Science

Super-Jupiters have masses a dozen times that of Jupiter, but they are often illustrated as having a very Jupiter-like appearance. A new study finds that the classic banded-cloud look of Jupiter is very different from the look of the largest worlds.

Scientists were amazed to discover a 507-year-old clam that was already 100 in Shakespeare’s day, but why did it live so long and what can we learn from it?

Excavations of a workshop that was buried in Pompeii almost 2000 years ago have given archaeologists unique insights into Roman construction techniques and the longevity of the empire’s concrete

I was of course appalled by the assassination of Charlie Kirk, just as I’m opposed to the assassination of any innocent person and nearly all “non-innocent’ people. And no, I didn’t agree with most of what Kirk said or stood for, but we can disagree with people without suggesting that they be killed, or celebrating when they are killed. I did agree with Kirk’s view, which some thing was phony, to promote discourse and exchange of views with one’s opponents.

But when people like Kirk push religious behaviors or values, I can still criticize their proselytizing. For Charlie Kirk was a Christian, and pushing Christianity was an important part of his message.  Yesterday he was helped along by the Free Press, which, along with other “mainstream” sites like the NY Times, is increasingly trying to tell us how religion is good for us—it fills the “God-shaped hole” in our being.  Notice that Kirk’s recommended Sabbath rest is part of the book’s message, and we’re supposed to kick back on the weekends, not to rest from the travails of the world, or because it recharges us, but because God tells us so. (Granted, Kirk does point out research showing the benefits of resting, but to Kirk, religion is central to this rest.) And Kirk’s new book from which the piece was taken is called Stop in the Name of God (an alteration of a Supremes song). From the book’s website:

In a world that never slows down, where busyness is worn as a badge of honor and screens dictate our every move, Stop in the Name of God offers a radical yet profoundly simple invitation: pause, rest, and reconnect. Through the transformative practice of honoring the Sabbath, bestselling author Charlie Kirk guides readers to reclaim a sacred rhythm that restores balance, nurtures the soul, and strengthens relationships. This book is not about escaping modern life-it’s about living it more fully, intentionally, and meaningfully.

Yesterday’s article, touting “Charlie Kirk’s final message to America,” is telling us to keep the Sabbath, and keep it in a way that the Bible recommends in Genesis and Exodus. (Presumably Kirk didn’t agree with the Old Testament’s approbation of genocide, though.)

The whole article, consisting of a bit by Kirk’s wife Erika followed by an excerpt from Kirk’s book, is introduced with approbation by the FP editors, who link to his book on a site where the FP may make a profit. The intro (bold and italics are from the original).

In the final years of his life, Charlie Kirk wrote a book. It’s about the importance of observing the Sabbath in our increasingly frenetic age; of resisting, for one day a week, your smartphone, your work, the distractions of modern life—and dedicating yourself to what’s truly important.

Stop, In the Name of God will be published posthumously on December 9. We’re honored to share an exclusive excerpt with you today. But first, there is no one better to introduce Charlie’s final message to America than his widow, Erika Kirk. —The Editors

Many people think their work is truly important, though. I know of many writers who didn’t take a stipulated day off to rest. Yes, they took time off, but not because God said so.

Click to read the article:

There’s an intro from Kirk’s widow Erika, and I do feel horrible for her, seeing her husband killed in front of her along with their two children. Kirk was only 31, and their kids will grow up without their dad.  Erika gives an introduction, and I do admire her for continuing one important part of her husband’s message: to have free discourse with your political opponents:

This, I think, is what saved him from burnout. Charlie didn’t write a book about the Sabbath because he wanted to learn the impact that it would have on his life. He did it because he knew it worked. The Sabbath saved him.

Writing it wasn’t easy. In every page, you can see the depth of theological and scientific research that went into it. There’s an area in our home with lots of plants in it; that was his secret garden. After work, very late at night when the kids were asleep, he would go there. And even if it was 30 minutes, 10 minutes, five minutes a day, he would write.

. . . There is a reason this book isn’t political. Charlie wanted to heal the country, and he saw his conversations with students on campus as a piece of the puzzle. But when he was on campus, if someone was screaming at him, he knew they weren’t actually listening. When you’re constantly combative and fighting, you have no time to treat other people like human beings. Charlie genuinely felt that if the world had a weekly day of rest, just one, it would be the ultimate game changer.

