Science

A new AI developed at Duke University can uncover simple, readable rules behind extremely complex systems. It studies how systems evolve over time and reduces thousands of variables into compact equations that still capture real behavior. The method works across physics, engineering, climate science, and biology. Researchers say it could help scientists understand systems where traditional equations are missing or too complicated to write down.

We have only just started to understand how our brains clean themselves, but columnist Helen Thomson finds promising evidence for how to boost this process

During November 2025, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) used five of its science instruments to observe 3I/ATLAS. The instruments collected information about how the comet is behaving and what it is made of.

A reader sent me a video-containing email with the header “John Oliver destroys Bari Weiss”, with the message below saying, “Somebody had to do it.”  Well, yes, somebody should criticize the Free Press, which is becoming, in my view, more political (right-centrist) and less full of news. And even news stories aren’t really written by seasoned reporters, and it shows.  Plus the site has a lot of clickbait.

Further, CBS New’s decision to make Bari Weiss a big macher in the news division shows questionable judgment at best. Weiss, who’s enormously ambitious, has simply spread herself too thin, and it shows.

Those are some of the things criticized by “comedian” John Oliver in his 34-minute rant below. Oliver is rightfully distressed that Bari Weiss has suddenly become editor-in-chief of CBS News, something that concerns me.  CBS has a distinguished history of reporting, including Edward R. Murrow, who took down Joe McCarthy on that network, as well as America’s Most Trusted Anchor, Walter Cronkite. Granted, Weiss is not an anchorperson, and editors usually stay off the air, but she’s already hosted a town hall interview with Erika Kirk, something I found cringeworthy. And Weiss promises that there will be many more town halls to come. Oy!

But Oliver, whom I almost never watch, goes after Weiss and CBS in the too-long and unfunny rant below.  I’m always mystified that people find Oliver worthy of watching. He’s like the latter-day Jon Stewart, all sweaty, ranty, and, most sinfully, not funny at all.  He doesn’t make you think, as Maher does: he goes after the low-hanging fruit that his followers want to eat.  To me, his humor and political perspicacity are far less engaging than Bill Maher’s.  And Oliver is hyperbolic, and when he characterizes Weiss’s written resignation from the NYT as “self-mythologizing.”  He also faults her for having control over the direction of CBS news but “not being a reporter.” Well, she was a columnist and surely engages with the news, so I don’t find being a “reporter” disqualifying from being an editor.  But others may disagree.

That said, I am losing interest in the Free Press as well, and yet I keep subscribing—almost entirely because I love Nellie Bowles’s Friday TGIF columns.

I’ll quote with permission from an email sent me by reader Jim Batterson when I sent him the link to the rant below. He stopped subscribing to the Free Press a while ago. Bat:

I think Bari lost her focus. She had a good focus on Israel and antisemitism as well as the excesses of Woke back when she left the New York Times. She started off Common Sense and early versions of The Free Press with proper in-depth critique if I recall correctly, but at some point spread herself all over the map…more chaos than heterodoxy.  I unsubscribed from TFP somewhere around when she was giving oxygen to the “it escaped from a lab” speculation, piling on Fauci, and starting her love affair with religion (I had thought her Judaism was much like my ow—cultural— and that she was of the Jewish people, not a deeply observant Jew).

Listening to Oliver is a painful experience to me.  Freddie deBoer points out the problem with Oliver’s sneering, progressive condescension.  deBoer’s column is largely about gender, but I’m highlighting the problems with Oliver’s progressivism combined with his hyperbolic humorlessness:

I get it: nominating John Oliver as a symbol of liberalism’s failures was well-worn territory a decade ago. This argument has already been made, all the ideological fruit plucked. And the broader debate about liberal condescension as a profound political advantage for the right has percolated in its current form since the 2016 election and in a more general sense for longer than any of us have been alive. I hate to fight yesterday’s war, and I hate to bore you with arguments that have already been made. But at some point, when you see liberals share the same videos week after week of an annoying British man sneering down a camera lens to tell you how stupid everyone else is, you do have to ask if the American left-of-center has any sense at all of how much their project has been damaged by their reputation for patronizing self-righteousness. If the Trump era has proven anything, it’s just how wildly sensitive voters are to the perception that someone somewhere is judging them. That level of sensitivity to vague slights is stupid and the grievance usually disingenuous, but that’s politics, baby. And Oliver is such a pitch-perfect caricature of progressive self-regard – snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious – that I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation.

