Science

Using a smart computational search, scientists discovered a catalyst ingredient that finally makes tough alkyl ketones behave the way chemists want. The reaction now runs cleanly and reliably, opening the door to faster and easier molecule-building.

Researchers developed a powerful new manganese complex that could revolutionize light-driven chemical reactions. It absorbs light extremely efficiently, has a uniquely long excited-state lifetime, and is far easier to synthesize than previous manganese systems. The team confirmed it successfully transfers electrons as intended. This breakthrough could enable large-scale, sustainable photochemical applications.

The headline reads, “Breakthrough blood test finally confirms Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” As you might imagine, the story is far more complicated than that. Let’s start with some background of chronic fatigue syndrome, also called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS). As the name implies, it is a syndrome, meaning a collection of symptoms with a typical natural history – CFS is characterized by severe debilitating […]

The post A New Test for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Michigan State University astrophysicists are closing in on one of space science’s biggest mysteries: where the galaxy’s most energetic particles come from. Their studies uncovered a pulsar wind nebula behind a mysterious LHAASO signal and set important X-ray constraints on other potential sources.

Mars’s Coloe Fossae reveals a landscape shaped by ancient ice ages, with deep valleys, cratered terrain, and frozen debris flows preserved from a time when the planet’s climate dramatically shifted.

Unexplained gamma ray radiation coming from the edge of the Milky Way galaxy could be produced by self-annihilating dark matter particles – but the idea requires further investigation

The laws of thermodynamics don't accurately account for the complex processes in living cells – do we need a new one to accurately measure the ways living systems are out of equilibrium?

Hoverflies, often mistaken for bees and wasps, pollinate three quarters of our crops. Now we’re discovering we can train them to be even more efficient

For reasons I don’t really understand, Steve Pinker gets piled on when he claims, correctly, that humanity has made both material and moral progress in the last eight centuries or so.  But there seems to be a group of miscreants who think that they’d be better off in the 13th century and were devout Christians, obeying religious dicta. This is not only wrong but stupid. If they returned to the times they tout, they’d most likely be living in filth, ridden with maladies, not be able to read or write, and, finally, would die at about 30 from a tooth abscess.

But they were religious! The absence of faith is the latest argument for the failure of modernity.  Material progress and improvements in health, so it’s said, have left humanity only with that damn “god-shaped hole”. Despite our higher well being, it’s said, we are still bereft, yearning for a god.  Although you can have your modernity and gods too, somehow these advocates of material regression think that the benefits of modernity have in fact produced that god-shaped hole by distorting our values, and we need to get back to Christianity (they never mention the other religions).

One of the biggest advocates of the god-shaped-hole (henceforth GSH) hypothesis is Paul Kingsnorth, an English writer who penned a dreadful article in the Free Press along the lines above, called “How the West lost its soul“. Kingsnorth argued that only religion (preferably Christianity, though he mentions others) can save us from the malaise caused by the lack of religion. The Enlightenment, he says, has failed, and so, lacking a morality that cannot exist without religion, we tack our way through life without spiritual mooring.

This is nonsense, as I argued here on October 13 (see also here).  And now Steve Pinker and Marian L. Tupy (the latter described as “the founder and editor of Human​Progress​.org, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity“) have taken Kingsnorth’s thesis apart, showing both the benefits of progress that came from the Enlightenment as well as the failure of religion to forge a workable morality. The resurgence of “Christian nationalism” in America, they argue, has only brought back the old morality that impeded progress.

You can read their piece by clicking below (if you subscribe, for it isn’t archived):

First, though, look how the Free Press‘s author Freya Sanders introduces the piece by Pinker and Tupy (henceforth P&T). The bolding is mine:

We write about this a lot here at The Free Press—about how phones have robbed kids of their childhoods and how young people think corporate jobs are pointless. Paul Kingsnorth argued earlier this year that when people in the West stopped going to church, “the vacuum was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism.” TikTok is warping our moral codes, and porn has ruined our sex lives. People are depressed, nihilistic, and increasingly illiterate.