First, note that Charlie’s way of healing the country is not a way that many of us would follow: he was pushing the Christian Right. Further, although his message isn’t political, it is based on Christianity, and that’s the part I oppose. In the part of Kirk’s book excerpted below, he deals with six objections to taking a Sabbath rest. Again, perhaps most people already do benefit from a weekend rest, but they are having it anyway! There’s no need to do it because God thinks it’s good when you’re doing it.. Just leave out the God part, since there’s no evidence for Him anyway. (I hate capitalizing “Him”, as it implies God exists).

Here’s how Kirk answers people who say they feel guilty taking a day or two off (the rest are excerpt from his book, and all bolding is mine):

If taking one day off makes you anxious or ashamed, then you must ask, What am I really worshipping? No idol condemns rest like the idol of productivity. This is the golden calf of the modern age. We bow to output, chase metrics, and sacrifice our joy on the altar of efficiency.

But our identity must be anchored in something far greater than toil. Work is good—it reflects God’s creative nature. But rest is holy—it reflects His sufficiency. The same God who calls us to labor for six days also commands us to rest for one. That’s not weakness; that’s worship.

Here’s part of his answer to people who say “I’m too busy to take a Sabbath”. The bold part is mine:

About five weekends out of the year—sometimes more—it becomes genuinely difficult for me to take a Sabbath. Occasionally, I’m asked to speak at conferences, churches, or public forums that fall squarely on weekends. And in those moments, I face the same tension many of you do: How do I honor God when life won’t slow down?

Here’s my answer: I do everything in my power to plan around it. But when that’s not possible, I get creative and deliberate. If I have to work on Saturday, I take Sunday as my Sabbath. If both days are booked and filled with travel or obligations, I plan ahead to block off the following weekend for extended rest—phone off, no emails, no output.

The goal isn’t a rigid formula—it’s a reordered life. The Sabbath is not meant to shame you into rest, but to awaken you to how much you’ve been missing.

You are also teaching your family something profound. Every time you pause your productivity and make room for stillness, you are discipling your children. You are showing them that faith isn’t confined to church pews but is woven into time itself.

And from the finale:

Don’t be afraid to turn off your phone. You’re not falling behind—you’re catching up to what matters most. The people in front of you. The presence of God. The peace you’ve been craving.

Now don’t get me wrong: it may be useful for some people to abstain from work or take phone calls on the weekend. (Kirk also reads scripture, sleeps, plays with his kids, and abstains from alcohol.) But for others, and those include me, I enjoy working (mostly writing and reading now), and I don’t spend that much time on the phone. Remember, many, many people don’t like their jobs and would appreciate time off, regardless of why one gets it. But I think you can see that this article’s publication is of a piece of what seems to be a new movement: cure the perceived malaise of people today by imbuing them with religious (often Christian) values.

In fact, Kirk’s message is pretty much the same as Jon Haidt’s, who’s long recommended that people abstain from devices, particularly kids. And that is to make us more social, more connected with each other. But you don’t need God to do that: Haidt is an atheist.  So you can get the benefits of rest, if you need it, without doing it in the name of God.  Religion may make people do some things that they need but wouldn’t do without it, but is that a reason to embrace Christianity. Humanists can certainly run their lives in a way not centered on a fictitious being and his fictitious book. You can also find a secular reason for the Sabbath in Jesus’s words (Mark 2:27): “And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.”

Here’s the central placement of Kirk’s message on the Free Press site yesterday.  I’m wondering if Bari Weiss and Nellie take a Sabbath, and I’m worried about what happens when Weiss becomes a big macher in the CBS News.

Remember, if Kirk transformed the country in the way he wanted to heal it, we would be living in a Christian theocracy and following the dictates of MAGA, but with strong religious overtones. That would not “heal” us.