One of the great weaknesses of contemporary liberalism is the absolute inability to take an L on any issue; scroll around on BlueSky and you’ll find, for example, vast throngs of progressives who are completely unwilling to admit that mass immigration of unskilled labor into the United States is deeply unpopular. I think the left’s control of our arts, culture, and ideas industries have left too many of us thinking that we can’t lose a culture war. But in the broad sense, we currently are.

A pox on both their houses. Without further ado:  Oliver tires to take down Weiss.

At the moment this post appears—9:03 Chicago time—winter has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere.  Time to celebrate Yule!

In Chicago, however, it feels as if winter has been her for several weeks. The good news is that the days will begin getting longer.

Once again I tender a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have several Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired the requisite 20 photos for posting. (Note: no AI pictures like the one I made below. Especially with the wrong number of candles on the menorah, like the two superfluous ones in the photo below!)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; the day before Koynezaa.

 

Spanish researchers have created a powerful new open-source tool that helps uncover the hidden genetic networks driving cancer. Called RNACOREX, the software can analyze thousands of molecular interactions at once, revealing how genes communicate inside tumors and how those signals relate to patient survival. Tested across 13 different cancer types using international data, the tool matches the predictive power of advanced AI systems—while offering something rare in modern analytics: clear, interpretable explanations that help scientists understand why tumors behave the way they do.

Engineers need good data to build lasting things. Even the designers of the Great Pyramids knew the limestone they used to build these massive structures would be steady when stacked on top of one another, even if they didn’t have tables of the compressive strength of those stones. But when attempting to build structures on other worlds, such as the Moon, engineers don’t yet know much about the local materials. Still, due to the costs of getting large amounts of materials off of Earth, they will need to learn to use those materials even for critical applications like a landing pad to support the landing / ascent of massive rockets used in re-supply operations. A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Shirley Dyke and her team at Purdue University describes how to build a lunar landing pad with just a minimal amount of prior knowledge of the material properties of the regolith used to build it.

Astronomers have uncovered a massive hidden planet and a rare “failed star” by combining ultra-precise space data with some of the sharpest ground-based images ever taken. Using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaiʻi, the OASIS survey tracked subtle stellar wobbles to pinpoint where unseen worlds were lurking—then captured them directly.

Superconductors promise loss-free electricity, but most only work at extreme cold. Hydrogen-rich materials changed that—yet their inner workings remained hidden because they only exist under enormous pressure. Now, researchers have directly measured the superconducting state of hydrogen sulfide using a novel tunneling method, confirming how its electrons pair so efficiently. The discovery brings room-temperature superconductors a step closer to reality.

By studying tiny distortions in the shapes of distant galaxies, scientists mapped dark matter and dark energy across one of the largest sky surveys ever assembled. Their results back the standard picture of the universe and show that even archival telescope images can unlock cosmic mysteries.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of international researchers has discovered chemical fingerprints of gigantic primordial stars that were among the first to form after the Big Bang.

Over at UnHerd, philosopher Kathleen Stock, formerly of the University of Sussex, critiques a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics that I discussed recently, a paper you can read by clicking below. (You may remember that Stock, an OBE, was forced to resign from Sussex after she was demonized for her views on gender identity. These involved claims that there are but two biological sexes, and her cancellation was largely the result of a campaign by students.)

As I said in my earlier post, this paper seems to whitewash female genital mutilation (FGM), and does so in several ways. The authors think that the term “mutilation” is pejorative, and is more accurate and less inflammatory than saying “female genital modification”, which covers a variety of methods of FGM, some much more dangerous than others, as well as cosmetic genital surgery on biological women or surgery on trans-identifying males to give them a simulacrum of female genitalia. (There is also circumcision, which some lump in with the more dire forms of FGM.)

