Science

Conventional computing devices will play a crucial role in turning quantum computers into tools with real-world application

New observations show that asteroid 1998 KY26 is a mere 11 meters across and spinning twice as fast as previously thought. The discovery adds complexity to Hayabusa2’s 2031 mission but also heightens scientific interest. The asteroid’s composition remains uncertain, making the encounter even more compelling. Insights from this work could improve future asteroid-defense and exploration efforts.

Scientists have directly measured the minuscule electron sharing that makes precious-metal catalysts so effective. Their new technique, IET, reveals how molecules bind and react on metal surfaces with unprecedented clarity. The insights promise faster discovery of advanced catalysts for energy, chemicals, and manufacturing.

Researchers have discovered a way to store information using a rare class of materials called ferroaxials, which rely on swirling electric dipoles instead of magnetism or charge. These vortex-like states are naturally stable and resistant to outside interference, but until now were almost impossible to control. By using circularly polarized terahertz light, scientists were able to flip these tiny rotational patterns on command, opening the door to a new form of robust, ultrafast, and long-lasting data storage.

Researchers have discovered a way to store information using a rare class of materials called ferroaxials, which rely on swirling electric dipoles instead of magnetism or charge. These vortex-like states are naturally stable and resistant to outside interference, but until now were almost impossible to control. By using circularly polarized terahertz light, scientists were able to flip these tiny rotational patterns on command, opening the door to a new form of robust, ultrafast, and long-lasting data storage.

Jay Bhattacharya's new "plan" is really an admission that if there's a new pandemic, he’s not competent enough to do any of the incredible things he “would have” done regarding COVID. He's not even going to try.

The post Goodbye to Focused Protection. Jay Bhattacharya’s Latest 1-Page Pandemic “Plan” is for Vulnerable People to Stop Being Vulnerable. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Let’s start out with something that we can say for certain: we live in an expanding universe.

Travelling up from Mars’s equator towards its north pole, we find Coloe Fossae: a set of intriguing scratches within a region marked by deep valleys, speckled craters, and signs of an ancient ice age.

The Moon gains new craters all the time, but catching one forming is surprisingly rare. Between 2009 and 2012, something struck our celestial companion just north of Römer crater, creating a bright 22 metre scar with distinctive rays of ejected material spreading outward. While the Moon's most dramatic bombardment ended billions of years ago, this fresh impact reminds us that our nearest neighbour continues to be peppered by space rocks, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study crater formation in real time and refine our understanding of impact rates across the Solar System.

When an interstellar comet tears through our Solar System at 250,000 kilometres per hour, pinning down its exact trajectory becomes a race against time. ESA astronomers achieved something unprecedented in October 2025, using observations from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter to improve predictions of comet 3I/ATLAS's path by a factor of ten. By triangulating data from Mars with Earth based observations, scientists demonstrated a powerful technique for tracking fast moving objects that could prove invaluable for planetary defence, even though this particular visitor poses no threat to our planet.

Exoplanets need not acquire their water from external sources like asteroids and comets. New experiments show that at least one common type of exoplanet can generate its own water. Interactions between hydrogen and silicates on sub-Neptunes can create water that could make some of the habitable.

The discovery that a toxin made by bacteria found in dirty water might help trigger ulcerative colitis could lead to new treatments for this form of IBD

Here’s Natasha Hausdorff (legal director of the UK Lawyers for Israel) explaining, in an 11-minute video, the U.N. Security Council’s resolution approving Trump’s plan for ending the war in and reconstructing Gaza.  She notes that this approval is not legally binding, but goes through the most important of the plan’s 20 provisions.

Some of the problems I’ve mentioned before, including the difficulty of bringing Arab neighbors aboard and constructing an international peacekeeping force, finding a decent transitional government to run Gaza, and the insoluble problem of disarming Hamas (a provision of the plan that Hamas of course rejects). She notes that the UN resolution clearly states that a “state of Palestine does not yet exist,” which embarrasses not only Palestinians, but also the many countries like France and the UK who have already recognized such a state. (5:05). (She notes that the UK decision has been applauded by Hamas, and thus is good for the terrorist group.)

She doesn’t mention the difficult issue of the West Bank. That’s not part of the U.N. resolution, but I’d like to hear her views on it, anyway.