What’s the answer? God, according to a lot of people. There has been a boom in religiosity across the West. We’ve published a lot about that, too—about how Americans are flocking to podcasts and apps that teach them about scripture; how young people are getting baptized in record numbers, or traveling to France to go on a pilgrimage; and how female Catholics are bringing back chapel veils because they want to connect to a “lost type of Catholicism.”

But in certain corners of the intellectual right, the idea that life was better in the good old days has intensified into a longing for—of all social orders—medieval Christendom. There are calls to replace American democracy with a monarchy. To make our laws and lawmakers more Christian. When Tucker Carlson says feudalism sounds good, you know things have gone too far!

So we’re glad to present the opposing view today, in the form of an essay by Steven Pinker and Marian L. Tupy—who believe that we are alive at the best possible time to be human: right now. And we don’t need the Bible to have a moral code, because we have a secular one that is the reason for all human flourishing: the set of ideas we refer to as Enlightenment ideals. They are the ideas America is built on. And they are written into the Constitution, right next to God.

America has always been a negotiation between reason and faith. Right now, the negotiation is fierce. We’re proud to publish arguments on both sides of it—including this thought-provoking essay. Don’t miss it.

This is disingenuous. Note that Sander says, “we’ve published a lot” about the “boom in religiosity” and the need for God.  Indeed they have, but the P&T piece is really the only humanistic attack on religion that I’ve seen on the site. The fact is that the Free Press is always banging on about religion and its virtues (Bari Weiss is, a Jew who, I think, believes in a higher power), and I think they published this just to show that the venue does indeed publish a variety of opinions, thus being “objective”.  (It also has some well known and eloquent authors) But so far it’s been about ten pro-religion articles to this single dissent, so I call that ratio slanted journalism.

But onward and upward, for this piece is a good palliative for all the Free Press‘s god-touting. P&T begin by describing how conservatism has brought us back longing for the good old days when Christianity ruled the West. They explicitly single out Kingsnorth’s article, for these two men have written a long rebuttal. In the introduction, they obliquely criticize the Free Press, too:

Of course, humanity has already tried monarchy and theocracy—during the Middle Ages—and sure enough, some of the new reactionaries are saying that those times were not so bad after all. Dreher writes admiringly: “In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. . . . Men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”

Other influential conservatives go further in justifying medieval hierarchies. On his eponymous show, Tucker Carlson recently declared: “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.”

And The Free Press recently showcased a full-strength expression of pre-Enlightenment nostalgia in an essay by Paul Kingsnorth called “How the West Lost Its Soul” (an excerpt of his book Against the Machine).

According to Kingsnorth, Western civilization has lost the sacred story that sustained it for 1,500 years: Christianity. The story begins with the Garden of Eden, where humanity chose knowledge over communion with God, which led to exile and suffering, though with a path to salvation through belief in a grisly human sacrifice and a miraculous resurrection. For centuries, “the mythic vision of medieval Christendom” offered people meaning and morality, writes Kingsnorth. But starting with the Enlightenment, and accelerating in the 1960s, it gave way to a “partial, empty, and over-rational humanism,” leaving societies spiritually adrift. With sustaining myths gone and no shared higher purpose, Westerners now live amid “ruins.”

The Free Press introduction captures the contrast starkly: “Conventional wisdom insists that technology has made life better,” whereas the abandonment of the religious story has left us with “a complete lack of meaning.”

I don’t want to reproduce huge portions of the article here, and since it’s not archived, you won’t be able to read it if you don’t subscribe (I suggest you do, if only for Nellie Bowle’s weekly “TGIF” column. Or perhaps judicious inquiry will yield a copy. But I am excerpting more than normal for those who can’t access the piece.

Here are the areas that P&T consider, with excerpts (indented) and perhaps a few words (mine flush left) on each.