The Ahmadu et al. paper also notes that anti-FGM campaigns in Africa, where the mutilation is practiced most often, have their own harms. As Stock comments in the article below,

And so our co-authors — the majority of whom work in Europe, Australasia, and North America — tell us that anti-FGM initiatives in Africa cause material harms. Supposedly, they siphon off money and attention that could be better spent in other health campaigns, and they undermine trust in doctors. They also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

And if you don’t believe Stock, here’s a small part of the section of the Ahmadu et al. paper trying to push the word “trauma” out of descriptionos of FGM:

Most affected women themselves rarely use the word ‘trauma’ to describe their experiences of the practices. If they describe the experiences in negative terms, they may use words such as ‘difficult’ or ‘painful’, but some of them may simultaneously describe the experience as celebratory, empowering, important and significant. This may even accompany experiences of pain, but this pain, when made sense of in its cultural context, does not equate to trauma.

Researchers and clinicians often use the mostly biomedically based DSM-5 (the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) to assess trauma, with a focus on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While narratives of women who have experienced a cultural or religious-based procedure may contain descriptions of symptoms that fall into the PTSD nosological category (such as ‘unwanted upsetting memories’, ‘negative affect’, ‘nightmares’ or heightened sensations, vigilance or sleep disturbance), the cross-cultural validity of PTSD as a construct and its use in migrant populations has been widely contested, because it applies Western cultural understandings to people who do not necessarily equate the experience of pain as directly causing trauma.

That is first-class progressive whitewashing! As Stock describes :

[Anti-FGM campaigns] also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

Finally, Ahmadu et al. note that anti-FGM campaigns, and the term “mutilation”, have led to unfair stigmatization of some groups in the West that practiced FGM in their ancestral countries (and still practice it in the West, though to a much lesser extent). You could argue, for example, that it leads to bigotry in the West against those of Somalian ancestry, as FGM is rather common there. And I agree that it’s unfair to stigmatize an entire group because some of them practice FGM. Only the perpetrators should be punished and the promoters rebuked. But the practice should be loudly decried, and aimed at communities who employ it.

In her article, Stock rebukes the article as a prime example of “cultural relativism,” the view that while people within a given culture can judge some acts more moral than others, considering different cultures one cannot judge some as having behaviors more moral than do others.  One might, if one were stupid, criticize this as forms of ethical appropriation. So, say the relativists, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge those in Somalia who practice infibulation of young women.

You can read Stock’s article by clicking below, but if you’re paywalled you can find the article archived here.

Stock is not a moral relativist, at least when it comes to genital “modification,” a term she opposes.  I’ll put up a few quotes, but you should read the whole piece, either online or in the archived version:

Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behaviour in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish.

Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.

That is: from the inside of a particular culture, certain practices count as exemplary and others as evil. Yet zoom out to an omniscient, deculturated perspective upon human behaviour generally, and there is no objective moral value — or so the story goes. All value is constructed at the local level. Worse: when you zoom back into your own homegrown ethical concerns after taking such a trip, they seem strangely hollow. Like an astronaut returning to Earth after having seen the whole of it from space, everything looks a bit parochial.

Stock lumps the authors into three groups, which she calls “the Conservatives” (no genital surgeries of any type), the “Centrists” (okay with circumcision for males but no surgery on females), and “Permissives” (people who think that “it is up to the parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm.” [that quote is from the Ahmadu et al. paper]. These conflicting views lead to the tension that Stock and others can perceive in this paper. What are the sweating authors trying to say?