A gaseous, dusty structure in the Cygnus X star formation region is reminiscent of a glowing diamond ring. There are others that are similar, but they're spherical and this one is flat. A team of researchers have figured out why.

Scientists may finally be closing in on the origins of two colossal, mysterious structures buried nearly 1,800 miles inside Earth—hidden formations that have puzzled researchers for decades. New modeling suggests that slow leakage of elements from Earth’s core into the mantle prevented the planet from developing strong chemical layers after its primordial magma-ocean era.

Astronauts strapped moss spores to the outside of the International Space Station for nine months - and most of them survived the challenging experience

This op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle is by two academics, Joan Roughgarden, whom people here might know (I reviewed her book Evolution’s Rainbow in the TLS), and Jaimie Veale, who are identified in the piece like this:

Joan Roughgarden is a professor emerita in the Department of Biology at Stanford University and author of “Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People.” Jaimie Veale is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychological and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato in New Zealand and a past secretary of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

As Wikipedia notes, “In 1998, Roughgarden came out as transgender and changed her name to Joan, making a coming out post on her website on her 52nd birthday.”  Jamie Veale‘s gender is not public, but she (Wikipedia refers to Veale as “her”) is described as researching transgender health and other issues. But their own identification, while perhaps motivating the thesis of this short letter, is hardly relevant to discussing the issues below. Click the headline to get the archived version, as the Chronicle’s own version is paywalled. 

Roughgarden and Veale (henceforth “R & V”), make a number of statements, some of which I agree with and other which I don’t, but overall they made me think about the differences between (biological) sex and gender.

First, they agree that sex is defined by gamete size, something that Roughgarden, to her credit, has always admitted:

Zoologists, botanists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists generally define sex in this way: males make small gametes (sperm), females make large gametes (eggs) and hermaphrodites, such as most plants and many marine animals, make both.

Many animals change sex, such as coral reef fish that switch from making sperm to making eggs, or the reverse, during their lives. In turtles and other reptiles, sex is determined by the temperature at which eggs are incubated. Thus, sex may be determined well after conception according to social and environmental circumstances. And in humans, gamete production does not occur at conception. Various precursor stages appear in the fetus weeks after conception and gamete production awaits puberty.

I would note, though, that sex in humans, which is what everyone’s interested in, is determined at fertilization: whether or not the fetus has the Y-linked SRY gene that is the trigger male development.

But they also claim that every trait other than gamete size is not part of sex but is part of gender:

Beyond gamete size, everything else — including secondary sex characteristics, body size, shape, color, behavior and social roles — is gender. Gender in nature is also extraordinarily varied and fluid across plants and animals, including humans. Beyond gamete size, no general binary describes how living things look, act or relate to others. Across species, gender difference ranges from penguins with near identical male and female genders to the extreme dimorphism of lions. Human gender diversity is in the middle, showing some gender difference that varies within and across cultures.

Thus whether or not you have a penis or vagina (secondary sex traits) are, assert R&V, part of your gender, even though their presence, and the other traits mentioned, are highly correlated with biological sex.  The idea that physical traits are part of gender seemed wrong to me, but the notion of what “gender” really is has eluded me for a long time.  So I thought about why it seemed wrong to call physical traits parts of gender instead of sex (behavior, as I note below, is a partial exception). This led me to come to my own tentative definition of gender.

The first thing I did, of course, was look up “gender” in the Oxford English Dictionary.  Virtually all the definitions had to do with the classes of nouns in languages in which words have genders, like French and German. But there was one related definition that did correspond pretty closely to what I see as gender: gender identity.

Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of gender identity:

An individual’s personal sense of being or belonging to a particular gender or genders, or of not having a gender.

Gender identity is generally regarded as distinct from biological sex, or sex as registered at birth. In later use it is also often (and for some commentators controversially) distinguished from gender as a socially or culturally constructed state (cf. gender n. 3b), and from its manifestation in gender expression or presentation (see gender expression n., gender presentation n.).