Well being and morality. In a section called “knowledge is more meaningful than ignorance and superstition,” P&T argue that religion did not improve people’s well being in the old days, but simply justified bad stuff. They argue that humanism provides a better grounding for morality than does religion, and who would argue otherwise? After all, even religious people pick and choose their Biblical morality, implicitly assuming that things are good because God approves only of what is good, implying that the “good” pre-dates the pronouncements of God. Quotes (all indented):

It’s said that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory, and the historical amnesia of the romanticizers of medieval Christendom is near-complete. Among the blessings of modernity is an Everest of data about life in the past, painstakingly collected by economic historians from original sources over many decades. This quantitative scholarship circumvents fruitless back-and-forth about whether the Dark Ages were really all that dark: We can go to the numbers.

In this essay we will show how the reaction against modernity has it backward. Before the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting “Great Enrichment,” life in the West was characterized for most people not by meaning and morality but by ignorance, cruelty, and squalor. Today we are blessed not just with prosperity and its underappreciated gifts, but with a robust moral mission—one that is grounded in our best understanding of reality, and the indisputable goal of reducing suffering and improving flourishing. Meaning comes from reason and well-being, not scripture and salvation; from governance with the consent of the governed, not rule by kings and clergymen.

, , ,the popular canard among theoconservatives is that religion is the only conceivable source of morality, and so a secular society must be mired in selfishness, relativism, and nihilism. Kingsnorth, for example, favorably cites the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s diagnosis that the Enlightenment left us with a morality that, “loosed from theology,” consists of “nothing more than [an] individual’s personal judgment.”

The dismissal is breathtaking.

The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason and well-being left us with a coherent fabric of arguments against the brutality and injustice that had been ubiquitous in human history. These arguments became the foundation of civilized society

Barbarism and immorality.  P&T show that “premodern Christianism was not moral, but barbaric.” Again, what rational person could doubt that?

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of universal well-being, the morality of holy scriptures was dubious at best. The God of the Old Testament prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, disobedience, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. Indeed, he commanded the Israelites to commit all of these against their enemies.

Whatever humane advances we might attribute to Jesus, his followers did not adopt them for an awfully long time. For some 1,400 years that separated Constantine’s embrace of Christianity in the early 4th century to the rise of the Enlightenment in the 18th, most Christians remained untroubled by slavery, the persecution of heretics, and brutal colonial conquest.

The point about the delay in adopting “Christian humane advances” is a good one. If Christianity causes moral improvement, why did it take millennia for this to get going?

“Health and prosperity are more meaningful than starvation and squalor”.  Steve has argued this clearly in two books (Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), and surely Tupy—whose work I don’t know—has made similar claims.  I’d love to ask people like Kingsnorth if they’d rather live in medieval Europe or in modern Scandinavia. If they accepted Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and had to be embodied in a random person, they’d surely choose the latter.

Westerners have been complaining about how wealth causes moral decline for millennia. Few of the complainants have reflected on how it was wealth that gave them the luxury to complain about that wealth. Their contemporaries who died in childbirth, or whose lives were wracked with hunger, pain, and disease, were not as lucky. The vanquishing of early death, propelled not by prayer but knowledge, may be humanity’s greatest moral triumph.

Some numbers can shake us out of this spoiled complacency. (For sources, see our respective books Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Enlightenment Now.) In 1800, the European life expectancy was 33 years; today, it is 79 years—which means that we have been granted not just extra life, but an extra life. Much of that gift came from leaps in prosperity that spared the lives of children. Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday. Today that fate befalls three-tenths of one percent. Even the poorest countries today lose a fraction of the children that Europe did until recently. If being spared the agony of losing a child is not “meaningful,” what is?

Children who survived often faced orphanhood, hunger, parasites, workhouses, and beatings. Famines, which could kill a quarter of the population, recurred around once a decade. Today, starvation in much of the world has given way to obesity. It is easy to condemn gluttony, but searching for life’s meaning is surely easier on a full stomach.

Christianity comes with antisemitism.  P&T argue that the hegemony of Christianity both in older times and now is inevitably accompanied by a rise in antisemitism, for if you embrace “Christian values”, you perforce see Jews, who supposedly killed Christ and cannot get to heaven by accepting Jesus, as being “anti-moral.” This, too, appears to be the sentiments of modern Christian nationalists, but is dispelled by secular humanism:

[Yoram] Hazony said: “All the classical questions of: Why is the Old Testament in the Christian Bible? What are we supposed to get out of it? Do the Jews have any role in history at all, or was it just supposed to have ended?—all of those questions are on the table.” It’s notable that Kingsnorth, in his essay railing against modernity, consistently cites the Christian, never the “Judeo-Christian,” tradition.