Our writers and contributors have chosen their favourite ever science-y books, films, TV shows, music, video games, board games and more to see you through the festive period

The time of day that cancer drugs are administered could make a big difference to a patient's outcomes, and would be a relatively simple intervention to roll out

Scientists are testing a novel way to measure cosmic expansion using time delays in gravitationally lensed quasars. Their results match “local” measurements but clash with early-universe estimates, strengthening the mysterious Hubble tension. This mismatch could point to new physics rather than observational error. Researchers now aim to boost precision to solve the puzzle.

Rik Gern is specializing in mushroom photos lately. Here are some photos from Wisconsin, though Rik lives in Austin, Texas. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here are some more mushroom pictures from my recent trip to northern Wisconsin. This is the first of two batches dedicated to the ubiquitous Pinewood gingertail (Xeromphalina campanella). These technically edible, but bitter-tasting mushrooms are usually found in large clusters.

Here are some on a fallen tree:

This cluster was found at the base of a living tree:

A closeup of this group of Pinewood gingertails in an old tree stump gives the impression of giant mushrooms at the mouth of a cave!:

These mushrooms growing in the crevice of a tree look like more giants, this time growing on the side of a rocky cliff:

The rest of the pictures are of individual and clustered mushrooms growing on mossy logs. I don’t know what it is about this species that I find so beautiful, but to my eye they represent the Northwoods as much as the ferns and pine trees:

One more batch of these beauties is on the way!

A sudden X-ray flare from a supermassive black hole in galaxy NGC 3783 triggered ultra-fast winds racing outward at a fifth the speed of light—an event never witnessed before. Using XMM-Newton and XRISM, astronomers caught the blast unfold in real time, revealing how tangled magnetic fields can rapidly “untwist” and hurl matter into space much like an enormous, cosmic-scale version of the Sun’s coronal mass ejections.

New simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies reveal that the strange split between two chemically distinct groups of stars may arise from several very different evolutionary events. Bursts of star formation, shifts in flowing gas, and even streams of metal-poor material from a galaxy’s outskirts can all create this double pattern. The findings challenge the long-held assumption that a major ancient collision caused the split.

How a Finnish physicist named Karl Lemström once became obsessed with recreating the aurora borealis from scratch – and may have ended up creating something even more intriguing

At the same time that Vera Rubin was turning cosmology upside down with conclusive evidence for the existence of dark matter, Stephen Hawking was doing…Stephen Hawking things.

Engineers can be split into two camps - those who just release whatever they’re building and try to fix whatever might be wrong with it as they get feedback on it, and those who test their product in every possible way before releasing it to the public. Luckily, NASA engineers are in the latter camp - it wouldn’t look great if all of the probes we send throughout the solar system failed because of something we could have easily tested for here at home. However, finding analogues for the places we want to send those probes remains a challenge for some NASA projects, so they make due with the best Earth has to offer. For Mars, that means testing technology in the desert’s rolling sand dune and rocky outcrops, and this year several different NASA technologies were tested in deserts throughout the country, as reported in a press release from the agency.

From machine learning to voting, the workings of the world demand randomisation, but true sources of randomness are surprisingly hard to find. Now quantum mechanics has supplied the answer

Mean temperatures this year approached 1.5°C above the preindustrial average, making it the second hottest year after 2024

Astronomers have captured images of two nova explosions only days after they exploded. The detailed images show that these explosions are more complex than thought. There are multiple outflows and, in some cases, delayed ejection of material.

In a new study, sustainability and space scientists discuss how the principles of reducing, reusing, and recycling could be applied to satellites and spacecraft.

Astronomers have acquired evidence that Omega Centauri, the largest-known globular cluster in the Milky Way, hosts an intermediate mass black hole (IMBH). These elusive objects should exist, according to theory, but have been difficult to verify. The IMBH in Omega Centauri is considered a candidate black hole, and new research examined the region with the JWST for any conclusive evidence.

New research and observations with the VLT's ERIS instrument show that some stars are following predictable orbits near Sagitarrius A-star, the Milky Way's supermassive black hole. This goes against the established idea that the black hole's enormous gravity destroys stars and gas clouds. Even a binary star system in the region seems to go about its business unaffected.

Some of the elements used by living systems are far more abundant in Cassiopeia A than we thought, hinting that some parts of our galaxy might be more suitable for life than others