Cultural relativism, while in style among progressives, is a non-starter. You can see that by simply imagining John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and ask imaginary people who have not been acculturated to look at various cultures from behind that veil and then say which culture they’d rather live in. If you are a young girl, would you rather be in Somalia or Denmark? If you’re gay, would you rather be in Iran or Israel? And so on.  Here’s Stock’s ending where she asserts that not all forms of “genital modification” should be lumped together or considered equally bad:

Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, anti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Rather than be a relativist about morality, it makes more sense to be a pluralist. There are different virtues for humans to aspire to, and they can’t be ranked. Sometimes there are clashes between them, resulting in inevitable trade-offs (honesty vs kindness; loyalty to family vs to one’s community; and so on). There are very few cost-free moral choices in this life. Equally, some virtues will vary according to cultural backdrop. The local environment may partly influence which virtues are paramount. For instance, family obedience and respect for elders will be stronger in places where close kinship ties help people to survive.

But still, there is always a limit on what behaviours might conceivably count as good; and that limit is whether they actively inhibit a person’s flourishing, in the Aristotelian sense. The most drastic and bloody forms of FGM obviously do so. They lead a little girl to feel distrust and fear of female carers; predispose her to infections and limit her sexual function for life; cause her pain, nightmares, and panicky flashbacks for decades.

With minimally invasive genital surgeries involving peripheral body parts, matters are not so clear. But whatever the case about those, you can’t just assume in advance that all genital modifications are equal, so that discriminating between them by different legal and social approaches is somehow “unfair”. If cultural relativism were really true, there would be no such thing as unfairness either. It would just be empty meaninglessness, all the way down. Academics with heroic designs on the English language should be careful not to fall into ethical abysses, even as they tell themselves the landscape around them is objectively flat.

Here Stock comes close to equating “more moral” with “creating more well being,” a position that Sam Harris takes in The Moral Landscape, and a position I’ve criticized. But here the niceties of ethics are irrelevant. There is simply no way that forcing FGM upon girls can be considered better than banning it.

An instrument aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft captured rare ultraviolet observations of an interstellar comet while Earth-based telescopes were blinded by the Sun. The spacecraft’s unique position provided an unprecedented look at the comet’s dust and plasma tails from an unusual angle. Scientists detected hydrogen, oxygen, and signs of intense gas release, hinting at powerful activity after the comet’s closest approach to the Sun. The findings may reveal clues about how comets form around other stars.

For years, scientists thought Saturn’s moon Titan hid a global ocean beneath its frozen surface. A new look at Cassini data now suggests something very different: a thick, slushy interior with pockets of liquid water rather than an open sea. A subtle delay in how Titan deforms under Saturn’s gravity revealed this stickier structure. These slushy environments could still be promising places to search for life.

This article from The Piedmont Clearinghouse MAY be a spoof. I don’t know, but if so it’s a bad spoof because a spoof will eventually let you in on the joke. Certainly many of the readers took it seriously, and the author doesn’t suggest it’s a spoof in the comments. To be sure, it is humorous, and maybe that’s the key to the fact that it’s tongue-in-cheek.  You be the judge.

It touts dgs as better pets than cats, but in fact cats are not “pets”; rather, we are their staff (we could be considered cats’ pets!). That is not the case for the obsequious dg. So even at the get-go Zack Morris is just dead wrong.

Click screenshot to read.

Some excerpts:

One of the most reliable cultural memes of the last hundred years or so is whether a dog or a cat is the better domestic pet. Everybody likes to debate it. This feels, in the main, very dumb. It is really inconceivable that a cat could ever be considered a better pet than a dog. Cats are awful. They are really terrible pets from start to finish. There is virtually nothing a cat does well that a dog doesn’t do much better, and there are countless things that cats do terribly, even horribly, that cat defenders hold up as positives rather than obvious negatives.

Up front let’s identify the one virtue cats possess over dogs: They can often catch mice and rats and other pests very well. This is a great skill. But it’s also something better suited to a working farm, or a wharf, or maybe a prison complex. I’m not saying it’s not a good skill for a pet to have, but look, if your house is being overrun with mice and rats, you’ve got bigger problems than the dog-vs-cat debate. You have to deal with that on a structural level. A cat can kill a lot of rodents in one day, which is great. But also, maybe you should clean up your house a bit, sweep up the crumbs and pick up the burger wrappers and whatnot. Then you won’t have so many mice to deal with anyway. If you do that—if you make your home less inviting to vermin—then you’ll just naturally have fewer mice and rats running around, and the cat’s one tactical advantage more or less vanishes.