America was founded on the secular Enlightenment principles of equality, rights, flourishing, and democratic governance. It’s no coincidence that Jews thrived here. Nor can it be a coincidence that a movement founded on parochial Christian theocracy would be accompanied by a recrudescence of the world’s oldest hatred.

In the end, I am both amazed and amused at people like Kingsnorth who long for the good old days when people embraced Christianity and thus were both moral and fulfilled. There were no god-shaped holes then.  But, given a choice of living then and now, I’m sure that all the Christian luddites would choose to live now. As for the god-shaped hole, all I can say is that many people, including me, don’t have one.  Our lives get meaning not from embracing Jesus, but from whatever we find fulfilling: friends, loved ones, and family, work, hobbies, and so on. True, some people will always glom onto faith because it’s so easy: all you have to do is go to a church and you get a preexisting set of beliefs, friends and supporters.  But people like me simply can’t believe in god if there’s no evidence for god.

In their last section, called “Modernity is not a ruin”, P&T reprise their argument, and I’ll give a longer bit:

the 21st century, with all its woes, is a better time to live than any time before. Extreme poverty, child and maternal mortality, illiteracy, tyranny, violent crime, and war deaths are lower than in any previous century. The wealth that theoconservatives find so corrosive funds the education and leisure that allow individuals to contemplate meaning, whether it be in work, family, community, nature, science, sport, art, or yes, religion. Another gift of modernity is that people are not burned alive for their beliefs but allowed to hold whichever ones they find meaningful.

It’s sometimes claimed that for all these opportunities, people today are suffering from a new “crisis of meaning.” Here again we shouldn’t confuse nostalgia with fact. Illiterate medieval peasants left us with no records of how meaningful they thought their lives were. As the historian Eleanor Janega points out, they themselves thought they were living in a time of decline, and “they were rebelling constantly.”

When we ask people about their lives today, their own judgments belie any narrative of decadence and decay. Global surveys find that it’s the richest and freest countries, not the backward theocracies, in which people express the greatest satisfaction with their lives. Pathologies like homicide, incarceration, child mortality, educational mediocrity, and premature death are more common in the more religious countries and American states than the more secular ones.

People also express their conception of a better life by voting with their feet. In 2020, of the 281 million who moved to another country, 232 million of them sought a better life in high-income, increasingly secular countries, particularly in Europe and North America. Today’s reactionaries can’t have it both ways, asserting that the affluent secular West is a decadent ruin while fending off the millions of people from poorer and more religious countries who risk their lives to get in.

And if people voted with their hands and had a time machine, they’d surely set it for now instead of 1350.

This is the last batch I have, so we’ll have a photo hiatus over Thanksgiving unless somebody sends in some pics.

Today’s photos come from reader Uwe Mueller, who sends us bird photos from Germany. Uwe’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The first five pictures were taken in the Bergisches Land, Germany.

A Great tit (Parus major) taking a steep turn directly in front of the camera. It took a lot of attempts to get this kind of shot from this little bird in flight:

This bird was really a hard one to identify. It could either be a Marsh tit (Poecile palustris) or a Willow tit (Poecile montanus). Both birds are very similar and only distinguishable by some minor differences in a few features. After a lot of investigation I tend to think that this is a Marsh tit. But I could still be wrong:

Grey wagtails (Motacilla cinerea) are to be found mostly at small creeks or shallow ponds where they meticulously search the water and the banks for food like worms and insects. They are quite skittish birds and don’t like the human presence. To get a close shot like this you have to stay low-key in nature and have a long lens:

A Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), one of the most widespread warblers in Germany. I had some difficulty with its identification because the blackcap of the bird in the picture is more like a mid-brown cap:

A European green woodpecker (Picus viridis), another bird that you often hear but rarely see:

A Great crested grebe (Podiceps cristatus) is feeding one of its chicks with fresh fish. This picture was taken at the river Ruhr:

A flock of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) flying over the Ruhr. In the upper right corner of the picture you can see a Greylag goose (Anser anser) and two hybrids also flying in this flock. My guess is that the hybrids are the offspring of the Greylag goose. Canada geese and Greylag geese are known to mate with each other and produce offspring:

A European herring gull (Larus argentatus) flying very low over the Baltic Sea near the town of Kiel, Germany:

A male Red-breasted merganser (Mergus serrator) with its distinct red eyes, also near Kiel:

Another picture from Kiel, a Great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) sitting in a surge of waves:

This funny little fella is a Sanderling (Calidris alba). They are constantly rushing over the beach with little mincing steps that are so quick that you hardly see their feet while running. Due to this behaviour they are called “Keen Tid“ in Northern German dialect which translates to “Don’t have time“. Every now and then they stop and stick their beak into the sand, searching for worms and small crabs, like in this picture that I took on the East Frisian island of Juist:

Understanding how exactly lunar dust sticks to surfaces is going to be important once we start having a long-term sustainable presence on the Moon. Dust on the Moon is notoriously sticky and damaging to equipment, as well as being hazardous to astronaut’s health. While there has been plenty of studies into lunar dust and its implications, we still lack a model that can effectively describe the precise physical mechanisms the dust uses to adhere to surfaces. A paper released last year from Yue Feng of the Beijing Institute of Technology and their colleagues showcases a model that could be used to understand how lunar dust sticks to spacecraft - and what we can do about it.

See some of the winning entries for this year's Oceania Photo Contest, including Miesa Grobbelaar's shot of a whale, which took the top prize

Moss spores spent nine months strapped to the outside of the International Space Station, exposed to vacuum, cosmic radiation, temperature swings from minus 196°C to 55°C, and unfiltered solar ultraviolet light. Over 80 percent survived the ordeal and returned to Earth still capable of growing into new moss plants. This remarkable resilience, demonstrated by one of Earth's earliest land plants, suggests that life's fundamental mechanisms may be far more robust in the face of space conditions than previously imagined.

The world's gravitational wave detectors just wrapped up their longest and most productive observation campaign, capturing 250 new collisions over two years of continuous listening. These ripples in spacetime, created by black holes and neutron stars spiralling into each other across the universe, have given scientists their first direct evidence for Stephen Hawking's 1971 theory about black hole surface areas, revealed second generation black holes born from previous mergers, and detected the most massive black hole collision ever observed. The haul represents over two thirds of all gravitational waves ever detected.

The cultivation of wheat, barley and maize, which are easily stored and taxed, seems to have led to the emergence of large societies, rather than agriculture generally

Our brain wiring seems to undergo four major turning points at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83, which could influence our capacity to learn and our risk of certain conditions

Astronomers have just catalogued the 40,000th near Earth asteroid, a milestone that marks humanity's transformation from passive targets to active defenders of our planet. These space rocks, ranging from house sized boulders to some the size of mountains, follow orbits that bring them uncomfortably close to Earth. Each discovery adds another piece to our planetary defence puzzle, though current surveys have found only about 30 percent of the mid sized asteroids that could still cause regional devastation if they struck our world.

Using a precisely aligned pair of laser beams, scientists can now hold a single aerosol particle in place and monitor how it charges up. The particle’s glow signals each step in its changing electrical state, revealing how electrons are kicked away and how the particle sometimes releases sudden bursts of charge. These behaviors mirror what may be happening inside storm clouds. The technique could help explain how lightning gets its initial spark.

Moss spores survived an extended stay on the outside of the ISS and remained capable of germinating once back on Earth. Their resilience to vacuum, extreme temperatures, and UV radiation surprised the researchers who expected them to perish. The spores' natural protective coat likely played a key role in shielding them. The study hints at the potential for simple plants to support agriculture beyond our planet.

Europe is investing in a coordinated effort to develop high-power optical vortex technologies and train new specialists in the field. The HiPOVor network unites academia and industry to advance applications ranging from material processing to environmentally friendly photonic systems.