Thinking further, it seemed to me that gender identity (what people mean when they self-describe their gender) is a psychological rather than a physical trait: it is how someone feels vis-à-vis where they lie the spectrum between being masculine or being feminine. Or perhaps they feel they aren’t on that spectrum at all, or are somewhere in the middle.  Now of course in this sense gender can be described as “biological,” but only in the sense that all human thoughts and feelings are biological because they reside in the neurons of the brain.  But otherwise, you can’t tell someone’s gender by their behavior, genitalia, body size, etc.  You can’t tell what self-conception a person has who possesses a penis and a beard, because you can’t see inside their brain.  Most such people, of course, are of male sex and feel themselves to be pretty close to male on the psychological spectrum, but traits besides gametes are not dispositive of gender. You  would find out someone’s gender not by observing them, but by asking them.

Behavior is a slightly different issue since behavior issues from one’s self=conception. So R&V are correct in saying that historically, different genders have characterized many societies—though I’m using gender in my sense and not theirs:

Across cultures and through time, societies included people corresponding to what the West now calls trans or gender diverse. Anthropologists and historians documented these people across North America, South America, Polynesia, India, Southeast Asia, ancient Rome and other parts of the world. Many cultures accepted these individuals as simply part of everyday life, often holding respected social and spiritual roles unique to their cultures.

I agree with them so long as you consider gender a psychological and not physical feature, and one that can but not necessarily is expressed visibly through behavior. In other words, gender is your self-identification in terms of how you fit on the sex spectrum (or off it), and gender roles are how those self-identifies are acted out in society.

But I disagree with the authors on two issues. First, on their claim that gender identity should somehow be recognized by the courts:

In matters of law and policy, “sex” actually refers to elements of gender because the criteria that have historically determined one’s “legal sex” (typically genitals, chromosomes, appearance and/or behavior) are properties of gender and not sex. As such, the courts should recognize that legal sex encompasses gender diversity. The authors aren’t clear about this, but it could mean that they think that biological males who identify as being women should be able to enter women’s spaces, including prisons or sports leagues, or have a right to do rape counseling if a woman wants a biologically female rape counselor. If that’s what they mean, then no, you need to recognize biological sex alone rather than gender. But I do agree with the authors’ final statement that you should follow the Golden Rule when it comes to gender identity: treating others as you would like to be treated if you were such people. (The exception, of course, are the stuff like sports and prisons).

Second, the authors seem to imply that “affirmative care” (they call it “appropriate care”, though I’m not sure that’s what they mean) is mandated for all young people suffering from gender dysphoria:

Today, every major U.S. medical association — the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, Endocrine Society, Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry — supports transgender people and their right to appropriate care. Still, if the medical establishment can switch from pathologizing trans people to supporting them, it could switch back under political pressure.

If “appropriate care” means “psychological care up to a certain age—the age when those with dysphoria can decide whether to take hormones or undergo surgery”—then I agree. But if they mean “affirmative care,” in which the wishes of children or adolescents are accepted and acted on therapeutically and medically, then I disagree.  I favor “objective” therapy, not “affirmative” therapy, but therapy done with empathy. But I do not sign onto the use puberty blockers or surgery until a patient is of an age of consent (18 or 21; I waver).

I find the article confusing, both in R&V’s definition of gender and in how they want it to be used in law. There are some people—I believe Alex Byrne is among them—who say that gender is really a word that has no real meaning (it’s analogized to a “soul”).  But there is still the phenomenon of people who don’t feel they adhere to concepts of masculine or feminine psychology, and I’m groping to find a definition of “gender” that can describe such people. (Most of them are, of course, biologically male or female using the gametic definition.)

Feel free to give your own take on gender in the comments. But remember, be civil and don’t call anybody names!

New research shows that light’s magnetic field is far more influential than scientists once believed. The team found that this magnetic component significantly affects how light rotates as it passes through certain materials. Their work challenges a 180-year-old understanding of the Faraday Effect and opens pathways to new optical and magnetic technologies.

New research shows that light’s magnetic field is far more influential than scientists once believed. The team found that this magnetic component significantly affects how light rotates as it passes through certain materials. Their work challenges a 180-year-old understanding of the Faraday Effect and opens pathways to new optical and magnetic technologies.

A nationwide analysis has uncovered how sprawling fossil fuel infrastructure sits surprisingly close to millions of American homes. The research shows that 46.6 million people live within about a mile of wells, refineries, pipelines, storage sites, or transport facilities. Many of these locations release pollutants that may affect nearby communities, yet mid-supply-chain sites have rarely been studied. The findings reveal major gaps in understanding how this hidden network affects health.