Thus on an even footing, a cat will lose this endless debate, and a dog will win. A dog is overwhelmingly just better suited as a human companion. Of course, people like to try and qualify this in all sorts of ways. “It depends on your lifestyle and needs!” “It really depends on your personality!” “It depends on what kind of pet you want!” That’s really the point, though: You shouldn’t want a cat, any more than you should want to live in a mud hovel or eat raw slugs for dinner. Some things are objectively not good!

The main point is this: The idealized dog is a good, affectionate, fun, loyal pet. I say “idealized” as a qualifier, because of course bad dogs exist, but in truth it’s really not that hard to create the idealized dog. Some dogs are smarter and others are dumber, some are more eager to serve and other are just looking to loll about, but if you fulfill a few certain obligations for a dog—if you get it pretty young, feed it well, train it even moderately, play with it, give it decent living conditions, keep it reasonably stimulated—then it will almost certainly be a good pet. The same is not true for cats, none of whom you can really train beyond teaching it to shit in a box, inside your home, which you then have to shovel out yourself as if you are the cat’s personal valet. (We’ll get to that.)

The author then further describes an idealized dog, which more or less resembles the kind of associate Donald Trump would like: an obsequious creature who jumps all over you, licking you and making you feel like you’re the BEST PERSON. I won’t go into the advantages of the d*g touted here, except to say that you have to walk dogs, clean up their poop, and they smell bad so you have to wash them.  They are not like people but more like  Karoline Leavitt.  Then the author goes on to debunk the supposed advantages of cats. which include these:

 

• “It’s independent!”
• “Cats make you work for it!”
• Cats shit and piss in a box inside your house.
• Cats bite and scratch for no reason at all.
• “He wouldn’t come near me for a week!”

He doesn’t seem to dwell on the fact that you have to haul yourself out of bed every morning and take the dog out so it can poop, then picking up the poop with a plastic bag. I could go on and on about this, but won’t. Readers will either agree or not. At any rate, here’s the ending:

Again: These really reprehensible behaviors and personality traits are largely held up as good things about cats. Even in the case of the litter box, meanwhile, it is seen as a point of pride how effectively one masks the smell of cat waste in one’s one home, rather than a source of shame and chagrin that one even has to be doing it in the first place.

I guess I am ultimately not sure why anyone would want a cat at all, at least not when a dog could provide every good benefit that a cat infrequently provides—companionship, entertainment, etc—without all of the chronic downsides to catdom. Why opt for something worse when you could have something better? “Pick the one right tool.” Embrace the dog!

If nothing else, at what point can we just admit that cats are very bad pets and dogs are almost universally better? Why is there even the faintest debate over this? When will this madness end?

The only relevant question is this: “Which makes you happier: a cat or a d*g? For me the answer is clear.

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Now one could add that there are seeing-eye dgs and emotional support dgs, but not seeing-eye cats or emotional support cats. But the former assertion comes from dgs having being bred to do what humans want (question: could cats have been bred that way? I doubt it, and it goes along with the lack of sociality of wild cats versus the nearly obligatory sociality of wild dgs.).  But there are indeed emotional support cats, as outlined in this article from petful.com, which you can read by clicking below. The thing is, an emotional support cat doesn’t have to do any tasks save be there, allow itself to be petted and hugged, and sometimes purr. That’s not too much to ask.

A few excerpts:

How Emotional Support Cats Sense our Needs

After my dad’s heart attack, my grandmother got me a comforting companion, Alexander, a lanky red tabby. He stayed by my side through that strange, uncertain time, and even after Dad returned home, Alexander remained my go-to feline. Although he lived outside with our other cats, my brothers always brought him to me whenever I was sick or hurt.

