taken last year in Germany.  Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge Ruth’s photos by clicking on them.

Here are some butterflies I snapped on my walks on mostly sandy soil near the Main and Nidda rivers in and around Frankfurt, Germany, last year. I’ll start with a good picture (some of the others aren’t that good) of the small copper, Lycaena phlaeas, a holarctic species, on ragwort.

The next not so brilliant photo is of the orange tip (Anthocharis cardamines), whose males are so busy chasing females and each other at borders between patches of woodland and grassland in spring. Only the males of the species have the eponymic orange tip, here visiting the species’ major caterpillar feeding plant, Cardamine pratensis.

Unlike the males, orange tip females look much like any typical white butterfly (Pierinae) from above. The underside of the females has greenish markings similar, but not identical, to the species you see in the next picture, Pontia edusa, here shown feeding on a Centaurea flower:

I saw several species of red-spotted burnet moths this year, all members of the West Palaearctic Zygaena family. These are wondrous creatures, dressed in what looks like a blue black fur coat with a red-spotted cape on top. The following two pictures are of the most frequent species here, the 6-spot burnet moth, Zygaena filipendulae:

The next picture shows a moment from a scene I watched for around ten minutes: a male Queen of Spain fritillary (Issoria lathonia), the biggie on the left, chasing and harassing a small skipper (Thymelicus cf. sylvestris). Should any of the insect lovers here know what might be behind this behavior, please tell me:

The caterpillars of Issoria lathonia feed off Viola flowers. Below, you can see a female getting nectar from a European field pansy (Viola arvensis) in spring, showing its underside that has silvery-white spots with a mother-of-pearl-like appearance:

Next is one of the prettier pictures, a male common blue (Polyommatus icarus):

While the males have a beautiful upper side of shiny blue (in young animals, the color can become washed out with age), the females of the German subspecies tend to be plain brown with orange spots: 

Next is a female marbled white (Melanargia galathea) , a species of the Nymphalidae family that despite its English name has nothing to do with the Pieridae family that most “whites” belong to. The females have a beige/tan hue seen from the side:

The boys are more black and white: 

And this one, shown from above, is apparently a bird-attack survivor:

Crystals hidden in Australia’s oldest rocks have revealed new clues about how Earth and the Moon formed. The study suggests Earth’s continents didn’t begin growing until hundreds of millions of years after the planet itself formed. When scientists compared the rocks with Moon samples from the Apollo missions, they found a remarkable match. The results support the idea that a massive cosmic impact gave birth to the Moon.

One of the best things about being able to see thousands of exoplanetary systems is that we’re able to track them in different stages of development. Scientists still have so many questions about how planets form, and comparing notes between systems of different ages is one way to answer them. A new paper recently published in Nature by John Livingston of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and his co-authors details one particularly interesting system, known as V1298, which is only around 30 million years old, and hosts an array of four “cotton candy” planets, which represent some of the earliest stages of planet formation yet seen.

Astronomers have uncovered the long-hidden cause behind Betelgeuse’s strange behavior: a small companion star carving a visible wake through the giant’s vast atmosphere. Using nearly eight years of observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, scientists detected swirling trails of dense gas created as the companion, called Siwarha, moves through Betelgeuse’s outer layers.

Hubble has revealed a strange cosmic object called Cloud-9, a dark matter–dominated cloud with no stars at all. Scientists believe it is a “failed galaxy,” a leftover building block from the early Universe that never lit up. Its discovery confirms long-standing theories about starless galaxies. Cloud-9 offers a rare glimpse into the dark side of cosmic evolution.

Imagine you walk into a parking lot full of cars. You have in your pocket one single key. It’s the key to your car. The same key you’ve always used, the same key you’ve always trusted, the same key that you always manage to realize that you’ve lost right when you’re rushing out the door.

Cutting down boreal forest and sinking the felled trees in the depths of the Arctic Ocean could remove up to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year – but it could come at a cost to the Arctic ecosystem

The supermassive black hole in the Milky Way's galactic center, Sagittarius A-star, is known for being quiet and dim. But that wasn't always the case. The powerful XRISM x-ray telescope shows that it flared brightly at least once in the very recent past.

One of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station is undergoing a “medical situation”, forcing NASA to bring the crew home early for the first time ever

Evidence is mounting that specific gut bacteria are linked to sleep conditions, which may open the doors to dietary recommendations aiming to boost the quality of our slumbers

Reader Norman sent me the first video below saying, “in one of your posts the other day you gave a link to an article about how anti-Zionism = antisemitism.”  Yes, I’ve frequently said that and in fact did so in the last post. And I think the equation is clearly true. For those on the left justifying anti-Zionism, the claim that it is NOT antisemitism rests on an incorrect construal of “anti-Zionism” as “criticism of the politics of Israel/Netanyahu”. Alternatively, “anti-Zionism could mean “favoring a one-state solution, a state that includes both Palestinians and Jews—and we all know what that means for the Jews.

As the moderator defines it in the video, “anti-Zionism” is “opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the territory defined as the historic land of Israel or Palestine” and that view implicitly favors the erasure or destruction of Israel, which to any reasonable person is antisemitic (where would the Jews go?). Further seeing the “anti-Zionism” trope as being politically okay ignores the fact that nearly all Muslim states in the Middle East are explicitly religiously Muslim as part of their government (viz., the formal name of Iran is “The Islamic Republic of Iran”). In contrast, while Israel was approved as a homeland for Jews after WWII, there is no requirement for residents to adhere to the tenents of Judaism, for 20% of the population are Arab Muslims and many of the resident “Jews” are, like me, atheists who are culturally Jewish. To show the difference, try being gay in Gaza or Iran as opposed to Israel.

So, below is what Norman wanted me to see: a short speech by British author and commentator Melanie Phillips.  It’s part of a four-person intelligence² debate that took place six years ago. The proposition debated is is “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Phillips’s bit, agreeing with the proposition, starts 47 seconds into the video, and I’ve begun the video at that point. Her bit ends at 10:28, so the part to listen to is about ten minutes long. The rest is some person, not part of the formal debate, banging on.

As Norman says, “this is one of the most forceful and succinct statements I have heard or read.” It is indeed. And despite its title, Mehdi Hasan does not explode here. That is in the second video below, which gives the entire two-hour debate.

Here’s the whold video, including besides Mehdi Hassan (his speech starts at 35:45) and Melanie Phillips, Einat Wulf (who agrees with Phillips; her speech starts at 24:00) and Ilan Pappé, an Israeli who favors a “one-state solution” (his speech starts at 12:25). The audience, clearly on the side of Hassan and Pappé throughout, defeated the motion.  They are wrong.

A new study finds that hot super-Earths begin as large puffy worlds with low densities. Over time their atmospheres are stripped away to leave more dense planets orbiting close to their stars.

The ice-covered island may be strategically important, but it's unclear that it could be a commercially viable source of minerals and oil in the near future

Calculations show that injecting randomness into a quantum neural network could help it determine properties of quantum objects that are otherwise fundamentally hard to access