Since Alexander, many emotional support cats have filled this role, sensing my needs even before I realized them. Here’s how these cats offer emotional support:

• Attentiveness to Emotions: Cats who form close bonds with their owners often become attuned to their human’s feelings.
• Natural Comforting Behaviors: Some cats instinctively respond with comforting actions, such as sitting close or gently nuzzling.
• Adaptability in Domestic Spaces: Indoor cats, in particular, develop behaviors that help them connect more closely with their humans.

As Patricia Fry observes, their cats try to console them when they’re unhappy, and indoor cats often reflect comforting characteristics due to this close connection.

The Comforting Legacy of Emotional Support Cats

Despite some misconceptions, emotional support cats have a history of providing comfort to humans. Here are a few stories showcasing their unique ability to console and uplift:

• Hima’s Gentle Comfort: A plushy gray cat named Hima consoles her young owner, who has just hurt her foot. Hima responds instinctively, nuzzling and gently patting the child as if caring for a kitten in distress.
• Historical Figures and Their Cats:
  • Abraham Lincoln: Even during the Civil War, Lincoln found solace by rescuing three kittens while visiting General Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters.
  • Florence Nightingale: Struggling with chronic brucellosis and depression, Nightingale found companionship and comfort from her cats, whose paw prints marked her personal papers.
  • Edgar Allan Poe: Although his life was often plagued with hardship, Poe’s tortie cat, Catterina, provided comfort by sitting on his shoulder, “purring as if in complacent approval” as he worked.
• Modern View of Cats as Therapists: Today, furry therapists like emotional support cats are recognized for their calming influence. Though dogs are typically chosen for therapy, cats remain invaluable due to their intuitive, independent nature, often comforting people in ways dogs cannot.

These examples illustrate how cats have provided companionship and relief, offering therapeutic support across generations.

The Unique Role of Emotional Support Cats in Therapy:

While dogs are often chosen as therapy animals, emotional support cats play a unique and irreplaceable role in therapeutic settings, particularly for individuals with complex emotional needs.

• Limitations of Dogs in Therapy: According to Animal-Assisted Therapy Programs of Colorado, dogs are excellent for initial therapy due to their accepting and non-judgmental nature. However:
  • Dogs may struggle to set boundaries, which can be challenging for clients dealing with social skills or family issues.
  • Unlike dogs, cats do not tolerate poor behavior, which can encourage healthier interactions and reinforce boundaries.
• Support for PTSD and Trauma: Cats have a special capacity to comfort people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma. In one instance, a woman described how her cat, Simon, became her emotional anchor following a traumatic event. She would often wake up in distress, only to find Simon gently “licking her tears,” offering solace that helped her reconnect with the world.

Emotional support cats provide a balance between comfort and boundaries, making them invaluable companions for individuals facing deeper emotional challenges.

The other sections are called “Emotional Support Cats: Companions for Seniors”, “Emotional Support Cats: A Matchmaking Service for Companionship”.  And there’s a short video captioned, “Watch Hima comfort her sad human”. The YouTube caption is this:

Contrary to popular perception, cats can be as loving as other pets. Take, for instance, Hima, a cat from Japan who is currently winning hearts on social media for the way she comforts her crying owner. When Hima’s owner, a little girl, hurt her foot on a chair and started crying, she tried to comfort her with some loving cuddles. The video, which has received over 9 lakh views on Imgur, shows Hima, a Russian blue cat, snuggling up to her owner as she cries in pain. Watch the unbearably adorable video below on Hima’s own Instagram, where she has over 2,600 followers.

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Finally, as it turned Yule yesterday (the first day of winter), it’s appropriate to learn about the Yule cat, which is not an emotional support cat but an Icelandic legend about a killer cat!  First, a tweet:

The icelandic cat who eats those who are not wearing their new clothes.

The Jólakötturinn, or the Yule Cat is a monstrously large creature from Icelandic folklore that is said to roam the snowy countryside during Christmas, with a particular appetite for anyone who has not… pic.twitter.com/hdaZJ0CDwn

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 14, 2025

Click below to read about Jólakötturinn at The Great Cat site, your go-to site for all things Cat.

I can’t embed it, but it has photos and drawings.  You can also read about it in Wikipedia, and I’ll give a few excerpts:

The Yule cat (Icelandic: Jólakötturinn, Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈjouːlaˌkʰœhtʏrɪn], also called Jólaköttur[1]) is a huge and vicious cat from Icelandic folklore that is said to lurk in the snowy countryside during the Yule season and eat people who do not receive new clothing. In other versions of the story, the cat only eats the food of the people who had not received new clothing. Jólakötturinn is closely associated with other figures from Icelandic folklore, considered the pet of the ogress Grýla and her sons, the Yule Lads.

The first definitive mention of the Yule cat is from an 1862 collection of folklore by Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri (is). It was described as an evil beast that would either eat those who did not get new clothes for Christmas, or eat their “Christmas bit” (an extra portion of food given to residents of a farm). Jón gave no source for either story.[2][3]

. . . . The Yule cat was traditionally used as a threat and incentive for farm workers to finish processing the wool collected in the autumn before Christmas. Those who took part in the work were rewarded with new clothes, but those who did not would get nothing and thus would be prey for the Yule cat.

. . . The establishment of the Yule cat as part of classic Icelandic Christmas folklore came in 1932, when Jóhannes úr Kötlum published his poetry collection Jólin koma (is) (lit. ‘Christmas is Coming‘). One of the poems, Jólakötturinn, centered on the eponymous man-eating monster which subsequently became a common part of Christmas festivities and decorations in Iceland

You can see Kölum’s poem at the “Legend of the Yule Cat” site above; it’s too long for me to reproduce here.

Here’s a three-minute video explaining and showing the Yule Cat:

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Lagniappe. First, a meme.

Still more lagniappe: Hispanic cats injure Jesus and his family, as well as the Good Shepherds. They have no respect, for they are cats. Sound up.

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More lagniappe from ISTANBUL! This is more or less what you’ll see if you go there.

And even more lagniappe: free accommodations on a Greek island if you take care of kitties!

h/t: Thomas, Nicole, Marion, Ginger K., Cate, Reese

During the deployment of new space telescopes that are several critical steps each has to go through. Launch is probably the one most commonly thought of, another is “first light” of all of the instruments on the telescope. Ultimately, they’re responsible for the data the telescope is intended to collect - if they don’t work properly then the mission itself it a failure. Luckily, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) recently collected first light on its 10 primary instruments, and everything seems to be in working order, according to a press release from the Southwest Research Institute who was responsible for ensuring the delivery of all 10 instruments went off without a hitch.

For the first time, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a pair of catastrophic collisions in another solar system. They were observing Fomalhaut, a bright star about 25 light-years away, and detected a pair of planetesimal collisions and their light-reflecting dust clouds. The system is young, and the collisions reflect what our Solar System was like when it was young.

Researchers have revealed that so-called “junk DNA” contains powerful switches that help control brain cells linked to Alzheimer’s disease. By experimentally testing nearly 1,000 DNA switches in human astrocytes, scientists identified around 150 that truly influence gene activity—many tied to known Alzheimer’s risk genes. The findings help explain why many disease-linked genetic changes sit outside genes themselves. The resulting dataset is now being used to train AI systems to predict gene control more accurately.

I have written a piece that will be published shortly on another site; it’s largely about whether academic disciplines, including the arts, can produce “propositional truths”, that is, declarative statements about the world that are deemed “true” because they give an accurate description of something in the world or universe.  Examples are “Jerry has five fingers on each hand”, “Sheila plays the violin in an orchestra,” or “humans and other apes shared a common ancestor.” The reason I was concerned with propositional truths is that it’s often said that the search, production, preservation, and promulgation of such truths is the primary purpose of universities.  Is it? Read my piece, which will be out next week, to see. I’ll post a link when it’s up.

I won’t give my thesis here about truth and the various academic disciplines, as that’s in the other article, but inmhy piece I omitted two areas: mathematics and philosophy. That’s because there’s a big controversy about whether these disciplines do produce propositional truths or, alternatively (and in my view), give only the logical consequences of assumptions that are assumed to be true.

For example, a “truth” of mathematics is that 16 divided by 2 equals eight.  More complex is the Pythagorean theorem: in a right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This is “true”, but only in Euclidean geometry. It is not true if you’re looking at triangles on a curved surface.  The “truth” is seen only within a system of certain assumptions: geometry that follows Euclid’s axioms, including being planar.  All mathematical “truths” are of this type.

What about philosophy? Truths in that field are things that follow logically. Here is a famous one:

All men are mortal
Socrates is a man;
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Well, yes, that’s true, but it’s true not just because of logic, but because empirical observations for the first two statements show they are propositional truths! If they weren’t true, the third “truth” (which was tested and verified via hemlock) would be meaningless.

Here’s another of a similar nature that came from a friend:

“All As are B; x is an A; therefore x is B—doesn’t depend on the content of A and B: it’s a *logical truth*.”

Again, the statement is indeed a logical truth, but not a propositional truth because it cannot be tested to see if it’s true or false. Nor, without specifying exactly what A and B is, can the empirical truth of this statement be judged. I claim that all philosophical “truths”—logical truths without empirical input—are of this type.

When I told my friend this, I got the reply, “This is analytic philosophy. The people who do it work in philosophy departments and call themselves philosophers: and most philosophy BA and PhD programs require a lot of it. I’m sure any of our competent philosophers would be happy to supply hundreds of propositional truths that are philosophical.”  The friend clearly disagreed with my claim that philosophy can’t by itself produce propositional truths. Insofar as philosophy is an important area of academia, then, I am not sure that it’s discipline engaged in producing or preserving truth.

Two caveats are in order. First, this is not meant to demean philosophy or argue that it doesn’t belong in a liberal education. It certainly does! Philosophy, like mathematics, are tools for finding truths, and indispensable tools. Philosophical training helps you think more clearly  Unlike many scientists, I see philosophy as a crucial component of science, one that is used every day. Hypotheses that follow logically from observations, as in making predictions from observations (e.g., Chargaff’s observation, before the structure of DNA was elucidated, that in organisms that amount of A equals the amount of T, and the amount of G equals the amount of C), are somewhat philosophical, and certainly logical. Dan Dennett is a good example of how one can learn (and teach others) to think more clearly about science with a background in philosophy.

Second, I do not feel strongly about what I said above. I am willing to be convinced that mathematics (but not necessarily philosophy) gives us propositional truths. There is, for example, a school of philosophers who accept “mathematical realism,” defined this way in Routledge’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Mathematical realism is the view that the truths of mathematics are objective, which is to say that they are true independently of any human activities, beliefs or capacities. As the realist sees it, mathematics is the study of a body of necessary and unchanging facts, which it is the mathematician’s task to discover, not to create. These form the subject matter of mathematical discourse: a mathematical statement is true just in case it accurately describes the mathematical facts.

An important form of mathematical realism is mathematical Platonism, the view that mathematics is about a collection of independently existing mathematical objects. Platonism is to be distinguished from the more general thesis of realism, since the objectivity of mathematical truth does not, at least not obviously, require the existence of distinctively mathematical objects.

A corollary of this is my own claim (which is mine) that although the objects and “truths” of mathematics and philosophy are inapplicable to all species outside of our own, as only Homo sapiens can grasp, discover, and use them. The earth spins for all creatures and plants upon it, but the integers and prime numbers are “real” only for us. (Do not lecture me that crows can count!).

I have read some of this controversy about mathematics, but it rapidly becomes abstruse and tedious, and so I’m proffering the view of a biologist, not a professional philosopher.  I am more open to the idea of mathematics producing truths than philosophy, simply because, as one reader once commented, “You can’t find out what’s true by sitting in an armchair and thinking.”

So it’s clear I’m soliciting readers’ views here to help clarify my own thinking. Comment away!